Elevate: Elizabeth Hickman on How to Be a Dragon

In this episode of Elevate: Women Leading the Way in Pharma Outsourcing, host Marianne Gissane talks to Elizabeth Hickman, CEO at AustinPx, about the mentors who pushed her before she felt ready, the feedback women get that men rarely do, and the note on her whiteboard that reads "be a dragon."

Elizabeth Hickman didn't plan a route into CDMO leadership. Her father was a physician and a mountaineer, someone who took his children rock climbing and skiing and treated risk as something to be managed rather than avoided. Her mother built and sold her own business. Between them, Elizabeth picked up an appetite for risk before she'd ever set foot in a lab. She loved science, biology especially, but knew early on that she didn't want to be at the bench. What drew her in was the business side: connecting the science to the strategy that gets it to patients.

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Comfortable with what you can't control

That early exposure to risk turned out to matter more than she expected once she reached the top of a CDMO. AustinPx develops formulations and runs manufacturing for other companies' clinical trials, and Elizabeth is blunt about how much of that sits outside her control. She can't influence a molecule's toxicity, and she can't speed up a board's funding decision or a trial's timeline. What she can do is build a team that's comfortable operating inside that uncertainty, and lead people through it rather than pretending it isn't there.

Her years in business development shaped how she does that. BD, she says, teaches you to listen before anything else: to understand what a client is actually struggling with, not just the scope they've signed. That client-first instinct now runs through AustinPx's culture, built around responsiveness and problem-solving rather than simply executing to spec.

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The feedback women get that men don't

Elizabeth is candid about the kind of feedback she's had over the course of her career, most of it useful, some of it less so. One note has stayed with her: a colleague once suggested she watch how high her voice pitched in meetings. What she heard, she says, was that she sounded like a little girl. She doesn't doubt the intent behind it, but comments like that land differently when they're about how you're perceived rather than what you've delivered. Over time she's stopped internalising them the way she used to, and come to see leadership as something with no single mould. Assertive or measured, the style matters less than whether it's genuinely yours.

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Be a dragon

That idea sits behind the note on her whiteboard: "be a dragon," a line borrowed from a scene in Game of Thrones where one of Daenerys Targaryen's advisors tells her to stop trying to be someone else. Elizabeth isn't after the fire and destruction, just the instruction underneath it: trust yourself rather than copying the style of every leader you admire. It's a message she comes back to often, and one she credits with helping her push past imposter syndrome as she moved into more senior roles.

That same instinct led her to the Biotech CEO Sisterhood, an organisation she was introduced to through her mentor Tim Scott. Based in Texas rather than one of the usual biotech hubs, she relies on the group's Slack channel to stress-test decisions and hear how other female CEOs are handling the same pressures.

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"Be a dragon. Stop trying to be somebody else. Be yourself."

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Speaking up before you feel ready

Asked what she'd tell her younger self, Elizabeth doesn't hesitate: stop waiting to feel one hundred per cent ready before raising your hand. Growth, she says, happens before you're fully prepared for it. She'd also tell herself to speak up more in meetings. It took her years to realise that leaders surround themselves with people precisely because they don't have all the answers, and that her perspective was wanted in the room long before she felt qualified to give it.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.