By Genny Filiciotto for TOPX Network & BiotechNews

When Martine van Vugt was four years old, her kindergarten teacher asked her class to complete a group task. While the other children waited to be told what to do, young Martine looked around the room and immediately started assigning roles. “I can tell you that not all of the teachers appreciated that mindset,” she recalls.

“I was often told not to be so upfront.” Decades later, as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Genmab, that impulse to look at ambiguity and start shaping it is at the core of her leadership.

A child of the ‘70s, when following your passion was simply what you did, Martine’s story is less about deliberate career mapping and more a case study in what happens when deep scientific conviction meets the willingness to jump before feeling ready.

Building something larger than yourself

Having decided by age twelve that she would become a biologist, her path into life sciences began at Wageningen University, an institution she chose with characteristic determination. “Nobody went there, only the nerds. I was adamant that I wanted to go,” she remembers, high praise indeed from a lovingly self-described nerd. That clarity of instinct struck again at 23, fresh from an internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, when she arrived for her first session of journal club at Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital. A confident master’s student, she didn’t hesitate to speak her mind when asked to present an article with no warning by the group leader running the session: a young Jan van de Winkel (Professor of Immunotherapy at Utrecht University, founder and CEO of Genmab). Far from being fazed, Van de Winkel offered her a PhD position in Fc receptor biology.

“That was, again, an instant conviction,” she says. “I decided he could definitely teach me something. There was always a big instinct in me about what I wanted to do. I just jumped.”

After completing her PhD at Utrecht University and a postdoc at UMCU, she found the academic environment too individualistic and slow-paced. When van de Winkel approached her in October 2000 with a vision for human antibody technology becoming transformative for medicine, she joined Genmab to help build something larger than herself.

Bringing people together from uncertainty towards conviction

Her early years at Genmab were spent in discovery research, including being part of the small team that developed daratumumab, now one of the world’s leading treatments for multiple myeloma. But even then, Martine was guided by a clear, practical drive: seeing a gap and wanting to help. When Genmab entered a collaboration with Roche in 2001, she looked at her team of scientists and technicians and realised they needed structure to hold their own alongside a big pharma partner. She began defining roles, responsibilities and deliverables, and in doing so, organically built Genmab’s project management function from scratch.

“It never started like, I want to be a project manager,” she says. “It was: this is what we need to do. Oh, by the way, that’s project management.”

But the true test arrived a decade later. In 2011, Genmab was navigating one of the most challenging periods in its history. The financial runway was short and daratumumab was still at an early stage of dose escalation in the clinic. Meanwhile, Genmab’s scientists had spent ten years developing controlled Fab-arm exchange as the foundation of the DuoBody® technology, a groundbreaking platform for producing stable bispecific antibodies at high yield. That was when Martine saw an opportunity. She walked into van de Winkel’s office and proposed finding partners for DuoBody®. He agreed, but with a condition: she would also have to find a partner for daratumumab. She stepped out into the hallway. “I’ve never done a deal in my life,” she thought. “Should I be the person?” She walked right back into his office and shared her doubts. Jan’s response was instant and defining: ‘Nah, no, no. Use your common sense. I know you will bring together a team of intelligent people with the right expertise. I trust and I empower you to do it.’

For Martine, intuition is not blind instinct but experience at work. “Intuition is pattern recognition based on years of science, transactions, people, failures and setbacks,” she reflects. The resulting deals transformed Genmab into the company it is today, but the underlying lesson has stayed with her.

“What I had to learn was that my value was not about knowing everything. At enterprise level, it’s much more about dealing with uncertainty, bringing together the right people, asking the right questions, and then moving from evidence to conviction and decision.”

Humour as a powerful connector

Ask most people to picture an executive leading strategy for a global biotech powerhouse, and they rarely imagine an introvert. Martine is quick to dismantle that expectation: “People think I’m an extrovert. I’m not.” What looks like extroversion from the outside is just, as she puts it, “what happens when I feel safe and inspired to spend that energy.”

Rather than collecting business cards at surface-level networking events, “those butterfly network events…no”, her strength lies in going deep. In tough negotiations, that manifests as a rare willingness to name what others tend to gloss over.

“I’ve been in negotiations where I noticed my counterpart was getting angry,” she recalls. “You can ignore it and push through, or you can say: I see that this is actually bothering you.” Humour, she adds, can be a powerful connector. “The most difficult conversations are helped if you articulate what you observe in a light, almost funny way,” she says. “It’s about addressing the situation and having the courage to voice what you see in the moment.”

The sum is larger than the individual parts

That leadership style extends to how Martine builds her teams. When assessing candidates, she mentally sorts them into two distinct groups: ‘Pile 1’ candidates focus on titles, salary and personal upside; ‘Pile 2’ ask what they can contribute to the mission. When asked if she has ever hired from ‘Pile 1’, her answer is immediate: “Never.” For Martine, this is about protecting the whole.

“I see Genmab as a collective,” she continues. “I can’t work with kings and queens. You have to be willing to be part of something bigger, supportive and serving, not the leading lady or man.” She adds: “I assess people not on what they’ve done, but on what they may become.”

The importance of continuously building trust

That deep commitment to culture stems from how Martine experienced leadership herself. Jan van de Winkel didn’t just give a 23-year-old student a chance: he extended trust that became a lifelong obligation to pay forward. But trust, she clarifies, runs both ways. When you are entrusted with a mandate you have an obligation to feed that trust over time, to come back to the person who believed in you when things get difficult, not just when they go well.

Finding that person rarely happens through cold or transactional interactions. Real mentorship requires someone who invests in knowing not what you are good at, but what drives you. “I cannot cheer for people if I don’t know what makes them happy,” she says. It may take years, but as she puts it, “it may only take one person that believes in you.” Jan was that person for Martine, and now she wants to be that for others. “I don’t throw people off a cliff,” she explains. “I just let them take a leap of faith. Or maybe stepping into the unknown with them and saying: you can do it.”

“Just do it”

For those earlier in their careers, Martine’s advice is disarmingly simple. “Don’t manage your career,” she says. “Find the opportunity. Get good at it. Work relentlessly. Give it your all.”

When paralysed by choice, she suggests flipping a coin. Not to let chance choose for you, but to listen to your reaction while it is still flipping in the air. “It’s not the coin deciding, it’s the reaction you have. Your subconsciousness already knows the answer. Be willing to listen to it.”

Above all, she says, jump before you feel ready. Her guiding philosophy comes from Pippi Longstocking, whose books she remembers fondly: Pippi’s mindset was “I’ve never done it, so I probably can do it.” Or, as she puts it more simply: just do it. “There have been so many women, and men, where I quite plainly told them: just do it, you can.”

And when the moment comes, don’t do it alone. “You never achieve something in your career without having the right support around you,” she says, talking of her husband of 30 years and two daughters, 21 and 24, both biomedical sciences students, as the foundation of her own.

Ask Martine what question she wishes someone would ask her, and her answer is: “What do you hope remains because you were here?” For her it’s not about the deals, the titles or even the medicines, though she is naturally proud of those. What she hopes remains is the knowledge, the way of doing things, and the people inspired enough to keep going long past her tenure.

As if to illustrate the point, she mentions that her eldest daughter completed an internship on Fc receptor biology, a similar topic to the one Martine built her PhD on 30 years ago. “Did you read my thesis?” Martine asked her. “No,” her daughter said. “Mom, you should not help me. I want to do it on my own.”

Some things, it seems, don’t need to be managed. They just happen.