CDMO Selection: Start With The Relationship, Not The RFP

By Natasha Kehimkar, CEO and founder, Malida Advisors

Team alignment principles don’t stop at your company’s org chart. They can also help sponsors and contract manufacturers build stronger, more effective partnerships from the start.

I was working with a life sciences client on team dynamics, team alignment, and cross‑functional collaboration when they asked whether our approach could be applied with external partners, specifically, contract manufacturers. My answer was yes. In many cases, the same fundamentals that help internal teams work well together also help sponsors build stronger, more resilient CDMO relationships.

The question came up because they had seen a range of outcomes in past relationships with contract manufacturers, just as they had experienced a range of team dynamics over the course of their careers. Some had been outstanding. Some had been frustrating. In the harder ones, the science was solid and the contracts were in place, but the partnership itself was shaky over the course of the engagement, with slow decision‑making, tense emails when challenges arose, and small issues becoming harder than they needed to be.

That is the opportunity. Partners can be more deliberate about how they build these relationships from the start. The same principles that support strong matrix leadership and cross‑functional collaboration internally can also help create better alignment across company boundaries.

The Sponsor–CDMO Relationship Is A Team Sport

A sponsor–contract manufacturer relationship is both contractual and deeply collaborative. Information, accountability, risk, and decisions move back and forth across organizational lines. That means many of the same dynamics that affect internal teamwork emerge. Think unclear roles, unspoken assumptions, mixed incentives, and communication habits that either build or erode trust.

One leader with experience inside a contract manufacturer put it well: “The magic isn’t in how fast each side can run. The magic is in the handoff.” That is why sponsor–CDMO relationships benefit from more than a strong contract. They benefit from alignment.

In advising this client, I focused on three areas: align on purpose, make ways of working explicit, and treat problems as opportunities to improve the relationship rather than just moments to assign blame.

Start With Shared Purpose

Inside your company, teams work better when they understand why the work matters. The same is true with external partners. Sponsors often assume a CDMO understands the full business and patient context for a program, while CDMOs may assume sponsors appreciate that they are one of many clients competing for attention and resources. In reality, both sides are usually only seeing part of the picture.

Start with shared purpose. To build true partnerships, explain the context and what is at stake: who the patients are, what a delay or stockout would mean, and why this product matters to the company. That kind of context helps partners make better decisions when trade-offs arise.

In many situations, each organization often has a single point of contact, and while that may seem efficient, it is rarely resilient. The obligation then is to ensure relationships are not “skinny.” Build broader connections early by engaging quality to quality, technical to technical, supply to supply, and you build trust and context across functions, not only with a lone gatekeeper.

Make The Way You Work Together Visible

Inside most companies, friction often comes from unspoken expectations. Sponsor–CDMO relationships are no different. A contract and project plan create the illusion of alignment, but underneath, people are still making different assumptions about decisions, communication, and priorities.

Before production begins, it helps to treat the combined group as one extended team and intentionally make “how we work together” visible.

Use Kickoff To Align People, Not Just Plans

Kickoff meetings are often packed with timelines, scope, and slides. What if partners used a portion of that time to align the actual people who will be working together day-to-day?

Consider reserving part of the kickoff for simple team alignment work with counterparts across sponsor and CDMO organizations. That can be as lightweight as:

• a short, structured conversation about how each side tends to make decisions and communicate under pressure
• sharing results from a simple individual assessment like the Kolbe A Index, which highlights how people naturally take action and solve problems, and then comparing those patterns across the joint team
• an open discussion about where styles might differ, such as a more consensus‑driven sponsor team partnering with a faster, top‑down CDMO team, and how you want to handle those differences when tension shows up.

The goal is to give people enough insight into each other so that when there is disagreement or stress, it feels understandable and workable rather than uncomfortable or time to escalate.

Turn Assumptions Into Simple Agreements

From there, you can move into some very practical ways of working questions:

1. Who decides what when problems arise?
2. How will concerns be raised and discussed?
3. When is email enough, and when is a live conversation necessary?
4. Which meetings are for updates and which are for real problem‑solving?

Leaders with CDMO experience often note that there are things written into the contract, and then there is “how we actually do things when something changes.” It is this second category (usually informal, undocumented, or inconsistently followed) where misunderstandings accumulate.

A simple one‑page summary can help. Capture the key agreements you’ve made about decisions, communication, and meetings, and keep them in your governance materials as a living “ways of working” document. Add it to your meeting agendas and invitations. Do a quick check-in on how the group is working at the end of a meeting. This can be as simple as a quick poll in Zoom. Make it a habit and something concrete to point to when new people join, when pressure rises, or when you need to reset how you’re working together.

Build Problem‑Solving Into The Relationship

Even strong partnerships encounter problems. There may be a delay, a failed batch, or an unexpected issue in testing, and these need not be proof of failure. The big question is how both sides respond when those moments occur.

In internal team alignment work, the two most important shifts are moving from two sides to shared goals and from blame to learning. You can bring that same mindset to future contract manufacturing relationships.

My advice is that when a meaningful issue comes up, pause to ask three questions:

1. What actually happened?
2. What did this reveal about how we are working together?
3. What should we change next time?

Focused after‑action reviews help both parties examine the immediate event and the relationship around it. Did the right people engage soon enough? Were decisions clear? Did everyone understand the risks in the same way? Those questions strengthen the response to a given issue and the partnership overall.

Leaders who have worked across multiple CDMO relationships describe the same pattern: when both sides are willing to learn, not just defend, trust grows faster and issues become easier to resolve.

The Principles Are The Same

My bias is to keep things simple and practical, because simple and practical mean solutions are sustainable. Organizations do not need a completely different alignment philosophy for external partners. The principles that help internal teams perform well, encompassing shared purpose, clear ways of working, and learning‑oriented problem‑solving, also help a sponsor and CDMO build stronger relationships from the start.

In sponsor–CDMO work, the contract matters. The science matters. But the relationship is not secondary to performance. It is part of how performance happens.

About The Author:

Natasha Kehimkar is the CEO and founder of Malida Advisors. Kehimkar and her team help life sciences and tech companies build high-impact leaders and cohesive, future-ready teams. With nearly 30 years of leadership experience at firms like Pfizer, OpenTable, Data.ai, and Guardant Health, she’s known for guiding organizations through rapid change and transformation. Her insights and expertise have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Success magazine, Forbes, and Business Insider.