May 25, 2026 – 7 min read
by Sean Frontz, in partnership with PDG Content Team
Why do pharma sales leaders overrate their teams? Research shows 62% of performance rating variance comes from the rater’s own tendencies, not from the person being rated. The three most common biases in life sciences commercial organizations are historical bias (assessing talent based on past performance rather than current capability), tenure bias (overrating long-tenured team members to avoid confronting what your own coaching produced), and affinity bias (coaching people differently based on personal chemistry rather than developmental need). All three originate in the leader’s own psychology, which means the leader cannot self-correct without structured diagnostic tools and trusted external accountability.
Every commercial leader in pharma I work with believes they know their sales team. They know who the high-performers are, who needs development, who is coasting. That confidence is a problem.
A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that 62% of the variance in performance ratings comes from the rater’s own tendencies, not from the person being rated. Only 21% reflects actual performance. When you sit down to assess your team, more than half of what you “see” is your own psychology reflected back at you. Your memory. Your ego. Your personal preferences.
In decades of working with pharma commercial organizations, I have never met a sales leader who rated their people accurately on the first assessment. Every single one overrates. That is human nature. But with compressed timelines and competitive entries reshaping markets, the cost of seeing your field force wrong has never been higher.
Historical bias is the most prevalent bias I see in established pharma organizations, and it is the most dangerous because it does not feel like bias at all. It feels like knowledge.
Think about the last time you sat down for a talent review. Before you looked at the numbers, you already had a rating in your head. You remember what this person delivered during a launch two or three years ago. That memory becomes the rating, even when the market underneath it has completely changed.
Here is the part that should give every leader in our industry pause. When someone says they have 15 years of experience, what does that actually mean? For a lot of people in life sciences, it means one year of experience repeated 15 times over, because nobody held them accountable to practice something different or get different results. The industry has been reshaped by COVID, by AI, by shifting access models, by impending generic entries. The person you are remembering may not exist in today’s market. But your assessment of them has not moved.
Tenure bias gives long-tenured reps inflated credibility, latitude, and ratings because they have been on the team for years. Nearly every leader does it.
Part of it is straightforward. The rep knows the accounts, knows the playbook, has the relationships. History earns them benefit of the doubt newer reps never get, even when the numbers do not back it up.
The stickier layer is ego. When a rep has been on your team for five years and is not where they need to be, there is no one else to hold responsible. Your coaching produced their results. Admitting they are underperforming means admitting what you built. So the rating stays high. Not because the evidence supports it, but because the alternative is a mirror.
That is how tenure bias survives quarter after quarter. History buys the credibility. Ego protects it. The coaching conversation never happens, and the underperformance compounds.
Affinity bias is the tendency to coach people differently based on how much you enjoy their company, and it runs in both directions.
You have someone on your team you genuinely connect with. You golf together, you share a drink after a regional meeting, conversation comes easy. On the same team, there is someone with a completely different energy. Different personality, different politics, different way of showing up. You do not dislike them. You just do not gravitate toward them. Without realizing it, the person you connect with gets more of your time, more benefit of the doubt, more patience when they miss. The person you do not connect with gets less coaching, less investment, less of you as a leader. Neither decision is based on performance. People are not aware of how much personal chemistry biases their leadership. Until you can see that lens and admit how it is shaping who gets your attention, you cannot do anything about it.
When someone says they have 15 years of experience, what does that actually mean? For some in life sciences, it means one year of experience repeated 15 times over, because nobody held them accountable to practice something different or get different results.
Awareness alone does not fix this. You can learn about these biases, commit to being more objective, and still fall into the same patterns the next time you sit down to evaluate your sales team. The biases are not a knowledge problem. They are a visibility problem. And visibility requires structure.
This is why we built the Performance Matrix at PDG. It’s a structured diagnostic that requires leaders to assess every individual on two dimensions—attitude and aptitude—separating willingness from capability and grounding evaluation in a consistent standard, not comparison or gut feel. What makes the Matrix powerful against bias is repetition and calibration over time. Initial assessments are often inflated, but when leaders reassess in 90‑day cycles and discuss placements with others, patterns emerge. Historical assumptions get challenged by current evidence. Tenure‑based ratings are tested against future readiness. Relationship‑driven judgments surface when leaders are asked to defend the dot. Across organizations, we see the same result: once bias is visible, leaders stop managing perceptions and start coaching what’s actually in front of them.
But here is the part most leaders underestimate. You cannot run this process on yourself. Three biases, three sources: your memory, your ego, your preferences. All three originate inside your own psychology, which means you are structurally incapable of catching them alone. I am not aware that I am biased in that way until someone helps me point that out. And without that outside perspective, I will remain blind to it.
You cannot be your own therapist. The person inside the system cannot diagnose the system. That is not a weakness. It is a structural reality. Getting to clarity requires a trusted partner outside of it, someone who brings discretion and transparency, who will tell you what they actually see with empathy and without softening it. Most people inside your organization will not give you that. Not because they do not care, but because they are part of the same system, carrying their own biases, subject to the same dynamics.
When that mirror finally gets held up and a leader sees their team for what it actually is, coaching becomes precise. The results follow. Not because the team changed, but because the leader finally saw clearly.
If you are ready to find out what you are not seeing, I would welcome that conversation. Reach out here.
Sean Frontz is the Sales Performance Global Leader at Performance Development Group, where he partners with pharma and biotech commercial organizations on coaching capability, leadership development, and field team performance.
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