Olivia de Roubaix on leadership, growth and patient care

Olivia de Roubaix first joined Unilabs more than 20 years ago. Today, she is the General Manager of Unilabs France, shaping the business’ future growth, with a strong focus on patients, innovation and care. In this article, she reflects on the challenges and opportunities facing the diagnostics industry and shares the leadership philosophy guiding her ambition to make Unilabs an even stronger healthcare partner.

Tell us about your current role and a brief history of your time with Unilabs so far.

I joined Unilabs more than 20 years ago. Over the years, I have had very different roles and responsibilities, which has allowed me to discover the business from many different angles. I think this matters a lot today because I know our organisation, our laboratories and, most importantly, our people very well.

Today, I'm the General Manager of Unilabs France. I took this role at a particularly important moment for the French organisation, with a clear mandate to transform the business and prepare it for the future. People sometimes ask me whether it is more difficult to transform a company you have known and cared about for such a long time. For me, it is the opposite. When you know an organisation deeply, you know what must be protected, and you also know what needs to change. And I feel a strong responsibility for both.

How would you describe the purpose of your role today?

My purpose is to make Unilabs France stronger and ready for the future. That means improving performance, simplifying the way we work, investing where it matters, continuing to grow and, sometimes, making difficult choices about where we can really make a difference.

But transformation is not an objective in itself. The question I often have in mind is: what kind of company do we want to leave to the people who will lead Unilabs after us? My responsibility is to help define that direction, make the choices required to get there, and ensure that we deliver. We should never forget what our business is ultimately about: people and their health.

Please describe your leadership philosophy.

There are a few things I believe strongly, these beliefs have developed over time, through experience, the people I have worked with and also through mistakes. The first is that leadership is about setting a direction, making choices, and creating the conditions for people to deliver. I believe in trust, but trust comes with accountability. If you give someone responsibility, you have to give them the freedom to exercise it and expect them to own the outcome. The same applies to me as a leader. I have to make decisions, including difficult ones, and take responsibility for them.

I also believe strongly in transparency, which doesn’t mean pretending that everything is always clear. Sometimes the most honest thing a leader can say is: “I don’t know yet.” You don’t need to have every answer to lead. You need to know where you want to go, be prepared to adjust the route, and give people enough confidence to follow you even when the road is not perfectly straight.

What challenges and opportunities is Unilabs France managing at the moment?

France is a fascinating market because diagnostics is both an essential part of healthcare and a sector under significant economic pressure. We are being asked to do more: more prevention, more sophisticated diagnostics, better access, faster results and a better patient experience. At the same time, healthcare systems everywhere need to control costs, and I think this tension creates a huge opportunity.

For a long time, diagnostics has sometimes been considered as one step in the healthcare process: a test is prescribed, we perform it and provide a result. I believe our role can be much bigger than that. We have extraordinary medical and scientific expertise, technology, data, and millions of interactions with patients and healthcare professionals. Our opportunity is to connect these assets much better and use them to contribute to prevention, earlier diagnosis, and better medical decisions; and I want Unilabs France to be at the forefront of that evolution.

How do you balance short-term performance with long-term transformation?

This is probably one of the most important questions in my role today. There is always a temptation in difficult environments to focus only on the next month, the next budget or the next target. Of course, performance matters. Without a healthy business, you cannot invest, innovate or build for the future. Having said that, sometimes you need to make decisions whose benefits will only become visible several years later. Investing in equipment, developing people, reorganising a laboratory network or changing the way we work all take time. So I try to keep both horizons in mind: we need to perform today in order to transform, but we also need to transform in order to perform tomorrow.

What is your ambition for Unilabs over the next few years?

We have something quite unique at Unilabs: extraordinary medical and scientific expertise, a large network across Europe, strong local knowledge, and an enormous amount of diagnostic information. Our ambition should be to connect these capabilities much more effectively and turn them into better prevention, earlier diagnosis and better care for patients. If we can do that while continuing to build a stronger and more sustainable business, I believe Unilabs can play a much bigger role in healthcare than it does today.