Nathalie Shahabian
Principal Director - Life Sciences
LBB Specialties
In this conversation, Nathalie Shahabian, Principal Director for Life Sciences at LBB Specialties, reflects on her fifteen-year career in chemical distribution. She discusses how she built a collaborative leadership style, why service and strategic partnerships have become central to distribution, and how her multicultural background and mentors have shaped the way she leads her team.
Background and Path to LBB Specialties
Nathalie has spent four years at LBB Specialties as Principal Director for Life Sciences, initially focused on excipients before expanding her oversight to include APIs and the broader pharmaceuticals strategy. Her career began at Brenntag Specialties, where she was exposed to inside sales and the many components of distribution, laying the foundation for the fifteen years she has now spent in the industry. She credits much of her growth to the operational and interpersonal skills developed along the way, along with the relationships she continues to build at trade shows and industry gatherings.
Industry Trends and the Role of AI
Nathalie observes that distribution is shifting from simply moving product to offering more sophisticated, service-oriented solutions. She points to AI as a major force driving operational workflow forward and pushing the industry to its next stage of evolution.
Building and Sustaining Strategic Partnerships
Managing partnerships across pharmaceuticals, food and nutrition, and personal care starts, in Nathalie's view, with a clear understanding of strategic objectives and what makes a distributor's portfolio attractive to the market. She sees LBB's role as a true extension of its partners' businesses, helping them expand across units and portfolios rather than limiting growth to a single relationship. Sustaining these partnerships over time means complementing each partner's strengths and accelerating innovation, all while keeping the customer at the center of every decision.
Driving Innovation and Customer-Focused Collaboration
When asked how organizations can innovate while staying aligned with customer needs, Nathalie points to the importance of a shared vision paired with flexibility for individual teams, favoring coordinated innovation over siloed efforts. She notes that the strongest customer solutions come from collaboration across sales, marketing, product management, and supplier relationships, and that early wins build trust even as teams work toward longer term goals. Her advice for collaboration within a company is simple: clarity of purpose makes nearly anything achievable.
Leading Through Market Challenges
Reflecting on a difficult year in the market, Nathalie says LBB Specialties chose to stay focused on solutions rather than obstacles, crediting the team's progress to its various business segments working together. She describes supply chain disruptions as, above all, a test of agility, one that trickles down through a team and depends on staying focused on shared goals even amid unfavorable conditions.
A Happy Accident: Finding Life Sciences
Nathalie's path into life sciences began unexpectedly. After majoring in life science at Penn State with plans for pharmacy school, a family health emergency changed her direction; time spent alongside doctors and pharmacists during her father's recovery led her toward a different calling. She later discovered Brenntag, pursued an MBA, and found that pairing business acumen with technical knowledge has served her well in her current role, where she serves as an ambassador between LBB Specialties and its supplier partners, overseeing strategy, growth targets, and KPIs.
Leadership Philosophy: Mentorship, Integrity, and Growing Emerging Leaders
Mentors have played a significant role in shaping Nathalie's leadership approach, with integrity standing out as the guiding principle behind her decisions, paired with the empathy she believes must accompany data when connecting decisions back to the business. She identifies agility, integrity, and empathy as essential qualities for today's leaders, encouraging these traits in her team by treating colleagues as peers and delegating meaningful responsibility. Looking ahead, she sees considerable opportunities in AI, digital transformation, and sustainability, and hopes to help guide the next generation of leaders as they take on that work.
Heritage, Community, and What's Ahead
Nathalie's multicultural background and fluency in several languages have shaped her ability to connect with people across the industry, and her Armenian heritage often sparks meaningful conversations at trade shows. When asked what excites her most, she points to watching her team grow and gain the same opportunities she has had, valuing her role as their advocate above a seat at the table.
Advice for the Women in Chemicals Community
Her advice to WIC members centers on staying agile and welcoming change. She encourages the community of women in chemicals to be bold, support one another, and hold each other accountable as they grow professionally.
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