Pharmaceutical industry
Cultural transformation: Achieving alignment and engagement
Opportunity
Working with a global pharmaceutical company, we helped the executive team to come together to lead a significant transformation, helping them clarify their purpose and strategy, then developing a unifying narrative and engagement plan. The company is Japanese and with a strong culture. It wanted to ensure that it gave an equal voice to its local staff and cultivate a collaborative environment.
The solution
This started with the executive team, valuing their diverse points of view and bringing in external perspectives, both from employees and external stakeholders, looking future-back as well as outside-in. With a clear purpose and ambitious goal agreed, we helped to translate the strategy into a compelling story and tested this with employees to understand what resonated and where we needed to refine the language to create the strongest possible connection.
Armed with a compelling cause and accompanying story, we then helped the executive team to identify how their individual and collective leadership behaviours needed to shift to underpin successful delivery of the strategy and transformation.
Coaching supported the development of both individuals and the collective team, helping unite them and increasing trust, honesty and accountability.
We then guided them as they sought to both engage and align their people. By combining purpose, vision, clear logic and emotion, leaders and employees responded incredibly positively, grabbing the opportunity to be more involved and take greater ownership, playing their part in transforming the business.
Impact
Providing a compelling view of the future, communicating with consistency and involving people in strengthening culture were essential to driving successful execution of the strategy across the business, which moved from third quartile to first quartile performance over the following 3 years.