How a top pharma team achieved high growth

The strength of the partnership meant that the work that LIW and our client did over 18 months could challenge some L&D norms and seek to get extraordinary results. Some of the L&D shifts that we explore in this submission are:

• From ‘learning to do’ to ‘doing to learn’: LIW’s focus on delivering business impact evolved still further through this partnership. With our client, we closed the ‘learning-doing gap’ totally. The team learned by doing at each stage, reflecting on what worked and what didn’t.
• From individual to intact team learning: This team invested the time to come together to learn and work together. The team recognised their dual roles; the vertical dimension as leaders of their own function, and the horizontal dimension as members of the leadership team. Whilst they all performed their vertical role, the importance of their horizontal roles drove the team’s ability to collaborate and to build execution across the business.
• From a skills focus to a performance focus: Many leadership programs focus on the hard skills of leadership and the business results, while others focus on culture and the soft side of leadership. We wanted to combine these approaches so that we could support the leadership team to develop their personal leadership skills, and build their mutual understanding as a team whilst maintaining a ruthless focus on business results. This was supported by the use of assessments, including the Team Calibrator™, throughout the year to track and build the Conditions for Success™ in the team.
• From a fixed learning path to agile development: Rather than setting out a complete development path upfront in ‘waterfall’ style, each element of the program was developed based on the learnings of the last, ‘pivoting’ where needed to arrive at the desired destination. Furthermore, the team viewed the development path as a journey rather than a set of discrete events, so that while they set some clear goals at the start, the path to achieve them inevitably evolved as they learned and progressed on their leadership journey.

It was not a smooth road – the team, like all groups of humans and all businesses, were hit with some curve balls along the way. There were cynics. There were some discontented customers to get on board. There was a serious health scare in the team.

All these challenges were overcome by a team that had the courage to speak freely, and to challenge themselves and others.

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The results have been dramatic, both in terms of leadership of the top team and business performance.

Key Results

1. Double digit revenue growth two years in a row.

2. Team Calibrator scores improved 29% through the year.  

3. Variability of Team Calibrator scores fell by 48% demonstrating an impressive improvement in alignment across the leadership team.

Latest business results are also positive, with the team delivering double digit specialty revenue growth two years in a row and a return to positive growth for the overall business unit in the fourth quarter of 2018.