Industry: Pharma

The challenge

Stein Cares, a pharmaceutical company with operations in several countries in Latin America, was experiencing unprecedented growth and faced the challenge of evolving its culture to be more agile and enable its expansion into new markets. Senior leaders recognized that the true driver of change was people, not just processes.

The company had identified and socialized its desired culture vision and behaviors, but needed to make the shifts real and relevant to employees’ day-to-day challenges and interactions. The goal was to translate their theoretical understanding of culture into tangible skills and behaviors that each employee could embrace and enact, regardless of their role or geographic location.

 

The approach

Our consultative journey began with in-depth conversations with Stein Cares’ senior leaders to better understand which were the biggest gaps between the current and desired culture and which mindset and behavior shifts needed to be prioritized.

With this input, Axialent designed a full-day, interactive program for their annual company offsite that invited employees to learn and practice new mindsets and skills related to effective communication and productive coordination to bring their desired culture to life. The facilitated session provided employees a common language and practical frameworks to build self-awareness, start igniting culture change, and drive shared accountability.

 

The impact

The offsite was an important milestone in the company’s culture journey. Leaders and team members left with not just theory, but actionable tools that translate into daily practice to enhance decision-making and more fluid collaboration, and started the integration of a conscious business approach into their rapid growth journey.

The challenge

This global pharmaceutical R&D company (US$33+ billion revenue/57,200+ employees) needed to increase delivery of medicines to the global market in the face of challenges like encroaching generics, onerous legislative hurdles (especially in the U.S. and EU) and shortening patent times.

Our culture diagnostic revealed significant barriers to innovation and to shifting ways to succeed within the culture itself.

Culture transformation through the leadership development program became a key strategy to improve the global turnaround and:

  • Enable more innovation.
  • Leverage knowledge.
  • Increase collaborative efforts.
  • Accelerate speed to market.
  • Maximize partnerships.

 

The approach

Together, we designed a transformation program to drive behavior and mindset shifts. This global communication and innovation initiative would involve all scientific staff in redesigning everything from operational processes to talent strategy and workplaces.

The Learner-Player leadership development program

Central to this project was Axialent’s Learner-Player leadership development program.

Designed to help leaders model a desired innovation culture, Learner-Player is a blended learning approach that ensures lasting, transferable change. In this case, the program included:

  • Designing a three-day R&D leadership conference, keynoted by Dr. Fred Kofman.
  • Two-day workshops for senior leaders, featuring individual behavioral assessments, Learner action plans, coaching to shift mental models, and acquiring new tools (behaviors and skills) to increase effectiveness in day-to-day management, communication and decision-making.
  • Half-day insight sessions on Learner-Player mindsets (interactive, conference-like sessions complementary to the two-day workshops).
  • Interactive, recorded webcasts every three months: Sessions were hosted by an Axialent facilitator interviewing senior leaders and taking questions from the audience.
  • Development of the Innovation Toolkit: papers, videos, WebEx deliveries and the New Way of Being booklet, used by leaders as a resource to initiate discussions within their teams.
  • Team meetings and self-development.
  • Learner-Player video clips featuring the application of Learner-Player to everyday scenarios.

  • An ambassador program to accredit internal facilitators, ensuring program’s scalability and transfer of skills to the remainder of the organization.

 
The program is, so far, seen as an unqualified success. About 94 percent of the people who attended feel that they have made changes in how they approach their work, and it is a unanimous view that rolling the program out to a wider audience in R&D will have a positive impact on the culture of the function.
Purchase, Learning and Development Partner for R&D

 

The impact

In this program, we worked face to face with more than 2,700 leading scientists in Sweden, the U.S., U.K., Japan, China and India, introducing the behavior changes required for the desired culture shift. Meanwhile, our custom information packs reached 10,000+ people, and we trained approximately 70 internal facilitators through the ambassador program.

The Learner-Player: Business Benefits impact study, conducted by an independent third party, confirmed there was a successful transfer of the Learner and Player concepts into the organization — both at an individual and team level, resulting in outcomes such as:

  • Reduced levels of stress due to a sense of control that Learner-Player mindsets create for people.
  • Increased engagement and motivation, and a sense of doing something worthwhile.
  • Visibly higher levels of collaboration and creativity.
  • A positive effect on business outcomes estimated in an independent report at more than $100 million.
Following the Axialent program, I clearly understood the task I faced to transform the culture within the business I was responsible for. After listening to hundreds of employees, we created our core values that accelerated our performance to change the culture. We saw better team engagement, happier staff, better turnover and significant improvement of our results.
Managing Director, Groupe PSA
Over the past two years, we’ve been working on a culture transformation project with Axialent. The last 24 months have been the most successful in the history of Mercado Libre. I am certain that working on our culture has been one of the key factors of this recent success.
CFO, Mercado Libre
Working with Axialent has allowed us like never before to increase our ability to take responsibility and create a culture of achievement and cross-collaboration at every level in our organization. Axialent's unique approach to having people work with themselves, each other and on key projects with full engagement has been of invaluable help to our organization.
Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
Previous
Next