Leadership Strategy Alignment and Mobilization

SITUATION

  • Business unit of a Global Pharma company headquartered in Europe

  • Some key plants had improved performance in recent years, but these improvements were driven mainly from the top

  • Down-the-line leaders and employees were mainly looking for senior managers to tell them what to do

  • Senior leadership team members were not behaving in a consistent way

  • The business unit VP felt a need to align the leadership team around a few core values and principles in order to generate more engagement and energy about building a world-class operating unit


SOLUTION

  • Held a series of workshops with senior leadership team, with work in between

  • Selected four core values from a broad range, and clarified among the team

  • Following the workshops, asked team members to identify situations that could be used to describe desired and undesired behaviors; built agreement on those

  • Incorporated values into evaluation systems for managers along with other performance measures

  • Held plant-level workshops to get people to internalize and formulate what the values meant specifically to them and their unit


RESULTS

  • Early effects show that the values are being referred to daily in the organization to address behavior issues

  • When critical situations occur or when decisions need to be made, the senior leadership team uses values as a checkpoint to guide them

  • Local adjustments of the values are part of a monthly follow-up routine and discussed in each team, down to the shop floor

Case StudyElise Barnes