This is the fourth blog post in a series that highlights our experience with different industries. The first blog examined our partnerships with restaurant, food and beverage organizations. The second reviewed our experience with all things retail. The third reviewed our history with manufacturing organizations, and the paragraphs that follow will target our experience with pharmaceutical customers.
A pharmaceutical company discovers, develops, produces and commercializes medicine. It is a $1.6 trillion industry and remains one of the fastest growing and most profitable sectors of the global economy. In the United States, pharma employs over 800,000 employees directly and is responsible for an additional 3.2 million jobs indirectly.
From our perspective at CLS, the pharma industry likes to be first! In the early 1980s, very few organizations had formal training departments, and fewer still had ‘leadership training’ as a designated department or role. Pharma had both! Pharma embraced the value of intentional, ongoing, leadership development very early in the game. Several of the pharma companies we work with have been partners for decades. Here are two distinguishing “lessons learned” that are the product of that extended partnership.
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- The Case for Custom – Pharma (generally speaking) believes in the power of unmistakable relevance when it comes to leadership training. They want managers to attend programs with corporate branding (at a minimum) and course components (case studies, assessments, etc.) that reflect the circumstances they encounter on a day-to-day basis. This quite often includes divisional nuances (i.e., a research setting is different from one in manufacturing or commercial operations). Additionally, as much or more than any other industry we have worked with over the years, pharma invests in tethering their training. For example, if managers are scheduled to attend a program on the Situational Leadership® Model after completing training in emotional intelligence, it is common practice for them to develop a stand-alone module that integrates the core messages of the two frameworks.
- What “Pull-Through” Really Looks Like – In pharma, and as a matter of standard practice, field sales managers accompany the sales professionals in their districts on calls with targeted physicians. This provides the manager with the opportunity to make direct observations and provide both timely and specific performance feedback at days end.Several of our pharma customers have asked us to co-develop performance management assets over the years to streamline that process. In that regard we have custom designed “field contact reports” for their approved use that reflect Situational Leadership® terminology. For example:
- TASK: Asking thought-provoking questions
- READINESS LEVEL for TASK: R1? R2? R3? R4?
- BEHAVIOR OBSERVED: _________________
This results in the highest level of post-training reinforcement, as every time a field sales manager conducts a field visit, the essence of being a Situational Leader is revisited.
The future of the pharma Industry would seem to indicate there will be both continued opportunity and increasing challenge. The time it takes to develop new medicines will be streamlined by technology … but complicated by ever-increasing regulation. Pricing in pharma has always been complicated especially for truly innovative therapy (i.e., what would a fair price be for pill that cured cancer … but took 15 years and $1.2 billion to develop?).
The industry will also continue to attract their fair share of the best and the brightest, and we at CLS will continue to be honored every time we can work with a pharma client and help them turn that potential into performance!
