From No Role Models to One Global Leadership Team

A pharmaceutical company needed to improve cross-collaboration to facilitate regional knowledge and best practices sharing across its international organization. This was critical to the success of the company because it was structured in nine geographic regions, which were expected to act as ONE team globally.

Leadership sensed a new structure was needed to make it act as ONE across. Innovisor was therefore asked to diagnose the real collaborative structures in the real organization which had been invisible previously.

The diagnose confirmed what leadership sensed:

collaboration happened in the regions. Across regions, it was limited!

Limited collaboration was also evident in the leadership network. It was disconnected! The two key insights into the leadership team were:

1. The leadership benchmark showed that 78% of leaders are normally connected in a coherent tightly knitted unit. In this pharmaceutical company, only 36% of the leadership was connected.
2. More frightening was that the leadership network was in reality 8 disconnected silos – almost reflecting the 9 regions.

It was clear! Leadership was not role modeling the behavior it requested from the organization.

This made leadership decide to first start with strengthening their own collaborative network across the regions. They did this through the following key actions:

1. They had set-up a workgroup consisting of the right leaders from the silos and thus quickly connected the leadership network into ONE;
2. They had set up a virtual knowledge hub for the leaders;
3. They had established guidelines and principles for the sharing of knowledge and best practices inside the Leadership team.

These actions proved to be successful. It helped the whole leadership team to role model the needed behavior. This was the first required step to successfully transform the structure and strengthen its ability to work as ONE. The next step was to engage the informal organization through the right employees who had the most influence – the 3% who influence up to 90% of an organization.