Recruiting people into your burgeoning pharmaceutical business who will think and act like you is a critical success factor. But as with many other similar organisations in the industry, it’s proven to be a real challenge to scale up from your core group without diluting your original intent.
The growth journey of small to medium pharmaceutical companies is faced with many obstacles. With your founding group of free thinkers, technical specialists and graduate professionals in place, and with a product that’s ready to market, your increased success will depend on your ability to continually build an effective, motivated and cohesive team around you.
But how do you go about developing the right culture that could take your pharmaceutical business from good to great.
Challenges of a fast-growth cycle
When you’re on a rapid growth trajectory, the chance for self-reflection is not always easy or possible. You are focused on getting the job done and there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
In the early stages of a growing pharmaceutical business, founders are often more motivated to manage tasks and respond to immediate pressures rather than prioritising and leading people. This can create a lot of employee churn. Closing the gap from fixating solely on task management towards creating a more positive culture with strong leadership where people thrive is the difference between good and great.
So why prioritise cultural change in your business?
Attracting and retaining the right talent cultivates a satisfying work environment that values cooperation, creativity and employee happiness. Ultimately it drives business growth and success.
But it’s easy to see why you might question the need to focus on the culture of your business. You may already have good staff, great products and achieving success. But the question is whether it is sustainable. It is only when you take an in-depth analysis of your business KPIs, delivery timescales or customer satisfaction rates, that you realise something needs to change if you are to maintain your growth trajectory.
If you recognise you have a silo-based culture that is strong in specific functions but not cohesive enough to drive the company to the next level, then it’s time to impact change.
Creating a solid foundation for growth
Making meaningful change involves modelling holistic processes that support learning and development, both at individual and group level.
You can initiate this by gaining a deeper understanding about the behavioural and leadership characteristics you want to develop to support your business. For example, moving from recruiting solely technical or functional experts towards recruiting people with the right overall skills package will help you achieve your growth ambitions. The aim would be that these leaders will stabilise and influence the organisation as you continue to expand.
Creating a stronger business from within
Developing cultural change for enhanced performance involves much more than just running training programmes. To achieve your desired outcome, you’ll need to bring everything together, from alignment and engagement of your staff and managers all the way through to the systems and processes that will support them. In particular:
- Leadership Styles: To get things started, you need to look at your existing leadership styles and take time to measure and analyse your combined emotional intelligence. Self-reflection is an integral part of this, where you would engage employees in using questionnaires, get them to evaluate their daily routines or run workshop-style informal meetings.
- Leadership Framework: Using this insight, you can now start developing a leadership framework which will help to set out your core values and common purpose, as well as focus on the energy and talent you wish to develop. The framework should define behavioural expectations that will support a more empowered culture; by establishing the values and behaviours you expect people in the organisation to do, as well as identifying ways to promote teamwork and improve collaboration. The framework should of course be aligned with your KPIs and performance management metrics.
- Talent acquisition: With your leadership styles determined and aligned with the framework you have in place, the next step is to recruit and on-board the right leaders with the right behaviours as you have defined. These can be sourced both internally and externally, but they must be aligned to your core values and common purpose.
- Tools and Techniques: These leadership foundations will enable you to identify and platform the right systems, processes and support mechanisms needed to improve leadership, with actions matched with your company’s purpose and values. They may be in the form of one-to-ones, coaching and mentoring sessions, making sure you give people a chance to practice what they’ve learned before you move on to the next stage.
- The Power of Informal: We also always say to our clients never to under-estimate the value of informal conversations. Creating space where you can provoke conversations, whether it’s to discuss challenges or what help someone might need, promotes good habits and will drive a shared vision.
Building the most effective team is a journey, requiring your staff to adjust, adapt and make changes in their daily routines. This isn’t always easy but it will ultimately change your business from the inside out, helping you transition from good to great.
Achieving sustained growth
To set up for long-term success, it’s crucial you create the right company culture, establish effective processes and ensure strong leadership with buy-in from everyone.
Building this solid foundation will enhance your team’s cohesion and collaboration, not only making recruitment and retention easier but will foster an environment for the wider group development and success.
Your pharmaceutical company will ultimately benefit from increased productivity with a culturally positive and well-managed organisation supported by a leadership team that is equipped to managed sustained change.
