Great leaders and how to follow their example

pharmafile | October 22, 2009 | Feature | Business Services |  careers, training 

We remember most clearly the leaders that have inspired us and shared their wisdom, and we absorb key truths from them and other colleagues over the years. But do we carry those insights throughout our lives and careers, or do they slip into the background?

When we are fortunate enough to experience these lessons, we may not truly apply them and pass them on, and this is where formal training can help. An informal culture of training is alive and well in most pharma companies, but what about formal learning and development – how does it happen, where and when?

As the Pharmaceutical Marketing Society’s partners in developing and delivering the PriMe training programme for marketers, we set out to explore the approach to learning and development in marketing across the industry by interviewing a number of senior executives in human resources, learning and development and functional marketing and leadership roles. We asked them to talk about the approaches to learning and development within their own organisations and their views on leadership.

Accountability

Throughout our discussions, a strong theme became apparent around individual accountability for development. Responsibility was seen to rest equally with the individual and their manager. As one respondent put it: “It’s the people who push themselves that tend to get on”.

There was a clear sense that an individual and manager have not only to be responsible for initiating development activities, but for following through during and after any intervention, to ensure that something changes as a result of the training. “Follow up is absolutely vital – all too often training becomes a tick-box exercise and nothing changes as a result.” There also has to be a willingness to engage and to change as a result. “They have to want to learn – do they acknowledge a development need, or do they think they are perfect already?” Ursula Franklin of Wyeth saw a clear accountability for the manager as well. “Anyone who has responsibility for people is also responsible for ensuring that learning and development opportunities are readily available to their team.”

Leadership

Every senior manager has, at some point, experienced the management crossover; the point where the balance of their role shifts from functional to managerial. Having built a base of functional skills and become expert in their field, new managers are thrown into a role that requires them to use new management and leadership skills from the start. They are often ill-prepared for this shift, although some of the organisations with whom we spoke do have new manager programmes designed specifically to support this transition.

Much of the emphasis today is on leadership rather than management, the two elements representing two very different sides of the same coin. There has been much discussion of the difference between leadership and management. As Warren Bennis (founding chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California and widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of leadership studies) once famously said: “Leaders are people who do the right things, managers are people who do things right. There is a profound difference.”

There are certainly misunderstandings about what leadership means in our industry, and as Ursula puts it: “There is a massive difference between leadership and management – you [can] lead people and manage things, but people often try to manage people.” We do indeed speak about ‘people management’ as a skill, which is perhaps a misleading term.

Another key question that we discussed is: ‘Can leadership be learned?’ Many thought that although some leadership skills come more naturally to some managers than others there is a clear place for training to support skills development. For example, it is quite possible to learn to be more people-focused, warm or engaging to improve communication skills, or simply to add tools to your toolkit. One respondent said, “Leadership courses can be really useful in underpinning what you have learnt, what you’ve seen and what you think – courses give you tools to help you do it.” He went on to add: “Sometimes you need to learn different ways of doing things. To paraphrase Einstein: ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Mike Shepley at Baxter does not believe that leadership training should be like “writing a prescription.” He commented: “Leadership is about key principles: vision, value set, [being a] vanguard of change, entrepreneurial risk – people need the aspiration to be a leader. No workshop can give it to them if they don’t have that.”

For one director, leadership is as much about the small things – “making people feel that what they are doing is valuable” – as the big things like setting direction and inspiring the organisation. There was a clear sense though that leadership skills and abilities are important not just for those in formal leadership roles, but for “everyone in the organisation whether they have a team or not.”

Inspiration

We asked our interviewees for their personal inspirational leaders. The names came from business to politics to science and humanities and included luminaries such as Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Mother Theresa, and Gene Kranz.

Gene Kranz, programme director of the NASA Apollo Program showed strong and iconic leadership through challenge and adversity. Kranz is best known for applying his rigourous ‘Tough and Competent’ approach after a fire on the Apollo 1 rocket launch pad killed three astronauts in 1967. Kranz defined Tough and Competent in a speech to his staff: “Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

Krantz and others picked up the leadership baton handed on by John F Kennedy. Like many leaders, JFK was an outstanding orator; he set out his vision in clear and vivid terms, a technique described in Collins and Porras’ seminal article in the Harvard Business Review in 1992. Kennedy’s speech at Rice Stadium in September 1962 is essential watching for any aspiring leader. The speech sets out a crystal clear vision, even down to the details of the rocket that would carry the first astronauts to the moon: “We shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun – almost as hot as it is here today – and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out – then we must be bold.”

As Martin Crisp, of Ferring commented: his inspirational leaders are all “great orators who can communicate effectively to all people at all levels” and this seemed to be a clear theme from those we spoke to.

And what of leadership qualities themselves? As Steve Glass of Biomarin points out: “If you Google ‘leadership qualities’ you get over 1.7 million hits – so where do you start?” For him, leadership is about four things, “Set the pace, believe in the future and create a picture of that future, connect people to the big picture and help people to believe in themselves.”

The qualities mentioned by our respondents were of having “very clear goals and giving clear direction,” “high principles, energy and a drive for things they truly believed in,” of “having a team that is truly inspired”, or “communicating the ‘art of the possible.'” Some mentioned “the ability to galvanise people and communicate Vision and Purpose,” or “the ability to communicate with everyone, no matter their level of education, beliefs or intelligence,” or as one respondent put it simply being “right for their time.”

Good marketing leaders must build from a base of functional marketing skills, and as Mike Shepley said: “Good marketing leaders might not always be the best functional experts, but they must have functional credibility.”

Learning and development

The specifics of learning and development provision varied somewhat across the group with whom we spoke, although again there were some clear common themes. Usually training and development needs are identified at the annual goal-setting meeting and tied into the performance management system. One respondent explained that they urge their managers to frame the learning or development need in terms of the behaviours needing to be changed rather than specific courses or programmes required. This then enables the training manager or HR team to work specifically with the individual and their manager to identify the most appropriate intervention. “Often these are not external courses at all – we aim to achieve an appropriate balance of internal courses, manager coaching and external courses.” As she explained, unless it relates to a highly specific functional or technical ability, “a ‘sheep-dip’ approach is seldom useful.”

The larger organisations have very capable corporate functions that provide learning and development programmes, especially for the more senior managers and leaders. “It’s also a great opportunity to network and to meet the global leadership team.”

Where personal development is concerned and given the emphasis on the individual, it was clear that in some cases individual training needs are neglected at the expense of the day job. There was also a sense that the higher up you become in an organization, the less training is available to you.

As Jill Skinner of Shire noted: “The more senior people are, the harder it is to find the time for training.” By this stage of a career, it is often more useful to be offered tailored support, and the use of one-to-one coaching was widespread. One organisation had found this approach particularly useful, although not all managers are prepared to take it up. “They sometimes see it as a remedial step, and an indication that they are failing – they really have to want to engage with it.”

One senior manager gains support from informal or semi-formal networking groups where like-minded managers across industries can get together and discuss general or specific issues with the support of a trained facilitator. This can be very useful, as it offers a forum to discuss issues of concern outside the framework of the organisation itself.

Companies generally seem to provide a mix of on-the-job, internal and external training, and some were seeking to become more self-sufficient. Innovative approaches such as work shadowing across divisions, especially in preparation for a move to a new role were seen as especially helpful.

In our highly regulated environment, marketing is surely a greater challenge than in other industries, where the “Brand is King” and there is scope to develop messages that address intangible unmet consumer needs. We work after all in a technical and rational field and it is perhaps unsurprising that much of our communications revolve around technical and functional messages. Most operational marketers in pharma have come through the salesforce route and as one respondent put it: “there is overdependence on rational and transactional elements”. This was felt to be an area where external support could make a difference. As one manager put it, “Some of our marketers feel that our internal marketing training programme is telling them things they already know.”

In conclusion, from these discussions, it seems that the trend is towards a blend of internal and external resources that is tailored to the needs of the organisation and the individual. External support takes the form of coaching, functional marketing skills and essentials of leadership. It is clear that all of the organisations to which we spoke, place learning and development very high on the agenda and see their future marketing competitiveness very much through their people.

Many thanks to our contributors:

Martin Crisp, divisional manager – gastroenenterology, Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

Ursula Franklin, assistant vice president, New Business, Wyeth Europa.

Steve Glass, vice president and general manager EUMEA, Biomarin Europe.

Simeon Saunders, regional director, Northern Europe, Abbott Nutrition International.

Mike Shepley, UK learning and development manager, Baxter Healthcare.

Jill Skinner, director, international sales & marketing training, Shire.

Amanda White, UK HR director, Abbott.

Mike Yates, head of marketing, thrombosis, Sanofi-Aventis.

About the author: Jonathan Dancer is managing director of red kite consulting group, partners to the Pharmaceutical Marketing Society in developing and delivering the PriMe training series. For more information on how PriMe can support you or your organisation, please visit www.prime.pmsociety.org.uk