Training marketers in the gentle art of teamwork
pharmafile | May 8, 2007 | Feature | Business Services |Â Â recruitment, trainingÂ
Trainers are often asked: how can learning and development have the biggest impact on our bottom line? In pharma marketing the answer is: by developing high-performing individuals and teams that consistently create and deliver successful brand strategies. But to achieve this, trainers need to take a holistic approach to developing both the whole person and the whole team – an approach that expands the current practice of personalised coaching to embrace the coaching of entire brand teams in how to effectively communicate and collaborate. If consistently focused on training marketers to become better strategists and better team players, this will deliver real, and ongoing, benefits for the business.
The current trend for personalised learning, or coaching, shows no sign of slowing down. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Developments (CIPD) 2006 Learning and Development Survey showed that four out of five respondents said their companies used coaching, and 90% of them thought coaching important or very important to their success. BusinessWeek also recently highlighted the growth of the coaching culture. Executive search firms, leadership coaches and consultants are rapidly expanding specialised executive onboarding services to give new managers a head start in their new roles.
This approach to coaching makes good business sense, especially for new hires or employees moving to new posts. But why stop there? All marketers can benefit from a personalised approach to their learning and development. Furthermore, while many companies have embraced individual coaching, few have considered how best to coach teams. All marketers work with colleagues to deliver brand strategies and tactics, and high-performing individuals can only excel in high-performing, well-integrated teams. By focusing primarily on the individual, companies are missing an opportunity to enhance their team's performance.
So how would holistic, strategy-focused learning, both for individuals and teams, work in the pharma marketing context?
Holistic training
Let's start with the individual. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. A brilliant brand strategist might be uncomfortable leading a large team. Or a brand manager with years of experience in one therapy area might be moving into a new one that they know little about. Personalised development programmes that look at the whole person, can analyse and work on these gaps to raise skills in targeted areas and help people reach their full potential.
Typically, the personalised approach involves four steps:
* Meeting with individuals and their managers to assess and analyse needs
* Developing tailored training programmes with the individuals input
*Implementing ongoing training sessions with real-job, active-learning exercises
*Establishing tracking and feedback mechan-isms to ensure enhanced performance
Allowing the employee to lead the way
The first step involves a consultant meeting the marketer to identify needs and assess them in the light of any existing performance issues. The process needs line manager input, but should be largely employee-led, as shifting power to the learner will improve commitment to the resulting programme. Employee-led learning is increasingly common but not universal in the UK industry. According to the CIPD 2006 report, fewer than half of all organisations used individual requests to identify training needs.
This assessment leads to a unique programme to develop the individuals needs in marketing strategy, therapeutic knowledge and soft skills that can improve interactions with the team. Soft skills coaching may cover leadership style and Myers-Briggs personality type, as well as communication and influencing styles drawing on insights from emotional intelligence theories and neuro-linguistic profiling (NLP).
Marketing strategy knowledge will focus on how to develop and deliver an integrated brand strategy across the product lifecycle. And, if needed, therapy area training will use specialists to give intensive coaching in the efficacy, tolerability and mechanism of action of the product, as well as the disease background, current treatment options and the future direction of drug development.
Learning by doing
The programme mixes one-to-one coaching and team sessions to embed the individual learning in a team context. It typically passes through stages of coaching, practical experimentation and review. The key to success is active, real-world exercises that lead to high employee engagement and practical, concrete benefits. Since the 1980s, learning and development experts have seen active learning as almost synonymous with effective learning.
Recent studies suggest that active learning without proper guidance can be frustrating and ineffective. But the current emphasis on learning by doing rather than learning by listening is still correct as long as it is based on a balanced mix of expert guidance and carefully structured practical exercises.
To ensure that personalised learning is working, progress is tracked and evaluated by the individual, line manager and consultant. Feedback is given and follow-up sessions performed.
The goal is to ensure that the potential created by these new skills and knowledge is being used effectively and leading to enhanced performance. These review mechanisms can also feed back into new learning programmes to establish an ongoing learning and development cycle.
The global brand director
To show how such an approach might work in practice, imagine this scenario: John is a rising star with more than 10 years' experience in sales, product management and marketing roles. He knows the brand and the therapy area, but needs help with leadership skills to establish himself quickly in the more senior position of global brand director especially as he's developing a reputation for an insensitive, aggressive approach. He'll also need to enhance his strategic marketing skills to better understand his market and develop a robust brand strategy.
John's personalised programme would include learning modules to fast-track his strategic skills in the context of his market. They might help him assess market segments in order to gain a fresh and detailed perspective for positioning the brand. They might also cover analysis of environmental factors and trends that are likely to drive change in the market, or coaching on how to develop a comprehensive lifecycle management strategy for the brand.
John's tailored plan would also include intensive, one-to-one coaching on leadership and communications styles. This might involve 360 degree feedback on his current leadership style and training sessions to develop his emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. He would learn how to use a broader range of inclusive and democratic leadership styles to help him develop and lead teams more effectively. He would also work on techniques to improve his self-control and empathy, without losing the drive and focus that got him to this level.
All this personal training will count for little if John is leading a dysfunctional team that works in silos and doesn't communicate well. Just as a football coach would never train his players in isolation; good pharma marketing training recognises that building an efficient, integrated brand team requires more than simply bringing together a group of talented, well-trained individuals. So the second step in delivering a successful brand strategy involves customised coaching for the entire brand team as a team.
Developing teamwork
Imagine John taking over an existing brand team that needs to raise its game in an increasingly crowded market. The team is very knowledgeable about its therapy area but has not been proactive enough in dealing with multiple, serious competitors. Its members need to take a broader, more integrated view of brand strategy to ensure that they've taken full account of the new realities and that their tactics successfully implement any new strategic objectives. The extra competition also means more pressure and a heavier workload – and cracks are starting to show in how team members interact with each other.
This brand team's coaching programme might include exercises to help them understand their own, and their colleagues' Myers Briggs personality types. This would lead to a more sophisticated approach from senior members to managing and motivating the team, and greater recognition among all team members of the strengths and working styles of their colleagues. Team members could also learn how to use NLP techniques to enhance communication with each other, as well as influencing more effectively across function, where they have no formal authority. Practical, strategy-focused exercises would then help the team own and experiment with these new concepts, allowing them to use and implement them as a group.
The team's brand strategy training might cover how to assess a changing market landscape and how to plan an integrated brand strategy using market research and SWOTs to develop the right strategic drivers, objectives and tactics that the whole team agree on together. It could also take a more focused approach, such as specific training in strategic publication planning or how to implement a key opinion leader development strategy. The goal of all this team training would be to develop high-level communication, collaboration and expertise in areas deemed critical for delivering a successful brand strategy.
All brand teams want to develop and deliver the best brand strategy possible, and some will have the individual skills and team dynamics to succeed without such focused training. But even these groups might not reach optimal effectiveness and may take longer than necessary to iron out issues with team dynamics or fill gaps in skill sets. Whole team and individual coaching will accelerate effectiveness and help brand teams succeed by design rather than by default.
Is it worth it?
Such a personalised or targeted approach to coaching may seem like a good idea in principle, but is likely to raise some objections. Can we afford to take key people (and whole teams) away from their jobs for the training? And is it worth the cost in terms of return on investment (ROI)?
Competing business pressures are a key reason for companies not doing more coaching. This is a legitimate concern, but by integrating real tasks into training, not only will better learning outcomes result, the perception that training is competing for time with normal business activity is reduced. An example could be a combined strategy development and training workshop that develops both individual skills and produces an output, such as a review of current strategy to increase competitive edge.
As for ROI, the honest answer is that training expenditure is notoriously difficult to link to the bottom line. The CIPD survey showed that only 36% of companies try to measure the effect of training on profits and only 18% attempt an ROI evaluation. But there are factors to suggest that taking training seriously pays dividends.
The Institute of Employment Studies 2004 report, called Skills Pay, says: "The contribution of skills to business success concluded that consistent trainers achieve greater returns and that higher levels of training and development are associated with positive business benefits. Other studies indicate significant benefits in companies where learning and development is embedded in the management culture and used in sophisticated ways, such as linking it to the business strategy."
In addition, tight labour markets and skills shortages mean that pharma companies may need to offer innovative training to retain talented individuals. Personalised learning and development programmes show employees they are valued; they can motivate and even excite employees, especially if they have real input into their content. This translates into higher engagement and job satisfaction, which in turn, leads to higher productivity and profitability.
Companies spend significant budgets on training, but can they be sure it is providing ROI? Personalised whole team coaching is not necessarily more expensive but its focus on aligning strategy and improving teamwork is likely to provide more long-term value. In deciding on the merits of this approach, pharma companies should also ask themselves: what is the cost of not doing this kind of coaching especially if some of our competitors are doing it?
Company benefits
Pharma marketers usually have so many day-to-day, tactical deliverables, it's hard for them to find the time to think strategically either about the product or their own development needs. If they are to develop into top-quality leaders, who can function effectively in high-performing teams, they must be properly supported. Providing separate quality time for learning and development is not only important for personal and team development; it helps with the day-to-day activities by giving the team new perspectives and tools so they can make sure theyre doing the right thing.
Personalised learning and development programmes are the best way to target marketing training resources efficiently. Such programmes provide significant benefits to individuals and brand teams; and are also likely to lead to significant benefits to the company's bottom line. In short, if pharma companies want successfully executed brand strategies, they need to invest in personalised whole team coaching for their marketers.
Suzie Denton is director of Complete Learning & Development. Contact her at suzie.denton@consultcomplete.com or on 01625 624003.
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