The Talent Masters, page 19
The most intense of these programs is a three-day weekend mentoring session for a select group of high-potential leaders in the early stages of their careers, and it is a remarkably intense exercise. Since its inception in 2002, more than 150 people in Novartis divisions and global functions have attended the program, a handful at a time. A Novartis division or functional head selects six to eight leaders for the mentoring program and takes them off-site for three days with HR staff and expert behavioral psychologists. Juergen Brokatzky-Geiger, Novartis’s global head of HR, or the head of HR for the respective division, is also on hand. The groups consist largely of people who work together and are likely to for some time, so the exercises and dialogues help to create a long-term culture of openness, candor, and collaboration.
The lead-up activity includes assessments of each participant in comparison with other leaders in Novartis and with a wider set of leaders from the outside world. Based on feedback they get from the assessments, the participants draft development plans with the help of the mentoring team. Each chooses a leadership challenge—a significant issue that they and their organizations are struggling with—that they will share with their peers and the mentoring team. It can’t be something that’s easy or that they’ve already solved, so the choice itself tests managers’ capacity and willingness for self-examination.
The leaders take part in a variety of formal and informal activities and encounters, from conversation over dinner to one-on-one meetings and group sessions with role-playing exercises. As the program unfolds, the multiple observations by the division head, HR people, and psychologists combine to produce a very detailed picture of each person’s individual and interpersonal behavior in several different contexts. Participants are led to explore both career and personal issues openly with their peers, a challenging feature that can be unsettling at first. As Kim Stratton, now head of Group Country Management & External Affairs, who participated in the program earlier in her career, recalls, “You’re talking sometimes about the way you feel or about things that matter to you, so the subject matter is very different from the normal subject matter you’re used to discussing in the Monday-to-Friday business environment.”
More revealing is when the person discusses that challenge with the group. Let’s say, for example, that due to a change in company strategy, Jay, the head of sales in a division, has been avoiding a hard decision. Kate holds a key position in the organization. She has been doing good work but is showing signs that she may no longer be in the right job given the change in strategy. Jay is going through an inner struggle about his personal values. Is firing a person who has been loyal and successful in the past the right thing to do? If he moves ahead with the change, how will others view him—as fair or as ruthless, the type of person willing to sell his grandmother to accomplish his goals? How will his personal brand be perceived from here on?
The dialogue between Jay and others in the program about his hiring dilemma uncovers the root of Jay’s inner struggles. Kate has performed well and been given the best ratings for the past five years. She’s highly effective with peers and a great cross-functional team player. It’s obvious that Jay likes her and appreciates how much she has helped him. Jay’s fellow participants query him about what is required to succeed given the changed strategy. Jay tells them that building a stronger network of strategic relationships with customers’ higher-level executives is at the top of the list. He thinks Kate might be able to do it, but only with lots of personal coaching over a long period of time—which might slow the execution of the new strategy. The give-and-take of the dialogue forces Jay to think about whether Kate has the natural aptitude for building these relationships. It also brings to light Jay’s poor history of bringing in outsiders and his worries that replacing Kate might make the situation worse. In the process Jay starts to reflect on how he is handling the situation and why. “Am I being defensive? Am I avoiding something? Is my concern for fairness preventing me from doing what is right for the business? Am I afraid to hire someone from outside because my record of doing so is poor?”
As people get immersed in the discussions, Brokatzky-Geiger and the division or function head give feedback in real time to help the person with his leadership challenge. Along with the psychologist, they also get insight into the person’s inner core, and they compare notes behind the scenes. Brokatzky-Geiger explains: “We see how they carry themselves, how they connect with each other, how they act when tired and frustrated, how they treat others in team situations. Over three long, intense days, we learn the private side of the person. Because the mask is going away in this program. There are certain exercises that challenge people more and more in how they act, and make it impossible for them to keep a mask in place.”
Everyone is observed by leader-practitioners, people who know the business context and the real external landscape. Even the psychologists learn the nuances of the business. Nowhere else can a leader get such valuable feedback.
There’s time between the group discussions for informal conversation and self-reflection to help participants make their own discoveries. “The opportunity to speak to the other associates about their experiences and what they’re getting out of the weekend helps crystallize where you are in your journey,” says Stratton. Self-reflection allows the person to come to terms with reality. “The goal is that these people get to know themselves extremely well,” Brokatzky-Geiger says, “and then through that to help them bring their private interests and the company’s interests together, to match their core values and purpose with those of the company.” Often the participants discover consciously for the first time their innermost personal and professional goals and ambitions—who they want to be, what they want to do in life as a whole and why. Finding that and aligning it with their work unleashes tremendous energy.
THE RIGHT CONTEXT
Many organizations hold off-site meetings where people are asked to share personal information publicly, and sometimes the results are not pretty. The difference at Novartis is largely in the context. The participants are not subjected to previously concocted questions or templates. Discussions take place with people who understand the business and the reality of the organizational settings where the participants work. Besides company leaders—the division head and head of HR—participants can draw on peers to provide insight into messy dilemmas they face. The context helps them wrestle with issues such as:
What is bothering me and eating my inner energy away? How can these problems be articulated very specifically and then framed and reframed, thereby making conscious what is buried in the unconscious?
Why was I suppressing this issue and not getting a clear solution? Is it because I have no imaginative alternatives or I do not like the consequences of the alternatives? Or that I have a fear of response to the actions that need to be taken because the situation is so uncertain?
Am I using the old success formula for a new situation and becoming overconfident?
Which of my core values is getting in the way of shaping the right solution? Do I need to recalibrate expectations? Do I need a sounding board—a trusted person who will help me clear up the confusion and isolate sources of anxiety and stress?
A decade or two ago few people in business would have been willing to reveal these inner thoughts, fearful that they would be used against them. But most cultures today are far more open when it comes to talking about personal details. People share intimate information through social networking, or track it down on sites such as Google. More and more of us are learning that being transparent about personal dilemmas and feelings is preferable to having others come to the wrong conclusions by using information they pick up elsewhere.
RESETTING EXPECTATIONS
The off-site experience helps both Novartis and its most talented and ambitious managers to reexamine views they’ve long taken for granted and open their eyes to new ones. As they reach a fuller understanding of their drives and motivations, some realize—and acknowledge to their peers and the mentoring team—that they either cannot or will not make certain sacrifices to reach the highest level in the company. Some ambitious people who had been set on becoming the head of a business with P&L responsibilities recalibrate their goals and choose another path to, say, being an executive with a functional rather than bottom-line responsibility.
Others may have second thoughts about accepting a foreign assignment even if turning it down means slowing or even derailing their career expectations. The toll on personal life of uprooting a family may be a deal breaker, especially when success in another environment is not guaranteed. Some people are fearful about living in developing countries. Drawing out this information benefits both Novartis and the young executives. The company can envision the right long-term roles for talented people it wants to retain instead of grooming them for the wrong ones.
Companies that don’t acquire deep enough insight into their people’s core values and purposes and do not help their talent to acquire insight into themselves can waste precious resources. We have seen this many times, even in talent masters. Despite its exhaustive knowledge of its people, for example, GE has more than once invested heavily in preparing an executive for a big job only to discover much too late that the person wouldn’t take it because of personal reasons. As Brokatzky-Geiger put it, “Whenever you get to know yourself or somebody else better, you can revise your judgment and act accordingly.”
In the final stage of the three-day off-site program the participants draft one-page “leader plans” for themselves, which they present to their peers and the mentoring team. A leader plan captures all the manager’s assessment results and key learnings from the exercises and interactions. Most important, it lists his talents, skills, and values and articulates what he discovered about his inner core. Some of the items may be hopes, not current realities, but these are no less useful, and perhaps even more so: they reveal to the person what he stands for, or aspires to stand for. That’s the main theme that pulls all the pieces together. It becomes a mission statement for the individual.
Over the following six months each of the managers has three or more individual coaching sessions on key developmental areas. These concentrate on helping the managers move from awareness and insight about their potential to practice and accountability.
The big breakthrough in self-awareness for most people is the discovery that they overleverage their professional skills and underleverage their inner values. Their heartfelt values and sense of purpose are reserved for their families or philanthropic activities, and largely disconnected from their leadership in business. Consequently, these bright, high-achieving leaders have often failed to develop their authentic interpersonal skills and their ability to learn from, collaborate with, and influence other people.
Novartis recognizes that these are essential qualities for its business. Teamwork and leaders who can foster it are especially important for continued success in the global pharmaceutical industry. Coordinating efforts in virtually every country of the world becomes more complicated all the time as governments, regulatory agencies, consumer groups, and financial markets respond in different ways to advances in medical science and changes in medical practice. Innovating a pipeline of prescription drugs to replace those going off patent increasingly requires that large teams of specialists in varied scientific and medical fields share information and work well together, not just internally but also with outside people and regulatory agencies.
Stratton had gone through several 360-degree assessments before joining Novartis, and each time they revealed an impatience when she wanted to achieve ambitious goals in a hurry. What hit home for her at the Novartis off-site was the disconnect between how she achieved her goals especially in times of stress, and what she truly valued in her life. “It came out during the weekend that one of my strengths was around empathy, and I knew that I wanted to build on that. But I don’t want to be sitting around at age seventy-five thinking, Okay, great, you were an empathetic person, three cheers. As I kept reflecting over the six months following the session, my core purpose began to crystallize: I want to realize my full potential as a female business leader and to ensure that my colleagues and my family reach their full potential. So I don’t want to lose my speed and drive, but when I take it to the higher level, I can remind myself, Kim, please take care when you’re in this situation. At the end of the day, if I leave people feeling bruised and unempowered and not fulfilling their potential, actually I suffer as much as if not more than they do because I’m not meeting my own core purpose. I may have won the battle, but I’ve lost the war. This is not something I arrived at right away or solely as a result of the mentoring weekend, but it’s quite profound.”
Stratton notes a crucial difference between the typical assessments and the Novartis program: “Quite often when people are giving you 360-degree advice, they focus on the deficiency. What made the difference for me was focusing on how the outcome feeds back into my core purpose. It’s more holistic.”
SEEING THE NOVARTIS SYSTEM WITH FRESH EYES
Joe Jimenez, who succeeded Vasella as CEO in early 2010, learned the value of self-awareness after he joined the company in 2007 as head of its consumer health division. He’d previously been president and CEO of H. J. Heinz North America and H. J. Heinz Europe. He was used to the demands of top-level business leadership, and he came from an industry, consumer packaged goods, that paid a lot of attention to leadership development.
Jimenez was struck not only by the formality and depth of assessments at Novartis but also by the way they produced a clear diagnosis of each individual’s needs in different areas. The payoff, he says, came not so much in his first Novartis assignment but a few months later in his second, when he was promoted to run the company’s core pharmaceutical division. After ten years of double-digit growth, the pharma division was facing several patent expiries and an increasingly tough environment, and performance in 2007 started to suffer. Jimenez wanted to build the future strategy on the culture that Vasella had created, centered on patient centricity. Jimenez diagnosed the problem as a lack of external focus on the needs of patients, the end consumers of pharma’s products, and the changing behaviors of physicians and health insurance providers, the customers whose choices determined pharma’s sales results.
The pharma organization didn’t want to see this, says Jimenez. “People were saying 2007 was an aberration, and if we just kept on our current path, then we’d be fine. I had to completely change that view and mind-set.” He had forged his leadership style in what he calls “a very hard-charging environment,” and now he was working in “a Swiss culture that was more reserved.” Thanks in part to the depth and rigor of the assessment he had gone through, “I saw myself becoming less patient and more directive,” he says. “The assessment helped me to rethink the way I was approaching the situation and to adapt my style to be effective in the Novartis culture. Instead of forcefully driving it through the organization—even though the external environment was rapidly evolving, necessitating change inside Novartis—I recognized that I had to engage it from the bottom up. So I immediately backed off and said, ‘Okay, let’s benchmark where we stand. Then let’s look at how we can address this in a way that makes us more nimble and flexible.’ ”
This transformed the situation. Instead of battling over a long period of time to effect change, Jimenez gained support for the patient-centric, customer-focused approach. Building on Vasella’s strategy, he took the pharma division’s top one hundred leaders off-site, where he helped them draw a clear picture of the external environment and the business challenge. Afterward, he asked each of them to think about and send him within fourteen days what they personally were going to do over the next six months to become more patient-centric and customer-focused. This brought Jimenez “an incredibly rich variety of personal commitment letters” that became the basis for “putting the wheels back on the pharma division.”
Note the virtuous cycle here. Becoming more self-aware made Jimenez more alert to the pharma division’s collective personality, so to speak. This enabled him to build on strengths in his leadership behavior in a way that made the entire organization more self-aware, and thus more alert and responsive to customer needs. As Jimenez sums it up, “The leaders in pharma said the process made them take ownership of the initiative and change their own behavior first. This allowed them to develop as leaders in terms of being more externally focused, so they could in turn help their people become more externally focused. It changed the whole tone of the pharma division.”
Jimenez’s experiences in his first year at Novartis drove home for him the value of rigorous psychological assessments focused on enhancing leaders’ self-awareness. He told us, “Other companies too often define leadership development in a cursory way without that deep up-front assessment of what will really make a person a more effective leader. They don’t identify the root cause of the problem, if there is a problem, or the key opportunity that the leader has. The thing that Novartis does better than any other company I’ve seen is that up-front piece.” Insight into people and diagnosing the inner core and values of a person help you become more effective in your work with others. Such insights into people also help in diagnosing the numbers differently and making better decisions and executing them better.
Novartis is now leveraging its assessment processes in two areas of special importance: developing leaders who can adapt their leadership styles to different cultures, and nurturing scientist-leaders who can manage research and development programs to meet key business objectives. Its program of developing self-awareness has the added benefit of building leaders out of scientists and technical experts in ways that other companies can’t. As an example, Jimenez points to Trevor Mundel, a very dynamic physician-scientist promoted to be head of global pharma development. Crucially, Jimenez and his senior leadership team saw that Mundel had to make strides in self-awareness in order to handle this enormous responsibility.
