Calibrating Company Performance: Just How Good Are You?

Peter Drucker advised that a company has to strive to grow better, or it will decline. He emphasized that one should optimize strengths rather than invest energy in correcting weaknesses. A vital exception to this rule will be leadership, as it will impact the quality of our calibration and our ability to act on our findings. In life science, where the concept of market success will need the contribution of several factors, weakness in virtually any area can jeopardize the whole. You'll be tasked with finding ways to address weaknesses through consulting, collaboration, or outsourcing. If we fail to do that, the special sauce formulated with carefully developed core competence can sour. We want a whole that can execute the best humanly possible towards reaching our objectives.?

Calibrating performance is an integral part of remaining competitive and achieving objectives in a timely way. Every company likes to think that their effort is the best that can be done, yet there is usually room for improvement. Calibrating performance helps us identify opportunities for improvement and, as importantly, where potentially damaging weaknesses are hiding.

The most common place we calibrate performance is in a performance review. However, it is most often brief, yearly, and focused on how an individual's work measures up to expectations, often compared to others with similar training or level of responsibility inside the company. Although individual work product is an important contributor to each program, comparison and calibration of performance should not limited to the individual. While a company may regularly track a program's progress based on time and budget, functional performance measures are rarely calibrated until the company is forced to by missing a milestone, being overtaken by a competitor, or encountering a pitfall or crisis that could have been avoided.

Calibrating performance should be an essential part of ongoing life science management and leadership to generate the most value from time, money, effort, and technology. It requires an open-minded and honest look at performance across all functions. Your leadership contributes to remaining sufficiently open-minded.

Calibration should include every aspect of the business, not just R&D. For example, how do your business development, operations, and regulatory teams contribute to creating opportunity, meeting milestones, and avoiding pitfalls? And look beyond your company to successful and unsuccessful strategies and practices for metrics on how your efforts are measuring up. Most likely, the outcome of calibration will uncover action items.?

Then, how one rectifies the issues hinges on leadership, where it too may be found to need tweaking. Since leadership is a foundational core competence, attempting to address other problems without dealing with weaknesses in leadership practices will be more likely to fail. Therefore, approaching skilled leadership as nice to have or something for later will deny a company its best chance for success, the impact of which may still not be readily appreciated in science-based businesses heavily focused on data.?

As Goffee and Jones from the London School of Business advise in their book Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?, our leadership should always be a work in progress, constantly evolving. This is particularly relevant to the changing circumstances of a growing biotech. Therefore, determining ways to fine-tune leadership practices will be broadly beneficial in calibrating other capabilities and improving performance. Be sure to include an assessment of the organization's leadership practices in leaders at all levels in your calibration by asking: How have your leadership practices evolved? Are current leadership practices enabling or detracting from the company's ability to execute its strategy? Have you recently experienced a crisis that required quick action that could have been better planned for? Has progress in a major program slowed? Is there evidence of demotivation in staff? All are symptoms of a need for finer-tuned leadership practices, not the science or technology or how much money is in the coffers.

Leadership must be developed as a core competence. However, it doesn't mean you won't need or can't use outside help. A company starts by hiring for it (leadership being a quality often noted as a requirement in a C-suite candidate) and then develops it throughout the organization through example, mentoring internally and training using external resources. In addition, to keep a company's leadership in tune with the organization's needs, it should be supported, kept current, and evolve within the C-suite. Executive coaching is a valuable external resource in this case. A recent article in The Economist noted: "It does not have to revolve around [or wait for] a crisis or a fork in your career path. At its best, it can illuminate snags executives face." And preferably, "Coaches can understand the executive mindset better if they were once executives themselves."

Ongoing calibration of performance, including your leadership and then doing something about it, assures that everything that can be done to succeed is indeed being done.

Executive coaching and leadership education for the life science sector: https://www.parenteaubc.com/

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