Life Science Rabbit Hole #16: You Have a Vacancy!

It’s a common occurrence as the leader of an organization – you have a vacancy, whether due to a resignation, retirement, separation, or an employee moving to an internal role outside of your department.

Whether the vacant position reports directly to you or lower down in your organization, the temptation is to fill the vacancy as rapidly as possible.? After all, your organization has committed to its goals for the year, and the vacancy has reduced your capacity to deliver.?

Wait! Evaluate the highest and best use of a new position within the organization generating the vacancy, and also look across your entire organization.

Evaluate the highest and best use of a new position within the organization that has the vacancy.

Ask your direct report to recommend the highest and best use to which the vacancy could be put within the same organization.?

Replacing like-for-like may turn out to be the best use.?

On the other hand, perhaps the best use of the vacancy within that organization is to add capacity to a different team that lacks resources or expertise, or to create a new role that is critical to the organization’s strategic priorities.?

Your direct report should involve his or her direct reports in this discussion.? Your direct report should remind them that converting the vacant position to a new role may need to be enabled by process streamlining or other tactical realignment within the department.? This is a good thing – you want your leaders continually evaluating their internal processes and resourcing, and those enabling moves may provide career development for the people involved.

Evaluate the highest and best use of a new position across your entire organization.?

The question for your full leadership team is, "What is the highest and best use of the vacancy in the context of the strategy for the entire organization?"

As you may appreciate, resource allocation is one of the most important aspects of strategy execution.? If you aren’t driving resource & staffing decisions based on your strategic priorities, how successful will you be in executing your strategy?

Spoiler alert: Not Very.?

Think of these vacancies like the gifts they are.?

What use of this “new” position will make the biggest impact on executing your strategy?? Is it another sales rep? A production planner?? A pricing specialist?? A data scientist?? A position in commercial contract compliance???

Here is an example - at one time I led the IT organization responsible for supporting the manufacturing and supply chain function of a biopharma business.? Our IT strategy was clear that we needed to integrate our business processes upstream with key suppliers, but this area had been neglected in the past and was under-resourced in light of the current strategic priorities.? In this case, we shifted the vacancy into our external manufacturing team from elsewhere in the organization.

Typically, I have the decision occur as an agenda topic at my leadership team meeting.? The organization with the vacancy shares their recommendation for using the vacancy within their organization, and one or two of the other organizations with the strongest case for using the vacancy also share their recommendations.? As the leader, I facilitated the discussion in a way that reinforced my leadership team’s joint accountability for executing our strategy and for operating as an interdependent, trusting leadership team.? If there wasn’t a clear consensus, I had to cast the tie-breaking vote, but I did it with transparency.? I wanted my entire leadership team to understand that this is how we continually align the organization structure and resourcing with our strategy.

Any decision about repurposing a single vacancy is unlikely, on its own, to determine the success or failure of your strategy.? However, consider the cumulative impact over time.

It’s not just one vacancy.? The life science industry experiences 5-15% turnover annually, more or less, so potentially you could be shifting 5-15% of your resources every year.? Over 18-24 months, without putting the organization through the distraction and turmoil of a top-down organizational redesign, you will have evolved your organization to be much closer to what your strategy requires.

It also accelerates people development.? As mentioned earlier, repurposing a single vacancy can result in developmental opportunities for several individuals in your organization.? Incorporating this approach for handling vacancies into your regular management practice develops your people leaders in critical aspects of leadership such as organizational redesign, strategic resource alignment, and continuous improvement.

Will this approach slow down staffing?

A fair question that deserves a response.? My experience is that this approach causes a very minor delay, which is more than made up by the benefits of a better organization structure and increased alignment among the leadership team.

Think about how this plays out – no doubt the first time your organization uses this approach will require extra time, while the various departments discuss potential new roles and tactical realignment of their organization.? However, the process moves very quickly for the second, third, fourth, and subsequent vacancies.? The department heads now have lists of “best use” future positions that are already aligned with the strategy, so subsequent vacancies only entail a confirmation or revision to this list in light of the current situation.? You can also help by setting a short timeline, say 14 days to make the decision.

Concluding Thoughts

If you are a reader of the Life Science Rabbit Hole, you are probably a participant in the broader life science ecosystem.?

You probably realize what a privileged position you have, being able to accelerate the development of therapies, medical products & services, in order to improve and extend the lives of patients and those who love them.

I hope you find this edition of the Life Science Rabbit Hole useful to you as you lead your organization and our industry.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.