Mindset Matters: Courage and Creativity in Pharma Leadership to Deliver More for Patients

Five years ago, we committed to doing whatever it took to make our organisation better at delivering value to patients and health systems. Our vision was to move beyond being a supplier of innovative medicines and diagnostics, and towards being a partner and enabler of health systems to help people live longer, healthier lives.?

To achieve this vision, we would have to radically change the way our organisation worked. We would have to give our talented people the flexibility and autonomy they needed to be able to serve our customers in a different way – to experiment and respond with agility to help health systems solve some of the problems they faced.?

Like many others, the pharma industry is no stranger to transformations and re-organisations. But, right from the start, we knew we would need to change in a way that was more fundamental and far-reaching than anything we had seen before. Our success would hinge not on our ability to introduce new organisational structures and new ways of working, but on my ability and the ability of those who worked closely with me to change what we understood leadership to mean.?

Five years ago, our leadership was more hierarchical, with a focus on working within our established systems. It fostered behaviours centred around control and caution, and it was internally focused: we tended to measure our success based on our outputs – not on what we helped our customers to achieve. This was reactive leadership.??

Our science and our innovations were creative, bold, brave and shaped by insights and inspiration from the world around us. Why couldn’t our approach to leading the organisation responsible for getting those innovations to patients be more like that too???

It could. But only if we changed our mindsets, letting go of our tried and tested approaches and accepting that what had made us successful in the past – as individuals and as an organisation – couldn’t guarantee our future.?

This meant moving away from reactive leadership and towards creative leadership. While the behaviours of reactive leadership tend to come from assumptions about how leaders are supposed to behave and a drive for avoiding risk and gaining approval, the behaviours of creative leadership are driven by vision and purpose. Creative leaders empower others, take responsibility for improving systems and lead with vision.???

It was creative leadership that would help us to unlock the power of our teams to solve problems, act with agility and focus on the outcomes that truly mattered to our customers.

This process of change would turn out to be one of the most challenging, but ultimately rewarding, of my career so far. We started with a 360-degree assessment and coaching from the Leadership Circle. This process assessed both our creative leadership competencies and our reactive leadership tendencies. It gave me deep, and unexpected, insights into how our mindsets and behaviours influenced our ability to succeed in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment in which we and our customers operate.?

It helped me and many of my fellow leaders to recognise that our past ways of working were not suited for the challenges ahead. But it also gave us a new understanding of the behaviours that enable change and how we could evolve our leadership for the future we wanted to create.?

Part of our evolution meant embracing four distinct leadership roles, defined by McKinsey as: visionary, architect, coach and catalyst (VACC). As visionary leaders, we would facilitate the creation of a clear and shared vision. As architects, we would design our organisation as an empowered system. As coaches, we would build the skills and mindsets that enable success. As catalysts, we would foster connection to our collective purpose and collaboration across the organisation. By encompassing these four roles we could create a more powerful kind of leadership.?

Five years down the line, the work we did to change our leadership mindsets is the least visible element of our transformation – a transformation that has now reached every corner of our organisation of more than 12,000 people in 100+ countries. But I believe it remains the most profound. If we hadn’t changed the way we think and lead, we simply wouldn’t have been able to make the other – radical, far-reaching, bold – changes we needed to make. These changes are enabling our people to focus their attention and talents on solving problems for health systems and patients. They are making us more agile and more able to anticipate and respond to our customers’ needs. They are helping us to reach more patients with our innovations, faster.?

How we lead and how we understand our role as leaders has implications for our people, our organisation and our collective ability to achieve our vision. When our goals are to support health systems and help patients to live healthier lives, how we lead also has implications for patients and society.?

In pharma, I believe we have a responsibility to challenge ourselves to be the leaders that patients need us to be. We have a responsibility to be brave and recognise when change needs to start with us.?