Pfizer
Pfizer, a leading pharmaceutical company, operates in 180 countries worldwide. Its UK Research & Development operation, based at Sandwich, Kent, is part of a global network dedicated to the discovery and development of new medicines.
Pfizer spends roughly £550 million in the UK alone in the search for important new medicines that may enhance human and animal health worldwide. The Sandwich laboratories employ over 2,000 scientists, making this the largest research and development (R&D) site of any foreign-owned pharmaceutical company in the UK.
The challenge: breeding creativity
In the fiercely competitive world of pharmaceuticals, resting on the laurels of the last wonder drug is not an option. Every year, billions of dollars are spent by the industry on research and development and clinical trials, predicated on the basis that bringing just one successful new drug to market out of the hundreds of possibilities will boost revenue and profits way beyond the initial investment. When the odds are so high against projects even emerging intact from the discovery research, maintaining the essential sparks of creativity, innovation and enthusiasm is no mean feat – a scenario with which, Pfizer, is very familiar.
After a period of significant growth for Pfizer, there was sometimes a real and more often perceived disconnect between the goals and activities of the technical staff working on the many clinical research projects at Pfizer’s global research and development headquarters in the UK, the senior ‘heads of lines’ to whom they reported and the support functions and resources they needed to conduct their work.
The problem was not one of structure or operational procedure but of communication and perception. Pfizer operates a matrix structure well suited to running and supporting long-term research projects and its success in developing new medicines is clear. It is also justifiably proud of its portfolio of standard operating procedures, developed over decades to facilitate and support the work of complex multi-disciplinary research work.
The difficulty was that, in the eyes of many of the scientists and technicians, as one person put it: 'Considerations of our needs were seen as being driven by supply, not demand. The larger organization was seen as thwarting rather than facilitating our work. In some camps there was a classic ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality’. The perception that the organization would not respond to legitimate requests for support and additional resources to help cut corners or save valuable time resulted in few people trusting the company system.
The solution: developing connectivity and empowerment
It was this sense of passive resignation that David Roblin, Pfizer wanted to overturn using Mission Leadership®, with the ultimate goal of increasing the effectiveness of teams working on global clinical research projects. This was not simply a matter of creating the right key milestones of success. It was about transforming people’s attitude towards meeting these milestones.
Two problems in particular, were high on Roblin’s list to tackle. The first was the need for clarity. As he explains:
“Getting people to sit down and go through the intellectual articulation of a simple mission is more problematic than it initially seems. Many people think they have done it when in fact they haven’t. For example, there is no point in setting tight deadlines for a research project to have reached a certain point in the clinical or regulatory process if the purpose of the exercise is first to question whether the market wants it. That is putting the cart before the horse.
“Getting this right requires the heads of lines to be very clear from the outset what the mission is, and to pause sufficiently in the consultation to ensure awareness and understanding. It then requires clinical research staff on the projects to draw up clearly articulated statements of what they need to do the job.
“To achieve this, we decided to review the way we consulted and communicated. We found that we needed a detailed planning and processes of breaking down decisions into sub-missions.
“The various components of a large multi-disciplinary clinical research team – pharmaceutical scientists, regulatory experts, manufacturing experts – all needed to talk to each other on a regular basis. Much smaller groups were needed to achieve this.”
The second priority Roblin identified was the need for empowerment – in this case, the empowerment that would emerge when, having established a clear idea of the main mission, staff of clinical research teams felt able to harness the resources of the organization behind it and explore innovative ways to keep the project on track.
Roblin wanted to demonstrate to scientific and technical staff that the ‘system’ would work for them if it was creatively challenged. On investigation they found that most of the procedures or processes that they saw as obstructive were precedents set by previous teams rather than by management. In the end, the only thing they wanted that we had to change a policy on was the ability to order sandwiches out of hours!”
In terms of effective leadership, the concepts of Mission Leadership®, outlined to both Pfizer’s heads of lines and to team members of key projects, stressed the need for leadership styles based on clarity and simplicity, and the role of communication and visibility; as well as an increase in individual awareness of the impact of their own behavior and how it can be modified to improve team effectiveness.
In terms of effective execution, it stressed the need for a strategic Mission and goals for the team; group alignment with the intention behind their objectives and a clear focus on their allocation of time and resources. It also set commitment to a target end-state for the business at the end of a 12 month period and individual responsibilities for achieving that, with measurable outputs; and a clear understanding of personal and collective operating space and their interdependencies.
The results: creating clarity
The results can be seen in the successful completion six months ahead of schedule of one of Pfizer’s most prestigious projects, the clinical research undertaken at Sandwich into the use of one of its key drugs, Revatio – more popularly known as Viagra – to help patients suffering from pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).
The ability of Pfizer’s research team to successfully register Revatio’s use as a legitimate treatment for PAH was important not just in the millions of dollars the company earned from having the drug on the market for this use ahead of time but also because it had been used to treat PAH informally for a number of years and it was very essential to have the treatment validated by formal clinical research.
The project leader, Colin Ewen, stresses the role Mission Leadership® played in enabling the company to stress the importance of the research and its strategic intent in conducting it. “It enabled us to establish the strategic objective clearly in people’s heads in advance, reach a strategic agreement on objectives and review progress against the original plan.”
But the real benefit he adds, mirroring David Roblin’s conclusions, was the freedom it granted team members to follow their own instincts and ideas about how to achieve their own objectives, so long as this supported the project’s main mission.
“Previously there had been reluctance among staff to explore this freedom,” he says. “There was a worry that some gung-ho project leader would place them in an awkward position that would have repercussions when their performance was reviewed and appraised at the end of the year by their heads of lines. They never explored the boundaries because they did not feel they had been given the licence to do so.
Both David Roblin and Colin Ewen sign up to one of the most important principles of Mission Leadership that stems back from its original use as an integral part of US and UK military command doctrine – that if people have a precise idea of what they are being asked to achieve, they will feel freer to explore how they achieve it.
The goal of good project management at Pfizer is therefore not to let things slip and keep everybody in mind of what they signed up for – while at the same time having the common sense to trust professionals to get on with what they know best.”