Case Study

Agile Organization and Transformation: A Global Pharma Merger

The Problem

A leader in pharma and wellness merged with a large partner, creating a global organization. The merger combined more than 15 different business organizations across 25 countries worldwide. With each business operating under differing business models with local support functions, hopes of global scale and efficiency were lacking. High-level leaders on both sides of the merger faced maintaining excellent localized operational production while building the agile capabilities to facilitate ongoing technological and digital updates.  

Additionally, leadership faced challenges in ensuring a common understanding of the new organization’s strategy, and further, organizing talent and systems around the new strategy. 

The Solution

The CHRO worked with RBL to create a global leadership capability-building plan to: first, align to the post-merger growth strategy; and second, empower leaders to operationalize the capabilities critical for success.

To gain deep perspective across the multiple business functions and identify key issues and concerns, RBL conducted interviews with internal stakeholders. Then, leveraging research from Reinventing the Organization (by Arthur Yeung and Dave Ulrich), The RBL Group architected a custom Leadership Academy to: (a) operationalize the CEO’s strategy across leaders’ individual business areas, (b) enable leaders to develop action plans to build the capabilities critical to success, and (c) build leadership skills consistent with the new logic focused on agile organization and transformation. 

The Outcome

The RBL Group piloted the custom Leadership Academy on both sides of the merger. Cohort members also participated in the MENTOR executive psychometric assessment and received individual coaching to identify individual propensities, trends, and gaps for the leadership skills required to navigate the new growth plan and to facilitate agility.

The custom Leadership Academy focused on building strategic, organizational, transformational, and individual agility capability and successfully helped senior leaders:

  • Share feedback, information, ideas, and concerns regarding the merger and transformation across business areas and geographies.
  • Operationalize the new strategy and develop critical action plans across more than a dozen business areas.
  • Identify and target critical 90-day leadership actions needed to enable successful business area growth in the post-merger corporate environment.
  • Create a common language and behavioral definition for the agility capabilities required to align the organizational culture to the new strategy.
  • Develop 12-month individual agility leadership-development plans, identifying key attributes and skills gaps for critical competencies.
  • Develop leadership action plans to cascade and leverage their Leadership Academy experience within their business areas.