The Human Experience Function with Norm Smallwood and Anne-Marie Law

Below is the full transcript of the podcast with Anne-Marie Law and Norm Smallwood.

How did RBL help with your HR Transformation?

Anne-Marie Law:
My conversations with RBL were really like, I have to design HR and then their conversations with me, it was, well, what's the business going to become? And if you know what the business is going to become, then you can start to figure out what HR should become. And that's when we really began down this conversation around what our direction of growth was going to be.

At the previous company, the previous path had been about product centricity. We were, as I say, this very expensive product, but we didn't have a particularly strong pipeline of new products. So we weren't going to be a product company. We could be a platform company, in theory, around the mechanism of action of our product, but there were already competitors in the field that had entered into the market with a similar mechanism of action. So being that platform company really wasn't going to work either.

Which then led to that final direction of growth around the customer, which really in many ways was the only path forward that was left to us. (The customer in our vernacular, being the patient.) And many of you who know the biotech industry will know, it's really hard to win by coming out and saying you're going to be a patient-centered company. Everybody's saying that, right? And now you have a reputation of being a highly priced drug and having a sort of a leadership organization or a leadership reputation that's in tatters.

So that doesn't seem like it's going to win you any favors, but really, I don't think you have any other options. So we decided as bold and audacious as that was going to be, we were going to become the most patient centered organization, within the confines of rare disease - which was where we were focusing. The question then isn't what we said we were going to be, but how we were going to design ourselves to be that - to be patient-centered by design.

So we were going to have to focus on what it was that patients needed and wanted from us as rare disease patients. And that was going to require us to change from the inside out. We couldn't stay the way we were organized. We were organized as a product company in silos. So the next question that we had to ask was, well, if we're going to organize ourselves some way differently, to be patient-centered for the patient experience, what were we going to need to do differently inside and what were the capabilities we were going to need to be world class in?

And that's really what drove us towards - well, you're going to have to be world class in innovation if you're going to be designing for patients, and those patients are going to be asking you to create new solutions for them. Innovation is something you're going to have to be world class in. But then looking back at the journey I described for you the context, it's like, well, how do you get to be a world class innovation company if that's not what you are? And we quickly concluded we needed to be world class in leadership and world class in innovation, because our leaders were going to need to help us transform the company on so many dimensions.

We had to focus on them almost first. That innovation could become a byproduct of the focus on leadership, which also then, in theory, would help us become more patient-centered. So that's where we really went to focus on our leadership, and that's where I think HR and the journey started to pivot in tandem. So the design of HR really became around becoming world class, in leadership, in innovation, and at the same time working with leaders to understand what it was that we needed to do to become truly patient centered.

How did you navigate this transformation in leadership with the employees?

Anne-Marie Law:
I will tell you that the journey around leadership, even though we were in somewhat in disarray as we tried to renew ourselves and become this new version of ourselves, we all kind of knew the journey started with leaders - finding the high potential leaders in the organization, getting them nominated by the executive team, putting them through a program which we co-designed with RBL to ask them the boldened question: what was the unit of competitive advantage for the company as we thought about being really patient-centered, and that part of it was fairly easy.

They're doing it in tandem as we redesigned HR and then finding out how to connect what they told us into the design that we were creating for HR. That's when it kind of was, I think, a little bit more challenging. Yes, HR was designed with all of that going on very differently to how it would have been designed if we didn't have all of that going on.

So, you know, the keys were the HR executive partners. That was a version of business partnership, but I would say it was on steroids. So we're redesigning the whole company and we need executive partners who are brave and bold and able to push the executives out beyond their comfort zones. But the typical challenge you have with HR business partners is that they have organizations underneath them, and those organizations underneath them often have tactical responsibilities. So it's very hard for them to get emboldened and do brave new work because they're being held accountable to metrics that are more transactional.

So we severed that relationship. And instead, under the executive partners, we brought in a cadre of what we called organization capability and strategy leaders. And these were people who came from Deloitte or came from PWC who had backgrounds in human capital in various different dimensions, and they operated like a swarm. So as an HR executive partner realized that, “My executive partner team has this particular challenge, I'm going to help them with that challenge-“ they went back out into this internal swarming team and said, come help me, come figure it out.

So they built a reputation very quickly of having capabilities to help with organizational transformation that they wouldn't have had if they hadn't got this sort of swarm team behind them. On the other side, we knew that the employee experience was going to be critical through this journey, that we created an employee experience function, and they focused on employee journey mapping. They focused on employee engagement. They focused on employee relations. Ultimately, underneath them, we had employee talent management, you know, employee skill training, all of that sort of like general area.

But it was under the employee experience function that freed it up from having to please the executive. They could almost become this expression of a canary in a coal mine, right?

They could be the ones that were saying, you're talking about the culture and you've got these sort of, you know, ‘words’ that you're using. But the reality that the employees are experiencing is very different.

So to ensure that we continued to invest in the employee experience and didn't get fooled by our own language, [we had to see] the reality that was really there. They were the two things that I would say were very different about the model that we built.

In addition, we didn't have a traditional talent management model. We really focused in on building capabilities around leadership and innovation. And ultimately, we kind of wove in belonging and diversity inclusion in the early stages with that journey.

So that there was a group that was purely free to focus on those elements. They didn't have to worry about whether or not people were getting their own career development needs met. They were just focused on how are we going to drive innovation and leadership, those capabilities that we knew we needed to become world class in.

So then in tandem, as I say, this group of high potential leaders went off. And the question that we asked them was, “What's the unit of competitive advantage?” They came back and said it is all of the experiences that our patients have with us, but we aren't designed to deliver it in any way coherently. Every single function within the business thinks it's got a piece of responsibility around it, but there isn't any rallying cry. There isn't any system internally to garner that information.

How did the customers or in this case, the patient influence this design?

Anne-Marie Law:
So a perfect example would be a patient who's on therapy drops off therapy. The sales team's responsibility is to find another patient, right? Because their numbers and metrics driven, their job isn't to find out why that patient isn't on therapy. So all of the knowledge that they might have about why that patient isn't on therapy goes nowhere. It doesn't even help them as they try and find another patient to put on therapy.

So that's when this group of high potential leaders came back with the idea that we should create an organization that was called STAR, that stood for Solutions To Accelerate Results for patients. Very leanly: a staffed organization or team that ultimately floated up these questions, these challenges, these problems, and these notable exceptions to our effort to be patient centric.

And really, it was in that group (STAR) that we tried to solve those problems - of course, using all of the people within the company who had expertise and creativity and wanted to help us solve the problems too. And that group came under me, and that's when we really started to destroy the terminology around Human Resources and really moved into Human Experience, because that was where we understood what the patients needed.

We had a vehicle to be able to solve for patients, and we had an organization, formerly known as HR, that was really dedicated to ensuring there was an internal design that could optimize solving for patients. And as we went through that journey, that sort of takes me to lesson six, which is this cohort of leaders that were ready to be champions, this group that was originally the high-performance team or a high-potential team, they stayed with us on the journey. They kind of grounded us, ensuring that we will continue to move forward and make progress. Ultimately what became really obvious was that digital was an enabler and without digital focused on enabling us, we weren't going to be successful.

And the job of IT had really been to drive efficiency. It wasn't to create products. It wasn't to create connections. It wasn't to create value. It was to ensure costs weren't escalating. And we really flipped that on its head and said, actually, the cost element of IT is a fraction. We can have IT help us design clinical trials. We can help IT can help us understand employees and that what's driving their exasperation so that we can refuel them and reenergize them.

We could actually be a force multiplier. So that's when IT also came into the realms of human experience and sort of became the connection point between the work we were doing to drive patient insights and solutions, and the work we were doing to drive organizational insights and people insights and solutions coming together through this wonderful energizer. We had an end in mind, even though we didn't know what the end was going to be.

How big was your HR department before and how has your organization grown over time?

Anne-Marie Law:
So Alexion, when I arrived, had about 2500 people, I think we cut the workforce by 25 percent and then built back up to I think about four thousand now. They just announced maybe six months ago, less than six months ago, that they're being acquired by AstraZeneca. So not that unusual given the industry that we're in. The HR department, I think, was about 80 people when I joined. I think it's roughly probably about 110 people now.

One of the things that the executive team decided to do in this sort of context of the previous reputation of the previous company and trying to become this new company. The decision was made to move the headquarters from Connecticut to Boston. So that became a problem because Boston's a very competitive marketplace for talent. And we didn't have a great reputation, but it also meant that many more people left because they simply weren't willing to move from Connecticut to Boston. So whilst the numbers didn't change, you know, on an annual basis, we were adding about a thousand people to the employee base.

And then what we also decided what we would do is that we would not just add a thousand people, but change a thousand people's jobs. By that, I mean that when you looked at the actual net added the first year, I think it was a thousand and close to. But then the sort of positions that we were filling were a thousand. But we weren't adding a thousand new people. What we had was that real life line of that chain where a job gets posted, an internal applicant applies, and they're successful. Another job then gets posted, and an internal applicant applies, so we really had this amazing sort of life-energizing move of people evolving their careers within the company. It meant that recruitment was still very busy, but we weren't actually adding that same number of net new people.

What was your burning platform: how did you create momentum and inspire change?

Anne-Marie Law:
Well, the burning platform was this sort of what we described as the path forward. So under the circumstances, there wasn't any option to stay as is, right? I mean, on every dimension, there was an expectation that we were changing. And so that really then created that, well, what are we going to change into? Because if you just sort of iterate, you don't really change. I mean, you may you may grow, but not to the extent that we needed to change because we had this terrible reputational challenge and we had a real challenge. If we didn't have a pipeline of drugs, we didn't have a reputation of being able to innovate. Investors didn't believe in us.

So it was sort of an almost cataclysmic set of circumstances. Well, what was interesting, however, was that whilst it was clear to me that we needed to be very bold and very brave, not everybody agreed with that. You know, some people thought we could be quite successful if we just made small changes. And that then I think goes to your point around, “Well, everybody's very busy.” What should we be spending our time doing and trying to find those things that people could do that would have multiple impacts, not just one impact?

And that's when we got to, you know, focusing on leaders. I found that very, very helpful. First of all, the executive team said they needed world-class leadership. Don't forget, we had a net promoter score of minus 70 within that top group of leader, so none of them were thinking we can transform the company without transforming their energy, right? They actually think that the company is not worth staying in and so we need to transform their energy. Engaging them was really clear then. And then once we engaged them, they became these full multi-force multipliers where in some instances where I would have said, oh, you know, “maybe we shouldn't,” they were like, “yes, we should.”

You know, some of them, even to this day, I think are very much championing the philosophies that were put out there, even though I'm no longer with the company. So they kind of, you know, to put it in some terms, they got religion and they became fervent. And then it wasn't my religion, it was theirs.

How do you heal what can feel like a battle between the HR agenda and the business agenda?

Anne-Marie Law:
There is an image of you as a leader of a practitioner, and you're challenging that, you're changing the way you fit in in the business, and you have to be brave and bold in knowing that that's true, and that many of your colleagues won't really understand why you're sort of stepping above the fray or why you're pushing this agenda. And you have to keep coming back to it's a business agenda. It's not my agenda, it’s not a HR agenda, it is a business agenda.

But you can't change a business if you don't change the people within the business in some way, shape or form. And if HR is at the center point of changing the people, whether that's changing leaders or helping people become more innovative or helping people understand how to better service. There are all those elements. It has to start with the people, and HR has the key to that.

But so, yeah, I mean, it's a challenging scenario, though, because sometimes people want to be able to sort of, you know, make it simple. And if you make it simple, then you under-utilize the talent that you have within the organization. Change isn't simple. So you're kind of in this challenging situation where people want you to make it simple, make it easy, make the problems go away.

But for you to be a real service, you have to keep reminding people of the complexity and the challenges and the reality and that, you know, it's not easy. So it's a fine line that you're walking, but it starts with you being willing to walk that line.

How can you be a champion for an outcome that hasn’t happened yet?

Anne-Marie Law:
It doesn't start with HR, but if HR doesn't transform to fit the new model that you're championing it, it will it will devolve and will dissolve. It won't work. So you kind of have to do the two in tandem, which is when it becomes I think, you know, uber stressful, right? Because people want you to be able to tell them what the outcomes of this changes that you're championing, but you can't tell them what the outcome is because it hasn't happened.

You know, you have to get people who are believers who are going to go on the journey. The benefit for us was that not changing, wasn't an option. There were definitely moments with the HR leadership team where I would sort of say, you know, we're on a journey, just draw the visual.