AstraZeneca R&D Leadership Case Study

by Bill Quirke

This article is an extract from the forthcoming Gower Handbook of Internal Communication.

The AstraZeneca R&D internal communication team took up the challenge of engaging leaders in being effective communicators. Faced with major and sustained change, the R&D organisation of pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca, decided to coach, equip and support its leadership teams to engage people in what was happening.

Communicators worked with leadership groups to align them, help them understand their roles and responsibilities and play to their combined strengths, and showed leaders how communication could help achieve real solutions to key business problems.

The whole pharmaceutical industry is facing change – cost pressures, new markets, outsourcing and changing regulations are just of few of the factors they face. Like its competitors, AstraZeneca is responding to these broader changes in the industry and R&D is a key area for its focus. Pharmaceutical R&D requires a huge amount of investment, and efforts there to bring about greater innovation, greater productivity and new discovery will result in real and worthwhile savings.

Engaging employees in this change, particularly after earlier waves of productivity improvement, constant process improvement and change was a key task for R&D’s Head of Global Internal Communication, Alex Kalombaris. Working with communication consultants, Synopsis, he and his team adopted an approach which focused on coaching leadership teams and equipping communicators to support them.

AstraZeneca R&D based their approach on the Synopsis FAME model of effective leadership communication. Each leadership team in R&D participated in a one-day workshop. A total of 200 senior managers took part.

The workshops were practical and focused each team on what they needed to do to bring about the necessary changes in their area. The entire day looked at how each group of leaders should articulate the direction for their teams, align behind the messages to their people, and prepare to engage their people in the changes ahead. Many participants were delighted that not only did they acquire new skills and techniques but they were also coming away with practical approaches to real communication situations that they were due to face.

A key aspect of the workshop was helping leaders understand their preferred communication style. A key distinction was whether the leaders were extroverts – lively, persuasive, and entertaining, or introverts – accurate, logical and factual. We used a detailed analytical tool to help leaders understand their natural styles and what this meant for the way they communicated.

Looking at communication styles helped the leaders in three ways. Firstly, they could plan to make the most of the strengths of their preferred style and minimise the impact of its downsides. Secondly, they could spot other people’s preferred styles and shift their approach to match and therefore increase their chances of getting onto the other person’s wavelength quicker. Thirdly, looking at communication styles helped them understand that different people were likely to react differently to the messages they were putting across, and that more than one approach was needed to reach everyone.

Early in the programme, a workshop for the R&D network of communicators who would be working alongside the leadership teams was run. In this workshop, communicators learned the key leadership communication skills, and practised ways to support their leaders long after the workshops were over.

AstraZeneca’s investment in coaching their leaders highlighted the importance of the relationship between leaders and communicators. Their experience also provides useful lessons in how leaders should communicate in times of change.

10 lessons learned

1. Communicators and their clients often have different styles which can cause misunderstanding. At AstraZeneca, communicators tend to have a different set of values and priorities from their internal clients. Whereas the communicators tended to be upbeat, spirited and considerate, their clients, most of whom were trained scientists, were by nature more likely to be lower profile, systematic and considerate.

Understanding more about communication styles helped the communicators change their approach to get onto their clients’ wavelength and achieve common ground from which they could agree a way forward. Without this understanding, it was easy for the scientists to dismiss the communicators as ‘all show’ and for the communicators to see the scientists as too fact-focused, and both parties coming away from meetings frustrated.

2. Members of leadership teams have different styles which can result in mixed messages. In one team in particular, different styles were reflected in different strategies for communication. A spirited and direct, energetic and charismatic member of the team was keen to talk to people in an unscripted and interactive way. More introverted members of the team were, however, uncomfortable with what they saw as an unstructured and undisciplined approach. The risk here was that different members of the team might take different approaches. The inconsistency that was likely to result could undermine alignment, and send mixed and confusing signals.

This was addressed by working with the team to agree the key messages and the ‘story’ and also reinforcing that the leaders needed to consider the preferred communication styles of their audiences and flex their approach to cater for them. They should be energetic and upbeat for those in their audiences who were extrovert, but also make sure they clearly link what’s happening with business objectives and have detail and evidence for the more fact-hungry introverted types.

3. Communicators have different styles which can result in mixed messages. At AstraZeneca communicators came from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines and had different styles themselves. Several communicators had been scientists themselves, and moved over to specialise in communication. Others came from journalism, and some through PR.

Communicators were helped to understand their preferred style and think through how to get the most out of it. They also had chance to assess the preferred styles of the leaders they supported and how they could use this information to provide them with an even more effective service.

4. R&D leadership teams focused on collaboration. Many of the teams were successful because their leaders were skilled in building strong teams, bringing together functional and technical experts, and fostering co-operation. Their natural style was to be considerate and collaborative.

In many ways, this style is useful during times of change – people expect greater empathy from their leaders, and to be reassured that they understand the pressures they’re under and the pain they’re feeling. On the other hand, the collaborative approach can also bring problems during change - leaders have to provide a strong sense of direction, and to be able to engage and motivate their people around the context for change, the compelling reasons for it, and the need to summon up another burst of energy for the new challenges ahead. Doing this means a shift to being more direct and upbeat.

5. Scientists like fact and process. Many appeared to be uncomfortable with emotion and story. The more introverted audiences such as many of the scientists do not like “arguing from analogy” – they don’t want images and metaphors of how one thing is like another. They believe that a thing should rest on its own merits and be tested for itself. Scientists may also want time to reflect on information, to process through its implications, and to have a later opportunity for challenge and discussion. They are used to informed argument, to establishing hypotheses and then gathering data to test it.

6. Leaders can be too close to the information and too far ahead in their thinking. Many of the leaders were so close to the information that they forgot what their people did and did not know. This can cause difficulties when communicating change as an unwise word, or unhappy choice of phrase could trigger concerns that had not existed before. Leaders can also become impatient with teams that are grappling with facts and detail they themselves digested some time ago and misinterpret their slow take up as resistance.

7. Leaders can project their concerns and uncertainties onto their people. For many leaders, the toughest objections to answer were those with which they privately agreed. Sometimes leaders would raise issues and concerns which their people may not have considered because the leaders did not want to be seen as corporate propagandists, or because they had their own concerns about how change has been rolled out, and the degree of detail which was available to them. Often, the end result can be extra confusion and concern.

8. Leaders need to develop their own questions and answers. Rather than having the communication team develop FAQ’s, leaders responded better when they challenged each other with tough questions, developed their answers, and tested out how real, credible and reliable these responses were.

It was also very helpful to challenge leaders to raise the questions they feared they’d be asked. In part this helped them prepare to deal with their fears, and it also helped them investigate what they were concerned about, get to the underlying issue and try and address and resolve it.

9. Meeting format matters. The leaders were especially interested in how best to put across their messages. The traditional way of communicating is to run large site events in which 200 – 300 people get the message at the same time. This minimises the grapevine, as everyone hears the same message from the same person in the same way.

However, these leaders also needed to ensure high degrees of engagement in order to maintain productivity and keep people focussed. Therefore they believed it was important to have discussion with their people, flush out their issues, and increase their sense of confidence about the change.

This meant they could not rely simply on the one off large scale events, since interaction at these would be low, and there would be little time or room for discussion. Indeed, it was more likely at any Q&A session the vocal minority would dominate, even if their views did not represent those of the majority.

Many leaders therefore decided to follow up larger scale events with smaller group discussions in which people could discover what the changes meant for their particular area of the business, raise their concerns and ask questions. They would also be able to challenge how well their leaders had created the vision for change, defended their interests, and developed a feasible plan for successful implementation.

8. Consistency is possible even when people see things differently. One of the group heads was especially worried about consistency of message. He knew this would be difficult to achieve because his department was spread across three sites, each of which had a distinctive identity and their own strong local leader.

Also, each of the sites were likely to be affected differently, and therefore would need not only different messages, but a different approach. For example, a site that was being severely affected by changes would not welcome an upbeat recounting of the benefits of the change to the organisation.

Each of the team clearly had different styles and different mixes of how much telling and discussing they were likely to follow. Therefore, even when the messages and slides handed out to the team were identical and consistent, they would inevitably be used and delivered in different ways, to audiences who were themselves different and distinctive – and who would start selecting different elements of messages that they might remember and pass on to other.

Faced with what looked like an almost inevitable guarantee of inconsistency, lack of control of what people might take out of the sessions, selective memory and decaying recall, the leader was naturally concerned. He was able to reduce his concerns by:

· Preparation – spending time together working through what the members of the leadership group actually thought, believed and felt confident saying

· Agreeing as a group an elevator speech, key messages, and answers to tough questions

· Rehearsal – in which they could challenge each other, simulate tough situations they were likely to face and develop responses together, rather than coming up with something on their feet when delivering ‘live’.

· Summaries – rather than leaving their answers in the Q&A sessions dangling, giving summaries of what they believed to be good about the changes and why they personally felt confident about it.