Why Pharma Leadership Should Prioritize Continuous Learning and Experimentation

It’s a time of evolution for pharma and biotech leaders. New technologies and changing regulatory landscapes are forcing them to adjust their strategies, especially in how they manage and grow their own teams.

Elaine Ferguson, global president at Inizio Medical, spoke with Pharmaceutical Executive about the importance of both managing and growing talent. In today’s world, this requires people already in leadership positions to identify potential future-leaders and provide them with clear and direct paths up the career ladder.

As the executive sponsor for the company’s talent accelerator, she plays a key role in developing these pathways. According to her, this requires an understanding of the current system, along with the ability to reach potential leaders where they are already at.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How important is it for pharma leadership to prioritize continuous learning and experimentation?
Elaine Ferguson: Inizio is a broad organization with a broad range of skill sets, which means ensuring our employees have access to the best training, development opportunities, and connections across the organization is critical to how we operate.

When we think about ongoing learning and development, we approach it in two ways. First, it is about providing the skills and competencies our talent needs to perform their roles at the highest level. But it goes beyond that. It is equally important that we are connecting individuals and expertise across different functions, different geographies, and different parts of the business. We think about development both in terms of building skills and in terms of building connections.

One program where we have had significant success is our Accelerator Leader and Manager Program, which we designed and have been running for the last three years. In that time, more than 320 individuals have gone through the program. It is an intensive multi-month experience in which participants work in cohort groups with access to leadership training, individual coaching, and AI tools to augment and support how they perform their roles.

The element our participants consistently identify as the most valuable is the opportunity to work in small cross-functional pods — groups of six or seven individuals drawn from across the entire organization. Each pod comes together to address a real business challenge. Those challenges vary: how we improve collaboration and connect expertise across the organization, how we unlock value for clients, or how we work more effectively as a business. What makes it powerful is that each individual brings a distinct set of expertise, and the group draws on all of it collectively to reach an answer.

At the end of the program, participants present their findings to the executive leadership team. We have an opportunity to challenge their thinking, and they have an opportunity to defend it. Several of the ideas generated through this process have since been adopted and deployed as part of our overall roadmap for creating value as an organization.