Learning from the Leader

Rebecca Goozee talks to Betsy Blee, the Senior Director and Group Leader of Leadership Education & Development at Pfizer Inc, the world’s largest pharmaceutical firm.

“We need to look at ways in which we can make decisions better, faster, speedier and look to techniques that will rapidly provide learning and learning support that drive changes”
-Betsy Blee

After six years of active service in the US Marine Corp, followed by 16 years in the reserves, Blee joined Pfizer Pharmaceuticals as a sales representative. She climbed the ladder and ended up moving to Pfizer Inc., taking care of management development and then leadership development. Blee is now responsible for the strategy, design, development and delivery of the educational offering for the company’s 130,000 leaders worldwide.

Training and development are important in the pharmaceutical industry because of the technical level of the products and the customers to whom these products are sold. In very few other industries is it so important – and so expected – that such a high level of technical selling is done.

Pharmaceutical sales people have to understand the background of the drugs they are selling, its competitors, the physiology of the body, and the ideology of disease. It is a challenge to get people to communicate with a technical sell with extreme limitations on the time and access to these customers.

Blee believes that learning and development “is a critical driver of results … There is a strong correlation and it can be measured. There is plenty of data out there to suggest how important it is that people have the opportunity to get better at something, and if they don’t have these opportunities there is an issue of morale.”

Changing sales force models
Sales force models are changing (Pfizer has cut back by approximately 20 percent), and training and development strategies must change also. Blee: “You have a responsibility in training and development to take care of your business people, in supporting them and giving them the right knowledge and skills and abilities to do what they’ve got to do behaviorally – and that demands that you are consistent, that you are more efficient and therefore effective. It is important not to use multiple models.”

She continues: “In terms of training efforts for pharmaceutical sales specifically, you’ve got to be focused on selling skills, product knowledge and then taking advantage of technology to increase efficiency of training. This is not new and emerging, I’m just not sure we have leveraged the technology fully and it is highly important to do that now.”

Robust front-line managers
“We do have very good first line training for managers, I would say we have 8,000-9,000 graduates in our first line program for the center. It’s quite a feat that it has been in place for so long and touched so many people.” Blee explains with a smile, “I was asked one time by a previous chairman, ‘haven’t you gotten to everybody yet’ and the answer is ‘no!’ – the population changes, people come and go, people are promoted or they just leave, so there is a lot of change going on all the time.

“It’s important that senior leadership see the connection between first line performance and business results. It’s a very important investment: it has produced results, it’s been well received and it’s ongoing – there have been over 10 years of continuation in the investment in the front line and great, terrific organizational support for it.”

New training techniques
Following a 20 percent reduction in its sales force, in January 2007 Pfizer announced plans to layoff a further 7,800 employees and close several research and manufacturing facilities – accounting for 10 percent of total workforce. It has been suggested that new training techniques making employees more flexible will be in place. “Our new CEO [Jeff Kindler] has really articulated that we should become more entrepreneurial as an organization. We want to have the size and scale but act like a smaller venture which is agile and always focused on continuous improvement, and that is going to require a serious culture and behavioral change in the organization. We need to look at ways in which we can make decisions better, faster, speedier and look to techniques that will rapidly provide learning and learning support that drive changes and in order to do this we need to leverage technology. However we also need to work on the culture simultaneously and develop and embrace leader learning and coaching.”

E-learning
E-learning is a rapidly emerging technique that enables people to learn over the internet, usually by taking a course, answering questions and completing a test. Blee notes that “E-learning is a vital part in the array of options – the fast pace of business has more and more of our colleagues looking for flexible options.” She admits it isn’t for everybody (“Because we are all human and we all have different learning styles”), but having the option to use it is important. “We need to help people find this learning and find the information when they need it,” says Blee. “However, e-learning and the internet can only go so far to transfer knowledge. You can’t learn everything on the internet, but you can learn from the doctors and pharmacy and the sales reps here, who have lots of experience articulating all the details and the product itself.”

Blee goes on to say, “E-learning will play a more and more important role, not just for Pfizer but for all major firms that have people distributed all over the world. It’s good for business everywhere.”

Future training, leadership and development
Asked about her opinion on the future for the pharmaceutical industry’s training methods, Blee claims to be optimistic. “We will figure out what good leadership looks like and also get strong and visible senior leadership in order to implement or execute any sort of plan. I believe that development and training will stay on people’s radars as a very, very important way in which people can do their job as well as they can, to the best of their ability with this important support.”

Talking Talent
Q&A with Chris Altizer, Vice President of Global Leadership & Talent Development at Pfizer

What does it take to acquire and retain your top talent?
There are a lot of ways that we accomplish this. Through word of mouth – the industry and the best sources of talent aren’t that big – having colleagues who are engaged in their work and with the company, and are willing to share that, are critical. Colleagues who understand not only their role, but the role of the company and the industry are the best ambassadors for any company. Colleague referrals are a key source of talent.

Pfizer is highly regarded as a real training and development machine for people and having that reputation is a second way to acquire and retain talent because people go where they will get grown and developed.

The fundamental way that you acquire and retain talent is by having effective leaders – we focus on ensuring that new supervisors get the training they need to effectively lead others, and we hold them accountable for demonstrating the leader behaviors that create the necessary environment and develop the colleagues they lead.

What are the current challenges for talent management in the pharma industry?
One of the biggest challenges we have is not so much around talent but around the industry itself. Our industry is under scrutiny and in some cases under fire like it’s never been before, and how we react to that matters. The industry has to promote the value of what we do and the career opportunities that come with that. When it comes to talent, frankly, this is the biggest issue we have right now – people look at the industry and don’t trust us.

Do you think this will change?
It will have to. The world wants new medicines and it is our job to help them understand what that process is and what that investment is, otherwise we will just have a formulary 20 years from now that looks like todays, and that is not going to satisfy the need.

How important is talent management in driving business growth?
In our industry, talent drives growth. Every aspect of our industry requires talented people to discover, develop, license, manufacture, market and monitor medicines. We do have a value proposition that a lot of other industries don’t – we can help save and improve people’s lives – and that is something that perhaps we don’t leverage as much as we should when it comes to talent. But talent is what makes that happen.

You have previously spoken about the need to find the right job for the right person rather than the right person for the job. Can you explain this?
What it really gets down to is understanding the capabilities that are required for certain jobs as opposed to a job description. You can’t custom design a job for every person based on the person’s capabilities – by the time you get all that done all the jobs would have changed at least once! Instead, we are looking at the capabilities that are required to deliver on a given outcome.

When you start thinking about the jobs of the future, you don’t do a job the way you did it three years ago, so the capabilities required for the job today and the job tomorrow are different from the job yesterday. Understanding and planning that roles will change requires you to focus on those current and future capabilities that must be developed in your people. This is different to how it was even 10 years ago.

It is estimated that 50-60 percent of the workforce at Pfizer has joined since 2000 through Pfizer’s acquisitions. How do you track this talent and use it to its full potential?
Actually, many of those new to Pfizer since 2000 have come through the hiring process, though it may seem like we’ve acquired that many. Talent and the need for the future are changing, and when we’ve acquired people in the past we’ve actually done a pretty good job of identifying the capabilities and the fit of people.

Fit builds the diversity of the pipeline, you know, backgrounds, different experiences, different company backgrounds, and we’re trying to expand on that and build on that diversity platform because without diversity of thought, innovation doesn’t happen and innovation is what we are about.

Where do you see the future for talent management?
Talent management is becoming the work of the manager and the employee but it is not there yet – I believe we still think of it as a backroom process with excess charges that are hidden away and conversations that happen quietly. That is not what talent management is about. Effective leaders understand that developing their people is not just a way to get innovative products, that’s how we outsell the competition, that’s about business.

As an industry we simply have to do more to expand the talent pool of people who want to be in pharma if we want innovation and new medicines – robbing from one to pay another isn’t going to expand our talent universe. In addition to developing our own, we would do well to further expand our place in places of higher learning and our view of non-traditional and diverse backgrounds that have the capabilities that will drive our business.

Chris Altizer, Vice President of Global Leadership & Talent Development at Pfizer
Betsy Blee, Senior Director and Group Leader of Leadership Education & Development at Pfizer