Learning Can Outpace Market Change in the Pharmaceutical World
How do you work smarter not harder and deliver a 20% improvement in effectiveness and performance?
The pace of market change in the pharmaceutical world is relentless and is only expected to accelerate. For the pharmaceutical industry to enable effective career development in its leaders and in its wider workforce, the old training approaches are no longer fit for purpose. They rely on encoding ‘best practices’ which are out of date before they are deployed to the front line and, more often than not, fail to meet the required standard in what is the reality of today’s workplace.
However, there might be a new approach that fully meets the training needs of this new era and is based on dramatically increasing people’s learning agility.
Recent research from the Harvard Business School and HEC Paris shows that reflective practice can increase performance by over 20%. By equipping leaders and employees with the ability to learn much faster than they did before, combined with challenging and leading edge research in their field, people can develop an ability to make better sense of their unique situation, change as fast as their circumstance require and grasp opportunities before the competition. They do this by instantly deploying new thinking they have gained to their particular work challenges.
This project represents my first ever critical self-reflection in eight years of working for [my company].
This quotation captures the tragic waste of human capital prevalent in many companies today. By encouraging staff to “execute and not think”, companies expect high performance. What they increasingly get is obedience, low performance and an organizational inability to adapt fast enough. In this article, I would like to demonstrate that there is a better way; one that is in tune with today’s relentlessly changing pharmaceutical marketplace.
By critically self-reflecting and immediately applying new insights into business projects for his team, the student quoted above - on one of our Master’s programmes - went on to develop a whole new set of opportunities for both himself and his company. He was clear that the old pattern of unquestioningly following old habits would not have brought this success and this matches recent research at Harvard Business School and HEC Paris showing that reflective practice increases performance by over 20%.
The Imperative of Disruptive Change
The pharmaceutical sector is facing disruptive change beyond the headlines of the demise of blockbuster drugs.
Within the constraints of the regulatory and compliance environment, we all appreciate that the industry is having to go through a period of massive transformation in the way it goes to market; not least the acceptance of the concept of pull – rather than push – marketing and the acceptance of solutions and consultative selling and highly focused and strategic key account management. New players from new sectors are encroaching on our traditional space – think wearables and even Apple’s new health R&D platform – and things are having to change fast in the pharma sector if it wants to maintain or rebuild trust with the various health sector stakeholders that include the Ps we all know - that along with pharma include healthcare providers (doctors/physicians), payers (Government and insurance companies) and patients.
Whilst now having a significant impact in the industry, disruptive change like the above might be seen as a little “late to the party” in the pharma sector when compared to some other industries. However, we can, no doubt, learn some invaluable lessons from those other sectors that have already been down the disruptive change road; especially in the way that companies in those sectors go to market.
In medical aesthetics, for example, one of our customers dealt with market turmoil by transforming the focus of its sales representatives to address the fundamental concerns of their customers; namely to operate profitable and growing private clinics. Sales people have to become more akin to business consultants in this scenario and sales leaders have a crucial role to play in coaching and helping their people learn and adapt quickly.
Savvy companies are choosing a different way to learn because, as more markets move at digital speeds, today’s traditional approaches to learning are not fit for purpose.
We can’t work harder – finding the secret to working smarter
Increased labour productivity of knowledge workers has come at a price. Data shows that between 1973 and 2000, the average American worker added an additional 199 hours to his or her annual schedule – or nearly five additional weeks of work per year. Anecdotally, we have become even busier since then. We are, therefor, at a point where we really must move to working smarter not harder.
A question that many company leaders are asking themselves is “where is the next performance breakthrough going to come from?” L&D has concentrated on learning through doing, allied to learning new skills, acquiring new knowledge. Whilst we acknowledge new knowledge is essential to stay relevant, many of our customers have reached breaking point with their current approaches. For example, today’s best practice is often out of date before it can be codified and, when it is trained, it rarely meets the specific market reality of the learners. And, simply going online with training doesn’t solve this basic flaw. A global head of sales enablement summarized his quandary as “trying to download 300 days worth of information into two days of enablement per quarter.” And it’s going to get worse.
Developing the Reflective Practitioner
The HBS research mentioned above found that knowledge workers improved their performance by around 23% through reflecting at the end of each day for around 15 minutes.
There is another way to learn. To stay relevant, professionals must develop greater learning agility through thinking and adapting for themselves. By providing an environment which makes the learner think, reflect and challenge their own ways of working they can find new and original answers that can be rapidly deployed to the business front line.
The HBS research mentioned above found that knowledge workers improved their performance by around 23% through reflecting at the end of each day for around 15 minutes; even after taking into account what is effectively a 15 minute shorter day working on their core tasks. The performance improvements were lasting and participants reported greater competence and self belief in being able to perform the role well. They were developing their professionalism through thinking more carefully about the role, thinking about what went well, thinking how to improve their role even more.
Reflective practices work because they have been honed by the people that are using them and, through working collaboratively with their employers. To achieve organization-wide impact, reflective practice should be incorporated at the heart of a learning system, based on a number of core principles:
1. The participant experience drives everything
2. Follow academically verified best practices for successful adult learning
3. Provide leading edge, business relevant material that radically challenges students’ existing worldview and triggers them to seek new answers
4. Students immediately apply the new learnings to a business-relevant project
5. Use reflective practice and individual, peer-to-peer coaching and virtual collaboration to encourage real learning
6. Place this in a formal academic framework that ensures quality standards of education and a goal. (For instance, in our case, Masters degrees in Transforming Sales or Transforming Sales Leadership that provide student ‘pull’).
Tangible Results of Reflective Practice
A student’s journey starts by transforming their ability to think and change and we’ve seen them constantly surprise themselves with the results that stem from their ability to transform their practices and those of their teams. Seeing them re-ignite their passion for learning and watching them become much more agile learners than before is like watching Rocky getting back into shape after years out of the boxing ring. They also become thought leaders for their areas of business as they seek new ideas and information to keep them one step ahead. The benefits for their employers are just as significant as they get to retain their top talent and test their best and brightest; many of whom we’ve seen get promoted off the back of their transformed perspectives.
He took it upon himself to lead the transformation of recruiting sales people within not just his area of responsibility but within the whole region of the Middle East. His organization subsequently recorded its highest performing year ever in 2014 and doubled its rate for converting sales opportunities into contracts.
Pharma has a major challenge finding the sales representatives and managers of the future with the ability to thrive in the new world of rapid new product introduction and rule changing from digitization. Our expectation is that recruitment will need to become much more sophisticated with candidates coming from new sources including different backgrounds and different sectors. We have a number of students currently studying for a Masters in Leading Sales Transformation with Consalia and Middlesex University. As an example of what can happen, one student concluded that improving the quality of recruitment was the single biggest impact area for the business. He took it upon himself to lead the transformation of recruiting sales people within not just his area of responsibility but within the whole region of the Middle East. His organization subsequently recorded its highest performing year ever in 2014 and doubled its rate for converting sales opportunities into contracts. The MD has attributed a substantial portion of that improvement to the improvement in recruiting.
Another student on the same Masters course was a sales manager with three team members on performance improvement plans (PIPs) facing imminent redundancy. Sales managers are notorious in finding it hard to turn around PIP situations but, to the student’s delight and surprise, after reflecting and using an Appreciative Inquiry approach of looking at the positives rather than the traditional negative mindset, all three PIP employees were coached to success and are now solid performers.
I firmly believe that this reflective practice approach that focuses on the learning agility of students is a blueprint for learning that can outpace the needs of the market in any profession. It marks a seismic shift away from traditional learning and towards actually delivering performance improvement by working smarter. And what business can afford to ignore that opportunity?
Ian Helps is a director of Consalia, a global sales performance improvement consultancy and a member of Cranfield University’s Practice Advisory Board.