Organization Workshop Intervention at a Pharmaceutical Company
by Tom Devane
An East Coast-based pharmaceutical company wanted to reduce the historical animosity between its production and quality assurance organizations. The company was planning a major new product launch, and leaders felt that fostering a more harmonious environment would be critical to its success. Past interactions between the two organizations had been tense, rooted in political power grabs, and marked by outbursts of strong emotion.
In one meeting an individual threw a three-ring binder across the room and stormed out of the meeting because he didn’t agree with the group’s consensus decision. Such interactions and related gripe sessions around the water cooler helped shape an environment in which each group was highly distrustful of the other.
Before diving into details of the Organization Workshop’s (OW) application at this company, some background would be helpful. Through improvement programs like Six Sigma, Total Quality, and Lean, many organizations today are striving to hold all their employees responsible for quality. This view is consistent with quality guru Dr. Edwards Deming’s assertion that there should not be a need for a separate quality department in an organization, since everyone would possess the knowledge, skills, and responsibility for quality. Unfortunately, regulations that govern pharmaceutical companies mandate certain policies and structures for public safety that make Deming’s dream a structural impossibility in this industry.
By law, pharmaceutical companies must have separate production and quality organizations. To avoid conflicts of interest, the Quality VP does not even report to the Production VP. Instead, these two are peers who both report to the CEO. This arrangement sets up multiple conditions for the typical “tearing” space experienced by Middles. Quality managers experience not only the up-down structural tearing between the needs of Quality Tops and Quality Bottoms, but also sideways tearing between FDA regulations and their peer production managers who want to get product out the door as fast as possible to meet company revenue goals. And, of course, Production managers find themselves in similar “up-down and sideways” tearing situations within their own management structure and with Quality department interactions.
Some pharmaceutical companies have mastered this built-in conflict potential between Production and Quality departments. Others, like the one discussed here, have not. Internal conversations, which govern external behavior, tended to be quite uncomplimentary and caused conditions to spiral downward even further. Production people had the attitude that, Those Quality people are just like small town policemen with monthly tickets—always out with a quota of comments and investigation requests, regardless of whether the product we make is good or not. Not surprisingly, they had a chip on their shoulder each time they prepared to respond to Quality comments or investigations that slowed the shipping process.
And the Quality department was not above the organizational space fray. The tone of its internal conversations—Those Production people can’t be trusted to make a good product; we’ve got to watch everything they do with an eagle eye—likewise colored the manner in which Quality employees approached shop floor inspections and joint problem-solving meetings. Such conditions presented formidable challenges for Middle integration between Quality and Production Middles. The classic Middle feelings—a sense of going it alone, lack of Middle group solidarity, occasional inadequacy, and distrust of peer Middles—were all present and accounted for in both groups.
Fortunately, the Production VP was a visionary who saw multiple organizational needs and a convenient way to address them all with one stroke of his pen and funding from his new product launch budget. He knew that while the interdepartmental animosity was a huge problem, it wasn’t one that could easily be tackled head-on. Most managers in Production and Quality had been promoted quickly to accommodate rapid organizational growth. Consequently, most lacked the managerial skills to perform the jobs they currently held.
While the company’s Human Resources Department had completed a needs assessment for managerial skills two years prior to this impending product launch, they lacked the internal bandwidth to develop and implement a leadership development program. Using input from the earlier HR study and interviews with a sampling of middle managers and front-line employees, the Production VP and I, as an external consultant, co-architected a leadership development program that would upgrade Production and Quality managers’ skills in critical areas such as feedback, time management, direct communication, systems thinking, conflict management, and managing change. And he stated – and the Quality VP agreed -- that Production and Quality managers would go through the sessions together.
Three months into the leadership development program, all the Production and Quality managers participated in an OW. An OW, or Organization Workshop, is a group learning session in which participants experience universal conditions, common traps, and dilemmas of organizational life. Its purpose in this pharmaceutical company’s context was to provide the newly developing Production and Quality managers with the following:
- A general understanding of the organizational spaces of Tops, Middles, Bottoms, and Customers
- A company-specific appreciation of how the conditions and traps of various organizational spaces contributed to create many of the unproductive interaction patterns that had become part of the organization’s culture, and
- An opportunity to jointly apply the new principles and language to design some high-leverage ways out of their unproductive interactions.
The OW was selected as an intervention because it was an experiential exercise that would simultaneously hit people at the “gut” and the “intellect” levels. This was an important criteria as it fit with the overall “blended learning” approach for leadership development that included classroom skill-building sessions, experiential exercises, on-line learning, assessments from multiple raters, planned job rotations, and one-on-one coaching sessions.
Very little advance notification of the event was broadcast. Managers knew they had to allocate time for a leadership development activity, but they weren’t sure of its exact nature. They were told only that it would be highly experiential and directly address key management issues they were facing. This level of secrecy created curiosity and a general air of expectation about what might happen. Since previous leadership development sessions had gone quite well, there was a high level of trust in the leadership development program, and members of the group were even beginning to trust each other. People were actually looking forward to discovering what the session might hold in store. This non-outcome-oriented yet positive attitude toward the event turned out to be quite conducive to rapid, enthusiastic learning.
Early in the workshop, the directors and managers quickly grasped what it was like to be in the Middle space. They had lived it daily, but now had an opportunity and new vocabulary to talk about what was going on. They recognized they were sometimes caught in the vertical pull between Tops and Bottoms, and sometimes pulled in various lateral directions between FDA and revenue requirements. At the end of the workshop, each member publicly committed to the newly developed shared goals of first-time-right-quality-and-compliance and fast plant throughput. The OW was a turning point for middle managers in this organization. Previously, they had not felt like a unified group of Middles, but rather like a bunch of different people who happened to share a common middle manager job title.
Participants voiced several stand-out experiences. Going into the OW’s first interim debriefing session I heard a director comment, “This is just like real life: I just start to get something done and I get called into a meeting.” Another participant’s “aha” was that during the course of a single day she might find herself as a Top, Middle, Bottom, and a Customer. She stated, “I’ve always tried to deal with my organizational problems consistently, but now I realize the power of figuring out what space I’m in, figuring out what space the other person is in, and then developing a strategy based on where we’re each coming from.”
This leadership development session did not end at the formal conclusion of the OW. Once the group had developed and committed to shared goals, and pledged to work together to achieve them, the next question they had to address was, How will this happen within the current culture? Immediately following the OW, we conducted an “Open Space” workshop.
Open Space is a group method for generating ideas, energy, and action plans to address complex issues. The sequence of an Open Space is typically as follows: people introduce a topic around which they have a particular passion, they convene discussion groups around that topic, people who have an interest attend, some people attend multiple sessions and cross-pollinate ideas, and then the topic convener writes up action plans and notes resulting from the discussions. The guiding question for this Open Space was: What is the future of shared leadership for Production and Quality in this company? The outcomes of the one-day session were: clearly defined goals and metrics, clear roles and responsibilities, a monitoring mechanism to track progress, and a plan for future Middle Integration meetings.
Since the initial OW session, the Production and Quality Middles have conducted three Middle Integration meetings. In the first meeting they discussed areas of common interest and concern in light of their shared goals. In subsequent meetings they have begun to actively co-plan the new direction of the two departments as a “single work system.” They have also discussed how they plan to change their respective organizational cultures, and how they will create conditions for front-line workers in each organization to embrace the new culture, shared goals, new internal conversations, and ways of interacting on the shop floor and in joint problem-solving meetings. These meetings, held without Tops or external consultants, are now a formal part of the leadership development program. And now, one year after that OW was conducted, bi-annual assessments of the leadership development program have shown that managers are still using OW language, concepts, and leverage principles to help them operate as effective leaders.
To contact Tom Devane directly:
tomd@tomdevane.com; www.tomdevane.com
