After three days of running a complex global pharmaceutical business simulation that spanned three 
regions (US, Europe, and China), three therapeutic areas including oncology, 9 products, a Sales team, a Marketing team, Medical Affairs, Operations, Manufacturing, HR, and the finance department, the 60 participants of the high potential leadership program were exhausted.
But they weren’t done yet. Actually, the hardest part of the learning journey was about to begin; the debriefing and key learnings. Typically, high potential leaders talk about how they learned strategic thinking, financial management, goal setting, and a General Management point of view.
Today, my first team in the debriefing - and the team that did the best in terms of creating shareholder value, revenues, and profit – decided to focus their presentation entirely on their biggest learning: Trust between operating leaders is more important than anything else in business.
When things got tough during the third year of their four-year business simulation experience, the team said they focused much more on each other and being aligned than they did conducting a competitive analysis. “We knew that everyone was coming after us. We knew it would be with price, service, products, everything. That didn’t phase us. We knew we had to focus on execution and since we had the best products in the industry, we had to make sure we made enough and got it to the patients. We knew we had to continue to get the payers to pay for our products and again, we trusted each other to communicate and focus on the key priorities.
It was one of the most unusual and refreshing presentations I’ve see in a long time and to hear how they were going to take their learnings back to the “real world” was truly amazing. After their presentation, I spent time with the team to ask them about their path to success and what they thought were the primary drivers of their trust that they will take with them from the experience. They shared five key point that I have summarized below:
Be clear with each other
The team shared they were very focused on being clear with each other taking any ambiguity out of their conversations.
Make sure everyone contributes
Everyone on the team had their own strengths and their own areas of development. The team shared that they built trust in each other through the contributions they each made and the hard work they each put in to make sure things were aligned at all times. “Nobody hid. We all contributed and optimized their efforts.
Skills to do the jobs
The third element of trust was embedded in the skills and competencies to do the jobs. “We immediately built trust in each other when we realized that we had an all-star team of talent. We also talked about how all-star teams can have dysfunction and we figured out ways of dealing with conflict and we all left our egos at the door.”
Committed to success
Another key theme was the teams’ commitment to success. What was interesting to me was they chose the metrics of success that were aligned to their business strategy and that everyone bought into. They wanted to launch new products before anyone else and hold onto market shares of at least 35% with their key products in their key markets. They were able to do that in all but one product in the China market.
Connected to each other
The final element of their trust was how they felt connected to each other. They developed great respect and compassion during their fur years together and that bond help them through hard times and to make the hard decisions.
