Creating a collaborative team across the diverse Asia-Pacific region

“The workshop gave us the opportunity to understand that it’s ok and good to have healthy, constructive conflicts among the team. I can see that there are more questions being asked during team meetings, leading to significantly better outcomes.”
Participant testimonial

Type of Organisation

Multinational pharmaceutical company

Type of Solution

High-Performing Team Development

Participants

Regional Commercial team

The Problem

One of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world needed support whilst undertaking a complex M&A transaction. Not only was the integration taking place within a heavily regulated industry, and between organisations with highly matrixed and complex organisational structures, it was happening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The team was heavily dispersed across the Asia-Pacific region but needed to find a way to connect so that they could keep innovating in – and adapting to – the constantly shifting environment. The regional director needed an intervention that would equip the team to not just manage, but leverage the change and ambiguity they were facing.

The Solution

It was important that the program was tailored to the highly-matrixed structure of the companies. Because of this, we interviewed a set of six highly-networked and well-connected team members across countries and functions to understand the state of the team. We then created three 4-hour workshops, each one week apart, based on these team member-identified needs.

We leveraged proven ALI-C content and engaging facilitation methodologies to keep participation and energy high throughout the sessions. Since 2012, we’ve been facilitating online leadership development programs, and even pre-COVID most of our work was already delivered online; so we felt confident to take on this challenge.

During the workshops, we asked the team to assess the functioning of the team and define focus areas for their collective growth moving forward. We utilised various culture maps (based on the work of INSEAD professor Erin Meyer) to help the team understand how geographical culture affects trust-building, as well as communication and feedback styles, and we created a space where the participants could practice real-time feedback and peer coaching.

The team defined the following collective practices:

Deepening trust and making relationships less transactional.

Building healthy conflict and the ability to have difficult conversations in a timely manner.

Like all of our team transformation journeys, we carefully spaced our engagement over multiple months to provide the time for intentional integration of the materials and practices, and to create accountability.

We facilitated two follow-up sessions of three hours – one three months later and the other six months later – to check in on individual and collective progress and provide coaching support to address obstacles and challenges that arose in the integration period after the initial sessions, while also introducing the next level content and developing additional skills.

Results

100% of participants said that they had seen an improvement in connection and alignment in their team since the first workshop.

100% of participants said that they had seen an improvement in their team’s ability to have difficult conversations since the first workshop.

Participant testimonials:

Since the first workshop, there has been “more open communication and understanding among team members – we understand each other’s strengths/weaknesses and areas of improvements.”

The workshop provided the opportunity to “get to know the team and bond better, which in return built on trust in the brand team, making people more comfortable to speak up.”

Mixing corporate and startup cultures to create high-performing teams

Equipping healthcare leadership and caregivers with tools for resilience during the pandemic