Break down the silos and show everyone that the problems are everyone’s problems. We need team alignment to work together to solve them.
Customer Journey Series: Oliver
This article is part of a customer journey series following “Oliver,” a CTO in a pharma company scaling up to begin commercialization for a new drug. Oliver was facing a growing team, fast growing IT expansion, and collaboration across a rapidly expanding organization.
Each post explores a real coaching conversation or leadership challenge from that journey.
This is the third post in Oliver’s series.
“Coaching has helped me with strategies to get people aligned and moving forward,” Oliver reported. He had achieved his goal of becoming a trusted thought partner, and his team was now being asked to lead a lot of other planning processes.
“I need to be on top of everything to make sure we have the systems we need to get to commercialization,” Oliver said.
People loved the flow charts and decision trees his team was using. He added Gantt charts to stay on top of IT and reporting needs.
Not a lot of people have experience taking a drug to market, so it was an incredible opportunity but also a lot of risk too.
As the commercialization moment neared, activity increased across the company. Every time they had good news on the clinical side, their stock price jumped.
“We’re in a weird position,” said Oliver. “When the market cap rises, auditors need to increase their compliance requests. Before the launch, we can’t have holes in the reporting.”
But still, they were running into roadblocks.
There were a lot of systems and functions they had not yet built:
- They needed a system to hire, on board, and manage a lot of new employees.
- They needed a system to house clinical data for future R&D and for compliance.
- Every department had data and didn’t want to give up control.
- They didn’t have anyone overseeing compliance functions.
To make matters worse, Oliver was discovering that the management team had a blame culture. One executive had told Oliver, “Make it someone else’s problem.”
Oliver was beginning to realize that blame and silos were connected. When people feared being blamed, they protected their own departments. When they protected their own departments, collaboration and team alignment became harder.
Another problem was that every team was in silos and each team wanted to own their own data systems themselves, decide on what they wanted and implement it. This would mean a lot of duplication and also a lot of IT headaches as systems needed repair and troubleshooting.
“We need to break down the silos and blame culture and show everyone that the problems are everyone’s problems, and we need to work together to solve them.”
Breaking Down the Silos by Inspiring with a Vision
Oliver decided to create an IT Council. Every department would have a senior leader on the council, and they would meet once a quarter. Each meeting would focus on a theme to help facilitate team alignment.
The council would help reduce blame and break down silos by showing everyone a bigger view. He envisioned that he would set up the theme and spend the bulk of the time listening.
“I will listen to their concerns and desires, but more importantly, they will listen to each other.”
He continued to envision it: “When we run into someone’s anxiety, I’ll step in and validate the risk. They are right to feel anxious. Then we can break down what is creating the risk and how we can mitigate it.”
The First IT Council
The theme of the first IT Council was data management.
- We need a lot of new employees. Where will the employee data be located? Who will have access?
- Clinical data is key to R&D and to compliance efforts. Where will the clinical data be located? Who will have access?
- What are our rules for data governance?
- Who will oversee compliance which touches almost every department?
During the discussion, Oliver noticed a fear that departments would lose control of their data. They were afraid that if there was a companywide data center, someone would get access to their data and compromise their processes and results.
Oliver proposed an ownership split:
- Departments that generate data own the data
- The company and IT own the systems to store it.
“Think of it like a traffic system. People own their own cars and trucks and drive where they want. Anything in your car or truck is yours.”
He went on. “But the city owns the streets and the parking spaces. The city’s job is to make it easier for you to get where you need to go and park your car when you don’t need it. They fix the potholes and synchronize the lights so you move around better.”
It will be the same for IT he explained. “If you are in clinical trials, all your data is yours. You control access, you control who sees it, you control audits and compliance reviews. But the system where it sits is an IT system, so we maintain it and monitor it and make sure it’s safe from threats.”
In the end he summed it up like this: “we fix the potholes, and you get to drive.”
Everyone seemed to like that idea.
The proposal worked because it addressed the concern underneath the objection. Departments weren’t resisting technology. They were protecting ownership.
“We’ll help you develop good data governance, just like rules of the road.”
In the end, it was a great meeting and there was agreement in principle on IT running systems for everyone and customizing the data management according to the rules each department was able to set. The CEO sent him a note to thank him for pulling the team together.
He said to me later, it was a miracle to get everyone agreeing in one room at one time. “Everyone agreed in principle and it was all based on the trust that my team has built over the last few months. They are going to trust us with their data.”
The months of building trust and facilitating planning systems had paid off.
As he looked back, Oliver realized that trust wasn’t just helping people share risks. It was helping departments solve problems together.
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