Strategic Leadership Training for New Directors

A major pharmaceutical company chose Enspire’s Executive Challenge to help new directors develop a strategic mindset, understand the relationships between different departments, and develop greater personal awareness of their leadership competencies as they move into new roles as managers of managers.

Challenge

The New Directors program at a leading pharmaceutical focuses on the challenges the company faces and offers a strategic orientation that leads to long-term success. As a siloed organization, the company recognized that their directors needed an understanding of the relationships and interdependencies between the departments within the organization.

Approach

Enspire worked closely with the client executives to create an experiential learning opportunity using Executive Challenge that allowed participants to synthesize and practice more conceptual elements of the surrounding week-long program. The schedule included sessions on finance, strategy, marketing, and other key topics that these individuals would need to understand in their new roles. Deployed as a day and a half module, the simulation provided the opportunity to put these pieces together and gain an intuitive understanding of how they fit into the big picture. The simulation’s pipeline process mapped well to the business model of the pharmaceutical company. Key decisions such as pricing, capacity, and target market segments reflected many of the choices made by the corresponding real-world departments. Facing a simulated workforce constraint in which skilled labor restricted production of advanced products provided a teachable moment for discussing the strategic importance of long-term planning for talent. The client used a combination of facilitators (including a company vice president and a tenured faculty member from a top-tier business school) to provide context for the experience and broaden the scope of participant debriefing. To reinforce learning objectives through the simulation experience, facilitators challenged participants on their team’s decisions, drawing analogies to the real world and the company’s business.

Outcome

Participants developed, executed, and measured the success of their strategies as they practiced running a business. Described as the highlight of the week, participants left the simulation with a greater understanding of the interdependence of functional silos within the company, the need for greater coordination between the departments, and big picture perspective of the business.