Over the last 3 years GSK, under the helm of Group CEO Emma Walmsley, has pivoted into a much more competitive model. Against a changing environment of pricing pressure, technology disruption, and consolidation, significant changes include:
Against this blueprint of the “Why and What” of this transformation becoming very clear, changes across GSK’s purpose, goals, strategies, priorities, values and expectations, the “How and Who” became extremely important.
Here’s how we have partnered with GSK across Europe, U.S. and Asia Pacific:
In 2016, GSK targeted a high potential group of 250 Asian leaders across 15 nationalities to assume future leadership roles both regionally and globally. CorporateDNA partnered with GSK on pioneering the Asia Leadership Program (ALP) in coaching and facilitating multiple annual cohorts over the last 5 years.
This experiential program complemented with group coaching drew delegates from GSK’s current talent pipeline with clear destinations and taught them skills in managing complex ambiguity, developing effective relationships, influencing impactfully without authority, engaging leadership narrative and deepening cultural intelligence.
Based on the overall learning needs, the program was designed with a high focus on intrapersonal and interpersonal spaces: developing their self-awareness, how they show up and how they interact with others. Through various assessments such as GSK 360, Firo-B, Learning Styles and Globesmart, a strong linkage between ambition and business purpose were uncovered in participants.
The Asia Leadership Program focused on expanding their knowledge, navigating growth dialogues and shifting their mindsets, so they could fast track their development to key leadership positions within 5 years.
Following an epic global transformation, GSK’s Emerging Markets came into the spotlight with an enormous mandate that captured the “Power of Winning, Now” across 113 countries and 14000+ employees.
The newly appointed Business Head of Emerging Markets initiated an accelerated cultural change through a complete transformation starting with leadership. CorporateDNA was tasked to create a culture that stimulates growth, engagement among colleagues and pride in working for an innovative, high performing region.
This mandate was given after an intense reorganization, which signalled bold and unprecedented changes within the company. The people who were chosen not only had great experience, but had to demonstrate certain character traits that combined high confidence with high humility to drive change.
The CorporateDNA culture transformation process was used to deepen the change narrative for Emerging markets, heighten the levels of self-awareness throughout the Emerging Market Leadership and energize purpose through a shared way of working. Habit installation methods were used to ensure that the new, desired ways of working became hard wired in regular meetings, decisions, and reviews. The personalities of Emerging Markets were defined and then tested to see if the new beliefs, mindsets, and behaviours could withstand the challenges of 2020. This double loop process of co-creation, adjustment and reinforcement allowed the new culture to embed through a shared language, feedback loops and hard metrics, while reducing blame, denial, and avoidance.
New ways of working with new mindsets, behaviours and sense of accountability established for the organization’s LT and LT -1 levels.
Increased engagement in both leadership and followership across functions and markets.
The annual GSK survey results showed significant increase in satisfaction across emerging markets.
At the end of the 9 month journey, CorporateDNA assessed the key achievements in Emerging Markets where a clear turnaround was evident. The proof points from the EM Leadership team included: