Week 16, 2022—Issue #200
Transformation at Roche: Redefining Leadership, Reinventing Budgeting, and Creating End-to-End Jobs
Each week: three ideas to help us build better organizations. This week: three insights from the trenches of organizational transformation.
Bill Andersson is the CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals. For the past five years, he’s been working to transform the pharma giant into a more empowering and entrepreneurial organization. He recently spoke to Humanocracy-authors Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini about progress made and lessons learned:
The full interview is well worth a listen.
These are my top 3 takeaways:
1. Redefining Leadership
Roche’s transformation started with a contradiction: engagement surveys that portrayed company leadership as bold and courageous simultaneously showed a culture that was stymied and risk-averse. The reason, explains Andersson, was that leaders weren’t in control of the system but rather that the system was in control of the leaders. Despite repeated attempts to root out bureaucracy, people kept leading much the same way they always had — through command and control. To break free from old habits, the company had to redefine its leaders not as managers, but as visionaries, architects, catalysts, and coaches.
2. Reinventing Budgeting
There was another reason for the company’s woes: a rigid and time-bound budgeting process that made it difficult to get things done. Here again, bureaucracy reared its ugly head, and here again, it was a perceived need for control that prevented the company from moving forward. Attempts to simplify the process were met with resistance and fear that spending would go through the roof. The answer, explains Andersson, was a new budgeting process that provided “freedom within a framework” of accountability. The process, which was introduced in 2020, has since helped the company to decrease spending.
3. Creating End-to-End Jobs
The road to bureaucracy is paved with good intentions. That was another of Andersson’s findings during those early days of transformation. Roche had, in years past, pushed heavily towards job specialization in an attempt to afford people clarity and career options — effectively doubling its number of discrete roles. The unintended consequence was that fewer and fewer people had end-to-end responsibility for patients — a fact that decreased job satisfaction and made it harder to identify, let alone address customer unmet needs. As a result, the company is now working to create jobs with broader responsibilities.
Roche is 5 years into its transformational journey and it’s far from done. “We’ve had to ask senior leaders to dismantle the house they’ve built”, explains Andersson, adding that “We all grew up in this system. It’s very easy to slide back into old ways.” It takes time, lots and lots of time, to redefine and reinvent systems that are often deeply ingrained in organizational life. But transformation has to start somewhere. For Roche, that somewhere happened to be leadership, budgeting, and job crafting.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
PS. Woohoo! This is the 200th issue of WorkMatters! What a milestone. I wouldn’t believe it myself if it wasn’t for the rather long list of past issues that now adorn my website. Next stop: 500!
