Four principles and six stories. I name no one. The stories are theirs as much as mine.
The principles
My people are the experts. I am the coach and reviewer. They present, I stand behind them, and anything critical we handle afterwards, in private.
Decide and adjust. Making the call usually matters more than waiting for the perfect one. I am never the bottleneck. The few one-way doors get the time they deserve.
We win as a team. Everyone on my teams has an annual goal to help a colleague succeed with a task the colleague owns. It has to be documented, and it counts when the annual bonus is assessed. Everyone should also be able to point to a time they asked for help themselves.
Feedback the same day. Both "that went well, and here is why" and "here is what we do better next time". Not in a review six months later.
I measure myself by where my people go next. Including when that is away from me.
2018leader of leaders since
200in my largest organisation, 40 of them reporting directly in 5 teams
4.8+employee satisfaction out of 5, since 2018
95%+retention, since 2018
Six stories
Including the one that went wrong.
An area at the bottom of the survey
2018 · Digital Health
In January 2018 I took over one of the areas with the lowest employee satisfaction in the company. 2.8 out of 5. The team had had a bad year, and it showed.
I scrapped the agenda for our first offsite. We spent hours at a whiteboard instead, drawing where we were going and how to get there. Alongside that we ran a year on trust, going after what actually caused the poor working environment.
Nobody left. When it was measured again later that year, we were at 5.0.
Employee satisfaction, scale 1 to 5
The Sunday phone call
2018-2021 · Digital Health
She started as an admin coordinator and did not believe she could carry more. She could. I gave her more responsibility, a bit at a time, and she was promoted several times. When she left she was a project manager.
One Sunday she called. She was in the running for a job outside Novo Nordisk and asked if I would be her reference. I was, and I helped her prepare for the interview. She got the job. Today she is back at Novo Nordisk with what she learned outside.
One of my specialists had a PhD and a post-doc behind him and wanted to be a people manager. That was the path he saw. I saw another.
I saw a potential in him that he had not seen himself. So I got him to explore the specialist track before he settled. We built the picture together, including what seniority looked like there, and I coached him for years, among other things on showing leadership through projects, with no manager title to lean on.
Today he is a Senior Director on the specialist track in data science. Whether he would still have liked to manage people, I do not know. But the other path would have been much longer.
Back from stress leave
Executive Office and Early Development
Twice I have taken over a team where someone was on stress leave after previous management. Both times we made a plan over 9 to 12 months, where responsibility came back a bit at a time, and she helped prioritise her own work and set the pace.
The first time I also went after the cause: too few people for too big a task. We got an extra position, and it was a growth step for someone else on the team.
One of them now heads quality at another pharma company. The other became one of my strongest people and got a rotation into product development, where she could use skills she had always had.
Snitches & Flowers
2021-2022 · Digital Health
We created an award where colleagues nominate each other for role-model behaviour. The person nominating stands up in front of everyone and says who and why. The winner gets a small gift with one condition: share it with someone who matters to them, preferably outside work.
The point is that people have to put words on what they value. Then everyone can see what good looks like.
The best signal came from colleagues themselves. When one of the first winners was mentioned on LinkedIn, colleagues wrote on their own that they had seen the same behaviour. One of the posts.
Digital Health was built around diabetes. Over a few years the centre of gravity at Novo Nordisk moved to obesity, and the power moved with it.
I spent my time on what was already decided and running. I did not invest enough in the head of obesity strategy, neither in understanding what that area needed nor in giving him a real stake in what we were building while it could still be shaped. When obesity became the heavier part of the business, they preferred to start over and build their own. Shortly after, the franchise was split into diabetes, obesity and rare disease.
What I took with me: hold close the stakeholders who are not important yet. And do more than feels necessary, because by the time it feels necessary it is too late.