In 2024, our client incorporated an operating model aimed at gaining agility and reducing dependence on hierarchies in decision-making. In that context, an organizational legacy of order and adherence to established processes became a challenge when adopting this new way of working, particularly due to its impact on the ability to make autonomous decisions. For this reason, the local team in Mexico joined efforts with Leaderlix to design the Advice Process, through which key actors were enabled to make informed and autonomous decisions.
Context: A Nearly Bicentennial Company Seeks to Overcome Its Centralized Decision-Making Culture
Founded in Germany in the nineteenth century, and with a presence in Mexico since 1921, our client is a global life sciences group with more than 100,000 employees, operating in key areas of health and nutrition.
With more than 160 years of global history in highly regulated sectors, the company undertook in 2024 a profound reorganization to sustainably improve its performance and implement decentralized decision-making processes. It did this through the introduction of an operating model with which it sought to reduce hierarchies and the company's complex decision-making structures.
The Challenge
The company sought a change by incorporating this new way of working to improve decision-making processes in a highly regulated industry. Thus, the company's Medical Team realized the deep-rooted legacy of respect for order and process in a centralized organization. Now they wanted to learn how to incorporate risk with decentralized, responsible, and agile decisions.
The Solution
The company's Medical Team joined efforts with Leaderlix to create the Advice Process, a method that consists of six steps: initiative, listening, proposal, open consultation, autonomous decision, and effective communication. With this, they sought to align their decision-making processes with the new decentralized leadership model.
The Impact
The Medical Team of our client already had the initiative; collaboration with Leaderlix paved the way to transform a complex problem into small, diagnosable and solvable problems. Through the Advice Process, the Medical Team defined this new way of working in concrete habits to gain greater agility in informed and autonomous decision-making.
Why Leaderlix?
We combine science, practical leadership, and effective communication to collaborate with bold teams and companies to cut through the noise and lead significant change. Through the Advice Process, the company's Medical Team continues its organizational transformation to respond to the agility required by today's pharmaceutical-medical market.
The Challenge: Incorporating a Decentralized Decision-Making Process Adapted to the Needs of a Highly Regulated Industry
This change in working model required the company to confront a bicentennial global legacy and a centennial legacy in Mexico.
For this reason, the company's Medical Team turned to Leaderlix to identify the root of the legacy of respect for order and processes that now required agility and a decentralized structure. This without losing sight of informed and responsible decision-making processes.
The challenge consisted of learning to manage risk without eliminating it. Rather, to assume it with responsibility and coordination to gain agility. Thus, defining this complex problem into a method to change concrete habits that would allow reaching our client's objective was the greatest challenge faced by their Medical Team.
The Project: The Advice Process: Incorporating a Decentralized, Informed, and Responsible Decision-Making Process
The Medical Team of our client observed that for an effective implementation of the decentralized leadership model in their organization, they required not only adjusting their behavior to new needs without questioning the assumptions that motivated them, but also making the effort to change the underlying assumptions. This challenge not only involved difficulty in the face of the need for change in the pharmaceutical-medical industry, but the perception itself of a complex problem.
Every organizational culture is made of basic assumptions. The Advice Process was a tool that helped the company's Medical Team observe its centralized legacy and respect for processes as a set of concrete habits that could change to gain greater agility in their decision-making, without losing sight of the fact that such processes are informed and responsible.
Impact: The Culture of Advice: Transforming Complex Obstacles into Methodical Training Approaches
One of the most challenging obstacles faced by our client's Medical Team was step #4 of the Advice Process: the key to changing a culture of centralized decision-making into a decentralized and responsible one lies in openness to advice that introduces agility in an organization through effective communication.
In this sense, the Advice Process allowed them to discover that the large organizational problems they observed could be divided into small and manageable pieces.
Key Learnings: The Knowledge for Organizational Change Comes from Within, It Just Takes a Method to Clarify and Implement It
- Complex problems are solved in small parts. The Advice Process gave the Medical Team a perspective to reduce the complexity of large problems into smaller, diagnosable, and solvable problems.
- A good way to implement organizational autonomy is to train the team. Organizations change when they implement defined methods to replace concrete habits of their teams in relation to leadership and communication.
- Sometimes a good way to manage risk is by transforming it into a learning opportunity. Agile and decentralized organizations turn each decision into a learning and reinforcement opportunity with an attitude of responsibility and collaboration.
- Cultural change can occur from middle management. Sometimes it is middle managers who install or block new habits that senior management seeks to implement in the organization.
- Decentralized decision-making processes can also be informed and responsible. The Medical Team of our client taught us that a legacy of respect for processes to comply with the demands of a highly regulated environment can be transformed into a decentralized organization that respects them through agile collaboration and effective communication.
- Organizational problems can be solved as challenges of effective communication. The Advice Process is an example of how agility and decentralized and autonomous decision-making processes are an objective that can be achieved through training in effective communication.
Leaderlix: Three Pillars: Science, Leadership, and Effective Communication
Our experience in storytelling and leadership combines three pillars: Science, to design solid methods in the pharmaceutical and medical sector, Practical Leadership, to train autonomy with responsibility, and Effective Communication, to sustain cultural change and align organizations at all levels.
These pillars of our trainings have helped us collaborate with teams and companies in the pharmaceutical-medical industry the size of the company, who want to adapt to the new demands of a highly regulated and constantly changing market.
The Advice Process is an example of how our experience has allowed us to collaborate in organizational change through training in habits of effective communication.
Next Steps: What is Needed to Address a Complex Organizational Problem and Improve a Team's Performance?
First, team initiative is required. The fact that the approach came from our client's Medical Team is what contributed to the collaboration with Leaderlix leading to the creation of the Advice Process.
Second, converting the team's initiative into a set of habits that allow reaching the organizational objective. The Advice Process is a tailor-made procedure that required open collaboration between Leaderlix and the company's Medical Team to define organizational needs in a method.
Every micro-habit counts. As James Clear reminds us in Atomic Habits (2018): it is not the big goals that lead to transformation, but the small goals that lead to repeated actions.
Third, constantly adjusting communication helps achieve agility and decentralization in an organization's decision-making. The Advice Process defined an organizational problem into a set of habits to achieve effective communication.
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