5 Lessons Pfizer Has Learned About How to Maintain Agility

If there’s one thing Pfizer employees know: It’s that minutes matter. They matter to the family who is hoping for a breakthrough cancer treatment. They matter to the person who is waiting for a medication that will treat their crippling pain. And they matter to the millions of people awaiting a vaccine that will give them the best chance to make it safely through another flu season.

Sherry Cassano, the SVP of people experience at Pfizer, shared some of the lessons the company has learned about maintaining agility during a keynote session at Talent Connect 2023, LinkedIn’s annual conference for global talent acquisition and talent development leaders. In 2020, Sherry said, “we had to completely shatter the bureaucracy that existed in our company and really empower our employees to act decisively and to collaborate more effectively.”

The fruit of their labor: Pfizer developed a COVID-19 vaccine in nine months — an achievement that would normally take more than 10 years. The agility was both stunning and pivotal and Pfizer wanted to make sure the life-saving lessons learned were not lost in the moment.

Sherry shared five actionable lessons Pfizer has learned about staying nimble, even for the largest of undertakings:

Lesson 1: Make your cross-functional teams as small and nimble as possible

Cross-functional teams can be effective because they bring together people who have different roles to work toward a common goal. With diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and skill sets, team members can attack a problem from multiple vantage points. 

Pfizer had used cross-functional teams successfully in the past, Sherry said, but this time the stakes were so high that they rethought their process. “We know from research that the larger a team is the more ineffective it could be,” Sherry explained. With too many people, it could become difficult for leaders to step up and for decisions to be made quickly. 

It became clear that they needed smaller, nimbler, more focused teams. At the same time, they had to create an environment where people felt valued and a sense of belonging even if they weren’t chosen for a cross-functional team. They didn’t want workers to be offended if they weren’t asked to be on a particular team. “We’ve all heard about the fear of missing out,” Sherry said. “We had to create the joy of missing out.”

Lesson 2: Make one person the decision maker for each team

It’s never good to have too many cooks in the kitchen. To ensure that decisions could be made efficiently, each cross-functional team had a leader that the company dubbed a “pilot in command.”

That person wasn’t selected because of their title or their level. Rather, they were selected because they were the best person to lead decisively at that moment.

Most of the people on a given team didn’t report to the pilot in command functionally, but for the purposes of the project, team members had to view the pilot in command as their leader. “So what we did is we actually changed our performance management process to reflect that,” Sherry said. Pilots in command were given the additional responsibility of assessing the performance of the members of their team, whether those people reported to them functionally or not.

“For Pfizer,” Sherry said, “it’s not about the hierarchy, it’s about leadership. We are trying to create more leaders. Our pilots in command can come from anywhere in the organization.”

Lesson 3: Embrace zigzag growth

Not only does Pfizer believe in a nonlinear career path, but they encourage it. “We believe that there are multiple paths that one can take to grow their career,” Sherry said. “One such path is what we refer to as a diagonal move.” 

That’s when a person, because of their requisite leadership skills, takes a move outside of their functional area of expertise, she explained. For example, a person on the finance team might do a stint in people experience, Pfizer’s name for human resources. 

Such a move brings two major benefits:

• When people move to a new area of the organization, they bring a different perspective. “They don’t have the bias of ‘this is the way it’s always worked,’” Sherry said, “and that can bring innovation and spark creativity.”
  
• When people move around the organization, they have a broader enterprise mindset. Sherry’s predecessor in the role of chief talent officer came from Pfizer’s commercial business and returned to the commercial business two years later. Not only did he make a great impact as a talent leader, Sherry said, “but I’m sure the lessons that he has learned in this job will forever remain with him.” Pfizer has more than 1,000 employees who have made diagonal moves this year alone. “It is truly embedded,” she added, “in the way we are developing the leaders of our company.”
  

Lesson 4: Give employees the space to fail

When people believe they’ll be penalized for failure or for making mistakes, they won’t take risks. And that kind of culture would be devastating for a company that is a trailblazer in the biopharmaceutical industry.

“We’re in an industry where 90% of what we do fails,” Sherry said. “That’s drug discovery.” If employees only took action when they were 100% certain they would achieve success, no major breakthroughs would ever be achieved.

That means giving employees room to make mistakes and learn from them as well as the leeway to try new things. “Our employees really need to believe that we are there to catch them when they fall,” she said, “because, if not, we have a situation where people become afraid to try things.”

Lesson 5: Know what leadership looks like and then pursue it

Pfizer has a clear definition of what it means to be a leader within the organization. “When we say leader, we’re not talking about how many direct reports you have,” Sherry said. “We actually are calling leadership a skill.” 

To identify candidates who possess that soft skill, the company looks for specific qualities that build on Pfizer’s core values:

• The courage to make decisions and challenge conviction — particularly in times of uncertainty and adversity.
• A focus on excellence and measuring outcomes.
• The ability to discern when progress should supersede perfection.
• The capacity to engage with compassion.
• The ability to not lose sight of joy and pride in Pfizer’s purpose. 
  

Pfizer created an assessment that evaluates candidates against this leadership profile. “Our recruiters are not just focused on somebody’s previous work experience or their technical skills,” Sherry said. “Yes, we still care about that, but we equally care about the leadership traits that they’re going to possess in this company. Are they curious? Are they resilient? Have they been able to take thoughtful risks? Have they tried something that didn’t go according to plan? And what did they learn from it?” 

Final thoughts

Pfizer believes that time is precious, so they’ve carefully studied what they need to do to remain an agile organization. Those same principles help the company achieve pharmaceutical breakthroughs that better the lives of patients and their family members. 

It all goes back to that central tenet that minutes matter. “This is the only way,” Sherry said, “that we will help our patients regain those moments that are so important to them.”