Tag Archives: team leadership

Are we there yet? The Secret to Keeping your Company on Track

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Road in the rural woods

It’s not how far you have gone, it’s how much further you need to go to get there.

By: Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Every summer as a kid, my family would pile in the car and drive to beautiful Lake Champlain, Vermont for a week of fun and relaxation.  The car ride itself felt like a quick detour to the 9th circle of a place a little less nice than Lake Champlain.  This was due to my brother and I repeatedly asking my Dad, “Are we there yet?” (Ten minutes into a 6 hour drive).  Sound familiar?  This scenario plays itself out every week at companies all over the world at the dreaded update meeting.

The Problem
You and the team went through the effort to prepare a good plan for charting how you will get to your next milestone.  One day after publishing the plan, it is out of date.  The key here is then updating your plan with new information and then moving on.  When a lot of effort is spent fiddling with the plan and keeping it updated, a lot of time is wasted on  ‘managing the plan’ rather than focusing on getting the things done that are going to move you closer to reaching your goal.  At the end of the day, you really need to know what is left to do more than what you have already done (eg you really want to know how many more miles left to go before getting to the lake than how many you have already travelled).

The Secret
It’s how you ask for progress updates.  The use of Gantt charts, lists and other planning and project management tools can make this seem like an exact science.  You plug in a number and out comes the new finish date.  The problem is that most of us are terrible estimators of how close we are to finishing unless there is a hard metric to provide guidance.  So here is how you ask for feedback that will be the most accurate and will require the least amount of time and effort on everyone including yourself.

Cut and paste these lines into the Request for Updates e-mail that you are sending your team.

  1. What tasks on the list assigned to you are now completed (100% done)?
  2. Which tasks have you started?
  3. Of those tasks that you have started, how many days will you need before it is done?

Sounds simple and it is.  The key here is in the last question.  When asked in this way, a person will have a much better idea of how much time they need rather than the percent complete of the task.  (Professional project management tools will automatically calculate the percent complete when you enter this information – you will find that the percent complete will go up and down over time until this is finished) Each person will automatically factor anything else that they are working on or delays or problems that would affect getting the task completed.  This whole process should take no longer than five to ten minutes of effort from the team including yours to update and send out the updated plan.

Quick Tips:

  1. Cancel all update meetings.
  2. Send out requests for progress updates via e-mail using the 3 lines I suggested above. (Once every 2 weeks or more often as you approach a critical milestone)
  3. Update the plan with progress and send out to the team.

Picture Credit:  © Hamiltongraphics | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

The Successful Life Science Company: Three Tips to Insure You Survive Your Success

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By: Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Keeping your expanded team well informed, supported and rewarded will insure the continued growth of your company.

Keeping your expanded team well informed, supported and rewarded will insure the continued growth of your company.

What do you do when things start to go well?  Sounds like an odd question but it is something that every Life Science entrepreneur should consider even in the early days.  It is very easy to lose sight of the intangible contributions of your early team as you start to have some compelling profits and the company is growing.

The early days
When you are just getting started, you will have a small but very passionate, focused and solid team.  (If you don’t have this, you soon will not have a business at all).  You can easily sit around the same table at lunch and share what is going on, your ideas for what should happen next and anything else that concerns the company.  Furthermore, everybody is more than willing to put in the insane hours and total commitment it takes to build your company’s success.

What happens when you start to see success?
You and the team have launched your first product or service and you are beginning to see revenues and maybe even some profits.  At this point you and the early founding team may have added a few more people but it is still possible to squeeze together in the same room.  Whether you realize it or not, the culture of your company is by necessity changing.  With the growth of your company, the way that you communicate and get things done needs to scale as well.  This is where some processes and procedures come into play.  Ad Hoc worked well when it was just three of you.  This cannot work as the team grows.  There needs to be communication between the R&D and Sales & Marketing teams but it would be a waste of time and resources to call all of you sales people in for every R&D meeting and vice versa.

Nurturing the goose that laid the golden egg
At the start, everything was about getting your first product or service to market.  Now that you have successfully launched, you need to grow and expand profitability by boosting sales with your commercial team, reducing costs with your operations team and begin and expand your market reach with ‘follow-on’ products (or services) by launching your next product development effort and/or business development efforts.  You need many more hands to get this all done and so the team will now grow significantly (sometimes doubling and tripling in size).  Many will bemoan the loss of the ‘small company feel’ but if you hope to be successful transforming the company from its startup roots, this  is essential.

The easier part here is to start to adopt some of the tried and true processes and procedures that are often associated with large established companies (you just need to scale these down to fit your company so that you don’t import a bunch of bureaucracy).  The hard part is maintaining a positive culture.

Keeping it ‘real’ with the new team
Your company works best when everyone’s individual goals and aspirations are well aligned with the company.  In the early days, only those people that shared your passion and vision would have joined as founders.  By definition you are all aligned and that is partly because you will each individually be successful if the company is successful (financially, better reputation, etc.).  Later employees will often not be well aligned as they do not have the same interests and passions as the founders (the link between their personal success and that of the company will usually be weaker).  However, the company will do best when it can utilize all of the talents, intelligence and ideas of everyone on the payroll.  Get this right and you will see a continued positive impact on the bottom line.

Tips for Boosting Innovation as Your Company Grows:

  • Adopt empowering HR policies.  Consider why someone at the bottom of the compensation scale would want to share their good ideas with the company.  Perhaps there is a monetary reward, opportunity for promotion or other benefit that would encourage this and other employees to ‘go the extra mile’.
  • Nurture a culture of respect and fairness.  A company where employees can share their concerns without being afraid of repercussions is critical.  So is taking care to recognize excellence in the company and to reward it frequently.
  • Maintain excellent communication with the troops.  There is confidential stuff for sure (but share as much as is appropriate).  As the company grows, you may wish to have quarterly ‘State of the Company’ meetings (both in-person and remotely with those in the field), a company newsletter and other tactics for sharing how the company is doing on a regular basis.  This will allow everyone to better connect what they are doing as individuals with the ultimate fate of the company (kind of like in the ‘old days’ when the three of you founders plotting over a pizza at lunch).

Picture Credit:  © Pakhnyushchyy | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

5 Easy Steps to Effective Brainstorming

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By Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Brainstorming is a little like crowdsourcing today, getting as many opinions and inputs from a group of people to solve an issue. When done poorly this turns into a creative waste if time.  But if done correctly, this can be a transformative force for change resulting in not only new ideas but actionable steps toward achieving your goal.

Step 1:
Create and send an agenda that clearly states what you expect to achieve and how the meeting will be conducted to participants.  The following is an example of what you should include:

Example Agenda for First Meeting:

  • This meeting will be to discuss how we will … (e.g. boost sales by 20%, solve technical problem A, identify the next killer application, etc.)
  • Introduction of issue – 5 min (You)
  • Brainstorming session – 40 min (All)
  • Identifying next steps and meeting wrap up – 15 min (You)

Note:  By sending out the goal of the brainstorming session prior to the meeting, the participants will have a chance to think about this on their own prior to the meeting which improves the quality of the ideas.

Step 2:
Start the meeting by writing the identified goal on a large piece of paper or in the center of a large whiteboard or PowerPoint slide and circle it. Be sure to let everyone know that the meeting minutes will be used to begin formulating an action plan and to set priorities for any follow-up brainstorming meetings (there should be at least one more) and that the final fifteen minutes of the meeting will be used to identify actions to be taken.

Step 3:
Lead the brainstorming session by asking for major areas that need to be considered. Write these topics around the central circled goal and circle them as well.  Then ask for what should be done at each of these focus areas by asking for 3 or more and for each of the sub-categories.  This should be linked to each of the subcategories.

Note:  Make sure that you ask someone else to take minutes for the meeting including the names of all attendees.  The meeting leader should be moderating the session, updating the figure on the board/screen and keeping the team on track and on time.

Network diagram after first brainstorming meeting showing concept relationships

Sample brainstorm meeting graphic after first meeting. Identified goal in center white circle, first level major areas in blue and second level details in yellow.

Step 4:
Take a picture of the diagrammed feedback from the brainstorming session and send this along with the meeting minutes to all participants.  Ask each of them to select the top 3 subcategories that they think would have the best chance of achieving the circled goal in the center of the figure.

Note:  This is a critical step since not everyone is comfortable speaking out in a group setting and this will allow you to get unbiased feedback from the quieter participants.

Step 5:
Take the top two or three highest priority sub-categories to use for a follow-up meeting to build the plan.  This meeting should only include those team members that will be important to completing the goals of each of the sub-categories identified from the first meeting.
This meeting will start with a slide with a subcategory on the top of each.  Under that will be each of the 3 or more actions that the team identified from the last meeting.

Example Agenda for Second Meeting:

  • This meeting will be to identify everything that needs to be done to achieve the goals in the subcategories we identified at our last meeting. – 5 min (You)
  • Cycle through each of the actions for categories and identify all tasks and actions that will need to be done to insure success. – 40 -45 min. (All)

Use the feedback from the second meeting to create a plan to solve the original problem.  Creating an actionable plan will insure that you and the team will get the most out of this exercise.

This method will allow a team leader to garner the best thinking from their team on a given issue while keeping this from devolving into a useless diversion.  By keeping the agendas clear and with the group and individual inputs to this exercise in place, you will be able to get better, more thorough input and ideas for moving things along.  By breaking this process into two meetings, you will get the widest number of opinions at the first one and end up with a focused and prioritized plan of action from the second one.

Network diagram showing connections between topic, tactics and tasks

Sample brainstorm meeting graphic after second meeting. Feedback from the first meeting indicated that Tech Support was the highest priority and this branch was selected for the second meeting. Identified goal in center white circle, first level major areas in blue and second level details in yellow. Actions needed to achieve the second level details (yellow) are shown in red.

Taking This to the Next Level
There are professional software tools to facilitate brainstorming. (Brainstorming Software Review) These tools make the visual diagramming process fast and easy  and often allow direct conversion of the ‘mind map’ to lists in Excel, Gantt charts and meeting notes.

Picture Credits: © Andrew Johnson | UpStart Life Sciences

The Business of Life Sciences: Using Great Science to Build Great Businesses

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Big sand dune with dark shadow on one side

There is no ‘dark side’ to commercializing Life Sciences – just a ‘different dise’.

By Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Having a clear understanding of the differences between how science is done from an academic standpoint with how it is done in the typical Life Science company can significantly ease the path from discovery to market success.  To the uninitiated scientist, the commercial team (Sales people, Marketing people, Business Development folks and the Financial Team) has been viewed as ‘the dark side’ and only interested in driving the business and either not understanding or valuing the role of the underlying science.  From the business perspective, there is a concern that company scientists are only concerned with making more discoveries and not pushing towards doing the kind of work required to launch a compelling product.  Neither view is accurate.  Getting a good understanding of the differences can help to align the critical goals of each of these important parts of the life science company and increase the chances for success.

Why the Confusion?
Some of this confusion is caused by the way that scientists are trained in academia.  The increasing pressures that academic scientists are facing to fund their research programs as NIH funding continues to become harder to secure only acerbates this.  New relationships between commercial life science and biotechnology companies with academia, often facilitated by university technology transfer offices, are providing new sources of research capital.  Strategic partnerships, patenting and out-licensing of intellectual property from research conducted in academia are increasingly filling the government sponsored funding gap.  Like it or not, the lines between academic and commercial science have already been blurred.

Confusion is created because academic – commercial partnerships do not really combine the science being done in university labs with the commercialization efforts being done at the outside company.  This separation allows traditional roles and attitudes to remain prevalent.  In a Life Science company, the priorities of the science, the way that it is conducted, how it is validated and decisions on what projects will be worked on and which ones will be discontinued must be driven by commercial priorities.  However, it is equally crucial that the commercial team allows enough freedom to R&D to insure the quality of the experimental and feasibility work and that there is some room for discovery (you never know what killer application you will find or valuable intellectual property your R&D team will develop).

Getting the R&D and Commercial Teams on the Same Side
The following table lists some of the key differences between academic and commercial science.

Academic

Commercial
Research Scope The scope is wide.  New   research findings drive the efforts in often unpredictable ways.  This process is inherently unpredictable   and random. The scope of the experimental program is very focused.  Only work that progresses the science from   feasibility to finished product is encouraged.
Goals Improve understanding of scientific or technical discipline Improve robustness of product and provide initial data to support   applications that will support commercialization
Scientific Validation Publications, Presentations, Patents Product Sales, Patents (as part of a strategic intellectual property   estate)
Funding Sources Grants, Foundation Sponsorships, consulting fees, licensing fees and   royalties Investments, Sales Revenue, licensing fees and royalties

 

There is no ‘dark side’ in a successful life science company, just a healthy relationship between the scientific and commercial teams.  In both academic and commercial cases, the goal is to produce new technology and science.  The only difference is in the path that each of these endeavors use to achieve this.

Picture Credit:  © Engere | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos