The Problem
A pharmaceutical company asked The RBL Group to help them redesign HR and create an HR strategy. However, as we spent time with the HR executive team, it became clear that we were starting in the wrong place. To develop the HR strategy, there needed to be clarity about the overall business strategy. The industry was changing quickly and the client saw a real shift coming in the products and services they were offering, and they had no clear sense of how they differentiated their business. Without that clarity, any attempts to redesign the HR function would be unlikely to yield meaningful improvements.
The Solution
As this lack of clarity became clear, the leadership team committed to clarifying their competitive positioning. RBL helped design and facilitate a series of strategy workshops for the executive team. Those workshops were based on clarifying customer needs where growth would come from and how they wanted to differentiate themselves from competitors.
We took a forward-looking approach in identifying the strategic direction of the organization that created alignment on the capabilities that would be core to success. This new approach resulted in two very significant changes:
- The leadership team realized that the path that held the highest growth potential for the future involved approaching their customers and market as two different businesses instead of one.
- Significant changes to the prioritization of initiatives and resource allocation.
Once the strategy work was done, the leadership team took the next step and began redesigning the organization to delineate the two major businesses they had identified, including structuring support functions like HR to best support each business. Internal design teams worked with RBL consultants to create an entirely different organization focused primarily on connecting with each business’s customers in new ways.
The Outcome
By helping the organization identity two businesses and clarify the strategy and organization design for each, the organization emerged stronger and better positioned to win. There was clarity of purpose for each business, clear prioritization criteria and an improved ability to allocate resources.
Most importantly, this work added millions of dollars of value to the organization. By developing the right organization with the right capabilities to deliver on the strategy this work generated significant confidence in investors and set the stage for a very successful IPO that occurred several years later.