Driving Cultural Change During Transformation

As business management expert Peter Drucker once said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” An organization can carefully craft its strategic plan with great care and detail, but at the end of the day, its goals will not be accomplished if the company culture does not support the vision.

Today, I speak with Andrew Moore, the General Manager of Pfizer CentreOne. We discuss his journey with shaping organizational culture at Pfizer and the learnings he garnered through these experiences. Since his time in the military, Andrew had an appreciation for how team culture can shape expectations, goals, and values to drive performance.

However, early in his career, Andrew believed that the most effective way to accomplish goals was through tactical execution—his focus was results-oriented. After working with WLH, he came to find that other elements can be just as, if not more, important to accomplishing results. We reflected on a project we conducted with a company in Canada wherein we brought the company together by focusing on the values, behaviors, and experiences of employees, rather than by approaching the project from the standpoint of results. With this perspective, we took the company from a 2% decline to a 12% revenue growth and a 98% profit growth in 12 months.

Andrew went on to spearhead the cultural transformation at Pfizer CentreOne in alignment with Pfizer’s new values that encompass the most important behaviors and beliefs of the company. He also notes that this would not be possible without buy-in from leadership. He explains that while beliefs and values are the most important components to driving organizational success, this is not possible unless you create an environment that is conducive to accomplishing a strategy that embeds the right values. Leaders have a unique role because an organization is a reflection of their leadership—everything begins with the leadership team, and from there you cascade down.

Cultivating and maintaining a healthy and consistent company culture needs to be at the center of any organization’s strategy, especially as we come out of the pandemic and implement the new learnings and norms of both in-office and at-home working. We at WLH want to help you achieve this goal. Subscribe to stay up-to-date with our lessons learned and tips on transforming organizational culture!