Background:
LumoGenix (fictional name) is a UK-based biotech start-up founded with a mission to develop innovative gene therapies for rare diseases. Within just three years the company experienced rapid growth, expanding from a small founding team to a workforce of fifty employees. This growth was fuelled by significant investment and a series of promising breakthroughs. However, with this expansion came challenges. LumoGenix began to experience growing pains. The previously unseen organisational and operational issues emerging were consuming the c-suite and threatening to derail LumoGenix’s progress and potential for future success.
Challenges:
Departmental Tensions: Team silos began to develop. Each team had diverging interpretations of what was needed to fulfil the company’s mission. Managers were becoming increasingly guarded over sharing their resources and information, resulting in less and less collaboration between departments. Individuals outside the formal hierarchies held disproportionate influence confusing priorities and stirring up politics.
Slowing Agility, Innovation and Problem-Solving: Meeting sizes were increasing as was their frequency. This was creating additional burden on resources, wasting time, and draining productivity. While the atmosphere in meetings was friendly enough, often after a lengthy discussion, a decision would be carried over to another meeting or escalated. Smaller after-meeting meetings were occurring to make sense of the unspoken.
Increasing Staff Frustration: Employees felt overwhelmed by competing priorities, inconsistent messaging from the leadership team regarding strategy, frequent changes in direction, and a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities. The resulting sense of chaos leading them to feel confused and unable to work to the best of their ability. Consequently, a flurry of experienced members of the workforce decided to apply their talent in other local Biotech companies.
Intervention:
LumoGenix’s leadership team were concerned at the loss of key employees. They recognised that the company was struggling to meet the agreed deliverables, and the Board were becoming increasingly agitated. They had listened to the concerns raised from the teams, yet despite attempts to tackle the issues raised, problems were recurring. The strain was starting to show within the leadership team. The CEO was growing increasingly concerned about the company’s ability to sustain its growth and innovation trajectory that would attract further investment.
Engagement with Alignment Cubed:
LumoGenix’s CEO reached out to Alignment Cubed after a recommendation from a trusted advisor who recognised the symptoms of organisational misalignment. After several meetings with the CEO to listen, understand and assess the situation, Alignment Cubed proposed a three-stage approach to address LumoGenix’s alignment challenges:
Stage 1: Attune – Improving Leadership Cohesion
The first step would focus on developing greater leadership cohesion and improving the quality of the team interactions. This would involve a mix of one-on-one conversations and group activities with the executive team. Through these sessions, Alignment Cubed would explore the concepts of vulnerability-based trust, humility, and psychological safety and, apply an innovative framework to help the executives understand their strengths and frustrations both as individuals and as a collective.
Stage 2: Articulate – Bringing Organisational Clarity
Working across two days with the executive leadership team Alignment Cubed would co-create an Organisational Context Page (OCP) for LumoGenix. This single-page document would capture the company’s entire identity and context in a way that is simple and actionable. The precise format of which is intentionally designed to enable the leadership team to provide clear strategic foundations, cascade that clarity throughout the business and use it to guide all future decisions.
Stage 3: Activate – Establishing Execution Architecture
With the leadership aligned and the OCP in place, Alignment Cubed would then work closely with a nominated team of LumoGenix leaders and key influencers. Following an initial kick off session, over the next twelve months they would co-create the execution architecture and engage the wider organisation in aligning the company’s people, practices, processes, and systems to the freshly clarified organisational context.
Results:
1. Unified Leadership: With psychological safety improving and a newfound self-awareness the leadership team began to engage in healthier dialogue. They could openly share and vigorously discuss their differing perspectives, allowing them to align on strategic dichotomies specific to their unique context, develop a set of strategic goals and function as a unified team. Greater cohesion enabled them to make faster, more effective decisions and determine clear priorities for the whole organisation.
2. Energised Employees: The introduction of the OCP and brought employees the strategic clarity that had been much sought after. With clear priorities set, teams were empowered to act autonomously without waiting for executive sign-off. Collaboration began to flourish with quicker decision-making based on shared strategic anchors rather than individual interests. Staff attrition rates subsequently dropped.
3. Focused Execution: The organisational and departmental scorecards established set out the goals and objectives that were needed across the enterprise. Combined with the dialogue managers held with their teams to discover and co-create a list of day-to-day behaviours, team members were left in no uncertain terms how and what they needed to contribute to serve the company mission. Project delivery metrics consistently improved month-to-month.
Conclusion:
Through its partnership with Alignment Cubed, LumoGenix was able to address the underlying misalignment that was causing the challenges. By focusing on Leadership Cohesion, Organisational Clarity, and Execution Architecture, Alignment Cubed helped LumoGenix to deliver on its stakeholder commitments through a collaborative effort, aligned with the leadership’s strategic vision. This transformation not only stabilised the company during a critical growth phase but also positioned it for long-term success.
Alignment Cubed supports busy biotech CEOs, providing them with an accelerated pathway to organisational alignment as their company scales and becomes more complex, and priorities conflict. To find out more about how Alignment Cubed can help you, contact Jonathan or Majid.
Back
