Elevate: Culture change in a CDMO happens one conversation at a time

Maria Ebro Andreasen, Chief People Officer at Avid Bioservices, on why a strategy nobody discusses one to one doesn't move anyone.

Two weeks into her role as Chief People Officer at Avid Bioservices, Maria Ebro Andreasen put fifty of the company's most senior leaders in a room and asked them what culture the business would need to build next. Avid had been acquired, and as she frames it, "we got bought for a reason." That reason pointed somewhere, and getting there meant people would have to work differently.

The morning didn't go the way the afternoon did. Part of the room arrived with a position she recognised: we're fine, we should just carry on doing what we're doing. By the end of the day, several of them had come over to her. "I've had so many aha moments throughout the day," one said. "We actually need to do something differently."

Over the following weeks the notes kept coming, by email and on Teams. Leaders had gone back to their teams and started talking about psychological safety, about how to challenge each other, about stepping into discomfort. One had built it into their tier meetings, alongside a standing check on whether the team was holding to the commitments it had written for itself. Nobody had told them to.

"The rings in the water had started," Andreasen says.

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The problem with a strategy on slides

Her reading of why that happened runs against most of what she was trained to do. She came up partly through consultancy and was schooled in the standard change management processes. Her view now is that they rarely touch anything.

"You can make the best strategy in the world, but if you don't go out and have the one-to-one conversations, nothing's going to change just because you communicated a new strategy to your teams," she says. Companies bring in a large consultancy, get a strong set of slides, and then wait for something to happen. "Nothing happens, because the actual change happens with the people."

Her position is that organisations don't change, people do, and that people change through direct conversation rather than through announcement. "We won't do something differently tomorrow just because we saw it in a town hall. We only change once the neuroconnectors in our brain have been created." Getting there means a leader starting different conversations with their team, and the team prioritising differently on Monday than they did on Friday.

That belief has grown rather than been held from the start. Earlier in her career she was process driven, and thought a well-built change programme would carry a business through. "Easy peasy," as she puts it, looking back at that version of herself.

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What high performers have in common

Long before Avid, at IBM, Andreasen built a talent programme called Blue Hero. The company had already identified twenty people as its high performers. Her question was why those twenty, and what they shared.

The answer wasn't in their backgrounds, which varied completely, or in their function. They sat across HR, finance and IT. What they had in common was something she had written her master's thesis on and has kept studying since: the ability to mentalize.

She describes it as putting yourself in another person's position while accepting that you will never fully understand them, staying curious about their situation anyway, and wanting to keep improving the relationship. Situational leadership grows out of that. So does reading a room. "That's what they all had in common. They were really, really good at it."

The question underneath the whole programme is one that matters to anyone hiring into a growing CDMO. Why can the same person be a high performer in one setting and not in another? Andreasen has been circling it since her thesis. "How do you fit together the right person and the right environment, so that they can grow and the company can grow?"

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Four hundred and fifty people

Avid is heading towards 450 employees. Andreasen is direct about the arithmetic. "How can I meet with every single person? You can't."

Her answer isn't a tidy one. It means working through mechanisms other than the traditional channels, starting with the fifty leaders who do have those conversations daily, and accepting that the change spreads at the speed of the people having them.

What it's for shows up in a story she tells about a recent visit to site. A patient came in to talk about the medicine that had been made there, in the vials downstairs. She had received it in time. She couldn't have waited another month.

That's the connection Andreasen makes between culture work and a manufacturing floor. Whether quality holds, whether timelines hold, and whether people bring the extra effort to both, comes down to how the people doing the work relate to each other and to what they're making. It was also what pulled her out of a decade in banking and into life sciences. "It would take a lot for me to leave the life science sector again."

She is now nine months into running a development programme with those fifty leaders, timed so that the pebbles keep landing rather than arriving all at once and stopping.

"That doesn't mean you're done at all. It means you've dropped some pebbles in, at least, to start something."

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Maria Ebro Andreasen was speaking to James Diemar for Elevate, Vector Talent's series on leadership in life sciences. Before joining Avid Bioservices she was EVP and Chief Strategy Officer at FUJIFILM Biotechnologies.