How to Rally a Team Around Building a New Business

Dan Asch, Vice President, Oncology Franchise, Boehringer Ingelheim

Over the past several years, we’ve seen a sweeping evolution in oncology, with many new players entering the space, helping to spur the rapid acceleration of drug development and innovation, especially in areas of unmet medical need.

That’s good news because we need new innovations urgently; so many patients struggle with cancers that either have very limited options for treatment or have subpar choices.

While cancer research and care have significantly evolved, it’s different from other areas of healthcare. It requires understanding a highly complex ecosystem and focusing on partnerships with patients and top academics, as well as regulators, payers, and advocacy organizations.

In my role, leading the growth of Boehringer Ingelheim’s oncology organization, we need to scale quickly, while maintaining a sense of cohesion. To my mind, there are three components that are critical in building and rallying the team.

GETTING THE STORY RIGHT

We’re focused on delivering the best possible treatments to help patients live healthier lives and keep families together. That is why we’re researching across a variety of cancers, including those that are rare. But we can only fulfill the promise of that story if we’re telling it right.

The most important thing is to communicate clearly—both externally to the world and internally to our own talent—about real people and the impact of our work on patients, their caregivers, and their families.

It’s easy to get so fixated on the nuts and bolts of the research that we lose sight of the human stories that demonstrate the power of our work and rally us around a vision of how to give those people hope in their battles against cancer.

PRACTICING AGILITY

Part of the opportunity and challenge across the pharma industry is that the standard approach to bringing new medicines to those who need it, especially in rare cancer areas, doesn’t always work or make the most sense.

We have to be resilient and flexible in the face of uncertainty each day. Laying a long-term strategic plan will always be important, but so is being able to course-correct based on new information.

Building organizational readiness to bring new innovations to those living with cancer requires a very different approach than our work that supports much larger populations. Because of that, one of the first things we did was gather our cross-functional partners from across the organization in workshops and forums with experts in rare disease to understand how we need to pivot to serve this community.

We ended up creating new roles and functions to ensure we understand the unique needs of the patients, their families, and providers—and the best ways to support them with educational efforts and future services.

MASTERING THE ART OF HIRING

We’ve talked about the why (communication), and the how (agility). There’s also the “who.”

We want to attract people who want to be part of building something that we think could be momentous. But they also need to be comfortable working through unknowns every day and must be enterprising.

As we strive to build a world-class team, from attracting oncology experts to retaining key personnel, our success hinges on our ability to cultivate a culture of excellence and empowerment.

Talented employees have no shortage of places to go if they feel like they’re bumping up against a ceiling for their potential, or find themselves bogged down in endless processes or politics. My view: Hire the best, give them opportunities to grow and run with great ideas, and stay out of their way.

Building a great team is the first step toward achieving anything great; the next is rallying them around a shared purpose today and for generations to come for a better tomorrow.

Dan Asch is Vice President, Oncology Franchise, Boehringer Ingelheim