Case Study: Genentech
Leading from the Center
Overview
Genentech is a biotechnology corporation with 13,500 employees worldwide. The company engaged the Kahakulei Institute to support their leadership team in the reorganization of two departments into one unified and cohesive team.
Given Genentech’s global presence, these employees were spread across twelve time zones, adding more complexity to an already ambitious timeline. The two departments sought Kahakulei’s leadership training and facilitation to successfully navigate this reorganization, cultivating new organizational practices and developing a medium-term workplan that represented the strategic thinking and strengths of a more focused and powerful team.
Solution
Leading from the Center immerses leaders in a new paradigm of leadership. Over the course of 6 months, the Kahakulei team introduced Genentech’s leaders to the core components of this program, cultivating the skills to assess the individual and collective gifts of their colleagues and identifying any imbalances.
We designed three team-building retreats and facilitated Genentech’s leadership team to model Leading from the Center in practice. Using our Five Elements framework, we identified the team’s strengths as creativity and innovation, decision-making, and implementation. What the team lacked were clear standard operating procedures and policies, and more importantly, a shared sense of team and organizational values.
In practice, the team tended to conceptualize projects and ideas and implement them, but in ways that not only felt disorganized, but missed the mark in terms of aligning with a common sense of purpose.
With this foundational knowledge, developing a strategy and workplan for the team came naturally. We developed a common organizational vision and strategy, clarifed roles and responsibilities to provide a stronger infrastructure for the team, and along the way, deepened the team’s sense of camaraderie that had been lacking due to the nature of their remote work and global schedules.
Outcome
Introducing Genentech’s leaders to Leading from the Center allowed this reorganization process to serve as an opportunity to double down on the team’s strengths while identifying where to focus their careful attention for the next six months. Overall, this was a much smoother transition than any of them had hoped for, adopting our accessible approach during the team-building retreats within the first hour. The team successfully established a common purpose and set of working values and devoted time to building more meaningful working relationships with each other while developing their medium-term work plan.
“The Kahakulei team has an amazing ability to take very complex and broad concepts and break them down into clear, tangible action items. They are able to both engage and motivate a diverse group of individuals toward a similar vision, resulting in concrete outcomes.”