Claes Glassell is focused on
building a better process
at Cerus Corp.
And it’s not just for INTERCEPT Blood System, the $11
million biopharmaceutical company’s product that inactivates
blood-borne pathogens in
donated blood. Glassell, Cerus’
president and CEO, is also concerned with getting employees
pushing in the same direction.
That takes time, but if you can
get everyone at your company
pushing toward one goal, you
can excel.
“You can empower and delegate authority very broadly to
people who are competent,”
Glassell says. “It requires that
you spend time as a team defining what the goals and overall
strategy for the company are.”
Smart Business spoke with
Glassell about how to build and
share simple goals and why you
have to measure performance
to keep people on track.
Q. How do you develop an
action plan; who is involved?
They would be developed by
those teams, with some input
and dialogue from the management team. But we basically prefer that they do it. That means
they have ownership of their
own specific plans and goals.
The benefits are huge, in terms
of motivation. If someone told
you, ‘Here’s the goal; you have to
go do it,’ and you had very limited or no input, I think you’d feel,
‘This is impossible; I don’t own
this. This is not my goal; someone set this up for me. I don’t
feel obligated to deliver on this.’
But if you’ve been part of the
process, you’d say, ‘I think this
could be done.’ In terms of motivation, it’s a huge difference.
Q. How do you keep those
goals simple?
We want to have a limited
number of goals. Typically, we’ll
operate on an annual basis with
about eight goals for the company as a whole. Those are the
overarching goals, which are
broken down into much more
detailed plans and include more
detailed goals.
Every year, you can look at
those goals and say, ‘If we
deliver those, we have definitely accomplished a lot of valuable progress for the company.’
Q. How do you get buy-in
from employees on goals?
We inform them fairly
regularly of what’s going
on, so that when we set
goals, that’s not seen as an
activity in a vacuum.
Throughout the company,
we communicate the
strategic plan to all the
employees.
It’s not like we have a
200-page blueprint; we
work with a simplified plan
so that it is easily understood. Then we solicit the
input from employees.
When the final plan is put
together, we have obtained
input from not just my
direct reports but from the
organization as a whole.
Q. How do you monitor
progress toward goals?
Typically, we take the strategic
goals and break them down into
more concrete action plans. We
then break them down to specific goals, near term, for different parts of the organization.
For instance, say we want to
have a project in Phase II clinical. We can say, ‘Well, that’s
three years down the road. To
get there, we need to be in
Phase I in 18 months, and to get
to Phase I, we need to have the
following data available to us,
so let’s go out and develop a
specific operational plan for collecting that data.’
So we map out how to get to
the big goals in pretty good
detail. Then, we can track how
we’re doing.