Focus on a higher purpose
To attract the best innovators to your company, you need to give them a reason to want to work for you. That starts with building a compelling vision.
At Isis, Crooke has continually focused his work force on the company’s reason for being: developing and producing medical drugs that benefit patients. From there, he backs up the validity of the company’s mission with evidence of progress and evidence that its products produce a beneficial end result.
“First, it’s the quality of your aspirations,” Crooke says. “Second, you need evidence that is clear and tangible to you and that you can make clear and tangible to others, that you are progressing, even if you’ve had a setback. It really boils down to a reason to exist and proof that you can make clear to people that you are progressing to the ultimate goal.
“The third factor is just force of will. Especially when you are facing a difficult time in your business, you need to have a driven leadership that just won’t give up. That is where leadership really matters.”
Crooke says many companies don’t have a truly compelling vision for the future, something that is going to differentiate the company in the eyes of creative, innovative people — something beyond just making the most money.
“It’s great to want to make products and make money, but we’re motivated by the good that we can do, the extraordinary opportunity that we have to do good work and benefit the common good,” Crooke says. “You need to remember that there are all kinds of higher purposes for an organization. Generally, companies that succeed, whether they be automobile manufacturers or software manufacturers or whatnot, do aspire to a greater purpose that is about more than simply making money. On Wall Street, the greatest people really have a vision that is more than getting the biggest bonus. All the successful businesses find a way to display value that is beyond simply making money.”
Finding that reason for being is a key factor in not only recruiting the best creative and innovative minds, but it’s a reason why they stay at a company. Even if you can’t offer the highest salaries in the industry or the biggest bonus checks each quarter or year, you still stand a much better chance of keeping your best and brightest idea generators by showing them the ways in which their work extends beyond the walls of your office building.
“You need that consistent set of goals and aspirations to keep people around for long periods of time,” Crooke says. “Of the original 30 people that were here with the company in 1989, we still have 1
5.
There is inevitable turnover, because people simply are going to find other opportunities and leave. But we’ve had a lot of senior-, middle- and lower-level leaders who have stayed the course. That’s what assures consistency. You know who you are, what you’re doing and you don’t deviate from that.”
To keep that higher purpose as an area of focus within the culture at Isis, Crooke has kept his messages in front of employees as often as possible, and he has done so in plainly spoken language that can be received by employees in all areas of the company.
“Our scientific meetings are for our scientists, but we also have a lot of nonscientists out there,” Crooke says. “Most of what is worth understanding is understandable, so you try to stay away from jargon as much as possible when you’re talking to a broader audience.
“It’s mostly vocabulary and how you use it. A lot of things you are trying to explain are easily understood if you just reduce it to common English.”
Aside from meetings, you need to keep your organization focused on a day-to-day basis. That means getting out of your office and engaging your employees whenever you can. It’s an example Crooke has set at Isis, and he expects his managers to follow.
“I don’t foster face-to-face communication, I demand it,” Crooke says. “People behave as you behave, they’ll do what you set the example for. Communication is always better if you treat people with respect and give them the attention they need. That’s why I want everyone around here to be extremely forthright with what is going on. The common purpose is better-served if you and your managers are highly communicative and extremely forthright.”
The same holds true for communicating with people outside the organization. Investors, customers and clients need to know what your company stands for, what purpose it’s serving and how it intends to fulfill that purpose. Investors and customers may not be immersed in your corporate culture every day in the same way employees are, but they still want to know that your company possesses a definition of purpose and a strong culture that will allow you to deliver on the promises you make.
“With investors and those outside the organization, just like employees, what gets them interested is the scale of the dream and opportunity,” Crooke says. “What is required to explain why a particular disappointment occurred doesn’t diminish the value of the progress already achieved. So you communicate that just like you did to your people, and you do it in broadly simple terms that anyone can understand. For us, those are the challenges that depend on good communication skills and ability to convey science in a way that is exciting and not complicated.
“That’s what we need in an organization of science: for the leadership to take all of those elements of progress, which span many disciplines and span thousands of experiments, and summarize those against the long-term objectives of creating the technology. We need to point out what the progress is and why that points to a future in which we’ll have better success.”
How to reach: Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc., (760) 931-9200 or www.isispharm.com