Abstract
The CEO and CFO of this global pharmaceutical company had a history of low-level conflict in their strategy and decisionmaking processes. While their disagreement and hearty debate didn’t threaten the relationship between them, they often got stuck and the strategy was stuck too. In a series of Strategic Governance sessions they wanted a higher level of performance to deliver to investors and shareholders.
In many ways, these two leaders were at different ends of the spectrum in how they solved problems, made decisions
and operated in the world. The CEO was rational in his thinking, required lots of data analysis and was slower and more considered in his approach. The CFO was an intuitive thinker and moved quickly to decisions, sourced data from
a number of key people in the business and trusted his gut instinct and wisdom.
This difference in approach at times led them to misunderstand each other and assume the other was blocking the way forward. This undercurrent played out in unhelpful politics in the exec team. The company was falling well short of capitalising on the strategic wisdom of the players at the top level.
Both were employing previously successful strategies for dealing with complexity. However, the roles they now had and the environment that they were in required new capability in both of them.
Through the Strategic Governance process they were able to move from fixed positions to more complex strategic thinking, empathy and dialogue. Through a real conversation, dialogue, they found new sources of resilience in themselves, with each other, and only then could they work together to mobilise the resilience the organisation
needed in the rest of the exec team.
The exec politics shifted as they dealt differently with each other and the executive. They devised a stakeholder strategy that had the key players align with their position which returned value to the shareholders and external stakeholders.
