Lance Hill shares what he has learned about leading a company after joining Within3 as CEO in 2007 and helping the organization to grow into a trusted partner for the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical organizations and leading medical device companies.
PM360: What’s your secret to making your employees or team perform better?
Lance Hill: Make sure everyone has as much context as possible. In some businesses, people can do a repetitive task and just fit into a system. In our business, we’re about innovation. Innovation means people are listening, learning, and noticing when things aren’t going well and trying to improve things. If you don’t give people context as to where something fits and why, then everyone’s intelligence actually starts to work against you because people may head off in a different direction that doesn’t bring the whole company together. So, I spend a lot of time making sure different departments understand why we’re making the decisions we’re making.
What’s the most important leadership skill not enough people talk about?
A good leader can make the complicated simple. For instance, being able to translate the same message to different types of people in different parts of the organization so that they can understand things more easily. As companies grow, there’s so much going on and that level of complexity can fray a company’s ability to drive quickly. A good leader works as a counterbalance to that complexity by trying to simplify things down to the heart of what the issue or the message is, and ensuring it’s well understood within the company.
What are the keys to building a successful company culture environment?
Empathy is a big one. You need to understand the people in your company and what will make them great or not great. The opposite view is just saying, “I have a system, if you don’t fit into it, you’ll be done.” That works in some businesses, but given the creativity and the diversity of staff that I like to have in a company, it requires being able to meet people where they are and then bringing them along with the rest of the company.
Finally, who is the boss?
I don’t think there’s a singular answer. First and foremost are customers, obviously. I got an opportunity to meet Magic Johnson a few years ago and he said one of the early pieces of advice he got was, “If a company isn’t winning financially, then all the other goals you have don’t matter.” And if the customers aren’t happy, then you’re not going to win financially.
The second one is investors. People put up their time and money to make your company successful, and you owe those people to give them your all. And then third is the employees. While they might not be the boss on the food chain, making sure you’ve got an environment that’s serving their needs well means that they will have a seat at the boss’ table as well.
