The Challenge: For this fast-growth company, developing new leaders and getting them up to speed quickly was a key concern.

The Solution: To create training process that would become became the cornerstone for the organization’s management development plan.

The Results: The course was so popular the training department was swamped and unable to meet the initial demand. Individual accountability and responsibility has improved, and barriers that had prevented individual contributors from performing at peak performance levels have been removed.

Genentech. Has a futurist ring to it, doesn’t it? Yet, for more than 20 years Genentech, Inc. has been known as one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies. Focused primarily on cardiology and oncology, it keeps the door open to “opportunistic” projects where the company has the potential to fill a void in other significant areas of medicine.

The Genentech motto—“We hire the best and brightest”—is evidenced in the people at this living laboratory—a place where no limits are set for the superstars it employs.

With solid science at its foundation, Genentech’s success is predicated on its ability to recruit and retain highly qualified and motivated people. Of the more than 4,200 Genentech employees, more than 80 percent have college degrees and more than 25 percent hold advanced degrees, including Ph.D.s and M.D.s. The company encourages scientists to use their unique backgrounds and skills to develop novel areas of research.

“Genentech is very much a high tech model. We have bright, committed people with great technical skills. They have a passion to contribute all they can,” says Gayle Renneke, Director of Learning and Development, Human Resources.

“Our motto is a reality here at Genentech,” says Renneke. “The truth is that if you recruit stars, you may not be astute about coaching and developing talent, as you assume it’s there.”

Renneke explains that Genentech has a strong knowledge-based culture. There are high expectations that people coming into the organization will contribute quickly. It’s not the type of place where you want to say “I don’t know.”

The nature of Genentech’s business means that people have a compelling need to network and to work cross-functionally. Historically, new people were expected to take whatever skills they came in with and engage people who had been there a long time, many of whom had never worked anywhere else and had no background in how things are done elsewhere.

This challenge was magnified by the company’s assertive goals.

The philosophy here is, “We have bright people; we can figure out how to make it happen,” says Renneke. “The difficulty is, they may have the commitment, but not the skill level to make it happen. You can’t hire the perfect employee. Even though we say we hire the best and the brightest, they still don’t know everything.”

When she moved into Human Resources with 14 years experience as a manager, Renneke says that management development quickly became a priority, but they didn’t have much of a program— “a few classes here and there.” Renneke had experienced Situational Leadership^® II in a previous job and viewed it as a perfect fit for the culture at Genentech. “Our concept is to do this with people, not to people, and that’s the foundation of SLII^®.”

Chris Edmonds, a Consulting Partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies^®, helped to outline a systematic approach for introducing SLII to managers. Training began at the director level, and that trial was good enough to convince them to help move it out in the organization. Now SLII—called “Partnering for Performance” at Genentech—is the cornerstone of its management development program.

Renneke believes the SLII Model is so inviting because it assumes that people want to contribute and that people can. “Everyone can get to D4 if they want to,” she says. “Often, though, companies have a control model in place that defines and limits what someone can do. If you remove the organizational obstacles, there are no limits.”

“Our objective was to identify obstacles and opportunities and get them out of the way so the individual contributors could spend their time doing work and not battling organizational barriers that create complexity and cause burn out,” says Renneke.

As SLII began to energize those who went through training, the word spread quickly and generated so much excitement that Renneke’s team faced a demand it wasn’t yet ready to serve.

Gearing up, they conducted two open enrollment classes a month with every class full. Although they’ve reached out to more than 600 Genentech managers, they haven’t attained the goal of training 75 percent of all managers, so training is continuing on through 2001. Intact group sessions are also offered with a goal of getting the functional groups trained in programs designed around their work. And, Meribeth Germino—a Genentech trainer—now conducts one-day instructionals on the SLII Model.

Because so many managers want their people to have access to the SLII language, Genentech is rolling out a condensed course in Situational Self Leadership (SSL) to give others access to the language, concepts, and philosophy. The program—which is targeted to the individual contributor—will be piloted in February and launched in March.

“SSL is a good accountability model and gets people to be responsible,” says Renneke. “It also helps in the process of removing barriers that prevent individual contributors from maximizing their contributions.”

The lack of organizational obstacles is what allowed Renneke to evolve into her current position at Genentech. She came into the organization with a background in clinical drug development and previously served as its Director of Operations, Medical Affairs. Although the transfer to Human Resources may not seem a logical progression to some, she says she’s doing exactly what she was meant and loves to do—helping others “connect the dots” with Situational Leadership^® II. Genentech’s “brightest and best” truly know no limits.