The Challenge: To create a core leadership development process with worldwide application and demonstrated value.

The Solution: To utilize Situational Leadership II to support the change process with a focus on sustaining performance.

The Results: An integrated, enterprise-wide curriculum for leaders and a shared, global leadership model and language.

Pfizer Inc, founded in 1849, is dedicated to better health and greater access to healthcare for people and their valued animals. With a focus on discovering and developing breakthrough medicines and providing information on prevention, wellness, and treatment to 38 million patients every day, the organization truly lives its vision of working for a healthier world.

Pfizer is connected by this vision and anchored in core values including leadership, innovation, integrity, and respect for people. The values are supported by key leadership behaviors including sustained focus on performance, creating an inclusive environment, encouraging open discussion and debate, managing change, developing people, and aligning across the organization. Of critical importance in this picture was Pfizer’s desire to provide a core leadership development process.

Pfizer’s journey with The Ken Blanchard Companies^® began in 1997, when they made the shift from the original Situational Leadership^® training model developed by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey to the Blanchard’s Situational Leadership II (SLII) process. Betsy Blee, Senior Director with Pfizer’s Leadership Education and Development department explains, “SLII was based on updated research that more accurately reflects how people develop and grow.” The following year, SLII was rolled out to supervisors in every division of the organization, including sales, research, manufacturing, and finance, and it became a mandatory component of the organization’s overall leadership development curriculum.

Subsequently, additional Blanchard programs, including Situational Team Leadership, and Situational Self Leadership, were added to the Pfizer curriculum to provide assistance with team chartering and effectiveness as well as individual development and empowerment. In 2000, Pfizer made the shift from classroom to blended learning, utilizing Blanchard’s SLII on the Ninth House Network web-based program to further enhance the organization’s goal of assisting Pfizer colleagues around the world to speak the same leadership language. Pfizer felt that this online support tool for SLII provided an emotional learning component that shifts individuals’ mind-sets and sets up the transfer of learning. In addition, 360-degree assessments administered before and after training allow the organization to track Level 3 behavior change, while performance support tools provide reminders and prompts for action plan follow-up. Finally, individuals use Blanchard’s Partnering for Performance skills to further define their action plans with their managers and agreed upon next steps.

Doug Trainor, Director and Team Leader of the LEAD department, states that “SLII is a foundational piece in our leadership curriculum. It allows us to validate that we’re moving the needle on leadership behavior. In the past two years, SLII has become the mainstay for developing leaders at Pfizer to diagnose, communicate, and partner for performance more effectively.”

Betsy Blee agrees. “We love our partnership with Blanchard,” she says. “And we plan to maintain it going forward. The programs and processes work together and have allowed us to create continuity and consistency over the nine years we’ve been working together. We wanted to adopt a core and shared model that was practical, easy to use and deliver, and that would create demonstrated results. And our work with Blanchard has resulted in a worldwide application of consistency across the organization.”