At ConantLeadership’s most recent BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit—a virtual meeting of the top leadership luminaries in the business space—Amanda Poole (Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer of Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) spoke with Doug Conant (founder of ConantLeadership, former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, and bestselling author of The Blueprint and TouchPoints) about creating inspiring workplace cultures.
Enjoy the following tips and takeaways for creating inspiring workplace cultures from their conversation in the recap below. You can also watch the recording of their discussion (skip to roughly minute 7 to skip intros and housekeeping).
Be the ‘Keeper of the Flame’
As the first HR leader ever featured at the Blueprint Leadership Summit, Amanda Poole is uniquely qualified to discuss how to create positive workplace cultures that spark innovation. In her role leading global, diverse, and inclusive HR teams at biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS)—she’s observed firsthand that a thriving company culture is essential to delivering on their mission to help patients prevail over serious diseases all over the world
Doug Conant, a seasoned leader with over 45 years of experience, who is now devoted to teaching the tenets of “leadership that works,” champions the importance of the Chief People Officer function, and says HR leaders are the “keeper of the flame” for company culture. To deliver extraordinary results, Conant says that HR leaders and CEOs must work in tandem. He asks Poole to share more about her experience leading the cultural helm at BMS.
Poole says that while she’s been at BMS for 20 years, it’s like she’s “worked for three or four different companies” because of its “rich heritage of reinventing and transforming.” And she’s used these transformative periods to gain deeper insight into the employee experience across job functions and to spotlight new avenues of leadership. One opportunity arose when Poole temporarily left HR to be a first-line sales manager at BMS from 2008 to 2010. It allowed her to spend time in physician offices alongside the sales team and observe what doctors and their patients needed from the company and the healthcare industry as a whole.
A few years later, Poole spent some time overseas leading HR for BMS’s global markets—another transformative era. And she recalls a key “pivot point” when she led the integration of BMS’s 2019 acquisition of Celgene Corporation, as well as the particularly tumultuous “rollercoaster” of being a working parent during COVID, which followed shortly thereafter in 2020. These and other experiences helped her put herself in the shoes of the people she was leading, and to better understand their tapestry of needs and functions.
Throughout, particularly during the uncertainty of COVID, Poole did whatever she could to “reinvent” the culture and bring people together despite limitations. The circumstances changed, but her commitment to the company mission never wavered. Each transformation helped her better “understand and speak the business,” and add kindling to the flame she continues to carry for the company. Poole says all leaders should adapt to change by using each new experience to hone the message and find more effective ways to deliver it.
Bring Your Mission to Life
In their day-to-day, Conant says leaders often feel like they’re “trying to thread the needle,” because of all the complexity on their plate: driving performance, managing change, keeping employees engaged, and honoring stakeholders. The list is endless: “You have a lot of things pulling at you,” he says. His advice is to remain “tethered to the mission” throughout it all. Leaders must “be the message incarnate” if they want to build trust and inspire high performance.
Poole agrees, reiterating that keeping the mission front and center is critical. She says BMS’s purpose of helping patients is “what has kept me here for 20 years.” In this case, remaining mission-oriented isn’t just admirable, it’s vital: The mission is crucial to continuing to deliver “remarkable and life-changing products,” which are innovative in how they harness the body’s immune system to fight cancer, cardiovascular conditions, and other diseases. They also recently made waves in the neuroscience space with the first new schizophrenia treatment in more than 30 years.
The objective to save lives and serve people is what keeps Poole and all 30,000 BMS employees grounded as the company continues to grow. “We have the privilege of keeping patients at the center of what we do,” she says. And they bring patients to the forefront of company culture in a variety of ways, including Global Patient Week, an annual event where BMS convenes patients from all over the world to share their stories. At a recent Global Patient Week, Poole recalls thanking one visitor for traveling a long way: “[The patient’s] response was, ‘I need to thank you for saving my life.’ There’s not much more you can say after that.”
It was a striking moment for Poole, and one that tangibly drives home what the company mission is all about. She says that hearing from patients “provides this opportunity for us to remind ourselves of the impact of our medicines,” and also offers a call-to-action that, “we have to bring a different level of urgency to what we do and what that looks like.” People’s lives are depending on it.
That sense of urgency speaks to an epiphany that many leaders have in the course of their career: the realization that business often is personal. On his own leadership journey, Conant has learned that “effective leadership is as personal a pursuit as it gets.” He observes that Poole and other BMS leaders have team and matrix members counting on them, and that putting patients at the center can “galvanize the tension,” and remind other stakeholders that their voices and jobs matter. “In leadership . . . you have to make it real for people. It’s got to go beyond words and sayings on walls and has to be brought to life,” says Conant.
Evolve Your Leadership Language
To create inspiring workplace cultures, Conant urges leaders to familiarize themselves with “the four L’s of employee engagement,” a concept first shared with him by leadership legend Stephen Covey. There are four basic and essential needs leaders must meet for employees if they want to “transcend the ordinary” experience.
- Living. Employees must be compensated fairly. Do they earn enough to be productive members of their organization, family, and community?
- Loving. Employees must know they are valued contributors. Are they earnestly thanked for what they do? Are their ideas welcomed and considered?
- Learning. Employees must be able to learn and grow. Are they presented with opportunities to learn new skills or expand their growth in other ways?
- Legacy. Employees must have a strong sense of purpose and feel that their work matters. Have they connected to their role in a way that is personally meaningful and impactful to the greater good?
Poole builds on the Legacy piece: “Whether you have a 30-person or 30,000-person workforce . . . people want to feel like the work they’re doing has an impact, can make a difference, and they want to feel like they’re valued for what they’re doing every day.” As long as leaders keep this at the forefront, “the rest can follow,” she says.
Conant also celebrates psychological safety as a key component in the language of thriving workplace cultures. He points to his interview with Amy Edmonson, the renowned scholar who coined the term “psychological safety,” and her insights on how permission for candor in the workplace reduces the fear of failure that often plagues organizations and stifles innovation. Poole adds that transparency and a willingness to be vulnerable are also part of psychological safety and are “really helping to make a difference as we drive a culture change for BMS right now.”
Working to evolve the culture at BMS is continuing to inspire “new language” for Poole and her fellow leaders. For example, they are expanding the meaning of the word “integrity” by making it actionable. To Poole and her team, “being in integrity” means showing up and behaving in ways that align with the company’s mission and their commitment as leaders. They’ve also evolved their language around accountability, urgency, and passion; Poole says these values are “just as implicit in the success of our business strategy as the business strategy itself.”
Both panelists understand that developing new language around leadership starts with “leading by listening,” a concept Conant describes in the book he co-authored with Mette Norgaard, TouchPoints. He affirms that leaders must genuinely care and “demonstrate curiosity about people” because they are “counting on you to lead them in an enlightened way.”
Poole adds that leaders don’t need to “pretend like we have all the answers to questions,” because vulnerability can fuel trust, collaboration, and innovation. She says to listen first, and then let what you’ve learned light the way forward so you can be of service to your people. Poole offers a final pearl of wisdom for leaders: “Surround yourself with great people,” who are “smarter, better, brighter” than you are, and then, “unlock them to be awesome.”
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Watch the full recording of this interview to get more details, including insights from an audience Q&A. You can also access the complete inventory of previous BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit sessions, including illuminating conversations with Brené Brown, Susan Cain, Indra Nooyi, Amy Edmondson, Bill George, Barbara Humpton, and many more.
About the Author: Vanessa Bradford, a featured contributor to ConantLeadership, is a freelance content writer and copywriter, and C3PR’s Content Marketing Director.
(Header photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash)
