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Driving strategy, culture, and transformation

Astellas

About Astellas

Astellas Pharma Canada is the Canadian branch of a Japanese pharmaceutical company. The company was formed in 2005 when Yamanouchi Pharmaceuticals merged with Fujisawa Pharmaceutical, which already had a Canadian branch. Since the merger, Astellas Pharma Canada has introduced new products and continues to build its pipeline. The company has about 110 employees in Canada and a total of 17,000 employees globally.

Strategic business challenges

Astellas Pharma Canada was facing multiple strategic inflection points: market and industry disruption, a need to drive accelerated growth and transform its business model, changing customer expectations, and talent challenges.

Primary challenge

The pharmaceutical industry has been changing rapidly over the past several years, and the COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated the pace of that change. During the pandemic, Astellas Pharma Canada went through a couple of rounds of downsizing and restructured its organization in order to navigate those changes and meet the industry demands. Today, with several new products set to launch over the next 18 months, they face the additional challenge of scaling up for this expected growth.

They also face a fundamentally different business environment post-COVID, unlike anything the organization has dealt with before. Total healthcare spending has fallen post-pandemic, and physicians are booked back-to-back with in-person and digital appointments, making it harder to break through and get their attention in traditional face-to-face meetings. Specialty treatments for rare conditions are the new competitive frontier, and Astellas is transforming itself to specialize in these cutting-edge therapies and compete in this dynamic market in order to bring value to patients.

Leadership Goals

  • Transform the organization’s culture, in order to meet changing customer demands and navigate industry changes.
  • Achieve accelerated growth, while launching new products under a new commercial and business model.

  • “In order for us to be successful moving forward, we can't rely on how we've operated up to date. We've got to change and evolve.”

    — Frank Stramaglia, General Manager

How they did it

Astellas began with an acknowledgement that the organization needed to significantly transform the way it operated in order to thrive in the future. LCI worked with them to design and implement a program to make that change happen.

  • 01

    Define expectations and what was needed

    • The executive team gathered for an offsite to align around the transformation that needed to take place.
    • A team created a working group to define the culture change initiative and strategic story to help employees understand the change and what it would mean for them.

  • 02

    Align leaders and teams to those expectations

    • A people leader forum kicked-off the role out of the organization-wide culture change initiative, ensuring all leaders knew how to step up and what was expected of them and their teams.
    • Leaders at all levels held sequential workshops with their teams to discuss current market dynamics and help team members understand what these changing dynamics would mean for their specific roles.
    • Astellas held workshops for employees focused on the organization’s history to build awareness and understanding of struggles that were faced and overcome in the past.

  • 03

    Embed the mindset and behaviors into daily routines and organizational practices

    • The organization asked people from all parts of the organization to serve as ‘culture champions’ and develop new expectations for leaders and individuals in Astellas’ transformed culture.
    • Astellas’ General Manager met with every single employee 1:1 to hear their thoughts about the organization’s strengths and weaknesses and learn what they needed from their leaders.
    • Leaders ensured that every communication going out to employees was connected back to the culture change they were driving.

Strong leadership cultures drive higher engagement

Employee engagement jumped from 60% to 81% in less than a year.

Engagement in the Canadian operation is now 11 points higher than engagement across the entire global organization.

  • “Don't underestimate how fast you can shift culture in employee engagement with dedicated focus and effort. You can move the needle quite quickly.”

    — Frank Stramaglia, General Manager

Additional Results

  • Astellas developed three core pillars of its new corporate culture: ambition, competitiveness, and accountability. These pillars were developed organically, through conversations and workshops with individuals at all levels of the organization.
  • Employees quickly embraced these three pillars. Today, a leader or employee will reference at least one of these pillars in almost every internal meeting.
  • Astellas now has a thriving community of leaders. LCI has helped them facilitate company-wide dialogue and collaboration for more than two years now.

Strong leadership cultures drive performance

  • +15%

    Growth

Astellas Pharma Canada grew its business by 15% in less than a year. That’s the second-highest rate of growth among all global Astellas affiliates.

  • 3 new products

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  • 18 months

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With its new leadership culture well established and embedded throughout the organization, Astellas Pharma Canada is ready to grow.

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