Building and Belonging to a Team in Business with Rohit Sood, senior pharma executive, mentor, and investor

Alloutcoach

A big part of the reason my latest podcast guest, Rohit Sood, has become a successful and recognized leader, mentor and growth advisor in the pharma industry, is because he has been able to build successful teams. This is how his colleagues describe his unique success story as a recognized pharmaceutical industry scholar, Rutgers Business School lecturer, expert in organizational change, investor, and senior executive in life sciences who currently serves as Executive Vice President of Global Commercialization at EVERSANA. Rohit prefers to make deep and deliberate connections in business and he shares some truly unique, practical case studies and solutions on performance metrics, hiring, team dynamics, mentorship, growth mindset, and execution in this episode. 3:10 - Q: What were some of the strongest teams you worked with or led in your career that you still remember today? 6:47 - Q: What are the principles to building a strong team? 9:32 - Q: How do you design a structure around a team with a strong culture and vision? 13:45 - Q: Why do teams with best products and best performers fail? 19:27 – We discuss a story of a state tennis champion three years back to back who plays on a high school basketball team as a bench player the entire season, wins a state championship, and later admits openly to his teammates that winning as a bench player was his biggest accomplishment to date because he was a member of a team even though he had won individual tennis state championships. Rohit: we all have certain role players on our teams. You do not have to be at the center of every play or decision of your team. One of my favorite interview questions - tell me about a time when you were a role player - what was your contribution to the success of failure, and reason? 21:12 - Q: Performance metrics - Do you think performance metrics can be designed to promote collaboration as well as healthy competition? The Net Promoter Scores at Eversana are very high. Team Collaboration will be one of our metrics we will be tracking at Eversana that will be a part of the variable compensation of our employees! We will capture these metrics by gathering feedback from various brand teams across different functions. Did you feel included? Did you know what decisions were being made? We have also implemented frameworks around processes and operations. Our philosophy is that leaders have to be consistent. And consistency does not just happen. There have to be operations and processes in place that allow for consistency in execution. In summary, we are focused on 3 KPIs - 1) internal behaviors that ensure a collaborative culture; 2) behaviors that stimulate our clients and stakeholders' satisfaction of the quality of our products through their feedback; and 3) operations and processes to ensure consistency. 25:56 - Metrics also impact how you think about your goals for the year. We have three tiers of goals at Eversana. The first goals are tied to organizational performance. The second are corporate citizenship goals - make sure to do something in your role that impacts work outside of your day job! The third level of performance goals are related to individual interests. 33:06 - Aspirational idea of 1 single global metric - earnings per share. If not met, individual metrics come into play - hierarchy / tiered approach. 36:45 - Q: How do you recalibrate teams after successes or failures? 38:39 - Case study of a recent team member's problem with a deadline 41:28 – Q: Do you think the sense of belonging is what helps the best teams to succeed specifically? 45:24 - Q: How do you manage transitioning from team to team as often as we do today? 49:43 - Q: Should everyone start a team of their own regardless of their role or experience? 58:54 - Key Final Messages from Rohit!