I’ll spare you the suspense and get right to the thesis here: Work gets done in the industry through people. And as much as you might think that AI, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, and the like will render people unnecessary, Exhibit 965 of my case is that just this month another self-driving ‘smart’ car ran over another pedestrian. Yes, you may think, “But how many pedestrians were hit by human drivers this month?” That’s a good question, and the answer is “many more,” but there are also many, many, many more human drivers intersecting pedestrian pathways every day, and a scant number of licensed driverless test cars allowed out in public. And of course, humans can be, and are easily distracted, while driverless car computers are incapable of distraction.

So while a human can be, and often is, distracted by a text from a family member, a stock-price push alert, or an unsatisfactory radio station, a driving computer is solely and entirely focused on driving and computing. Ergo, we humans aren’t irrelevant yet, and the likelihood is that the future will continue to be humans abstractly thinking about strategy and nuance, while computer-assisted agents will help out across tasks. After all, ‘smart’ programs still can’t figure out Captcha programs where we just have to type in the text field what the street sign says, or whatever the newest algorithm does.

So if we all get work done through and with people, how do we get better?

Read this carefully: There IS NOT a different species called “Millennial”

Conventional wisdom: There are those ‘older people’ born before 1980* who are the backbone of society, and then there’s a newer evolution called Homo millennius who are out to steal everyone’s proverbial lunch money.

I can’t believe how often across different industries I see this utter nonsense of ‘millennials do [this]’ or ‘millennials prefer [that]’. Even specifically within pharma and biotech, there are online courses, programs, e-learnings, and whitepapers on how to properly manage Millennials. There are countless admonishments to managers that they aren’t ‘properly’ hand-holding Millennials through their career paths.

Just because you see it flowing from every outlet in your daily life doesn’t mean that it’s true; in fact, it means that the vast majority of the public has been duped by an idea not supported by any research or evidence. There was also a time where ‘everyone’ thought that The Beatles’ White Album Revolution 9 had hidden messages within, or that Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven track had backwards messages designed into it within the “bustle in your hedgerow” section. This is non-scientific conspiratorial thinking at its finest (or worst, as the fact may be).**

What I’ve described is a special case of ‘groupthink’ where everyone thinks they know something to be true because everyone else seems to be espousing it. It’s a logical fallacy called Argumentum ad populum, also known as Appeal to Popularity, or Bandwagon Effect. Just because everyone ‘seems’ to know something, don’t just agree.

Tips For Leading, Managing, and Excelling With Smart People
Whether you’re looking at participants in a clinical research study, negotiating with regulatory inspectors, or mobilizing brand and marketing teams to improve sales performance, there are certain commonalities that can help you.

1. It’s still all about trust. Kouzes & Posner had written a global survey of the leadership arena, and found that worldwide, trust was the most universally-recognized and necessary element for good leadership. Taking this a bit further, it’s the people element of work—the knowledge, skills, reputations, and relationships that work together to generate the highest business value. Period.
2. Companies with evidence-based, progressive talent management strategies tend to have higher return on sales, investments, assets, and equity.
3. Silos beget social ingroups (and social infighting). By allocating roles through transactions across bosses and individual groups, there is inevitably and inexorably the development of competitiveness, envy, and consternation. Sure, a little bit of competitiveness drives improvement, but when groups have too great an identity, the research shows that ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ outcomes are almost inevitable. The problem is that when companies try to develop process owners, or other cross-departmentally-cutting ways of working, most employees just go through the motions, waiting and hoping for a return to what is comfortable (even when it’s worse for them in the long-run).
4. Treat your people like…people! Sure, some employees may have been digital natives since birth, but the variation in individuals is far greater than the individuality effects of early exposure to technology. So your best bet is to forget about all the fake news you read about how to manage or relate with different generations. There have always been admonishments that “this new generation doesn’t do [this] right,” and guess what? Different isn’t necessarily worse. In fact, every generation has said this about their successors, so at this rate, our current generation(s) should be performing at a level of zero value if every prior generation thought that each that followed was worse.

People Strategy Epilogue
When PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 14th Annual Global CEO Survey on global talent noted, “The ability to attract and retain millennial talent will be a vital step to achieving [long-term aims and ambitions of the company],” they weren’t referring to the separate species, Homo millennius, but were simply making a commentary on the aging and renewing job demographic. Simply speaking, those participants in the workplace who are called ‘millennials’ by their birthright will be the bulk of the job market for the next phase of our future. The more we play the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ game, the more we create artificial social ingroups and false identities, which equates to more variable and chaotic business performance.
I’ve spoken on talent management for high-consequence industries in the past (nuclear, aerospace, chemical, and yes, pharma) and it always comes down to relationships. Treat your people well. Smart people don’t need to be micromanaged. Create strategic boundaries to limit variability, and then let them engage. 


* There’s such interest in this, that the Pew Research Center developed proper categorization for ‘when’ Millennials were actually born relative to other generations. It is 1981-1996. And by the way, the authors actually note, “Generational cutoff points aren’t an exact science. They should be viewed primarily as tools… Generations are often considered by their span, but again there is no agreed upon formula.”
** There are songs with vocals and musical tracks recorded backwards, called ‘backmasking.’ But the human brain doesn’t interpret backwards speech. These musical phenomena don’t cause subliminal behavior changes.

References

1. Dimock, M. (2018). Defining generations: Where millennials end and post-millennials begin. Pew Research Center.
2. PricewaterhouseCoopers. (2017). Growth reimagined: Prospects in emerging markets drive CEO confidence. (available as pdf).
3. Locwin, B. (2016). Making the case for evidence-based care. Association for Talent Development.
4. Bryan, L.L., Joyce, C.I., & Weiss, L.M. (2006). Making a market in talent. The McKinsey Quarterly.

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Ben Locwin

Ben Locwin, PhD, MBA, MS is a pharma executive, a member of several advisory boards and boards of directors across the industry, and was the president of Healthcare Science Advisors. He has created many of the frameworks for risk management currently in use within the industry, and has worked across the drug lifecycle from early phase to commercial manufacturing and marketing (GLP, GCP, GVP, GMP). Connect with him on LinkedIn. Twitter: @BenLocwin.