Bayer: Leadership upskilling – IMD Sprints for scale, speed and impact
How Bayer was able to revamp its leadership development, which helped the weedkiller-to-aspirin conglomerate create a new culture of psychological safety and performance management.
Context
For the better part of two centuries, Bayer has been the darling of corporate Germany. A pioneering force in life sciences, known for inventing the aspirin painkiller, the group also boasts giant divisions in consumer healthcare and crop science. Today, the 160-year-old corporate behemoth employs 100,000 people and holds a market value of around €30 billion.
Challenge
For the better part of two centuries, Bayer has been the darling of corporate Germany. A pioneering force in life sciences, known for inventing the aspirin painkiller, the group also boasts giant divisions in consumer healthcare and crop science. Today, the 160-year-old corporate behemoth employs 100,000 people and holds a market value of around €30 billion.
But in 2021, amid a tough operating environment, Bayer faced a clear problem: its organizational culture. It had an internally focused, risk-averse mindset, and a rigid top-down structure to boot, which stifled decision-making and innovation.
That’s a big problem for a company that relies on R&D to discover and develop new products, while also facing the impending loss of exclusivity of some of its best-selling drugs.
But the challenges didn’t stop there. The weedkiller-to-aspirin conglomerate struggled with poor performance management: in 2020, only half of its employees had a development dialogue, and just one in four set any development goals. On top of that, 40% of Bayer’s leaders reported difficulties in evaluating staff performance.
At the same time, the operating environment was not helping, with the company navigating the multifaceted challenges stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic – among them supply-chain delays, raw material shortages, and soaring costs.
Clearly, something had to change. To thrive, the company, under the leadership of then-CEO Werner Baumann, needed to upskill its leaders with a “coaching mindset”, marked by providing ongoing, constructive feedback to staff, thereby boosting the performance of teams right across the organization.
Recognizing that traditional methods wouldn’t suffice — where training is typically confined to a select group of senior executives — Bayer needed a more agile approach.
This new strategy aimed to upskill leaders at all levels, allowing them to propagate the new culture throughout the sprawling conglomerate, which encompasses 354 companies operating in 83 countries. Essentially, Bayer needed to democratize leadership development.
Although its three divisions operate in distinct markets, leaders across the group faced a similar set of challenges.
“We needed to become a more performance-driven company, to develop accountability as well as our leaders’ ability to have difficult conversations. We started with the top 500 senior executives and needed to find a way to quickly spread that new learning throughout the company,” said a Bayer executive.
By the end of 2022, most of Bayer’s top leaders had completed a program focused on developing psychological safety and using coaching as a real-time approach to performance management. But for this cultural transformation to succeed in the long term, Bayer understood that it had to involve everyone, at every level. In a nutshell: it needed a scalable solution.
Partnering with IMD
The company turned to its long-time partner, IMD, to co-create a scalable and impactful leadership development program.
Bayer required a solution that could be deployed quickly and efficiently across its global operations, targeting an initial 5,000 leaders, launching and completing within a year, and with an engaging design as well, to foster both individual and organizational learning.
For this, IMD proposed a custom “Sprint” format, which integrated both synchronous (live) and asynchronous content. Co-created in six months, each Sprint consisted of five modules spread over 15 days, with a daily time commitment of 60-90 minutes.
It focused on developing key leadership behaviors, such as creating psychological safety, shifting to a coaching mindset, and actively managing performance.
The design and implementation of the Sprint involved several key elements. First, the program had to be scalable, reaching a large number of leaders in a short period. All told, the program was delivered through 29 Sprints over the span of 10 months, reaching 12,826 Bayer leaders globally.
This scalability was achieved through a blend of synchronous sessions featuring IMD faculty and Bayer senior leaders, and asynchronous content that included practical assignments and peer discussions. This approach allowed participants to engage with the material at their own pace. while also benefiting from live sessions with faculty and peers.
“It was a peer sharing experience, and it became a movement of people that wanted to participate because they saw the benefits of those who had already gone through. It was a horizontal world of coming together to learn differently,” said Beatriz Rodriguez, Bayer’s Chief Talent and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer.
Second, the program needed to be impactful. This meant not only delivering knowledge, but also ensuring that participants could apply what they learned in their daily work. To achieve this, the program included practical assignments, peer discussions, and reflections, all designed to help leaders translate theory into practice.
To that end, Bayer senior leaders played a vital role in the program, facilitating cohort sessions and modeling the desired behaviors. Their involvement added credibility to the initiative and helped reinforce their own learning.
By sharing their experiences and successes, senior leaders encouraged participants to embrace the new leadership culture, and apply it in their teams.
“A success indicator is the application to daily work. You can say it’s successful when there is a psychologically-safe environment and people communicate with each other — even during difficult conversations — or you can see productive sharing and people setting stretching goals,” said Christine Elian Peralta, a Government Affairs Manager at Bayer in the Philippines.
Third, the program had to be engaging. Bayer and IMD understood that for the Sprints to be successful, they needed to capture the participants’ interest and keep them engaged throughout the learning journey. This was accomplished through a mix of learning activities, including videos, readings, discussions, and practical exercises.
Additionally, it was achieved through the program’s structure, which facilitated learning on multiple levels. Individual leaders were encouraged to practice new behaviors and reflect on their application in their work context.
And small discussion groups enabled deeper conversations and bonding among participants, while larger cohort groups allowed for broader networking and knowledge sharing. This multi-level engagement helped embed the new leadership behaviors across the organization.
“We learn best from others, and by hearing other people’s personal journeys and experiences. While there were a few hundred per cohort, the learning really took place when interacting in the smaller peer groups,” said Brian Naber, now President for the North America and Australia/New Zealand region for Bayer’s crop science division.
“As a participant and facilitator, I had a chance to engage with people that I’ve never met in person. So, it extended your network in the process as well.”
Tangible impact
The program’s success was evident in the high completion rate (83%) and positive feedback from participants. Leaders reported significant improvements in their ability to create psychological safety, adopt a coaching mindset, and manage performance effectively.
These changes had a tangible impact on the organization, leading to improved performance and increased engagement. Overall, the program resulted in an estimated return on investment of 66% – almost three times the target of 25%. For every €1 invested, Bayer gained €1.66.
Moreover, the Sprint program had a major, positive impact on Bayer’s business, leading to an estimated €23 million in annual efficiency savings.
But the program’s impact extended beyond the immediate financial rewards; it created intangible benefits such as building trust, fostering psychological safety, enhancing active listening, and promoting collaboration and networking.
These elements are fundamental to managing high-performing teams and driving organizational success. A Bayer facilitator said: “It has transformed the behaviors from words on a piece of paper into concrete actions. It is really rewarding to see leaders providing feedback as we sit in different meetings, as well as making sure that everybody has a voice at the table. We are starting to see leaders do things that they would not have done before.”
The program also led to the increased adoption of key leadership behaviors. Those included encouraging team members to share thoughts and ideas, giving feedback to improve performance, delegating with necessary power and freedom, having courageous conversations, and communicating the reason behind actions.
What this success demonstrates is that large-scale, impactful leadership development is possible, setting a new standard for executive education.
As Paul Hunter, IMD’s Director of Programs and Learning Design, noted: “For years, organizations have struggled with the democratization of learning – often mentally accepting a trade-off that scale and speed are somehow incompatible with impact. The IMD-Bayer Sprint provides demonstrable proof that simultaneously delivering on scale, speed and impact can be achieved, opening the way for a new era in the deployment of learning at scale.”
Key takeaways
- Bayer faced challenges with a risk-averse, top-down culture that stifled innovation, necessitating a cultural shift to support better decision-making and performance.
- Partnering with IMD, Bayer implemented a “Sprint” program that upskilled 12,826 leaders globally, combining live and self-paced learning.
- The program emphasized psychological safety, coaching, and active performance management, all essential for fostering a supportive and effective leadership environment.
- With an 83% completion rate, the program significantly improved leadership skills, delivering a 66% return on investment and €23 million in annual savings.
- The Sprint program built trust, psychological safety, and collaboration, crucial for sustaining high-performing teams and long-term organizational success.
