Team Building: All For One and One For All

PharmaManufacturing.com

Clear communications, the right structure and makeup, and a focused agenda are essential.

By John Wilmoth, Alcon Laboratories, and Cynthia Palka, Future Map, Inc.

As pharmaceutical companies work to improve efficiency and product quality, teams are becoming more important than ever, and they are handling most of the work that goes on in manufacturing facilities. It’s not easy to build an effective team, or to get members to work together for a common goal, but it can be done.

This article examines what makes manufacturing teams effective, and discusses ways to improve and evaluate performance and build team spirit. It also explores some of the challenges inherent in building, or improving, a pharmaceutical manufacturing team, and how to address them.

Effective teams yield concrete bottom-line results, but equally important “intangible” benefits for their members, creating ongoing opportunities for empowerment and an atmosphere of continuous learning and improvement. An effective team is rewarding to work on, and the best teams create and foster an atmosphere of trust among members that enhances their ability to work and learn together.

Design the Team

Clear communications, proper team composition and structure, a focused agenda, and the coordination of team activities are prerequisites to an effective team. At the earliest stages of team formation, would-be members must understand why the team is being set up, so they can embrace a common goal.

In understanding what makes for a good team, it is essential to understand the differences between teams and “work groups,” which exist side by side [1] in most pharmaceutical manufacturing environments. Each has some of the characteristics of the other, but they are quite distinct. A work group is a set of individuals who work under the direction of a common manager or supervisor. The manager assigns tasks to the members of the group, and integrates the various pieces of work to ensure that the group reaches its goals. Individual members of the group do not necessarily have to collaborate with each other to complete their tasks.

By contrast, a team is a group of individuals with complementary skills connected by their commitment to a common goal and who depend on each other to complete their mission. Although team members look to their leader to provide resources and connect them to the rest of the organization, they are empowered to make decisions independently. For this reason, it is important to articulate how team members will work together and how they will be held accountable.

It’s also important to distinguish between the two most common types of teams in use today: self-managed work teams and project teams. Self-managed work teams handle particular ongoing tasks and are responsible for essentially the same work each day. They have some choice regarding how best to do the work and incentives to establish effective procedures and strive for continuous improvement. Project teams, on the other hand, are organized around specific, non-routine tasks and are often disbanded once the project is completed.

Forming a team is a good approach when the following conditions are present:

• No single individual has the right combination of knowledge, experience and perspective to do the job
• Individuals must work together with a high degree of interdependence
• The goal represents a challenge (recurring or unique)

A project team would be needed, for example, to handle manufacturing scale-up and/or validation runs for a new product formulation. A long lead time is required to charter this group, because once the decision is made to create the team, proper team composition is important to ensure that all necessary disciplines are represented. 

Find the Right Mix

In a manufacturing environment, cross-functional teams should include members from a variety of disciplines including Production, Quality Assurance, Package Engineering and Finance. If a project involves the introduction of a new product or process, the mix may change and disciplines such as R&D, process development, regulatory affairs, distribution, and global graphics may be more active in the discussions. 

Different backgrounds bring different perspectives, help ensure early buy-in, and ensure that key facets of the project are not overlooked. Cross-functional teams are typically led by a designated project manager who is responsible for coordinating the action of the team and, in many cases, is held accountable for the team's accomplishments. It is important to build flexibility into team design since the manufacturing process is extremely data-driven and can require disciplines to come in and go out—to join and leave the team—over time.

Great individuals can move forward, but great teams can move mountains!

There are several challenges in designing effective teams which are specific to a manufacturing environment. In a climate of increased FDA scrutiny, pharmaceutical companies are more aggressively recruiting highly experienced quality personnel. According to recent research, approximately 90 percent of top companies’ quality staff have more than five years of industry experience. [2]