Life Sciences Team Of Teams

A newly formed U.S.-based pharmaceutical executive team needed to move faster, build trust, clarify decision rights, and deliver multiple enterprise priorities at once.

Bright Arrow coached the team in the flow of real work, helping leaders strengthen alignment, resolve stalled dynamics, and use a Team of Teams model to accelerate execution.

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Background

A global pharmaceutical company’s U.S.-based executive team was newly formed following a reorganization.

The team faced several challenges at once. It was composed primarily of recently promoted functional leaders, which created gaps in direction, efficiency, trust, and candor.

The newest executive team member, brought in from outside the organization to lead the integration of a new product, was initially poorly received — a common pattern when a change agent enters an established system.

The team was also oversized, which made it harder to clarify who owned enterprise goals, who had decision rights, and how priorities should move across the organization.

At the same time, the team needed to solve significant enterprise challenges, including:

Hitting financial targets
Aligning to global leadership expectations while strengthening U.S. regional strategy
Innovating the organization through AI and other emerging technologies
Successfully integrating a new product
Addressing internal operational gaps that surfaced during the product launch
Preparing systems and functions that had not previously brought a similar product to market
Shifting the culture toward stronger performance accountability

The company had been working with another professional services firm but wanted a more specific, results-oriented coaching approach. The prior work pulled the team offline and focused heavily on conceptual coaching.

The pharmaceutical company turned to Bright Arrow for coaching “on the field” while the team delivered its actual work. This approach helped prevent unnecessary time and resource drain by coaching the team to build new ways of working while advancing its goals.

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Bright Arrow provided a six-month leadership team coaching engagement focused on helping the team clarify purpose, improve operating practices, strengthen accountability, and organize itself to deliver multiple enterprise priorities in parallel.

The work also surfaced pockets of interpersonal conflict that were slowing the broader team’s progress and needed to be addressed directly.

Leadership Team Coaching

Bright Arrow’s engagement focused on several core priorities:

Refining the team’s purpose
Improving team processes
Clarifying decision-making rights
Building stronger accountability
Strengthening trust and candor
Supporting enterprise-level thinking
Helping the team organize around multiple priorities without losing alignment

This work helped the team move beyond functional representation and begin operating more like an enterprise leadership team.

Discovery

The initial discovery phase created a deeper understanding of the team’s current reality, including challenges that had not previously been identified.

Discovery included:

Stakeholder interviews
Team member interviews
Review of team artifacts
Analysis of meeting agendas
Review of performance goals
Assessment of operating patterns and team dynamics

This phase identified:

The team’s top six challenges
The team’s top ten strengths
Patterns affecting decision-making, trust, and execution
Opportunities to improve how the team organized around enterprise priorities

Bright Arrow then helped the team begin working through its challenges systematically, starting with a refined team purpose statement.

These sessions helped the team:

Deliver against its Team of Teams goals
Address emerging roadblocks
Improve working rhythms
Strengthen team accountability
Practice more direct communication
Clarify decisions in real time
Receive private one-on-one coaching when needed to support the broader team agenda

This real-time coaching model helped the team learn, adjust, and improve while the work was underway.

The team also established:

New team norms
A centralized tool for setting and managing enterprise priorities
A before-action review process to anticipate likely challenges
A practice for applying lessons from prior experiences before launching new work

Team of Teams

To increase agility and move multiple enterprise priorities forward in parallel, Bright Arrow helped the broader executive team divide into smaller Team of Teams groups for four-month sprints.

These smaller teams allowed leaders to focus on distinct enterprise priorities while remaining connected to the broader leadership agenda.

Bright Arrow taught the team how to:

Form Team of Teams groups around specific priorities
Clarify each group’s charge and decision rights
Disband groups when the work was complete
Form new groups as emerging priorities required attention
Bring work back to the broader executive team for feedback, decisions, and alignment
Maintain visibility into progress, interdependencies, and roadblocks

The newest executive team member also received private coaching to improve internal traction, strengthen alignment, and support progress on personal and employee NPS-related goals.

Bi-Weekly Team Coaching

Bright Arrow provided ongoing bi-weekly coaching to support the full leadership team as it worked through real business priorities.

Executive Shift:

The engagement was not designed to take the team away from the work. It was designed to change how the team performed while doing the work.

The coaching engagement resulted in meaningful improvements in team dynamics, business performance, cohesion, and working practices.

Enhanced Team Dynamics

Leaders developed stronger working relationships, increased trust, and improved their ability to speak with candor.

A key example involved the relationship between two executives in sales and fulfillment. Healthy tension between these areas can be productive, but in this case the relationship had become dysfunctional and was widely known across the business.

Bright Arrow coached the two executives through the conflict and extended the work into the next layer of leadership to ensure the dynamic was addressed fully.

As the engagement progressed, the team also moved from functional thinking toward enterprise-wide thinking.

The team strengthened its ability to:

Name tension more directly
Work through conflict productively
Build trust across functions
Think beyond individual areas of responsibility
Stay focused on enterprise priorities
Hold one another accountable for shared outcomes

Improved Business Performance

The U.S. division delivered ahead of schedule, and sales numbers increased.

The former head of the North American division stated that it was “undeniable that Bright Arrow has figured out something really unique here” about how to work with leadership teams.

This reflected the value of coaching that stayed close to the business agenda and helped leaders improve performance while executing priority work.

Improved Team Cohesion

Within six months, 360 reviews of the newest executive team member improved significantly.

The business also made progress in maturing enabling systems and functions needed to support the product launch.

These improvements helped the new executive gain traction while the organization strengthened the internal capacity required for the launch to succeed.

Effective Working Practices

The team implemented new processes and tools that improved priority-setting, accountability, and coordination.

New working practices included:

A centralized tool for setting and managing enterprise priorities
Clearer processes for prioritization and reprioritization
Before-action reviews to anticipate challenges
Stronger team norms
More disciplined decision-making practices
Team of Teams groups to move multiple priorities forward in parallel
Regular return points to the broader executive team for feedback and decisions

The Team of Teams approach helped the broader leadership team stay connected to its values, priorities, and enterprise agenda while smaller groups advanced specific workstreams.

Executive Shift:

The team’s progress came from changing both relationships and operating practices.

Bright Arrow helped the pharmaceutical company’s leadership team move from early-stage friction and ambiguity into clearer alignment, stronger accountability, and more disciplined execution.

The engagement provided a results-oriented approach to leadership team coaching that stayed close to the team’s actual business priorities. Rather than coaching only to concepts, Bright Arrow helped the team practice new behaviors, solve live challenges, and build operating rhythms that supported measurable progress.

Through the engagement, the team was able to: