An HR executive shares his thoughts on managing culture and employee experience during rapid organizational growth
Few organizations experience a “growth spurt” at 150 years old, but that is exactly what Eli Lilly and Company, and subsequently its Canada affiliate, Lilly Canada, are experiencing today. Growth does not always mean adding large numbers of employees. It can also mean expanding an organization’s capabilities, bringing together new areas of expertise, and helping employees adapt to new ways of working. For HR leaders, this raises an important question: How do you build the capabilities an organization needs while protecting the culture and employee experience that has contributed to its success?
Growth is not only about numbers; it’s about integrating experience
Despite more than 150 years of history, Lilly believes its legacy is defined not by what it has achieved, but by what it does next. This forward-looking mindset globally has helped drive a robust research and development pipeline, as well as acquisitions that expand both scientific capabilities and talent. As the global Lilly organization expands its pipeline and capabilities, HR teams at affiliates around the world are tasked with helping employees respond to the resulting changes in expertise, collaboration, and ways of working. The challenge is not simply adding employees. It is creating conditions where new talent, existing employees, and acquired expertise can learn from each other and thrive together.
What acquisitions can teach HR about organizational learning
When Lilly recently acquired POINT Biopharma in Canada, I observed that bringing together companies with different histories, structures, and ways of working requires more than aligning policies and processes. Striking a balance between preserving a strong company culture and embracing a different organization’s norms and values can create a healthy tension, but also one that offers opportunities for knowledge and learning in both directions. It’s not just one event. Not one orientation session. It’s an ongoing journey of leadership communications, town halls, networking opportunities, and a consistent reinforcement of company values and vision. It requires helping employees with clarity about how that expertise contributes to a broader mission. That integration of expertise is where HR plays a critical role.
Small decisions can have a big employee impact
Like any growth spurt, rapid expansion – whether that’s through recruitment, acquisition, enhancing capabilities, or changing roles – can bring growing pains. As an example, acquisitions are often viewed through a strategic lens, but it’s the individual details that come along with change that can be workload-intensive for HR departments. They can bring the challenge of integrating highly specialized talent while preserving the entrepreneurial mindset that helped drive innovation in the first place. For HR departments, it’s through hundreds of smaller decisions that directly affect employees that have a huge impact. These can include:
- Finding equivalencies in compensation structures.
- Educating employees on changes to benefits programs.
- Reclassifying positions within a new organizational structure.
The goal is to ensure that employees do not experience a negative impact while maintaining fairness across the broader organization. The secret ingredients? A dash of flexibility, a pinch of problem-solving, and an extra helping of empathy.
Building learning agility across the workforce
Managing growth spurts requires organizations to continuously adapt. When I joined Lilly Canada, it was possible for many employees to focus deeply on one particular product area. Today, our workforce may require employees to navigate a far broader portfolio, collaborate across more areas of expertise, and learn new systems and technologies quickly. From an HR perspective, our focus is on training for adaptability, curiosity, learning agility, resilience, and change readiness.
Many of the skills that helped employees succeed 20 years ago remain important, but today's environment places increasing value on adaptability and continuous learning. Expanding capabilities can create new opportunities for employees, including exposure to new innovations, broader career paths, and a wider range of experiences. Change can also create an opportunity to reconsider processes that may carry unnecessary administrative burden, to allow for more focus on what matters.
Take home: keep the focus on the people
Whether change, or a “growth spurt,” is driven by acquisition, evolving capabilities, a changing portfolio, or new technology, HR plays an important role in helping employees navigate the waters and understand what it means for them personally. The true challenge is ensuring organizational growth never outpaces the employee experience. It’s about creating spaces for knowledge to be shared, for learning to have time to move across the organization, and, above all, to ensure every individual feels connected with the broader purpose of the organization.
Francois Gilbert is Vice President of Human Resources at Lilly Canada in Toronto.
