How an HR outsider became Lilly Canada’s Associate VP of HR
Francois Gilbert didn’t officially take on an HR role until a couple of years ago, but he believes it started indirectly a few years earlier. Due to a natural disaster, he was thrown into the deep end when it came to balancing business and people goals during a time of crisis.
Gilbert — now the Associate Vice President of HR for pharmaceutical company Lilly Canada in Toronto — became the general manager of Lilly’s affiliate in Puerto Rico in 2018 – soon after Hurricane Maria devasted the island territory in 2017.
“I started in Puerto Rico just a few months after the hurricane as a new leader in a new culture, where the whole group just went through this dramatic event,” says Gilbert. “Very quickly, it put things in perspective, and you realize that you can have the best strategic plan, you can have the best execution metrics and trackers, but at the core, what will make you successful is connecting with a team, building trust and empowerment, making sure that you have good two-way communication, and that you support their well-being and engagement.”
Gilbert believes that experience is part of why he became successful in that position and later as an HR leader.
“I think I lead more through relationships, connecting and engaging with people more than being the best executioner of strategies, and it became very visible in that situation,” he says. “I needed to put my efforts towards really inspiring and supporting the team, building on small incremental wins and success because, as we were rebuilding the island, we were also rebuilding our business and the two had to go hand-in-hand.”
Rebuilding the business and the workforce’s resilience
The company couldn’t focus on building the business and the use of its products without focusing on rebuilding resilience and a positive mindset with its workforce – who “just had maybe the most dramatic event of their lives,” says Gilbert.
And so, after spending two years in Puerto Rico as a general manager — “I had human resources reporting to me, so that's where I put the start of my HR career,” he says — Gilbert started having conversations with his mentor that HR was something he’d like to do full-time.
It was an interest stemming from his passion for continuous learning and different experiences, which has been a thread throughout his career, including nearly two decades with Lilly.
“I'm a scientist who started in labs with a passion for neuroscience, who eventually started an MBA to get more of a business perspective, and when I joined Lilly I started transitioning to people leadership with external assignments [such as Puerto Rico] and then landing here now in HR,” says Gilbert. “Some people say I have the fear of missing out and that might be true — if I get asked, ‘Have you ever thought about working in this?’, my usual reaction would be, ‘I'd love to work in that field one day, it looks super interesting.’
“That's what led me to being the general manager in Puerto Rico, that's what led me to come back to Canada and our largest commercial division, and that's what led me to say I'd love to work in HR,” he adds. “Curiosity and passion for different experiences is my foundation.”
‘The business of HR is the business’
Gilbert’s perspective on the evolution of HR is shaped by both his scientific background and his business experience, and he observes that the HR role has been evolving quickly, both in Canada and at the international level.
“Maybe the biggest piece is HR moving from being perceived or known as a process-driven type of function towards way more of a strategic function — our global HR leader says the business of HR is the business, and is essentially deeply involved with all of the key processes.”
He agrees that HR is now at the heart of business strategy.
“Sometimes I get old colleagues asking me, ‘Don't you miss the business now that you're in HR?' and I say I don't miss the business at all, because I’m part of every relevant business conversation. So I’m always making sure that everything that we do with strategic workforce planning is aligned with business goals, challenges, and opportunities”
Collaboration with global affiliates
Lilly Canada’s HR team operates within a global organization and Gilbert sees this as an opportunity for two-way learning and innovation. His Canadian team collaborates with divisions in Europe, Asia, South America, and elsewhere, creating a two-way exchange with his team contributing ideas and strategies with other affiliates and others sharing learnings with his team. The organization’s new initiatives and tools are shared on a global stage, as are talent-sharing programs, he says.
“There are places where I would say we [Canada] clearly lead, and we have a few local initiatives that created so much curiosity in the global organization that they were replicated in many places — for example, what we do in terms of our of our onboarding program,” says Gilbert. “Lots of effort is put on recruiting, but you want to make sure that you set the right foundation [with new employees], so you talk openly about the mission, our purpose, and our values — it helps to close that loop with the recruiting team.”
Gilbert acknowledges the external scrutiny faced by the pharmaceutical sector, but he stresses the importance of focusing on the organization’s mission and culture.
“There's so much being discussed in the media these days and I understand how it can become a distraction,” he says. “The way that we approach it is we really focus on what we can control and what our mission is, so you're trying to work and isolate that noise if possible — we're lucky we have a strong local leadership and for us it's clear what our mission is, and we’re committed to having an engaged workforce, developing our talents, and having a strong local culture.”
Shared experiences, functions
With his experience in different roles — and dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane — Gilbert believes that HR shouldn’t be viewed as an isolated function.
“Now with the integration of HR with so many other functions, I think we're seeing more people like me who started in research and commercial and I’m now in HR, and we have HR people transitioning to becoming amazing commercial leaders,” he says. “The old way of thinking that HR is where you start and that's where you stay, that has to change because there's so much more that you can gain in insights and experiences and bring it back to HR, or take what you learned in HR and bring it to a different function.”
