Reflections of a Leader's Transformation - Interview with Alan McGilvray

Bayer CEO Alan McGilvray is about to embark on the second phase of his culture reform vision. Ahead of his presentation at the upcoming 5th Australian conference on Culture and Leadership, he generously agreed to give us an insight of the Bayer journey so far.

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Kate Walker (Human Synergistics): What was the situation that prompted you to do something? What need was identified?

Alan McGilvray (Bayer): There were two main reasons to take action.

Firstly the need to improve our business and secondly there was a need to address the results of an employee satisfaction survey conducted in 2000.

1. From the business perspective, it is clear that in Australia, we are a long way from developing markets. We have a moderate population growth and GDP growth is not coming from our traditional end user markets. All in all, stagnation is a concern, and for these reasons we needed to investigate other ways to improve our business.

2. In addition the Bayer Australia Employee Satisfaction Survey conducted in 2000 showed that we needed to address leadership issues and that our engagement score was less than satisfactory. Put simply, we needed a better culture.

KW: Can you give specific examples of the culture at Bayer Australia before your interventions?

AM: Bayer is a diverse company with many business divisions. Products and services range from well known brands such as Aspirin, to veterinary and diagnostic solutions and even plastics for the optical disc market. In the past we tended to have a silo mentality. Good practices were not being shared across the business. This could have been interpreted as a 'competitive' culture, but rather than provide any benefits it has been detrimental to the overall business. Communication was not open and transparent. The culture was more of a 'passive' rather than 'constructive' style. New ideas were sometimes stifled and work or business was often conducted in a conventional fashion.

KW: Can you describe Bayer's culture profile?

AM: Yes I can. We measured it using the Organisational Culture Inventory (OCI) developed by Human Synergistics.

Our results were not unlike the average results shown by other Australian companies. However, whilst the results may have been sufficient I wanted to lift our organisation above the "average category". Hence the decision to develop an intensive programme to change our culture. We measured our culture about two years ago and we are due to remeasure later this year. I envisage we will see great improvements, but we won't have reached our ideal culture yet. We have spent an enormous amount of time developing 'constructive' styles of behaviour in our organisation and we will continue to see progress over the coming years.

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