The Corporate Partnership Programme in Action: Roche Courageous Conversations

In 2021 we organised two sessions for Genentech, a subsidiary of our Corporate Partner Roche, around the topic of ‘Courageous Conversations’, with Professor Mark de Rond from the Judge Business School. The first took place in June and the second in November, and focused on how best to navigate communication in the post-pandemic world.

In 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic had been going on for almost a year, but many employees still faced an uncertain return to the workplace, along with a myriad of other personal, social and working challenges. In view of this, our William Pitt Fellow for Roche, Dr Rav Seeruthun, came to us seeking to explore how Genentech could best support its staff through this period of prolonged remote working. Rav had recently moved to Genentech and this was his first activity with us in this capacity.

Rav recognised that, although employees had shown resilience, fortitude and demonstrated impressive problem-solving throughout the pandemic, they were also under extreme stress.

This request developed into an idea for a conversation between Rav and Professor Mark de Rond, Professor of Organisational Ethnography at the Judge Business School, about emotional intelligence in a virtual world. In particular, Rav wanted to look at what things effective teams do differently when working virtually and how to have difficult conversations within virtual teams, drawing on Mark’s decade of experience in mediation as well as 15 years working with teams in corporate life and beyond. Rav hoped to give Genentech staff space through our session to think about how they interact in a digital world, as well as provide tangible practise areas.

Mark had recently held a webinar addressing the topic of how to have “Courageous” conversations, as part of as part of the Cambridge Judge Business School’s webinar series ‘What’s Next? How to Survive and Thrive in a Post-Covid-19 World’. The first of these sessions with Genentech built directly on this, covering ‘Courageous Conversations’ as a whole.

Rav introduced Mark as the speaker, with the question: how do we have courageous conversations? Mark presented three challenges:

• how can we prevent such conversations from needing to take place?
• how do we best prepare ourselves for them if they must take place?
• and when they do, what evidence-based practices can help us ensure they have the best chance of succeeding?

Mark explained that over Zoom we must work harder to provide context for others, without the same body language cues we might have in person. Checking in with yourself and your colleagues about how you are feeling can be an effective way of mitigating conflict, and he stressed the importance of continuing to take this approach when facing difficult conversations. This session overall stressed the importance of continued engagement, while also giving yourself and others the benefit of the doubt. Mark’s talk was then followed by a spotlight Q&A.

This was followed by a second, more specialised session in November, which took the form of a panel discussion, representing different groups with a diversity of background and experience at Genentech. This followed up on some of the ideas introduced in the first session by focusing on: what do effective negotiators do differently?

The panel was made up of Rav, Mark, and three Genentech employees: Jiji John, a recent joiner with experience negotiating with Genentech from the outside; Nikheel Kolatkar, lead of scientific operations at Genentech with experience across different parts of the company; and Dean Alford, with over two decades of experience in customer-facing roles at Genentech.

Mark introduced a nine-step negotiation framework. For example, he stressed the importance of coming to a negotiation with ‘walk away’ possibilities – in case no agreement can be reached, an effective alternative gives you more bargaining power. This was summarised by Nik with the mantra to ‘embrace your BATNA’ (your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement). Other important methods included maintaining awareness of what it is that motivates us to negotiate in the first place and ensuring that this is the basis for any agreement. The legitimacy of any negotiation must also be considered, by examining options against external criteria for fairness, such as industry standards or precedent.

Together, these two sessions addressed the problems posed by the ‘new normal’ of working virtually, in an uncertain world. In this context, how do we recreate the emotional connectivity that we have face to face? Together the sessions had almost 300 attendees, demonstrating the high engagement of the Genentech audience, and the effectiveness of such sessions for fostering corporate community.

Reflecting on the sessions, and on Roche’s wider relationship with Pembroke, Rav commented that “the Corporate partnership between Pembroke and Roche/Genentech allows us to unlock the potential of a collaborative ecosystem outside of our usual networks. By staying curious and partnering with world leading academics we all further our societal goals”.