When Stephanie Hall founded Uptake Strategies in 2005, her goal was to be sustainable by being nice to clients, rather than focus solely on financial goals. She shares how she stayed ethical in the world of big pharma.
As an ambitious graduate in her 20s working for a global company, Stephanie Hall was told by her line manager that she could lead a team on a project. He then took her to one side and stressed that if she really wanted to progress, to make sure she got all the credit when it was completed. “I felt deflated,” she recalls, “because that would have meant I would have to take advantage of my work colleagues.”
It’s a reason why Hall went on to found her own strat-up, Uptake Strategies, on strong values.
“Values guide our actions and behaviours, and the way our clients experience working with us. They allow each individual in our company to feel confident they are delivering an exceptional performance, which in turn enables our clients to do the same,” she explains.
“We have a bold vision to be a global force of growth for our clients and our people by delivering work that positively changes more patients’ lives. We see values as enabling us to do that.
“We have seven values which complement each other. We sat round the table - the team was much smaller then - and talked about what we stand for and defined the values together in a collaborative way. But then if they are to influence new employees joining the team as the company grows, each value needs a clear statement along the lines of ‘what we do’ and ‘what we don’t’ in terms of behaviours.
“Values have to be defined, not just stated because people have to be able to see what they actually mean if they are to be delivered in practice. We have over 100 people now - double the number a year ago – and values mean a company doesn’t lapse into what you could call negative practices when it is growing at pace.
“So each of the values has an explanation. For ‘kindness’, that reads ‘for us, it’s personal not transactional’. For ‘easy to work with’, it’s about ‘making the complex simple and always delivering’. ‘Challenge’ has the description ‘we offer constructive (the word highlighted by Uptake in bold) challenge that ignites ideas and change’.
“If we take ‘integrity’ for instance, while many businesses will also have that as a value, in the consulting space it’s essential. For us it addresses report confidentiality, that when we are talking to a prospective client we don’t reference work we have done for others, that we don’t gossip or vilify other organisations.”
“Our on-boarding journey when people join us is all around our values, our culture, because that’s what makes us a team,” Hall says. “We hire and recognise people across our business who demonstrate our seven behaviours and required skills.”
That last word is interesting. It takes values beyond behaviours and into the realm of defining whether someone has the skillset to be able to apply the values in the first place. One of the values, ‘intelligence’ extrapolates to ‘we solve problems with a blend of theoretical, emotional, and practical intelligence’.
“What is also mission-critical,” maintains Hall, “is that senior appointments from outside need to be synchronised with your values, otherwise a whole department can be run by someone whose leadership behaviours are misaligned with the heart and soul of the organisation and dilutes the efficacy of your values.
“And unless values have real meaning, in a high growth environment they can get lost in the numbers. Values are not just about good practice but essential practice if a company is to attract and keep good stakeholders.
“In our life sciences and humanities degree graduate scheme, we instil that sense of responsibility that values bring, which will shape how they think and operate in their future careers.
“Graduates coming out of university now have changed fundamentally how they integrate work into their lives, and the way in which their personal beliefs will influence who they decide to work for. And that influence has spread across all generations. Someone who doesn’t enjoy working for you, or believes the company doesn’t live by its sense of purpose and values will vote with their feet.”
“The difference between values and process,” suggests Hall, “is that with values you are prepared to take tough decisions from a more holistic performance perspective.
“If someone’s behaviours aren’t aligned to your values, it should be apparent, and those values can’t just be applied internally. We had a marketing agency whose approach to business, it turned out, didn’t fit with our values of accountability and integrity of quality outputs, and as a consequence we weren’t comfortable with them; so regardless of the calibre of their work we decided to part ways, and actually it was a fairly easy decision - we couldn’t continue with them.”
“Getting all this right makes everyone proud of the company, and that’s a reason why we get out of bed in the morning.”
Hall thinks for values to be effective, a company has to demonstrate humility, and that is best achieved by having a lack of hierarchy.
“We have a hotdesk booking system and it wouldn’t be acceptable for example if a senior member of the team said to someone ‘oh, you’re at the desk I usually have’,” she explains. “Also at the end of a meeting, we don’t leave it to a junior member of the team to take the cups out to the kitchen.
“How do you make values ‘live’ and how to course-correct them should be recognised as a core management skill.”
The pandemic provides an illustration of the ‘what we do – what we don’t ethos of Uptake. The CEO appeared in a spoof video about working at home to demonstrate that ‘we don’t’ with laundry in full view, the doorbell jangling, a dog barking, and not having all the information required for the meeting to hand.
“Clients want to work with happy, successful, nice people who work effectively together,” observes Hall. “That doesn’t come from a culture of being primarily financially driven, because if a company gets everything right in terms of living its values, then it will have a greater opportunity to achieve financial success.
“If we had focused primarily on financial goals, could we have grown faster? Possibly, but then our goal wasn’t to make money in the quickest possible time, because that approach to growth is less likely to result in a sustainable business - and what impact would that have on our mission, our legacy?”