CASE: Walgreens Boots Alliance
Senior Director, Platform Solution Delivery
The Situation
We were approached to recruit a Senior Director, Solution Delivery for the Healthcare & Pharmacy Technology Platform of Walgreens, a business that we have been working with for 10+ years.
In recent years, Walgreens has made a significant effort to compete in the digital pharmacy landscape, a dynamic and evolving space characterised by a desire to provide customers with better access to healthcare products and services. This transformation had already begun, and the business was keen to going beyond the starting foundations towards a more integrated digital future.
A key part of this journey involved connecting the dots between engineering and the other parts of the business. To drive this forwards, the business was seeking a Senior Director, Solution Delivery to facilitate engagement and alignment across the organisation.
The Opportunity
Walgreens was looking to bring onboard an individual to deliver products in a meaningful way to connect with the customer. The business wanted someone that could see ‘the bigger picture’ and cut across functions to leverage the programme management and architecture teams.
The successful candidate would be someone who could contribute through questioning the existing ways of working and challenging their colleagues to better align the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, and to ensure that the organisation moved through its transformation in the most effective way.
Walgreens was also looking for someone who could plan, direct and oversee the execution of complex technology programmes ensuring outcomes, end to end organisational alignment, and data driven decision making.
What made this interesting?
We were running this search simultaneously with one for a Senior Director, Product Engineering in the same unit of the business. Director-level employees were already in place for both roles, but the division’s Software Technology Executive, and our main client for both searches, wanted to bring in Senior Director level leaders in these areas, so that he could afford to spend more time interacting with business stakeholders.
It was also exciting to work with the Pharmacy and Healthcare division, which is one of the most vital business units within Walgreens, with responsibility for key operations such as: dispensing pharmacy products, coordinating the pharmacy supply chain and communications, and overseeing pharmacy advisory services.
Towards the end of the search we were also told that Walgreens were making multiple hires for this role, which gave us the opportunity to potentially see multiple shortlisted candidates successfully find a new role.
What made this challenging?
An obvious challenge for us was working on two projects at once for Walgreens. This meant that we had to spread our focus evenly between both roles. This gave us twice the amount of candidates, interviews and stakeholders to manage.
In addition, due to the size and complexity of the business, and the importance of both roles to their digital transformation we had a lot of responsibility to deliver a world-class shortlist of candidates with the experience and credentials to deliver. We found that within other organisations, leaders with the level of responsibility that this role required (in terms of team size, budgets and scale of operations) sat at the VP level, increasing the challenge of finding a suitable leader at the Senior Director level.
Furthermore, the Solution Delivery title is not a widespread one, and the set of skills and responsibilities that made up the role were characterised in a number of different ways within different organisations. This made identifying the right individuals in the first instance particularly challenging.
The Digital Board Process
As a longstanding client of ours, we have had multiple searches to gather information on the organisational structure, culture and complexity at Walgreens. On the other hand, we had never worked directly with our main contact, the Software Technology Executive, before and therefore took our time, as always, to get to know his process and his vision for the Solution Delivery Role. We set up multiple stakeholder briefing calls to fully get to grips with the role.
Once we had completed these calls, we briefed our research team. From our calls, we focused in on three main criteria for this search:
Ability to see the bigger picture - someone to bring a fresh perspective and lateral thinking to the division’s various activities.
Positive disruption - a leader who would also contribute through questioning the existing ways of working and challenging their colleagues to better align the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.
Consumer healthcare experience – the role-holder needed to have a strong understanding of the healthcare industry to grasp the problems Walgreens was facing.
Using this criteria, our research team developed a list of targets. From this list, we set up multiple introductory calls with candidates to assess their interest in the role, their fit to brief, their past achievements and their cultural alignment.
From these calls, the next stage was to formally interview a selection of these candidates. Our CEO, Bryan MacDonald, conducted these interviews and shortlisted four candidates who met with the client.
Throughout the process, our research team continued to identify new candidates in case there were any issues with the shortlist.
Success Story
We successfully brought onboard two candidates who were an excellent match for the role.
The first candidate came across as a diligent and high-calibre leader, someone who could bring a fresh and engaging perspective to the organisation. Moreover, this candidate had a consultancy background which the client was very impressed with and wanted to bring ‘in-house’. This was an element that also made the role attractive for this candidate, as they were keen to bring their consulting skills to a singular organisation.
The second candidate was a bright and resilient leader with a wealth of pharmaceutical experience. They particularly excelled at connecting the dots between the business and technology, possessing a clear and effective communication style. This candidate was eager to take onboard a new challenge at Walgreens and work for a company where they felt they could grow as a leader.