Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories, a $13-billion health-care manufacturer with 56,000 employee, has achieved double-digit growth in its annual earning per share for 27 years. To sustain that growth in a market that is rapidly changing, Abbott is further developing leadership among its top managers, stressing a capacity to set strategy, mobilize resources, and think long-term.

Abbott's Leadership Development Program (LDP) brings sets of 35 high-performing, high-potential directors and vice presidents together for three separate weeks scattered over nine months. Participants work at broadening their thinking, developing their strategies, and creating change in their operations. They study the leader's role and responsibilities at Abbott, they consider alternative leadership approaches, and they receive feedback on their own leadership style and impact.

Abbott executives, company consultants, and business faculty provide participants with both conceptual and practical models of leadership during the week-long seminars. Participants also "consult" with operating unit presidents on real cases within their businesses.

LDP participants also apply their leadership lessons in community service projects. This special program features stems from management's conviction that leadership increasingly requires a capacity to work across company, country, and cultural boundaries. Abbott leaders must be able to respond effectively to the needs of subordinates, teams, and customers rather than forcing solutions or requiring compliance. The community-service project is thus designed to place company managers in an environment where standard approaches to leadership often will not work, where positional authority carries no weight, and where understanding and adapting to the concerns of sometimes vastly diverse people means everything.

Each year, LDP identifies a community organization for partnering according to three criteria: (1) people differences - how dissimilar is the community group from LDP managers (the greater the difference, the better); (2) community need - can LDP participants address real needs of the community group, and (3) organizational compatibility - does the community group's staff appreciate the program's purpose and can its staff work well with program participants. Among the organizations with which the program has worked are a temporary residence for released convicts, a foster care home for hard-to-place teenagers, and a center for abused women and children.

Once the community organization has been selected, LDP participants initiate three rounds of contact with the organization and its clients. The first event entails volunteer labor and the others social engagement. LDP participants are usually uncomfortable with the experience at first, but they typically come to consider their experience invaluable for their own leadership development. They learn to appreciate differences in others and the need for alternative approaches to leadership. They are also reinforced in their commitment to Abbott's mission of ensuring that its managers serve the communities in which they live and work.

For more information about Abbott's Leadership Development Program, contact its program leaders, Don Kraft at don.kraft@abbott.com and Elaine Gern at elain.gern@abott.com. Information on Abbott Laboratories can be found at http://www.abbott.com/about/index.htm

From the Wharton Leadership Digest, July, 1999.