The level of self
Inquiring at the level of the self or intra-personal is to assume that the behaviour is primarily a function of the individual’s style, personality or nature.
Relatedness with self.
When we inquire at the intrapersonal level we focus on relatedness with self. In doing so, we do not focus on processes that occur outside or with others. Instead, emphasis is placed on an individual’s traits or behaviours, personality, knowledge and skills. Deepening inquiring at this level also means paying attention to ego defenses, ego ideals, and various needs and pulls driving an individual.
The obstacles to working with this level.
Inquiring at this level of individual explanations predominate organisational life - that is, in most cases, the first explanation articulated is personal - an incompetent boss, subordinate or peer. And even if there is a complaint about the system, we tend to hold a specific person responsible for the system’s failure. The truth however is that, a single explanation can never account for events in organisations. And that is because individuals are embedded in groups, departments, organisational cultures and larger systems, and examination and understanding through the other four levels is needed. Only after inquiring across those other levels, we can come to a conclusion that the individual level could be the single or most compelling source of challenge. And if so, removal or behavioural modification of the individual involved may improve the situation at hand.
Improving the situation by working with this level.
The intrapersonal level of inquiry allows a number of possible types of action in an organisational context. Most common are two broad approaches - removal of the individual from the situation, or changing of the individual’s behaviour through coaching, training, counselling or educating.
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The power of early years
Daniel Vasella is a Swiss medical doctor, author, and executive who served as CEO and chairman of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis AG, the world's fifth largest drug company. Vasella is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004, Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people, and he was chosen as the Most Influential European Business Leader of the Last 25 Years by the readers of the Financial Times. Vasella’s life emerged from extreme challenges in his youth to reach the pinnacle of the global pharmaceutical industry, a trajectory that illustrated the trials many leaders have to go through on their journeys to come into their potential as leaders at the highest level.
Vasella was born in 1953 to a modest family in Fribourg, Switzerland. His father was a history professor at the local university, and his mother was a housewife. His desire to become a doctor began during his childhood, which was marked by several tragedies. His first recollections were of a hospital where he was admitted at age four when he suffered from food poisoning. Falling ill with asthma at age five, he was sent alone to the mountains of eastern Switzerland for two summers. He found the four-month separations from his parents especially difficult because his caretaker had an alcohol problem and was unresponsive to his needs. At eight years old, he contracted TB and meningitis and spent nearly a year in hospitals. Lonely and homesick, he suffered a great deal that year, as his parents rarely visited him. Later in his life, he still recalled the pain and fear when the nurses held him down during the lumbar punctures to prevent him from moving. One day, a new physician arrived and took time to explain each step of the procedure. Vasella asked him whether he could hold a nurse’s hand rather than being held down. “The amazing thing is that this time the procedure didn’t hurt,” Vasella recalled. “Afterward, the doctor asked me, ‘How was that?’ I reached up and gave him a big hug. Such human gestures of forgiveness, caring, and compassion made a deep impression…” on Vasella and on the kind of person he wanted to become. These early years of medical problems and human experiences of vulnerability and fragility gradually fired up and shaped his passion to become a physician.
Reframing and rewriting life story in a quest to help others
Throughout his early years, Vasella’s life continued to be unsettled. When he was ten, his 18-year-old sister passed away after suffering from cancer for two years. Three years later, he lost his father during a surgery. To support the family, his mother went to work in a distant town and came home only once every three weeks. Left to himself, he and his friends held beer parties and got into frequent fights. This lasted for three years until he met his first girlfriend, whose affection changed his life.
At 20, Vasella entered medical school, later graduating with honors. During medical school, he sought out psychotherapy so he could come to terms with his early experiences and stop feeling like a victim. Through analysis, he reframed his life story and realized that he wanted to help a wider range of people than he could as an individual practitioner.
Developing the capability to pursue the quest
Upon completion of his residency, he applied to become chief physician at the University of Zurich; however, the search committee considered him too young for the position. Disappointed but not surprised, Vasella decided to use his abilities to increase his impact on medicine. At that time, he had a growing fascination with finance and business. He talked with the head of the pharmaceutical division of Sandoz, who offered him the opportunity to join the company’s U.S. affiliate. In his five years in the United States, Vasella flourished in the stimulating environment, first as a sales representative and later as a product manager, and advanced rapidly through the Sandoz marketing organization.
When Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy in 1996, Vasella was named CEO of the combined companies, now called Novartis, despite his young age and limited experience. Once in the CEO’s role, Vasella blossomed as a leader. To meet a broader range of customer needs—and better insulate the company—Vasella led the shift from a prescription-drug-based business to a diversified portfolio of health care products. This major transformation required a much more complex organization. For Vasella, leading change started with a clear sense of purpose at the top. He had a series of early discussions with a small group of senior managers to establish the company’s vision and objectives. The chief goal—“to discover, develop, and bring to patients better medicines again and again”—spoke directly to the challenge of broadening the company’s offerings. To achieve it, Vasella increased spending on research and development during his tenure.
In those meetings, he also clearly spelled out his expectations of others.
First and foremost, he needed employees to be flexible. As a growing company developing new medicines, Novartis would face challenges no one could anticipate, and the team would have to roll with whatever issues came up. And employees had to be accountable and act in the customers’ interests.
Second, to facilitate the above, Vasella set up clear metrics for gauging performance and ensuring quality across the company’s increasingly diverse units and product groups. As Novartis grew, he knew, more people would need to take charge, and a good performance management system would help keep employees focused on the right things. “You also have to make it clear what you won’t tolerate,” he says. “I will not tolerate bribing. I will not tolerate bad stories internally.”
Third, because Vasella believed that collaboration and alignment across divisions could not be forced in a growing company, he decentralized decision making to empower people to do what was best for their own units. He felt that this allowed teams to move faster and to think and act more creatively. “My view was to focus on the outside—on the competition and the customers,” he says. “Don’t get inhibited or slow down because of concerns about whether you’re behaving in a collaborative way with people you don’t need to collaborate with for your results.”
Fourth, as the new practices were implemented, Novartis employees became more customer-centric and performance-minded at the same time. “First you have to deliver to your customers what they hope for [better medicines and vaccines],” Vasella says, “and then you can ask for a return for what you deliver.” With each organizational change he made, he realized that the company’s culture was starting to match the vision he’d outlined in his early meetings with senior executives.
Vasella had envisioned the opportunity to build a great global health care company that could help people through lifesaving new drugs, such as Gleevec, which proved to be highly effective for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia. Drawing on the physician role models of his youth, he gradually built an entirely new Novartis culture centered on compassion, competition, accountability, and collaboration. These moves established Novartis as a giant in the industry and Vasella as a compassionate leader.
