Driving operational scalability and growth: gritty leadership and unified culture at Qkine

Throughout this programme, Qkine has launched over 10 new products and was set to introduce 6 more over the next 2 months; all while successfully establishing 5+ key strategic industry partnerships, expanding the availability of growth factors globally.

The key identified programme objectives were:

1. Empower the Qkine Leadership Team to lead high-performing teams effectively – encouraging solidarity, togetherness, responsibility, ownership and effective and timely communication
2. Align priorities and recognise interdependencies, gain clarity around decision-making
3. Normalise pace and commercial mindset

“It currently feels like a gathering of team leaders rather than one team. There is too much problem-solving in the vertical teams so things drop through holes too often.”

“We have wonderful people in the team but assertiveness is sometimes shadowed by politeness – resulting in cautious sharing and a slower pace.”

RESULTS

• We have confidence in the robustness of the culture
• We have more impact faster together
• We harness our differences to scale quickly
• People feel as if they are one team
• Right people in the right roles, playing to strengths
• Communication and process step-ups 

“We extended our DAT programme to include the whole business because of the immediate impact of the curriculum. This helped consolidate the learning of the leadership team and started the process of creating a shared leadership language across the company. Horizon37 delivered an empowering curriculum and individual coaching to develop leadership behaviours at all levels in the business“ – Catherine Elton, CEO

Context: who is Qkine

Qkine is raising the standard in bioactive protein manufacturing and innovation through life science research tools. Based in Cambridge, their dynamic team is determinedly working to empower science, creating the technologies of the future.

As they moved into new premises, another milestone in their growth journey, we began partnering with them to deliver results-winning leadership as they meet new challenges and milestones.

Leadership Goals & Challenges

Based on the briefing and ambitions call, the top identified opportunities were:   

• Form a senior leadership team that owns strategy and plans; makes great decisions; and develops solutions – working brilliantly together to deliver the business goals and milestones
• Create a consistent strategy that drives correct prioritisation (with conviction) at all levels, and allows senior leaders to lead the business consistently together
• Set unambiguous, high yet realistic expectations for performance
• Make timely judgements and decisions on people
• Empower leaders, allowing individuals to play to strengths and personal styles to achieve results
• Get maximum value from diversity of expertise, thought and style in your team
• Create a culture that disaggregates genuine performance (e.g. great decision-making) from “brand” (e.g. a decisive manner)
• Maximise the value of the board – by making it easy for them to contribute that value efficiently

Solution: their leadership journey

We delivered our nine-month Discover Align and Transform programme over two phases to Qkine. Our collaboration began in June 2023 by engaging their leadership team to gather insights through the application of ScaleUp Institute endorsed HorizonMethod tools, alongside staff surveys, discovery coaching, board interviews, and observations of meetings. Armed with a comprehensive understanding of the business, we geared up for in-depth discussions with the executive team, sometimes challenging, to pinpoint priorities crucial for leveraging Qkine’s performance in the upcoming months.

We teamed up to cut down on the non-essentials because in today’s fast-paced world, you can’t do it all. Plus, we set up a 360 feedback system, custom-made for the Qkine leader, with input from the execs and our guidance.

Together, we enabled very focussed discussion on defined topics that we delivered through a series of specialist workshops with content curated especially for Qkine. 

The six HorizonMethod workshops engaged the team on several key leadership aspects. Their curriculum included the following workshops: Decision-making for the Leadership team, Organise and Deploy, My Leader Self, Impact-based Prioritisation, and Culture to Catalyse Growth – The team used this workshop to create alignment on shared values and revive them and presented their Menti findings at the annual Qkine Townhall event in April 2024. After listening to the Leadership Team, and how valuable they found the concise Decision-making frameworks, we decided to roll out a Decision Making 2.0 workshop for the wider team consisting of team leaders and aspiring managers, to create a shared language within the business.

“We have seen a transformative change in ownership, and the frameworks are now anchored within the business, which is helping to maintain a common aligned approach in a fast-moving phase of our growth” – Catherine Elton, CEO

The team’s learnings were… 

• A shared best-practices approach to decision-making, supported by the identification of key decision-making roles and application of a 4-step process, followed by clear communication of made decisions
• Clarity of roles, responsibilities, and delegation rights, paired with accountability techniques
• Everyone in the Leadership Team generated a sense of a clear purpose, recognising their key strengths, and increasing awareness of what people count on them for as a leader
• The mission-critical activities for delivering business results were identified, and de-prioritisation is celebrated
• Existent, excellent culture was solidified, and key aspects that will be needed in the next phase of scaling were consciously and deliberately chosen

“I’m more confident as a leader and feel the new knowledge has improved my ability to lead my team and mentor other people” – Luana

“I was very operational but now I’m able to use a more strategic leadership style to improve the performance across my department” – Andy

Impact and results

“This programme has been a massive transformational step forward”

“We have witnessed maturity and ownership uplifts, the brand is stronger and more established”

“Progress against all 5 transformational themes has been observed”

What’s next?

In the coming months, Qkine must maintain its focus on maintaining exceptional product quality, a core element of its value proposition, while sustainably scaling people and operations. The company is approaching another phase of scale-up and international expansion where the strong foundations and culture will be critical for execution at pace.

The leadership team reflected that the DAT programme has helped provide the tools to support:

• Further improving cross-functional collaboration and communication
• Consolidating recent learnings and proliferating leadership, integrating new leaders
• Ensuring consistent culture and performance language across the company and board

“I felt very safe throughout the programme – I was engaged, open and honest” – Dave

“The exceptional breadth of commercial experience and professionalism within the Horizon37 team provided insightful input and pragmatic interventions beyond our expectations when we started the DAT programme. We’ve seen a genuine transformative impact on performance and execution – thank you all” – Catherine

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Horizon37 designs and delivers leadership programmes for exec teams and individuals ready to step-up their leadership, enabling them to succeed in breaking new ground.

Get in touch to hear more and discover our programmes.