Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2017 - 25

C A S E S T U D Y : B AY E R

✓

✘

MAIN ADVANTAGES

MAIN DISADVANTAGES

✓ Diversity of ideas and inputs

✘ Differences in culture and

✓ Ability to access additional resource

decision-making, leading to
inefficiencies

(money, capacities, expertise)

✘ Different time horizons and priorities

✓ Reduction in error rate

✘ Difficulty of adapting established

✓ Better management of risk

processes to partner needs

✘ Capacity and resource constraints
Figure 2

Building Bayer's Alliance Management and
Alliance Practitioner Capability
In March 2016, Bayer received ASAP's annual Alliance
Program Excellence Award. As rewarding as that was,
given the importance of partnerships to Bayer's success,
Bayer's leadership and alliance team believed it had the
opportunity to go even further to enhance its partnering capability.
In the midst of broader initiatives to build its overall organizational partnering capability, Bayer decided to work
with Vantage Partners in 2016 to build up the partnering
capabilities of its individual alliance practitioners. The
goal was to develop the requisite skills and competencies
for effective partnering across all those working on alliances at Bayer (not just alliance managers).
Up until last year, Bayer's leadership believed that welltrained and generally effective team members would be
equally effective when staffed to alliances. For this reason, there was not an emphasis on identifying a different
set of skills for alliance effectiveness. Despite the presence
of core skills related to partnering in existing job competency sets (e.g., communication, leadership, managing
complexity), seasoned and senior people at Bayer, when
staffed to alliances, found the responsibilities of partnerships very demanding. Over time, however, individuals

staffed to alliances became more capable, and these individuals would then model best practices for others
struggling on their teams. There seemed to be an opportunity to help people become successful partners more
quickly, and this insight prompted a renewed attempt to
identify the specific skills that, though often not considered a priority in a general business setting, would be
critical in the partnering context. This led Bayer to work
with Vantage Partners to develop a partnering capability
model that describes essential partnering behaviors
(which are related to, but distinct from, general management skills) along with a development pathway. This
program will be rolled out to all individuals involved in
alliances across key departments in the coming months.

Bayer's Journey to Improve the Partnering
Capabilities of All Alliance Practitioners
(see Figure 3)
Step 1: Identify critical partnering skills and organizational capability gaps
The first step that Bayer and Vantage undertook was to
conduct a survey to better identify what employees at
Bayer saw as the most important skills for effective
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2017

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