Hi!

Sometimes you hear about ambitious professional development initiatives and wonder how they actually pulled it off. This session at last month's Biopharma Comms Forum gave us the real story.

Amy Atwood, Takeda’s Vice President, U.S. and Global Corporate Communications, gave us a glimpse at their three-year journey to transform a global communications community—200+ communicators across 80+ countries in a highly matrixed organization— which included reassessing ways of working, comms frameworks, and talent investment.

The scope and intentionality around recruiting, developing, and retaining talent were particularly impressive: career development frameworks, custom training programs, success profiles for different levels, and tools for managers who lead communicators but aren't communicators themselves.

They focused first on asking what people needed, and then on building solutions around those insights. And what I found most encouraging is that the principles scale beautifully, regardless of team size or budget.

What Made Their Approach Work

• They started with real research. Before building anything, they surveyed their communicators and talked to their leaders, as well as leaders at companies they admired. You can do this with five people or 50; the insight often matters more than the sample size.
• Leadership championed it from day one. When the communications team made the case for investment, executives listened. The business case works whether you're asking for $10K or $100K.
• They leveraged internal expertise. Rather than hiring expensive consultants, their own experts created training modules.
• They built for their reality. Instead of adopting someone else's framework, they created tools that worked for their specific structure and challenges.

Your Starting Point (Whatever Your Resources)

• Create a simple skills assessment. Ask your team (even if it's just you) where they feel confident and where they want to grow. Build development around actual gaps, not assumed ones.
• Document your wins and lessons. Keep a shared document of successful campaigns, useful templates, and hard-learned insights. This becomes your institutional knowledge base.
• Partner with whoever handles people development. Whether that's HR, a chief of staff, or your CEO directly, we need allies who understand career growth frameworks.

The Bigger Picture Worth Your Attention

• Investment in communications development creates competitive advantage. Teams that grow their capabilities attract better talent and deliver stronger business impact, regardless of budget constraints.
• Your specific challenges are your strength. Small biotech faces different pressures than big pharma. Build development around navigating uncertainty, wearing multiple hats, and making every interaction count.
• Community becomes curriculum. Some of the best learning happens through peer connections, industry forums, and shared problem-solving. These cost time and intention, not necessarily budget.

What keeps resonating with me is how this conversation highlighted something we all recognize: we're incredibly good at developing everyone else's capabilities while neglecting our own.

The scale of resources matters less than the commitment to growth. Whether you're building a program for hundreds of people or developing yourself and one direct report, the fundamentals remain the same: understand the gaps, create targeted solutions, measure what works, and keep building.

Your team deserves the same level of strategic thinking you bring to every other business challenge. Start where you are, with what you have. The investment compounds faster than you think.

Thanks for being part of this community where we tackle these challenges together,

Lynnea