When it comes to creating a vision to lead by, building a culture and supporting a team’s career development, Takeda leaders know what they’re doing.
Being passionate about leadership and what you do helps too, said Head of Enterprise Data Barabara Latulippe.
“To drive transformation in a digital age, it’s important for me to lead with passion and ensure our vision is aligned with how each team member can contribute in their role,” Latulippe said.
Built In spoke with Latulippe about how leadership builds culture and vision and how that’s crucial to the work Takeda does. Read on to discover the exciting projects the team is working on and some of the company’s open roles.
What’s your vision for leading your team?
My vision is to provide Takeda with trusted, connected and converged data that is easily, responsibly and readily available to accelerate business insight.
This vision provides a cohesive and compelling picture of where we need to grow as an organization in order to achieve our data and AI ambitions at Takeda. Since I have recently joined, it’s essential to develop a strategy that enables the business to leverage the power of AI to transform the way we engage with our employees, patients, and healthcare providers — and communicate that strategy.
Having clear goals on how to construct a data marketplace, how to offer data science as a service and how to build a modern data platform ensures each team player knows how to engage and contribute to the achievement of our vision. Communication is continuous, and multiple channels — coffee chats, town halls, newsletters and Yammer — are employed to create a targeted experience for the members of the team.
How do you build team culture? Why is that important for the work that you do?
Innovation and execution are at the heart of what we do. As such, I need a high-performing team that thrives on challenges. It’s a team of explorers, on the frontier of technology — seeking to accelerate value generation across Takeda.
In order to succeed we have a culture of trust, collaboration and support for each other. For example, we leverage our XD Labs to conduct workshops in a design thinking session where we engage in challenging discussions to address what isn’t working while focusing on how to get a better solution. This illustrates the importance of trust across leadership and of being transparent in building our relationships.
We leverage modern communication and collaboration tools; I also have an open-door policy and engage in several skip-level meetings to get a pulse on the team’s sentiment. Celebrating success, recognizing wins and communicating accomplishments is vital for our team.
Celebrating success, recognizing wins and communicating accomplishments is vital for our team.”
How do you help your team members grow their careers?
Our data and analytics practice has so many diverse areas of expertise, growing opportunities and emerging technologies that fostering collaboration across teams is essential.
We built cross-functional pods, championed an exchange program between the business and data, digital and technology resources for a six-month rotation and created opportunities among several internal sites for on-demand training, as well. This enables development to be self-paced and explore various competencies such as data science, program management, data engineering and architecture.
Fostering a growth mindset often requires personal growth and feedback between leaders and their employees to set a clear path for new opportunities and advancement. I enjoy sending articles and doing coffee chats with my extended global team to provoke new ways of thinking.
What is something exciting that you are currently working on with your team?
My team’s most exciting project right now is the development and deployment of the Takeda Data Marketplace. We are pursuing a self-service model connecting data producers and consumers that allows you to select products and services. Think of shopping in a grocery store; instead of groceries you can select data sets, bundle them in your shopping cart and away you go with self-service analytics and AI.
Ease of use for our business partners is first and foremost. Driving collaboration and transparency across multiple team members to deliver this product ensures we capture diverse points of view early on. My style is to deliver the vision and empower the team to collectively discuss ideas, try approaches and take ownership of their deliverables. It’s always exciting to see the team’s energy, to support them with removing roadblocks and to foster a fail-fast approach as part of the innovation process.
What is the employee value proposition for those thinking about joining Takeda?
The primary reason my team members and I joined Takeda is the opportunity to impact patients’ lives every day. I frequently start my town halls with a patient story or video to remind us how important our work is.
We have an inspirational digital, data and technology leader who truly encourages me to think big, be visionary, disrupt the norm and be ready for the future. With the volume of healthcare data continuing to grow exponentially, the opportunity to leverage data for AI, machine learning and advanced analytics is huge. This provides a great opportunity for growth and advancement in at least two dimensions: the practices within data and analytics on our modern data platform and the worldwide regions of the company.
We’re by definition a very diverse global team — this is the core of our power. We value and cherish our environment of trust and open collaboration. We recently launched two campaigns that provide challenges and opportunities for the team. The first is “BrightIdeas” which will build a pipeline of business cases that can leverage AI. The second is “#DataInfluencers” which will promote knowledge sharing across our data and AI citizens in the company.
