Pharma Voice

Conflict management in pharmaceutical industry

In the third and concluding part of this series, Dr B Philip Ashok, Vice President-Quality, Star Drugs and Research Labs, Tamil Nadu, India, Dr S S Murugan, Scientific Director, RCC Laboratories India, Hyderabad, India give models arising from the conflict situation between pharma managements and end with a QA perspective

The conflicts arising due to the four factors mentioned in the previous part (namely: timelines, communication, resources, training) have to be managed and resolved. These points of conflicts will not fall into the interpersonal or intrapersonal conflicts, but, these are called 'substantive conflicts' which means in a way conflicts over goals, values or methods.

The models arising from displayed in the figure are as follows:

1,10 (Quality): In such a distribution, the quality goals are given paramount importance and the business sense takes a back seat. Here, the achieved quality goals have not been converted into business and hence not an ideal scenario. Here, again the conflict will be very high, but, this is a not a scenario in which you find many companies.

10,1 (Business): In such a distribution, the business goals are given paramount importance and the quality takes a back seat, here the achieved business goals will be short term and this means the business management may be working for personal gains (or) short term financial gains. Here, the conflict will be very high and the four points of conflicts should be seriously attended to and constant attention should be paid to achieve success.

10,10: This is the ideal scenario and the conflict management should be such that it targets to reach this level where the quality is given equal importance coupled with a good business strategy such that both there are no conflicts and the organisation is set to achieve long term goals. This is a level that should be always the target even though achieving it may not be practical. Here, the concentration of management on both business and quality, is such that there will little need for conflict management.

8, 8: This is a practically achievable, sustainable and optimum level which would yield steady long term business gains with a very good reputation and good will. But, certainly this would take a lot of effort, putting up with temporary losses, coordination from the management and the quality unit in tandem. But, once this level is reached, the business will stand to gain and the company would by then have gained dedicated loyal employees, a good team so that all further tasks and targets would be achieved easily and the success rate is certain to increase year by year. To achieve this level, the management should have sufficient focus on managing the conflict by using the four major conflict points (timelines, communication, resources, training) discussed in detail.

5,5: This is in practice in most companies and such companies should ensure that they take enough steps to move up as moving down from this level may prove detrimental and may end in loss of reputation and business in the long run. Even to maintain this level, managements have to consistently work on the conflict points.

Between 5, 5 and 8, 8: Any level between the two points are desirable and the business managements would do well to focus on conflict management to maintain this level and strive to move forward constantly.

Approach of QA professionals

Due to the pressure from the regulators, competition and the complicated product and market mix, QA professionals have started to focus only on the success of audits, which is a part of their performance reviews and have started to take a tougher approach which in our opinion yields only short term results for the company as the commitment from the different departments and teams are lacking in such an approach. Also, the QA professionals should learn to be good managers in order to reduce the conflicts or avoid conflicting situations.

This will be better understood under the five points discussed below. The pre-requisites for a QA professional for effective functioning with minimum conflicts can be understood from these 5 points which can give rise to conflicts.

• Audit phobia
• People Management skills
• Commitment Vs Rebellion
• Understanding Vs Autocratic
• Assertion Vs Arrogant

Audit phobia

Dr B Philip Ashok is Vice President-Quality, Star Drugs and Research Labs, Tamil Nadu, India. He can be contacted at bphilip_ashok@hotmail.com

Dr SS Murugan is Scientific Director, RCC Laboratories India, Hyderabad, India. He can be contacted at siva.murugan@rccltd.in

The QA professionals should not allow fear to set in before audits. Instead, calmly, meticulous planning should be done, should involve all the departments in the making the action plan and execution. The QA team should spread positive attitude and should exude confidence themselves prior to any audit. This will certainly help to overcome minor shortfalls and also help to gain the trust of the auditors. If fear is set in before the any audit, the experienced auditors can easily find out the discomfort in the team and will lose trust and confidence even though the non conformances would have been minor.

This is now becoming a prevalent problem and the QA professionals should avoid developing what we would term as ‘audit phobia’ which would only worsen the audit results and the post audit scenario and in no way help towards success.

Here, the conflict arises as the blame game starts, and everybody prepares to defend their respective department observations mainly in cases where the QA approach is found to be undesirable. This conflict can be managed by a simple and straight QA approach and by following a sincere Root cause analysis approach. QA managers should always strive for an unbiased and helpful approach as they work with every department unlike other professionals.

People management skills

The QA professionals should have people management skills and develop capability to build teams within QA and also between departments. If the QA professionals lack man management skills, their implementation effectiveness will be impacted indirectly and will be much lesser than those with such managerial skills. Also, they will not develop good relationship with all the departments which is essential to implement and maintain a good QMS.

Commitment Vs Rebellion

Managers with good people management skills as discussed above will certainly bring about lot of commitment within the team which will help the organisation to build stable teams and to achieve long term goals. The QA approach should never elicit rebellion which will affect the company in the longer run.

Understanding Vs Autocratic

QA Managers and staff should be understanding in their approach in the sense that they should try and understand the problems of every individual / department and then provide solutions and then help them while they are implementing instead of just sending a directive and giving a date for starting a practice. The understanding approach yields a much higher success rate than the autocratic approach.

Arrogance Vs Assertion

QA Managers and staff should never be arrogant in their approach and communication, but, when they are in the mode of implementing a major practice or corrective action, they have to ‘assertive’ and not arrogant. This makes a whole lot of difference to the whole situation and again slowly this assertive approach coupled with the other attributes discussed above will yield a greater and longer success rate.

Conclusion

The success of any company lies in how well the management of conflict between the quality units and management/operations is handled. We have tried to bring out the major points of conflicts which arise due to the approach of the business management (or) approach of the quality professionals. We hope the analysis would help in managing conflicts in a better way.

(Views expressed in this article are personal. The authors welcome feedback at bphilip_ashok@hotmail.com and siva.murugan@rccltd.in.)