Eli Lilly and Company (LLY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So we'll be recognizing a couple of folks -- peers at the recognition part at the very end. Please stay at the end of the program. First up for the program, we have Meredith Harper. Meredith is the VP and CISO at Eli Lilly and Company. Meredith, great to see you.

Great to see you as well. Thank you so much for having me.

How is the video feed? Can you hear me all right?

Yes. I can hear you well.

Excellent. We're in really unusual times. When the country shut down right around March of this -- earlier this year, we were at a summit in Orlando, actually with the 3 Florida SIM chapters, Southern, Mid and Tampa Bay SIM chapters. And specifically, I had this feeling. I said onstage, I said what we're going to walk through and go through today and into the future will be unprecedented in our professional history. And so what got you here today is going to be very different than what the kind of leading leadership skills you need, the kind of business skills you need, the kind of organization skills you need will be dramatically different from the next day on, we're into this now crisis, what, 7, 8 months' pandemic. What changed for you back, say, 8 months ago, from 8 months ago to now, Meredith?

Great question. Actually, what changed for us as an organization was just the external pressures that we were seeing our team members have to now juggle, that we didn't necessarily have that as a part of the equation before. Yes, we had team members with children. Yes, we had team members with parents that they were helping to care for. Yes, we had team members that were traversing their various communities, going about their daily lives and then coming into a physical place to carry out the business of Lilly. But when we got to about March 8, or 7 or 8 and the decision was made to move all of our team members home, that created an entirely different scenario in terms of what our team members now have to juggle. So they became instantly online teachers. They became instantly still caregivers for their parents but doing it in the same space where they're actually living in some instances. So all of those pressures that seemingly were external have now been brought into the work -- the new workplace. And now there's a juggle that's happening. How do we continue to drive for the mission of Lilly, continue to develop medicines for people around the world but also understand that our team members are now experiencing a level of stress that wasn't necessarily there before? So we had to start to think differently around the health and well-being of our team members and how to help create balance in those spaces.

And Meredith, you're a pretty large organization. Give us an idea of the scale and the kind of business Eli Lilly is in.

So Eli Lilly, life sciences organization. We're in drug development as well as medical device development, 34,000 team members around the world. Probably, I want to say 60% of those individuals are actually resident here in Indianapolis, Indiana. So we are heavily involved in the support for COVID as well, not only for our state, but also for the industry as a whole and for the communities as a whole. So we're playing our role there. A lot of moving pieces. We are in multiple countries. So there's jurisdictions that we have to deal with. And then also thinking about how has the crisis, the pandemic, not only impacted us in the U.S., but how is it impacting our team members that are sitting in other geographies as well? So this just wasn't an Indianapolis, U.S.-based issue. We were looking at this worldwide. How are our team members in China? How are they addressing this? How are we doing in France? I mean there's all these areas where we had to address that. So a very big company, a lot of moving pieces.

So thank you for the detailed answer. When you think about the whole idea of diversity and inclusion, how do you orientate yourself to diversity? And what's your approach?

So diversity, equity and inclusion has been a part of my brand for years. I feel that being a woman, specifically a black woman in this space, has been interesting for the last 27 years that I've been doing this and just paralleling the experience to be walking into my first real job out of college and being the second African-American ever hired for the company that I was working for. And so this was in the early '90s that I am now the second, kind of shocked me in that instance. But it's part of my brand and it's something that I continuously push, because as we have evolved as an industry, we have seen more women than, say, 25, 30 years ago. But we still have a diversity challenge and diversity in terms of race. I think we have a lot of work that we need to do there. I would love to say that I walk in a room and I'm no longer the unicorn. But I am because you don't typically see black women in these spaces. So I think that I try to make sure that that's part of my discussions, my leadership style. How am I opening up doors for underrepresented populations? How am I supporting women in the workplace, especially in tech? And then how am I working with my male allies to help sponsor and support women and minorities as they move into these spaces? I think we have to have a very different conversation than what we've been having prior to this. One, we need to be transparent and acknowledge that there's an issue. Two, we have to stop thinking about the simplistic ways of us to address diverse inclusion issues. Mentoring programs often wonderful, but we don't need any more of them. We don't need any more mentoring programs. What we need is access to roles and opportunity. And so we have to now start opening up those doors. And that's what I'm trying to push, not only at Lilly but also as I'm working in the community.

What does that look like, access to roles and opportunities? We've been working with a group out of New York, NPower, for a long time, working with kids in crisis between 18 and 23, kids in inner city looking for that opportunity, right, and/or Genesys Works, right, based in Houston.

So I think that there's 2 pieces to it. I think that there is the initial exposure that we owe it to various communities to expose them to the opportunities and possibilities of what a STEM career could be, right? So getting with the kids is great because I think you have to touch them earlier. We can't just start talking about women and minorities -- talking to women and minorities in their college age about coming into, say, security, right? We've got to start that much earlier. So I think having those programs that we could either support or manage, facilitate or whatever we can do to keep those going, I think that's important for us to do. I think the second part of that statement of what that looks like for me when I talk about access is if we are in a position where we have a role and we're recruiting for that role and we don't have a diverse candidate pool to pull from, how can we really say that we are focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion? So looking at those segments of our communities where we can find the talent, we have to go after that. So using an example, if we are looking for African-American talent and we're going to the University of Iowa, we probably won't find it. But if we're looking for that talent and we go to Florida A&M University or to North Carolina A&T or Howard, we will find it. So I think that we have to target our efforts in a different way to be able to have access and exposure to those talent pools that we don't typically see.

So where would you say Eli Lilly is in this whole progression or, let's call it, maturity of diversity?

I think Eli Lilly has done an amazing job. And I'm not saying that just because I'm biased and I work for them. But honestly, when I was looking at this opportunity with Lilly, I was also entertaining other opportunities as well. The deciding factor for me was the fact that Lilly was very clear on their diversity, equity and inclusion perspectives and what they're tangibly doing to be able to address those disparities, right? So they were talking to me about that as I was interviewing with them. And to me, that was the deciding factor. We have been really in the forefront lately, especially coming behind the George Floyd incident. Lilly has been very vocal, not only about giving our team members space -- safe spaces to have these conversations around racial injustice and social injustice and being able to do that as a company and as a team, we've been able to do that together, which is much different than what I've ever seen in my career. We've never really had honest conversations around race and diversity the way that we're having them now. So I appreciate Lilly's perspective on that. I think that our CEO, Dave Ricks, is modeling wonderful behavior in terms of what a good corporate citizen looks like as it relates to driving forth these discussions in the community. So there have been some commitments that Lilly has made. We have pledged $25 million towards social injustice causes, organizations like the National Urban League that needs help in funding and support to be able to break down some of those barriers. We've also donated and offered up 25,000 volunteer hours of team members' time and talent in all of that for them to be able to get in the streets and really start to help our community have these discussions in a better way.

Final kind of comment, Meredith, great story. What is it like for you leading in these challenging times?

I think it stressed all of us. I think that -- I would want to say that I have always been a fairly engaged leader with my team, not micromanaging but a very engaged leader. But it's allowed me to lean in a little bit more. It's allowed me to think about not only the way that my team members deliver, which they have been doing at an enormous rate, which I'm happy about, but I'm also concerned about the impact that that's having on them. So I'm happy to think more about well-being in balance than I can say we were probably thinking about a year ago because again those external pressures are now being brought into our new workplaces. So it's changed me in that regard. I think that I listen a little bit more now and want to hear people's lived experiences around certain topics that we haven't been used to discussing in the workplace. So it's changed the way that I've interacted. I've always been active with my team, but it's changed the way that I've done it.

Meredith, thanks so much for coming on the program today and coming to Houston with us. And you've really given a great gift of thought leadership to our Houston friends.

Thank you. I appreciate you, and thank you for having you today.

This has been excellent. I'd love to interview you for my new book, book 7. And we have a Women in Technology Summit coming up. I'll have [ Melissa Moore ] in my team reach out to you. I think you'd be awesome to be part of that global summit.

Thank you. Whatever you need, I'm here to help the community.

Awesome. Thanks, Meredith. Take care.

All right. Have a good one.

Have a good one.