Leaders need to get away from constant fire-fighting and focus on creating a sense of permaopportunity
Writing Audrey Clegg
My Dad trained in the US Air Force and remained a keen amateur pilot throughout his life. I remember flying with him in a single-engine Cessna when I was just 16. He’d shown me some of the basics, but one afternoon, he really surprised me.
“Ok Audrey,” he said. “It’s time you learned how to land this plane in an emergency. If anything happened to me, you’d need to get us down.”
He booked me on to an ‘emergency landings for non-pilots’ weekend course which turned out to be a great introduction to the most important thing in crisis management strategy: be prepared.
With the rolling sense of crisis that seems now to be part of everyday corporate life, we all need to be prepared for ‘emergency landings’ – but that’s only the foundation. The big question for leaders is: how do we get away from firefighting and fear-based responses and start maximizing the strategic opportunities that arise? How do we pivot from permacrisis to permaopportunity?
Over the course of my career, I’ve evolved four techniques that help. They don’t solve everything – but they do help leaders limit risk and turn abundant threats into opportunities.
1. Focus on the essentials, stay flexible
At Sanofi, our people are the priority: our backgrounds, our skills and our potential are the most precious resource. Talent development is what powers innovation in an R&D-driven biopharma leader – so, one of the first things I did when I joined was to work with the talent team to review and enhance our strategy for giving our people more opportunities to learn and grow.
What we developed was demanding and focused, but also flexible. We launched it in mid-2023 – but within six months, a major reorganization took place, creating a new business operations function that combined elements of commercial, finance, digital and people services in four hubs around the world. Fortunately, the seven talent principles we had chosen were compatible in many ways, which helped us navigate the change and scale up hiring. Today, we have a talent team of around 150 in the hubs, the majority of whom are new hires – and business operations has become a significant part of the delivery model for our team. The values and principles we had established prevented any elements of what was a big challenge from tipping into crisis.
The same is true of the healthcare support we give our people. Expectations are high, but so is the care we give. I recently met one of our marketing team in Mumbai, Isha Chaudhari. She had suffered vital organ failure due to a Covid complication and had to undergo a transplant.
“For four months, I was under strict medical monitoring at home,” Chaudhari told me. “It was so tough, maybe the toughest time of my life! But the one thing I did have was time. I could upskill for the next phase of my career.” With access to Sanofi’s learning resources, she studied business analytics, forecasting, modelling and corporate finance. Since coming back to work, she’s taken on gigs to build her skills, and moved from our specialty care division to vaccines. Chaudhari still has to take time out now and again for her health, but she gets the care she needs and comes back aiming higher.
Moving across functions or businesses like Chaudhari is one of the best ways to build the skills and networks we need to turn threats into opportunity. We put the same care into supporting health and wellbeing for our teams and the institution as a whole. That means we can successfully navigate the organizational changes that are routine for large corporations today.
2. Freshen up with outside-in thinking
If you’re going to find innovative solutions in tough situations, getting insights from people outside your usual tribe is essential. Did you ever hear about the truck that got stuck under a bridge? Emergency workers debated whether to dismantle parts of the truck or chip away at parts of the bridge. But a kid walking past said, “Why don’t you just deflate the tyres?”
That kind of smart lateral thinking has been part of our DNA at Sanofi for years, but we are getting better and better at putting it center stage. Some years back, the organization was fragmented with a number of siloed brands. We were struggling to compete. So, in 2021, incoming chief executive Paul Hudson announced a seismic move: for the first time in our 50-year history, we would unite as a single organization under the Sanofi name.
Many employees felt deep allegiances to our legacy brands, many of which – such as Pasteur and Genzyme – had their own histories. We needed a gear shift: something new and radical, something participative.
The Paris Olympics in 2024 presented a unique opportunity. Every sponsor reaches their own agreement with the Games, and our terms were to receive the maximum number of opportunities for Sanofians to participate in delivering the Games: in fact, 85% of our internal budget for the Games would be spent on employee engagement. For a multinational with demanding shareholders and an ambitious R&D pipeline, this was an extraordinary investment decision.
It created the largest ever Olympic and Paralympic employee engagement program. More than 2,000 Sanofians from dozens of countries came to help run Paris 2024, and we worked with them to help them share the stories of their inspirational experiences.
That has really helped with one of our key talent and learning goals – to build employer brand. Our online Olympics campaign drove 4.5 million clicks and a 215% increase in conversion. Just as important, our sponsorship massively inspired our influencer community to share their stories both about the Games and, afterwards, about their experiences working at Sanofi.
In 2025, we hit our highest score to date in the Employer Brand Index, ranking above our key pharma competitors. The Paris Olympics played a big part in that.
3. Get ready to leapfrog
The third strategy for turning crisis into opportunity is to look for openings where it is possible to push ahead with changes initially considered too radical. Many of us discovered during Covid how extreme situations open our minds to what we previously thought was impossible. In 2019, I had been working with a number of colleagues to try to introduce the idea of gig working in an fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) multinational. ‘Try before you buy’ is such a part of any FMCG launch, we hoped that the idea wouldn’t need too much of a sell-in. But many line managers in the business thought there was a risk of chaos. “Just search on the intranet and apply? Really? And HR wouldn’t be involved?,” asked many. “How do we keep track of productivity? What happens to the ‘day job’ when you’re also working a gig?” said others.
We knew that gig working was a great opportunity for people to experience different functions or roles, to upskill, and to help us meet business needs with different perspectives – a win-win-win. Yet, it was only when Covid left us with acute demands in some areas, and surplus
of talent in others, that we were able to get the project launched.
Within six months, we had more than 1,000 people participating in gigs. That was way more than we anticipated – and it set a foundation for
a profound shift in our working practices in the years ahead.
4. Story, story, story
My final must-have for dealing with permacrisis is all about narrative. An ambitious and flexible talent and learning strategy is essential to ride the storms – but it will only get you so far if the storytelling that brings it to life doesn’t hit the mark.
One of the hardest and most important things is to put your audience first. What matters to your customer – what helps them get their job done – is as important in sales or digital as it is in HR. Whether we’re reporting on progress to the executive committee or interviewing early talent, we’ve got to have the right facts and a good story – and we’ve got to keep telling it.
Finding the right tone of voice and using everyday language is vital. I speak three languages if you count American and British English as different (a ‘yes’ in British often means ‘no’, after all!) But my third language is corporate. I know we need to synergize core competencies and leverage paradigm shifts with actionable insights – but talking about it like that will only get you so far, especially in crisis. That’s why we don’t say we have a tripartite career progression model. We say it “takes three to tango.”
To help us change the way we share stories, we’ve now given 5,000 Sanofi Influencers storytelling training. When they start out, the language is often corporate – but when we suggest they use the same style they would if talking to a friend over coffee, the response they get goes way up. That’s what authentic stories do: they open hearts, build trust, and throw new light on tough problems.
When we were starting our Olympic volunteer program, I was on a Zoom with over 1,000 people. I was staying with my parents. In spite of my careful instructions, right when I’m ready to start my part of the launch presentation, Dad comes in and opens the fridge. Out falls a big box of blueberries – and they roll all over the floor.
By this point, I’m talking on the Zoom, fiercely signaling to Dad to leave ‘my office.’ But no, he picks up a broom and starts sweeping up, even reaching for the berries under my feet.
It was well-intentioned but, as I reflected later, isn’t that the worst way of handling a crisis? Focus only on your stuff; don’t think about the team; don’t communicate with anyone – or, in fact, actively ignore what they’re telling you. It’s the playbook for many leaders in the world today, and it makes any crisis a whole lot worse.
Storytelling sharpens our storylistening
When I put social media away for the day, I sometimes think back to my grandparents’ childhood in the 1910s and 1920s. There was no shortage of crises then: World War One, the flu epidemic of 1918 – which killed an estimated 50 million people – and then the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Four years later, US national income per capita was down 28%; it didn’t recover to 1929 levels for a full decade. In contrast, when it came to the global financial crisis of 2008, per capita income fell by only 5% and recovered within six years. And yet, no one then spoke of a permacrisis.
I think the difference today is the quantity and quality of news stories we hear. Perhaps the idea of ‘permacrisis’ is a product of how we think, because of the stories and opinions we feed on.
The science is clear: the way we measure impact – and drive profitability – in social media gives a preference to content that provokes strong reactions. Outrage gets more engagement. The result is that the most divisive, inflammatory voices get a bigger platform, and too much influence. Rethinking social media metrics is urgent but, in the meantime, we each have a responsibility to question what we read.
In fact, learning how to tell good stories is the best way to understand the tricks employed to tell bad ones – those that grab our attention by manipulating our emotions, promising easy solutions to complex problems, often scapegoating particular demographics, filling our feeds with fake news.
Storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest tools. It shaped the evolution of our brains, it defines who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going. The stories we tell ourselves and each other can either build our emotional intelligence and guide us through the storms we face so frequently – or wreck the foundations we have worked for so long to build.
It’s all too easy to let others dictate the narratives that determine our lives. But fortunately, we have a choice. We can rewrite the stories we tell so that they support us as individuals, as teams and as businesses – no matter what challenges or crises come our way.
Audrey Clegg is chief talent and learning officer at Sanofi
