Guest blog by Gretchen Cook-Anderson, Mike Firestone, Trinh Nguyen, Eustacia Ready MacNaught, Laura Rubin, Zach Stanley, Alexandra Valdez, Rev. Willie Bodrick II
On December 20, 2022 Mayor Michele Wu called a Life Sciences Workforce Development meeting in Boston, MA also known as ‘the Hub of the Universe’, to announce her 1000 jobs in the Life Sciences initiative. This is where the journey began for the now famous, team of eight.
The goal? To tackle the problem:
Boston’s booming life sciences industry needs to hire thousands of workers to meet growth demands. Black and Brown residents and those without college degrees are excluded from the sector’s wealth and prosperity exacerbating persistent inequity.
Quickly coming together to establish a team constitution, the group committed to building an actionable plan that would create awareness, reduce barriers, educate, train, and employ Boston residents in careers in the Massachusetts life sciences industry to maintain Boston’s worldwide leadership in the industry, diversify the workforce, and achieve shared prosperity for Boston residents.
Why would this group agree to work on this problem?
Our value proposition was defined, and we were ready to articulate it to the Mayor and the community by saying: We will tackle workforce needs in the life sciences industry and underrepresentation of Black and Brown residents with and without college degrees. With this work, we aim to increase economic opportunity for residents, meet growing labor needs, and diversify the life sciences industry at all levels to strengthen the City’s position as a Life Sciences global hub.
We will begin our work together by making a business case to large life sciences companies to scale training programs and audit their job descriptions, and by launching a campaign to increase community awareness of the sector, its training programs, and career opportunities.
We will know that we have succeeded when life sciences training programs are scaled, more residents are aware of career opportunities in the industry, and the sectoral workforce is more diverse at all levels.
However, to get there, we learned quickly that patience, consistent communication, and hard work were needed. We are all tackling this project in addition to our regular jobs. We couldn’t go from zero to sixty- with someone else’s ‘solution’. Bloomberg-Harvard helped us make a plan that fit the City of Boston, the Hub of the Universe.
We put together a fishbone diagram that identified the major issues and considerations associated with our goal. This process helped us identify entry points to start the work:
The team chose three “themes” for closer examination:
- Lack of community awareness of the Life Sciences Industry
- Current employer hiring practices and culture
- Residents skills gap
Entry points were identified as places to begin the work. The following steps were initiated:
- The City of Boston will launch a campaign with community partners to increase community awareness of the life sciences sector, its training programs, and career opportunities. An RFP would be delivered that focused funding and resources to achieve this goal. This RFP was released on March 31, 2023 and proposals are due in March 5th.
- The City of Boston also committed to issuing an RFP to provide matching support for training programs that offer programs with hiring commitments. There is a heavy focus on employer engagement and measurement of training outcomes over time. Parallels between Healthcare and Life Sciences industries will be a valued component of the winning proposals. This RFP is slated to release May 14th, 2023.
- MassBio and Vertex will lead efforts to engage 10 CEOs/senior Execs to build support for reforms to hiring practices around key actions including but not limited to: sponsor 10-resident cohorts to receive compensated training in specific jobs and to hire graduates; and review of job descriptions to remove unnecessary requirements.
Vertex assembled several CEOs for a meeting to discuss training programs and opportunities on April 25th
Continuing work within the community will be done to expand networking opportunities to strengthen hiring and retention of Black and Brown scientists and other professionals.
Reflections, Insights, and new approaches garnered from our time with Bloomberg- Harvard:
The BH program helped the Hub take a large problem, with a long and politically fraught history, and break it down to the essentials. Following the process of identifying issues that lead to the creation of the problem over time and plotting them out in a fishbone diagram allowed the team to:
- Determine what areas of influence were easier to tackle first
- Identify stakeholder buy-in need (from CEOs, Community organizations, training partners, HR professionals)
- Identify, individually and as a group, where the sphere of influence existed vs where additional authorization was needed to move forward.
As a result of this, we were ready when Mayor Wu asked the group, at our latest update meeting “what can I do to help.” The support of the Mayor is, and will always be, a critical source of authorization in this project, but she and the group acknowledged that small wins, negotiated by collaborating team members, could also be achieved to keep a positive project momentum moving forward.
Key Takeaways Summary from the Hub:
- There’s power in a team of leaders with different perspectives and objectives
- Making change happen within a team of leaders from varied organizations requires compromise, intention, listening, and steady focus on collective goals – expanding our individual leadership skills
- Determining entry points can get a team to action steps more quickly, make problem solving less daunting, and enables early wins that build confidence
- Community review and input on the city’s problem and proposed solutions is of critical importance
- Building authorization requires an on-going openness to new ideas and willingness to change course to include that feedback
- Never underestimate the power of great resources – readings, videos, storytelling – to expand our approaches to problem-solving
- Equity should remain our North Star as we drive Boston’s life sciences workforce diversity and global hub image
- Learning from other cities fuels inspiration and best practices
It’s clear that the process introduced in the collaboration track of creating a problem statement, then crushing it to bits and reassembling it with a fishbone diagram could be adapted to any large problem. Trusting the process, taking stock of the constant learning, leaning on the team, communicating in a systematic way, not being afraid to evaluate the result and change things for the next iteration, as well as celebrating all small wins will move you forward to the next step.
The sessions together with the other cities made such an impact and added amazing value to this process. Keep at it everyone. Check in with your teams, communicate, celebrate the wins and stay focused!
Go Boston!
This is part of a blog series written by city leaders who participated in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative cross-boundary collaboration track during 2023.