Capability over loyalty: The people decisions behind Sandoz's spin-off

When generics and biosimilars specialist Sandoz spun off from Swiss pharma giant Novartis in October 2023, the hardest decision facing Chief People Officer, Tripti Jha, was picking her team.

“Spinning off is not for the faint-hearted,” she tells UNLEASH.

A Novartis veteran of nearly 20 years, Jha had occupied a host of HR and talent roles during her time with the company, cultivating numerous relationships along the way. But she knew that a spin-off the scale of Sandoz’s left little room for sentiment.

“It comes with its own share of not just volumes of work, but accountability and responsibility, magnified by pace. The cycle of decisions is much faster; you're taking decisions that'll have long-term implications, so you have to be diligent about it,” she explains.

“The hardest decision was for me to change both the structure but also 50% of my team, my leadership team - you have history, you have legacy, they had trusted relationships with the business.”

It’s a side of people leadership that isn’t often seen externally – choosing capability over loyalty, and the emotional burden that places on leaders. Ultimately, being a good people leader means making decisions a situation like Sandoz’s spin-off calls for.

“I needed a team around me that could manage the intensity and scale of a spin-off, and brought that trust, credibility, and capability that we needed,” Jha adds.

“It's not just changing structure or design. There are people you've grown up in the last 20 years with. I was emotionally very exhausted.”

Keep what serves the Sandoz of the future, not what's familiar

When it came to deciding on what culture looked like at Sandoz, Jha explains that it wasn’t simply a case of picking what to keep from Novartis and what not to – the starting point was to ask “what does the Sandoz we dream of, the Sandoz of the future, need?”

“It's a biosimilar and generics business: time to decision matters, quality matters,” Jha states.

As such, there were characteristics that were carried over from Novartis: “Focus on quality, focus on financial and execution discipline, focus on rigor when it comes to really managing scale.

“What we did evolve was necessary for our business.”

A significant part of this evolution was embedding an entrepreneurial spirit into Sandoz. Jha acknowledges that this may be hard to swallow considering Sandoz’s 23,000-strong workforce, but it is about ensuring employees have the right tools and framing to make decisions and move with agility.

The intent was to create a mindset where employees are more invested in the business outcomes as they understand their role and impact. And for Jha, managers are at the heart of it.

She has declared 2026 the “Year of the People Manager” at Sandoz, whereby the 3,000 people managers across the business will play a pivotal role in defining the upcoming ‘Golden Decade’ – an unprecedented patent cliff valued at $320 billion in biosimilar opportunities by CEO Richard Saynor.

“If you look at it by volume, we are probably the world's largest healthcare company with the number of drugs we produce and number of patients we reach,” Jha says.

The 3,000 people managers within Sandoz have a “disproportionate role” in shaping the organization and its culture, rather than it being solely dictated from the top echelons – allowing that influence to impact more effectively on the day-to-day experience of thousands of colleagues.

Jha explains that the company did “a lot of work after the spin-off” with 200 of Sandoz’s top leaders: “We’re taking that big book of work on leadership much more into our middle management.”

“This is about how you help them work with greater accountability, how they continue to drive performance, but also colleague experience. It’s the what and the how of the business.”

Jha states that for Sandoz to ensure internal risks that could threaten the opportunities presented by the Golden Decade, the answer doesn’t lie in more projects but in being more selective in the work that is required.

She frames it as moving away from fear of missing out to “the joy of missing out.”

“Do you always need 20 people on a call? Probably not. Decide the key decision makers you need, how you do things where you need to be absolutely 100% in quality and where it's an iterative process, 80% is good, and you go and learn,” she explains.

Again, managers are a pivotal part of this and Jha highlights the People Manager Academy inside Sandoz that provides a two-year, systemic development pathway that enables them to “to take decisions in the organization and drive focus.”

But she also acknowledges embedding this across the enterprise and on an individual level is an ongoing process.

A different path to leadership: Focus, purpose, and three priorities at a time

Jha explains that she doesn't do “Top 10 priorities”- instead, she prioritizes three or four at any time that are most relevant and pressing. It’s focused decision-making applied to her own leadership style, role-modelled for other people managers across the organization.

It’s typical of her leadership style that is rooted in origins starkly different from most of her peers at the CPO level.

After completing her Masters, Jha went into the NGO sector working towards improving health equity and access for underprivileged and underserved women and children.

She tells UNLEASH that it has always been her goal “to work for organizations that have a greater purpose.” Starting out in humanitarian aid provided that and it “has gone into every company I've worked for.”

“There needs to be a larger purpose that makes me more excited, more thoughtful about how I show up for work every day. This goes for my book of work as well, because the people I work with make a difference to someone.”

It is this conviction that provides the foundation for Jha’s leadership principles and an insight into the advice she says she would offer both her younger self when starting out and to her peers.

The first is to “always think about the outcome. Think about the difference your work is going to make and if you can't find that difference, don't do it. Don't do process for the sake of process; it must make a difference to someone internally or externally.”

Secondly, she says the real value of HR lies in the impact on the business and the longevity of that impact. This means investing in managers and leaders because “they’ll make the most difference - leaders drive culture, and culture drives performance.”

“Leaders' culture and performance are not separated; they are very much the same. You can't ignore leaders and leadership behaviors if you want to be a differentiated HR person.”

Finally, Jha says to “lead with courage and curiosity, but curiosity especially - that's what keeps you right.

“You can learn how to ask great questions, but if you don't have genuine curiosity, it'll only go so far.”

The second part of our in-depth interview with Tripti Jha will be published on UNLEASH next month.