Living Our Values
- We attempt to weave our core values and commitment to good
citizenship into every facet of our business.
Abbott’s Value-Based Culture
Abbott’s four core values – pioneering, achieving, caring and enduring –
guide and support our employees in every aspect of their work. We engage
employees globally with values workshops and our statement of purpose, the
Abbott Promise for Life, published in six languages.
Each Abbott division president is accountable for pushing the company’s
values deep into the organization, where they can influence and guide the
day-to-day decisions that are made across the company and around the world. For
example, Abbott’s international pharmaceutical division – the company’s largest
– has embraced a program called “I AM ABBOTT,” which encourages employees to
think about the four values in the context of their own decisions, not as
something ambiguous.
“It is one thing for a colleague to see a plaque on the wall that says the
company is pioneering,” says Olivier Bohuon, president, Abbott International,
“It is quite another for that same person to think to him or herself, ‘I
pioneer.’ It is only by internalizing the values at an individual level that we
will be able to build the kind of culture we want at Abbott.”
Decision Making Among Our Leaders
We continued to update our core leadership training programs, with a focus
on supporting employees at key transition points during their careers. As part
of the process, we developed training modules on how to incorporate the Abbott
values into daily activities. The curriculum in this area addresses a number of
core issues identified in the values workshops with Abbott management,
including balanced risk taking, approaches to minimizing bureaucracy, and
developing more long-term strategic thinking, increased collaboration and
cross-divisional focus to better serve stakeholders.
Understanding our values helps employees make the best choices to create
positive experiences for our stakeholders and, ultimately, leads to positive
perceptions of our company. In 2007 we developed tools to create opportunities
for values learning with additional training programs, including our new
employee orientation and onboarding process. These tools have been integrated
into key applications in 2008.
Abbott’s values integration is reinforced in specific leadership programs
taught by members of senior management, including: Abbott Executive Compass for
newly appointed executives; Global Leader Program for newly appointed or
soon-to-be-appointed international general managers; Operations Leadership
Summit for key leaders in quality assurance, manufacturing, supply chain and
regulatory affairs; Leadership Development for Scientists Program for senior
scientists with leadership potential. Values training is also included in our
Abbott New Leader program, a core foundational program for all Abbott
leaders.