Selker Leadership

Gregory T. Lucier has served as Chief Executive Officer of Invitrogen and member of the board of directors since May 2003. In April 2004 he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors. From June 2000 to May 2003, Mr. Lucier was the President and Chief Executive Officer of GE Medical Systems Information Technologies. Mr. Lucier was named a corporate officer of General Electric Corporation (GE) in 1999 by that company’s board of directors and served in a variety of leadership roles during his career at GE including as Vice President Global Services, GE Medical Systems. Mr. Lucier is currently a director of BIOCOM, serves on the BIO Board of Directors as well as on the board of the Burnham Institute of Medical Research. He is actively involved at San Diego State as a distinguished lecturer. He received his B.S. in Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Invitrogen Corporation (Nasdaq:IVGN) http://www.invitrogen.com/content.cfm?pageid=1&CID=TN-Home is a global company with revenues of $1.15 billion. They provide products and services that support academic and government research institutions and pharmaceutical and biotech companies worldwide in their efforts to improve the human condition. The company provides essential life science technologies for disease research, drug discovery and commercial bio-production and its products can be found in nearly every major laboratory in the world. Invitrogen’s product family includes many of the most widely recognized names in the industry, including Molecular Probes, Gibco, and Dynal Biotech. Founded in 1987, Invitrogen is headquartered in Carlsbad, California, and conducts business in more than 70 countries around the world.

Recently we sat down and spoke with Greg Lucier to get his perspective on some of today’s most crucial issues, such as what it takes to hire and develop top leadership, how to adapt your management style to meet the need of the emerging Gen Y workforce and a board’s obligation to guide the competitive development of its leadership cadre in this next era of SOX compliance.  After a candid discussion with Greg Lucier, it became clear to us that trust is now a prime ingredient in leadership development programs for global companies.  Trust is the catalyst that can foster collaboration between mentors, top and emerging executives to build long term careers and develop superb leaders. Here are the highlights of that discussion. 

For the full interview with Invitrogen’s CEO, Greg Lucier, click here.  Greg Lucier: Complete Interview 

Greg Selker:  What are you doing today to help develop your people into the best leaders that they can become? What are you doing that’s different today than you might have done in the past?

Greg Lucier:  You know ten years ago, fifteen years ago, there was a much higher degree of trust between the employer and the employee, and given that implicit trust there was a greater ability to have people take horizontal moves, even take a step back, to learn a new skill in order to take two steps forward. Unfortunately, I just think there is not that level of trust anymore in the population between employees and employers.

Greg Selker:  Why is that? What do you think happened?

Greg Lucier:  Well, this is certainly just me opining but the concept of moving to a new job every couple of years has certainly been accepted. That fact linked with the point that the labor markets are very tight, makes it more acceptable for “an every person for themselves” mentality.

What that all translates into is it becomes harder and harder to get people to actually do career development inside a company. To resist that trend, you better have one heck of a good career development process. And you better have really good mentoring capabilities inside the company. In spite of doing everything right, companies are still in a constant struggle against this force of employees asking the question:  “I wonder if the grass is greener over there?”

Greg Selker:  What type of cultural edge do you think you can develop or hone that will make a difference in your ability to not just hold your own but to win against these trends?

Greg Lucier:  I think this may sound a bit “Machiavellian”, but it comes in two ways. One is you have to do a much better job screening people coming in for the right type of character—a personality that can commit. We’ve done some work there. The second point, and this is where the Machiavellian comment comes in, is that when somebody leaves in a less than honorable way, you have to be very clear that it happened in a less than honorable way to the rest of the organization, and that there is a collective learning. What you’re basically saying is we are a company that is all about trust, and when that trust is violated by an employee, a wrong has been committed.

Greg Selker:  I understand exactly, and it’s got to be balanced with that front end of strongly giving messages of support and encouragement and empowerment for the behavior that you want to see.

Greg Lucier: Exactly.

Greg Selker:  Looking at your hiring practices, how are you making certain that the people who are interviewing really interact with the hiring process as a leadership competency and leadership obligation?

Greg Lucier:  Are you asking how you make sure that the people doing the interviewing have real “skin in the game”, that they care about the outcome of the interviews?

Greg Selker:  Yes.

Greg Lucier:  Great question. I think you have to have some real forethought about who’s doing the interviewing. What we do is make sure we have a gauge for every class of potential hire. So if we’re interviewing a scientist, as an example, we have a handful of people that interview all our scientists. They’re not the only ones doing the interviewing, but they interview every single scientist and …

Greg Selker:  And excuse me for interrupting you, but these are folks who are themselves senior scientists from within the organization?

Greg Lucier:  That’s right. But they have been asked to do this special duty, and because they can see more, hear more and learn more, they get pretty darn good at assessment and what fits in this company. These people then get augmented with the hiring manager and a few other people, but we are consciously focused on not having too many interviewers.

Greg Selker:  So you restrict the interviewing team. You have a core group of people for instance, senior scientists, who interview all senior scientist candidates. Does that that follow suit with other functional areas as well?

Greg Lucier:  Absolutely. Sales specialists that handle sales candidates, etc.

Greg Selker:  So you’re building up over time a consistency of data and feedback and putting people through the same filtering process.

Greg Lucier:  You got it.

Greg Selker:  If we look at the whole tenor of discussion that we’ve had so far, talking about the hiring and development of leaders, instilling a culture of leadership, the accountability of the board with respect to that – when you look at executive search firms, what should their role be in these processes?

Greg Lucier: Well I think our early dialogue about what Selker Leadership is doing to think longer term about the success of the placed executive, that they’re only successful when the placed executive moves the needle, is important. We both know that evaluation can take a few years, and so the fact that Selker Leadership tracks the performance of its placed executives for two years is really spot on. When a search firm does take a longer term approach, they will also take a more penetrating view of the executive into the company, and be darn sure that the people they are sourcing have the potential to be great in that firm. I think there are so many choices today with executive search firms, and the competition is so fierce, that perhaps many executive search firms are caught up in the “time to place” a person metric. But that’s not really what you’re after when you hire a search firm. You are also after the success of the executive, and so I applaud a lot of the things you’re doing to think longer term.

Listen to what Greg Lucier has to say about these and other hot topics, click
here for full interview.  Greg Lucier: Complete Interview

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