Most industries fight to claim their uniqueness. In our experience, most are more similar than they know, or care to admit.
Recently a statistic in a pharma industry report stopped us mid-read. Not because of what it said about pharma, but what it hinted at everywhere else.
A 2026 study in the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics found that pharma companies are actively moving away from siloed, function-by-function structures toward cross-functional, interdisciplinary teams. The same research found that 91% of companies in one national survey reported real difficulty finding people with the right capabilities to make this new way of working succeed.
That’s not really a pharma-only problem. It’s a preview of what’s happening in tech, finance and manufacturing too. Whenever an organization restructures to move faster, it’s asking people from different disciplines, with different training and often different assumptions about how work gets done, to trust each other, fast.
Process first, people second? We don’t think so.
Walk into almost any industry right now and you’ll find a similar pattern. Teams that used to work in clear, separate lanes are being pushed together. Specialists who never had to coordinate closely are now being asked to move and perform as one unit.
Leadership tends to call this agility, and on paper, it makes sense: faster decisions, fewer silos and more responsive teams.
We’ve noticed something that gets less attention, and it’s what happens to the people inside that huge commercial shift.
And it’s our observation that most companies don’t design for that. They just expect it to happen. They take a process first, people second approach. The trouble is, that means the people and culture piece (the glue that holds this work together long-term) becomes something you scramble to fix once there’s already a problem.
Can you hire your way into trust?
It’s self-evident you can hire for exactly the right skills, character and ambitions and still end up with a team that doesn’t actually work as a team. We’ve all seen it and most of us have experienced it first-hand too.
Expertise doesn’t automatically translate into the kind of fluency that lets people navigate different working styles, different professional languages, and different interpretations of what “done” looks like. And that’s one of the biggest challenges facing organizations today: how do you get great people with very different ways of working to actually work well together?
We think that kind of fluency is built through shared experience, more than an org chart update or a new set of Slack channels. Teams given a genuine opportunity to build something together before they’re expected to run fast together, seem to close that gap quicker than teams left to figure it out on the job.
What does this mean for leaders?
If your organization is currently restructuring (you may be calling it something else but you know exactly what we mean), the relationships between your newly combined teams need the same level of intentional design as the org chart itself.
That means giving people an early, deliberate reason to trust each other before the pressure of the new structure hits home. This approach recognizes that people are the foundation of success, and that process and structure should be built around them, not the other way around
And in practice, the teams that navigate change best aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleanest reporting lines. What seems to matter more is whether connection, belonging and psychological safety were given any real thought during the redesign, rather than being tacked on once the new structure was already live.
The Connected Culture take
Restructuring changes who reports to whom. It doesn’t automatically change how or whether we trust each other. Ignore that human side, and the new structure can look great on a slide but struggle in the office, warehouse or laboratory.
Build trust in from day one, and those newly formed teams have a much better chance of performing well together, faster.
What the data shows
Remember that 91% of companiessurveyed were struggling to find people with the right skills to thrive and develop in cross-functional teams. The problem is the skills gap gets the attention and grabs the headlines. The trust gap, quieter and just as costly, rarely gets a mention.
A question worth sitting with
If your organization starting restructuring tomorrow, would the new teams trust each other without question on day one, or would they spend the first six or eight months figuring out how to work together?
We recently went deeper on this for pharmaceutical teams navigating exactly this type of shift. If you work in pharma, or some of this feels familiar in your own industry, The Science of Getting It Right is worth a look.
Thanks for your company today,
The SongDivision Team
