You’ve spent years as a site head. Every day on the floor, solving problems in real time, managing everything within your control. Then you’re promoted to oversee multiple manufacturing sites across continents. Suddenly, you’re on video calls instead of the shop floor. You can no longer walk the line or fix issues yourself. And the teams that once followed your direct leadership are asking why they should align behind a strategy you’re not implementing on their site.

It is a transition that catches even the best site heads off guard. In Episode 25 of Active Ingredients, Laura O’Brien draws on her own journey from site head to global network leader to explain why direct control fails at scale, and the four steps that replace it.

The Problem

Manufacturing leaders often assume that global oversight means extended site head authority: more control across more sites. Yet the opposite is true. When you move from single-site leadership to a global manufacturing network, your power shifts from direct control to influence.

This counterintuitive shift catches many high-performing site heads off guard, because the skills that made them successful at the site level (hands-on problem-solving, direct accountability, swift decision-making) must be completely reimagined.

The temptation is to manage a global network as if it were still a single site: attend every meeting, control every decision, enforce standards through authority. But this approach fails because each manufacturing site has its own legacy systems, evolved processes, and entrenched site leadership.

You cannot mandate alignment. According to Laura O’Brien, a Global Operations and Quality Executive who has led manufacturing networks at Sanofi, Novartis, and CSL, “It’s a really big transition because it’s much more about influence than being in direct control of that area.”

Laura O’Brien is one of the few pharma leaders who has successfully navigated this transition multiple times. She moved from site head roles, where she was the first woman in those positions at several organisations, to global quality, manufacturing, and operations leadership. Along the way, she learned the precise mechanics of influence in regulated manufacturing environments.

The Solution

Step 1: Build Your ‘Number One Team’ as Peers, Not Reports

The foundation of global network leadership is reframing who your core team is. Most site heads think their number one team is the people who report to them. In a global role, your number one team becomes the peers with whom you share leadership responsibility: the other heads of manufacturing, quality, supply chain, and engineering.

Drawing on Patrick Lencioni’s ‘number one team’ concept from Five Dysfunctions of a Team, O’Brien explains: “Your number one team shouldn’t be the team that you lead, but the team that you’re part of. So for the site heads, their number one team really is that team of site heads for me as their manager.” This distinction matters because when your peer group is cohesive, the message reaches every level of the organisation consistently. When there is friction between peers, that friction amplifies downward through the entire network.

O’Brien invested consciously in these peer relationships. She had to understand what was important to each leader beyond her own priorities and find win-win approaches. “I definitely had to invest in those peer relationships for sure. And understand what’s important to those leaders versus what was important to me, and how could we come to a win-win going forward.”

Step 2: Move Site Heads from ‘Kingdom Thinking’ to ‘Network Thinking’

Site heads are accustomed to being accountable for everything on their site. Their incentives, careers and reputation are all tied to site-level performance. This creates ‘kingdom’ thinking: optimising for their site, even when it conflicts with network-wide strategy. Your job is to shift this mindset without removing autonomy.

Laura created “network value stream leads,” senior people at each site who took additional accountability for network-wide problems and lessons. She reinforced: “Site heads all like to be, you know, kings or queens of their domains. And then to become part of that network where you actually play for the network, you don’t just play for the site.”

This shift is not negotiable if you want one quality management system, one standard approach to deviations, or shared learning across sites. It cannot be imposed through authority; it must be sold as a business imperative. As Laura says: “It’s really about selling the benefits to people. Why it’s important for the business and not just for that individual site.” Once early converts emerge, momentum follows. As she notes: “When you get a few advocates, things can happen quickly.”

Step 3: Extend Leadership Coherence Two Levels Deep

Your direct site heads may align with your global vision, but the next level of leadership, their direct reports, may not. Laura solved this by creating an extended leadership group that met quarterly and included not just site heads but their reports, ensuring consistent messaging.

“Getting the next level of leaders all together to play for that network, I think can be immensely powerful because all of a sudden the messages, direction, the consistencies going into the organisations at a deeper level.”

When manufacturing supervisors, quality leads, and engineering managers hear the same priorities from both their site head and the broader leadership group, they stop seeing decisions as arbitrary. They see alignment.

Step 4: Ask More Questions; Control Fewer Decisions

As a site head, Laura had a direct, forward, transparent style that worked. As a global leader, she had to adapt. “I have quite a direct, forward, transparent style. That doesn’t always work with everybody, you know, particularly as you get more senior in the organisation, and there are more people you have to influence.”

Rather than telling site heads how to solve a problem, she shifted to asking what they had tried, what other sites had done, and what constraints they were working within. Decisions stay local. Ownership stays with the people closest to the work. The conversation changes from performance management to genuine problem-solving.

O’Brien asked a direct report to observe her in meetings and give real-time feedback on whether she was asking enough questions. “It softens that, it makes that relationship stronger as well, right? Because you’re showing you trust them.”

This trust compounds. When leaders see you genuinely asking for their input rather than seeking compliance, they work harder to solve problems on your behalf.

The Evidence

In O’Brien’s experience, the difference between a fragmented network and a cohesive one is stark. “When you’re really cohesive, it’s immensely powerful. But if there’s friction there, that does not bode well further down the organisation either.” Coherence at the top reaches every level almost immediately.

The reason is straightforward. As Laura explains, people throughout the organisation are watching senior leaders closely: “They’re looking up to us to see, how are these two individuals working together? How are they behaving together?” When the answer is cohesion, it gives everyone permission to follow the same direction. When the answer is friction, it gives everyone an excuse not to.

The proof shows up in the language people use. Laura described a moment that stood out: a value stream lead, unprompted, framed a problem in terms of what the network needed rather than what their site needed. “That was fantastic,” she said, “because that’s what I’d been wanting people to say for, you know, a year.”

Your Next Move

The steps above are not theoretical. Every one of them has a practical starting point that does not require organisational change or a new mandate. Start by auditing your own behaviour before assessing your teams.

Ask yourself three diagnostic questions:

• Do your direct reports (site heads) see themselves as part of a network leadership team, or as competing kingdoms? If they compete, you have not yet established your number one team concept.
• When a site faces a challenge, do they instinctively reach out to peer sites for solutions, or do they wait for direction from you? If they wait, you are still leading through control rather than influence.
• Can your extended leadership group (two levels down) articulate the business case for network-wide standards without referring to your authority? If they cannot, consistency will fail the moment you are not in the room.

Global network leadership is not about having the right strategy. It is about building the relationships and structures that carry that strategy into every site, every level, every day.