Case Study: How Alcon Built a Community of Changemakers Around the World
As a global leader in eye care, Alcon relies on innovation and collaboration—and to stay on top of the market, the company needs its associates at the top of their games.
Alcon R&D wanted to create a culture that nurtured and grew ideas and talent—but in a global enterprise, top-down initiatives rarely lead to real change. A true community of changemakers needs to be built from the ground up. That’s where Cultivate came in.
Building a community sounds easy. Those words get tossed around every day. But how do you take a company vision and turn it into a living, breathing movement? It’s not through slide decks or training sessions. It’s by allowing each and every employee to unleash their full potential.
That’s what Alcon and Cultivate created together with TEDxAlcon R&D.
In this case study:
Our Offerings
The Spark
The Solution
The Results
What’s Next?
Now It’s Your Turn
Our Offerings
Strategy Design Sprints
Custom Assessments
Bespoke Program Design
Fascinate
Advance Your Idea
Community Accelerator
Community Consulting
Empowered Cultivator
The Spark
Every movement needs someone to light the spark. At Alcon, that was Lalaine Gedal. As the Associate Director of Learning and Development for R&D, Gedal was tasked with building buy-in for Alcon’s newly-created Values and Behaviors.
She knew that building a workplace community was the right approach for Alcon and turned to us for help in bringing her vision to life. Our ultimate goal? To give employees the space to live out the company values of collaboration, courage, and innovation.
Working with Gedal, we brought together stakeholders across Alcon R&D to set goals, gain buy-in, and identify what a thriving community would look like. With that scaffolding in place, the real work began.
“Alcon was ready for innovation. The company was ready to focus on and restore the values and behaviors of the organization. They were looking for a platform to focus on the ‘why’ of the organization.”
The Solution
At Cultivate, we specialize in identifying changemakers and unleashing their talents. And we know that they’re found in every part of an organization, not just in the corner offices or old lists of leadership program participants. We identified associates throughout Alcon R&D with the drive to challenge change the status quo and partnered with them to plan a TEDx event that would empower participants from across the organization.
Associate ownership gave TEDxAlcon R&D the energy of a grassroots movement. Team members who had previously operated in silos had the chance to shine, make new connections, and grow their leadership skills. The result? New connections, stretch assignments, and growth opportunities, plus renewed engagement with the company.
While the Alcon program is volunteer-driven, a TEDx event comes with plenty of moving pieces. Cultivate provided essential support in bringing the true TED experience to the R&D department through ideation, speaker selection, and action planning. Each Alcon speaker received months of hands-on support and guidance from Cultivate’s expert coaches, who helped them hone in on a meaningful topic, write and rewrite their talks, and perfect their delivery using the Fascinate curriculum. With additional support from our design team, every speaker took to the stage with a talk and visuals that sparkled.
The Results
The first TEDxAlcon R&D event launched at Alcon’s Fort Worth, Texas headquarters in 2018, featuring speakers from the manufacturing floor to the C-suite. And with talks ranging from the tech-focused to the intensely personal, participants learned to see each other—and themselves—in new ways. Relationships built in the months of preparation turned into deep friendships and new collaborations. Speakers became campus celebrities.
The word spread quickly across other Alcon sites. By 2019, the TEDxAlcon R&D team was growing globally. We helped Gedal’s team identify the right locations for expansion and strategize how to deliver the magic of TEDx from afar. With a little bit of travel and a whole lot of calls, the TEDx program took off in Johns Creek, Georgia, Lake Forest, California, and even Schaffhausen, Switzerland.
Then 2020 hit. As COVID-19 scuttled plans for in-person events, we worked with the Alcon team and pivoted to Zoom. In true TEDx style, the change in medium was just a new challenge to overcome. Live conversations, town-hall conversations, and interactive workshops brought Alcon together, creating a space to collaborate and engage ideas in the midst of an isolating pandemic.
For Uma Chandrashekhar, writing and preparing a TEDx talk about her family’s challenges after her father’s death provided the impetus for action. The outcome? She developed an innovative new data management program that Alcon hopes to roll out across the company, and is now filing a patent for the technology behind it.
“I see the TEDx program as immensely valuable. Just the energy and the culture of innovation that it created in our local site is incredible.”
What’s Next?
After three years of successful TEDxAlcon R&D events, it was time to survey the program’s achievements and plan for the years to come. At Cultivate, we use highly intentional strategy sprints to identify purpose, goals, and tactics, and we’re working through that methodology with the Alcon team. One thing is clear—the program has changed Alcon.
The purpose of TEDx talks is to spread knowledge and ideas, the lifeblood of Alcon R&D. Alcon innovates every single day to help people around the world see better, but, paradoxically, in a large organization, it can be hard to see the advances. TEDx provides a lens through which all associates can take a glance at the wide range of projects pushing the bounds of science at Alcon every day.
Our strategy sprint gave the Alcon team the opportunity to explore new ideas for their community, and has allowed for them to explore new partnerships and expand the scope of the initiative as they look to grow the community even more.
Now It’s Your Turn
Community is organic—it evolves on its own wherever there are people. But to create a healthy culture in which each individual can thrive and live up to their potential, organizations need to take a more intentional approach.
At Cultivate, we’ve mastered the art of building purposeful and effective workplace communities. The secret to our success? Identifying Cultivators that can bring people together and giving them the tools to do it. We design programs that nurture leadership skills and provide practical guidance and support to lay the foundations for a community that can stand the test of time.
Looking for that energy in your organization? Let’s talk.
Share your ideas. Solve problems. Make a difference.
We’re building a community where your voice is heard, solutions are shared, and changemakers around the world can mobilize for change. If you are passionate about change, culture, and innovation, this is the place for you.
