How Pfizer R&D Builds Leadership Training Programs That Actually Stick

Most leadership development programs follow the same arc: a day of workshops, a stack of slides, a few takeaways that fade within a week. Laurie Weinberg has spent 30 years effectively changing that.

As Head of Pharmaceutical Sciences Learning & Development within Pfizer's R&D division, Laurie designs programs that look less like training days and more like deliberate pressure tests. These are structured experiences that force participants to make hard decisions, recalibrate under uncertainty, and reflect on what that reveals about how they lead.

Simulation-based learning has been central to Pfizer’s model since 2012.

How Pfizer Structures Experiential Leadership Development

Laurie runs three distinct development tracks:

• A year-long global leadership program for directors through VPs
  
  
• A manager development program for first-line managers and leaders of leaders coming up from scientific roles
  
  
• An expanding set of shorter, topic-focused sessions for teams working through specific challenges
  

Each track is built around the same philosophy: introduce a concept, make participants live it, then debrief what happened.

"I don't believe in being in front of a room and training people with PowerPoint presentations," she says. "I like to highlight a concept, have them try it out and pressure test it, and then do the debrief — because that's really where the most powerful learning is."

Learning simulations serve as that pressure test. Laurie cycles through Forio's Ready-Made catalog matching each simulation to the specific gap she's trying to close. For instance:

• Change Management is a perennial anchor in the manager program.

• Judgment in a Crisis surfaces consistently when leaders need to wrestle with decisions that have no clean answer. 

"Half the time, every choice you have is awful," she says. "Which one are you going to take, and why — depending on the situation you're in? That's the real world."

The Everest Redesign: Cross-Functional Learning at Scale

One of her most instructive examples came from a session with 63 participants from a clinical organization going through significant restructuring. The team struggled with siloed communication — each functional group pursuing its own goals without a shared sense of operating as one organization.

Laurie chose Everest because its structure mirrors the exact dynamic she needed to surface: distinct roles, competing goals, and a summit that no one reaches alone.

She split participants into groups across separate conference rooms, gave them role assignments and a room list, and let them connect only through the simulation's chat. Then, midway through — at day four's decision point — she shifted the groups. People were pulled from their roles and placed into unfamiliar ones.

What emerged in the debrief was exactly what she'd designed for. Participants realized they had never thought to walk down the hall and talk to another group in person. They hadn't sought out colleagues playing the same role to compare notes and align on goals. They had accepted the limits of the structure without questioning whether those limits were real.

"I always tell them about the boundaries — and then they put boundaries around themselves," she says. "When we got to the debrief, the aha moments just kept coming."

Years later, participants still reference that session in their day-to-day work.

How to Reuse Leadership Simulations Without Repeating the Experience

What's kept simulation-based learning central to Laurie's programs at Pfizer for over a decade isn't novelty — it's adaptability. She doesn't run the same experience twice. The Networking simulation, for instance, has been retooled across three different scenario variations, allowing her to reintroduce it to the same population in different contexts.

That flexibility matters in a program built on repeat engagement. "Sometimes I had to retire simulations because I'd used them so much and there weren't enough opportunities for different scenario play," she says. More options mean more ways to keep the learning fresh.

It also means the catalog can grow with her programs — rather than capping what's possible.

Why Pfizer's Corporate Training Model Is Worth Replicating

Laurie's approach doesn't require a large team or a complicated infrastructure. It requires clarity about the learning objective, willingness to redesign the experience rather than run it out of the box, and commitment to the debrief as the place where the real work happens.

The result is a program other divisions at Pfizer have started asking to join — not because it's well-branded, but because it visibly changes how teams operate.