When Pfizer needed to develop a COVID-19 vaccine in nine months, a process that normally takes a decade, the company had to abandon many of its own operating norms.
Bureaucratic approvals that required four levels of sign-off were compressed. Decision-making that lived in committees moved to individuals. Teams that had always included every function got smaller and faster.
The vaccine worked. And then came a harder question: How do you keep the good parts of a crisis without the crisis?
For Sherry Cassano, Pfizer’s chief talent officer, senior vice president of people experience and a 22-year veteran of the company, the answer was a cross-functional operating model the company calls “project-based ways of working,” built around a role borrowed from aviation: the pilot in command.
One accountable leader, one layer of governance
The framework has three core tenets. First, every cross-functional team has a single decision-maker: the pilot in command. Not a co-lead, not a steering committee. One person.
“We didn’t want to use typical terms like team lead or project lead, because we felt people would think it was more of the same,” Cassano told i4cp’s Next Practices Weekly. The new language was intentional.
Second, there is no more than one layer of governance above the team, which Pfizer calls “air traffic control.” The analogy is deliberate: Air traffic controllers don’t tell pilots how to fly. They manage takeoffs, landings and emergencies. The pilot flies the plane.
Third, team composition is fit for purpose. The expectation that every function must be represented on every team was eliminated. Pilots in command determine which functions belong as core members and which are subject-matter experts to be called in as needed. That cultural change, she noted, was harder than it sounds.
“Sometimes you find your value in being on the team,” Cassano said. “We really had to say: It’s not that you’re not valued, you don’t have a core deliverable.”
The Workday moment that made it real
Culture frameworks often live in slide decks. This one got built into the performance management system.
When an employee is working on a cross-functional project, the pilot in command—not the functional manager—assesses that portion of their performance review. In Workday, the functional manager’s section for project-related goals is grayed out. If there’s a disagreement, they can discuss it. But the system makes the intended authority structure visible and enforceable.
“That was a huge enabler to actually letting people understand what we were trying to do and where we were going,” Cassano said.
Lessons from scaling
Pfizer started with nine teams. They iterated to 50. Today, 700 teams across the company operate this way. It is no longer a pilot program, but currently, it is the expected way to work cross-functionally at Pfizer.
Two lessons emerged from the rollout, according to Cassano.
The first: Functional managers needed more support than the initial plan provided. Their role changed substantially, from driving decisions to coaching and supporting, and the organization underestimated how disorienting that would feel.
Pfizer ultimately created separate forums for functional managers to voice concerns and receive updated guidance, separate from the pilot-in-command coaching and learning circles already in place.
The second lesson: Empowerment can feel threatening before it feels freeing. Teams given wide guardrails often assumed their boundaries were narrower than they actually were. Building psychological safety into the model—explicitly telling teams they had permission to act, and that course-correcting was acceptable—became part of the ongoing work.
“What do you mean I don’t have to clear this through two levels of approval?” was a common early reaction.
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