COVERSTORY
By Jennifer Bryan and Tiffani Higgins, MHA
T riage. It’s a word you may associate with medical dramas like The Pitt or Grey’s Anatomy. But, increasingly, the same skill set—rapidly assessing competing needs, defining clear plans of action and delegating effectively—is becoming essential for training and development teams.
The need for these triage skills is clear. Training and development teams face growing constraints on budgets, time and resources, even as the needs they support and customer groups they serve continue to expand.
These pressures are further complicated by inefficiencies. Trainers, for example, may operate in silos, and in many organizations there is no established communication pipeline between development and training personnel. Such issues create serious challenges at a moment when these teams are called on to do more with less.
None of these challenges, however, are insurmountable. In 2025, our US Commercial Talent Management/Human Resources and Commercial Training & Development teams implemented a five-step process designed to help us adopt new ways of working and triage more effectively. As a result, we’ve strengthened collaboration, improved resource allocation and created a more flexible, responsive learning ecosystem that supports employees across roles and career stages. We believe this approach may offer useful lessons for other organizations looking to improve how they prioritize and respond to training and development needs.
Before you can improve your team’s ability to triage, it’s essential to understand what’s working well and where gaps exist. Are there clear lines of communication between training and development colleagues? Do you know where your development colleagues are positioned throughout the organization so that you are best able to collaborate with them? Are there resource duplications or other inefficiencies? Is there an established system in place to field training requests and uncover needs?
While these questions focus inward, it’s just as important to assess how well your team supports the broader organization. Too often, training and development devotes a disproportionate share of its attention to sales. This can be a missed opportunity. Overall effectiveness suffers when training and development does not support those who, in turn, support sales — including supply chain, value and access, compliance and marketing. To drive meaningful impact, we must commit to serving the full organizational ecosystem.
Through the assessment process, you’ll likely uncover disconnects—both in communication and understanding—between training and development personnel. To improve your triage practices, first bridge those gaps. Start by engaging your colleagues with a clear, aligned objective. For example, our driving goal was to better serve the entire organizational ecosystem, from support teams to sales. This goal became a north star as we charted our way forward.
When contacting your colleagues, be clear that you are inviting collaboration. Keep in mind that your invitation will set the tone for what follows. Rather than imposing your point of view, ask your colleagues to share their experiences as well as their vision for ways to improve. Throughout this stage, we were continually surprised by how our colleagues challenged our assumptions and helped us reimagine our ways of working. By ensuring everyone at the table felt welcomed and heard, we built the trust needed to navigate the more difficult questions ahead.
The assessment we conducted (Step 1) and our ensuing discussions (Step 2) brought to light that many across the organization, and even within our teams, lacked a shared understanding of what differentiates training from development. This confusion was creating miscommunication and inefficiencies. In response, our first order of business was to align on the spheres of influence for both our training and development teams. Starting broadly, we determined that, for our purposes:
Training focuses on the transfer of job-specific knowledge and skills that are required to succeed in one’s role.
Development focuses on creating behavior change and reaching long-term career goals through learning, practice and reinforcement.
From there, we defined the responsibilities for each role, creating clear lanes. It didn’t happen overnight, but completing this step proved to be the most important in the entire process. So, don’t assume everyone at the table shares the same perspective. Give yourselves time to build a shared understanding of your team’s roles and responsibilities.
While these five steps are inherently collaborative, once actual triage begins, decisions cannot be made by committee. Seeking input from every member of the team for every project would be inefficient, while fully decentralizing decision-making would quickly create as many silos as there are team members.
That’s why your group will need to appoint one or two members as triage leads. These leaders will act as point people for all requests, determining priorities, deciding how to allocate the budget and delegating needs to the appropriate personnel. Centralizing authority in this way will promote clear communication, create continuity between projects and maximize efficiency.
When you have your leads in place, it’s time to map what will happen at each stage of the process. How will requests be routed to your triage leads? What expectations will be set once work is delegated? How will your teams communicate this new process to the organization?
Once you answer these questions, and before you move to Step 5, you’re ready to set your triage process in motion!
While Steps 1-4 will give your triage process a strong start, you must periodically revisit the ideas underpinning your work and assess their effectiveness. This should be done through formal touchpoints, such as quarterly meetings that reconvene the entire group. That said, we’ve found that informal discussions can be just as valuable in evaluating progress.
By the end of Step 4, we had solidified bonds across our training and development personnel. Building on that foundation of trust, we encouraged our colleagues to keep the conversation going. Our guiding principle was simple: we all needed to be honest about both our successes and setbacks. Only through that honesty could we identify areas for improvement as well as achievements on which to build.
In the months since launching our triage process, we’ve strengthened communication not only within our training and development teams, but across the organization. By clarifying our roles internally, we’ve also sharpened how we articulate to those outside our teams the value we provide. Our new ways of working have enabled us to deliver on this promise, reaching more learners while managing our budget to maximize its impact. As a result, we’ve fostered new partnerships and, with each project, moved closer to our foundational goal: better serving our entire organizational ecosystem.
The examples and perspectives shared in this article are based on the authors’ experience with an internal Teva US Commercial initiative and are provided for informational purposes only. They should not be interpreted as formal Teva policy or guidance.
Jennifer Bryan (left) is the chief talent management officer, U.S. Commercial, for Teva Pharmaceuticals and is treasurer of the LTEN Board of Directors. Connect through Jennifer.Bryan@tevapharm.com or linkedin.com/in/jennifer-bryan-36232466.
Tiffani Higgins, MHA, (right) is head of commercial training & development for Teva Pharmaceuticals. Connect through Tiffani.Higgins@tevapharm.com or linkedin.com/in/tiffani-j-higgins.
