“We must embrace change if we want to improve”

Markus Lung CMgr FCMI, general manager of Vita Green, a pharmaceutical company in Hong Kong, is a big advocate for embracing change. He admits that changing a company’s systems can be a hard task. Employees often don’t want to alter how they work, but Markus believes that taking the time to have key conversations allows people to understand any change in working practices and get on board. 

It’s why he started having one-on-one meetings not only with the people who report directly to him, but also with the assistant managers and support staff who sit underneath his team, too. 

“It means I can let them know the company goals and missions directly, and give them more motivation and inspiration,” Markus says. It’s a lesson he took from his training while becoming a Chartered Manager – one that has paid dividends. 

From pharmacy to manufacturing

Markus has been in pharmaceutical manufacturing for nearly 30 years, but he didn’t set out for a career in the industry. Instead he studied pharmacy in Chinese medicine at the University of Hong Kong, which involved mainly clinical training, and registered as a pharmacist after graduating. 

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“I tried to find opportunities in pharmacy and luckily I couldn’t,” he says. He moved into manufacturing by accident, starting out in production management and quality assurance before stepping up to become a factory manager by the time he was 30.  

“I didn’t have any experience in drug manufacturing when I was studying pharmacy and also didn’t have any management or leadership training,” Markus says, but he learned how to manage people through experience and training. He worked at a number of leading pharma companies in Hong Kong, including Jacobson Pharma Group and Wai Yuen Tong, before joining Vita Green in 2018, building a breadth of experience within manufacturing of Western drugs, Chinese medicine and health supplements.  

Becoming Chartered in 2023 helped Markus gain the recognition he deserved for his work and boosted his credibility in the workplace, enabling him to influence organisational change and advocate for best practice. 

“I feel l have developed a deeper understanding of strategic and critical thinking and stakeholder engagement,” he says, “which has helped me perform my job more smoothly.”

I feel l have developed a deeper understanding of strategic and critical thinking and stakeholder engagement

Markus has developed an understanding of the importance of getting stakeholders around him to buy into his vision if he wants to implement new systems. Crucially, he learned that if his teams are going to get on board with changes to their roles, they need to understand the rationale behind his decisions. This strategy has served him both on large-scale construction projects and smaller-scale work that affects the daily tasks carried out by frontline staff. 

Open communication

Pharmaceutical drugs undergo safety tests to detect any heavy metals that could be present, and contracting this work out is time-consuming and costly, Markus explains. After presenting an idea for a new testing lab to his boss that would allow the company to take the process in-house, he went to the next set of people he needed approval from to move forward with the project. 

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“I interviewed the main stakeholders, like the quality control manager, the quality assurance manager and the engineer manager, to find out what they thought about the potential risks. During the discussion, I explained the rationale behind constructing a testing lab to get their buy-in,” he says. That lab was completed in 2022.