From Answers to Questions: How Takeda Earned a 2026 Novie Award for Building a Global Coaching Culture

Key Takeaways:

• Takeda has won a 2026 Novie Award for Workforce Enablement, NovoEd’s recognition for programs that unlock new skills, career pathways, or workforce mobility
• The award celebrates “Be a Great Coach,” Takeda’s practice-based program that reached 1,350 people leaders across 50 countries, every business unit, and 20 languages
• Small learning circles and AI-powered role plays gave leaders a safe space to practice coaching skills, reflect, and change their behavior at scale
• Because each participating leader influences the people around them, the program has the potential to positively impact more than 10,000 Takeda employees worldwide

How do you build a coaching culture across 1,350 people leaders, 50 countries, and 20 languages, while creating meaningful behavior change at scale? That’s the challenge Takeda’s Leader Development team set out to solve, and their answer earned them a 2026 Novie Award for Workforce Enablement.

We’re proud to celebrate this recognition, because it captures exactly what the Novie Awards are meant to honor: programs that unlock new skills, career pathways, and workforce mobility for the people who make an organization run.

Who Is Takeda?

Takeda is a global, values-based, research and development-driven biopharmaceutical leader headquartered in Japan, with roots stretching back more than two centuries. Today, Takeda employs roughly 50,000 people across approximately 80 countries and regions, united by a shared mission to create better health for people and a brighter future for the world.

With a workforce that spans so many countries, languages, and business units, developing consistent, effective leadership across the entire organization is no small task. That challenge sits at the heart of the work led by Takeda’s Leader Development team, and specifically, the team’s ambitious “Be a Great Coach” program.

Building the Muscle of Coaching

In the Novie Award customer story shared on NovoEd’s YouTube channel, James Downey, Takeda’s Head of Leader Development, explains that the ultimate goal of “Be a Great Coach” was to develop a genuine coaching culture across the organization, building both the muscle and the competencies of coaching in leaders around the globe. The underlying business case is clear: Leaders who coach well create a better people experience and that translates directly into stronger retention, higher engagement, and greater impact across the organization.

What set “Be a Great Coach” apart, according to Downey, wasn’t simply teaching leaders about coaching theory. It was creating the actual conditions for leaders to practice, reflect, and ultimately change their behavior at scale, a much higher bar than typical leadership training, and one that requires a fundamentally different kind of learning design.

Practicing in a Safe Space

Behavior change requires practice, and practice requires psychological safety. Downey describes how the program was built as a practice-based experience, giving Takeda’s leaders a safe environment to try out their coaching skills first in small learning circles before applying them more broadly. The program also incorporated AI-powered role plays, giving leaders another low-stakes way to rehearse real coaching conversations and build confidence before putting those skills to work with their own teams.

This combination of small-group practice and AI role play reflects a core insight about how coaching skills actually develop: They aren’t absorbed by watching a presentation or reading a framework, they’re built through repetition, feedback, and reflection. As Downey puts it, the goal was to move people leaders from simply giving answers to asking better questions, a subtle but foundational shift for anyone in a coaching role.

Delivering a Cohesive Experience at Massive Scale

Rolling out a practice-based leadership program to 1,350 people leaders spanning 50 countries and every business unit at Takeda presents an enormous logistical challenge, on top of the instructional one. Downey credits NovoEd’s platform with helping enable a fully integrated, structured learning journey that ensured a cohesive experience across every cohort, regardless of where in the world a leader happened to be participating.

With 20 languages represented across the program’s global population, built-in translation features proved especially valuable, removing a barrier that could otherwise have fragmented the experience or left some leaders without full access to the material. As Downey describes it, these details, translation support among them, made a meaningful difference to the overall success of the program.

Why This Recognition Matters

The Workforce Enablement Novie Award exists to recognize programs that build new skills and unlock workforce mobility. Takeda’s “Be a Great Coach” program delivers on that promise at remarkable scale. This isn’t an initiative measured only by completion rates or satisfaction scores. Its real measure of success lies in the ripple effect it’s designed to create: If every one of the 1,350 participating leaders changes even one behavior, the program has the potential to positively influence more than 10,000 Takeda employees worldwide.

For L&D leaders building their own leadership or coaching initiatives, Takeda’s approach offers a clear lesson. Real behavior change requires more than content delivery. It requires designed opportunities for safe practice, whether through peer-based learning circles or AI-powered simulations, paired with a platform capable of delivering that experience consistently to a genuinely global, multilingual audience.

Congratulations to Takeda

We want to extend our sincere congratulations to James Downey and the entire Takeda Leader Development team on this well-earned 2026 Novie Award. Their work building a scalable, practice-based coaching culture across such a vast global organization reflects exactly the kind of workforce enablement impact this award was created to recognize.

If you’d like to hear more from James Downey about Takeda’s experience partnering with NovoEd, you can watch the full customer story on our YouTube channel.

See What NovoEd Can Do for Your Organization

Takeda’s story shows what’s possible when a global organization commits to building real behavioral change, not just delivering content at scale. Whether you’re developing a coaching culture, rolling out leadership training across dozens of countries, or building any program where practice and reflection matter as much as knowledge, NovoEd’s platform is built to help you deliver a cohesive, personalized learning journey to every leader, wherever they are in the world.

Want to learn how NovoEd can help your organization build its own award-winning talent development program? Request a demo today and discover how we can help you turn your learning strategy into measurable impact.