What is Going for Gold?

Going for Gold is Lilly’s global employee recognition and development program, open to employees at all levels who demonstrate a commitment to elevating their performance and living the company’s Team Lilly behaviours: Include, Innovate, Accelerate and Deliver. Across the 2026 program, 1,846 employees applied, and 100 were selected.

The program is about more than attending the Games. It includes months of preparation, virtual sessions on leadership, safety and logistics, culminating in an immersive week that pairs world-class sporting moments with structured leadership development facilitated by Lilly’s Center for Leadership Performance.

Learning the Performance CODE

At the heart of the Milano experience was a leadership framework called the Performance CODE – four factors that underpin sustained high performance:

Clarity: knowing what to do, why it matters and to what standard

Ownership: taking responsibility, showing initiative and being accountable for outcomes

Discipline: building systems, processes and behaviours that deliver consistent results

Effort: sustaining energy, adaptability and a positive mindset over time

Simple to read. Confronting to apply honestly.

The framework was brought to life through the story of Olympic figure skater Yuna Kim, whose journey illustrated how sustained clarity of purpose, personal ownership, relentless discipline and enduring effort combine to produce extraordinary results. Participants then reflected on their own careers: what they had worked hard for and achieved, what they had desired but not reached and what made the difference.

Milano as a living classroom

The program used the city of Milano itself as a leadership lesson. Before diving into the CODE framework, participants were asked to discover five people (past or present), whose work and influence helped shape Milano into the remarkable city it is today. The answer, as the facilitator noted, is that Milano became great by combining individual genius with collective effort. It was a fitting metaphor for Lilly’s culture, where individual growth and team performance go hand in hand.

Beyond the classroom, the week was packed with shared experiences: a cooking class at Mercato Centrale, a social impact day volunteering at Banco Alimentare della Lombardia (a food bank serving communities across the Lombardy region), and unforgettable evenings watching short track speed skating, figure skating and ice hockey at Olympic venues across Milano and Verona.

The question we brought home to Australia

For us, the most powerful takeaway was the homework assignment: study the Olympic event you attend, discover how performance expectations have changed over time, and observe how athletes responded, or didn’t. Sitting in the stands, watching athletes compete at the highest level, the lesson became visceral. The athletes who stood on the podium were not simply the most talented. They were the ones who had been the clearest about their goal, who owned every training session, who maintained discipline when it was tedious and who kept showing up with energy when the outcome was still uncertain.

The Performance CODE gave us a language for something many people feel instinctively: that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost always a gap in clarity, ownership, discipline or effort, not in talent.

That lesson is not only for Olympians. It applies to anyone who wants to get better at what they do, whether that is delivering a project at work, learning a new skill, supporting a teammate through a tough quarter, or simply committing to being a little more intentional each day.

Why it matters

Programs like Going for Gold reflect something important about Lilly’s approach to its people. In a company whose mission is to make life better for patients around the world, investing in the growth of the people behind the science is not a side project, it is essential. When employees return from an experience like this, they bring back more than memories. They bring back a sharper sense of what great looks like, a global network of colleagues who share the same values and a renewed commitment to raising the bar in their own work.

As we settle back into our roles in Sydney and Adelaide (respectively), the Performance CODE has become part of how we approach our day-to-day. Before starting a new initiative, we ask: am I clear on what success looks like? Am I truly owning this, or waiting for someone else to move first? Are my systems strong enough to sustain progress? And am I bringing the energy this work deserves?

You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. That line, shared during the program, has stayed with us. And it is a reminder that the best version of what we do tomorrow starts with the habits and choices we make today.

Santiago Guisao is a Principal Associate in Lilly’s Global Medicines Quality Organisation, and Rachel Newson is a Real World Evidence Senior Director.