The pharmaceutical industry, particularly the small molecule domain, faces unprecedented challenges of escalating costs, high attrition as well as increasing competitive pressure from other companies and from new treatment modes such as biological products. In other industries, process improvement approaches, such as Lean Sigma, have delivered benefits in speed, quality and cost of delivery. Examining the medicinal chemistry contributions to the iterative improvement process of design-make-test-analyse from a Lean Sigma perspective revealed that major improvements could be made. Thus, the cycle times of synthesis, as well as compound analysis and purification, were reduced dramatically. Improvements focused on team, rather than individual, performance. These new ways of working have consequences for staff engagement, goals, rewards and motivation, which are also discussed.