4 Actions to Stop Being Pharma's Best-Kept Secret

This episode picks up where the last one left off — and gets super specific. If your performance and results are strong but your advancement isn't reflecting it, the issue isn't how hard you're working. It's where that work is being directed.

I'm walking you through four moves you can make right now to see growth in your career.

What you'll learn:

• Ask the one question that reveals exactly how your manager is positioning you in leadership conversations.
• Map where your reputation currently lives — and where it needs to go for advancement decisions to go your way.
• Communicate your work in the language that actually moves the needle with senior leaders.
• Build the relationships that determine whether your name comes up when opportunity is available.

If you're ready to stop being the best-kept secret in your organization, this episode gives you the specific moves to change that.

Referenced in this episode:

3 Reasons Pharma's Best Performers Get Passed Over - New Live Webinar April 14th at 12pm EST. Register here.

Get the Book: Your Worthy Career: A Science-Backed Method to Build a Meaningful Career in Pharma and Biotech here.

Work with Me: Learn more and apply to work with me here.

Love the podcast?  Share your feedback by leaving us a review. Thank you!

Connect on Socials
LinkedIn
Instagram

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

If you're someone who wants to find out just how good your career can get and how much of a difference you can make in the pharmabiotech industry, you are in the right place. Welcome to Your Worthy Career, the podcast for women, building meaningful, high-impact careers in pharma and biotech. I'm Melissa Lawrence, career and leadership coach, organizational psychology expert, and the founder and author of Your Worthy Career. I spent over 12 years inside this industry and talent development across biotech and large pharma, and I've been coaching women in this space exclusively ever since. I bring you research back strategies, an insider perspective on what's actually happening inside industry organizations, and the perspective shifts that get you real results. Here we build careers that are meaningful, aligned with who you actually are, and positioned for the impact you're capable of making. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome to the episode. Now, last week we talked about what actually happens after the performance season closes in Pharma and Biotech when you get that compensation statement. And if you haven't listened to the episode yet, I'd recommend starting there because this one is going to pick up right where that left off. But let me give you a little bit of a recap. After your compensation statement lands, most high-performing women in this industry do one of three things. They volunteer for more work to prove themselves that they're ready for that next level or to kind of earn what they think was a lack or gap in their performance review or in the amount that they were awarded in their compensation statement or their bonus. They update their resume and start looking for new opportunities, thinking that there's nothing that they can do and they're not going to grow where they are. Or they tell themselves to be grateful and push that frustration down. And underneath all three of those responses is the same thought. There's nothing I can do here. Now we ran the kappa on that thought last week in the episode. And the root cause, incomplete information about how advancement actually works and a passive approach toward an industry that responds to active positioning, strategic positioning. Your effort and hard work is not the problem. It's misdirected effort with having the wrong strategy that is the actual problem. So this week we're gonna get really specific because the perspective shift and how to think about that performance review cycle and what to do to kind of make this year different is going to be more useful if you know some strategic steps, some tactical and practical moves that you can do right now, right? So I'm gonna give you four practical things that you can get started doing this week. Now, one thing before we get into it, the goal of what I'm about to share is to not necessarily add things to your to-do list. So if you're thinking, I'm busy, like what am I gonna have to do now? This is to replace things that are not working or are ineffective. So if you take these actions that I'm gonna share with you and layer them on top of the firefighting, the steering committees, the 6 p.m. emergency calls, you are gonna burn out faster and you're gonna resent this strategy and these actions that I'm gonna give you. And that is not what we are doing here. So the first move is really to stop doing the things that are not working, to redirect your capacity to say no to things that are not actually moving you forward. And then you're gonna add in some of the right actions and the right steps. Because, like we talked about last week, and like I've said before, hard work is the baseline in this industry at your level. The best performers around you are working hard, or at least most of them are, and your strategy is the differentiator. So let's dive in to the four things that you can do. Now, number one is to have the positioning conversation with your manager. And don't worry, I'm gonna give you a verbatim that you can use. Most women, after performance season, think about what they can do differently on their own, right? You might update your IDP or look for a new training or credential that you can do or take on a stretch project. Very few actually have a direct conversation with their manager about what's actually happening in the room where decisions are being made. So you might be having conversations to say that you're frustrated, to say you're ready for something more, to ask for that promotion. But the way you ask the question and the question that you ask matters. So here is a question that I want you to ask your manager in your next one-on-one. Write this down and you can use this verbatim if it helps. Otherwise, make it your own. Here's the question: if my name came up in a talent conversation tomorrow, what would you say about where I'm headed and my readiness for the next level? I'm gonna say that again. If my name came up in a talent conversation tomorrow, what would you say about where I'm headed and my readiness for the next level? Now the answer to that question is gonna be very revealing. If your manager can give you a specific compelling answer in business language, your positioning is in reasonable shape. If they pause or give you a general kind of you're doing great, or they talk about your effort and how you're an important part of the team and your reliability rather than your impact and your trajectory, then you may have just identified your root cause. Because I have sat in some of these conversations and I know what gets said about people, and I know what does not get said. The leaders in that room, they're not evaluating your IDP, they're not reviewing your deliverables quarter by quarter, they're not working from the same information. They're working from impressions, narratives, and what your manager is able to articulate about your trajectory in two or three sentences. That is what determines your outcome before you ever even walk into your review. So the question does two things it tells you the current state of your positioning and it gives you your manager the opportunity to be honest with you about what they're working with so that together you can build a better case. Because I believe your manager wants to advocate for you. This question gives them a reason to have a different kind of conversation with you rather than the one that you have been having. So this can really open up the dialogue so that you can help your manager help you. Now, move two is to map your visibility rings. Now, I use a framework called visibility rings with every client I work with, and it's the fastest way to see where your positioning work needs to grow and where you can be more visible. And I go into this in detail in my book. Imagine your career influence as concentric circles, like ripples and water. The innermost ring is you and your direct manager. The next ring out is your immediate team and cross-functional partners that you work with regularly. The ring beyond that is gonna be senior leaders and adjacent functions, your skip level managers, the people who show up in leadership forums, but who may not interact with you week to week. They might know you exist, but not really the details of what you do. And then the rings continue to expand outward until you get to kind of the industry in general. Now, most women in Forma invest almost entirely in that kind of innermost ring. Their boss knows their work, their team knows their work, and that is kind of where their reputation stops. Others might know of you, but again, not of the impact that you make. And advancement and hiring decisions are often made in those outer rings, not exclusively, but substantially. So, according to LinkedIn Global Trend data, approximately 80% of roles in this industry are filled through internal movement or relationships rather than external postings. Now, that stat can be a little bit fuzzy, but it is consistently between that 70 and 80%. I have had recruiters tell me this is true. This is something that I've seen working in the industry that I continue to see, and it's what the data continues to show. The people who fill roles are not always the most qualified on paper. They're the ones whose names come up when someone says, Who do we have that we could do this? Who would we love to have part of this project or part of this team? And if you're not in the outer rings, your name may not come up at all. So the strategic question is not how do I work harder? How do I prove myself more? It's which ring do I need to be more intentional about? And what is one specific way that I can build that this quarter or even this month or even this week? Not a networking event, not a LinkedIn connection request, but a real interaction that can spark a meaningful relationship, a project touch point, a question asked in a leadership forum that demonstrates your thinking, coffee with a senior leader in another function where you share something specific about your work and ask something genuine about theirs. One real relationship in an outer ring of where you're currently operating, built over time, is worth more for your advancement than a year of being the most reliable person on the team in that most inner circle. Okay, now move three is to communicate wins in business language, not effort language. This one is specific and it matters more than people realize. When high-performing women in pharma talk about their work in performance reviews, in one-on-ones, in interviews, in leadership forums, they tend to describe it in effort language. They stayed late, they managed the complexity, they kept the team together through the re-org, they got things across the finish line, they're the person everyone calls when something goes wrong. Effort language describes what it costs you to do the work, right? Business language describes what the organization gained because of it. Now, here is what the difference actually sounds like. Effort language might sound like I managed the CMC submission for the phase three filing, and it was a very complex process with a lot of stakeholders involved. We got it done in time though. Business language, the phase three CMC submission landed on time without a major amendment request, which protected the filing timeline and kept us on track for a Q4 filing date. One of those sentences makes a senior leader think she works really hard. The other makes them think she understands the business consequences of her work. Those two impressions do not lead to the same advancement outcome. You have to consider all of the leaders that are part of the decision-making process for promotions, advancements, and hiring decisions. Some are gonna go just based off relationship, some are gonna go off of that business language that you use, right? You have to consider like what is that kind of dominant motive for how advancement is going to happen in your context. And generally speaking, business language is gonna outweigh effort language every time. Now, I want to connect this back to something from last week because I think it really matters. The feedback research that I cited in last week's episode was from Stanford and Harvard Business Review, showing that women are significantly more likely to receive vague, non-actionable feedback that's focused on style rather than something that is constructive or substantial, which means your manager may not even be giving you the language to work with. They may be telling you that you're great without giving you the specific framing you need to advocate for yourself, or they could be even telling you what you need to improve, but really they could just be kicking the can down the road and not actually giving you the right feedback. So you have to do a little bit of digging yourself and taking responsibility for your career to make sure you're working with the right data. Because your manager cannot advocate for you in business language if you're not giving them the material to work with. So start speaking it in conversations where work comes up. Just kind of practice in your performance reviews, skip level meetings, leadership spaces, if you go to panels or conferences, if you meet people at networking events, casual conversation before kind of an all hands starts. Every one of those is an opportunity for you to kind of practice the way you talk about your work. Now, if you want a little bit of an exercise to take this a step further, you could take, say, one win or accomplishment that you had last year or last quarter and write it down in a way that you would normally describe it. Like don't try to filter it, just how would you normally talk about what you did, what you achieved in that kind of effort language? Then rewrite it in business language. What did the organization gain? What risk was mitigated? What timeline was protected? What outcome was possible because of the work that you did? Are there any metrics you can draw from? And then practice talking about your work in that way because that is the type of conversation that belongs in those calibration conversations for your next level. Now, the second or the fourth, I should say, the fourth move would be to apply the worthy method. So the worthy method, I go into detail in my book, um, but I outline what the R stands for is raise your visibility and the T stands for tap into relationships. Now, these are consistently the two most underdeveloped levers for high performers in this industry. Raise your visibility does not mean self-promote in a way that feels uncomfortable or that pulls you away from work, that feels like bragging, that's not what I'm talking about. It means being intentional about who sees your work and hears about your direction. It means finding the intersection of what you are excellent at and what the organization needs at the next level and making sure the right people know that that intersection or that gap exists. It means showing up in rooms where your thinking, your unique perspective with all of the credentials that you have can be observed by people beyond the immediate team. You want to look at who the real decision makers are and who strategically you may want to work with in the future. And tapping into relationships means building strategic relationships with those specific people. Not everyone, not broad networking, not just kind of generic LinkedIn connection numbers. You want to have three or four people who have influence over your next move and who currently do not know you well enough to advocate for you specifically and then intentionally build relationships with them. So this isn't because you need something from them right now, because genuine professional relationships are how advancement happens in this industry. So it's just how this works. And you know this, right? Because women often tell me that they stayed in an unhappy job longer than they wanted to because they liked their boss or had a relationship with their boss, or that their senior leadership already brings in their team from other companies, or even when they want to leave, they might be looking for other roles because of a negative relationship. So our careers are very relationship-driven. And at some point in our careers, the hard work, the good performance reviews, they just don't work for advancement. And you might be at that point now. So building these relationships really proactively feels uncomfortable to a lot of women in pharma and they don't think it's necessary, especially the ones who have built their careers on delivering excellent work and letting the results, the results really speak for themselves. And there's nothing wrong with that instinct necessarily. Your results do matter, they are the foundation, but at a certain point in this industry, the results stop being the differentiator because everyone around you has those results too. So then you just blend in. And what differentiates you in those outer rings is that people know you, they trust your judgment, they can picture you in that next role. And that doesn't happen by accident. It happens through intentional, consistent, really genuine relationship building over time. So I want to leave you with one belief shift that really ties both of these episodes together because I think it is the most important thing that you can take from this conversation. And that is to shift from I need to work harder to I need to work in the right direction with the right people. Hard work is what got you here. It is real, it matters, and it reflects who you are, but it is the baseline. Everyone around you is working hard. Hard work earns you the right to be in the room. It's the strategy and the relationships that determine what happens when you are there. So the four moves I gave you today, again, they're not about doing more. They're about redirecting, redirecting how you talk about your work, how you put your relationship energy into focus, redirecting the conversation you have with your manager from a check-in to a more positioning conversation, these small redirects that you sustain over time, they compound in a way that an IDP with every box filled in simply does not. Now, if this episode today, if this resonated with you and you want to go deeper on how advancement actually works in pharma and biotech, I have two things for you. First, I'm hosting a free live training on April 14th. It's called Three Reasons Pharma's Best Performers Get Passed Over and How to Be the Exception. We're going to go beyond what I covered in these two episodes. I'm going to walk you through why performers that are getting those good performance reviews stay stuck in this industry and what the people making advancement decisions are actually looking for and what you can do to start being seen differently now and be that exception. It is free. It is live, it is built specifically for women in pharma biotech. I actually haven't done a live webinar since October. I think it's been about six months. So I'm really excited to be in a live room with you again. And the link to register is going to be in the show notes. You don't want to miss it. Now, second, if you want the complete method, the full diagnostic, the frameworks, the form of specific stories, that is in my book, Your Worthy Career. It is designed to give you the framework, the method that you can follow to proactively build a meaningful career now and for years to come. It gives you a career development method that works in this industry and is authentic to you. And there's links in the show notes for that as well. So I will talk to you soon. And if you're joining me on April 14th, I will see you there first.