Activity vs Strategic Positioning in Pharma Careers

This episode is for the woman in pharma or biotech who has strong performance reviews, a supportive boss, colleagues who rave about her, and still can't get the move she wants. We're getting into the difference between activity and strategic visibility — why being known is not the same as being positioned, and how to fill the gap.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why you can be exceptionally well-positioned with your immediate team and completely invisible to the people who actually control what's next for you
• The difference between being valued and being someone the organization has a stake in keeping
• The nuance in visibility and positioning that can result in roles being created for you even when there isn't an allocated budget

Monday May 28th - Strategy Hour for Women in Pharma - Limited to 25 women. Register at https://yourworthycareer.com/strategy-hour 

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-backed 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 and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. This week we're gonna dive into activity versus visibility when it comes to your former career. Now, what do I mean by activity versus visibility? I'm gonna explain that to you through a story. Now, one of my clients, she was a director of medical affairs, she reached out and she wanted to explore coaching because she felt like her career was kind of stale. She loved her boss, she had excellent performance reviews, she had colleagues who raved about her, she had a PhD, no shortage of credentials. The team relied on her and she was able to use her expertise. So outside looking in and to a lot of people, very successful career. But it started to feel hollow. She felt like the projects that she was working on didn't really engage her, and she felt kind of bad about that because her work was important, like logically, she knew that. But because she had a family member that she loved so much, passed from cancer, as many of us have had that experience, she felt like her time could be better spent finding a cure for that specific type of cancer or working on something that would have maybe saved her loved one, or that she could just kind of see and feel the impact of the work that she was doing day to day. And the other thing that really muddied the water for her was her boss. Her boss advocated for her, celebrated her, was supportive of all of her development goals, was honestly, she said, the best boss that she had ever had. And her boss at her last company, on the other hand, was a tyrant, toxic. And actually, the reason that she left. So she was faced with a couple of issues. She wanted more meaningful work and was considering moving from medical affairs to translational, but she wasn't sure it was the right move. And there weren't openings anyway. And two, she was worried about the relationship with her boss. She didn't want to let her boss down. So it's this kind of confusion of not having a clear path forward. And she thought if she moved departments internally, it would be bad for the relationship with her boss. She didn't want to let her boss down. She had some allegiance to her. And then there wasn't like a clear opportunity anyway. So it just kind of felt like she was stuck and there wasn't a clear path forward and she wasn't sure what she wanted to do. And it just felt risky no matter what she did because of the relationship with her boss, because of the opportunities that were lacking internally, because of her experience with a prior company. It just ended up in her kind of staying in circles right where she was. And she represents a familiar story for my clients. Like this is not really unique. So you might even see yourself in this experience on some level, the kind of high achiever. She's recognized for her work. She did a good job, but she just wanted something more or different. And sometimes when you have something really great, it's even harder to make a change because you think you should just feel grateful and you have what a lot of other people wish they had. And so it kind of feels selfish to want more. Um, and I totally understand that I felt that way too when I've made pivots in my own career. And that's just a real thing that a lot of people don't talk about. Um, but we talk about that all the time in my space. So she had strong relationships with varying levels of leadership. She had the supportive boss, she had the consistent high reviews, she had the impressive resume. And you know, because I listened to her accolades, it actually reminded me of one of the hesitations that she had on even reaching out for coaching to begin with. Is she thought coaching was really to fix a problem. It was to help a poor performer because when you think about it, that's often what organizations use coaches to do. Like they bring them in to help people be leaders because they're not the leaders they want them to be, or because they see someone as having a good opportunity for the succession plan, and they need to, you know, they're a little rougher on the edges and they need to fix that, or they need to help them be a more strategic leader, or they need to help them be better with their kind of emotional intelligence and people management, or they've had some complaints in the past, they need to do some reputation management. So she had actually come to see that coaching is not something just to fix a problem. It's something that is your competitive edge to raise your standard, to see what you're really capable of, to learn tools that shift your results for the rest of your life. Just like in music, there are coaches. In sports, there are coaches. Really, any coach in other scenarios, other than our own personal and professional development, is taking the best of the best and making them better by making those little tweaks and helping them see what they can't see, helping them see where they need to correct their form, helping them excel beyond what they think is capable of. If you've ever had a really great teacher or a really great coach in any part of your life, like that's similar to what this is like. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar and that's helping you see what you can't see. It's helping you get that edge that is taking, like in pharma, we have so many high performers where everyone is kind of great, everyone is accomplished for the most part. And this is the thing that kind of sets you apart. So my client, she had a lot going for her. And what we did first is we identified the next best role for her that was going to give her the meaning and the purpose that she wanted. And we tabled all of those what ifs until we had that answer. And that is something that can be so helpful and underestimated, is that sometimes we can't decide because we get so caught up in, well, what if I want to move internally and I can't actually make that happen? What if I go to what if the answer is that I need to go to another company and then I end up with the same kind of boss I had before? Like all of these what ifs then keep us solving the wrong problem and we don't actually move forward. So this is what we did is we stopped all those what-ifs and said, let's just first figure out what is that direction, then we'll solve any problems that that direction may come up with. Okay. Then what we discovered is even though people knew her and celebrated her, she actually didn't have the strategic visibility she needed to make the move she wanted. People think that when I say strategic visibility, it's just about being visible, being known by leaders, being valued for what you do, but it's so much deeper than that. Let's talk about activity then versus visibility and the way to talk about it here. So, activity looks like my client. She was known, recognized, had friends tell her that she should be promoted, she should be able to move into any role that she wanted, and she was doing everything right. The CMO even knew her name. She had people in the C-suite who knew what her role was, knew her name, knew what she did. She always delivered, she mentored junior scientists. She even had a blog that she wrote with an industry colleague to support other women in pharma. Okay. She gave up time at home, time she wished she had more of to spend time with her son. But she was balancing a high-stakes career with motherhood, with being a wife and a family. She presented at conferences, she was published. So, like, again, just like how good her career looked from the outside, she also felt she was very visible. And when I list out these things, you might think, wow, like she sounds like a rock star, and she was. And you might think, wow, she was visible. But when it came down to what she wanted, moving to translational oncology with her current company, she met with her boss. Her boss supported the move. And she met with the head of the department and they said, When we have an opening, we'd love to consider you. And this is where most women stop. They stop at, okay, I did all of these things. I have the visibility. My boss supports me. This department head is ready to hire me. I just have to wait for that opportunity to show up, right? But then what happens is they keep delivering, keep talking to their boss, following up with the department head, looking for updates, exploring outside opportunities because they're not sure if it's actually going to work out. And all of it is just leading to like waiting and staying in a role that's actually feeling stale and draining you. They keep sacrificing their family time, trying to prove themselves because when you're in that situation, you might feel like you can't let one ball drop. You can't, you know, let them see you not performing because you feel like you're constantly just proving and giving evidence that you're ready for that next role, trying to show that you're already ready. And the more time that passes, the more doubt can creep in. Doubt that it's ever going to happen, doubt that you're even on the right track, doubting if they're lying to you, are they really gonna give you that opportunity? Is it really coming? Are they just trying to exploit your work? Like what is actually happening? But because she had me to help, here is what we did instead. We identified who was missing, who actually was the decision maker, and how we could position her to be necessary for the role she wanted. And once we did that, she had the role created for her. It was a lateral move, director to director, but she got a $20,000 raise. And within two years from there, she used those same skills that she worked on in coaching to get promoted to senior director. Now, this didn't happen from her performance or just the activity of being visible, the activity of delivering. She got positioned. Strategic visibility is about positioning. So when I say positioning, what does that mean? It means you're intentionally shaping how specific people think about you before you need them to think about you at all. And far more specifically, positioning is the gap between being known as really strong technically, being known as the person that delivers, versus being known as the person that we need when something is complex and the stakes are high. Both might be true, but only one gets you to that next level. It's what you're known for, who knows it, and how consistently that perception is seen and communicated by the right people. You can be exceptionally well positioned with your immediate team and completely invisible to the people who actually control what's next for you. It's even knowing who are the people who make those decisions for you, because some think it's just their boss or their skip level, and they're completely wrong. If you don't have the right people even identified, you can spend time trying to be visible and positioning yourself to the wrong people, wasting your time installing your career. And we don't want that. So when you have the right person saying your name in a room you're not in before decisions are even made, and they're convinced that you need to be in that role that you want, not for you, but for the benefit of the company, you become valued in a whole new way. You get considered for things that never get announced. The stretch assignment that becomes a VP's direct line, the cross-functional leadership role that gets created around someone's skill set. The like we need, we need you, Jan, to handle this ex-project conversation that actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon between senior leaders, and none of that is posted. All of those examples, they go to the person who is visible and strategically positioned, not the one who's just doing the activity. Think about it this way: the real payoff of you working on this skill and being strategically visible and positioned is that you become someone the organization has a stake in keeping. That's different from being valued. Valued employees get good performance reviews. People the organization is invested in become protected and developed and promoted because losing them would cost them something. Learning how to position yourself and how to be visible is a personalized process that is 100% learnable and a skill you can completely learn that will change the possibilities of your career. Look at my client. Imagine if she stayed stuck, not knowing what role would be best, or waiting for something to open up, thinking that she was doing everything she needed to do. She was doing enough. Who knows where she would be? But I can tell you where she is now. She's coaching her son's soccer team. She's a senior director in a role she loves on the succession plan to lead her division. You might already recognize yourself in this episode and see where you might have a gap that needs to be addressed. But I want to leave you with a question to consider because honestly, like you can read all of the books, take all the training programs on visibility or positioning or brand or leadership skills. But if it's not personalized to you in your brain in the way that you think, if you don't get your blind spots identified, it's not going to be effective. It's probably things that you've already tried. You've probably read the articles and done the things and it's not working. So think about the last time a senior leader, someone two or more levels above you, reached out to specifically ask for your perspective or something strategic. They did this on their own, not because you're on a project team or you're the project lead or because the boss looped you in. If you can't name a specific instance, or if you have to go back more than six months to find one, this is probably a gap for you. And I hope that one thing that you take away is that you can't fill that gap with more activity. You fill it with skill and strategy. If you want to dig deeper into this topic, diagnose what gaps you might have, fill them with personalized career and leadership development, then head to my website, yourworthycareer.com. I typically do this work with my clients inside the right move protocol. Now, until next time, remember that whatever goal you have, you can reach it. You can be the exception to everyone and everything around you. I see it all the time. Have a wonderful rest of your week.