When No One Has Your Back

You put together the strategy your VP loves, then your own manager tears it apart, and you're left standing in the middle with no one publicly on your side. Or your name isn't in the meeting where decisions about your own project get made, and you find out after the fact what everyone else already agreed to. 

In pharma and biotech, matrix teams and shifting priorities make this common, not personal, and most women read it as proof there's nothing they can do. That belief is the actual problem. This episode breaks down exactly what to do about it, so you stop waiting for the room to change and start leading it.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why conflicting feedback from your stakeholders isn't a dead end
• The real reasons you get left out of decision-making meetings
• How to get buy-in from a stakeholder who doesn't think like you do
• What radical responsibility looks like when no one seems to have your back
• The three-step shift I coach inside The Right Move Protocol every week

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

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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 this week's episode of the podcast. I'm so happy to be with you here today. I hope that you are having a great week. Now, a few episodes ago, I mentioned that I started playing pickleball, and I wanted to give you a little bit of an update. I love it so much. I was so scared to do it at first. I was worried I wouldn't get it or wouldn't keep up with like the rest of the class. And I was just, at the end of the day, just a little worried that I wouldn't belong. And we often have these surface level feelings that can present themselves as being too busy or not wanting to spend money. We come up with a logical reason that we shouldn't try the things we're interested in. And so that's exactly what I did with pickleball for a bit. But deep down, there is always a deeper emotion, often tied to a fear of rejection, a fear of making the wrong choice, a fear that we can't do it. And because my whole business in life is really around being in tune with the thoughts and feelings and how they connect to our results in life, I'm able to pinpoint this and redirect myself, but it's only because I built this skill. It's not how I lived my life all of the time. So it doesn't save me from the human experience of feelings. We're literally wired in our primal brains to avoid discomfort and stick with a herd mentality to stick with others to feel like we belong. So the problem is that this human experience can actually prevent us from doing things we want to do and seeing what we're really capable of. And sometimes it's in your career and sometimes it's in your day-to-day, and sometimes, like for me, it's with pickleball. But let me tell you, I just figured out how to do it. And the first step is to decide. So I decided that I was going to learn how to play pickleball, that I was gonna try it, right? You don't have to commit to just gonna try it. So I found the place that I wanted to go to. I found a beginner training program, and then for a little added fun, I roped my wife in to do it with me because I wanted us to have a fun new hobby together, other than just wine tasting, right? And if I really liked it, I wanted her to be my partner. I wanted to have someone to play with. So she started to learn after me. If she would have waited, then I would have been too advanced for her, and that's not good for either of us. So we did a seven-week program and we look forward to it every week. We met some fun new people to play with, and now we actually just graduated and we are signed up for a level 201 program. So listen, if I would have let my fear and discomfort get the best of me, I wouldn't have this experience of going to play with my wife every week. The new group chat that I have with a few other players from the pickle club to coordinate when we're signing up to play so we can meet up. I wouldn't be so excited to get a fancy new paddle for my birthday, and I wouldn't be moving my body and getting a good workout in, doing something that I really enjoy. So it's really all just wins all around. And I know some of you might have followed my decision to do this from my stories on Instagram or client conversations that I might have shared with you. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of an update on how that was and how it's going. And I even got a massage last week and I mentioned that I started playing to my massage therapist, and she said, Oh, I've been thinking about playing. I keep hearing about it, but I'm nervous because I need my body to do my job and to do my work, and I don't want to get injured. So, because I went, because I shared with her all of the ways that she could try it and that it could be safe, I helped her build comfort to start where she's at. And she told me that I should work for the Pickleball place, you guys, that the place I should go to should hire me as an affiliate. Okay, and now she's gonna give it a try. So if there is something that you have been wanting to try or get for yourself, whether it's maybe a painting class or maybe it's a new sport or coaching or whatever it is, just know that you won't feel a hundred percent confident until you try it. It's dang near impossible. You can feel 80%, but that confidence that it was the right decision actually comes after you do it, right? Because we don't know what we don't know, and your brain can't make you feel confident in something you don't know. So I always ask myself this would I regret it if I didn't try? If I didn't do the thing, if I didn't get the thing, would I regret it? And if it's yes, then I do it. So in a couple of weeks, I have a client actually from the Right Move Protocol who's gonna join us on the podcast and she's gonna talk about the way she thinks about decisions, which I thought was just really brilliant. And so she has a way that she thinks about things that's different from the way that I think about them. So for when you're not a hundred percent, that I think is actually really gonna help if you're someone who gets caught up in analysis paralysis and research and hesitation and overthinking and trying to control outcomes and not taking any risk, right? So look out for that in the beginning of September. All right. Well, I guess as I started talking here on this with a little picklebell update, I end up doing a little bit of a little bonus lesson on making decisions and where confidence comes from and trying new things. But what we're here to talk about is a little bit different, related, but a little bit different. So today we're gonna talk about what to do when no one backs you up at work. And I'm going to approach this from a couple of different angles. So you might want to listen for where this might fit for you. So one is a real situation you might have when you get conflicting feedback and direction and you don't have backup from your boss or the project lead. This can happen on project teams with different stakeholders, working in a matrix, because we have a lot of people to cater to and consider. And sometimes you can do what the science says, what your highest ranking member on the team says, and your boss just doesn't buy it, doesn't think it's the right direction. So it's one scenario. The other issue is more invisibility. You're responsible for an important part of your work, but you're not included in the meetings where decisions are made. You're not even feeling like you're considered at all. So you're running the project, you're running the program, you're leading the team, the timelines, but you're getting directed and you're not leading. You don't have that autonomy and you kind of feel invincible, right? So these are two different ways that you don't feel supported and that you can feel like no one is backing you up. And I'm including them together because the solution is similar. And when you see the solution is similar because it is, you can see it as a skill set that once you learn and see differently, you can apply to so many different situations that will ultimately help you with your career. It's also worth noting that I recently asked those on my biopharma trailblazers email list what topics they'd like to hear about on the podcast. And this issue came up there. So I figured no time like the present, let's get this topic out there. It's also something that I've been coaching on inside the right move protocol. So the same things you deal with day to day is exactly what we troubleshoot and solve for every week when we coach together, except it's personalized to you and timely exactly when you need it. We also have more time to get very specific on you and your specific situation, your stakeholders, your career. But for today, let's dig into this topic of not being backed up, not feeling supported, and what you can do about it. Are you ready? All right, so let's break down the situation, the first that first situation that I mentioned. Let's break that down first on conflicting feedback. So recently a client was experiencing this where she was asked to put together a strategy and she had three key stakeholders that were on like the leadership of this project. She had a VP that was in another department, her boss, and her boss's boss, so her skip level. And my client has a challenging relationship with her line management and a great relationship with the VP in the other department. The VP is considered someone who knows her area in immunology really well. And her line management doesn't seem supportive of moving forward on any of my clients' projects, just kind of it's like a Debbie Downer on things. So when she put the strategy together, the VP loved it. But when she went to present it, her line management had a lot of critical feedback and didn't think it was gonna work. Now, the problem here is that the VP wasn't in some of those meetings and also just on the side, wasn't chiming in and having my client's back. And my client felt stuck in the middle and that there was really no pleasing her management. So in the end, she felt that no one had her back, at least not publicly where it mattered. She's kind of in the middle, just trying to do her best job, and she wasn't getting the support she needed, and she felt like she just kept getting beaten down with this negative feedback. Now, I've also seen this happen where you're dealing with leaders from different groups who are contributors to your project, and those leaders don't have a good relationship, and so their feedback is in conflict, and you almost feel like you have to be a marriage counselor because you need to get them aligned and it's not even about you, they're just kind of trying to be right and one up each other. This can also come up when your role is undefined. So everyone likes each other in this scenario, but no one is setting true direction, and so you're left trying to put the pieces together and make everyone happy, but the target moves all the time because people don't really know what they want, right? Sometimes, especially in the world where we have a lot of AI and companies are trying to hire people for AI roles or trying to figure out how to use AI in their company, a lot of times they are defining as they go, and so there's not clear direction, and that can be really frustrating. So now the second related issue that can pop up in these circumstances where you have conflicting leaders or just on their own, and that's where you're not included in the meetings or decisions that impact your work. This is that invisibility. So you don't always have the right information, or you're told information too late, or you can end up in meetings and be caught by surprise to learn certain decisions were made that you were not included on. And I experienced this in my career too. And sometimes this is because of hierarchies and titles, and some meetings happen, and it's honestly just not your place to be in them. Sometimes it's political, like in my situation, it was that there was this other HR person that had a different role, um, but she wasn't included in some of the meetings I felt I should be included in, or they were, and then it would seem like I was overstepping if I was also there. And so some of it was just about appearances. Sometimes you're just overlooked, and the people making the decisions don't see the impact of excluding you. It can be that simple too. Now, I know I gave you a lot of examples of what can contribute to feeling like no one is backing you up and making it harder to do your job. And maybe you saw yourself in one of them, maybe you saw yourself in all of them. And to me, if we boil all of these down, the issue and the solution fundamentally are the same. And I'm going to be pretty direct on this. The issue is that you have an idea for how things should go, and your stakeholders don't see your vision and they are not bought into it. And you are seeing this as a circumstance that you cannot overcome rather than taking radical responsibility for what you need. And I know that it might seem like it's impossible, and your stakeholders might really suck, and your boss might be a jerk, and you might feel like they are out to get you or a hot mess express or that you aren't valued, all of those things. And those are things that we should talk about, we should process, and we should work through. But at the end of the day, you want to be seen as a leader, you want to be valued, you want to be successful. So the best way to do this, in my opinion, is to look at your obstacles as problems to solve. These are data points that inform your strategy. They do not define your outcome. When you think there's nothing you can do, your leaders are who they are, but it's just the culture. What happens? Your brain literally stops trying to find the solution and instead will find all of the reasons that you're right. You might go to happy hours or talk to your friends or your partner about how it sucks. And they might tell you that you're right, that it shouldn't be that way, that maybe you should leave. But what is that getting you? It's just putting a band-aid on the problem. It's making you feel better for a second. It's giving you that validation and that reassurance that you need that you're not getting at work. But then what happens when you go somewhere else and you get the same problem or difficult people and you don't have the skill or the perspective to handle it, then you're always running from the problem and potentially negatively impacting your career opportunities, stalling things when this could be solved with skill and perspective. So let's talk about what you can do. Because I know that this sounds easier said than done, but I want to give you three things to think about that you can try to work through what your situation is where you're feeling like people aren't backing you up so that you can have a path forward, right? So the first is understand your stakeholders' point of view. What do they need? What is important to them? How do they like to communicate? What is success for them? Sometimes we make assumptions or make decisions based on our own expertise rather than understanding the business priorities. Sometimes we get stuck in thinking that we know best, right? Because we worked hard, we are credentialed, we have an expertise. But you have to understand the people you're working with so you can work with them best and make the best decisions because they also have a point of view, they also may be credentialed and feel they have expertise. And so you have to work together on the same side of the table. Number two is to get them to buy into your vision. So let's say you understand your stakeholders' point of view. Now you can only get them to buy into your vision if you understand them. And I want to explain this further. Are you familiar with the soda alternative called poppy? It's a prebiotic soda, there's olipop, there's different versions of it, but it's essentially a healthier alternative to soda. So let's say that you love poppy. You think it's what everyone should be drinking. It's delicious, it's low in calories, and it's good for your gut health. Well, let's say that your stakeholders, these leaders, the people that are not supporting you, let's say they love Diet Coke. You can go in with all of the benefits of poppy. But if they are die hard Diet Coke fans, you aren't going to win them over. You have to meet them where they under, where they are. You have to understand what they like about Diet Coke. When do they like to drink it? Why do they like to drink it? How do they feel when they drink it? And then you have to tailor your message to them to get them to buy into Poppy based on what's important to them. So, for example, you might assume in this situation that the person brings diet drinks Diet Coke because they like soda and they don't know there's a healthier alternative. And so you might meet them with all the healthy facts. But maybe they drink Diet Coke because their grandma drank Diet Coke and they feel connected to their grandma, who's like no longer here anymore, by drinking Diet Coke because it's something that they can share. You would never know that if you just made an assume assumption for why someone drinks a certain thing, or if you imparted your logic on them, right? So you have to understand where are they coming from, that's understanding your stakeholders' point of view, and then you have to get them to buy in to your point of view, to your vision. So whether it's getting invited to a meeting, hearing your idea about how a strategy should work, your stakeholders will listen to you. And it isn't about agreement, it's about being heard. Unless you're the CEO, every decision will not be yours, but you can get heard. You can increase your influence and you can lead more effectively by getting them to buy into your vision, by getting them to listen to you. But they're not going to listen if you're not communicating a way that is meeting them where they are and that they feel that their perspective is also being heard. Now, when I wanted to be invited to a meeting, for example, I tapped into curiosity and asked questions from an open, curious place as opposed to a defensive or accusatory one. Now, this is what I learned from my boss when I did this. One, didn't realize how valuable hearing that information firsthand was to me. So she did not realize this. Number two, that once she learned that it was important for me to hear it firsthand because I was gonna have a different perspective, different follow-up questions to ask. I would get it more in real time. She had another objection, which was my other HR leaders were not invited. Once I knew her real motives and she understood why the information was useful to me, we could problem solve the right thing, which was how can I get the information and how can I follow up and ask questions in real time? What we determined is that there were certain leadership meetings that I could be invited to and others I would be informed. But we had a pathway to ask questions, and she advocated for me with other senior leaders at my request to give them a heads up that I may be reaching out to them to discuss certain topics. And this met both of our needs. But if I had gone in assuming that she didn't see my value or some other reason, I wouldn't have gotten to that solution. So sometimes we kind of stay spinning on things, worried about an outcome, and that distracts us from solving the right problem. It's like a good kappa, okay. Which I have a prior podcast episode on um good kappas or career kappas. You can you can check that out. And that's around getting to the root cause of the problem. Now, the third thing is to take responsibility for the leader you want to be seen as. Don't feel entitled to it. Listen, we are credentialed, we are high-achieving women who spend a lot of time and money on our expertise. So sometimes we can feel a little entitled to be recognized, to be asked, to be given opportunities because we feel we have earned them. Or you might have thoughts like, why do they even hire me if they aren't gonna listen to me? Why do they want to do things the hard way or the long way? Why do they want to stay stuck in the past, right? That can be true. It can be true that you deserve it, that your ideas are better, that their way is longer or harder. Consider though that maybe being an expert doesn't entitle you to be heard. That maybe your way is the best way, but it's not the way your company wants to go. Or consider that maybe you just need to communicate differently or build better relationships. We generally underestimate the value. You of liking working with someone and how that positively impacts our work. Because think about it. If someone you like asks you to do something, you're more likely to do it, even if you're busy or don't have time. But if someone that you don't like asks you to stay a little late to help them with something, I'm sure you've got 13 backup excuses in your pocket for like why you can't stay late, right? And why they needed a plan better. So if someone you like wants to run an idea by you, if you like them, you'll give it more weight, right? You'll at least hear them out. So I'm not saying go be besties with everyone at work or that you have to have a relationship outside of work. It's really not about that. What I'm saying is that when you only rely on your resume, meaning your track record and credentials to get people to listen to you, it's a huge disservice to you and to them. Maybe there is an opportunity here to find out what you can agree on, what you like or respect about these stakeholders, ways to build a relationship that work for both of you. I was coaching a leader once on this topic, and she had a colleague who was notorious for cutting people off in meetings, being derogatory, spending too much time, you know, mansplaining his point of view, and it was stalling the project. People didn't like him, and my client didn't care for him much either, but she needed to work with him. She was the head of the project, she was the leader. If the project fails, she fails. Excuses were not going to help her. So I suggested that she meet with him one-on-one and get to know him. And she was like, Are you kidding me? And I was like, No. You have to learn what are his perspectives on the project? How does he want meetings to run? Where does he see himself contributing best? And so she did, a little begrudgingly, but she decided she'd give it a shot. And the first meeting went pretty well. He looked to her actually in an upcoming group meeting after that to help kind of steer the conversation with trust that she would have his back because they built that connection privately. But it took more than one conversation. So she established one-on-ones with him every few weeks, and she then became his confidant. He became a supporter of her. And so she earned the trust to coach him a bit, to bring in feedback. Everything is time, place, communication skill to help the team. He didn't report to her. She did this because she was a leader and because she saw herself as a leader of her expertise, of her project. So she found a solution to the problem. She empowered herself. Escalating, complaining, throwing your hands up, oh, that's just Jeff. Everyone agrees Jeff sucks. Doesn't get you the leadership recognition. It doesn't get you the project done any quicker. In fact, it probably slows you down. So these skills around people are so important. It's what AI cannot replace. It's what gets you recognized. In fact, that client was approached to become the head of her department after that. Imagine if she only complained or told her boss or felt there was nothing she could do or struggled through those meetings, right? Instead, she became a problem solver of not just scientific data, but of people. I'm a nobody. I already tried. And I want you to think about those thoughts. Don't just play them on repeat. Whatever resistance you feel, how do you feel when you think that there is nothing you can do? And that these are just circumstances you cannot control. There's stakeholders that are just jerks. That energy is what you bring to your role, to your leadership. It's part of how you are seen, even if you're delivering your goals 100%. It's just like some stories I've shared recently on the podcast where women have done all the right things. They were working towards a promotion. They were working towards a pivot into a new area. They thought they did everything right. And then just like that, they got some feedback, some hidden feedback that was never on the review that came down to the very skills I'm talking to you about right now. You can't expect it to come because you're great at what you do. If it were that easy, you wouldn't be having the problem to begin with, right? And there's nothing wrong with you. You can solve this. These are just skills that most people don't spend the time to learn, but you are different because you are the exception. You just need radical responsibility. You can't fall into, but I can't because you have to move to here is what I can do. Very rarely is the problem unsolvable. The person or circumstances cannot be influenced or the relationship cannot be repaired. It might be harder than you think. You might get in and try some things and it doesn't work and you have to keep trying again. But very rarely is it a lost cause. It just usually requires you to do the change and to be the change instead of waiting for them to change, waiting for the circumstance to change. You are the change, my friend. If no one is shaping the strategy, you do it. If everyone is confused because it's new and there's no direction, what's stopping you from leading? It all comes down to understanding your stakeholders' point of view, getting them to buy into your vision and taking responsibility for the leader that you want to be seen as. Do those three things considering how I talked about them today, and watch people start to back you up. Watch how you start to think and feel differently about yourself and your career, and your results will follow. All right, that is all for today's episode. I hope that you have an amazing week. Till next time, you might find me on the pickleball court. I'll talk to you soon.