#9 A Few Lessons on Career Growth
TLDR - learn building and maintaining good relations with people
After spending two years at a Big-Pharma company as an interdisciplinary early career scientist, I moved on to a senior scientist position at a different organization. I joined an extremely successful big-pharma company as soon as I finished my PhD. While the reasons for my transition from acedemia to industry are not important in the context of this article, I would like to share a few lessons I learned working in a good work environment, smart people and exciting drug development projects. The lessons I share here are meta-scientific in my opinion, which no one learns about in academia, let alone PhD students learning them. I hope these will provide a framework for others who are entering industry for the first time and help them learn the industry situation a bit faster than otherwise.
Disclaimer: Nothing in this article represents the organization I worked at or currently working at. All of these are my personal opinions and experiences. These lessons are in no way a complete capture of my experiences and knowledge I gained, I consider much of the meta-scientific knowledge I gained by observing people is tacit in nature. However, this is an attempt to make some of it explicit to help myself and others.
It’s a People Game
Innovative drug development companies are complicated by nature with different functions e.g. computational scientists, medicinal chemists, biologists, patents etc coming together, working on a single drug for years. Working with a large number of homogenous people is itself complicated, let alone people with diverse experiences and educational backgrounds. The sooner you understand that people are different, have blind spots and don’t have any personal agenda against you, the better you will appreciate the complexity and efforts people are investing to take the projects forward.
In his book “The Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel explained that why we shouldn’t think people are crazy - “People do some some crazy things with money but no one is crazy. People from different generations, raised by different parents who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, experiencing different job markets with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons”. You can apply this to any situation and be kind towards others and yourself.
Earn Trust Early On
If you are a newbie, building trust early on is one of the key foundation no one tells you about. You have to actively seek opportunities in the first weeks, identify critical roadblocks across projects and solve the ones that can be solved relatively quickly. This will start building a positive reputation about you as a doer. Your team, colleagues from other functions, boss has to know you are a “gets shit done” person. This will start a virtuous cycle of people believing in you with high value projects, which in turn will lead to more trust.
At the same time don’t fall into the trap of showing up to every meeting, that you don’t have any time left to actually work. Once a negative impression, although not career ending, falls on you, it will be difficult to get rid of it.
Though relatively a boring book (if you are into scientific research like me), “First 90 days” by Michael Watkins has some good insights on this point. The majority of the content in this book is about what one should do in the early days (ie first three months) of joining a new position in a new company or promotion to a higher position within the same company to optimize contribution from you to company and vice versa. Chapter-4 (Negotiate Success) and Chapter-5 (Secure Early Wins) are the most relevant in the context of this point, you can basically ignore rest of the book.
Be Proactive, Irrespective of Your Position
Though this is largely connected to previous point of earning trust early on, it still needs an explicit mention. If you joined a company soon after PhD or postdoc or even group leader position, “Be Proactive”, in reaching out to people, taking initiatives, proposing ideas and asking for critical feedbacks etc. You have to be in peoples eyes for good reasons, especially in big companies and that can only happen if you proactively force yourself to involve in high impact projects/events where crucial personnels take part.
PhD students and postdocs heavily rely on their supervisors in academia. Replicating this behaviour after joining an industry position might have a penalty on your career growth. It is of course your managers responsibility to get you started in the beginning but expecting them to guide you every step of the way might not be ideal. When I started my PhD, I had this mindset that supervisors have a ready-answers for problems, why else would they be in a position of supervising someone? I couldn’t be more wrong. They are figuring it all out as much as you are, except they are a few years ahead of you and can provide educated judgement of the solutions. When you talk to managers, collaborators, do not just point out the problems, always suggest possible solutions with their pros and cons and what’s the best possible way forward in solving the problem.
Talking about being proactive, one thing we have to do more at workplaces is appreciating people. Appreciate managers for their managing skills, collaborators for their projects, ideas and thank the janitors if you see them cleaning the dishwasher at the office kitchen. Even if you see the CEO at the elevator or coffee machine, find something they did in the recent past e.g an email they sent addressing employees or something they said in a town hall meeting etc, appreciate them mentioning the points you liked. No one is tired of listening to someone telling them they did a good job, just like you are. Never hesitate to appreciate people for their work.
Communication
Evolution has done great many things for humans but one thing it hasn’t done well is giving good communication skills for all humans. When I say communication, I mean not only talking to people but also presenting in front of a large audience who are experts on the topic and completely outsiders to send across your point. I see a lot of academics doing ground breaking research presenting their data very poorly, so poor that audience start scrolling their twitter feed from second slide onwards.
Wherever you work, whatever you do, a common theme you encounter is people. There is no other way to coordinate with people except with good communication skills. This is even more important when working with interdisciplinary people on complex projects. When you are establishing yourself in a new position, focus on horizontal as much as vertical communication. Vertical communication is establishing relations within your team/department, focusing on problems that can be solved within the realm of the department, while horizontal communication is across departments and functions which is more complicated and more rewarding.
People in big organizations are involved in a ton of different projects. When you start new projects and assemble teams to work on it, it is your responsibility to keep them informed about the progress. Do not expect them to remember what happened in the last meeting, keep repeating to bring everyone on the same page even if you loose a few minutes of the agenda. Otherwise, people will get lost in the stream of data without having any clue what they should do to support you.
Deliver. Deliver & Deliver More
There is nothing much to expand on this point. It is as simple as the word ‘deliver’.
In industry delivering products, results and value are much more appreciated than spending months figuring out minor details. In academia, we are so used to focus on minor details and often it is the goal of academia. I have seen smart people sidetracked in figuring out something that doesn’t affect the overall project itself and as a result getting the impression of someone who can’t deliver. Figure out what’s the minimum viable product for your project is and iterate/improve on it with feedback and suggestions from peers.
Simulate Leadership Behaviour
In companies there are certain people who are very good at leadership and people who are good at management and a few good at both. You ideally want both of these skills for yourself to grow in your career. Find people with skills you want for yourself and observe how they are talking in meetings, what kind of questions are they asking and why. Try to understand their thinking process behind asking that question, in which direction they want to drive the discussion, all this with giving respect to the presenter. Simulate the same behaviour in smaller meetings with your team/colleagues and in new jobs. Great leaders do not only care about taking the projects forward but also think about individual’s growth in their team. Once people have an impression that you not only care about yourself but the growth of the team/organization, they start to see you as a good leader.
Finally, I always thought working with a large group of people is not my cup of tea. However, I started to like navigating the complexity with different styles of communications and exciting projects which might one day benefit a patient. One reason for change in my opinion might be getting the chance to talk and work with extremely smart peers who are kind, understanding and help you grow. Not everyone will find such a place in their first job, if you feel you are suffering among the nut cases, leave and find a better place for yourself. As Steve Jobs said, work fills almost 80% of your life, unless you enjoy the work, people you work with and feel your contributions matter beyond the company itself, your life becomes an everyday hell.
It all boils down to how good you are with people, how well you can maintain relations and manage conflicts. Everything else will follow.
Great advice! especially when you see your senior colleagues. You can compliment them with good words that will avoid the awkard silence.
:)
Very insightful read.
Thanks for sharing Venu !