Inspiring Journey Video with Stephanie Bova

Video Transcription:

Early on in my career I worked for a medium-sized pharmaceutical company and I was told at one point by my boss that there was no career potential for me because I dressed too well. I didn’t have the look. I didn’t fit in and that was going to be career limiting unless I tried to make myself look more like everyone else. You know at first you’re just kind of shocked and taken aback and you almost don’t know what to say and I think you know as you get older you get better at comebacks and what you should of said and what you wanted to say. You know at the time I didn’t really say anything, but what I did was different. I made the decision, this is not a place where I fit in. I could spend a lot of time trying to convince them all the reasons why I’m a good employee and that they should be thinking about meritocracy versus what people look like or I am not wearing men’s suits today. That’s fine, but it ended up making me make the decision to leave the company.

Now I always interview the people who are interviewing me. Are you good enough? Am I a person who’s going to work well with you? Is our fit good? Am I going to learn from you? So I approach it now, I interview them as much as they are interviewing me. Be confident in who you are in yourself. Just because someone tells you something, if you know it’s true in your heart that this is not a bad thing. It was very interesting, before I left I ended up working for like a wonderful boss who basically said yeah I heard that feedback this person gave you and they were on the board and it’s like really sad. We knew you were going to leave soon after that and it’s shocking and devastating one person’s comments can have that effect. But, I think they had wished that more of their leadership team had been more of a mentor. So you know if it would have been different.

I think my reaction of it was a general pervasive perception from the leadership that that was true because then it would of made me actually think more about my you know, maybe I am you know I’m not always right on things. But it was just an ‘N’ of one and you know we work in science and you know what an ‘N’ of one is. It’s just an ‘N’ of one.

Stephanie Bova is Head of Europe and Canada, Digital Accelerator at Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Seuss Recruitment is a pharma-recruitment specialist that finds synergistic fits between life-science superheroes and forward-thinking pharma, biotech and clinical research companies using the art of match-making with a modern twist. Call us at +31 (0) 20 29 00 016 or email us TalkToUs@seussrecruitment.com to have an engaging conversation about how to transform your career or company