Inspiring Journey Video with Valerie Guertler Doyle

Video Transcription:

I am scientist by training and I always worked either as the bench researcher or worked in clinical research and at some point it was clear that I needed to move on and do something different. And I was approached by the head of European registry affairs at the time. He was looking for somebody to take over the regional team which was basically the world outside Europe and the U.S. And I said to him, I have no idea about regulatory affairs, I don’t know anything about it. I am not a subject matter expert. He goes, that is not why I want you to take the position. He said I want you to take the position because of your strategic skills, your leadership skills and we really need to move this forward, we need to be visionary. At the time I literally did not know that dossier had four parts. I stayed in the position for up to nine year because I was having so much fun and I knew I was making an impact. And in those nine years I never touched a dossier.

So the key message from that is you do not need to be a subject matter expert. You just sometimes need to take a deep breath and go jump and the rest of it you can go and figure it out. The key is having a very good team behind you. That’s where your subject matter experts are, so you can delegate work to them, you can give them the visibility when questions come along. Your jobs are totally different one as a leader. Honestly I was getting bored. I could have done what I was doing in my sleep. I still enjoyed it. I knew we were having an impact on patients. That’s why I even worked in healthcare. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to expand my own skills. I wanted to get a little bit closer to the commercial world. You should never consider a job too big for yourself. I think you should just have confidence in yourself. If you’ve been asked consider taking this position, the fact of the matter is these people believe you can do it. So just go with that, take it and run.

I remember one of my mentors told me something very valuable which I would like to pass on as well. She was a head of a manufacturing unit and was asked to take on a major global initiative and she was asked to do it two days before a big presentation. She was given the previous holders presentation to show, which is always horrible. And she was standing there in front of the executive committee doing the presentation and the CEO was getting irritated and she could see he was getting uneasy, irritated. So she turned off the slides and said what exactly is it you want to know John? And he said, okay, I need to know A, B and C. She goes, I’ll get back to you later on today, got a big smile and said thank you very much and walked out. So just watch the body language even if you don’t know what you are talking about, it can happen even if you are two days into the job, it’s very very normal, admit you don’t know and say I’ll come back to you with the answer. It’s all you need to do and don’t be afraid to do that.

Valerie Guertler Doyle is an innovative thought leader in diversity strategies and is the founder of Diversity in Business. 

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.