This Girl KAM with Liana Lubel

Liana is Global Head of Strategic Insights at Abbott. She currently lives in Switzerland, but born in Mexico and having lived in France and the US with a partner who spends half the year in Thailand, she has experienced so many different cultures already throughout her career.  I loved chatting to her about how she adapted her approach continually, whilst developing a passion for network building and mentorship.

Liv: Hi Liana, welcome to the show.

Liana: Hi, Olivia. Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be here.

Liv:  I’m delighted to have you. You’re very welcome, Liana. I’m really excited to get talking to you. Before we start, please tell us all about yourself and, how you came to be where you are?

Liana:  Right now I am living in Switzerland and I’m working for Abbot. I am responsible globally for what we call strategic insights and analytics.  I was born and raised in Mexico.  It is quite a bit of a different society, Mexico from Switzerland.

My family is not at all from Mexico, so I was born in Mexico, but my family is pretty multicultural.  I have family from all over the place, which made me quite open to  change. I think that that’s what helped me explore Europe as an opportunity to go to work. 

In my personal life, I don’t have kids, but I was married, I am divorced.

I have a really cool partner that supports me all the way.  I have been living in Switzerland now for six years.

Liv: Where did you meet your partner?

Liana: I met him in Switzerland. He’s German, but I met him in Switzerland.

Liv: And you get to travel around all over the place, don’t you?

Liana: Yeah, we both love traveling. He’s super supportive of my career. He’s also super ambitious and driven. I think we have a quite a nice balance of trying to support each other, and we try to make both of our objectives work. It’s not always the easiest, sometimes we need to sit down and really talk about it.

He’s more of an entrepreneur. That helps us balance and it’s really nice to know that there is someone that supports me and that we can actually really grow together. 

He doesn’t really like winters,  so he’s able to be for the winter in Thailand for five months. I don’t get to be with him, because I can’t work from home all the time for five months, but I go back and forth in winter to be able to be with him in Thailand. That way we can make it work for him. He’s working from there and I can continue my career. Technology today helps us to be connected.

Liv: And you get to spend New Year’s Eve in Thailand!

Liana: Yes. Not bad at all!

Liv:  I’m interested in knowing a bit more about you as a person and for you to put into context the jobs you’ve held and, and the reason you went the specific route in the career that you chose to?

Liana: Sure.  I have a pretty multicultural family, which gave me a different perspective of what was typical for society in Mexico. My friends were growing up and a lot of them were basically going to university just because they were waiting to get married. That was the reality of the society in Mexico.

That was not a possibility for me in my house. In my house,  it was really important for me to have a career.  I was expected to do that. My grandmother had two careers,  this was something that was like expected of me, and that gave me a little bit of a different perspective in the society.

When I graduated,  in Mexico only 5% of women were actually graduating and having a job. Very few of them would end up working. So when I started working in marketing , I was in meetings mostly with men. That exposed me pretty quickly to what is like the typical boys club kind of talk, and because that was the only thing I knew, although I was exposed to it,  I never felt that it was uncomfortable for me.

 I think that helped me, to be honest, I think it helped me more than it made me uncomfortable.

The type of conversations that men like to have during work,  it forced me to learn in different ways in I had to network with men. Because obviously I could not go out and say like, oh, let’s go for a drink. You don’t do that as a woman, and definitely not in Mexico!

So I had to learn different ways to capture their attention, to be able to network with them during work hours. It was not the same for them talking to me, than talking to someone else, when they were able to talk about cars or about something that you would consider a man talk!

It became pretty natural for me. So I think that really helped me. Then I had the opportunity, I was married to a French guy, so I moved to France.  France was completely different culturally in terms of working. Completely different.

When I moved there, most of the people working in the office were women. It felt so strange for me to be around women, it gave me another new exposure.

After being 10 years in France, I decided to move again and I moved to the US. That was super interesting for me because it was kind of  like a double whammy. On one hand, it was a time when in the US they wanted to bring women to higher positions.

But also because I was born in Mexico, I also had the label of Hispanic. That was a totally new experience for me. To be honest, in some ways it made me pretty uncomfortable because I felt that I was being labeled and that I was given opportunities only for the fact that I was a woman and that I was Hispanic.

Something that I had never experienced for the time that I was in Europe. It really made me question a lot of things. I was thinking, is it because of my capacity? Am I  being promoted or am I being given this opportunity because of me? Or is it because I am Hispanic and how do people even know that I’m Hispanic?!

So that confronted me with a very different cultural reality. The way that we deal with these things in the US versus the way that we deal with it in, in Europe is very different and the way that men deal with it as well in each of these cultures.

I feel personally, that in Europe it’s a lot more natural, the way of dealing and treating women in the US. At that period, men were a little bit afraid because of the amount of complaints that women could carry to HR or the way that they had to change the vocabulary,  the way that all of a sudden they could not be in a room, for example, in an office with only you talking to them. The door would have to be open, a series of things that were not natural for them, and were not natural for me either. It made me question a lot on, what I am doing and the value that I am bringing to the business. Where do I really fit and what are the things that I feel that I can really bring to this business? How can I develop my career without feeling that I am being favoured?

That’s a question around what has happened in the world with trying to push women for top positions. How do you do it in a natural way to say, you are allowed to be in one of these positions because you have the skills and the capabilities that are needed, versus let’s just push women  to be able to balance it out until it becomes a norm in the society.

Now I am back to Europe.  Switzerland being also very different than than France. It’s less Latin. The job that I have now, this division doesn’t operate in developed markets. So even though the headquarters are based in Switzerland, all of our business is actually in emerging markets, which means that most of the people that I interact with are from emerging markets.

I think the balance between having worked in places like the US or France and then my background from Mexico has been really helpful.  I think that my age also helps! It comes with experience.  So I take things a little bit more lightly than I used to when I started my career.

Liv: How long were you in the states for ?

Liana: Eight years.

Liv: Wow.  It was a long time. So it sounds like it was probably quite a pivotal moment for you. Would that be fair to say?

Liana: Yeah, it is true because at the time the company that I was working for was an American company, so I did not expect that change in culture from going from France to the US. I had in mind the idea that I knew it quite well because I had always been working in the same company.

It was strange because you know the language, so you feel that the understanding is going to be there. But all of a sudden you realise that it is as culturally different as moving to any other country, and the way that you have to network and the way that you have to actually build relationships with people is different just because it is a different culture. Even if you feel that, okay, I understand the language and, and we kind of all speak English, but it’s not the same.

Liv: It’s so interesting. On this show, we talk a lot about being female and the impact of being female, but that double whammy, being labelled Hispanic and a woman, the fact it had never been something you’d been faced with before, it must have been a real shock to your system.

Liana: It honestly was because you know howsometimes when you need to fill out  forms, especially in the US,  they ask you, which race are you? It has always been really funny for me to say, well, should I choose Hispanic because I was born in Mexico? Or should I choose white because all of my family is actually not at all from Mexico. It has always been a little bit of a discussion in my brain! But experiencing what it actually means in a society to be considered to be in a box, it’s something that I had never felt, not even when I was in Mexico and I was the only woman in the meeting room. I’d never felt that people were dealing with me separately. It was quite interesting.

Liv: let’s go back a little bit further if we can. Tell me what it was that got you into the pharma industry in the first place and where that passion came from?

Liana: Sure.  I started my career in marketing, so I have always been in marketing and I’m really passionate about innovation. With time I learned that I was very comfortable with change, which is something that not everyone is.  I wanted to continue my career in marketing doing the things that I love doing and working in innovation, but I had started working with some technology companies and because the industry of market research had not evolved or changed that much with time, technology started making some changes to this part of marketing, and I got really excited about it.

 I started thinking, I want something different for my career. I thought, if I want to do something in marketing, which is different from what I have done, and a challenge, pharma is a good area because technology is disrupting pharma in some areas. 

So I wanted to keep on working in marketing and I wanted to keep on working in innovation, but I also wanted a challenge. So I thought if I work in pharma, I could still do what I love and bring the value of things that I have learned in these other industries, and try to see how technology would drive a change or a transformation of the industry within whilst trying to drive that transformation.

Abbot presented me with this opportunity saying, How can you help us drive the change of the organisation and transform the organisation into a customer-driven and data-driven organisation? That was totally within what I knew what to do and where I was excited about, so that is how I ended up in pharma. I took on the challenge, even though most of the people in pharma have like more of a medical background and I didn’t know anything. At the beginning I couldn’t even pronounce our brands or our molecules! But I had the experience of understanding what consumer driven actually meant. I was really passionate about how I can help the transformation. Not let the disruption just come and erase everything, but rather really help Abbott grow through this transformation. 

I’m super passionate about it. Pharma has the advantage of being close to the consumer even though there are so many regulations and limitations. But in reality, you’re all the time thinking about how can you help people live better lives.

Even though it sounds like a cliche, you’re really trying to do that right and you can really see how you can make a difference in people’s life. I think as you grow older, this part becomes more important to fulfill, I think.

Liv: Yes. I completely agree. So what are the most exciting things from your perspective, that we can look at with the partnership, if you like, between technology and pharma?

Liana: I think there’s a lot of little pieces.  I think that technology will give us a possibility of transforming the experience of healthcare for people.

I think up until now, or up until a few years ago, people were going to the doctor and the doctor was a little bit like a god. You went to the doctor, you didn’t know anything about it, and you just had to believe what the doctor was saying.

 Everything around how healthcare worked for someone meant siloed activities. Let’s say sport and whatever you ate, were two completely separate activities versus actually going to the doctor, who might give you a pill and then you went to a pharmacy that was nothing connected with it. Then the next time that you went to the doctor, you might recall, or not, some events that were important, but everything was very separate activities and the  patient had very little input into that.

I think that technology will allow us to create, or to transform healthcare into a true experience, where every little thing is connected and where you as a patient will have a say.  The fact that you have a say will actually make you more of an active part of it and it will make it easier for you to have a better resolution of the problem because you will know what you’re trying to do and how it is important.  We will be able to transform it. Of course this is more of a long term thing, but we will be able to transform it more into part of your normal life and more part of prevention and how you take care of your overall life rather than reminding people that all of a sudden they have a problem and that they might die!  I think this is really exciting and this would not be possible without technology. It’s a long way to go, and the industry needs to evolve quite a bit, because there’s still the regulations and the limitations.  We have a lot of barriers that we will need to work with. But I can see a future that is good, for all of us, in how we deal with our health.

Liv: Tell me about the most pivotal moments of your career so far, and what have been the main motivators for you when you’ve made a change in your career, do you think?

Liana: The first one I can think of  was very early on in my career. At the time I was working for Unilever, I was working in marketing and my boss moved to a different position within the company. And so within three months that I had started, I was kind of alone. The director of marketing at the time came to me and said like, Hey, I have a challenge for you. Would you work on launching a new product? It was a hair product at the time.  I think it was a little bit of naivety and ignorance from my side, or pride or a little bit of how my family had raised me thinking , you can do whatever you want…

Either way,  I didn’t think twice and I said , yes, definitely I can work on it! I honestly didn’t really know what it meant. I had to work on things like put together a financial plan, put together a competitive plan. I had no clue. I had just come out of school! So I needed the help of a lot of people within the company to be able to accomplish what they had asked me to do because I didn’t know how to do it.

It forced me to, first, understand the responsibility and what it meant, then it also gave me a lot of reassurance that I could actually do it. Very early on I learned the importance of networking and from that exercise I was able to get my first  mentor and learned the importance of having a mentor in a company.

I learned that it was essential for me to develop, to continue my career. It really changed my career. That was only three months after I started working, so that was pretty essential in what influenced my career. 

Liv: You’ve talked about a mentor, this is another area that really fascinates me. Has it always been a mentor within a specific company or do you have a mentor just in life as well? Who would be your go-to person that you would talk to about career?

Liana:I think that I’ve kept the mentors throughout my career with most of them, I still have contact. So now  a lot of them are outside of pharma, for example.

Or they just stayed in my life. I think what happens with time is you keep people, there’s people that help you in a point in time with an issue, and then you learn that some people are better at certain circumstances than others.

So some people will remain as mentor for let’s say, more technical issues. While it gives you the opportunity of saying, well, this person is better when I don’t know if I should choose path A or B. More on, on a personal level.  Related to your career, but more on a personal level and you know that you can always pick up the phone and talk to them, while there’s also others where you have more of a regular touchpoint.

For me, in my case, that changes, depending on what I feel that I need. If it is something that has to do more with leadership or if it’s something that has to do more with team management, I have different people that I go to.

Of course a lot of these mentors have become my friends. So yeah, there’s a fine line between thinking, am I having a conversation with one of my mentors or  having a conversation with one of my friends? . But I guess that it doesn’t really matter. 

Liv: Is that something that you believe is important in terms of in your career and would advise others to do the same, find a mentor?

Liana: Definitely. I think it is really important.  I think it is important mentally. It gives you strength. A lot of these people end up being people that know you and there are moments where you need reassurance, and that you might actually need to know that someone else probably thinks the same way or not, or that helps you think in a different way.  I think something that is really important is to have mentors within your company.  I don’t think that this is specific for women. I think this is very true for men as well. They should all have mentors.

You need a mentor in a company. You can’t do it alone.  I think that always within your career in your company, you actually always need someone that will actually look after you. The other thing that for me, sometimes women  feel more comfortable to have mentors that are women, but I have found that it’s really important to try to have both.  The advice and the perspective that men can have when they are mentoring you is also very different. And it helps you analyse and see things from a very different perspective.

I really think that it’s important. I try to mentor every year I have at least three or four people that I am mentoring, and I try to do it not only mentoring women, but even mentoring men because I think men, women, mentoring men also gives them a different perspective of how they should see things.

And to be honest, I think a lot of the things that are probably perceived as this might not be appropriate, for a professional environment, sometimes when seen through the lens of a cultural difference, it gives you a very different perspective.

This is not to say that everything should be allowed, not at all. I think that when things are disrespectful, they are disrespectful. But I think trying to understand some of the cultural differences, it really helps you balance things out.

I think that this is something that we could invest more in in most companies, making people understand these cultural differences that might not seem important but they are. 

Liv: It tends to be quite taboo, doesn’t it? I think people have become so afraid of talking about it sometimes that in a way that does more harm than good.

Liana: I agree. In my new position, everyone is from a different nationality. So we talk about these cultural differences and we have learned actually to laugh about them. It makes a big difference in how things are actually taken. Even now that the team has been working together for several years, they all have a really good relationships, but it still happens, someone might make a comment and someone else from the team is surprised about it, but because we are open about it, we can discuss it, it really takes out this idea of, wow, this is taboo.

I think the other thing is, we have started  seeing that there’s more talk about it, but I think that over the past years there have been a lot of emphasis in trying to prepare women for higher positions and doing a lot of coaching or  a lot of emphasis on how women need to act or how women should respond or giving training to women.

I think we need to balance that by training men on how they should feel about having women at work, how they should treat women. So putting a little bit more of emphasis in terms of, it’s not just the women that have to do it differently, or the women that have to interpret it differently. It is also the men that need actually to react different to interacting with women. . To not feeling weird because women are part of this conversation.  I think it has started to change, I have seen in some companies, a little bit of emphasis on that, but I think we could do more.

Unless we bring men together to this and we make it something of a more normal conversation, it won’t be normal for women either.  

If  men have women in the corporation, what can they learn from them?

Liv: On that note, of learning, talk to me a little bit about the main lessons that you have learned throughout your career? If you could go back to your 18 year old self, what advice would you give yourself?

Liana: I was privileged in being raised in a house where I was taught that everything was possible for me.

A lot of women don’t have that, but I think that gave me a reassurance and I went into work, not thinking that I was behind, or that it would actually be difficult for me. So some of the things that became difficult, I didn’t think they were any more difficult for me than for the guy that was sitting next to me. That was ignorance, but in reality it was because of how I was raised. I would have become a lot better at networking if I had learned this earlier on in my career, it would have been very helpful!

Without a doubt, most men are much better at this than women.  Women get things done. We go to work and we are like, what is the objective? What is it we need to do? And we do it, and we put less emphasis on just building relationships at work.

It took me a while to understand that it was not wasted time,to just network with people.

If I could choose one thing, that’s probably the one thing that I would say we should put more emphasis. Learning the importance of just building relationships. 

Another thing is the importance of learning financial vocabulary and feeling comfortable with it. 

Liv: You mentioned earlier, when you were in that male-dominated environment in Mexico and you talked about learning to network with men and how different it was. I’m dying to know just some of the little things that you did, that you found that worked for you. How did you navigate that? What sort of things did you do to get them comfortable talking to you?

Liana: The first thing I did, which was the most comfortable to me is to try to find things that I could do for them or that I could solve for them so that we could have a conversation about it.

I tried to understand that they would not talk to me  unless I could give them something that was of value of them in terms of the business. So really it was easy for me at the time to say, I am going to understand what they are looking for in terms of data or something and try to get to tell them, I know this piece of data, I can give it to you, but I need your help on this… So that sort of understanding that I could not just go to them with a demand, unless I was giving something back to them. That was the easiest way or for me early on to network.

Later on I actually learned that if you learn what is the trend of the moment in what they are talking about, for example, there was a time in my career where guys were all about golf, so then I needed to learn a little bit about golf.  To try to talk to them and make a few comments.

So learn the vocabulary. Yes, you can’t actually go out and take a drink with them, but at least when they are talking about something, you can participate in the conversation.

Liv: Like learning a language?

Liana: Exactly. Learn a language.

Liv: Thank you very much Liana. Are there any other questions or things that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t talked about?

Liana: The only thing that I can think of that you and I had talked about before, that maybe is important now, is with Covid, I think that an opportunity for women opened up.

 I think Covid opened the door to everyone, to the importance of emotional support in a corporate environment.

For the teams and for people within the corporation. I think that there’s no doubt that women know how to do this better than men. It’s just more natural for us than for men. I think this is a good time where men are also realising that this is important. Either a lot of them have realised that they require it or they are actually realising that their teams require it.

I think this is a great opportunity for women to help some of the men within the company to try to mentor them. To try to show men that there is an important balance of what women can connect, the value that it brings to an organisation of having both men and women and how we can support each other. I think that this is so obvious that it’s a really good moment for women to take advantage of it.

Liv: There is definitely that need for more emotional understanding that there’s no doubt about it that on the whole women are stronger in that area. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what we could achieve over the next few years as we’re going through a massive period of change anyway on the back of a pandemic. If you could see what we can do with the technology and different mindsets and openness to diversity in different cultures.

Liana: I agree. I think this is a disruption moment.   I think that we need to take advantage of that also, because as you’re saying with technology, it means that every company needs to transform itself and during transformation, there needs to be emotional support to the teams and to the people within the organisation.

So driving that change and taking people along with you. On this transformation is important.

I think that this is a good moment for men to be open to hearing how to do it and how to do it differently It’s a great moment for the industry and I think that this is a great moment for us as patients. It’s great for women as well in the industry.

Liv: Thank you so much Liana. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and thank you so much for sharing your story with me. 

Liana:  Thank you, Olivia, thank you for having me.