This Girl KAM with Paula Sheridan

Liv: Hi, Paula, welcome to the show!

Paula:  Thank you, Liv, for the invitation. I’m really glad to be here.

Liv: So, Paula, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and your story from your career so far?

Paula: Oh, thank you very much. Yes, I’m Paula Sheridan, and I started my career in pharma at Glaxo Labs in 1993, which subsequently became GSK. I spent 25 years with the company. I didn’t set out to forge a career in this one company, but every time I got a bit bored, another job would come up! So, I stayed with GSK for 25 years. However, redundancy eventually came along, and now I work with women who feel overlooked and frustrated that less experienced people keep getting promoted over them. I help them learn to recognise their value and more crucially, how to communicate it to other people so that they recognise their value.

Liv: Fabulous. So, how did you get into that then? What led you down that path?

Paula: GSK had an internal coaching program where anyone could train up to be a coach or have access to a coach. I really enjoyed that and other stuff around it, which was organising conferences and developmental events for the UK Women’s Network. A common theme that kept coming out was the frustration of women not being noticed. This was when I realised that this stuff mattered.

Liv: So, go back for me a little further if you would, Paula. Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to work in the pharma industry in the first place and paint the full picture for me?

Paula: Sure. I did medical science at university and then came out of university thinking, “I have no idea what I’m going to do.” I knew that I didn’t want to follow the milk round of management consultancy, accountancy, and all of that kind of thing that a whole load of my university mates were doing. It just didn’t really grab me. Then, my dad was a pharmacist, and he said, “These drug reps seem to have quite a nice life.” So, I went out with one for the day, and I thought, “This is a bit more interesting. This is going out and about, talking to people. This is something that you can get behind and believe in in terms of selling medicines that make a difference.” I applied and started a role. My first job was actually in Norfolk, and then I stayed doing sales for about four or five years, which is probably two years longer than I should have stayed. But life and the situation I was in at the time – I had gotten married – that kind of kept me where I was because it necessitated living in the same place as my husband! But then we split up and got divorced, and the world was my oyster. I looked around and thought, “What do I actually want to do?” At that time, I had a manager who supported me in going to the office and meeting different people from various departments. He set up several networking meetings for me, so I could learn more about what each department did and what it was like to work there. This was a fabulous thing for him to do. So, I got to know more about certain departments, and then a job came up. It was billed at the time as information analysis. Bear in mind, I had never even opened Excel in my life. This was in 1998, and I had no reason to do so. But what this job required was accessing data that was held in an ancient database that had no front end. So, I had to learn to program in a language that no one knew anymore. A lot of the job testing was an aptitude test for programming, and it turns out I had quite a high aptitude for programming, despite not having the actual skills for the job at the time. I got the job based on my high aptitude and my experience with the company, knowing the drugs and their context, how the sales system worked, and so on. I loved that job. I was nosy and curious, and in that job, I could answer all the questions I really wanted to know, like what people used before they prescribed our drugs, what was triggering the use of our medicines, what areas were growing faster, and so on. I loved the challenge of learning programming, Excel, and building big spreadsheets. I know this makes me a bit weird, but I enjoy figuring out what questions we want to answer and how we can answer them. I enjoyed that job, and through it, I wound up working with the channel management and dispensing doctor’s teams, and eventually moved sideways into looking after commercial operations, which I also enjoyed. We were all very supportive of one another, which I really valued. Then the merger with Smith Kline Beacham came along, and I stayed with that role to get through to the other side. During this time, there was a pivotal moment where the head of the department offered me a different job outside the department, but he backed me for any role in a year’s time if I stayed and got us through the merger because I was the only one who knew how this area worked. He was true to his words, and after that, he put me forward for a role in Europe, working across central and eastern Europe, initially in commercial analysis, which brought in market research as well. I stayed in that area in Europe and then opened up to the whole of Europe for about five years because I enjoyed it. I built a nice little niche for myself in developing medicines and pre-launch development, which was fun and exciting. But I realised that I had sailed under the radar quite a lot in that area. I became the expert in the bits and pieces that I was doing and the products that I was working on because they were not marketed yet, which meant that no one really knew what I was doing a lot of the time. From there, I went through a variety of roles and wound up in rare diseases for the last 10 years with GSK. I liked rare diseases a lot because it’s easy to draw a line from the action that you take on one day to the impact on a patient when you have only  a thousand patients on your medicine around the world. It really matters what decision you make about how much stock to make, where you’re going to send that stock, all of that kind of stuff. It makes a difference and I found it easier to really get behind that and get motivated about it rather than something where there was millions of patients and it felt more anonymous.

I think that, the theme of not being very good at communicating what I was doing and not saying it out loud meant that it wasn’t very obvious because when you are in various roles, when you start out as a graduate, you get loads of supervision in whatever job you’re doing because frankly, you don’t know what you’re doing. And so you need supervision. But as you get more experienced and move up a few levels, there is very little supervision because it’s assumed you know what you’re doing.  Then jobs become much less about delivering really big wins and more about making sure things don’t go wrong in terms of what you’re actually delivering. So you become this expert in doing what you do and knowing how to do it. No one knows about all the problems you’ve solved about that you noticed that regulatory wasn’t copied on that really crucial email, they haven’t given their feedback, and if we miss this deadline, it’s going to cost us half a million pounds. Yeah, I definitely fell into it in terms of yes, not realising how to articulate the value I think that I was offering .

Liv: Do you think that’s one of your main motivators then? Looking for the bigger picture? Do you think this led you to work with coaching women? Did you see the opportunity and a greater need?

Paula: That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that really is the line, isn’t it? It’s something I care about deeply, being able to see the straight line between what I do and an outcome, which is incredibly motivating. Making a difference is really important to me. I am fortunate to work with people who can see and experience the difference that coaching makes. Additionally, I have worked in several roles where I have seen the difference made, such as keeping a rare disease medicine in stock against all odds. That is incredibly motivating, and I suppose that is what drives me towards solving problems. I like finding the answer to something and figuring out the path to that answer.

Liv: When working with women, do they typically come to you in a state of crisis or do they come to you because they are ready for something more?

Paula: To say they are in crisis would be too strong of a word. They may come at a decision point, trying to make a decision about where they want to go and what they want to do next. Usually, there is a flurry of activity at the beginning of the year, after appraisals, when people are thinking, “Why did I receive that appraisal rating when my teammate who did less and delivered less received a better rating?” People usually ask, “What the hell do I do to get out of this?” It is typically about understanding how to become more visible and how to make what they do and the value they contribute more visible. Quite often, it is about recognising what that value is.

Liv: When we first spoke, you discussed the concept of unconscious competence. Could you remind me of that concept again?

Paula: We start out thinking that we know everything and are completely unaware of what we do not know and need to know. This is the state of being unconsciously incompetent. As time goes on, we realise just how big the gap is between what we do not know and what we could know. Then, at least, we become consciously incompetent and can start to bridge that gap. Consciously incompetent is a good place to be. You move from there and notice that you are learning, improving, and getting better. You become consciously competent, aware of what you are able to do. After a while, though, you forget because it is no longer a challenge. This is when you become unconsciously competent, unless you find some way to remind yourself of what you are doing and achieving. For example, when you are a project manager for the first time, you have to think about everything and are aware of what you are doing. After a while, it becomes second nature, and you become unconsciously competent, unless you find some way to remind yourself of what you are doing and achieving.

Liv: So, that must be commonly linked to the feelings of imposter syndrome that people experience, if things start to feel natural to them and they are not necessarily good at reminding themselves of their skills when put into a new environment. Is this part of overcoming imposter syndrome?

Paula: Yes, the imposter phenomenon is often related to feeling like you don’t belong in a particular environment or group for various reasons, such as being the only woman in an all-male group, or being different due to race, neurodiversity, or other factors. Part of overcoming imposter syndrome involves having a good self-esteem and being aware of your skills and value. If you lack self-esteem and are not aware of your skills and value, it can make you feel like you don’t belong in a particular environment, or worse, that you won’t belong there, and may lead you to avoid putting yourself in that situation. All of these factors are interlinked.

Liv: Can you tell me about your own experiences? We briefly touched on pivotal moments before, and on this show, we tend to talk about sliding doors moments. Have you seen the movie?

Paula: Yes, I have. This is interesting because it has made me think through some of the things that happened in my life. At one point, I was offered a job in Paris for an important role in market research, but I turned it down because I knew it wouldn’t be interesting enough for me. I enjoyed the variety of having a range of things to look after, which was what my current role provided. Also, when I left GSK, there was a job that I would have loved, and I was on the interview list for it, but I stepped back from it and chose to take the redundancy. It felt like a time where I needed to stand up and put my money where my mouth was.

Liv: So you knew you had to go it alone at that point?

Paula: Yeah, I knew that was something that was quite important to me personally, to go it alone. ‘Cause I suppose the previous few years, I had been on a bit of a journey with myself in terms of confidence and in terms of learning what my actual value was, how to communicate it, what I was good at and less good at, and those kinds of things. So it felt like an important thing to do at the time.

Liv: So do you advise organisations now as well, Paula, or do you just work one-to-one with women?

Paula: At the moment, I work one-to-one with women. And yeah, I would love to get into more conversations with advising organisations. I’m also putting together some group coaching programs as well because there’s something about the accountability of being in a group with others that can be really motivating for people. And there can also be benefits for the companies as well, in terms of people networking and getting a broader understanding of the company and its roles and that kind of thing. So I’m putting something together on that. But at the moment, yeah, I work with one-to-one clients.

Liv: I guess from your experience with all of these women, you have a unique take on how different situations could be approached.

Paula: Yeah, I guess so. We’ve all experienced really good managers, or at least I hope we have at some point in our career, at least once. And we’ve all experienced, probably at some point, managers who didn’t really care. Let’s hope that was only once as well. But in between, there are a whole bunch of managers and leaders who do care but are maybe missing the mark in terms of only looking at the world through their perspective, through their own lens and range of experiences, and not seeing that different people come with a whole different set of experiences and may need a different approach to succeed.

Everything in society is improving somewhat, but everything has trained us to wait to be noticed. But that’s not how the workplace operates. So what managers and leaders can do in their one-to-ones and conversations is to ask their direct reports or the people who work for them what challenges they have faced that week, what they have overcome, or something that can be quite powerful: “What would have gone wrong if you hadn’t been here?” This makes someone stop and think in terms of, for example, what would have happened if someone was left off a distribution list. If I hadn’t noticed that, what would have happened? Then you realise what you’re contributing, and you start to value it. Essentially, your job to a great extent in the office, in pharma or any other field, is to stop things from going wrong and keep things on the right track. If you start thinking about what you’re doing in those terms, you start to recognise what you’re contributing. But it’s also a manager’s job to help their staff recognise these things and prompt them to think about them.

Liv: So what are some of the practices that you go through then? What are some practical tips that you can give people?

Paula: In terms of actions and top tips, it’s to start. Imagine you’ve applied for a job and you’ve read the job description and you’re preparing for an interview. I don’t know if you prepare for an interview the same way that I always have, but you go through the job description and for every single line on there, you think of two or three examples that you’ve got of things that you’ve done. And then you write them out, you write them out in the achievement format of what was the situation, where did we need to get to, what action did I take, and what was the result? Ideally, quantified in some way. When you do that, it’s really motivating because you think, “Wow, I’ve achieved a lot. This is great. I’ve done loads.” Yet we don’t do it the rest of the time. It’s so true. Look at your own job description and imagine if you were trying to impress someone with what you’ve done in your job description or just pick up any job description, whether you are going to apply for it or not, and go through that process and challenge yourself in your one-to-ones with managers, with more senior people to say, “Come up with achievement statements along those sorts of lines. So this was the situation. This is what got in the way. This is what I did, and this is the outcome.” Practice saying those, practice saying them to your friends. If you can’t quite bring yourself to say it to someone more senior, just to get used to these statements of fact. This is what I have done. This is what I have achieved, and this is the impact it had.

Liv: Where do you think women are now in general with work-life balance? What’s your perspective in terms of remote working and how women are coping post-covid?

Paula: Remote working seems to have set this expectation of being available all the time. So things seem to be back-to-back much more than they ever were in an office. So everything is back-to-back pinging instant messages all the time, and it’s just incessant. And so the days in the office where people then block out their diary to an extent, there are actually fewer meetings and getting more work done. But has it gone back too far? No, I don’t think it has, but I think there’s a legacy of expecting people just to be available whenever, and we need to get back to establishing boundaries around our time and shutting down the computer at the end of the day, putting it away.

Liv: I guess a lot of that is down to us as individuals really. There’s only so much organisations can do, I think. We have to set our own boundaries and communicate those.

Paula: Having your work life and your personal life all in one place does blur the lines, doesn’t it? Yeah. So even though a lot of people aren’t necessarily working at home all the time anymore, those lines have now been blurred and it’s quite difficult to redefine them, isn’t it?

Liv: I know. It is. It’s all just so addictive. It’s horrendous. So where do you think is next for you then, Paula? Do you set yourself regular goals that you revisit? What’s on your agenda next?

Paula: What’s on my agenda next is bringing in some group coaching, which I’m really excited about and looking forward to. And there is a book in there somewhere. Seeing me saying it out loud, it now has to happen. I definitely would like to pull that together and put it out there. Those are the two next things I think to focus on.

Liv: How do you define success?

Paula: Oh, this is so hard. Referring back to it, for me, success is about seeing the line between what I do and a positive outcome. Being able to feel like I did that, and that’s with family as well. I measure success in terms of family, making sure that I give my daughter the attention, focus, and support she needs, as well as work. You can’t really have one without the other. It’s about seeing the line between what you do and a positive outcome and solving a problem. If you’re talking about addictive things, like Sudokus, all of those crossword stuff, it’s solving a problem. Wordle? 

Liv: Wordle?

Paula: Oh yeah, I love it!

Liv: Love Wordle! Every day… How old is your daughter?

Paula: She’s 10.

Liv: I have a ten year old daughter too. I quite regularly try to instill messages into her, but she pays no attention to me! Do you have key things that you try to instill in her learnings for the future, preparing her for a future?

Paula: Yes, we talk a lot about praising effort more than the outcome, and articulating out loud what we notice. We talk about what she’s proud of to get her used to talking about her achievements. We focus on what she did right rather than what she did wrong.

Liv: So, on that note, while we’re talking about advice to younger people, you’ve touched on with me that there are a few things that you know now that you wish you’d known earlier. What if you had to go and speak to yourself when you were, say, 13 or 14, what advice would you give yourself?

Paula: Ooh, at 13 and 14, be brave. And when you do new things, there will be anxiety, but that’s all right because it passes. And I think that would have been an incredibly valuable lesson to have learned at a very young age. I think in the workplace, starting out in the workplace, it would have been very much about the secret to success being about influence and visibility. Influence and visibility, get involved in stuff, and be really open to trying new things. My career was quite accidental, so I didn’t plan a path, and I don’t know if I’d planned a path whether it would have been any different, but I think there is value in planning ahead a bit and finding out about what the next job is that you want to do because your path can change. That’s okay, but look a couple of jobs ahead. What job do you like the look of? What would you need to do to get there? And is that appealing? So, put in place a plan. You don’t have to say it out loud to anyone or anything else, but at least it’s making you look ahead and making you think, what would it take to do that? And do I actually want what it would take? So, I would never want to be the CEO of some massive corporation because I know that’s not a life I want, but there are plenty of other roles that could have been quite fun and could have been quite exciting.

Liv: Paula, thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been an absolute pleasure to hear your story, but also the advice that you have for people because there’s been some really valuable stuff there. I really appreciate it.

Paula: Thank you for inviting me. I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been great. Thank you.