Liv: Good morning, Charlotte, and welcome to This Girl KAM. It’s really good to see you. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your career today in a nutshell.
Charlotte: Sure! So, I currently work at Amgen as the Director for Strategic Planning and Operations in our global customer capabilities organisation… which is a bit of a mouthful!
Effectively, that means I work in the organisation that helps to build the capabilities across our commercial functions that will help us engage with customers better. Some of those are digital, some of those are sales and field focused, and my particular role is to act like a chief of staff to the VP who runs that group. I’m a bit of a right-hand woman, but I also spend a lot of my time making sure that our leadership team is set up to be really high performing.
Be that through the way that we shape our culture, or the way that we’re organised, the processes that we use to plan, horizon scan and set strategy. And also the layer below that leadership team, you’ve got a group of directors who are all responsible for very specific technical verticals. They’re really amazing subject matter experts, but someone needs to get their arms around them and make sure that everyone’s driving towards the same customer engagement vision. And so, I will partner with my boss to do that as well. It’s a great job to do. I feel very lucky. I genuinely feel like I’ve got one of the best jobs at Amgen.
I’ve been doing this kind of work for about four years now: I’m one year into this global role, and I did two or three years in a very similar role, chief of staff capacity, but to the GM of our UK and Ireland affiliate. So similar vantage point, similar partnership with the leadership team, but in different segments of the organisation.
I’m seeing life at the 10,000-foot view now in the global group, but I’ve seen life at the affiliate level as well. I just love this kind of work. I came into strategic planning and operations, or the SPO job as we would call it, at Amgen in 2020, just as the pandemic hit – so that was an interesting time for me.
Before that, I did 10 or 15 years in brand communications and corporate communications which was a really nice experience, and I enjoyed working with cross-functional brand teams from a comms perspective rather than right at the heart of it in sales and marketing.
So, that’s the work side of me. Personally, I live in York with my partner, Rob, who is a pilot, and our little Jack Russell. We’ve been in York for about a year now and we’ve come up here to be a little bit closer to our extended family. As someone who was born in London, there is a lot to be said for York, it’s a beautiful part of the world.
Liv: Yeah. So, tell me a little bit about what motivates you in the work you do now. You spoke really passionately about your role. Can you tell me more about what it is that excites you on a day-to-day basis?
Charlotte: Personally, the thing that motivates me the most is to make sure that I’m growing. One of my old bosses once said something to me about recruitment and talent development, which has stayed with me for a long time, which is “if someone’s got 20 years’ experience, I’m less interested if they had the same year, 20 times”. And I always try and make sure that I never have the same year twice, that I’m always doing work that will stretch me or make me just a little bit uncomfortable because, in that discomfort, I know that I’m growing. I know that that’s the place that gets me to my best performance and my best work. I try to instil that mindset in others because I think that its approach to growth is a really healthy and exciting one. It feels scary when the workload gets really heavy and it feels like there’s just so much to do, so it requires a calm mind to be able to lean into the stretch elements of growth year on year on year. But I think that’s the way that you realise your potential.
As I’ve got older, and particularly since the pandemic, I’ve also talked a lot about integrity being a core value. Five or ten years ago, I might have said, “yeah, because I really want people to believe that what you see is what you get, and I can always be trusted to deliver.” And that’s true and I still hold that quite closely.
Actually, I heard Brené Brown talk about integrity from a much more holistic sense, and I really love the way she defines it: she goes back to the Latin root of the word, ‘integer’, which means ‘to make whole’. And, the more I think about integrity and what it means, the more I feel like it’s about having a sense of wholeness in the workplace. You hear people say a lot, “I bring my whole self to work” and I think that’s important. It’s in danger of becoming a buzzword, a little buzz phrase, and we mustn’t let that happen because ‘to bring my whole self’ means that I accept that sometimes I’m having a crap day, and that’s okay.
I have to accept that, make adjustments and not try and be some superwoman that is still going to knock out a 10/10 when actually it’s not going to be a 10/10 day today. I’m really passionate about creating that environment of psychological safety for others where performance is looked at from a much longer-term perspective, and it means you’ve got to forgive yourself for the days where you might only be able to deliver a 5/10. Because there will be some 5/10 days and some 7/10 days, but there will be some 12/10 days too – probably more 12/10 days than you congratulate yourself for! And, when you look back at a quarter or a cycle or a year’s worth of work, you’ll see things that you can be immensely proud of and that are worth celebrating. You can also be proud of the fact that you gave yourself a break for those days when you weren’t quite 100%. That’s really important for me as well.
Liv: Yeah, that makes so much sense. It goes back to what you were saying about having a growth mindset as well. Someone needs to feel that safety in their environment to be able to grow in that way; it’s okay to feel uncomfortable and overwhelmed if you’re in an environment that’s safe to do so.
Charlotte: Yeah, definitely.
Liv: I completely agree. Okay, so that’s fascinating. You were quite young to be in a leadership role, weren’t you? Tell me a little bit more about that, and let’s talk about the sort of challenges that you’ve faced up until today.
Charlotte: Yeah, judging by standards across our industry, you probably would think I was quite young to be on a leadership team. So, I’m 37 now, and I joined the leadership team in the affiliate in 2019 when I was about 33, 34. Definitely the baby of the team back then, but I earned the opportunity, I think, because I had worked very hard.
I was still in my corporate affairs role at the time (I joined Amgen originally to lead corporate affairs and I moved into the SPO job afterwards), but I was given the opportunity because it was seen as strategically important to put corporate affairs on the LT. It probably changed the trajectory of my career, so I’m incredibly grateful for my boss at the time taking that decision, but I almost felt like the new girl on a very experienced and very tenured team. Many of those directors had been in their roles for a long time, and I felt like I had to really work hard to earn their trust and their confidence.
I had to earn their confidence in my confidence. What I mean by that is I had to prove to the organisation that I could be trusted with confidential information. That I could be trusted to consider the leadership team as my first team and, therefore, to do everything I can to serve that group. This was quite a tough shift for me as I had to make sure that my relationships with my peers weren’t going to change either. Luckily, I had a friend of mine at Amgen who was asked to join the LT at the same time, so it wasn’t just me, he and I were thought partners and coaches to each other throughout that process. But we did compare notes on the fact that we had to have some quite transparent chats with some of our colleagues who were also friends because, when you get invited to a space or to a table that not everyone’s invited to, it’s very easy for those colleagues to say, “oh, off she goes, not sure we can be friends in the same way” or “not sure if we can trust her with information”. It was really important for me to make sure that I maintained those relationships, so I was very transparent about the fact that it might be a little bit awkward for a while, but nothing needs to change. If anything, it made me really good at being transparent when communicating with people. So now, people will ring me up complaining and I ask “what ‘me’ are you talking to here? Do you just want to chat or are you talking to me as someone on the leadership team? Do you want me to do something with this information?”. After that, it became much easier for me to distinguish between the two, and now I don’t have to worry about betraying any confidences or compromising the effectiveness of those relationships as well. So, it was a learning curve, but I got there in the end.
Liv: That’s a great way to approach it. It’s not an uncommon situation where you go from being part of a peer group to suddenly being in a leadership role… getting that balance right is so difficult.
Charlotte: It was important to craft a reputation for myself as someone who places importance on learning and humility. That makes it much easier for people to assume good intentions about what I might be trying to achieve if I go to a meeting or insert myself into a conversation. They know that I don’t have some political agenda and that I’m genuinely curious: I want to know what’s happening at that moment and how I can help to either remove a barrier, unblock something or to broker a conversation so that we can move forwards. And I think that’s where sometimes having your values really well known and understood will pay dividends in ways that you don’t even anticipate. I take it as a huge compliment when I hear people referring to my commitment to learning because it tells me that they understand where I’m coming from and it is almost always a place of curiosity and wanting us to be better. I think that’s often quite a non-threatening way to be able to do really positive things in the organisation.
Liv: And have you always taken that approach of making your purpose of continued development and continued curiosity clear to everyone that you interact with? How do you go about that?
Charlotte: Yeah, it’s not the first thing you say at every meeting or when you meet someone for the first time, but it can play out in the way that you conduct yourself and the way that you ask questions. To listen and really listen to seek to understand. Many times in organisations like ours, you have a lot of people who are just listening for the next opportunity to say something. Especially when you move closer to the more political parts of the organisation. So no, I don’t need to shove it down people’s throats, but if I can try really hard to be thoughtful in my questions, to show that I’ve listened and to not just barge in and assume that I know what’s happening. To seek first, to understand and then to be understood. I find that doesn’t really serve me wrong. If I can stick to that approach to engage with my colleagues, I usually get a good outcome.
Liv: Yeah, absolutely. Talk to me about success and how you have defined success in the past versus how you define it today.
Charlotte: Yeah, it’s interesting the way you framed it actually. I think earlier on in my career I would have said success was ratings at the end of the year. So, this is not a humble brag, but I work very hard and I have achieved either ‘exceeds expectations’ or ‘far exceeds expectations’ every year since I joined Amgen. But if you were to ask me today, “tell me about how you’ve been successful”, I would never point to the rating that I got at the end of the year. I would tell you about the projects that I worked on and the partnerships that I forged to be able to get really good outcomes for the organisation. And I would certainly tell you about the lessons I learned. Five, seven years ago, I would have been much more likely to point to the tick at the end of the year, the external validation. Someone has rubber stamped my year and said, “well done, Charlotte, you had a great year”. As far as I’m concerned, I think I would have really clung onto that, someone else’s interpretation of how well I’d done. And, certainly, I think through a lot of my twenties I worked in some PR agencies where it’s a little bit easier to get promoted. You can kind of cycle through the pay bands pretty quickly because the fight for good talent is so fierce that they’ll promote you just so that they can keep you. I’m not saying I didn’t earn them, but I had a taste for being promoted in agencies that simply doesn’t exist when you come in-house. And a less mature version of myself might have had a bit of a bruised ego and think, “why am I not getting promoted every year?”. You have to give that up very quickly when you come into pharma because that’s not happening for good reason actually. You are much more encouraged to seek growth in the experience, seek growth and success in the learning. And so now when I think about success, I think, “did I achieve a meaningful outcome? Did I learn something along the way?” Even when times were tough, like when we were going through the pandemic, and there were some tears, do I think we were successful during those times? Absolutely. Because we learnt something about each other, about the work that we do. And so, I think for me, success is much more about being able to face adversity and find a way through it, to be able to draw on your resilience and all of the tools.
We do a tonne of training on resilience and, actually, when you are really tested is when that stuff becomes meaningful. I don’t know if you’re going to ask me about how I interpret failure as well, but I’d probably say something similar. I’d say, they’re like sisters, they’re such close friends. Success and failure, they’re made of the same stuff. And I think often the key to taking the sting out of failure is realising that it’s just around the corner from success. And that the requirement to face adversity, to tackle challenges, to find your way to a meaningful outcome lives in both places. The only thing that’s different is your mindset.
I reflect very infrequently on my failures but, usually if I have failed, it’s because I didn’t take a lesson with me or I let my ego get in the way. Or I didn’t get back up after a knock down, I just retreated and moved on. You must get back up. It makes me feel good to be able to talk about success in this way. It’s oddly freeing because it comes from a much more intrinsic place. It’s all about how I feel about it and the value that I can draw, and to know that other people have experienced that value as well, and much less about some rubber stamp.
Liv: Obviously you’ve grown and learned so much, does that mean necessarily that you’d go back and do things differently? Are there any parts of your path that you would change with hindsight?
Charlotte: No, because everything’s led me to today. And particularly if you’re asking that question through the lens of how I might have perceived success and chasing promotions and things like that. No, because I was in my twenties, I was a little bit green. I was naive and learning, which is exactly what you should be doing at that stage in your career. I think it’s always the right question to ask whenever something hasn’t gone to plan, you look back and say, “would I have done something differently?”, but when it comes to my own growth and maturity, I’m 37. In the grand scheme of things, I’m still a baby in this world, I’ve got plenty of maturing to do, and I’m looking at that really fondly and optimistically as well. So no, there’s nothing that I would want to go back and change. I’m more interested in looking forward with the wisest head I can put on my shoulders.
Liv: So, you’ve led me perfectly onto the question that I want to ask you next. What do you think about when you picture your future, or even just your short-term and long-term goals, what do they look like for you?
Charlotte: I think one of the things I learned about the way that I tackled work and career in my late twenties/early thirties, when I was chasing that external validation, was that I probably didn’t focus enough on relationships, my personal life and really being honest with myself about whether or not I wanted to have a family at that time. I really leaned into my career and it’s only over the last few years that I’ve been much more balanced about it. Again, I’m not coming from a place of regret at all, but my life and my success are now, at least for a certain period, going to be about leaning out of work because it is really important for me to start a family now. I was talking to a colleague of mine over in the US who is a similar age, and we just remarked on how there’s an open conversation about women who are my age (mid to late thirties) who are considered ‘peak value for money’ from an HR perspective.
I’ve done the initial maturity part; I’m firing from all cylinders now. But professionally, I could probably grow my career to a steeper trajectory now if I wanted to, but it’s so tough to do that, to lean into career. I might be at my most mature now professionally, my most able to add outside value to the organisation, but I really want to start a family. And, if I don’t do that now, if I continue to lean into career and lean out of my personal life, I could regret that for the rest of my life. So, there’s this interesting moment where you realise that your biological clock is pulling you out of the working space and into a space that’s much more focused on motherhood. And I don’t know if I’m just a product of my generation, but I grappled for a few years now with this sort of Sheryl Sandberg-esque ‘Lean In’ mantra, and I’m going to give myself a backache if I keep leaning in. I don’t think it’s about necessarily only leaning in order to have a really fruitful and fulfilling meaningful career. And if it is a binary choice, then I know that soon my choice will be to lean out so that I can make space for family. But I’m interested in reinterpreting what it means to have balance. What it means to “have it all”, whatever that’s supposed to mean for a woman. And yeah, I don’t know what success is going to mean for me as a parent and as a partner to a co-parent as well.
This is something obviously my partner and I are wanting to do together. But I don’t know. Again, I’m optimistic about the future. But I think it’s important to be honest. I’ve come onto this podcast to mainly talk about myself in the work capacity, but I talked about that idea of integrity and being whole, and wanting to be successful as a mother and as a parent is also a really important part of me.
And probably, when I do go back to work when the time comes, it’s going to make me an even better professional as well.
Liv: Yeah. 100% it will. There could be a whole series of this, and I’m so glad you’ve touched on it because it’s so important. You’ve obviously put everything you’ve got into your career, you’ve reached that pinnacle point where there’s no escaping it. As women, no matter how much we don’t want it to be so binary, that choice is there.
It will be very interesting to see as we progress with DEI agendas and that equality mission, how that starts to look for women moving forward.
Charlotte: I think it’s two things. If I lean on a particular example from Amgen, we’ve got a network in one of our global ERGs called ‘Women Empowered to be Exceptional’ (WE2). It’s basically a women-only networking group. I started as a mentee and I was assigned to a group of ladies from all over Europe, and we happened to all be paired up with the lady that’s now my current boss. First of all, it’s a very specific way that an experience with an ERG has had a direct impact on my career because it gave me exposure to a really inspirational senior leader in a space where I was first and foremost coming to talk to a mentor. So, those mentorship conversations can be considered extracurricular. They are, nine times out of ten, not really about the day job, they’re about those unique pressures or areas of confusion for women navigating the workplace in varying parts of our lives. Because, again, I have a huge amount of respect for ladies who are a little bit older than me who are grappling with menopause in the workplace as well. I’m actually really proud of Amgen for the spotlight that we’ve shone on that. But I was able to get the exposure to my boss that gave me the opportunity to call her up and say, “I’ve actually just been playing with an idea, and can you tell me if I’m completely asking the wrong question” and it happened to be about the disconnect between the way that our global organisation partners with local affiliates. It was enough for her to remember me, to think “this isn’t a complete picture”. Six weeks later, she’s made a VP and she’s calling me about applying for a job, so I’m grateful to those women-only spaces because it creates a safe place to be your full self. I was never worried about pressing her because she was just there as a mentor, and as a person who I could bounce ideas off. And when you get that safety with a senior leader, it led to me having the confidence to say, “can I just run an idea past you?”, and then that had a direct consequence as well, so I cannot encourage it enough!
Any women who might happen to have access to female-only ERG spaces should take advantage of them because they really can bear fruit if they do what they’re intended to do, which is to create a psychologically safe space to work some stuff out and to unlock potential that maybe you didn’t know was there. The more time I spend with her, the more I see how important it is for her to role model. She’s incredible – she’s got four kids, is VP of the organisation’s big global remit, and she’s a really good role model for what it means to have that balance. She has really good boundaries between her work commitments and her family life. And again, if you can see it, you can be it. That’s another cheesy catchphrase. I promise I’ll never say it again. But I have direct access to a really inspirational role model. I can’t tell you what a difference that has made to my sense of confidence. She’s a great example that, not only will everything be fine, but you’re probably going to be better than you ever were. And it is more than possible to shape a highly successful career with a bunch of kids in tow as well. Yeah, I think I owe a lot to the women-only spaces that we have at Amgen, and that’s a place where I see the DEI agenda having real value. And I feel like I have access to opportunities from a much more equitable space as a woman.
Liv: Yeah, absolutely. And is that environment and that role model position, something that you offer to others?
Charlotte: Yeah, I try to. You have to shed the imposter syndrome with jobs like mine because an SPO, someone who works in Strategic Planning Operations in the chief of staff capacity, is paid to be an enabler. I talk to my boss a lot about the fact that, while I love the job I do, it’s still really important for me to have clear areas of accountability because it’s important for me to have something that I can plough my energies into. I have a huge capacity and hunger for really successful output, therefore if I don’t feel accountable for anything that I’m working on, it’s difficult for me to do that. And again, when you look across the most senior leaders at Amgen, VPs usually come with a SPO attached to them because it gives them this sort of enabling force, multiplying resource that can make sure that the leadership teams are in really good shape, the organisation is in good shape, that the comms are good etc. But I’ve learned that being a SPO, for me, is not following my boss around with a clipboard, asking “how many sugars do you want in your coffee?”. I am here to enable, but that doesn’t mean I have to enable from the shadows or to enable from behind. But, being the most junior person in any room is a huge privilege because, nine times out of ten, I know I am going to learn a tonne from that experience. It doesn’t come without its challenges because I’ve had to shed the imposter syndrome and shed this idea that being an SPO somehow makes me less of a leader. It’s often not easy to write down a ton of KPIs for how I’ve been impactful, but if you ask the people that I touch the most frequently if I have made a difference, I hope that they would say I have. And because I have this role that is so much about enabling and accelerating and removing barriers from people, and so much about my personal contribution, my attitude, my ability to help a group talk its way out of a situation, I can’t help but be really mindful of the impression that I’m leaving. I do work incredibly hard to be a good coach, a good mentor, and where I can, a good sponsor as well. And I see all three of them as different things. I think they’re quite easy to confuse and sort of merge together, but I think coaching is there for anybody to impart on anybody else. It’s nothing to do with level or experience, I think being a good coach is about curiosity and listening and just being that mirror for someone. I try really hard to do that, especially for less experienced colleagues, to show them the benefits of my experience and the path that I’ve trodden. And most importantly, because I’ve benefited so specifically from sponsorship, to do that as well… and you can’t throw your sponsorship around willy-nilly. You’ve only got so much to give because it requires you to spend a little bit of your own political capital, you’ve got to spend some currency on someone else, perhaps on something that other people don’t see. It’s a very personal thing, I think, being a sponsor because you have to care. You’ve really got to want to help that person succeed. And I can think of two or three people now that I’m sponsoring, and I will differentiate my time for them, because I see something incredibly special in them, and therefore, with whatever currency I’ve got, I want to spend it on opening doors for them and helping them to be as successful as they can be. Because what good is power if you just keep it all to yourself? It’s not what it’s for. Power is there for you to act on behalf of others and for you to create the best environment and the best outcome for the most people. And the power that I have, I want to try and spend it.
Liv: I love the way you articulate this. The difference between a sponsor and a mentor and using that currency. That’s such a good way of articulating the differences between all three ideas actually. And so important to do because, again, we referred earlier to how things are becoming a buzzword and ‘sponsorship’ is definitely something that’s become a buzzword. And, like you say, so often just mingled in with ‘mentorship’.
Charlotte: Yeah.
Liv: But you’ve articulated that beautifully, I might pinch that moving forward. I’ll be referring back to this one, no doubt.
Charlotte: You can have it for free.
Liv: Thank you very much. One of the questions I ask every time I speak to women on this podcast is about the movie ‘Sliding Doors’. Is that a movie you’ve seen?
Charlotte: Yep, I’m very familiar with it.
Liv: Super. Okay because, when I started doing this, I presumed everybody had seen ‘Sliding Doors’ but it turns out they haven’t.
Charlotte: Because ‘Sliding Doors’ is from the nineties, it’s therefore a cultural reference that not everyone will get. I had an intern who hadn’t seen ‘Love Actually’! I wouldn’t be surprised if you get some Gen Zs on your podcast, and they look at you blankly when you mention ‘Sliding Doors’.
Liv: I know, exactly. Yeah, you’re right though. I’m probably going to have to try and find something more up to date than ‘Sliding Doors’ for the next generation. But let’s stick to ‘Sliding Doors’ for today. And let’s talk about if you’ve had one particular moment in your life that you perceive to be your ‘Sliding Doors’ moment.
Charlotte: Honestly, I think it would have to be (and this is going to sound like such a publicity plug for my company… it’s not) joining Amgen. Joining Amgen was just about location in the beginning. I was with my partner, we had been together for a while, we met at a comms agency that we had both worked at and started seeing each other. When it became serious, he took a job with AstraZeneca and their global HQ is based in Cambridge. I was still in London at the time, and I had to make a decision about whether or not we would stay in London. In the end, I went for love and followed him to Cambridge. I went job hunting and Amgen just happened to be hiring. I had a really great interview with my corporate affairs boss, so my first second walking in the door at Amgen, I was greeted with a really impassioned female leader, and I thought, “yes, I like you. I think I can make a home here”. And I’ve been so privileged and lucky to have never had a bad boss at Amgen in the six years that I have been working here.
And, yeah, I’m really grateful that Amgen just needed me when I needed them. It was a great experience.
Liv: Yeah, it sounds like the perfect match, especially talking about what you were referring to before about your future and having children and balancing that. It sounds like you’ve found a company that will embrace you developing that side of you at the same time.
Charlotte: I think I’ve come to see Amgen as a safe organisation to talk about family planning. In my career, I definitely experienced a time where it would have been career limiting to bring up family planning, to talk about the desire to want to start a family, to build that into personal development conversations. And I’m so grateful that I made a choice to perhaps break a taboo, to do what other women weren’t, and just be really open with my bosses about the fact that I’m going to want to step out and, all things being well biologically, you should expect me to be taking some maternity leave at this point. And, you know what, everyone was great about it.
Perhaps it was because I felt a sense of security in the time and the work that I’ve invested so far. Amgen knows what they’re getting with me, and I think they would be happy for me to take that break because it’s only temporary.
I know that the first year of motherhood is challenging. But, for me, it’s important to take that space and to come back, so I don’t worry about it. I’m very open with career conversations. Actually, last year, I lost a pregnancy and it’s only because of that sense of openness that it didn’t even occur to me not to tell my boss, and it was a male boss as well. I rang him straight away and he was amazing about it.
It breaks my heart that there are women who would go through something so horrific and feel like they cannot reveal their ambitions for motherhood because it is career limiting. Honestly, I can’t believe that we’ve ever lived in a world where that might have even been a fear or a concern. I feel incredibly grateful that it didn’t even occur to me not to be honest and to take the time I needed.
Liv: Wow. Although we still do live in that world, thankfully there are more and more organisations like yours and more environments that are starting to feel safe.
I’ve had so many conversations on this podcast with women who were having children and they didn’t really want to talk about it, and with women who were feeling like they were expected to want children. They questioned whether they were being held back because they were expecting to want to go off some time soon. Those conversations are all too common. And, actually, for you just to sit here on this podcast and say, “I want to have children” is one of the most powerful things I think I’ve experienced, and I love it.
And to go through that, to lose a child and not be able to share it for fear of showing them that you’re in that stage of your life, that’s scary, isn’t it?
Charlotte: It is, but I feel really confident and optimistic that we are moving beyond that fear. And I think that’s where, if you look at the entire DEI agenda, a rising tide will raise all ships. I hope that, as more organisations think much more carefully about the needs of groups or individuals that may not look the way we do, or walk in the shoes that we do, and they can be more thoughtful about how those needs might be more different to ours, then slowly we will see improvements. Whether you’re looking through the lens of race, gender, disability, ethnicity, an improvement in one space will lead to improvements in others. Speaking to colleagues inside and outside of Amgen who are particularly involved in the DEI, and I know you’ve been involved with Yam from the Black Sherpa Podcast as well, he’s a really great example of that. And he and I often compare notes about the pace of change and whether sometimes that can agitate us because we want to be helping our industry to move a little bit faster. But I think it’s a balance between keeping your foot on the gas and not settling for complacency, whilst also having the patience and the ability to see that this is a long game. You will find pockets of success in some places, and you must celebrate them. You must shine a light on them because that is how they will grow and flourish. And so, you could look at Amgen and say, “this is great that you are really focusing on the experience for women, you are differentiating your investment and you are creating spaces for women. Now tell me what you’re doing about race and disability.”
That’s a really fair question to ask. But you mustn’t diminish the real, life-changing impact that you’re having for women just because, as an organisation, we haven’t come up with the 1, 2, 3 solution for all manifestations of diversity immediately and made perfect progress in all places. That is an unrealistic expectation.
And we will upset ourselves by having those unrealistic expectations because no organisation is going to be able to meet them. It’s a difficult one. And I remain optimistic for other people and other individuals who might have their own stories of diversity to be able to, like me, say that their employer has done something really meaningful to enhance their experience and opportunities. I hope that everybody will be able to say that at some point. You have to start somewhere, and you’ve really got to celebrate the successes where you get them.
Liv: Yeah 100%. I feel like we should leave it there. . . I don’t think we can end on anything better. Thank you so much for coming onto the show, Charlotte. It has been incredible to listen to you and I’ve learned so much. I think this is one episode that, if I can get past listening to my own voice and just listen to you, I will be going back to listen to this one over and over again. So, thank you very much for taking the time.
Charlotte: I really appreciate the invitation. It’s been a really fun experience for me as well. And I can’t wait to dig into more of your episodes! I think you’ve got a great podcast here and I’m happy to have been a part of it.
Liv: Thank you!