This Girl KAM with Deb Whitehouse

Deborah has enjoyed a long and varied career with GSK. As a senior global commercial leader, she humbly describes her role as helping amazing people do outstanding things for patients.

Liv:   Hi, Deb. A massive welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me.

Deb:  I’m really excited to be here. It’s a great way to start my week. Super excited.

Liv:   To kick us off, do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself?

Deb:  Yeah, sure. So, my name’s Deb Whitehouse. The obvious question is, is it Deb? Debbie, Deborah. So, yes. An identity crisis on that one, but we’ll go with Deb, for today.

I am, a mother of Eloise, who is three. My husband’s Nick. We live in South London. I work for GSK, I’ve worked for GSK for the entirety of my career. I joined from university, and at the moment I’m Vice President of an asset in early development, which is fantastic.

We’re working in the genital herpes space. So super sexy, but a really important, high unmet need, with no innovation for a long time. I’m excited to be doing that, and I’ve had a very meandering, varied career at GSK, which is why I’m still there and loving it.

Liv:   When looking at your LinkedIn profile, you have a science degree, you did your graduate program, at GSK, it looks very much like you always knew this was the path for you and this was the direction you were going to take. Is that the case? What did you want to be when you grew up?

Deb: Oh, no, not at all! What did I want to be when I grew up? I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I’m a massive Top Gun fan. Then I realized I’m too short and I’m too blind, so it was never going to happen! But that was my dream, early on, which then transitioned into wanting to go into medicine.  I got into med school, and through some reflection process decided, it probably wasn’t for me, which is quite good. As it turns out I’m actually pretty squeamish.

I would’ve been a terrible doctor.

I went to university to do Biology because I love science. I had a great biology teacher who inspired me. And that was where I ended up. As part of my degree there was a placement year, and the way you got your placement was the good old fashioned notice board in the biology labs.  I kept going down there to look for placements but nothing inspired me. It was all lab work, microscopes, and that just wasn’t for me, I wanted to be around people.

I wanted to find something that felt exciting. The other thing that I did at university was organise parties. I always found myself as a social secretary. One day there was a job at Janssen Cilag. and the advert was to “come and help us organise congresses for next year.” I thought, brilliant, I can definitely do that. That sounds like loads of fun. I applied and it was a brand executive role, and I was tasked with organising attendance at all the haematology conferences, and set up the early branding work. I absolutely loved it. I found I was at the intersect of biology and then what I soon learned to love, which was business. It  turned out that I was quite good at it, which I wasn’t expecting.

So from there onwards, it became quite clear that the pharma industry was this beautiful point between using science and having a career where I felt like I could use my brain to help people, which was really important to me. I’m always learning, as I’ve gone through my career.

I was offered a job at Janssen, but decided I shouldn’t probably go back there and knew I should try somewhere different. I applied to the GSK grad scheme. A little naively, not really knowing much, but because it was a great grad scheme and I got a place I thought I’d go and try it for a bit.

I loved it. The company felt similar to the experience I’d had at Janssen. Very people focused, very patient focused. So I decided to stay. And I’ve never had a reason to leave so far.

Liv:   That grad scheme looked fantastic. You got so much different experience, didn’t you?

Deb:  Yeah, it’s really good. It lasted two and a half years. They really cram it in! But it gives you a really nice foundational experience. I did sales, marketing, insight work, secondary care, primary care… I’m really grateful for what was an amazing entry point. It was hard though. We had to present every six months to the board.

Liv:   Oh wow. That’s scary for someone early in their career!

So from there, what was it that you loved from the program that you wanted to take forward with you?

Deb:  When I exited the program, I’d had a really great time in the field working for an amazing lady  in respiratory. I learned in that process the hugely changing dynamic of the NHS where we were moving from individual doctors making individual choices, based on data and the patient in front of them, and we were starting to move towards population decision making. The budget holder was changing and the role of market access. A regional, local level was becoming increasingly important. I was keen to do some more time in that space because I felt like that no longer was marketing in isolation or sales in isolation.  Account management was critical. Population level decision making was critical. Really good value propositions beyond the clinical data were important. So I went into a role in the respiratory team as the market access lead on a really big very high spend drug. I did a lot of work on pricing, value propositions, account management capabilities, working as account teams, it was fantastic. I think it took me beyond the core of brand marketing into a more holistic kind of commercial view on how we sell.

Liv:   One of the things I pick up on is you are really people focused, aren’t you? Do you think you’ve had one in particular mentor or key person?

And do you see your role as that too within GSK now?

Deb:  Yeah. I think I am. I’ve become more people focused as I’ve got older.

When you go into grad programs, you’re forced to be an individual contributor and you’re forced to be competitive. We were getting ranked every six months, which is great as it forces performance and that forces you to make sure you get on and deliver, but sometimes , it’s a negative connotation, being ranked against your peers. That’s of course, how life continues in the corporate world, and that’s fine, but it’s less overt. After I’d done my market access role on the respiratory product, I became a second line sales leader in the east of England. That was a hugely changing period for me. Inspiring and helping other people to be brilliant in their roles. It’s all about what your team do. I think that was quite an inflection point.

I definitely have a few people who really mentored and sponsored me. I have a guy who I’ve worked with for a very long time at different points through the organisation, and he was instrumental in me going for this second line sales leader role. I remember sitting down with him and talking about, what I should do next? We were talking about first or second line sales leader, and I was at that cusp. I thought, second line leadership, is that, is that too big?

It felt very scary. I’d never done first line sales leadership, but I’d done a lot of different types of leadership in the organisation and he really poked me to go down that route.

He was great. He was a sponsor as well as a mentor and a coach. It was such a critical point because in that step change, the role of a second line leader is a much different job to a first and I got the chance to learn more from that job than I would have in first line sales, which I probably would have grown out of quite quickly. I worked for him again in a job that I did a couple of years ago when I was the general manager of the UK.

He has been a constant support, helping me navigate through my career. I think you need somebody to push you. I think you need different people in your village, if you like.

It’s helpful to have somebody who makes you feel uncomfortable.

Liv: So tell me, do you think you play that role for other people within the organisation?

Deb: I try to. I invest a lot of my time in coaching people. I’ve got some formal coaching relationships and formal mentoring relationships, and I think I do play that role for people. I try very hard to dedicate time to doing that because I think it’s really important to. I’ve been invested in throughout my career and I want to pay that back.

Liv: When you’re coaching and mentoring people new to the industry now, what are the common challenges or areas of focus for them?

Deb: It’s interesting. There are different needs and different conversations depending on roles in the organisation. There’s a lot of conversations around optionality and choices. People asking, how do I take hold of my career path and how I continue to progress? What are my options? How do I take the first step in moving in that direction.

We talk about thriving a lot in GSK.

How do they thrive and how do they continue to progress? That’s a conversation that we have a lot. The other discussion, and it’s a unique role that I play because I’ve been in the organisation a while, is also how do I navigate? Who do I network with?

Both of those ultimately come down to “What’s within my gift as an individual to take accountability for and just go and try some stuff?” The hardest thing is often making the first step. Making some choices and then getting on and doing it.  People talk a lot because it’s scary. It’s scary trying something new or going out of your comfort zone or making a decision to make a change. Does it matter if you fail? We talk about that a lot. Who cares? What’s the worst that can happen really?

If you know you want to do something differently or things don’t feel great, you don’t have to fix it all. But what’s within your control to do and what happens if you try to make a different choice?

Liv: As a mentor, and if you think back to when you were, say 18 or in your early twenties, when you just joined the industry, what do you think would’ve been that key piece of advice to yourself?

Deb: I think earlier on, you feel like you have to plot everything out. That you have to know what’s your 10 year career strategy, I’m sure I’ve been asked that an obscene number of times. You think, my God, who actually knows that? I find, do something that sounds fun, that you think you’re going to love and enjoy.

Make your choices based on where you have energy and what you enjoy. To balance that, if it doesn’t feel scary, it’s probably not worth doing. For me, my metric of making a choice or a change is, does it sound fun? Does it scare me?

If it answers those two questions, I don’t really care whether it sits on the plan or not.

The other piece of advice that I would have is to value and build deep relationships with, not just your senior stakeholders, but also your peers, the super smart people around you.

As I’ve progressed and worked in different areas, I find that these organisations that we work with are full of insanely smart people. If you stop and learn and listen, engage and invest, you find the most amazing people around you. Sometimes you feel like you have to know everything and it’s just not true, so I would have definitely been a bit kinder to myself, in learning early on to lean on others. In a really positive way.

You build relationships, you build bonds through those casual moments of investing and connecting with others that I think is incredibly powerful in the long run.

Liv:  Earlier on, you referred to failure and talking to people that you worked with about how to handle. Can you tell me what you perceived to be your biggest failure and maybe what you learned from it?

Deb:  My God. My biggest failure? God, there’s so many, aren’t there? I feel like there are micro failures every day. I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to reframe the concept of failure in my mind.

I suppose there are things, I look back and I think I wish I’d done that differently, or that didn’t go as well as I hoped. It sounds really cliche, but you learn way more from when things go badly than when they go really well.

I think there was, there were inflection points. Let’s put it that way.

There were, personal failures where, I’ve not got a job, for example. I was at a moment where I wanted to get a new job. I wanted to change. I’d been doing second line sales leadership, and it was time to move on and do something different.

I’d gone for a job and everyone around me was saying, “of course you should get that job.” We’ve all been in tat situations where people think it’s a slam dunk. In my heart of hearts, I knew I didn’t want it. I wasn’t excited by it. But I felt like I should do it. Firstly, making the choice to go for it was a bad choice because I was listening to people around me more than what I wanted in my heart. I wasn’t excited to go into the interview. It just didn’t feel like the right thing to do.

So that was a bad choice. I’d call that a failing. Of course, I didn’t get the job because I didn’t sound like I wanted it, and when you are recruiting people, you want them to be able to do the job, but you want them to love the job. That’s the two components, isn’t it when you’re looking for someone.

It was a huge lesson for me in being true to myself and following my heart, only going for things that I really desperately wanted. They were really important moments of reflection around ownership, owning my choices and doing things because they felt right for me, not because I felt like I should. That was a critical moment, and I went on to do something that ended up being much better for me. I went into something completely different, and that was a great outcome but I learned a lot from that process.

Then if I think about the business failures along the way, what are the key themes? Often they come down to something’s gone wrong because I tried to keep everybody happy and didn’t follow my gut, tried to find a middle ground, which was never the right thing to do.

Some of it was around not truly valuing different perspectives and engaging deeply. When you do a big project and you’ve got this great idea and the team’s got this great idea, you go really fast at it and you don’t take a moment to pause and engage people along the way. Then you get to the critical governance moment or the inflection point because you’ve been so head down, you’ve not truly listened deeply to experts outside of the project group. One moment in particular recently where if I had paused and deeply listened, rather than looking for validation that we were right, we would’ve found out that there were some valuable alternative perspectives that would’ve made a really important difference to the production of the project.

Liv:   You’ve done a lot of work with developing countries, haven’t you? Tell me a little bit about that.

Deb:  I did some time in the UK and then I got a role in a global team, and by fortune got asked to be part of a program looking at what we do in Africa and what our presence was in Africa. How do we expand access, going beyond the major hubs, the major cities and the major markets. I ended up doing six years working with developing countries. I went to Viiv, which is our HIV business, and ran Africa and the Middle East,  an amazing experience and, it was such an important milestone because when you work for big companies, we talk a lot about the major markets. We talk a lot about the importance of the US, the importance of Europe etc from a commercial perspective, but, there’s so much that we do actually. If you look at the mission for GSK, it’s about reaching patients and the patients that need us beyond the major markets are in developing countries. It’s complicated and, it’s hard, but I suppose my biggest learning from that was how much we can learn from countries that don’t have as many resources as us. If I think about the people that worked in our offices in, Nigeria Botswana or South Africa… Phenomenally passionate, phenomenally resourceful.

When you work in a big company, in the UK, in London, you’ve got people to do everything, all the stuff that we take for granted is just done. Then we just get to focus on the branding or the sales force execution. When you’re working in smaller markets, smaller businesses with less resources you start to learn so much more about focusing on what matters. Focusing on getting the right stuff done, not going to perfection. The importance of community and being part of a community that makes movements and things change. There’s a huge role, particularly with my role in HIV, huge role for activism and advocacy that really are the root causes to driving change, to driving phenomenal progress.

It’s insanely inspiring actually. Not that we don’t have amazing people in the UK. We really do. We have great community groups etc, but it’s just a completely different experience. When you are working in an environment where it’s not so straightforward, getting things done is just a bit harder. Beautiful people, just brilliant, brilliant people to work with. Getting the chance to do that through work was phenomenal. I felt very privileged to be part of that journey and to try to contribute in some way to making progress.

Liv:  How long did you do that for?

After I left the UK business, I went to work in the global consumer organization. I was part of a project called Africa 2020. The project was looking at  how do we expand, what’s the right footprint, what’s the right presence?

There’s a lot of work on route to market. Go to market model distribution, which was phenomenal. So did that for a few years,  then  I went to Viiv Healthcare to run the HIV business for GSK, which was under the Viiv Group,

for another two years. That was purely focused on HIV. That was an amazing experience. It was entering a new HIV medicine into Africa. A game changing, huge game changing medicine. I did a lot of work directly with governments, global funding to do early pathfinder work.

It was actually one of my most proud moments in my career. I will never, ever forget it in my life. The medicine that I was working on, there was a lot of advocacy around getting access to it, and I remember, we’d done a huge amount of work , to start to accelerate the pace of getting registrations and things like that.

We were at the conference and there were women who had done this huge protest to get access to this drug. They’d had t-shirts made up with the name of the medicine on them saying, “We want this medicine now!” They overtook the stage, overtook the main auditorium, and it was a phenomenal moment where you think, my God, I’m working on something that matters so much that people would do this, that’s the advocacy that we see out there. It was just an amazing experience.

Liv: Throughout your career you’ve experienced so many different things that are just fantastic. So, what is next for you?

Deb: I’ve worked with all of these amazing, countries. I’ve travelled to amazing places, and I’ve loved it, but I’ve never yet actually lived abroad, and that for me, feels like a failing. Having worked with all these great places and having the opportunity to do these great jobs in different types of roles in the organisation, but not having yet had experience living in a different culture and testing myself to see how I and my family react to that. That for me feels like a massive, missed moment. The older I get, the more nervous I get about not making it happen. It’s so easy to say now’s the not the right time. My husband’s very supportive, but I think as a woman, as the lead spouse, I feel the pressure and the challenge of doing that.

So that feels like my biggest, it’s not a job, but that for me is the clearest next thing that I want to do. Having worked in different countries, I genuinely believe you grow so much from seeing and experiencing different cultures.

Liv: You see, now I’m going to need to know if you do that!

Deb:  I’ll come back and let you know. I’ll do it. We’re definitely going to do it.

Liv: Well you’ve put it on air now! Okay. Last question for you. What do you think the industry as a whole will look like in five years?

Deb: When I came back from mat leave, I worked on a medicine for Covid. What I learned through that process is the way that healthcare is delivered is rapidly changing our expectations of accessibility.  Everything’s online, everything’s remote.

Everything is moving to a more remote connectivity and I think there’s this huge shift where we’re still trying to figure out what’s between this online remote care model, which enables more fluidity, more connectivity with the role and the importance of personal connections and relationships that continue to enforce and inform how knowledge grows and how science is disseminated. I definitely feel like we will be in a different world in the five to 10 year horizon in terms of omnichannel, in terms of the way that we go to market, the way that medicines are delivered.

I think the role of physical buildings will change dramatically. The role of patients in being part of the choices and the decision making in their care, continues to enhance.

Since Covid, we’ve all got a lot more interested in what’s happening in our bodies, what goes into our bodies? What illnesses are we at risk of? How do we take personal accountability for care, prevention of getting poorly in the first place. Proactive management.

I think we will see a more empowered public patient pool, which I think will be interesting to see how we as an industry evolve our views on disclosing and sharing scientific information outside of healthcare professionals. I think we are going to, at some point, have to have that conversation again.

We are on a huge journey actually. But I do think that we are going to become more accessible, and much more agile.

We are so slow still. We’ve got a big role to play in getting more customer and patient centric in how we deliver and disseminate information in my opinion.

I think we just embrace it, right? I think we set the vision, we say this is the world we’re in, we’ve got to get on board. You look at any other industry and it’s fully possible. We just have to get over ourselves. I think we we’re so entrenched, particularly the UK, so entrenched in process and regulation that we don’t see the wood for the trees in terms of innovation.

Liv: Thank you so much, Deb. It’s been really good to speak to you.

In an industry where very few people stay in the same company for their whole career it was refreshing to speak to someone still so clearly passionate and dedicated after nearly 20 years in one organisation. It’s not hard to see why GSK have invested in Deb, the passion and excitement she holds for the work we do and her part in making a better world for patients is utterly inspiring. I am left with no doubt that someone with such determination and drive will fulfil her dream of living abroad!