This Girl KAM with Vicky Williams

Liv: It’s great to have you here, Vicky. To kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, and your work life?

Vicky: Sure. I’m the general manager of GSK Germany, living in Munich with my husband Giles and my three boys who are 13, 11, and six. Giles looks after everything that’s non-pharmaceutical in our lives, so it’s a bit of a team effort. I’ve worked for GSK for 25 years, starting straight out of university at the age of 22. I’ve had an incredible career adventure with GSK, working in different countries, globally, regionally, and in different roles in Europe, and it’s led me here to Munich. I have a fantastic organisation here with so much potential in Germany and a massive impact on people’s lives living in Germany, which is a real privilege.

Liv: Fabulous. So you started in January last year, is that right?

Vicky: Yes, that’s right. I spent the first eight months commuting back and forth to London before we all moved as a family to Munich in September. We previously lived in Paris for 10 years, where all the kids were born, and I was the general manager in Austria before moving to London during the pandemic and then to Munich.

I find that the family unit is really important, and because my kids have moved a few times, they seem less attached to having one best friend. They tend to be able to live within a group of friends and are used to friends coming and going within that friendship group. We do a lot as a family when we’re here, like different adventures across the country, and I think they really like that. They may resent me for moving them around, but at least they’ll be able to speak two or three languages! Maybe one day they’ll thank me. We never know exactly do we, but at least they can communicate their anger in multiple languages.

Liv: (laughs) That’s true. So talk to me more about your career journey?

Vicky: Yes, it’s a funny story. I was always going to join the British Army and almost signed on to be an officer at Sandhurst. But the last weekend before I signed, it was raining, and I was getting shouted at in the mud. So I had a fairly abrupt career change of heart. At the time, I went to an art and black tie event where GSK was offering one of their student presentations and dinners. I didn’t have much money and went there and really liked the idea of having a career where I could combine my biological sciences degree with business, people, and leadership. So I joined the graduate trainee scheme and spent the first 10 years in the UK as a medical rep, sales manager, and gained quite a lot of marketing experience. Towards the end of that time, I was HIV business unit head and also launched the vaccine for prevention of cervical cancer in the UK in a business unit before I moved to France. That was the first 10 years building up a base of commercial experience. Then I moved to France and was a regional marketing director.

We had a European office in Paris and I really fell in love with French life and ended up spending 10 years there learning French, having three children. In a society that has a very different approach to childbirth and having young kids than the uk.

It was very interesting to see the differences.  I ran a business unit in France for rare diseases. And then I was sales director in France. And then after that I moved to Austria as the general manager. I then had this incredible opportunity to lead the global launch for monoclonal antibody during the pandemic in collaboration with a biotech in San Francisco.

I knew I was never going to get a role like that again. It was absolutely incredible to do something, make a difference in the pandemic, at an unbelievable pace with a whole group of different customers that I’d never spoken to, with a team that was so incredibly driven by purpose.

A lot of the barriers that you normally face just didn’t exist. It was incredible and I think, I learned a lot from that.

Liv: Yeah, I bet. Can you take me back to when you were in France with young children and you talked a bit about the different approach they have in France to family? I’m interested in that and the work-life balance aspect, and how it differed there and how that’s been for you in different places that you’ve lived.

Vicky: Yeah, there were very interesting cultural experiences. The idea I had of childbirth without painkillers? There are no women screaming in French maternity wards. Everyone has an epidural, and I think there is actually less pressure on women in France. I think there are fewer expectations on this need to be perfect about breastfeeding. Many French women go back to work. I felt there was less societal expectation than I had previously felt on women in the UK.

Maybe it was just because I was in a different culture, but it was certainly a model that accepted and supported women to go back to work. At that point, both my husband and I were both working, and I think the provision of childcare was pretty good. So yeah, there were some differences. I wouldn’t say it’s easy going back to work after you’ve had a child, but it was certainly not as challenging as I had thought.

Liv: On that topic of going back to work after you’ve had a child, is that something then that you now bring into your practice as a leader? Is that something you’re quite passionate about, that return to work for women?

Vicky: I think it’s more generally about how we treat, make it easy or make it fair for women who do have different stages of their life, versus our male colleagues. Women should not be biased against because they may be thinking about having children or because they may have kids during that period. We know nobody knows what women might be going through, especially with infertility challenges, etc. We need to make it possible for women to work flexibly and make a return to work if they want to with different models.

As a mother, I just need flexibility. I very rarely see women who aren’t working really hard, but they just need that maybe a Friday afternoon to do X y, they want to be able to leave a bit early and then pick up the computer later. And I think that’s great, isn’t it? Post the pandemic, we are open to a more flexible model, which should absolutely support women at work. Unfortunately, data shows that’s not quite the case yet because during the pandemic, women picked up a lot of additional home care tasks.

Women working in a more hybrid way get excluded, and it may be the male colleagues who are their lives are set up more practically for them to return to the office. So we need to make sure that flexibility is not leading to exclusion of women. We need to work really hard on that. We also need to make sure that we are not excluding ourselves. If we are choosing to work 1, 2, 3 days a week at home, we’re doing that consciously of what might we be missing out on that might be happening in the office. Therefore, I think a hybrid model is very important so that women are being represented in the meetings and are there when decisions are being made and not forgotten because we may need to work at home a bit more.

We are also really demanding 50/50 at home, that if we’ve got partners who can share working from home, that we are asking for that 50/50 in not lots of aspects of our lives. So it’s not as simple as it might seem now that we think we’ve got more flexibility, that it’s the miracle that we thought it was going to be. But I think it does give more women options to be able to cope with work and life. We just have to be careful that we don’t take a step backwards as well.

Liv: I think there’s a lot that we put on ourselves, though, as well, Vicky. I can tell you since I started working independently, I deliberately take Friday afternoons off. I say “off,” but I’ve got two two-year-olds for the afternoon, and they’re actually hell. But that’s another story. But I deliberately section Friday afternoons off so that I have that time with them. But even now, I still feel like that’s not something I should broadcast. I find it really difficult to admit that I’m not working, you know? And I can’t be alone in that.

Vicky: No, I think men and women do this as well. We set unbelievable expectations on ourselves and then beat ourselves up. Last year, this was happening to me all the time. I was beating myself up about all the things I couldn’t do in a day, even though I’d actually done quite a lot. But it’s all the things I couldn’t get to. This year, I’ve started really writing much more about what I really need to achieve in a day, and I’ve found this is much better for me. Avoiding trying to be perfect every single day and in a way, celebrating what I have achieved, some of the really important things every day, even though I might not have got to the end of my inbox or I didn’t quite get around to doing X, Y, Z. So I think we all set really high expectations on ourselves, and that’s part of a broader societal problem. We’ve got to find ways to be kind to ourselves and say that in general, good is good enough. Because if you don’t, we just beat ourselves up all the time. Definitely something that I’m working on this year is just trying to be a bit kinder and celebrate what I have achieved, rather than all the things I haven’t got to.

Liv: Yeah. Yeah. So when you and I first spoke, I was just going to put into context our pre-chat and talk a little bit more about what we talked about at that time. We had quite an emotional sharing of events in our lives. You shared with me about your daughter when we first spoke and the experience of her stillbirth, which you called a late miscarriage. Would you like to tell me more about it?

Vicky: You know, it’s all part of how we can better support women during the time that they are thinking about having children.

Having children, both the positives and some of the unfortunate experiences that can happen to women, there. And I think pregnancy or child loss, unfortunately, as we discovered when we were speaking to each other, Liv, is much more common than we think. And my experience at GSK,  is that supporting women through fertility issues, miscarriage, is really not that well developed at a lot of countries and companies, and certainly in GSK, it was only recently that if you wanted to find information about what to do if you had a miscarriage, you still had to look in the “having a baby” brochure where you went through pages and pages of “congratulations, you’ve had a baby,” which is just so painful. GSK has now changed it and changed it as soon as it was highlighted, but I think that it was difficult to find support that was available during miscarriage. I think we need to also be able to mentor and support women who may be going through this period of their life, which we all know can stretch several years where you may be thinking about trying for maybe having unfortunately lost babies.

We need to be careful that period doesn’t become a period where women don’t advance their careers or feel that they can. This whole area, I think, is an evolving area that companies need to develop in, admit it’s happening and talk about it. I think women, many, many women feel unable to talk about pregnancy loss or fertility issues because they don’t want people to know they’re trying for a baby. But God, it occupies your headspace when you are in it. So it is a very difficult period for women. I think we need also to be evolving the way that we are supporting women around these issues because it’s happening to so many women. I think it’s still a taboo area that we’re not willing to talk about at work.

I think if women do want to speak about their family journey or maybe they’re struggling with fertility issues or similar, then I think that they need to reach people who are sympathetic and can understand that. I’ve had an experience in my career, and luckily it was a few years ago, and I really don’t think in GSK today that you would hear this, but I was not put forward for a promotion, which I felt I deserved. And the email I got back from my manager at the time was that he had decided that it wasn’t the right time for me to go for this job because I had young children.

That was a real eye-opening moment, Liv, where I was like I’m gonna take control of my development here. I’m not going to rely on someone else deciding for me. And that really actually changed my approach to my own personal development. I don’t hear that where I work, luckily at all, those kind of conversations. But I think all of us as leaders, and maybe we are leaders who’ve had children, we need to champion because that’s all part of maternal bias and we need to challenge it whenever we hear it.

Liv: Yeah, you are so right. It’s those moments when you say this is going to shape how I now move forward.

Vicky: Exactly. I think that we are in a real battle for talent, and yeah, I want the best people in the industry working at GSK Germany. And so what people are looking for is diversity inclusion, trust, an organisation that does the right thing.

You can say that it’s all about being number one in the access to medicines industry list. It might be about your sustainability agenda or your employee resource groups supporting the LGBT community or racial diversity. But it’s also about this: if I have a man or woman here who happens to have a drink in a pub with somebody or goes out with somebody and they say, “Oh, GSK is really brilliant in terms of supporting women and families,” that person is much more likely to apply to GSK. This is not only the right and fair thing to do, but it’s also a selfish reason. It’s about making your company attractive for the best people to come and work for you. As a leader, I have very clear objectives about diversity and inclusion. Diversity, in all its forms, has enormous power for organisations as well as being the right thing to do in society.

I think it all starts with leadership and allyship. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, I support gender equality.” It’s about what you’re doing on a daily basis to challenge some of these things that you might be hearing in a meeting, talent review, or recruitment board. People don’t set out to be against women; that’s very rare now. But there is a lot of unconscious bias that sometimes we don’t realise we have until someone points it out. You don’t need to point it out in a very aggressive way. It can be as simple as saying, “Can we talk about what you just said?” or “Actually, I see it in a different way.” For me, that’s the next step in really achieving equality between men and women. In many companies, we have an equal number of men and women on boards or in senior leadership positions, but bias is what’s holding women back. Therefore, all of us, men and women, have to challenge it in the same way we would challenge inequity in other forms. That’s the next step.

Liv: Yeah. It’s one of my goals for this podcast because the more people that come on and just talk about situations that someone might not have considered, the more we can bring awareness to unconscious biases in a non-aggressive way. No judging, just pointing things out from a different perspective.

Vicky: In the same way that we are having a conversation about it, I think it’s important for us to have those conversations either with our friends or at work. When everything happened with George Floyd, I realized that I had no understanding of what the black community in America was facing or some of the considerations a mom of a child, particularly a boy, had to face. I probably had huge bias or misunderstanding because of that. I got over this by really looking for conversations, knowing that I might say the wrong thing, and apologizing upfront if I asked questions that were really delicate. I’m truly trying to educate myself and I’m open to having those conversations with anyone who wants to talk about my experience as a female leader in pharma. I’ll talk about some of the good things and the bad things and if it comes from a point of people wanting to know and being curious, I’m happy to do that. What I find really difficult is when I get asked questions where I feel there’s judgment behind it. For example, “Do you think your kids have suffered because you’ve prioritized your career?” I wonder, would you ask that to a man or are you asking it out of curiosity or because you’ve judged me to not be a good mother because I’ve had a lot of focus on my career? I think it’s all about where our intent is coming from. Are we trying to learn or are we coming from a point of judgment? We just need to be careful about the biases we might be exhibiting, and I’m always happy to discuss it if it’s coming from a place of curiosity and a desire to understand. And we should have similar conversations with men as well.

Liv: It would be nice, wouldn’t it, just occasionally to ask the same questions of a man! So, talk to me about the time after you lost your daughter and you came back to work, talk to me a little bit more about that period of time, if you would?

Vicky: Yes, I had a miscarriage at 22 weeks. It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. When you suffer a miscarriage you go through the feeling of it’s all your fault and your self-confidence just takes a huge hit.

I know it wasn’t my fault, but, you’ve failed in what you’re supposed to be able to do as a woman. Then you’ve got this whole trauma of whether we have to try for another baby or not. I imagined life to be different from this at 22 weeks, and now it’s not. It’s hugely psychologically difficult. So when I came back, people just didn’t know how to talk about it.

I came back to work after a month because I needed something to distract my head from this going round and round. People didn’t know how to talk about it, but maybe I also didn’t make it easy for people to talk about it because I put up a bit of a wall. I remember one time when I was doing a workshop and presenting, someone said to me, “Oh God, you’re really on form Vic. Nothing’s happened.” And I’m like, “Oh, you’ve got no idea. I’ve been in the toilets crying, but I’ve got a function here.” I think as other women and men, we can just say the right things to let women know they can talk to us if they want to.

We can say something like, “Look, I’m here if you want to talk about this,” or “I know this is going to be impacting you. Let me know if you want to talk.” I think there are other phrases that people use, like “You’ve got two kids,” or “You can always try for another one.” They are misplaced. The most important thing is that women who are going through these issues have someone to talk to.

Secondly, I needed a next step in my life. I needed to get past this point of losing Eleanor. There was one leader who offered me a promotion to a VP, and it was just the best thing that could have happened because it was something else for me to focus on. I was like, “My God, he actually believes in me. Maybe I can do this, maybe I could get out of this horrendous phase of loss and grief and everything.” It was just what I needed.

That really was a turning point for me to say, “My God, how am I going to pay this forward?” That’s the point at which I got very involved and interested in women’s leadership and support for women and all of this stuff. Sometimes you just need somebody who believes in you, who isn’t thinking, “Is she going to try for another baby?” or “Is she emotionally stable enough to handle this?” and gives you an opportunity.

I will always be forever thankful to him for doing that, and I think that was a lesson for me that I need to be there for other women and need to be there for other women to speak to if they need to. I’m very open that I had this horrendous miscarriage because actually then women come up to me and say, “That happened to me as well” Maybe it just allows these things to be talked about in a way that isn’t taboo. It’s about normalising all these things that are happening, unfortunately to women every day. That’s got to be the answer to it. That’s my learning from this horrendous experience, which I would never wish on anyone.

Liv: So how do we address this moving forward? What are practical things we can put in place or do to help?

Is it just raising awareness like this and having these sorts of conversations, like you said before, with each other as well?

Vicky: I think it is. Modern leadership is about being authentic and open. I’m not saying we all have to share our life stories, but as leaders, the more we can share our experiences to normalise those that others may go through, the more people will feel comfortable talking about things that are often hidden or considered taboo. In our organisation, we have leaders who are very open about their sexuality, and I believe that having senior leaders who are transparent about their personal lives allows others to feel accepted for who they are. Whether it’s women talking about the struggles of work and motherhood, talking about miscarriage, or openly discussing sexuality or struggles as someone in a minority group, modern leadership is about being open and transparent about these experiences. This creates a positive environment where people feel comfortable being themselves and can contribute their full energy to the organisation’s mission.

Liv: Role models are critical.

Vicky: Absolutely. It’s so powerful when you have role models who are open and transparent about their experiences. It allows others to feel comfortable being themselves and encourages them to share their own experiences.

Liv: From a personal perspective, I’ve spoken with you one-to-one about Harry. In certain situations, I am comfortable in a professional setting to share what happened to him, but it isn’t something that I tend to discuss publicly. My son Harry died in 2013, at 14 months old. I think the reason why many people don’t talk about these sorts of experiences is that, it’s just really hard. I’m very good at being practical and could have told you everything that happened, from his medical diagnosis to his surgery, but if someone were to ask me how I actually felt?  It’s overwhelming.

Vicky: I couldn’t do that either, but oh no, when we first met Liv, this is the topic that I can burst into tears about at any moment. I know. There can be a trigger, I could be watching something or whatever, and it will just trigger me because it’s unbelievable trauma.

But if it’s traumatic for us, there are probably women sitting at a desk out here who feel they can’t talk about it and that they’re coping on their own. So, as hard as it is, the fear of the tears is there. It’s hard for me because I still have this “stiff upper lip, get on with it” mentality. 

But then I think, “God, if someone in this organisation knows that I went through this late miscarriage and it enables them to have a coffee with me, saying, ‘I’m going through it too, and I’m really struggling. Can we have a chat about how you managed to get back to work?’ or, ‘How did you cope with the decision to have another child or not?’ Surely that is worth my pay, my uncomfortable vulnerability?  Not saying, ‘I can’t talk about this. It’s so upsetting and maybe I should just hide this because I’m going to get on with my job.’ I honestly am inspired by people who are able in a very authentic way to share their stories.

It has allowed me to maybe be a female lead in a different way than my male colleagues have been. I remember a very senior woman at GSK was the first person I’ve ever heard about who had a husband who didn’t work, and then I was like, “Oh, blimey, that could be a model that maybe I could do!”  But if I’d never seen any other woman doing this model, I would never think it was possible. And if that woman hadn’t openly spoken about the fact that her husband didn’t work and that’s what they were doing, maybe I would never have thought about it.

Because I’m sure I never saw it in any of our friends or family, such a different model. So, I’m so convinced about role modelling and openness and vulnerability and transparency that enables other people to think that maybe they can have a different approach or talk about things or get over it. As uncomfortable as it is, I think we need to approach it in a way that feels comfortable. I would never introduce myself and then say, “Oh, by the way, this happened to me.” But I think in a way that’s authentic, it can have huge power. Definitely.

Liv: Yeah. That openness to approach, definitely. Definitely.

Vicky: The more we see people who share lived experiences, the more I think we’re able to speak about ours. And yeah, then we grew up, you and I grew up in a family where we didn’t really speak much about our feelings. And it’s difficult to do it. You have to learn to be vulnerable and authentic. It’s not something that we had as kids. And so you’re, throughout your life, you’re learning it. I hope my kids will be a bit more used to their mum saying, “How are you really? Come on.” I don’t know. It’s not something that we did! So we’ve all had to learn this going through, and I don’t think we’ll do it perfectly all the time.

Liv: Thank you so much for making the time to come on the show. I really appreciate it and being so open and vulnerable because, as you say, it is really important. And I’ve learned something myself, and maybe I will try and be a little bit more vulnerable from time to time. 

Vicky: Thank you, Liv, for starting conversations. If this conversation we’ve had starts another conversation or somebody reaching out to a woman to offer conversation, then it’s a huge success. So thank you very much for the opportunity to do that.

If you’ve been impacted by my conversation with Vicky, or you’d like to talk about a situation you’ve experienced or are experiencing, or perhaps you manage a person and you are unsure how to approach their situation, please do feel free to get in touch with me directly. My email address is [email protected].