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Leadership
Five things I’ve learned about building range as a leader
Sanofi’s Global Head of Digital Markets, Charlotte Vestergaard, explains what it takes to pursue a non-linear leadership career – and why her passion for pharma sits at the center.
Speaking from experience, I’d say there are two reasons to pursue a non-linear professional trajectory. One is your own leadership development: the range, breadth, and adaptability that diverse roles and challenges breed. The other is the value you bring to your organization.
During my tenure with Sanofi, I’ve worked across a slew of different roles and business areas: from sales to product management, business unit manager to general manager, and, most recently, to Head of Global Digital Markets. Along the way, exposure to very diverse needs, challenges, and objectives has broadened my perspective immeasurably.
What that means for my organization is that in every role I occupy, I am better equipped to manage holistically – to see and appreciate the multi-faceted nature of problems, the different and sometimes competing priorities that must be considered; from geopolitics to the environment, from regulatory shifts to changes in the competitive landscape, from DEI to disruption. There is, I believe, a kind of plasticity and an amplitude of scope and range to this kind of leadership that organizations are going to need more and more in our highly volatile, unpredictable, and ultra-fast-changing world.
So how do you build this kind of career? How do you step into diverse roles and challenges and succeed? And, as a woman, how do you do this when today, the odds remain stacked against you?
Navigating non-linear leadership is about doing a few things well. It’s about building the right competencies and sending the right signals, forging the networks you will need, and sustaining yourself through curiosity and learning. This takes courage, resilience, and a support system that doesn’t fail you. It also takes a great deal of discipline, as well as an acute understanding of how far you can stretch – and when to let go.
I’ve assembled five insights here for other leaders, and women in particular, who want to pursue a diverse, challenging, and rewarding non-linear career in leadership. I hope they help you.
In my experience, opportunities come when you can prove your value and demonstrate that you have leadership capabilities that can be translated or applied within different contexts within the business.
1. Build competencies and send signals – it takes both to progress
It’s key to start with functional expertise – in business operations, say, or sales or marketing – to master core skills and demonstrate your value and competence. Once you have built these hands-on capabilities, the next phase is to pursue managerial responsibilities. For me, this meant pinpointing opportunities that aligned with my own goals – including greater functional and international exposure – but also making it a priority to express those goals and ambitions to decision-makers within the organization.
In my experience, opportunities come when you can prove your value and demonstrate that you have leadership capabilities that can be translated or applied within different contexts within the business. That means being good at what you do as a leader – good at empowering your team, at engendering trust, and at enacting empathy – and ensuring that the right people see that you are good at what you do.
If you want to grow and learn, be proactive: build competencies, send signals, and be open to the opportunities that come your way as a result – even if they are unexpected. I was on maternity leave when I was asked to take on the role of general manager and had not even considered making this kind of shift. Here was my organization making a big bet on me – but it was very much a function of having established my functional and leadership credentials, executing and delivering results across different areas, and building my exposure to the right people. The same is true of my move from commercial to digital leadership. If the organization can see you deliver success in different business settings and know you are keen to learn and progress, it’s easier for chief decision-makers to see a potential fit or a match – however much of a curveball it might seem.
2. Connect with people and be courageous
So how do you send the right signals? I’ve always been proactive about connecting with people and nurturing those connections consistently. It might be a specific opportunity that arises, or you might simply want to move into a new function, team, or area – reaching out to managers, and clearly expressing your interests is key. This can be formal and part of your discussions with career development leaders, but I believe it should also be informal. It should also be about the simple act of speaking to key people and letting them know what you would love to do if given the chance. This might mean having the courage to open up and share what you want with others. It almost certainly means having the courage to make a big move for yourself when the chance comes up.
You can’t know if you will be successful at something new unless you try – all you will know is that you are open to exploring, learning, and giving it your best shot. It will take some courage from your organization to place a new bet on you, too.
“Coming into new roles, I have always relied quite heavily on the incumbent team and trusted in their expertise and support.”
3. Focus on the learning to push through the pain points – because there will be some
Shifting into something wholly new or disconnected from what you have done before can feel frustrating. You’re accustomed to getting things done and delivering impact, and now you must learn the ropes again from scratch. If you are moving into a new function, you may struggle at first just to keep up with the conversation, to understand what is expected of you, and to truly envision the kind of impact you can drive. You might feel that you have completely lost your internal network and that you have to start over and build new connections.
When I made the shift from business to digital at Sanofi, it took me several months to learn a new way of communicating, absorb new concepts and ideas, and build my foundational understanding. As a high achiever, getting through this sometimes-frustrating process means having to really connect to the learning; uncovering what it is you need to know and master, and then being systematic about your learning journey. Your first step is simply being conscious of this. The next step is building your understanding. From there, you can start to bring in your own transferable leadership and business skills to make decisions.
This will take a certain degree of vulnerability, and you might need to be open to reverse mentoring. Coming into new roles, I have always relied quite heavily on the incumbent team and trusted in their expertise and support. At times, this has really meant letting them take the lead and make decisions, while my role has been more focused on engaging with different stakeholders within the broader organization to build collaboration pathways – again, something that a non-linear trajectory can facilitate.
At the end of the day, shifting to new responsibilities will be an iterative process, so cling to the learning, because it will come.
4. Be ruthless about discipline and time
As you take on new challenges, new learning, and new leadership responsibilities, it’s important to understand that you cannot do everything. This is especially critical for women. You need to come to terms with what you can and cannot do – and, where necessary, learn to let go and let someone else step into the breach.
Women still shoulder most of the responsibility for unpaid domestic work – cooking, cleaning, and childcare, for example. If you can employ someone to help you with these responsibilities, it will enable you to spend more time with your family, which in turn can assuage anxiety over any absence and enable you to focus on work.
I have found it incredibly helpful to be very purposeful about where I spend my time and focus, and when to have (sometimes nerve-wracking) conversations with the organization about boundaries and work-life balance. It is important to be transparent about these kinds of issues, I believe, to optimize your energy and set priorities – along with important periods to recharge, reset, and return to work refreshed for the challenges ahead.
A function of this is prioritizing things like physical fitness, exercise, nutrition, and sleep. Make space for the things that replenish and energize you and sustain your well-being.
I hope that these insights prove useful to colleagues forging ahead in their own leadership paths.
5. Feed your passion
Perhaps what has sustained me above all is the chance to pursue a career in a field that I care deeply about. Pharma is a sector that gives you a chance to make a real difference and have a direct impact on people’s health, well-being, and overall lives. Being part of something that can alleviate suffering through medicine gives a different kind of meaning to the work I do. In my day-to-day, I encounter patient stories that fuel my energy and commitment – stories that have sustained my journey and kept me in the pharmaceutical industry.
There is a tension within this industry that gives my work an additional dynamism. Despite the occasional bouts of negative publicity, the reality is that pharma is about research and development, and investigating experimental new drugs with the potential to eradicate disease. A lot of those drugs will fail. Those that make it to market typically have 10 to 12 years of commercial exclusivity before patents expire., which, of course, will impact revenue – and the funding for new research. So the challenges are huge, but so too are the rewards in terms of societal impact.
There is a passion for discovery in pharma that fuels learning and progress and sustains me personally, as I continue my own trajectory within the industry. Passion is the best guiding light, I believe, that anyone can have.
I hope that these insights prove useful to colleagues forging ahead in their own leadership paths.
Of course, it’s down to organizations to be purposeful about building the kind of leadership talent pipelines that have the range, versatility, perspective, and diversity to drive performance in the longer term. This must be a conscious choice on the part of decision-makers.
I believe they should prioritize a few critical questions, including how to provide the flexibility that talented women who are juggling careers and families will need to progress, how to integrate the kind of functional or international exposure that male and female talent need, and how to provide the right challenges to broaden scope, breadth, and perspective.
Organizations that get this right will be the ones with the leaders they need for the future.
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