This episode is all about the skills you need to be a thought leader so you can advance your career without sacrificing your values. You don’t need to be like the men and other women you see around the leadership table in order to get ahead.
I’m sharing with you the exact framework for being a thought leader and how to audit yourself to know exactly what you need to see yourself as a leader, have others see you for your expertise, and stand out as a thought leader in industry.
I’m also sharing an update about the future of this podcast.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
- How being a thought leader can transform your career and put you in the driver’s seat of your advancement
- The 3 things you need to have to be seen as a thought leader in Pharma/Biotech
- A quick audit exercise you can do to know what skills to focus on to put you on the path to your next promotion
KEY TAKEAWAYS
If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to stand out as a thought leader, especially in the male-dominated fields of Pharma and Biotech, you’re not alone. A common question I get is: What is a thought leader, and how do I become one? Today, we’re breaking it down into actionable steps.
You’re a Leader at Every Level
Here’s the first thing you need to understand: you are a leader, regardless of your job title or number of direct reports. Leadership is about mindset. If you don’t embrace the identity of being a leader, you won’t think, act, or advocate like one, which can keep you stuck, overlooked for promotions, and less effective in influencing others.
Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to adopt traditional, often male, leadership stereotypes. The “power suit, no emotion” approach might have worked for women a generation ago, but it’s outdated and unsustainable. You don’t need to alter who you are, whether that’s changing your look or suppressing your emotions to advance in your career.
Thought Leadership Isn’t About Conformity
In many companies, even those with gender balance at lower levels, senior leadership remains male-dominated. Women who break through often feel pressured to conform to male behaviors to succeed. But the truth is, you don’t have to play that game.
Through my experience helping women reach senior leadership roles—without changing who they are, I’ve seen firsthand how success is possible when you lead with authenticity. Thought leadership is about what you bring to the table, not who you try to emulate.
So, let’s get clear on the three elements that define a thought leader and how you can cultivate them to move your career forward.
1. Be Able to Persuade Others
Thought leadership starts with your ability to influence and persuade others. But what’s the difference? Influence is about building trust and strong relationships so that people are open to listening to your ideas. Persuasion is about driving action, whether that’s changing someone’s mind or getting buy-in for a project.
To build your influence, focus on:
- Strategic relationship-building: Invest in relationships with key stakeholders.
- Effective communication: Learn how to communicate your ideas with clarity and confidence.
- Self-advocacy: Be your own best advocate in the workplace. Speak up about your contributions and impact.
Once you’ve mastered influence, you can begin to persuade others to adopt your ideas, this is the first step toward thought leadership.
2. Developing Your Own Unique Ideas
A true thought leader doesn’t just promote the ideas of others, they develop their own. In Pharma and Biotech, this means thinking critically about the challenges in your field and offering fresh, innovative perspectives.
Ask yourself:
- What are the unique challenges in your area of expertise?
- How do you approach problems differently from others?
- What can you bring to the table that’s new, based on your experience, education, or insight?
Your ideas will be what set you apart. Whether you’re challenging outdated leadership norms or presenting new approaches to clinical trials, having a distinct voice is critical to thought leadership.
3. Establishing Credibility as an Expert
The final piece of thought leadership is credibility. This might already be your strong suit, you likely have the education, experience, and expertise that brought you into your current role. The key is ensuring that others beyond your immediate circle recognize your expertise.
Here’s how to do it:
- Raise your visibility: Share your insights and results with a broader audience. This could be through speaking at conferences, publishing articles, or even sharing your thoughts on LinkedIn.
- Build your personal brand: Be intentional about how you present yourself online and offline. Ensure your expertise is known in your industry, not just within your company.
- Network strategically: Connect with others in your field who can amplify your voice and advocate for you.
Why Thought Leadership Matters for Your Career
Imagine if you were confident in your expertise, clear about your unique ideas, and persuasive in getting others to see your vision. How much faster would you rise in your organization? Thought leadership allows you to break through barriers, earn recognition, and get promoted without changing who you are.
You don’t need to dress like a man, change your voice, or suppress your emotions. You can lead authentically, and that’s exactly what the Pharma and Biotech industries need right now.
So, the next time you doubt yourself or someone says you’re not ready for the next level, remember this: you have everything you need to be a thought leader. All that’s left is to put it into action.
Ready to activate your thought leadership? Start by auditing your skills and filling in the gaps. You’re in control of how people see you—and with the right strategy, you can achieve the recognition, promotions, and success you deserve.
Dig more into this topic by tuning into the full episode.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. I want to let you in on some news before we get started. I am going to be taking a break from the podcast at the end of this year. I have been hosting this show for over four years now with over 200 episodes with career strategies and tips, and I have loved having this platform and being in your ear week after week. I have also achieved the goal, though, that I had set out for myself with this podcast. I wanted to have a place where you and I could come together and I could help you from where you are without us having to set up a meeting or get together in person. I could share insider tips with you and help you grow your career holistically with internal growth, like building your confidence and feeling better and having the work-life balance you want, and the external growth, like new jobs, promotions, and leadership roles. This was my space to demonstrate my own thought leadership on career development and organizational psychology, and it is a body of work I am so happy to have available for you.
This is a massive library for you to come back and listen to over and over. I’m not going to be taking the show down. I plan to leave it up for you to return. If you have a problem that you want some help with, I bet I have an episode on it. I will always be here in your ear for you to listen to the Your Worthy Career podcast as much as you like. If you’ve been listening for a while, thank you so much for trusting me in being here. Staying subscribed and also keep following because you never know, I might just pop in again for a bonus episode or hit record again. If you’re new here, you are in luck because there are so many episodes for you to go back to. Women reach out to me all the time and tell me that they’re going back to the first episode. I think that that is actually brilliant because it not only gets you everything, where you get to hear everything that I’ve talked about over the last few years, but you get to witness my growth, too. You get to see the changes that I made as I grew my business.
You get to literally hear me come more and more into my own authoritative voice, and you can hear me just grow. It just is showcased, I think, so well as you see the episodes progress. I know that you may come here for a friendly voice and quick strategies that help you feel like you’re not alone in your career. I totally get it. My son even tunes in sometimes. We have built a community here, and that community is not going away. I am not going anywhere. There. If we are already on LinkedIn, if we’re not already connected together, send me a connection request. Say hi, let me know you’re a listener. The other thing that you can do is join my email list to get The Cheetah Chronicles. The Cheetah Chronicles is my weekly newsletter with strategies and tips just like what you get here, but it’s in a more quick-read format. Now, my business has grown, and a pillar that I have is to build community with women in the industry and to help you see that you’re not alone and to give you a safe space and competitive edge to rise above the Brosky tactics and outdated career advice so you can grow and succeed in your career.
This is why I now offer group coaching programs, which really was one of the best decisions that I’ve made for my clients. Keep an eye out for more opportunities to come together in a group with other women like you, whether you want to get a new job or get promoted, figure out your next best career move, grow and as a leader. Being on my email list is going to be the best way for you to have that connection with me to ensure that you don’t miss anything, whether it’s an upcoming training or workshop that I have, ways to work with me, or the tips like what you’re used to getting on the podcast. I really spoil my email list quite a bit. So I will be sure that there is a link in the show notes for you so that you can connect with me and add your name because, again, I’m not going anywhere. I’m just hitting pause on the podcast. So what can you expect? There are going to still be new episodes weekly up until the end of the year, just like there always has been. My last episode, at least for a while, is going to be December 11.
And I want to let you know that I have some fantastic topics planned for you. So be sure to keep listening and don’t miss any of those episodes. If there is a question, if you’re thinking like, Oh my gosh, I’ve been listening to you every week and I have a question, and you’d love for me to answer it on the podcast, send me a message on LinkedIn because I can easily incorporate that into an upcoming episode. Just do it as soon as possible because I do record these a little bit ahead, so I want to make sure I can squeeze that in for you. But definitely send me a message. I’m happy to answer your question. All right. So today’s topic is about thought leadership. I’ve talked about being a thought leader in, I think, one or two of the leadership development episodes that I have on the podcast. But I often get the question, as I’ve talked about thought leadership more and more, especially the last couple of years, I’ve been asked, what exactly is a thought leader and how do I become one? Why does this matter? And so I wanted to have just a stand-alone episode and discussion on just this topic.
Now, first, let me reinforce that you are a leader at every level, no matter what your title is. So if you’re hearing this and you’re thinking, well, I’m not a manager, I’m not a director, I’m not a VP, whatever your definition of a leader is, because you may or may not be surprised that in my conversations with women in the industry, they tend to all have different definitions of what a leader is. I just want to reinforce that you are a leader no matter what your title is. It really is something that you can embrace as your identity right now. You don’t have to wait until you get to a certain level because you might be surprised that I have clients who are directors who think that they need to be a VP to be a leader. Some of it is your mindset around this. Embracing this identity is so important to advance your career. If you don’t see yourself as a leader, you won’t think and act like a leader. If you don’t think and act like a leader, you’re not going to be promoted as quickly Maybe you won’t be able to influence others effectively, and you will likely end up feeling stuck at some point.
Because you are a leader at every level. You don’t need to have direct reports or to be on a senior leadership team to act as or be viewed as a leader in your organization. Now, this isn’t about you acting with the other leaders that you see, whether it be power suits or Brosky tactics. You might be surprised that some companies in the industry are still pushing some of these outdated norms. Now, one of the places that I worked had equally, I would say male to female employees. But once you got beyond middle management, it was primarily men. There were less women at those leadership tables. The one to two women who got into those senior leadership roles as in site leadership had a similar look and behavior. They were more dominant styles, more pantsuits, didn’t really show a lot of emotion or passion, really directive. The women that I worked with, we would have these conversations, and they thought, Okay, this is what I need to be. This is how I need to act to get promoted because the women that do get promoted, this is what they look like. This could actually be a greater conversation around representation and why that matters, and that if you don’t see a representation of yourself, then you think you don’t belong.
But that’s just not true. That is really part of what was shattering this community that I have, the clients that I work with, were really shattering the norms of what it is for women in the workplace, what the experience is like. Now, honestly, there were even women’s leadership development programs that I know that have encouraged women to tone down their looks and behave like someone they weren’t in order to be seen as leadership material. This is just really, really outdated. It didn’t even create the experience of building the actual strategic skills that women need in order to advance in the workplace. It’s so outdated. It’s so outdated. I found that the women that did make it to the table. They ended up being biased toward men, too. Whether this was a learned behavior or a facade or what they really thought and believed, I don’t know. But once they got to senior leadership, these women tended to be a certain age and tended to lean on male opinion more than women. They would even deny that there were gaps or problems with how women were treated differently. I found this really interesting. I was just, like I said, wondering if they were in denial or if this was part of the persona they felt they needed to have in order to succeed if they were just perpetuating what it takes or what they think it takes based on their experience to get advancement and promotions at a certain level for women.
Because I personally have seen men look some of these leaders up and down while at the same time, these leaders are telling me it’s never happened. It’s so interesting, right? It’s just like, are they not seeing it or do they really believe it’s not happening? I don’t know. As a woman in the workplace, I see this because you may be tempted to act differently, to be someone you aren’t in order to advance your career. What I found, why I have this business, and what I’ve helped so many women do is to advance their career, even to the senior director and VP level, without conforming to those norms, without dressing like a man, changing your hair, lowering your voice, turning off your emotions, overworking, looking the other way. How we do this is by getting first so crystal clear in what you want in a strategic way that builds your confidence as an expert, reinforces the value that you bring, why you’re special, and Building your identity as a thought leader. Now, I identify thought leadership as someone who has these three things. The first is to be able to persuade others. The first category is really to be able to persuade others.
You can persuade by advocating for yourself, communicating effectively, having influence, and building and maintaining the right strategic relationships. Now, if you’re wondering, Okay, well, what’s the difference between persuasion and influence? Influence is a more, I would say, subtle approach that comes from trust and relationship building. It’s like if you know someone and you like them, you see their track record, you’re more likely to listen to them. But persuasion is the ability to create change, whether It’s them actually coming over to your side and embracing your perspective, someone taking action, especially leading in a matrix environment on project teams, people looking to you as their leader and doing what you say, even if you’re not their manager. Being able to influence, I would say, is a step to be able to persuade. Now, the second thing you need is to have your own new ideas and opinions related to your scope of work. Being a thought leader isn’t just about influencing and persuading people on other people’s ideas or your company’s decisions, but having your own ideas that maybe are even different and you’re getting resistance on at your current workplace, being able to have your own ideas and be able to persuade on them.
So think about what are your unique ideas and ways of approaching problems in your field. This is part of what makes you a thought leader. So if you think of me, for example, the way that I talk about my career, then I talk about careers in general, even about rejecting the norms of what a leader looks like at work, the way I help you know what your best role is based on who you are and not just your skills and experience and your resume, and the strategies for how we create change for you are all part of my unique ideas and opinions. They are what helped me stand out as a thought leader. You have this, too. You may just need to spend some time thinking about what those ideas and opinions and how you communicate or convey them in a way that is uniquely you. Now, the final piece is to be seen as a credible expert in your area of expertise. Now, this one is probably the easiest one for you because you already have expertise, right? You have your education, your experience. The reason that you are hired into the role that you have is because you are a credible expert in your area.
But the gap you may have is in people knowing your expertise outside of your immediate group or work location or company. The more people who know who you are, what you do, and the impact you make, the better. Now, each of these three areas are an important part of the formula of what makes you be seen as a thought leader. Now, I want you to imagine. Just close your eyes unless you’re driving. I want you to imagine how different your career would be if you acknowledged your expertise and felt confident about it, if you knew your value proposition and what those unique ideas and opinions were about your field, and if you were able to persuade people on those ideas effectively. Having the right people in your corner advocating for you when you aren’t there. How unstable would you be? How quickly would you earn that next promotion if this is how you saw yourself, if deep down you believed yourself to be a thought leader? And if Everyone around you saw you that way, too. Your unique approach, how you are different, would be a strength, not a liability, not something you would doubt and overthink about yourself, but something that you would lean into.
If you were this effective If you would be able to get your project teams to do more, more quickly. Your direct reports would look to you as their leader. People would wait to hear what you have to say in meetings, and you’d enjoy work a whole lot more. The best part is you would be having the impact you want to make, and you would be doing the things you want to do authentically without being someone that you’re not. Now, what I love about this and what I’m sharing with you is so tangible and practical. That is just what is so amazing about this. All you have to do is audit yourself against the skills and traits I talked about today. You can then see what your gaps are and make a plan to improve in those areas. Everything I talked about is just a skill, whether it’s confidence, influence, communication, relationship building, developing your ideas. All of these things are things that you can learn. They’re not things that you either have or don’t have, are born with, not born with. You have all of this as your potential. You just have to activate it. So next time someone tells you that you don’t have an executive presence or you’re not ready for the next level or Even if you start doubting yourself, think about this episode. It isn’t foggy and mysterious. You have an action plan right here to take control of your career, be seen for your expertise, and stand out as a leader, earning you the promotions, the projects, and recognition that you really desire.
All right, that is all for this week’s episode, and I will see you here next week. I have something special for you. The episode is over, but that doesn’t mean your development ends here. If you enjoyed the podcast episode today, head to my website at www.yourworthycareer.com and check out additional free resources you can get access to right now. From joining my free VIP Insiders to download more resources and trainings, you won’t want to miss it. Head there now.
