Your Comp Statement Landed. Now What?

Welcome to your worthy career, a podcast for women in Pharma and Leadership Coach with me, Melissa Lawrence. I am a certified career and leadership coach with a master’s in organizational psychology who has worked in talent and learning development in biotech to large pharma, from non-clinical to commercial. I help women in pharma and biotech create a career worthy of them with Whether you want to get clear on what you want, get a new job, get promoted, or be effective as a leader at any level, this is the place for you. Every week, you will get practical career strategies and mindset shifts to help you overcome the problems you experience at work so you can reach your goals feeling better than ever. Your up level begins now. Hello, hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. Today, we’re going to get right into it. At this point, you likely received your performance review and compensation statement. Maybe you got the rating you expected. Maybe you got strong feedback and a raise that felt like it was calculated by someone who had never actually seen your work before. Maybe your boss just reiterated what you put in your self-evaluation.

Maybe your boss told you, again, that you are doing great and that next promotion cycle looks really promising. Processing. And you’re sitting with this particular feeling that it’s hard to name. It’s not anger, it’s not defeat. It’s more like you went in with a case. You delivered in hard times this past year, and The verdict came back from a jury of people who don’t really understand what you really delivered this year, and maybe more so, what you’re capable of doing next. So now you may think of doing one of three things. You might volunteer for something new to show that you’re still engaged and committed, or take on the project or work that your boss thinks is a good idea. Maybe you start quietly updating your resume just in case you see something that you want to apply to, or you tell yourself to be grateful for the career that you have and you push that frustration down because at least you have a good job. And wanting more, especially in this market, can feel ungrateful. Now, I know all of these responses. I have experienced them, and I’ve watched so many women over the years in pharma and biotech experiences, too.

So today I want to talk about what is actually happening underneath those responses, those reactions to your compensation statement in your performance review, because there is one thought that connects all three of these responses, and it’s costing you more than any single decision that you will make in your career. The thought deep down is there’s nothing I can do. It It sounds like acceptance. It sounds like maturity and logic dealing with the circumstances at hand to do one of those three things. And deep down, having that thought and thinking that these are your only options because there is nothing you can do is a thought air that will keep you exactly where you are for another year. So let’s talk about what performance season actually feels like for a lot of people who work in this industry. Because in pharma and biotech, there’s very specific norms. It’s not just the workload that can get you down, though the workload is real. It is the months of anticipation for a conversation that will last somewhere between 20 and 45 minutes and determine, at least on paper, how your contribution is valued. You’ve been tracking your deliverables, I’m sure, documented the submission that held its timeline because of how you restructured the review process and got the team on board.

You noted the cross-functional team you led through a regulatory fire drill in Q3. You’ve been building the case internally for months by doing everything you asked for or were asked to do and more. And then you sit down with your manager and you get good feedback. They tell you that you’re an invaluable part of the team, and you get that industry standard increase of 2-4% and no clear path forward for what’s next or what will happen and when it will happen. A rating of meets expectations, which in pharma means you did exactly what job description says to do and you did it well, which is not at all how you understood your contributions when you were working late at night or to deliver for team members that weren’t pulling their weight or pivoting and changing direction on a win. In a risk averse, compliance-driven culture that meets expectations has a high bar, so much so that it can feel impossible to get higher and it can feel very political to get higher unless you have a positive relationship with HR or senior leader enough that knows you and recognizes you. If exceptional delivery is met, how do you get recognition in any industry or even compared to some of your peers beyond that rating.

Your increase that is within the standard compensation band for your level, it seems inadequate, right? Some women tell me they reach the top of their pay band and then have nowhere else to go but to be promoted. But to be promoted, but they’re told for budget reasons, promotion isn’t on the table. So your reward is not for your impact. The person next to you who has the same title and has been coasting for three years received a raise in a similar range because the system is calibrated to levels, not to individuals and their impact unless you start having different conversations. So yes, they might tell you, Okay, well, you got a half a % more, you got the highest percentage, or you got one % more. But what really is that difference between what you’re doing and someone that’s barely doing their job? So this can look like a supportive manager who says your promotion conversation got moved. It’s on their to-do list. Your manager says they went to bat for you. And they say next year, next cycle, it looks really promising. You’ve heard this before. You do not know if they’re telling you the truth or managing your expectations at this point.

You have no way of knowing what was actually said in that room about you because you were not there. Or the most disorienting outcome of all, you got what you asked for and you still feel deflated because when the number lands and when you’re told you got the best, you realize it does not reflect what you actually bring. It reflects what the compensation band allows, what was budgeted for, what the calibration committee settled on for your level after a 90-minute meeting you were not invited to. And all of this can lead to burnout. There’s actually research from McKinsey and Lena, and they do an annual Women in Workplace report. And in 2025, the report said that senior-level women are experiencing the highest burnout rates on record. Among women who have been with their companies five or fewer years, 70% report frequent burnout, and 81% are concerned about their job security, which is higher than any other group. You’re delivering, you’re doing your job well, at the risk of burnout as a result without a clear roadmap. Now, here is what the research shows happens next, and I want you to recognize this in yourself without judgment, because it is a completely rational response to an irrational workplace system.

When high-achieving women perceive that effort has not been rewarded fairly, they don’t withdraw, they increase their effort, they double down, they look for what they can control. And the most available lever is always the work itself. It’s always to do more, even if it’s not working. So within days of performance season closing, that pattern begins. You might say yes to the project nobody else wanted because it feels visible and valuable, and at least it’s something. You add a LinkedIn learning course or start researching PMP certification timelines because maybe the credential gap is the problem. And if you just have one more thing on your resume, this will finally tip the balance. Maybe you submit your IDP for the new cycle with every box filled in and every development goal aligned to the competencies your HR business partner said matter most for the next level. You get it approved and you feel briefly like you have a plan. You stay a little later, you respond to the team’s messages at 9: 00 PM. You take the fire drill meeting that gets added to your calendar on Thursday afternoon, even though you had a hard stop at 5: 00.

All of it feels productive and feels like you’re proving yourself, and none of it is strategy. Between oscillating with that higher performance and having days you just don’t care anymore and start phoning it in and saying you’re going to use all your vacation days, you get exhausted. All of this, which just really makes it a little worse, is that it can be based on a feedback that you’re missing or misinterpreting. There’s some additional research from Stanford, the HBR, research by Shalya Coral and Caroline Simard, that shows that women are more likely to receive vague, non- actionable feedback and performance reviews, feedback focused on style rather than substance, while men receive specific, achievement-oriented feedback. And this directly limits women’s ability to understand what would actually change their outcome. Advancing your career requires a new strategy, one that identifies the feedback that you’re not getting or dismissing. It does not require more work. I see this come up with the women that I work with that are looking for a new role also. So even if you’re looking to go outside of your company, this can look like instead of following a strategy that maybe you You haven’t invested to learn or maybe you committed to trying, you only give it a little bit of time, maybe a week before panic starts to set in and then you start doubling down on what you were doing before that wasn’t working.

Because because it feels more productive to be busy than it does to be strategic. And we’re going to talk about this a little bit more. It’s really like the saying, Work smarter, not harder. Now, I want to tell you something I know from the other side of these conversations, something that you likely won’t hear internally. The performance review that you just received reflects decisions that were made before you walked into that conversation. In most organizations, calibration happens in weeks or months before that season closes. Your rating, your compensation outcome, your promotion status, those are the outputs of a conversation among a group of leaders who may or may not know your work firsthand, who are comparing you to peers that also they might not know well, using criteria that are rarely objective as the performance management system implies. Because this industry for it’s good and it’s bad, and you can look at this positively or negatively, I think it’s a great advantage, is that it’s very relationship-driven. The review meeting with your manager is largely communicating a decision that has already been made by the time that you’re hearing it, which means the effort that you are now deploying in response to this conversation to improve your next outcome, saying later, adding credentials, saying yes to more projects, is aimed at a test that’s already happened.

And doing the same thing again is going to create the same grade on your next exam. The preparation for your next cycle starts the day the last one ended, and what determines your next outcome is not the quality of your IDP. It is what the people in that calibration room know and think about you before that conversation begins. And that has a ripple effect beyond the people in that room, but the people that they listen to also. You have to get strategic in your relationships and uncover the conversations about you that you’re not in. So you can create an intentional narrative that leads to you getting fairly recognized and promoted. This happens also for new job seekers. The most expensive thought after your performance review or when something isn’t working is, I’m not good enough. Women in pharma at mid to senior levels rarely stay there for long. You might have that doubt creep in, but you know you have the degrees, you have the track record, you know you’re good at what you do, you know you’re capable. So that question, although it can creep in, often gets with almost an entitlement of like, No, I should be getting this promotion.

I should be getting this job offer. I have worked too hard to work this hard. The most expensive thought is quieter and more dangerous than And it sounds like this. It is what it is. My boss controls what happens to me, and my boss is supportive but can only do so much. The compensation bands are set. The headcount is frozen. There’s no room at the next level right now. I’m not seeing any My job’s being posted. I just have to wait until someone above me moves or leaves. I have to wait until something is shared or posted. There’s nothing I can do except doing what I’m doing and hope that the next cycle is different. That last sentence, that is the one, because it does not sound like giving up. All of this, it sounds like being realistic. It sounds like this is just how pharma works, and it’s precisely why thinking this way is so expensive for your career. I want to honor why this thought is compelling and it’s natural. I am guilty too. I am not immune to having these thoughts over all of the years of my life. It is not irrational.

You are working in a highly regulated, really industry with a lot of hierarchy where decisions do move slowly. There’s the matrix where headcount really is frozen during certain fiscal cycles where your manager genuinely may be constrained by factors outside of their control. And You’ve tried things before. You had the development conversation, you submitted the IDP, you took on the stretch project, and nothing changed. So the brain, which is very efficient, pattern recognition, draws a conclusion. This particular set of inputs does not produce the output I want. Therefore, the output may not be available to me. That is not weakness. That is your nervous system doing its job. It’s trying to protect you from the exhaustion of trying the same thing and failing again. Just like when I talk about getting a new role with a new company, right? When we aren’t getting the results we want, we double down on the things that aren’t working. And the more time you spend with people who validate that the market sucks. There aren’t any jobs. There’s nothing you can do. No one is getting promoted. The more you believe it to be a fact rather than just an individual experience.

Think about it. The people who have won the lottery, they probably didn’t think they were going to win the lottery until it happened. The first woman scientist didn’t have a lab of women to show her the way. Michelle Obama didn’t become Michelle Obama by sitting on the sidelines. I didn’t have this business until I decided to create it. I didn’t have people around me giving me the roadmap. I had to find new people to see what was possible. I don’t come from a line of entrepreneurs. I don’t know anyone who wrote a book, let alone a best seller. And yes, I’m tuning my own horn there because I earned it until I wrote it. I paved the way. All of these women blazed their way. They became trailblazers by being the first or being one of the few or being the one in their friend group or the first person in their family who did the thing that others didn’t. And you can do that, too. Sure, we all have different advantages, but no one is more special or deserving than another. If you don’t have the career you want, you can find the women who are doing things differently.

You can hire me to help you see your blind spots and a path forward. Are you listening to this podcast or if you’ve read my book, you certainly are open to finding a new path forward. There’s always a solution to any problem. The faster you start thinking about what you could do instead of what you don’t think is possible, the faster you’ll create a different outcome. Now, in my work, I treat career challenges the way we treat problems in regulated pharma environments as a Kappa. I’ve talked about this before, whether it’s on LinkedIn articles or in earlier podcast episodes. You know the framework, root cause analysis. You do not add more effort to a system that is producing the wrong output and hope the output changes. You investigate why the output is wrong. You find the root cause. You fix the system, not the symptom. When I hear there’s nothing I can do, here is what I actually hear. I hear someone who has correctly identified that the current strategy is not working but has incorrectly concluded that no other strategy exists. They have found the edge of one approach and mistaken it for the edge of all possible approaches.

So let’s run the Kappa. What is the root cause? Underneath underneath, there’s nothing I can do. In almost every case, it’s one of two things. First, incomplete information about how advancement or offers actually work. The belief is that advancement is driven by performance, a supportive manager, timing, and that belief is wrong. It’s incomplete. So there are parts of that that can be true, but that doesn’t mean it’s the complete story. Advancement in pharma is also driven by positioning, by visibility with the right people, and by relationships that exist outside your immediate team. Those variables are not fixed. They are entirely within your control. Second is a passive orientation toward a system that responds to active positioning. My boss boss controls my future. It’s partially true and mostly limiting. Your boss controls your current assignment and your immediate opportunities. The people above your boss, the leaders who sit in calibration conversations, who make decisions about talent pipeline, who have influence over what opens up and for whom those relationships are available to you. Nobody is stopping you from building them. Most women in this industry just were never told that building them was part of the job, that at some point you have to do more than and do your job well.

We can, and again, I have done this too, feel entitled to certain outcomes because of how hard we work. But hard work is not a predictor of advancement. It is not the only way to get from point A to point B. So when you believe there’s nothing that you can do, here’s what you actually do. You say yes to visibility poor work, the fire drop, the project that no one else wanted, the cross-functional request that comes in on a Friday afternoon. These feel like opportunities to prove yourself. They’re opportunities to stay busy at the same level. You under-communicate your wins, not because you’re humble and you don’t like to brag, although that is part of it, but because it feels pointless. Why spend energy telling a story if the story is not going to change anything. Or you go to the other extreme and maybe you come off as self-serving and pushy, trying to make sure everyone knows what you did. So your contributions stay inside your immediate team, invisible to the people one and two levels up who are shaping decisions about your future, or they’re communicated in a way that is putting people off.

You stop investing in relationships outside your immediate circle because networking feels political and transactional, and you do not have the energy for something that feels performative when the system is not going to reward it anyway. And you wait for the next cycle, for someone above you to leave, for the organization to reorganize in a way that creates space, for the right opportunity to appear on a job board at 10: 00 PM on a Tuesday. All of that waiting is what this thought creates in behavior. And the thought keeps you exactly where you are. So the next time that you think, There’s nothing I can do, treat it like a deviation that needs a root cause analysis. Ask, What inputs have I already tried? What inputs have I not tried? What do I know about how advancement decisions are made here and what might I be missing? The thought is a symptom, and the root causes almost always, incomplete information or passive orientation toward a system, an environment that responds to active and strategic positioning instead. Now, I want to be precise and really clear about what overworking looks like in pharma and biotech, because we talked a little bit about burnout, and it doesn’t always look like burning the midnight oil and working 80 hours a week.

And some women will say, Oh, I don’t overwork. Sometimes what you’re doing looks very productive. Sometimes it looks like the right thing to do. It could be researching PMP certification programs because maybe that credential is the differentiator you’ve been missing, even though your resume already has an advanced degree and a decade of regulated industry experience and a track record of managing complex high-stakes programs. It looks like building the most detailed IDP or HR business partner has ever reviewed. Every development goal mapped to a competency, every action item assigned a timeline, every stakeholder identified. You get it approved by your manager, your skip level, your HRBP. Everyone agrees it’s a great plan. And then someone else gets the opportunity that it was designed to lead you to. It looks like saying yes to the cross-functional steering committee that meets every other Friday at 4: 00 PM because it’s visible work and you thought visible work would translate to visibility with the right people. But the people in that meeting are your peers. The people who need to know your name are two levels up in a different building, and you’re starting to feel resentful, so you aren’t necessarily being your best self consistently in that space anyway.

It looks like applying to 60 or 80 roles on job boards, not because you have 60 or 80 dream jobs, but because volume feels like action, and action feels better than waiting. The resumes go out, some come back with rejections, most come back with silence, a You make it to a first-round screen that goes nowhere and you wonder if the market is impossible or if something is wrong with you. It looks like taking the 6: 00 PM escalation call, the one where someone in manufacturing is asking about the regulatory implications of a supplier change because because you’re the most knowledgeable person on the team, and being indispensable has always been how you’ve kept your position secure. Being indispensable to the people who already know you while remaining unknown to the people who make decisions. That is the overworking trap in pharma and biotech, and it’s very easy to mistake for strategy. I talk about this actually in my book. Research on performance response patterns show that high-achieving individuals typically increase task engagement rather than questioning their approach. They work harder at the strategy, not on the strategy. This is particularly true in regulated high accountability environments where reliability, often in global markets, is culturally rewarded.

Working in pharma and biotech compounds this reality. Regulated industries reward reliability. When you work in an environment where a documentation error has downstream consequences for patient safety, being the person who always delivers, who never drops the ball, who takes the fire drill call on Friday afternoon is genuinely valued. It is culturally reinforced. It is how you have built your reputation. But there’s a difference between being valued by your immediate team and being known by the people who shape your future. In a large pharmaceutical or biotech organization, the leaders who influence your advancement, the SVPs, the VPs, the cross-functional heads who sit in your organization’s talent review conversations often do not have direct visibility to your day-to-day work. They know names, they know impressions, they know who gets brought up in leadership conversations and who doesn’t. The most reliable person in the building can be completely invisible in that group. And the thought, there’s nothing I can do, is often what keeps her invisible because she’s spending all of her time and energy being indispensable to the ring that already knows her instead of being the ring or really building the rings to determine what comes next.

In my book, I talk about Visibility Rings. So if you read it by now, that will sound familiar to you. So here’s the distinction that I want you to carry out of this episode because it’s going to change how you evaluate every decision you make in your career. Hard work builds your reputation inside your immediate circle, and it’s important. Strategy expands it to the circles that make advancement decisions. Effort is not the enemy. Misdirected effort is the enemy. And the question to ask about every commitment on your plate, every yes, every fire drill, every Friday 4: 00 PM call is this. Is this building my positioning with the people who influence what happens next in my career, or is this building my reliability with the people who already know me? Both matter. The ratio is what matters most. And for high-achieving women in this industry, that ratio is severely off. I think about it. My wife talks about Snickers, and she loves Snickers And there’s the fun size. And then there’s the little tiny ones for Halloween or the holidays. And then there’s full size. And she’s very particular about the ones that she likes because she talks about the ratio.

And so if that helps you remember this, It’s like your perfect Snickers or your perfect treat where there’s different sizes, but there is a ratio that just has the most ideal balance for you and your palate. And that is what you want to do with your relationships and how you’re seeing your visibility and who’s seeing you the reliable performer and the leader for what comes next. We started this episode in the time after your performance review and compensation statement conversation. With the frustration, that is hard to name. With the three responses that feel like strategy, but they are not. The most expensive thought in that moment is not, I’m not good enough. It is, there’s nothing I can do. It is what it is. Because that thought, it sends you back into the the same cycle with the same tools expecting a different output, and that output will not change until the input’s due. There is always something you can do. The question is whether you’re doing the right things. Evaluating and revising your strategy for advancement does not require a new certification to go back to school to work later or wait for a better market or next performance cycle.

It requires different orientation, from reactive to strategic strategic, from proving yourself to the people who already know you to positioning yourself with the people who need to. Now, if you want the complete method to building a meaningful career in pharma and biotech, a way to identify whether your specific gap is in direction, positioning, visibility, execution, that is what my book, Your Worth Career, is designed to give you. It is the foundation. It tells you what to fix and why. And there’s a link in the show notes. You can grab that. And if you’re done waiting for the next cycle and you want to build the actual strategy personalized to you, the stakeholder map, the positioning narrative, your leadership skills to advance in this industry, the protocol that tells you exactly which moves to make and in what order, that is the work inside the Right Move Protocol. It’s four months of live coaching and support with me and a cohort of women in this industry who are building careers that are worthy of what they’re actually bringing to the table. Applications are open and there’s a link in the show notes. Hard work is what got you here, and strategy is differentiator.

I will see you next week.