The career development classroom is a great way to brush up on key topics that directly affect your future! Attendees can expect several intriguing sessions that speak directly to topics such as:
- strategic leadership,
- building teams, and
- managing one’s own career for success.
Here is a sneak peek of this year’s sessions in our career development classroom at this year’s PharmSci 360!
Better Together: Building More Effective Cross-Functional Teams
As organizations take on challenges that require increasingly innovative and agile solutions, the value of cross-functional teams is becoming more evident than ever. Bringing together the resources and skills from employees across different departments and functions, these teams can deliver better and faster results if they are well organized and managed effectively. Through teamwork and collaboration, they can become an invaluable asset.
Cross-functional teams also present some unique challenges. Their structure and how they function often differs significantly from what people are accustomed to, so careful consideration must be given both to how they are formed and how they are managed. Many of these teams also need to have access to practical tools to be successful.
In matrix organizations, where team members represent various departments/functions, the lines of decision-making are often blurred; it is not always clear who is in charge, or who has the ultimate decision-making authority.
In many cases, team leaders lack the skills to boost cooperation and communication within their teams, and team members often lack the skills to collaborate effectively.
Better Together: Building More Effective Cross-Functional Teams presents the four prerequisites for multifunctional team performance. Practical tips and examples of how to put these best practices in place will be provided.
Breaking the Curse of Knowledge: Sharing your Science with Nonscientists
The “curse of knowledge” will kill your progress more rapidly than a failed experiment. Scientists who want to build effective relationships with clients and partners must speak their language to communicate their own research effectively.
This hands-on interactive session will give scientists and researchers an inside look at how to speak the language of the clients and partners they hope to work with, which will lead to more effective meetings and presentations. They will learn how to make their science meaningful to a variety of audiences and know what questions to ask before every meeting to ensure that they are prepared with the best information for the specific audience.
We will practice with examples from the audience to illustrate how reframing a statement, using the assertion-evidence technique, and observing audience engagement are all critical elements of sharing your science successfully.
Women In Pharmaceutical Sciences: Strategies to Avoid Falling Off the Glass Cliff
With the increased emphasis on diversity across academia, industry, and government pharmaceutical careers, there is a modest wave of women climbing up the ranks. However, several reports indicate that the climb may not be straightforward or pleasant. In addition, women may break the glass ceiling only to fall off the glass cliff as a result of pressure to resolve organizational problems in short order in the context of being the one-of-a-few diverse leadership voices. This causes many women to fail, give up, or sustain family or health consequences. This session will feature four key topics to mitigate falling off the glass cliff:
- Innovative thinking: Diverse leaders must adopt out-of-the-box thinking to quickly establish themselves, make an impact, and navigate the environment that may not be accepting of diverse input. Having an entrepreneurial mindset becomes key for success.
- Inclusion: Women may make it into a leadership position, but if organizations are not willing to accept or incorporate diverse input, then women and other diverse minorities risk failing.
- Sponsorship: A key foundation leading to the success and benefits of diverse leaders is ensuring they get enough support and visibility. The best means to this end is powerful sponsors.
- Health and career: Being successful as a woman leader requires hard work, often beyond what is expected of the prevalent leadership. That often takes a toll on the individual. Considering ways to incorporate health strategies in personal objectives is very important.
Learn more about career development programming at PharmSci 360.