What Young Statisticians and Likely Others Expect from Their Management

Transcript

What Young Statisticians and Likely Others Expect from Their Management

[00:00:00] Alexander: Welcome to another episode of the Effective Statistician. I’m super glad that I have two people here on the show today. That stepped up and recently talked to a lot of senior leaders of the pharmaceutical industry and beyond, and about the needs and the desires, the hopes of the youngest generations that we have now in the workforce.

And there was a really interesting LinkedIn article about it that was creating a lot of buzz. And when I saw that and I saw the three keywords that kind of summarized all of that. That is exactly something that we need to talk about here on the podcast, so I’m super happy to have Evanthia and Arina here.

Let’s start with the first introduction of yourself. Arina, do you wanna start with introducing yourself?

[00:01:08] Arina: Hi Alexander. And hi everyone. Thanks first of all for having us today. I think it’s a great opportunity and great privilege and we’re both very excited to be part of this podcast. So my name is Arina Kazimianec.

I’m currently a principal statistician at GSK and yeah, I think as Alexander mentioned today, we’ll talk about a little bit about career journeys, hopes, dreams, vision, reflection of trust, exposure and other key parts of highly functional stats team. So excited to be there.

[00:01:41] Alexander: Awesome. Evanthia, how about you?

[00:01:43] Evanthia: Hello. Hi, Alexander. I’m also very glad that you invite us today and I would like to thank you for that. And as you both mentioned we’re going to talk about what happened and what we’ve discussed during the EFSPI statistical leaders meeting. And maybe provide some yeah, some input from our side as young statisticians.

I am a principal biostatistician at Novartis right now, and I’ve joined the pharmaceutical industry actually 15 months ago, once I finished my PhD. Yeah, not much experience working with the pharma.

[00:02:20] Alexander: Okay. Very good. So tell us a little bit about the backstory. How did it happen that you ended up attending these EFSPI leaders meeting where you talked about, the youngest generation that we have currently in the workforce. Eventia, do you want to start and talk about the background?

[00:02:38] Evanthia: Yeah, sure. The EFSPI stands for the European Federation of Statisticians Within Pharmaceutical Industry. And they hold yearly meetings with all statistical leaders coming from it’s actually one senior leader from each pharmaceutical company, if I’m not mistaken, across Europe, and they essentially discuss topics around how we can be, we can become more influential as statisticians within our organizations in order to move the field forward essentially, and further support drug development.

Regarding how we ended up contributing to this meeting I think last last year it was the first time that they have invited junior statisticians in this type of meetings to actually listen to what junior statistician had to say and consider their opinion on the matters that they wanted to discuss.

I guess this is very important because as senior leaders and after being within the industry, like for a lot of years, maybe sometimes, yeah, leaders recognize that they tend to forget how it was being a junior statistician, or even maybe listen to how the field changed during the past decades and what maybe challenges junior statistician face nowadays, because obviously these are way different as compared to what it was when they initially joined their organizations.

They invited the statisticians last year. This went very well. This worked out very well, and they decided to do the same this year as well. I was very lucky to yeah, be within Novartis and got invited from Emmanuel Zuber, who was within the organizing committee of this year’s this year’s EFSPI Stats Leaders Meeting.

And I guess it was the same for arena as well. With Christine Fletcher, who was also within the organizing committee and invited arena over and there was also another junior statistician who came to talk I would say mid-career statistician from AstraZeneca who is not with us today.

And Yeah, they invited us essentially to talk about our experience and provide some input regarding the topic of this year’s statistical leaders meeting, which was on how as a decision we can become more influential and what we could, what the statistical leaders could do to further support us during our career journey.

[00:05:40] Alexander: Very good. Yeah, I’m really interested in seeing what comes out of this meeting and I hope that there’s. a lot of action coming out of it. I think there’s always the potential risk to have a lot of talking, but not a lot of action in the end. So I really do hope that we all continue and increase our investment into the leadership skills.

 I’ve been talking about this. on this podcast more or less from day one. I’m very happy if that reaches broader audiences and it’s still prioritized even when there’s budget cuts within companies, because I think it’s a return on investment. In this is just amazing. And I think companies that do not do this will fall short and probably will have, lose people lose talents.

Yeah. Let’s go to the three topics that you already mentioned that kind of summarize your expectations. In terms of what leaders should provide and your first one was Trust. What does trust mean for you?

[00:07:01] Arina: I think for me, it’s like this a very complex and multi-dimensional work. Basically, it has a lot of components. One aspect is obviously statisticians, being trusted within the organization to make the right decision. Every school organization trusts the statisticians to be there, to be involved in key decisions. It’s also trust, that we can deliver and design, robust studies, robust, clinical trials.

And you can basically help to get best products to the market. It’s basically that you are doing the right thing, and you’re there to support your numerical skills when your decision making for the best outcomes and decisions. So that’s one aspect of trust for me. And another aspect of trust, which I think is very important, is that there has to be trust within the stats teams.

So within, with the senior leaders, with the colleagues, and basically that trust, you create this safe environment for learning, for making mistakes, for asking for feedback for yourself, also maybe for giving feedback for your manager, what’s going well, what’s not working so well. It’s also, trust to speak up.

So for me, it’s a very important and almost like the key thing, the most like important value, because I think if you have trust, all the other ones stem out of the main value of trust.

[00:08:27] Alexander: Evanthia, what does trust mean for you?

[00:08:30] Evanthia: I think Arina already covered a lot of the things that trust means to me as well. Feeling secure, it’s that the top one feeling secure to make mistakes, to develop, to ask questions creating this trust environment where you feel that your voice will be heard and that at the same time, it’s okay. If you are early in your career, it’s okay. If you make mistakes at the same time I would say, and I think Arina also mentioned this during the meeting during her presentation was to statistical leaders essentially are our role models, right?

So they should behave like ones, and they should have this in their bark of the heads that whatever they do, we’ll learn from them. And sometime I also was recently a video in LinkedIn about that were essentially was saying about leadership and it was shown essentially a father teaching his a young child to cycle. And I think it’s a relationship like this that they need to be next to you, to guide you at the same time. They need to allow you to make mistakes and to learn by yourself. They need to celebrate your wins and support you when you’re facing challenges. And all this relationship is built through trust, right? And respect.

[00:10:05] Alexander: Completely agree. I think what you are also describing is situation where it’s called psychological safety. Yeah, you mentioned what security and the opportunity to speak up, make mistakes, all these kind of different things. There’s an interesting research by Google that looked into high performing teams and they found that in high performing teams. You have this psychological safety, and so it’s absolutely in the interest of the leaders to create this psychological safety. Yeah, that’s not always easy. Yeah. Trust, however, is also two-way street. Of course, You want to be trusted, but you also want to trust. So how is that? How do you develop trust, in senior leaders?

[00:11:08] Arina: So I think for more junior, team members to start trusting senior leaders, I think there has to be transparency from their side, on why certain decisions are being made or, transparency may be about some real details of some projects or some real stories. Maybe they’re all horrible, there’s some failures.

I think for me also, it’s very important to see the human side of the person, senior leader or just the leader in order to trust them. And for me, it’s also very important to see, that they’re accountable for their actions and some things promised basically it’s been delivered or at least discussed. So there’s these constant communication going on. So I think for me, these are the key, things to build trust.

[00:11:55] Alexander: Yes. That’s all right. And what can you do to establish trust from your end?

[00:12:04] Arina: So I think you have to obviously have very good delivery of the projects, have very good performance, show that you also, you know what you’re doing. You’re not afraid to reach out, you’re not afraid to ask questions, you’re not afraid to face Parkinson’s syndrome, so you’re also take basically responsibility in the project.

I think it’s also important that, yeah, you’re also transparent about the things that may be going on in your life that may affect your performance. So I think it’s also you being human with them and also showing, vulnerable sides or on the side, it’s also speaking up what you may want to do in your career.

It’s basically also like nourishing, these kind of like bonds between you and the senior leader with definitely good work quality, timely delivery, enthusiasm to work, but also yeah, I think trying to bond a bit on that more personal level and just, yeah, remember we’re all, for these patients, we’re all human, we’re there because we’re actually pursuing the same goal to, deliver better treatment for patients to the market.

[00:13:08] Alexander: Yep. Yeah, I think this is very important. Yeah. All the things that you said about, the leaders, we need to model as well. Yeah. I think there’s a lot in trusting forward and being transparent, vulnerable and so on ourselves. And, yeah, that surely takes also courage. And so I think this is really important for everybody to have.

Yeah. Courage means you step outside of your comfort zone, despite your fear. What do you think about building trust from your end?

[00:13:45] Evanthia: For me, I think a key action to be taken from our side is to not being afraid to ask for help. This was a key learning for me. When you are, when we are young is usually, and especially coming from academia and from being on a project where I was basically by myself. Obviously I have the support of my supervisors, but at the same time, the whole project, the whole PhD was yeah, I think for me asking for help was a key learning during the past 15 months, not being afraid to ask for help and not being afraid to, yeah, because to show that you don’t know something and to accept that you don’t know something and that you need support from people who do know, who are experts.

This is, I think, also what I found as a key difference between academia and in the industry, that in academia, you’re usually the one who is the expert on your field of study. Whereas when I joined the company it was, yeah, I realized that there was a huge support group. Each of the people would have a different expertise and yeah, I have people to go to if I needed help.

I didn’t have to really go there and be by myself. And yeah, I think learning to collaborate effectively it’s a key component. And also to communicate your thoughts. So collaboration and communication could really help building this trust.

[00:15:28] Alexander: Yeah, asking for help, always asking questions, asking good questions. Never assume that you know it all. I think this is really important at the beginning of your career. And honestly, I think it becomes even more important later on. I’ve seen so many people that get the title of, group leader, director, vice president, and so on, and they stop asking questions.

They don’t, they think they know it all, or they assume they need to know it all. Early on my podcast, I had Walt Offen, a very accomplished senior statistician, and he was a role model for always asking good questions and always being curious. And never assuming that he knew it all and he definitely was one who knew a lot.

Yeah. He established that because he was that way. And so I think that’s a really important thing. And it goes back to the trustworthiness. Yeah. If you see that people ask for help, that is much more trustworthy than If they always wanted to sell themselves and sure, that’s a vision.

[00:16:45] Evanthia: Yeah. Maybe I can say a bit about that. So I think for me especially in large organization, I think it’s very common to have a vision statements, global vision statements, but how this vision statement applies to us as statisticians, right? For me, vision provides a clarity of purpose, and I would say that it really helps to identify what’s essential, what’s not essential, and also identify obstacles to overcome.

But, and when I’m talking about vision, vision from for our Statisticians themes, right? And a vision that everybody could follow. It’s from the most senior leaders up to the more junior statisticians. It’s, I would say from my current experience and the past year, I’ve realized that it’s so easy to get carried away from your day to day work.

And having a vision and having a clear vision it helps you get inspired. It helps you remind yourself that of your development plan and of what do you have to achieve at the end of the day, not only delivering your day to day work, but also keep building on our skills as young statisticians. That’s very important. And especially with the advancements of technology and how the field is shifting and changing our skills need to evolve as well, and we need not to forget about that. Again, in academia will learn to be so much focused on our technical skills and we would read papers and we will follow our fields, and then we come to industry and you have so many tasks to do so many meetings to do.

So it’s so easy to. Forget about your development. And I think the vision really gives you a path toward you can go. And this applies from the most senior people to up to the most senior people. And it can also help you identify what’s, as I mentioned, what’s Not that important and where you should really spend time during the stats leader meeting Steven Ruberg talked, gave a presentation and this was very inspiring.

And this is where a vision came from I would say, and he talked about how he would specify how he would create clear goals for his teams. And ensure that all the team members will be aligned with that. And this really helped for his team to be more effective and have higher impact within the whole organization.

And yeah, this is very important because it’s very common, I think, for people to, at some point, wonder that, okay, I’m doing this, I’m finishing this project, but, now what? What’s… What should I do in the future? What skills should I develop? What is important for me to work towards?

[00:19:59] Alexander: Yeah, I 100% agree. I was in the same organization as Steve Ruberg that you talk about, about 15, 14 years ago. Lily rolled out a new vision and I think that’s was different from the rollout of many observations, or, all stats departments probably have somewhere efficient statement, but usually, this is just on the internal homepage or, one, one slides that you talk about when you introduce the department or whatever, and then it’s more or less forgotten about.

At Lilly it was a little bit different. One, and I talked to a couple of senior leaders recently about this. So it’s very timely. The vision statement is only the essence of it. It is the short version of the overall vision. The vision only comes through life through lots of stories and explanations around it.

So that people can break it down into what does that actually mean for me personally? Yeah, one of the, I remember still the first two words of the Lilly vision, were lead Lilly. Lead. It was not support Lilly, enabled Lilly whatsoever. It was lead Lilly. Yeah. And the and this term was, among a couple of other things, but always iterated again and again, and examples were shared for all kind of different people from, the most junior ranks to the most senior ranks.

How they establish leadership and what does that mean? And through that, it came to life and it was then boiled down into the yearly goals into the overall strategy of the department. It boiled down to the individual goals of the people, to the development plan of the people, to regular staff meetings that were happening to the lead team meetings, every lead team meeting was constantly talking about.

Okay. Do we have another example of this behavior where we show this is a, It’s the right thing to do, and this is not the right thing to do? I completely agree with you, Evanthia. If you don’t have a vision, and you don’t bring it to life, you don’t know what’s important and what’s not. How you do your work, where you put your priorities.

We all have so much on our plate, and there are things we can do. With the 80 20 rule, there’s things we need to do perfectly, there’s things we maybe don’t even need to do. But if you don’t have this clear vision, and if you don’t understand it, and if you don’t, can’t break it down to your daily actions.

Affordability is doing something different and you never get along in line thing and you’ll never be able to reach your vision. And I’m pretty sure lots of companies have this kind of, we want to lead our R&D or we want to be, best partners within R&D or whatsoever. But if you can’t break that down to the individual statistician, what that means, it’s completely useless. Awesome. Thanks so much. Arina, what does vision mean for you?

[00:23:39] Arina: No, I think for me it’s the global why we’re trying to do something and also how we’re going to do something. Because, as you were saying, that often vision, I think, is very global, for example, yeah, we need to, lead innovation, but often it’s not really, being broken down to appropriate roles or appropriate even career stages because of this report. Senior leader in statistics, the contribution to the global very different than, for example, for a more junior person. So I think it’s very important to understand kind of the overall aim as a team or as a company we are heading to, but it’s also important to the simplify the vision and bring it to more like digestible chunks for more junior people so you can actually act on it. And at the same time you have all the, stories around how people contribute to the global vision so you can actually, that you’re making a meaningful contribution. And I think vision is also, like it also means to me, Strengths of the limitations of your team if you’re a senior leader. So you can see how basically people can contribute to your global knowledge in terms of skills and how you can contribute, so I think for me it’s the global like inspiration and guiding people also and also acting as an example in the past where we as statiticians, were as a team leader.

[00:25:07] Alexander: Okay, let’s come to the third part. Exposure. When I was early in my career, I didn’t even know what that meant. And honestly, I had no clue how important it is. Took me a couple of years in my career to figure that out. How did you learn about this term and what does it mean for you?

[00:25:33] Arina: I think for me, exposure is basically being exposed to a lot of different things and it’s being curious and trying different, areas of work and different aspects of work. Throughout my career, I have quite a lot of exposure to a lot of different things because I did my degree in biochemistry initially, so I have the exposure, to biology.

I also got some exposure to the world of statistics and bioinformatics because throughout my degree I met some people who were working in bioinformatics and that was very interesting for me. So that was my, basically, that was my exposure, for example, in introduction to the world of statistics. And then I moved on to do a degree in epidemiology, and that was my master’s in London.

And again, that was another kind of exposure to this. I learned, about diversity of the whole stats world, so I was working on different projects. Spatial epidemiology, transcriptomics. So all of these little goals are basically exposure, and it helps you to build, the diversity kind of the world, of the areas, see what you like, what you don’t like.

And then I moved to clinical trials. I was working in the University of Cambridge, that was another kind of stone in the old exposure, no story. And then I was working in a medical device company called Perspectum. So that’s again a very different field and very different skill sets required. And then I moved back to GSK to work with clinical trials. came to GSK and moved back to the world of clinical trials. And that’s basically another exposure in a big pharma, and again, a completely, new world, different world. So I think it’s very important to have this exposure early on because obviously you learn quite a lot of different technical skills.

You know how to apply them in different contexts, in different settings. I think it’s also important because you learn to work with mentalities, because, yeah, the tasks you may need to, accomplish in one, in the area of research or area of stats will be very different than when you may collaborate more, for example, with lab based people, or maybe with, statisticians who are working on methodologies.

So I think it’s also, learning what is important in that specific environment, learning to pick up those, key parts and also how to collaborate with people, how to communicate with people, and also seeing what interests you most and going forward and pursuing of these.

[00:27:55] Alexander: That’s interesting. When I saw this word exposure, I was thinking about something completely different. So basically you want to gain a lot of broad understanding of all the different areas so that you can see how they all work together. What could be interesting for you.

[00:28:16] Arina: Yeah, it’s that it’s because I think, for example, if you stay within the same, let’s say, life science of pharma industry, obviously being on different almost like science of the process that helps you to build a broader picture. And it also helps you to build this appreciation of diversity, of different, aspects of maybe processes, how you bring the product to the market. So it helps you to build this appreciation. And I think it also helps you, most importantly, to learn about yourself. So what really interests you, what area you would like to work on. And I think it’s also important not to be afraid to try those things and make those changes. Yeah just see where the path guides you and I think you can meet a lot of different inspirational people around your way and you can also learn some skills from them or just, yeah, their vision.

And I think for me, exposure is also means to keep developing and keep learning. And for example, it can be also exposure. By attending different conferences or different trainings. So again, it’s a multidimensional term for me, which means exposure in terms of like, how the world, you know, medical device or pharma works, but also it’s exposure in terms of, meeting new people, making connections, networking. And also we are learning from new methods.

[00:29:46] Alexander: Completely agree. It’s so super helpful to learn more about the companies, the industry, all these different things. Not just for you to see where, your biggest contribution can be and where your passion is, where you can apply your knowledge best. These kind of things. I definitely learned a lot from working different phases of drug development. To realize which phases I really like, which phases I hate, which phases really suit me, and things like this. So that helped quite a lot and developed a quite clear picture on this. What does exposure mean to you?

[00:30:29] Evanthia: I think exposure has two meanings for me. The first has to do with the diversity of experiences, as Arina already mentioned. And I also got the so I come from a more of a traditional statistical background. So I did my bachelor’s in mathematics and then master’s in statistics. And then I joined pharma. And the reason why I joined, novartis 15 months ago, it was because it was offering the virtual analytics network rotations, which is essentially associates will enter with permanent contracts in the company. But they will for the first 15 months, they will rotate across three different analytics teams.

So they will do three different projects. Most of the times they are in completely different teams, completely different disease area and also phase drug development phase. So my first rotation was a phase three B study. The second was more of a, in another disease area research project to support the phase two trial design.

And then my last rotation was within the stats methods group of Novartis to support again another disease area. And so this provide me a diversity of experiences and a clear understanding of drug development. This is essential for statisticians, I believe. And it’s very good if you have the opportunity to experience this early because provides you perspective and a clear understanding on what your impact can be, where you can support decision making and how your role is evolved, how our role is evolving through different stages of drug development and where our input can be most important and impactful.

That’s the first thing of exposure. But the second which I was very lucky to experience was giving you the opportunity to be bold and this will help you to build confidence as well. I was for my last rotation. I had to collaborate. Actually, it was not really that’s structured at the beginning, but I ended up collaborating with very, with many senior leaders at the same time.

And I was the youngest statistician actually the only young statistician within the team. And I had to, yeah, be part of meetings where a lot of senior leaders were in. And I had to learn, to speak up, not feel shy, not feel yeah, and express my opinion on the topic and this yeah I got exposure to very senior people and this really helped me build confidence and overcome some of the barriers my own self, which is to not feel shy and really express my opinion where I can when I can really contribute to a project. So collaboration with senior people. I think really helps and giving like responsibility to younger statisticians and allow them to get exposure to diverse experiences even if they are not always at their level with the appropriate support, it can really help them develop.

[00:34:20] Alexander: Completely agree. And your second point in terms of exposure to senior. People to very experienced people. And that doesn’t necessarily need to mean that, these are the, VPs of the organization could also be, the most experienced, most technically advanced statisticians that don’t necessarily need to have.

[00:34:43] Evanthia: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:44] Alexander: Lots of direct reports. Having exposure to these. People helps a lot from a couple of different point, and I think one is the confidence is a lot. The other, of course, is the visibility as well.

[00:35:00] Evanthia: Yeah, and another thing maybe I forgot to mention that I’ve really learned is I’ve learned and watched how they think.

[00:35:11] Alexander: Yes.

[00:35:11] Evanthia: Which is something that it’s, you only, you’re only able to learn by experience. And for example, I wouldn’t realize by myself necessarily why we make a specific decision. And I had the opportunity to really listen to discussions and understand what’s the thinking behind those decisions. And this is key because this is not something that you learn in university or that you, that people necessarily will explain to you. And you only really learn about that if you collaborate with those people. And that’s a very important thing for our future career, I believe.

[00:35:59] Alexander: Actually, that is also something that we teach in our leadership program, from the Effective Statistician. You can, but, and experience is definitely one part. Listening is definitely one part. Reflecting. Observing role models is really important. And yes understanding how decisions are made at higher levels helps you so much to, brings the right arguments brings the right facts brings the right data. All these kind of different things because then, we need to be aware about the consequences these has on the phase redesign or on the HTA area or on finance on timelines or on resources on, all kind of different things. And decisions are very often multidimensional. And of course also, what is the politics behind it? What can we actually do and what can’t we do? Where can we ask for a favor? Where can we I’m back on a favor. Yeah, these kind of things often play a big role.

Thanks so much. That was an outstanding discussions about three really important topics. Trust. Building trust, we talked a lot about this, and especially also about gaining trust, establishing trust. Having this feeling that you can speak up, that you can make mistakes. And so you have this feeling of security is really important. Then we talked about vision, and I think maybe we need to talk about vision much more here on the podcast. I definitely think it needs to be talked much more about in all the different organizations.

And within our leadership program, I’ve recently had some mastermind discussions where we talked about what is a vision statement, or what is the vision of your department. And I generally look into empty eyes and I have no clue yeah, I can look suck up, but I don’t know what that means. And I think this kind of situation is very widespread. And the last one was exposure. And this means exposure to many different areas. different therapeutic areas, different clinical development areas, and also outside of clinical development and of course exposure to senior leaders.

So if you want to summarize your takeaways from the EFSPI statistics leaders meeting where you talk, what is your main takeaway you would like to give to the listener. Who wants to start?

[00:38:50] Evanthia: I would say for me, I really learned not to be afraid to be present to communicate to not be afraid of the senior leaders as well. Yeah, because the EFSPI statistical leaders meeting was also A great opportunity to see people from different companies, even competitors, really work together to bring our field forward. And this is, this was so inspiring to see that all these people, they were, some of them, they were even friends. They were hugging each other. They would say hello to each other with such a warm way. And this was so nice to see. And I really enjoyed it, and it was truly inspirational. And I also appreciated a lot the fact that they really listen to our voices as well. And this clearly boosted my confidence, at least, and my trust to them.

[00:40:00] Alexander: Awesome. Arina, how about you?

[00:40:03] Arina: Yeah, so for me, I think it just made me reflect again on the value of the exposure. Because it’s been so inspirational to be, exposed to so many senior leaders to listen to their stories and have some, inspirational talks, but had some opportunities to also bond with some of them, we had some fun activities throughout the day, like some icebreaker games, we had some talk, we had a dinner together. So for me, it was about, exactly like Aslante was saying, being exposed, being able to speak up, maybe stepping out a bit of your comfort zone to network and build those connections.

It’s also like a reminder, I think, that we’re all people, and we’re, and even though some people, are much higher in the career ladder than we are, we’re all driven by the same goals, and we all have, points to connect with each other, where we can all, listen to each other, and learn from each other, and ask questions, and it’s basically being a part of this community, of the wider FACT community, so it’s been a very inspirational day for me, and I definitely learned a lot.

[00:41:13] Alexander: Awesome. Thanks so much. For this great summary. I’m pretty sure this will not be the last episode about an EFSPI stats leaders meeting. And maybe that’s another episode in the future where we meet again. So all the best for you within your careers. Keep working on these things. I think this is exactly, the right thing that we need to all work on. And honestly, I think this is not just for, the early people or the youngest people. This is really for everybody in our organizations. Thanks so much.

[00:41:49] Evanthia: Thank you very much, Alexander. Thank you.

[00:41:52] Alexander: Thanks so much.