Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is Scott Comery. He is vice president head of oncology medical affairs for GSK, and we talk about why medical affairs needs more leadership. It's an awesome conversation. Scott's amazing. I know you guys are gonna love this. So don't forget to follow me on LinkedIn and check us out the 1st Tuesday of every month, typically, at 1:30 PM EST for our MSL talk live, which is a live version of this podcast with a panel. And, I think you'll love those.
So thank you for listening, and we appreciate all your support. Welcome to MSL talk with Tom Caravella, a podcast specifically designed for MSL and all things field medical. Hey, Scott. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me. Yeah. It's a pleasure. Thanks for asking me to be on, Tom. Yeah, man. I'm excited. So, guys, you know how I like to give a little context how these things come about.
So I run into Scott at ASCO this year, and we got to talking, and he had a really good idea for a podcast episode, and here we are. So can't wait to jump into this. But before I do that, as always, Scott, why don't you do a quick intro, tell everybody who you are, where you're from, all that good stuff? Yeah. Hey. Thanks, Tom. So, Scott Connery. I'm the vice president of oncology field medical for GlaxoSmithKline. My passion is is leadership development.
I've been in people leader roles for the past 20 years of my career, and I'm at a stage of my career where I really wanna leave a place better than I found it. And, you know, how I do that is really developing leaders behind me. So when I'm ready to move on, I have a a bench and a talent pipeline to step in and and lead better than I did when I'm gone. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we're gonna talk about leadership today. We're excited.
And, but before we do that, we do have a sponsor for today's episode. Our sponsor is Aspire MSL, which is a coaching program that Sarah Snyder and I developed. It is a online course, which is a step by step guide on how to land your first medical science liaison role. So any aspiring MSLs that are out there, check it out. You can go to, mslmastery.com for details, and we'd love to have you join our program. So, Scott, let's get into this.
So you had this idea of talking about why medical affairs lead needs more leaders, and why medical affairs specifically doesn't do the best job in developing leaders. So where did this come from? Where did this come about? Let's start there. Yeah. I you know, I think a lot of it comes from my observations throughout my career. I've had the pleasure of working for some amazing leaders. I've also had the pleasure of working for some awful leaders too.
And it might sound it might sound odd to say the pleasure, but, you know, you learn from great leaders, but you also learn from leaders that are that are not so strong. Right? And and because you know how it affects you and you know how it feels to work for them. It doesn't mean you can't take some positives away from them, but you also learn a lot of what not to do.
And if there's a common theme in some of the poor leaders that I have worked for, a lot of them are old school, like command and control type leaders from the perspective of, we design the strategy, we tell you what the tactics are. It's your job to do it. Right? Don't ask me any questions. It's your job to carry it out. I once had a leader tell me I was a I was a first line leader at the time managing a team of MSLs, at a former company.
And, I'm the type of leader that really wants to create psychological safety with my team so they can come and tell me, you know, what's working well, but more importantly, what's not working well. Right. Then, you know, they're the individuals in the field in front of our customers that impact our patients every day. We need to understand what's not working and how we support them to give them the tools to succeed and remove the barriers that are in their way and create that environment.
And so, you know, that's how I always position myself as a leader and and do to this day. And so I brought feedback to my boss that, you know, about some of the there were a lot of challenges in this particular organization. I brought challenges on how we can improve, etcetera. He said, Scott, you're not a leader. You're a manager. It's your job to have your team carry out the strategy we put in place.
And I don't wanna hear what's not working, and I don't wanna hear what people are complaining about no matter. Wow. And it was that day, Tom, that I said, you know, I need a new place to work. Yeah. It doesn't align with how I wanna lead. And and I had to know we had a lot of turnover in this organization, specifically because of the toxic senior leadership environment. And I used to I got so sick, and I had 2 people resigning me the same day once. That's a record I hope not to break sometime.
And, at least when was it the beginning of the day, when was it the end of the day? But I got so tired of having conversations with my people where they're like, Scott, we thought, like, we love working for you. We thought you were gonna be able to change it here. But I probably stayed a year longer than I would have because I had faith in you. And it it let me look in the mirror one day, and I'm like, why am I here?
And and so but what I you know, in trying to, like, peel back the onion a little bit, like, what makes leaders like that? One of the things that I recognized is when you look at medical affairs leaders, traditionally, it used to all be MDs, but now organizations are more flexible. You see PharmDs leading, you see PhDs. More and more nurses are coming into medical liaison roles and starting to ascend to leadership also.
But one common thread with medical professionals and how we're trained, and I'm a PharmD by training, is, you know, we're trying to be scientific experts. You're either right or you're wrong. Right? There's no there's no gray area. And all of us when we're in our clinical years of, professional school, we're usually rounding, in, you know, in an academic hospital with a multidisciplinary health care team, and we're a student, and we have our notebook.
And you go from patient to patient, and your attending professor will just hit you with 20 questions. Okay. What's wrong with the patient? What test do we need to run? This is the result. What should we do? And, you know, if you answer wrong, it's like, no. That's the wrong answer. You go find the wrong answer and come back to me. And that's how we're trained.
So when medical professionals, if if they come into the business world, often they're in an individual contributor role to begin with, which aligns with their expertise. But those who are really good at that role, they often get moved into a leadership role, and most of them have no training for people leadership, but they default to kind of that command and control. Do you have the right answer? Do you have the wrong answer? No. This is how I said to do it and move on.
And the generation of workers that are, you know, with us today and more and more, I look at the people that work for me under the age of my kids, and I'm like, oh, they're a whole they're a different generation than I am. That they don't relate to that. They really want a say in their work environment. They really want to say, what's the purpose of the organization? How do I have an impact? And and that type of leadership doesn't work.
So there's a huge need to develop leaders in medical affairs organizations early on, you know, aligned to the purpose and and then where you have more like a trust and inspire leadership. And I'm speaking there's a Stephen Covey book called trust and inspire leadership, where it's talking about, you know, gaining trust of your people and then inspiring them around a purpose versus command and control. But you can even go back to, Jim Collins.
My favorite leadership book is good to great, which I read probably 20 years ago. Right? He talks about the level 5 leader. And the level 5 leader, you know, looks through the window and not in the mirror. So, essentially, you know, looks through the window at all the people in their organization and says, we are successful because of these people.
And and I need as a leader, it's my job to set them up for success and invariably I'll be successful versus looking in the mirror and say, well, we're we're great because of me as a leader. And, you know, might be aligned to the, you know, the old Lee Iacocca, type leader. It was all about them. But what you see with those leaders is when they leave organizations, they may make things happen, but then the organizations fall flat because there isn't someone behind them.
So, you know, that that those are just, you know, like, a few nuggets on why I think there needs to be just more dedicated people leadership because people from a medical affairs or a medical background just don't naturally have the skills to align with today's generation of of workers and really leading effectively. Yeah. And and I think listening to you, I hear problems. I hear a lot of problems.
And and on my side of it being a recruiter and being on the staffing side, I can tell you, and you probably heard this before, a lot of people here, you know, people don't leave jobs. They leave toxic environments. They leave bad bosses. And you're describing that. So here's the dilemma. The dilemma is it what you're saying is it sounds like medical affairs doesn't naturally develop medical affairs folks aren't naturally good leaders. They need to be developed.
But it doesn't sound like medical affairs and pharma companies are actually doing a great job in helping those people develop. So what's your advice for somebody that wants to be a leader or maybe is a leader but needs to grow? Yeah. It's it's tough because it is very difficult to do on your own.
If you wanna be a people leader to find the resources and the support to help you grow and develop, you know, I would implore anybody in an organization who has a desire to be a people leader to really tap into the organizational development portion of the of the company and see what type of leadership development courses exist within the company.
What you often see in the pharmaceutical industry is there is a very well laid out leadership development, talent management plans for commercial portions of an organization. It makes sense. It's the largest part of the organization. So people are identified pretty early on in the commercial group as far as, you know, talent pipeline future leaders.
On the medical side, we do it to a degree, but there often isn't the same level of, like, rigor and structure to get someone who say is, like, 3 years out from being a leader into a a new leader development course. Right? Get them into a new leader development course where they get exposure to a number of things. You you'll do a 360 on someone. You'll do social style program. Do you actually get what is your leadership style based on your own social personality style. Right?
And what happens with these early new leader development programs is you can build out a profile of an individual and find out, like, what they really do well, but also areas they need to grow and develop, and then tie that to their development plan. Right? And and you can have a timeline saying, you know, some of these people might be ready in a year, but some might be 3 years out. That's okay. Everybody develops at a different time.
But then be very purposeful with their development and give them the opportunities to lead in small ways, either lead lead small teams, lead task forces, maybe do an ad interim role as a leader, but also understand bay maybe where some of their deficiencies are, which would, you know, interfere with them being a more effective leader and let them grow and develop. So then when a the first line leader role opens up, you as an organization have a group of people. You're like, hey.
I have there's, like, 4 people that are ready today. And those individuals feel like they're ready to step into the role. You see it on the commercial side, but you don't see it so much on the medical affairs side or other organizations that, you know, don't have the same number of workers within the group. You know, you think of other small parts of the company, like maybe a compliance group or their legal group.
And everyone from the different parts of the organization, they should go through the same leadership development programs. Leading people is leading people. You know, your functional expertise is gonna be different, and depending on the type of people you have underneath you, how you lead them might be different, but leading people is leading people.
So I, you know, I think organizations need to do a better job from a holistic perspective of looking at the organization as a whole and kind and implementing what they may have in place for commercial, but really making sure it touches all parts of the organization to develop your leaders early on. And you you and I talked about this a little bit, but as as we talk about that piece of it, which is organizations developing leaders.
As you said, the commercial job the commercial side does a better job. So on the medical affairs side, I've seen companies, and we talked about the fact that a lot of organizations just outsource this this part to vendors. So vendors are handling most of this. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Talk about whether or not it makes more sense to do this in a homegrown fashion or to outsource some or all of this to vendors. Yeah. I see a trend.
You know, early in my career, I worked in an organization. I was in a training role at the time where I trained medical affairs more from the technical component, but I worked in a broader training department that had an entire leadership development wing, if you will. There are, like, 4 people. They were former field leaders, mostly commercial, but their goal was leadership development in the organization.
But I've seen that really shift over the years to more and more vendors, and which isn't necessarily a bad thing because it may be difficult within an organization to source people with expertise in leadership development. I mean, it's a specialty in and of itself. And so just because someone has ascended to a leader role in their career and they could be a great leader, doesn't mean they necessarily can teach leadership from the development perspective.
So, forming it out to vendors is not necessarily a bad thing. I think one of the especially if you have a clear plan for what you wanna do. One of the challenges I have seen, since some organizations do it really well and others don't, is really having a clear curriculum for leaders.
So, you know, identifying people early on who may be in an individual contributor or who wanna be a future leader and getting them into a, like, a talent pipeline and having, like, an early development program prior to so you understand when are they ready to be a leader soon? Are there deficiencies? Will they do well, etcetera?
Then when someone becomes a first line leader for the first time, you know, it's critical within the first 6 months in that role, maybe first 12 on the, going out a little bit, or really the first 6 months, get that person in a new leader development program. Because now, even in the, you know, in the future leader program, you're still kind of role playing. Right? You're not in a leader role.
You you you kinda you kinda play, oh, if I was a leader of people, I would do this, and this is the skill I need, etcetera. But once you're in the first line leader role, now it's it's live fire. Right? You actually have people reporting to you, and you wake up and realize pretty early on, well, the skills have made me a good individual contributor. Most of those don't relate to being a good people leader. And early on, and every leader has this. Right?
You have you have one person, if you're lucky, 2, but one person you they walk, talk, think, act, do the job just like you. Now, that person's a rock star. They're great. They do the job just like I do. And you have a bunch that are kind in the middle. They're successful in their own way, but not like you. And then you have 1 and, you know, hopefully, you don't have 2, and they're just the exact opposite of you and they drive you crazy because they do everything different than you.
But then it's still pretty successful, and, you know, one of the key things to learn is you treat everybody as an individual and you manage them based on what makes them successful, not what makes you what made you successful. But I digress a little bit.
So getting someone in a new leader program, ideally in the 1st 6 months, and and really, you know, having them use some real cases from their new team, etcetera, because and having them grow, and then building it out to then an experienced first line leader program, someone who's, like, 3 plus years into the role and more advanced skills in the leadership component, right, and how in in preparing people to lead at the next level.
And then also, and very few organizations have this, a second line leader plus leadership development program. Because when you become a second line leader, it's the the skill of people leadership is still there, but you're much your your customers, your stakeholders are much more internal people in the organization, and your leaders, your direct managers are leading the field teams or the individual contributors.
So teaching people to move from a leading a unit of people to much more like an enterprise wide thinking style of leadership. Right? So, you know, when I look so it's okay to have vendors, but you really need to have a prescriptive leadership development program starting with future leaders, new leaders, experienced leaders, and then, like, second line leaders plus. Yeah. No. I think that it there's gotta be some ownership on the part of the of the leaders within the organization.
Because when you bring on vendors, I don't care how good they are, it's still you you you're responsible for your own culture. So if you bring in vendors, you're now asking them to now help with your culture and core values by bringing on and developing helping to develop leaders within your company, but they're still not your company. Right? So what other what other key components talk to the leaders that exist out there that are listening to this.
What other key components do you think you want to tell them they need to keep, you know, into take into consideration in not just developing people and bringing more leaders into medical affairs or developing them in medical affairs, but how do they ensure that their culture transcends into the leaders? Yeah. That's critical, Tom. So thank you so much for bringing that up.
Because when you do work with external vendors, that they all have, like, you know, off the shelf programs they're gonna, you know, bring to you, right, that they use for other organizations. And and a lot of the guts of that are effective and meet your needs. But every organization is different from a culture perspective, and you need to work with an external vendor that is gonna customize it to your needs.
And so I had the pleasure a number of years ago, by the first time I moved into a second line leader role, moving into a second line leader plus development program. And it was a pretty intense 3 day program. We went through lots of, like, in-depth case scenarios, but they were all custom made around our cultures of the organization and how our CEO we had a CEO who was a visionary leader. He very much had a vision for how everyone should lead in the organization aligned to our culture.
And so our specific, like, business cases that we went through as a team and as individuals all, you know, lined up with that culture. So it is critically important for the individuals within not only your organizational development part of the of the company who are really responsible for the nuts and bolts of the training to engage senior leaders in the organization to say, you know, how do you want our leaders to lead? You know, how do you want them to show up?
How do you want them to lead our teams, you know, lead our functional areas? How does that marry up to our culture? And then how do we build the training for those leaders, whether we do it internally or bring a vendor in, which aligns with our culture and your vision for the leaders in our organization? Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
And, you know, so as I'm listening to you, it dawned on me that, so you guys, you know, I've I've been in this industry for a long time now, and I remember Scott many years ago in a number of other roles. So Scott's developed this tremendous career and has emerged as a tremendous leader. So, Scott, what's your secret? Tell everybody, how how did you do it? And it sounds like you've overcome some challenges. You said you've had some bad bosses and learned some things from bad bosses.
And, how did you do it? And how how did you get to where you are? What's your advice on what to do and what not to do? That I don't know, Tom. Is that the is that a good answer? Yeah. You know, I sometimes wonder how I got where I've gotten, Tom. For me, I you know, this sounds simple, and this is a quote you hear all the time. It's like, people don't care what you know till they know how much you care. Right? For me, it's all I love to connect with people. It's just my passion.
I love to help people grow and develop, and I've always seen my role as how do I unlock each individual's potential to help them be the best they can be. Right? I I I have to quote Matt Campbell. He he's the coach of the Iowa State football team. My daughter went to Iowa State. So I have a soft spot for Matt Campbell, but he's the first one I heard say this. I've heard a lot of people say it since.
So I don't know that you can attribute it it to him, but he talks about making everybody their best version of themselves. Right? So I always looked at people leadership is how do I help everybody who reports into me or reports into my leaders be their best version of themselves? How do I help them grow? How do I help them develop? Always be there for people.
There's one gift you can give as a leader which sounds very simple, but in the moment it can be difficult and it's giving people the gift of time. If someone says, Scott, can I bend your ear? Do you have time for me? I tell everybody on all of my teams, I will always make time for you. My calendar is a little crazy. It might take me a few weeks, but I will always make time for you.
But if your direct reports or even your direct reports reports, someone texts you out of the blue and go, can I grab you for 5 minutes? Well, you might be in the middle of the most hectic day on earth. But if you can make 5 minutes for that person and give them your undivided attention and listen to their because they're coming to you with a problem. Right? They have an issue.
And you may not be able to answer it in real time right there and then, but the fact that you listen and care and demonstrate that you care for them, it just goes a long way. I'll tell anybody listen, I was a lot smarter people than me. There's people with greater expertise. I sometimes like, when I sit in, like, high level senior meetings, which I sometimes get pulled into now, I'm like, boy, there's a lot smarter people in this room than I am.
But I think the secret to my success is just really caring for my people and help them grow and develop and always be in there there to listen to them. And that's That sounds simple, but that that's my answer to that. And you know what? That I think that's why you're so successful as a leader. And, guys, just so you know, I Scott had no idea he was asking him that question. I totally put him on the spot with that question, and I think you knocked it out of the park.
As a matter of fact, you know, I I have quotes that I just put down that I think are just amazing. You know, it is a goal to unlock each person's potential and help them become the best version of themselves is probably some of the greatest leadership advice I think anybody can can give or receive depending on who you are, and give people the gift of time and just say that you will always make time for people, I think, is tremendous.
I think if we ended this right here, that would be some really good wisdom. But we're not gonna end it here. I'm gonna put you on the hot seat again. Alright, Scott? Hey. Ouch. Alright. So that's all great. So what about if you had to change anything or do anything differently or if there's any if you feel like there's mistakes that you've made along the way that you can look back and say, jeez, I wish I would've done this differently. What would it be?
Yeah. Yeah. That's you know, I make mistakes every day, Tom. So, picking one is tough. The and I think, actually, being understanding you're gonna make mistakes, I think, is important. As an individual contributor and even as a first line leader, I've always been a little bit of a perfectionist. I'm usually glass half full with my teams and my people, but I'm often glass half empty when I look in the mirror. I need to be nicer to myself sometimes. I'm hard on myself.
But in my role now, I'm a third line leader. I lead a group of 50 people. I have 4 second line leaders and I have, what, 6 first line leaders underneath them. Right? There's going to be imperfection in my organization at all times. And sometimes those are the things I focus on. Like, why isn't this better? Why why are we struggling here? And I need to be nicer to myself at times.
But as far as, like, mistakes I made, I think one thing to understand is I'm I always pride myself on being a great teammate. It's one thing that I've always been a really good collaborator and a teammate, and I'm one that I want people's input when it's time to make a decision because I think everybody's voice needs to be heard. And they may disagree with me, which is fine. Right? I need to hear from everybody.
We all bring different experiences and deep different input to a problem, and someone may look at an issue completely different than I do. And if I don't seek that input, I'm not doing my job. Having said that, sometimes, because it's not a strong suit of mine, we we can struggle to make a decision as a team because I'm looking for input from a bunch of people. And sometimes I need to say, okay. People are looking for me to, like, put my foot down and go, this is the direction we're going.
Right? Right. So these are things I, you know, I learn and I try to get better at every day. Well, thank you for being vulnerable because I I honestly, I know I put you on the spot and and that was, I think that was a great answer and it and it wasn't the safe answer. It wasn't the easy answer. I really I really appreciate you being vulnerable. But let's shift gears, and I wanna hear from you in what you think medical affairs needs to do to evolve.
What does medical affairs need to do to, you know and I'm not just talking about in in leadership development or in this discussion on leadership. I'm talking just in general, loaded question. What's next for medical affairs? What do we need to do to be successful for the future?
Yeah. I think medical affairs, we need and and this is happening and and it's more advanced in some organizations than others, but medical affairs needs to view themselves as business leaders, a critical business leader of the organization.
Medical affairs is a unique part of a company that I didn't realize until probably 10 years into my career because a key component of medical affairs is supporting marketed assets and partnering with all your commercial partners, right, in a compliant appropriate way, right, to support education of HCPs to impact our patients. Right? So there's a key component of your role that supports the the market components. And let's face it.
That's what keeps the lights on in an organization are your marketed components. But having said that, you also have your foot in the camp of all of your products in development, your pipeline, your near term pipeline, but also your early pipeline in clinical development.
And when you partner with a clinical development team, they wanna know how's medical affairs supporting us from a clinical trial perspective, engaging key thought leaders in the space for their input on how we develop a compound, how we move into a a new therapeutic area.
So you also are in that space too, and medical affairs organizations need to be more active in having a voice in in the clinical development of new compounds, but then also playing a key role in understanding that appropriate partnership and collaboration with the commercial side of the business impacts patients too.
And we're not just a passive part of the organization that, like, supports clinical trials, publications, data dissemination, but we have a key seat at the strategic table in early development, but also in life cycle management of your marketed compounds as well. Got you. Yeah. That's that's good stuff. I, yeah, I I I think that it's it's it's so critical looking at that.
And I'm glad you mentioned the patient because there's so much emphasis on the KOL engagement piece and driving value and omnichannel, and you hear all these these terms now, and there's all these concepts. But at the end of the day, the the responsibility is to is for that engagement to help the practice ultimately help the patient. Right? I mean, isn't that the bottom line always? Yeah. That's why we do what we do. Right?
We are impacting patients in a in a more indirect way than if we still were in direct practice, but we're medical professionals who got into this industry to advance drug development and impact patients. That's what we do. Yeah. Final words final words of advice. What anything you wanna talk about? I'll come back to leadership and not just from a medical affairs perspective, but just the topic in general.
Every organization, I don't care if you're selling pharmaceuticals, cars, computers, whatever it is. If you're in government, god forbid, do we need better leaders in our government? That's a different problem. That's a whole another conversation. That's a different discussion. Right? Every organization, regardless of of what their business is, they need to view themselves as a leadership development organization, and they need to develop strong leaders that invest in their people.
And because all of us as leaders I can see light at the end of the tunnel, Tom. Hopefully, it's not an oncoming train. Right? My my my days are numbered to a degree, if you will. But if I walk away and I have a a whole group of leaders ready to step in and be more impactful than I am, I've done my job. Right? I've I've developed leaders underneath, and and all of our all organizations need to look through the lens of are we developing our future leaders? I love it, man.
That's a great way to close this out. This was awesome. Scott, you're an amazing leader. And, I've known you a long time and following your career, and I I think that you, you're a really great role model for anyone that either wants to be a leader or currently is a leader, and and wants to up their game. So thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today. Thanks for having me on, Tom. I love it. Awesome, man. We'll do it again. Alright, guys. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
Take care. Thank you so much for listening to the show. And if you enjoyed it, please subscribe so that you don't miss an episode in the future, and feel free to leave a rating or a review or a comment. Thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you soon.