Carolyn Micklesavage

My success comes from how I respond to failure and mistakes. Every time I failed or made a mistake, I looked at what I did, did a self-assessment, and analyzed what I could do better, and then I moved on. I don't live in the failure. I always tell my mentees that it's not the failure that defines you - it is how you respond to that failure that defines you. I've made mistakes my entire life, but I'm not going to hide that. What defines me is the way I handled the mistake and what I did after it was made. Working in pharmaceuticals, when I made a mistake, it was also about alerting senior leadership and being held accountable for it. It's not just learning from it - it's being able to tell someone I messed up and let's get it corrected now. When I was in that quality role doing batch record reviews, I'd always tell people it is easier for us to correct a problem when you just do it, because it's small and everything's there. The more you try to hide it, the more the lack of transparency, the more difficult it becomes to correct. So be honest and do it right then and there.

The best career advice I ever received was from my father, who was a VP of an engineering firm. He looked at me before I started my career and said, 'Carolyn, everyone is valuable.' He told me to remember that the custodian that's cleaning your office area is just as, and actually probably more important, than the president and the vice president. He said to treat everybody with respect, and then you'll have a good time up, and a great time, and when you're on the descent, you'll have all the friends around you. And you know what? He's been exceptionally correct. I have lived my life by that.

Find your mentors, and understand that the people who are going to have the most influence on you, you're never going to know who it is. Don't think that you can't get advice from somebody just because they're not who you want to get advice from. Since I'm older and there are a lot more men in my career, I didn't have a lot of female mentors, but some of my male mentors were very good. You have to find the person you click with - don't look at anything, don't look at their color, their sex, nothing. If you're clicking with them and they're on your line, just know that they could be a mentor. And your mentor can also be a mentee. Always ask questions. Always admit that you don't know everything, and listen to people. That's what I would tell people - your mentors are key in this industry.

The biggest challenge in my field is that the FDA does not consistently apply the regulations. How regulations are applied in Philadelphia, which has five FDA agencies between New York and Delaware, is very different than if it was in the middle of the United States where there may be one agent. You need to know where you're working, know your environment, and know the pulse of your industry. Always do the right thing by the patient, because when you think about recalls and situations where somebody didn't do the right thing by the patient, the damage created is immense. Most pharmaceuticals can't even calculate the level of damage that does to them. It's not only the financial fines - you lose trust. When you lose that trust of the patient, you're gone, you're done. You have to wipe everything off and start over again.

First is full transparency. If you're going to ask me a question, I'm going to give you an honest, transparent answer. I also believe in ethical decision making. In this role, you really do have to make some tough decisions, but as long as when you're evaluating them, your decisions are ethically sound, then you can move forward. The pharmaceutical industry is a huge industry, but there's not a lot of people that do what we do. So those are the values I want everyone to remember about me - when she did this, she was always honest and transparent, and her decisions were based in facts and ethics. That's what I want.