Evelyn G Marchany Garcia

I live from the heart, and I don't believe in staying still. My success comes from having clear aspirations about where we want to go next and what the future may look like, then building a strategy where we are very clear about how we can get there. I make sure we have the right goals in place to move us in that direction, knowing that nothing stays still and things change. When that happens, I focus on how to pivot and how quickly we can do that. My leadership is multidimensional. I lead people to generate engagement and desire to do what they do. I also lead with determination to make sure things that need to happen are done and executed, and I hold myself and others accountable for our outcomes. When something doesn't go right, I will not throw you under the bus because I'm accountable for that too, so we're all going in together. I keep in line with what the business needs, what the employee needs, and what we are aiming to achieve. Even when the challenge is so big, I decide to go at it almost always and figure out the best way for us to get there, giving people the assurance that I'm there leading them so they don't have to worry. I focus on direction, discipline, leadership, and making sure our employees feel valued, motivated, and whole as we do the work we do every day. When we have to make tough decisions, we can talk about them and be honest about what's happening and why, and that makes the whole difference.

At one point in my career, I felt a little lost when I came to the U.S. for the first time. I had a very big job and was very influential, but suddenly I didn't know anybody, couldn't connect with people the same way, and it was hard to create impact, which is something that motivates me. I met with a friend and colleague, and she asked me who my sponsors were. I said my sponsor was my boss, but she said no, who are your sponsors? She told me that at the end of the day, the people that are going to move your career are the people that are at the table, and those are your sponsors. You need to make sure that you know them and they get to know you for who you are as a person, as a leader, what are the outcomes of your work, and the value that you're driving. Those are the people that will make your career move. That was the biggest and best advice ever. I snapped out of my frustration and made a plan. In a year, all senior leaders that I was related to knew me. It wasn't just my boss who knew me, everybody knew me. The president of the function even said to me one day, 'Seems like you're a constant topic on my agenda every month' because they were talking about talent and I was part of that discussion. It's not just about talking about yourself or giving your card, it was about building relationships with these people and getting them to see your value beyond just the work, seeing that when you say you're going to do something, you do it and deliver on it.

The most important thing is to be patient in a way. One of the key questions I always ask young leaders and young people coming into this work is, what do you aspire to? What do you want? You have to have goals and aspirations, even when those aspirations may seem too high or too big. When you know what you're aspiring for, then you can make decisions about your career that go in the right way. If you know you want to be an astronaut, then you're going to make sure you take the right classes to prepare yourself for doing that. But if you don't, you just go and do your bachelor's degree, then do the work you were thinking you wanted to do, and then you wait for somebody to tell you what your next job is. We as women are educated with blinders on the side of our eyes, so we're working very, very hard, looking down and working so hard, and then we wait until somebody notices and gives us the cue that we're doing so great and offers us a new job. When it doesn't happen because it was given to somebody else, the difference between them and you is that you don't have to really wait. You own your career. You have to be humble, don't be in a hurry, just know what it is that you want, what is the skill set, the next skill set you need to build so you can get closer and closer to where you want to be. Maybe the direction changes in the future, that's okay. But if you have a line of sight where you want to be, and if it changes, then it changes and you build back. The patience comes from the generation where you just want to move up, up, up. There is no need to move up if you don't build the competencies that you need to grow. You're going to fail, and nobody should be putting roles to fail.

The biggest challenges in the industry as a whole are the geopolitical environment, and I think that's happening to everybody because everything is altered in some way. How the supply chain works, how we get affected by, for example, the coronavirus situation, and how that affects our ability to deliver our products to the patients in any kind of way. Of course, the financial pressures and all of these things, the geopolitical environment is the key challenge that we have. The opportunity is that we have the opportunity to learn how to be more agile. How do we adapt to this environment? Assuming it's always going to be like this, what is the skill set that we need to build in order to be more agile to react to it? We have been very steady for a long, long time in any industry. We all were more steady, that's where roles and jobs were 30 years long for people. Not anymore. Now it's more unpredictable. So you have to learn how to navigate in the ambiguity and react faster to that change. If you stay, then everything keeps moving but you don't. The opportunity is learning how to be more agile so we can keep up with that fast pace of change. Organizations are like heavy ships sometimes, and to turn that ship in the middle of a storm is harder unless you create a new engineering design for that ship to be able to turn faster. We need to rewire how we operate and be more flexible with risks that we take, as long as we don't harm anybody.

Honesty is one of the most important values to me, if not the most important. Being transparent is also critical. I care for people, and I think we all deserve respect. So respect, honesty, and transparency are my three key values.