Climbing the MedTech Career Ladder - How to Get to the Top

In this episode of the Global Medical Device Podcast, we’re joined by Elena Kyria, a talent acquisition specialist and CEO of Elemed.

Elena delves into what it takes to climb the career ladder in the MedTech industry, whether you're early or late in your career journey. Our host, Etienne Nichols, engages in a rich discussion on career paths, leveraging personal strengths, and the importance of networking and personal branding.

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Some of the highlights of this episode include:

• Networking is Key: It's not just what you know, but who knows you and what they know you're doing.
• Visibility of Achievements: Share your successes within your company; if you don't, others may not recognize your contributions.
• Defining Success: Success doesn't always mean reaching the VP level; it's about personal satisfaction and contribution.
• Strengths and Weaknesses: Focus on your strengths but be aware of your weaknesses and compensate with your team.
• Career Paths: Understand the different career paths (leadership, expert, generalist) and what they entail for growth.
• Communication Skills: Strong communication skills are paramount for leadership and for translating technical details to a broader audience.
• Continuous Learning: Always seek new knowledge and experiences, no matter where you are in your career.
• Adaptability: Be prepared to pivot and adapt to changes within the industry and your career.
• Take Action: Don't just reflect on advice; apply it to make actual changes in your career approach.

Links:

• Elena Kyria's LinkedIn
• Elemed
• Working Genius
• Greenlight Guru
• Etienne Nichols' LinkedIn

Memorable quotes:

• "If you're not talking about the value that you add, how is anybody going to know what impact you're having?" - Elena Kyria
• "Everything's uncertain really, isn't it? What you've got to have is a clear sense of forwards and just have a goal." - Elena Kyria
• "Nobody goes to the gym and looks at the weights and gets fit. You have to do the reps." - Elena Kyria

Transcript

Etienne Nichols: Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. My name is Etienne Nichols. I'm the host of today's podcast. Today's podcast is recorded live in Montreal, Canada at the Regulatory Affairs Professional Society (RAPS) Convergence 2023 this one is a pretty fun episode because it's with Elena Kyria.

She's the founder of Element. She's an award-winning talent acquisition specialist in the MedTech industry, the CEO of Elemed, and is in charge of executive placements across Europe. She speaks at RAPS convergence and travels all over the world, has great advice for MedTech professionals.

Hope you enjoyed this episode on climbing the career ladder. How to get to the top Elena welcome to the podcast. Why don't we start with a little bit about your background and your origin story.

Elena Kyria: I'm the CEO and founder of Element. We are a talent management agency. So, we do recruitment and skills development in the space of medical devices and diagnostics. We focus on regulatory quality and clinical.

And RAPS is the regulatory affairs professional society and a real heavyweight in this space. I'm really excited to be speaking at the event as well. On I'm going to be doing a LinkedIn workshop, so I'm going to be talking about how to hack your LinkedIn profile and to build your personal brand and also about how to get into regulatory quality as a career.

So that's how I'm here in Montreal. How I came to found element is a whole other story, and I don't know if we've got time for that, but I'm happy to delve in if you want to know more.

Etienne Nichols: Okay, fantastic. And I know you've talked about that on some other podcasts, so if we have time, I am curious.

I also, maybe if we have some time at the end, we could talk a little bit about some of your LinkedIn tricks and tips and we could talk a little bit about that.

But how to get into the MedTech industry, how to accelerate your career within the MedTech industry, who do you think this would be most applicable to? Those who are listening?

Elena Kyria: I would say anybody working in any of the areas that I've just spoken about now, regulatory quality and clinical, because we're really going to talk about career paths. Right. And we're going to talk about how to strategically think about your career and how to, in quotes, get to the top.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah.

Elena Kyria: Doesn't matter where you are, if you're early stage, if you're late stage. And also, I think if you're the CEO of a business, I think that's also important because that will help you be able to frame for your team as well what options they have available to them.

Everybody should listen. This is going to be a great episode at the end.

Etienne Nichols: Okay, fantastic. That's what I love to hear.

When you talk about getting to the top, what are some of the steps you think that we need to take? It's a long game, but what are some of the steps we need to do?

Elena Kyria: I think what I'm a big believer in is actually taking a moment to do some hard thinking about what does success look like? Because I think there's a definition of success.

That is, to get to the top, you need to be a VP or you need to be the chief quality officer in a company. But actually, having spoken to loads of people on my podcast and just in their careers, because all I do all day, every day is talk to people about their careers and their journey.

What I find is that sometimes people get to that top role and they're surprised by actually what that role involves. And I think it's important to start by actually figuring out what does success look like for you?

What are your skills, what do you want to do and how do you want your life to be longer term? Because if you start with, how do I want my life to look longer term?

And we can go more into that in a sec, that will help you decide what routes, what moves to make in order to get there. But you need to have a loose end goal so that you can take the right steps to get you towards that goal.

Right.

Etienne Nichols: So, there's a couple of things you said there. One particular you mentioned the skills.

Elena Kyria: Yes.

Etienne Nichols: So, how do you identify those skills? Because I imagine it's tied to your strengths. There's a couple of different ways to look at that. Do I short my weaknesses? Do I focus on my strengths?

What do you recommend?

Elena Kyria: I think I'm a big believer in leaning into your strengths, but to be aware of what your weaknesses are. So, I think there's loads of different ways to find out what your strengths and weaknesses.

The you can do personality test, that's always fun. And if you've never done personality tests, do one right. It's usually quite insightful and you learn, I haven't had anybody that has done one and said, hey, I didn't learn something about myself.

So, start with that. There’re loads of free ones online. You have Myers-Briggs, you have DISC, you have all those sorts of standard personality tests that will give you quite an interesting overview of what your strengths and weaknesses might be.

There’re also some other interesting ones. So, for example, one that we've done recently with the element team is this one called work ingenious. So that one is a $25 test.

You can Google it, and you'll find it. But the thing I really like about that is that talks about more like tasks and not about you as a personality, what your strengths and weaknesses are, but actually what kind of tasks give you energy and what kind of tasks drain your energy.

And that's more about what am I naturally really good at. So, for example, my one is, one of my working geniuses is innovation, right? So, I am the person that you come to me with a problem, and I'd just love to figure out a way to solve that.

But actually, one of my working frustrations is tenacity, for example. Right? So, what that means is tenacity is the person that likes to check every single thing off their list and get everything done and it be completely finished and perfect.

And I'm not that person. Right. So, I know that when I'm running something at Elemed, I am the person that's going to start something. I'm not the person that's going to finish it.

So, I need someone on my team that's excellent at finishing things. So, it allows you to build teams also around you and to get your teams to lean into your strengths.

You lean into your strengths and have them lean into weaknesses of yours. So that's my two cent on it working.

Etienne Nichols: Genius. I wrote that down so that we could put that in the show notes. So, I love the way you talk about building your team to show up your weaknesses. That's a fantastic way to handle that.

So, you talked about how to get identify those strengths, identify those weaknesses. Before we got into that, you started talking about identifying your end goal or what success looks like.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: Could you give some examples as to what that is? Because it still seems nebulous when you're.

Elena Kyria: Looking at this really fluffy. And honestly, I'm the person that hates asking the where do you want to be in five years question. Because honestly speaking, who knows where they're going to be in five years?

Nobody predicted Covid and actually what did that do to the world? But I think it's important to have to understand what the roots are. So, I'm going to outline the roots to you.

Right. So, in the space that we're in, what you have is what I would call the leadership route, which is the big, glossy corporate business success looks like getting to that top role, becoming a VP or a chief quality officer and overseeing 300 people for a big corporation.

Right. And that's like the classic career route that people would think about when they talk about careers. Then you have what I would call the expert route. So, the expert route is perhaps it's working in a company like that, or perhaps it's working in a medium sized organization, but that route is not necessarily a leadership route, but it's an expert route. So, you develop real deep, inch wide, mild, deep skills and experience specific to a certain topics. For example, you are the go-to person for quality systems or a specific area of quality systems in your company.

You are that person. If there's ever a problem, you become known as the problem solver for that specific thing. That is more about technical expertise. Right. So that's really good if you want to be a technical person, if you want to lead projects, but not necessarily people.

That's really good if you want to build a reputation for a certain skill set. So, where I'm seeing a lot of that right now is like in AI and cybersecurity or in digital health, right?

You're starting to see people that specialize specifically in that area and that technology.

Because the thing about the leadership route that not a lot of people understand is on the plus, you get the big title, it's a sexy role, right? You get the power, you have, all that sort of stuff.

But on the other hand, it's a HR role to be a VP in a big organization.

You're not dealing with the day to day regulatory and quality topics that maybe you're dealing with when you're earlier on in your career. Actually, what you're dealing with is how do I build teams?

How do I get the best out of my people? How do I build a relationship with the commercial department? How do I solve this other issue over here? How do I think about how what I'm doing is fitting in into the overall business and sell the benefit of what we're doing to the CEO, for example, it's not about the technical stuff anymore. And so, if you're a technical person and you want to stay in that area, maybe that VP role is not for you.

So that's the second one. So, the expert route. And then what you have as well is the generalist route. So, the generalist route would be. So, we spoke about being inch wide, mile deep as an expert.

So, the generalist is the other way around. So, it's inch deep, mile wide. And so that works really well if you're somebody who constantly likes learning, always wants to have a new challenge, and then you can pick up other disciplines.

So, you might do something in regulatory, then you pick up quality, then you might pick up clinical. That's more suited to working in a smaller business. So, like a startup, for example, where you're wearing loads of hats, think about the one-man band type.

You're playing loads of instruments at the same time. Right? That's the generalist route. And the pros of that is that you're always learning something new and developing a new skill.

On the other hand, that can look quite flat in terms of where you can go in an organization.

Now, the two last routes that I've outlined to you, so the expert and the Generalist lend themselves really nicely to what I call the entrepreneurial idea. So, what that means is later on in your life, those are the kind of routes where you could become a consultant, you could work on a beach doing some regulatory stuff, work two days a week and have that kind of lifestyle, whereas the leadership route, it doesn't take you down that way. That will allow you to have that lifestyle, at least not early on, until maybe you retire and then you become a consultant.

So, it's about trying to understand, what do I want my life to be? Do I want to have that big, powerful, sexy role, that big title, or do I want a lifestyle, or do I want a lifestyle business?

Do I want to be able to set up a lifestyle business? And so, you might want to focus on the other two routes that will allow you to get there.

Etienne Nichols: You don't really hear people talk about that a little. Very much. At least where I, my experience, people expect you to go deep on something, they expect you to get specific.

Elena Kyria: Yes.

Etienne Nichols: So, can you elaborate a little bit more on that generous role? Has that been something you've seen a lot of?

Elena Kyria: Yeah, loads, and in particular in smaller businesses, because what you tend to find is when you're working in a big corporate business, if you think about a job description, one bullet point of a job description in a corporate business might be a whole team doing that one thing, right.

Whereas, like, when you're in a small business, let's say you're the only one that does quality and regulatory, and you're working in a company of 13 people, right? All of a sudden, you're covering all the classic regulatory tasks.

So that might be you're working on new product development projects and you're developing regulatory strategy. Then you might be looking at specific country registrations, you might be looking at MDR, you might be looking at FDA, you might also be then looking at, okay, how are we going to go about building and implementing our quality system?

Who are we going to partner with to do that? Asking all those questions, doing all that due diligence. So, you're going deeper there. You might be working on design controls as part of new product development.

So, you see you're picking up a lot of different skills and experiences along the way. So, you're wearing lots of hats, as we say, in the UK. You've got your finger in lots of pies, as we say, as well in the UK.

But it's a completely different kind of world than big corporate.

Etienne Nichols: So, if you go one route versus the other. So, I'm just thinking, okay, maybe I've been pretty linear in my progression. I've stayed in quality, or I've stayed, I guess if I diverted for a minute.

So, my background, I started out in a non-regulated industry as a mechanical engineer, worked my way into manufacturing for an orthopedic. Well, we were doing lots of different things, but neurosurgical equipment, so forth, became a regulatory guy, got my PMP, became a product development guy.

And I've looked at them like, man, am I good at anything. You've just done so many different things. If you've gone one route versus the other route, how do you see bouncing back and forth?

And can you speak to that linear progression of a career and whether that's good or bad?

Elena Kyria: So, this is really interesting because this is actually, I spoke yesterday on this, and I'll give you the picture so that you can add it to the show notes. But basically, this is me and my artistic side.

I basically brought up a screen, and it's just like a squiggle.

Looks like your three-year-old drew it, right. Imagine that's what a career path typically looks like. It is not linear. And I think people that go into their career thinking about, okay, I'm now a specialist, now I need to be a senior specialist, now I need to be a manager, now I need to be a director. Now I need to be a VP. They're missing a trick because actually, what I've learned from interviewing people on my podcast and talking to them and seeing how their careers develop, actually, the most growth comes when you take a chance, and you take the role.

That was a bit of a wild card.

And I think that longer term, in your career, when you do start to get more to the top, what really matters are communication skills and being able to connect with other departments.

And so, if you've come from commercial or if you've come from R&D, if you've been on the other side of the table, it gives you an insight that if you've just been focused in one discipline throughout your whole career, you won't necessarily have and not say you can't get there, but it's more learning that you need to do to bridge that gap. So, it gives you some really interesting insights. And some of the best people that I know in the space haven't got all the shiny qualifications.

They didn't study all the masters of whatever. They don't have all the certificates, but actually they've learned by doing, and they've learned by building relationships and connecting with people. And that's really powerful.

So, I think that I always encourage people to think outside of the box when it comes to making those career moves as well. To your point, about how easy it is to jump between the different routes.

I think it's possible, but there are certain routes that will take you one way. Right. What I don't see happen very often is a VP of a big company that's got 300 people in his or her team, then turn around and say, I'm going to become a single contributor and I'm going to specialize specifically in writing 510 k's for companies.

Because actually they've gone a different route and they've got a different skill set and they've got different, perhaps interests as well. But I do see between the expert and if you're an expert working in a company, then you might go and become a freelancer and stay with that expertise.

But now you're serving loads of companies. Or you might go and work for a consulting company. We didn't speak about that. But you could go and work for a consulting company and that will allow you to still get the salary and the think you call it over here, the pension.

Yeah. All the security. But then you work with loads of different companies still leaning into your expertise. So, there are also these fringe routes that allow you to do a bit of both. So, I hope I've answered your question because I've been rambling.

Etienne Nichols: Totally answered my question. And I actually want to get into the question of each one of these three paths, whether it's the specialist,

the expert, or the generalist. And I love how you break it down. I love categorical thinking.

I want to ask you, what does it take to get to the top for each of these different areas? And maybe we can define what we think. Just a supposition of what you've seen, what success is for each one of those, and then what it takes to get there.

But before we do, I'd like to thank our sponsors and also make sure our videos.

Elena Kyria: Okay. Because I don't like it when it.

Etienne Nichols: Turns off on me. Let me check this real quick. All right. I'm going to turn it back on and reset my timer. Check your notes.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: So, we've been going almost 20 minutes. Check my notes one more time. Sorry. If I keep looking over here, I want to make sure we catch everything. I could just talk.

And I love that, but I also want to do you fair. Okay, we're back. What does it take to become a success or to get to the top? Start whichever one you would like to.

Elena Kyria: Okay, cool. Yeah, because that's a really good question. I like that question. Because it is different. Right. So, if we take the classic, like, leadership route. What does it take to get to the top?

I think the people. So, the difference between a director and a VP, from what I've seen, what does it take to get to the top? It's communication skills. I have to say, it's the soft skills.

Etienne Nichols: Okay.

Elena Kyria: It's not how much, but it's how you can communicate with the people that have the answers. And it's commercial understanding. It's actually understanding that regulatory and quality, they're not the police of the company, but actually they're partners.

And if you do it right, it can give your company competitive advantage. So, it's how well can you sell that and how well can you communicate that? The more effective you are.

Sales skills, I think, are skills that I think we should be learning that at school from day one. Because ultimately, life is, you're always selling something, but often you're selling yourself.

And I think what I've seen is that those top people have excellent communication skills and excellent leadership skills.

Etienne Nichols: Can you give me an example? Because I feel like you have good communication skills and you've seen, we talked to a lot of people today. Can you give me an example?

This person has good communication skills because they have ABC versus this person who maybe doesn't and could work on it because of XYZ.

Elena Kyria: Yeah. Obviously, I'm not going to quote people to you. Right.

Etienne Nichols: That's fine.

Elena Kyria: But I'm going to give you an example of the difference in terms of what I've seen. Right. Let's say you are. I'm going to take a topic that I know that is like MDR, for example.

Right. Not great communication skills would be the person, let's say, that would go in and would talk to leadership and say, these are all the things that are wrong with it.

This is why it's all a mess. It's a disaster. And let me quote you every single article from the regulation, and they're talking to a CEO or a commercial person.

Right. Let me quote you every single article from the regulation, specifically the wording and explain the meanings between the words and the grey zones as to why this is going to be a big problem for us and why actually we need to pull all of our products out of Europe,

for example. Right? So that's the person that's going into way too much detail. You got to know your audience. Right? CEOs, they don't want to know that level of detail. Be bold, be brief, be gone, as they say, versus. Don't worry, we've got this regulation coming in Europe. It's going to be a challenge, but if we get it right, it's going to give us competitive advantage because our competitor, if we can get there first, it's going to open up the market to us and allow us to take competitive advantage and grow more in country X. Don't worry about how. I'll take care of that.

But this is what I'm going to need from you in order for me to be able to achieve that. So, it's talking about the benefit and talking about what matters to the person that you're talking to.

Etienne Nichols: You mentioned something that I think is really important, that I think sometimes we forget. Maybe we get the first part, but you said, and this is what I need from you, because usually when you're talking to an executive, I would assume I need something, and you need to know what that is.

And then you can make a decision whether we move forward or don't move forward. I just think that was really good.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

And that's what it is. It's like commercial understanding of how the business works, understanding of who you're talking to and what they need and what they don't need.

To my point earlier, if you are the technical person that loves the detail and loves the interpretation of the different words in the regulation and wants to debate that, maybe that leadership route is not for you, maybe the expert route is for you.

Maybe you're the person that's leading the project on the inside, but maybe you're not the person trying to pitch the idea to the CEO.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah. One of the things that I think is important, too, even if you become an expert, is learning that communication, recognizing the value with it. I think you'd agree, and I'd love your input on this.

But one person early in my career, this really helped me when he said, engineers flip the pyramid, and you need to flip it back to where it should be. So, engineers, they'd start with all those details and then they drill down.

Then drill down. And this is the point. If you start with the point and then go into detail as they ask, that could be helpful.

Elena Kyria: Yeah. And the other way around. Right. Because if you're talking to an engineer and you just make a loose, glossed over comment, the engineer is going to be like, I can't trust that.

Etienne Nichols: Prove it.

Elena Kyria: Where's the data? Give me facts.

Etienne Nichols: Right.

Elena Kyria: And hence why this personality exercise is always really interesting because you get to see all the different colors of, there's like the most basic one, you have four different colors. Right.

Etienne Nichols: It.

Elena Kyria: And if we talk about social styles, which is the one that I really like. The red people are the drivers. They're the ones that want it brief, want it bold. Don't give me any small talk.

Just come to me with the information and let me make a decision. Then you have your yellow people that are. You have to ask them about their family. You have to build that rapport.

Let's not talk business. Let's talk everything else first, sports. And also, if you're not asking me how I am, how am I going to build trust with you? They're your yellow people.

Right. And then your blue people are your classic engineers. They're the analytical. So don't say anything if you've not got any data that will back it up, because if you make a comment, I better see where that evidence is coming from.

Otherwise, I'm not going to believe anything that you're saying. And finally, you have your greens, which are the people that are just happy and just want to be part of their team, and they just want to support, and they're loyal, and they just want to feel trusted, and they want to trust you as well.

Each of these different personalities has different needs. And so, it's important to understand where do you sit on that scale. But then also recognize that 75% of the people that you talk to are not the same as you.

Etienne Nichols: That's good.

Elena Kyria: That's good. So then when you can start to understand, okay, I'm dealing with a CEO who most likely, they tend to have strong traits of red. Actually, the way that I talk to that person needs to be very different to if I'm talking to marketing, who often.

So, it's a really interesting exercise. And do one with your team, because it will help you figure out how to communicate best with them as well. So, you got to meet people where they're at, not where you want them to be.

Etienne Nichols: So, for the sake of the rest of this interview, what color are you?

Elena Kyria: I'm red.

Etienne Nichols: Oh, no kidding?

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: Okay. In case you didn't know, I've been trying to pinpoint you like she could.

Elena Kyria: I'm red and a bit of yellow. Okay.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah.

Elena Kyria: But very red.

Etienne Nichols: That whole statement made me think of a book that I read a long time ago when I first got married. And it was the five love languages. I don't know if you've heard of it or not, but I did a talk with another individual.

We talked about the five quality love languages and how quality needs to learn how to speak these other languages if you're going to get your point across. And it's really applicable in any department.

You need to learn the other languages of those departments. Yeah. Okay. So that's really good communication. So that's how you get to the top when it comes or one of the ways you could get to the top.

What else? Or anything else in that career path.

Elena Kyria: I think it's about building your network but internally networking as well. In order to get to the top, you need to develop relationships and networks outside of your department.

Etienne Nichols: When we talk about networks, sometimes that can be a dirty. What's the best way to do that?

Elena Kyria: To build your network?

Etienne Nichols: Building network. Yeah.

Elena Kyria: So, if you build a network, let's say, inside of a company.

Etienne Nichols: Okay.

Elena Kyria: Right. It's about, honestly, just chatting to people outside of work or just going for a coffee and just being curious. I'd love to understand a little bit more about your story.

How did you get to where you are today? Just building a connection with people without any expectation that they're going to do something for you. Helping people, making them look good in front of their boss, all that sort of stuff.

Externally, it's a lot of the same. I think it's just about understanding what people do, and I'm a big believer in giving value and don't ask for it. Don't ask for anything in return.

So, it's not particularly difficult, but it takes energy, effort, and consistency.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah. And I'm sure depending on the color that you are, you're more likely inclined towards that than others.

Elena Kyria: Yeah, definitely.

That if you're the more introvert, sort of blue, then it is a bit more difficult. You might find it more difficult because you're feeling, okay, I have to put myself out there.

I don't know what I'm going to say.

Etienne Nichols: You used a word that, though I think is very helpful for that blue individual or anyone who may be finding or struggling with this, because I know some people say, I don't want to promote myself.

It feels smarmy or whatever, but that word you used was curious if you could be curious about the other person. People love to hear about themselves.

I hate to say it that way, but people deserve to be recognized for what they've done. So being curious about people is really.

Elena Kyria: Helped, I think just asking interesting questions.

The one thing that I hate is, like this concept of elevator pitch, because then what happens is people think that when they introduce themselves to someone, they need to do a pitch, or they need to ask for something.

And that's not really it. It's about asking good questions. I think in my career as a recruiter, obviously I spent all day talking to people and what I found is that asking really good open questions is really powerful and it's what coaches do as well.

Right. If you have a really good coach, they don't tell you the answer. They ask you good questions to help you get to the answer. So, asking good questions is critical to being successful in any of these routes.

I would say, yeah, I'm going to.

Etienne Nichols: Get to a question here, but I want to do a quick side story because we're at a conference right now. We're at the Regulatory Affair’s Professional Society. One of my favorite times was I was at another RAPS event.

I can't remember how many years ago it was. I'm usually with a sales team partner, team marketing team, whatever, and I'm just back in their play, whatever they're doing. I was by myself and so I thought, what am I here for?

I'm just going to hang out with people and be curious. And so, I'd talk to people, find out what they need. Oh, I just talked to somebody who does exactly what you're looking for and I connect to people thinking and I'd walk away.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: And I built more relationships out of that, just not even thinking about building relationships. Some of those people are really good friends now that we connected.

What you're saying is very true, but I want to go back to what you said, too. The coach.

Elena Kyria: Yes.

Etienne Nichols: Who is that applicable for and how do you find one?

Elena Kyria: There's a real difference between mentoring and coaching, and sometimes the words are used really interchangeably when the function is really very different. So, the coach is really, the really good coaches are people that are really specialized in asking you good questions and helping you find the answer yourself. So, they might not even have a background in what you do.

They might not know anything about what you do, but they're able to ask you questions and unlock something in you that will help you figure it out for yourself. Right.

So that's the thing about coaching. Mentoring is more the telling. Right. It's someone who's been there before, who's done it, who's talking from a point of experience and who might want to advise or guide and say, hey, look, you've got this problem.

If it was me, this is what I would do. Try. That's a mentor, that's not a coach will ask you the question of what are your options?

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, both are valuable for sure. So, at what point in your career would you say one versus the other? And do you have any advice on pursuing those relationships?

Elena Kyria: I'm a big believer in having them.

Etienne Nichols: And I think across the board.

Elena Kyria: Yeah. I just think it's really powerful and really helpful. Especially, I think especially people that are maybe CEOs of their own company where they don't have that manager. Right. I think it's important as leaders of businesses, like, how do we continue to develop our skills and to improve ourselves?

Because we expect that of our teams, but how are we doing that as well? So, I think by surrounding yourself with mentors and coaches, they serve different purposes. So, mentors are the people that are going to talk from their experience and help you figure out options, whereas the coaches are going to ask you those difficult questions to unlock something to help you push forward.

I think early on in your career, mentors are good because you're learning. Right. And so, you want to learn from people that have done it.

Etienne Nichols: Okay.

Elena Kyria: I think coaches start to get really interesting, like mid stages of your career, I would say, or when you're really facing a real challenging moment.

Etienne Nichols: Almost a handoff.

Elena Kyria: Yes.

Etienne Nichols: It seems the mentor is really valuable. Early career, maybe. Always.

Elena Kyria: No, always mentors. Yeah, always. But they just serve different purposes, I would say. Right. And even with element, we've got a mentoring academy in partnership with RAPS, actually. Right. And what we do is we match people.

Right. So, we'll take someone junior in their career or mid-level or wherever in their career and, okay, who do you want to be matched with? What kind of experience does this person need to have?

And we'll make these matches and that's really a sharing of experience. Right. Whereas coaching is like different kind of different kind of conversation.

Etienne Nichols: So, I can almost see going back to our earlier part of our conversation where we talk about what does success look like? I imagine that's pretty key even in this part, in choosing a coach.

Choosing a mentor.

Again, though, the question is still burning because it's always been something that I've driven to have is someone I look up to who I really value their input. I can actually throw out a few names.

I won't embarrass them. But people have really valued their input and not necessarily the coach, but more the mentor side. But I know other people who've struggled to build those relationships.

Any advice on finding those people?

Elena Kyria: I think there's different ways. Right. So, there's like the informal way of not actually asking somebody to be your mentor, but then them just being a mentor. Right. So, everyone has probably someone at some point in their career that's given them a chance or seen something in them and your mentor can also be your manager.

Right. So, let's not forget that it doesn't have to be somebody that's not your manager. Some people have managers that are also mentors for them, which is brilliant, right? Because you get two in one.

So, one is really informal and not actually saying, hey, will you be my mentor? Because that's also really cheesy. But then there's also the formal route, which is like, on a program like element or whoever else is that's really like a formal program where if you're finding it hard to find a mentor to build those connections, you can go to a place where those connections are sort of made for you. So, it makes that initial conversation a lot easier because it's very structured. There's a lot of tools and templates to get the conversation started, and that's a different way of doing it.

I think everybody's had somebody in their career that at some point has given them a chance. Those are the people to build relationships with, I think, for the long term, because they see something in you.

Etienne Nichols: So, I look back on my career, and not that it's been illustrious or anything like that, but I've tried to have something of a board of directors at times.

Elena Kyria: Oh, yeah, I like that idea.

Etienne Nichols: And it came from, I would go into McDonald’s, or I'd go into someplace and there would be these guys all just sitting there every Saturday morning. And I thought, I'm going to build a group like that I can go to, maybe individually or whatever in my own mind, it's built.

And if I ever reach a milestone where I may have thinking about starting a different career, starting down this different path, moving across state lines or whatever, I'm going to ask each one of them what they think and weigh their thoughts and just go with what they let them guide.

Be my board of directors. And I think that's an interesting idea, too. Just one thing that I've had in my own life. Okay, so we talked about the first one.

What about the expert?

Elena Kyria: Expert. So, to get to the top in the expert route, you have to choose what you're going to specialize in and then go inch wide, mile deep, be that person. But then it's not enough in today's world to just be that person.

You have to become known for that thing, right? So then personal brand matters. You need to be the person that's speaking at events on that specific topic to really create thought leadership around that thing that you specialize in.

Right. So, you need to build your personal brand. You need to start speaking at events.

Etienne Nichols: Can we get tactical for just speaking at events is interesting to me because I totally agree that speaks volumes to your credibility. But how do you get your foot in the door in some of those situations?

Elena Kyria: I think you can start really small, right? I think LinkedIn is a really powerful tool that over the last couple of years has become more commoditized, but the organic reach is still really powerful.

And I'm on a couple of LinkedIn's specific. I've recently received my top voice and stuff like that. So, I've seen the behind the scenes of LinkedIn, and what LinkedIn really wants right now are people that have opinions and share expertise on their platform, and LinkedIn will prioritize that kind of content and push it out to everyone's feeds who they think would be interested in it.

So, if you're an expert on a specific subject, don't just reshare someone else's content or reshare an article, but actually talk about your interpretation, your own. Put yourself out there a little bit. Sometimes people are a bit afraid because it goes out there in the ether, and what if somebody finds it five years later?

And actually, you said something wrong. But actually, if you talk about your insights, your sharing, your learnings from that, your recommendations, you'll start to find if you do that on a consistent basis, LinkedIn will start to aggregate that reach for you.

And all of a sudden people start following you because they're interested in what you have to say. And now all of a sudden, you have a mini personal brand, and then you can create some online events.

You can do maybe a LinkedIn live session. You can work with people that maybe have bigger followings than you, but actually whose audience might be interested to hear what you have to say?

So, at Elet about regulatory affairs, but the people that are specialists in the areas that they're know. So, we're doing that. We did a combination device roundtable. We did a future leaders roundtable.

We want people on our platform that are talking about the stuff that's relevant to our audience. It gives you an opportunity to piggyback off the following that those other brands have.

Right? So Greenlight Guru is another example. So that's a way. And then once you start to become known, if there's a physical event that you can see that the topic that you specialize in is on the agenda, it's about saying to the organizers, hey, I specialize in this.

Do you want me to share some insights? Can I come and join? So, it's a slow, long game,

but you have to be consistent.

Etienne Nichols: It's interesting because, and I'd love to hear a little bit more of your comments on building out the LinkedIn. You said you're speaking on it later this week. Yes.

I'm going to take advantage just for a minute, maybe. Let's see if the Internet even lets me do this. But I thought maybe I'd let you link it and pick a profile file and you could tell me what to do to improve it or give me your five tips.

But before we go down that route, I'm curious, or I want to just relay one other thing. So, we've been on the other side of events at Greenlight grew. We build out a lot of different events.

We're doing our true quality roadshow. And I can confirm what you're saying. We look on LinkedIn and we base a lot of. Some of our speaker. Not a lot, but I'd say 50% of our speaker determinations, especially if we don't have a big presence in that city.

We look at the following and the type of content they're putting out. Is this person an expert? And we determine that from their LinkedIn.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: So, you're speaking on this. Can we get a little bit more tactical and just tell me, you said optimize profile, or what were the things you're talking about?

Elena Kyria: Yeah, there's loads of different pieces to it, but one piece is optimizing your profile. That's one piece.

Etienne Nichols: It's basic.

Elena Kyria: That's basic, but a lot of people don't do it.

So that's one piece that's all-around structure of your profile. Then there's also what content you create and how you interact. What's your strategy around that? And then there's also, what do you measure?

Right. And that's the analytics side. So, there's like these three buckets that you need to be getting right all the time for you to be able to build that brand.

So, when it comes to, let's talk about the basics. Right, which is like the structure of your profile, a lot of mistakes that I see people make is they don't realize that in the settings of their photo, they've got it set to connections only.

Okay. So, what that means is that if somebody's not connected to you and they look you up on LinkedIn, you are what I like to call the enigma. The silhouette.

Etienne Nichols: Yes.

Elena Kyria: Without a photo, you're just this name. Without a photo.

Etienne Nichols: I don't trust it.

Elena Kyria: You don't trust it? No, but that's important. That's important because LinkedIn, whether you like it or whether you don't like it, everyone will be looking you up on LinkedIn. So, you can either control what you want the narrative to be by using it to your advantage, or you can just be like, hey, I'm not on LinkedIn, or I don't really use it, and then let people still have a judgment. They will still make an assumption based on what they don't see.

Etienne Nichols: So, time out for just a second because I want to ask a question. We're talking to the experts, or anybody really this specific to the expert. I can just hear someone in my voice, in my head saying, yeah, but I plan to stay at this company.

I don't need to mess with LinkedIn right now until I need a job. I don't plan to move jobs for a while.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: What are your thoughts?

Elena Kyria: Well, we all know what's going on right now in the market in terms of jobs. And I think the best place to be as far as sort of like job searches, have feelers out, have a network before you ever need your network.

Etienne Nichols: Dig the will before you're thirsty.

Elena Kyria: Yeah. Honestly, because all of a sudden you're in a situation where actually the company's been forced to make some layoffs or the funding is cut from the startup company, or I don't know what, and your role is impacted, and all of a sudden now you need to build a network and you need to lean in and you need to do all this kind of stuff.

It's late. You need to be building those relationships and building that brand. How active you are or not active you are, it doesn't matter, right? If you don't want to go the expert route and become the thought leader, that's okay.

But you need to be activating your network before you ever need to tap into it. Because in today's world, people would always say, okay, startups are really risky. I'm going to work for one of the big companies because the big companies give me job security.

And we can see that's not necessarily the case.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah. Okay. So, I didn't mean to interrupt you earlier when we were talking about the LinkedIn. Okay. Obviously, you need to be doing these things regardless of whether you plan to use LinkedIn for a new job or whatever it is, it could actually be a benefit within your own company.

Even if you stay at that company building, that could, and I have stories about how that could be beneficial as well. Back to optimization.

What do you think about building those relationships on LinkedIn? Can you add a little bit more.

Elena Kyria: Yeah. So, I think what's really important is make your profile. Make sure you've got a photo on your profile, because that builds trust. Whether or not people know you, that builds trust.

That's important. And then it's about talking a little bit. So, it doesn't have to be a sales pitch, but just talk about what you do, how you help, how you add value.

Think about it. Not like a book. I've seen a lot of LinkedIn profiles where they're almost written in, like, third person. Do you know what I mean by that?

Etienne Nichols: Yeah.

Elena Kyria: So, it should really be your language style. So, you'll see, like, on mine, there's like some emojis in there, there's really short, fast sentences. That's the way that I talk. So, it's your personal website, if you like.

So those are the key things around optimization that I would say, like, you need to do as a basic, in terms of connecting with people.

There’re different schools of thought around it. So, creators now. So, me personally, I have a follow button on my LinkedIn because I try to connect with people that I know or that I want to engage in messaging with.

And you can also only have a certain number of connections now, right? So, it's not unlimited.

But I think what's really important when you make that connection request, if you try to connect with someone that you actually don't know, what's really important is not asking for something, because that's the biggest mistake that I see all the time, is, hey, I want to connect with you so that I can access your network. Hey, I want to connect with you so that you can help me do X, Y and Z.

Hey, I want to connect with you so that you can help me do whatever. Right. And that's what gets people's backs up and make them not want to connect with you.

So, it's about adding value to your point. How are you going to help them? Why should they connect with you? What are you bringing to the party? Talk about that.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, that's good. We actually met on LinkedIn, and it was so hilarious, and I'm so glad that we got to do this podcast together. Okay, that's the expert. And you actually mentioned something.

I want to go back to that as well at some point. And you mentioned whether you decided to be in a startup or a global company and whether or not it's secure in one versus the other.

What are some of the differences? And then we'll get into the generalist, or do you want to cover the generalist first, whichever you want. Let's just talk different companies first.

Elena Kyria: Okay. So, startups, differences between startups and big companies in terms of your role. Startups, fast paced, so roll your sleeves up, get stuff done because nobody's got time to waste. And the great thing about working in a startup is that you learn that pace and that urgency.

You learn efficiency, you learn ruthless optimization and prioritization, because it's like now everybody needs to go. It's that kind of pace.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah.

Elena Kyria: And I think that's really powerful, especially if later you go to a slightly bigger company because it gives you a bit of an edge, I think also working in a startup, you learn a lot more in a shorter period of time just because of the nature of how it moves and how much access you have, right. So, like in a startup, you normally would have access to the CEO or at least a C suite, right? So, you start to understand what makes them tick, what they look for, like their challenges.

And if you're a regulatory specialist working in Medtronic, you're probably not getting access to the CEO. Right? So, it's like working in a startup starts to give you a little bit more of that rounded picture earlier on.

Etienne Nichols: Steers you towards the generalist to a certain degree.

Elena Kyria: Yeah, it could. So, on the other side, with a startup, you have less products often, right? So, if you're in a startup company, there might only be one product that you're working on.

So, you go really wide in terms of responsibilities, but you only have one or two products that you work on. So, you don't have as much variety in terms of product expertise.

And that becomes important when, for example, if you're looking at regulatory affairs, it's nice if you've got a candidate that's worked with active devices, active implants, class three devices, non-active of software, and that broad spectrum of products, which you wouldn't necessarily get if you work in one startup, you need to work in a number of different startups or a bigger company that has a wider product portfolio to give you that kind of expertise. Then if you flip it and you look at a big company on the plus brand.

So, there's something about saying, hey, I work at Johnson Johnson. I met somebody yesterday who was literally like, hey, I work at Pfizer. And it was like the first, it's like, hey, I work at Google.

So, it has a little bit, that brand piece with have you get the chance to. So big companies are really good for training because they have these really well-structured training programs so when you go in junior or even, you're a developing leader, they tend to have really good programs that you can take advantage of and essentially you learn on somebody else's dime, as they say. So that's one of the good things about working in a bigger company. Typically, I would say you get stock packages, you get the 401k, you get benefits wise, you can get more interesting packages.

I would say with startups it's often a little bit more basic, unless you're coming in at a more senior level, and then you can start to get some equity play.

What else? But on the other side, in a big company, you tend to narrow down really quickly. So, you might be the regulatory person that works on this one product for Japan and that's it.

So those are the pros and cons.

Etienne Nichols: Okay, the generalist role.

Elena Kyria: Yes.

Etienne Nichols: And maybe we need to define success for this role as well.

Elena Kyria: Yes.

Etienne Nichols: What does that look like in the end? I'm sure you've talked to a lot of different, each one of these categories. What is the success? They're easier to define than the others for me, for whatever reason.

And maybe that's just my own thought process. But the specialist, like you said, maybe VP, maybe C suite, the expert, just being that thought leader, speaking at events and really leading the industry.

But the generalist, what's the end goal for them?

Elena Kyria: I think the generalist is the one that will lend itself nicely to becoming, to having that lifestyle business longer term.

Etienne Nichols: Okay.

Elena Kyria: Or even to going into a role that isn't associated anymore with regulator and quality but actually moving into a different department. So, for example, I once placed someone who was, I placed him as a quality director, then he became VP, quality regulatory, and then he became COO.

So, it acted as a springboard.

And that was because earlier on he'd worked in another company where he was like a quality director site lead. So, it's wearing multiple hats. And being able to do that will allow you to then leverage other departments.

For example, if you're covering two areas and then you go into a smaller company, you might be able to then cover three areas or become that top person for the CEO, for example.

Then you cover many different disciplines under your hat, basically. Or you could, yeah, go and work a couple of days on a beach under a sun lounger and work for a startup.

But you can pull on experience that you've got from regulatory, from quality, from clinical, so you can do a bit of everything.

Etienne Nichols: Time out for just a second. My timer, how are we doing? We're doing good on time, but it did its automatic stop thing, but that's fine. Okay. So, we talked a little bit about what the end goal is, but what about getting to the top, getting there for a generalist, what are some advice or recommendations you have?

Elena Kyria: I think it's about trying to constantly learn as much as possible. And building your network is important here as well, because as a generalist you're going to be great at pulling together lots of things, but you're going to need to leverage specialists for certain areas.

So, it's about building a network as well, of specialists on the areas where perhaps you don't go deep.

Etienne Nichols: So, knowing your weaknesses really.

Elena Kyria: Exactly, yeah. So, network becomes really important. I think as a generalist, a really good thing is trying to build some sort of like commercial understanding as well, like getting a little bit more of a business understanding, because as I say, in a generalist route, you typically do work in smaller businesses.

And so, it's really helpful to understand how regulatory and quality actually fit into the bigger picture of what the company is trying to achieve. So building skills around that as well is really helpful.

And then again, just having a good understanding of what you want your life to look like longer term. So do you want to lean on that generalist experience to perhaps take on more responsibilities and have a really broad and varied role, or do you want to have your own thing, set up your own company, your own mini consulting company, and help startups with specific challenges and work a couple of days a week and have more of a lifestyle business?

Because that's also okay.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, very cool. What are some myths? I'm sure all these different things. Everybody has a different thought on what it takes to get success, what it takes to get to the top.

And I'm sure there are some limiting beliefs that people have. What are some myths that you know of?

Elena Kyria: Oh my God, there's so many myths.

Etienne Nichols: Okay, how much time have we got? Hey, I've got all day.

Elena Kyria: I think the first thing is that careers are not linear. So, forget that. Don't try to make the perfect step every single time, because actually growth comes when you do step sometimes into the unknown.

I think that's first myth. Another myth. Certificates and qualifications. Not to say that they don't matter, but experience really matters before we get too far.

Etienne Nichols: So that limiting belief of, what was the first one you said? Linear. Yes, I love that because, and I was actually thinking about this on the airplane on the way to here to Montreal when the stewardess said, look around, find the exit.

Just be aware that it might not be the one ahead of you, might be behind you. I think that's great career, I was thinking, well, that's good career advice. The exit might be behind you, but anyway.

Okay, go on. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt the next one.

Elena Kyria: No, that's a really good point. And like I say, I'll give you the picture so you can put it out there. And it is a squiggle, but that is often most people's career path.

Right? It's a little bit forwards, a little bit to the sides, maybe a little bit back, maybe a bit to the side, and then maybe forwards again. Right. And I think I'm a big believer in this concept of building a portfolio of experience.

I talk about that a lot. When is it time to move company? When I've been in my company for three years. No, it's when you stopped building and adding to your portfolio of experience.

So, you can stay in a company for 20 years. If you're still developing your skills and you've moved positions and you're learning and adding to that portfolio of experience, you might be in a company for a year and a half and then all of a sudden that's it, right?

You've done what you're going to do. So don't count years of experience on your CV, but count actual valuable years of what you've learned in that time. That's really important.

Etienne Nichols: I love that. I actually had a conversation during an interview once where they said, you don't have a lot of experience on this. Actually, I have probably several years packed into one in that project where there's a lot of people, they may have 20 years of experience, but really they just have one year of experience 20 times.

Elena Kyria: Again, exactly that. Exactly that.

Etienne Nichols: Okay, what else?

Elena Kyria: Okay, so certificates, especially in our industry, I think that there's a place for them but having the certificate won't necessarily get you the job, so it won't necessarily get you the promotion. So, we shouldn't undervalue the actual practical doing companies, especially when it comes to hiring. They will hire for experience. There'll be a base level qualification that you'll need to have.

But let's just say I get people that ask me questions, shall I do this certificate, or shall I go and do this job? And my advice often is go and do that job because that gives you practical experience and that's what companies look for when they hire.

That's one of the challenges that we have. If we look at the junior end of the market, you get all these people coming out of university with all these brilliant qualifications and stuff like that, and then you've got companies that are hiring that they want to hire for a minimum of a year and a half of experience, and then there's a gap there and it's how do you get that chicken and egg thing? How do you get experience if nobody's willing to give you a chance to get experience?

And, and that's one of the challenges I think of if we look forward into Medtech and I think that there's a gap there.

Etienne Nichols: I've been on the other side of that where we were going to hire a new engineer and I feel bad looking back, but I heard this guy straight out of college, but he's not going to know anything.

And I thought, he has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and he doesn't know anything. But that's the case sometimes we're going to have to teach them. And so, I like what you're saying because if you can come out of college with experience,

then that's huge. So, you have a competitive advantage there.

Elena Kyria: Yeah, for sure.

Other myths, I would say job titles.

Yeah.

Not that they don't matter, because they do, but they don't matter as much as what everybody thinks that they matter because especially in MedTech, right, where you have all different kinds of companies and the startups, they know what they're doing.

Right. So, they'll hire maybe one person to cover quality and regulatory and give them like a chief quality officer title. That's not the same as a chief quality officer in Medtronic or whatever.

Right. So actually companies, recruiters don't really look at title, but actually they look at experience and responsibilities.

If you're currently a VP in a small business and you're looking at making a move, but that company is offering you a director title, but the job itself, like the scope of the role, is actually much bigger than what you're doing today.

And you're going to be adding to that portfolio of experience and learning new things. Don't be afraid just because of the title, because I think people, they understand that titles,

not that they don't matter, but really that's not the be all and end all of everything.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah. It's just another lever to pull, essentially.

Elena Kyria: Exactly.

Etienne Nichols: Interesting. You mentioned responsibilities there.

For some reason, my mind goes to resumes and I don't know if that's outdated.

What is your stance or take on resumes and how does that play into this whole thing?

Elena Kyria: In what way?

Etienne Nichols: Maybe it's the tactical question of building out a resume? Has LinkedIn replaced it? Maybe this is a conversation for a different time. I don't know if you have any.

Elena Kyria: Thoughts on that subject, but I think that there's still a place for CV like resume.

Etienne Nichols: Sure.

Elena Kyria: I think it's like your resume is like a collection of your achievements, I would say, and your experience,

LinkedIn supplements it. But that being said, I know a lot of people that recruit, like, not in our space right now, and the way that they would present a candidate is only using the LinkedIn profile without a cv now.

So, it could potentially go in that direction. But I think what's essential is that if you are applying for a job with a resume, you need to have a LinkedIn profile.

You need to have an updated LinkedIn profile, because the next thing that person is going to do is they're going to look you up on LinkedIn.

And you'd be surprised how many people send a CV with one thing and their LinkedIn doesn't say the same thing. Like literally different jobs on there sometimes, and stuff that people have left out.

So, you got to make sure that stuff matches.

Etienne Nichols: And so, the source of truth and people who are comparing those is going to be LinkedIn in their mind. That's good to know. Yeah. Okay. Abstracting, you have more myths.

Elena Kyria: Oh, hard work really matters. It does. But hard work isn't the only thing that will get you promoted. So actually, what matters is your network and people understanding what you're doing.

Right. There’re people sometimes that work really hard behind the scenes in the hope that they're going to get selected for that next promotion because they're working so hard. And then they get frustrated because actually they don't get the promotion.

The other person sitting next to them gets the promotion, who doesn't work as hard, but knows more people or connects with more people or has those relationships. And actually, the perfect combination is a bit of both. Right, work hard and have the connections. But don't think that hard work is the only thing that will get you promoted, because then you might find yourself being left behind.

Etienne Nichols: I'm going to give a specific example, and if you have a specific example, I can't say that word. I'd love to hear it, but I'm going to buy you some time.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: I was at a job once where they put me in a cubicle right outside the break room. So, if you left the break room, you either walked into my cubicle or you turned left or right.

They called this the cursed cubicle. No one knew why, but nobody had lasted more than three months in that cubicle. So, I and another guy were hired at the same time.

The other guy was a much harder worker.

I started timing how many people came into my cubicle to say hi. It was about 50 people a day, few minutes. That added up to three or 4 hours. I was getting nothing done.

And I thought to myself, I'm not going to last in this job. It was early in my career; I'm not going to make it as an engineer. And I finally realized this is an opportunity.

So, I started asking them, hey, how do you do this in the excel? How do you do this in SolidWorks? How do you do this in Ansys or whatever, the FEA.

And they started doing my job for me. Essentially, they'd tell me a trick, and I could do what would have taken me 20 minutes in two minutes because there was a code or script or something.

And I started getting everything done way faster than the other people. And it was because I knew more people. And I totally agree. Network is your net worth.

Elena Kyria: Yeah, I love that saying. Yeah, absolutely. So, I can't say the name of the company, but there was a company that we were recruiting for and basically they had a position that came open which was a VP of quality.

And it was a VP of quality, but it was overseeing like a ton of sites, all the sites for EMEA and really well-known company, ton of directors at the layer below that they could have selected for that.

So, any of the site directors could have then been promoted into VP to oversee all the sites. And that would be in theory, like the decision that would make sense, because those people, they know the company, they know quality, they know the products, they know the details. But basically because of the way that things had played out with the company, the director that had been there, most of the directors were quite new.

The one that had been there the longest had been there for about ten years. Really good person, but just quite behind the scenes, went forward for the role, didn't get it. They ended up hiring somebody from operations into that role. So, it's actually somebody that didn't actually know quality into that role. Yeah, because that person had a connection with another senior VP who had a connection with the chief quality officer and so on and so forth.

Etienne Nichols: Wow.

Elena Kyria: So actually, especially even in companies where you've been there for a long time, it's who you know and what they know you're doing. And I think sometimes people are a little bit afraid to say, hey, I don't want to say that I had the idea of that thing.

Or I don't want to talk about my achievements in a company because then it sounds like I'm bragging. But the thing is, if you're not talking about the value that you add, how is anybody going to know what impact you're having?

And so, you need to find a way to do it in a way where you're talking about the input that you've had and how you added value to the right people.

And that those people, we call them sponsors, they're talking about you when you're not in the room.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah.

Elena Kyria: So, network matters.

Etienne Nichols: I want to speak to the person who is probably frustrated that I could have done the job better. I was better at it. But something we forget is communication. Whether it's not necessarily promoting yourself, but communication about and to other departments, which you might think, oh, that person's better at talking, but I'm better at doing the job. Guess what? Communication is part of your job. And no matter what role you have, communication is part of it. If you're not communicating, you're actually not as performing as well as someone who is a better communicator, at least in today's world, with our remote culture and everything else.

Elena Kyria: Exactly that.

Etienne Nichols: Any other myths or do you want to add?

Elena Kyria: I think those are the big ones, I would say right now coming to mind.

Etienne Nichols: Okay.

Any thoughts then on accelerating your…

If I want to accelerate my career growth? You mentioned having an end in mind, but then tying that back to the one step, the phrase we use at Greenlight Guru, you keep one eye on the horizon, one eye on the step-in front of you.

You talked a little bit about the horizon, and I know you've mentioned a lot of tactical things along the way, but is there anything you'd add to this? Is something you and almost everybody should be working on right now?

Elena Kyria: Hard thinking. I think as humans, we like to be busy doing not a lot. Right. I hate that phrase when people are, oh, I've had a really busy day. But what did you accomplish?

Etienne Nichols: Right.

Elena Kyria: What did you actually achieve? And actually, deep thought about the future is, I find one of the things that requires a lot of brain power. So, it's this thing that people tend to put off, but there's nothing more important because if you don't have a rough, and I do say it can be loose because you might change your mind, and that's okay. But you need that kind of end goal to be shooting for. So, you know generally the direction that you want to take. So actually, put some thought into it.

But before you do that. Also do personality tests and think about what my strengths and weaknesses. And one thing that we didn't talk about at the beginning that's really important is to get feedback.

So actually, ask your manager, what do you think my strengths are? What do you think I'm good at? Do a 360. Get that feedback from your team. Get that feedback from your colleagues and your peers.

See if it aligns with your thoughts about yourself as well, because that's always quite interesting. But actually, figure out who you are and who you're not and where you want to go.

And then you can already start to orientate yourself around what skills and experience do I need to have in order to get there? And start then taking small decisions, micro decisions along the way. Right. You want to be the expert. Great. Let's get your LinkedIn profile up to scratch and let's start doing a post a week about that thing that you specialize in.

Etienne Nichols: Let's get you on stage.

Elena Kyria: Exactly that.

Etienne Nichols: So, you bring up a great point with feedback, someone we forget about and it's painful.

One of the times when I really recommend people get feedback is when they leave a company. And I'll give you an example. This was just totally random. I read Hal Elrod's book Miracle Morning, and at the very end of that book it says, okay, tomorrow I want you to email your colleagues.

I was leaving a company in two weeks and so I thought, I guess I could do this. It was a specific request for feedback, and I was a project manager of a really large project.

I got 19 responses back and I thought, wow, I didn't even know this and this about myself. Went to the next company and I was struggling in certain areas, and I gave them that.

It was painful and they said, this makes a lot of sense. We got to work on this and this. And it was very helpful. So, this is personal anecdote about getting feedback.

If you're struggling to do it and you're changing jobs, that's a great time to do it, but always should be looking for feedback.

Elena Kyria: Yeah, I think it's really powerful to understand and also you got to frame it in the right way because also I think one of the challenges is when you're in a position of power.

What I mean by that is if you're trying to get feedback from people that are on your team, they might not want to give you that feedback because then they're afraid about the repercussions of what that feedback, if it's not great feedback.

Etienne Nichols: Right.

Elena Kyria: And actually, we're trying to seek out the not great feedback so we can improve as well. So, it's about setting that stage and creating opportunities for people to be able to share that might be maybe not face to face like this.

Right? As you said, the email, whatever works. But it's important that you set the stage of why you're trying to get this feedback. And actually, you want to improve and you want to understand what you're doing really well and how you can be doing better and stuff like that.

And there's always really good stuff that comes out of soliciting feedback, although it is painful for sure, but that's growth, right? And you go to the gym, and you do reps, that hurts, but your muscle gets stronger.

And so that's.

Etienne Nichols: Someone gave. Let's see if I can remember this phrase. I wish I had it in front of me. The hard way is hard, but the easy way is a lot harder.

And I think that's if you're not looking for feedback and taking feedback, applying feedback, it's a lot harder later on. You're not growing.

Okay.

We mentioned these different pathways you brought up several times. Freelancing.

Elena Kyria: Yes.

Etienne Nichols: Do you want to talk about that?

Elena Kyria: Yeah, I do. I've got a lot to say about that. So, I think here's the thing on freelancing, right?

You've got to think about your tolerance to risk and your personal situation when you decide whether or not you want to become a freelancer or whether or not you want to set up your own business.

Because on the plus side, it can be really glossy and you can earn a lot of money, right? And you can work on a beach if you want to, which sounds.

I know I talk about that a lot, but on the other side, right, everyone can make money when the market's good. And so, I'll give you an example. We had the European MDR and IVDR and what I saw were a whole load of people jumping out of their normal jobs and saying, hey, I'm going to become a consultant and do some freelancing, right? Because I'm going to be making a lot more money, get more flexibility, whatever.

So now we've had movement in the DOAS, right? And so, what that means now is that companies that were planning to spend on getting ready for these regulations, there were some that are already ready. So, it's not a thing. But the ones that weren't have gone, okay, actually, we don't need to spend that money right now. So, what does that mean?

That means budgets have been cut. What does that mean? No projects. What does that mean for freelancers? You better be good at doing business development. You better be good at filling the funnel of opportunities for you to get projects on, because otherwise you're not going to have any projects to work on.

And so, where's your money coming from? So, what a lot of people I think miss is when you become a freelancer, you either need to have an exceptionally strong network of people that will feed you jobs, which is part of what we do at element, right?

So, we work with the freelance network. That's element interim. And element is the front of the funnel, and then we partner with freelancers that will work on the projects. But if you're not partnering with a network that will be able to feed that funnel, you yourself, you need to be really good at going out seeking those opportunities, pitching for those opportunities and trying to convert them. Because freelancing isn't only delivery, it's not only doing the project, it's actually bringing the business in. And then the other thing you got to think about is, okay, the whole back-office piece, right?

Who's sending invoices? Who's chasing invoices?

What happens if you deliver all the work and then the client doesn't pay your invoices? What about the companies that have 90-day payment terms and you've got a mortgage that you need to be paying on a monthly basis.

So, you really need to think about some of this stuff because that's where I see people getting caught out and that's where I see them saying, oh, actually it's not what I thought it was.

I need to go back to a permanent job because actually it's actually running a business. So, there's a whole side to it that people, I think, underestimate. But it can definitely be really lucrative.

It can give you loads of flexibility.

It's really rewarding because you can help loads of companies at the same time, or you can go project to project and see loads of things in a short amount of time, but there are bits that you need to be thinking about.

Etienne Nichols: So, you said the economy right now, at least in my experience, it doesn't seem to be as good as it was a year ago. Still money to be made for freelancers?

Elena Kyria: I think so. But I think the ones that will come out the other side of this will be the ones that have strong personal brands, will be the ones that have strong networks.

We'll be the ones that are in areas where companies will spend money to get that expertise, so they are strategic about where they're positioning themselves and what they're trying to do.

Etienne Nichols: So that communication and sales skills too. Yeah, very cool. What about skills in the future? Because we talked a lot about right now, and I know the economic, that's on a lot of people's minds, but things EB and flow, what are some skills as being incredibly important in the future,

honestly?

Elena Kyria: Like communication skills?

Etienne Nichols: I keep saying it's never going to go away.

Elena Kyria: I keep saying it, but really, is it that rare? I think yes.

Etienne Nichols: What is it that the 95% are missing out, or can you put your finger on it?

Elena Kyria: I think it's having.

When you're a technical person, you really see a lot of value in being really technical. Right. And I see a lot of people that are brilliant in the details, but not necessarily great at taking that concept and explaining it to a six-year-old.

And that's really critical in order to be able to get your message across to the 75% of the people that are not like you that you're dealing with and wider commercial understanding of how is okay, if I do this thing right now, how does that impact the bigger picture of the company?

And really how does that make or save money? Because if I can't link what I do with making or saving money for the company, then what's my value add in a capitalist world where companies are there to make money and help people, of course, but also, they got to make a profit, right?

Etienne Nichols: Yeah. Money is the air we breathe as companies. Yeah, I've heard this, and I'm sure you've heard this phrase before, the difference in a leader and a manager. Like, just take a bunch of people in the woods chopping down trees, those are the workers.

And the manager goes around and says, do you need it sharpened? Are you good? Everything like this, the leader is the one who climbs the tree and says, I think we need to go this direction.

And that seems to be the skill we're after here almost, I think, setting.

Elena Kyria: The vision and putting a stake in the ground. I think people sometimes are really afraid of being wrong. And actually, leaders are bold.

They know that sometimes they might be wrong, they might not make the right decision, but actually they're making a decision. And so therefore, that is forward movement, because there's nothing worse than not making a decision and staying where you are.

Etienne Nichols: There was something you said earlier that sparked the thought in my mind when we were talking about the difference in startup and global companies. And I think sometimes we apply that startup mentality to a startup, but if you bring that mentality into whatever company you're in and say, this cubicle is my startup, and I'm going to take a certain amount of risk and apply that thinking. It can actually accelerate your career even at that big company that is used to a little bit slower movement.

But if they see you being productive, not busy, but actually producing efficient, actually.

Elena Kyria: I like efficiency more than productivity. Yeah, I was listening to this podcast the other day, and what's the difference between productivity and efficiency?

Etienne Nichols: Good question. Efficiency I would define as the only doing the things that matter. Maybe only or doing them. I don't know. You tell me.

Elena Kyria: So, what I learned was, what I learned was because I was using them loosely, interchangeably. But what I learned was productivity is doing more to get more, and efficiency is doing less to get more.

Etienne Nichols: Oh, I like that.

Elena Kyria: Yeah. So actually, efficiency is really interesting, right? So, if you're efficient, say it takes you less to achieve more. That's really powerful if you're one of those people.

Etienne Nichols: And so that we don't get too, I guess, theoretical or philosophical an application for this. Do you have a specific application for doing less to get more versus doing more to get more?

Elena Kyria: I'm looking at AI, for example, and I'm thinking, okay, how can I use tools and technology that's out there right now?

How can I apply that to my role? I'm talking about anyone, right? Take your role, take your to do list and say, how can I use technology to help me achieve more but with less effort from my side?

Yeah, there's loads of stuff out there right now, and I think that AI is a really interesting space. I don't think it's going to replace humans, but I think the people that will get ahead will be the people that know how to use it alongside what they're doing.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah. Okay. I keep going back. So, this is my way of circular thinking here, but you mentioned something about the uncertainty and the ability to deal with risk in a startup world versus the global.

So, I recently read racing in the rain. I don't know if you've heard that book or not. It's a novel, actually, from the perspective of a dog, but it talks about racing in the rain and how if you're on dry pavement and you're going around a corner as a race car and you hit a banana peel, for example, you're not expecting that the pavement's dry. And so, I look at that as like the corporate world. Someone gave this advice to me. I said, that is something you're not expecting, but in your startup life, it's raining.

What's wet. And so, you can use that to your advantage. You can start to drift and do things like that. It's racing in the rain. So that uncertainty, how do you get used to that feel?

Or is it just something that you learn in that uncertainty?

Elena Kyria: I think how do you get used to uncertainty? But everything's uncertain really, isn't it?

Etienne Nichols: That's true.

Elena Kyria: Not to get big and woozy. Woozy about it, but really, we're navigating in an uncertain time all the time. Right. And I think what you've got to have is like a clear sense of forwards and just have a goal.

And whatever you do, take steps towards it and have that focus. And then I think uncertainty, because that gives you certainty, right. If you have a goal and you say, that's where I want to be, this is where I am right now, we need to go there, and everything that we do needs to move us in that direction, that gives you certainty.

Etienne Nichols: Yeah, you're right. I mean, I used to joke that things have always been uncertain. We just didn't realize it until 2020. Yeah, but absolutely, in a big corporate world, you never know what's going to happen.

You have one stream of income coming in versus maybe a startup world, multiple streams. You're just living in that. You recognize the uncertainty. Learn to live with it a little bit more.

Elena Kyria: Yeah.

Etienne Nichols: Any last piece of advice? I know, I really appreciate all the time that you spent with me this morning. Any last piece of advice to you, to those who may be in any of these different paths?

Elena Kyria: My piece of advice is take action.

Don't go away and just think about what we've spoken about, but actually do something right. Because nobody goes to the gym and looks at the weights and gets fit. You have to do it.

You have to do the reps. You have to put in the work. So actually, take some sort of action, whether that's go away and do that personality test. Go and ask for feedback.

Think about your long-term goal. Think about the steps that you need to do in order to get there but take some sort of action off the back of this and that will be a step in the right direction.

Etienne Nichols: Very cool. Thank you so much, Eleanor. Really appreciate it. And those of you listening, maybe a piece of action I'll recommend is just go see what color you are because you've got me intrigued.

I'm now wondering what color I am and email Eleanor or myself. Let us know what color you are and what you thought of this episode. We'd love to hear any feedback, actually.

Elena Kyria: For sure.

Etienne Nichols: I would love feedback. All right, thank you all. We'll let you all get back to the rest of your day. Everybody takes care. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, can I ask a special favor from you? Can you leave us a review on iTunes? I know most of us have never done that before, but if you're listening on the phone, look at the iTunes app. Scroll down to the bottom where it says leave a review. It's actually really easy. Same thing with computer. Just look for that leave a review button. This helps others find us and it lets us know how we're doing. Also, I'd personally love to hear from you on LinkedIn. Reach out to me. I read and respond to every message because hearing your feedback is the only way I'm going to get better. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

About the Global Medical Device Podcast:

The Global Medical Device Podcast powered by Greenlight Guru is where today's brightest minds in the medical device industry go to get their most useful and actionable insider knowledge, direct from some of the world's leading medical device experts and companies.

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