I became a manager the way a lot of people do.
Someone thought I was good at my job, so they gave me other people’s jobs to worry about too. No handover. No training. Just a new title and an assumption that I’d work it out.
So I did. Or I tried to.
For years I assumed the discomfort I felt meant something was wrong with me. That everyone else had quietly figured out the people stuff, the performance conversations, the politics, the strange exhaustion of being responsible for a team while still being expected to deliver technically, and I was the only one still improvising.
Then I started talking to other women in life sciences. And I heard the same story. Over and over.
Exceptional scientists. Highly credentialled. Promoted because they were brilliant at the work. Then largely left to figure out a completely different set of skills that nobody had thought to teach them.
It wasn’t a personal failing. It was a gap.
Between the technical training we’d spent years accumulating and the leadership reality nobody had prepared us for.
That’s what SPG is about. Not fixing people who don’t need fixing, but addressing something that probably should have been addressed much earlier.
This blog is part of me finding my voice in this space. I’ll be sharing more thoughts here as I go, on leadership, on the life sciences industry, and on the particular experience of being a woman navigating both. Some of it will be polished. Some of it probably won’t be. But it’ll be mine.
That gap is what I keep coming back to.
How much energy do capable women spend assuming the problem is them, when the problem was never them at all?