Milva D'Aronco

What is the biggest challenge facing women leaders in our industry today and how do you overcome it?

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Before COVID-19, I would have said that the biggest challenges facing women leaders were gender equality and unconscious biases. With COVID, I see quite a few women impacted by the changes that lockdowns, social distancing and work from home have brought into our lives. From personal experience, and listening to my entourage, I see a greater impact on women than men. The biggest challenge that all women are facing today is ensuring that our health and wellness are at the forefront of our day to day. While we may still struggle to find a “new” sense of normalcy, we need to ensure that we make our mental well-being priority within the current reality.

What is the leadership/business framework you use most often to help you lead effectively?

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The framework I use to lead effectively is authenticity; staying true to who I am as an individual and who I have become as a leader is ensuring consistency and avoiding disconnects. I am known to be passionate, committed, honest (maybe a bit too much!!!) and courageous. Within this framework, I tackle leadership in a holistic manner: leading people, leading organizations and, last but not least, “leading myself”.

In leading people, my first goal is to provide short and long term direction. My role as a “team coach” is to foster each individual’s strengths and capacities, to tackle weaknesses and to support them in filling capability and knowledge gaps. Building a team is creating a safe environment where trust is the cornerstone to gaining commitment on achieving shared goals. Leading an organization, driving strategy and culture, is an inherent component of my leadership. Organizations require change agents, leaders, to initiate, lead and sustain change; this is a role I embrace.

To lead effectively, I cannot forgo “leading myself". Leading yourself equals affirming that you, the person, are pivotal in successful leadership. We need to understand where we fit within a structured organization, what is our role, what are our responsibilities. Leading effectively is a balancing act between these three elements through authenticity.

What’s a trend going on in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry that doesn’t get enough attention?

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Again, before COVID my answer probably would have been different. Today, I believe that society in general and our industry more specifically are going through a major change dictated by this pandemic. I look at how we have been consulting our family doctor over the last six months: by phone calls or zoom. My children and husband have auto-immune diseases, yet not one of them has been seen face-to-face for a check-up, and this is likely to continue for another 6 to 12 months. Is this going to be the new normal? I do not believe we will go back to the pre-COVID era; I’m more inclined to think that there will be a “new normal” and it will likely be different than pre-COVID.

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How will physicians diagnosis if “phone / zoom” consultations become the norm? How will the medical information from pharma companies to stakeholders need to change to ensure we capture this new medical approach? And this is only a small piece of the pie: Are there going to be new virtual diagnostic tools? Will there be a further shift in research and development? Will work from home be a new norm? ...

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As we are transitioning our way to a post-COVID era, the pharmaceutical industry needs to place a greater emphasis into what we are transitioning towards. It needs to prioritize the analysis of what happened over the last few months, the assessment of what the future could look like and define the steps that need to be taken to be as relevant tomorrow as it was yesterday.

How do you allocate your professional time and energy?

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I believe in work-life balance, with a caveat: I have my own interpretation of work-life balance. My life balance starts with "me-balance" and comes from a few but necessary things. I need to sleep, eat well, meditate at bedtime, have alone time (30 minutes per day minimum, even if it means just reading, listening to a pod cast / Ted Talk), exercise 3 times a week. With that, I can tackle just about anything.

Is it possible to have all that, all the time? No. Then, it is a question of managing priorities. When I was in business finance, month-ends required more work than average, quarter-endings even more, and year-ends were a bloodbath. I knew it, I accommodated my needs accordingly. I knew sleep is a must have, so I can forego other things but not that.

My work balance is built on my “me-balance” and relies heavily on managing priorities and expectations. Setting and managing priorities are key in reducing my level of “self-stress”. It is equally important to manage expectations. When the unexpected arises at home or at work, and something has to give, I make it a point to communicate it to ensure that we are all on the same playing field. At this moment in my life, my work time is fluid: I sometimes work on week-ends or evenings, accommodating for the workload and for fact that I work over different time zones.

What is your favourite leadership book and why?

I have 3 favorite books; I cannot be asked to choose one. These have been favorites each in its own time and each with its own right. The first one is Saying No by Asha Phillips. This child psychology book has helped me in my role as a mom as well as in my work life, as saying no was not my forte. The second one is StrengthsFinder by Tom Roth. Taking the test and leveraging the book allowed me to further enhance my capabilities. Last but not least is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. The worst decisions I ever made were the ones where I did not listen to my intuition; that book put into words the concept of intuition and the importance of “listening to yourself”.