Hi, I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor. In my video last week, I talked about how medical writers can take control of their own MedComms careers, but they can’t do this in isolation.

So today I want to talk to people who line manage medical writers. You play such a crucial part in supporting medical writers in their career development, but it’s a role that we often don’t get much preparation for.

When I first became a line manager over a decade ago, I had no specific training to prepare me, literally nothing. Obviously, I had the experience of being a line report and working with various managers to draw on, and things have moved on since then. Training has become much more of a priority in MedComms, so I hope you’ve had some support to prepare you as a line manager.

But knowing how to help our line reports isn’t a simple thing to get to grips with no matter what job we’re doing. And there are various nuances of line managing medical writers that I want to cover.

Today’s focus is on how we can help our team members take control of their own careers. I understand that it’s likely you’ll be managing people who are at different stages of their careers, and probably the more junior they are, the more support they’re going to need.

But no matter how new, or experienced, they are, they should still be in control of their own career. Yes, total newbies will probably need an awful lot of guidance and support, but this shouldn’t involve spoonfeeding them everything and leading them without any input from them.

I’ve managed a few people whose expectation has been that I would tell them what to do and they would do it – they would have no autonomy or input. They saw their career as something very linear and predetermined. If they weren’t progressing, it was because I hadn’t trained them enough or given them enough opportunities.

I really, really struggled with this until my own line manager helped me flip that expectation.

We are all responsible for our own careers, and line managers in MedComms are usually pretty busy. It’s just not realistic for us to take responsibility for our line reports in that way, and it really doesn’t serve them in the long run either.

The microtips I’m going to share with you today are all focused on how we can help our line reports take control of their own careers and take responsibility for their own development in a supported and practical way.

We want our line reports to have the information they need to make informed decisions that are right for them, and the tools to act on those decisions so that they can progress and have a fulfilling career. So how can we do this?

1. Help them understand their career options

My first microtip is to help your team understand their career options. This includes exploring the specific roles that people are currently doing in your team and also the broader company. This is particularly important if there’s potential for hybrid roles or for people to transition from one business function to another.

Maybe that’s going from a traditional Medical Affairs type of account to working on more promotional aspects of the business, or vice versa. Maybe it’s moving from a purely scientific role to one that involves more client services aspects.

However your business is set up, there are bound to be some structures within the teams and potential opportunities for crossover. So thinking about where these lie and how you can expose the people in your team to these different elements will help them see what the future could hold for them.

But it’s not just about saying, “These are some job titles that could be available to you.” That doesn’t really help people understand whether these roles could be right for them or how they might progress into these positions. We need to help our team members understand what’s actually involved in more senior roles and how those people got to those positions.

I’ve got a few suggestions for how this could be done, and they do often involve some cross-functional collaboration in your organisation. For example, you could create a forum where senior people can give a brief overview of what their role involves and how they got to that position.

This could be people in your agency, but if you work for an agency in a broader network of other agencies, it could be really beneficial to include people in sister organisations. This is a great way of demonstrating the value of staying within the network, even if people have outgrown their current agency or want to pursue a different direction.

There are a lot of different ways you could run this kind of event. It could be a series of quick presentations followed by a Q&A. It could be a speed dating style event where attendees circulate around senior people for a series of short one-to-one chats. These could both be held either online or in person, and if a live event is too complex based on time zones and locations, it could easily be an asynchronous event with senior people recording a quick video or writing a short profile, then inviting questions or allowing people to set up a follow up conversation if they want to discuss things in a bit more detail.

No matter what format you go for, some key points for the senior people to cover would include

1. The experiences that help them get to where they are today
2. The skills and mindset they need to be able to do what they do
3. The best and worst aspects of their job.

I would also encourage anybody putting one of these profiles together to be honest, and possibly quite blunt about what’s needed, but with the caveat that this is just their opinion.

Your way of being a Scientific Director or whatever it is, is not the only way. There may be someone, possibly even one of your own colleagues, who has a completely contradictory opinion about, for example, the mindset needed for that role, and both are equally valid.

This process is about educating people on the range of possibilities and the ways they can be approached.

One of the things I love about MedComms is that there isn’t a one size fits all approach for anything. And one of the things I find most challenging about the industry is that often information about how things work can be quite opaque or treated as only available on a need-to-know basis, and the list of people who need to know is as short as humanly possible.

These kinds of activities will help open up that information and get people talking, but if you work for a smaller company or it just won’t be feasible to get multiple perspectives, you can always point your team towards the MedComms Stories series produced by Peter Llewellyn from MedComms Networking, and there’s a link to this below. There are a range of video and podcast versions of all the stories, which give snapshots of MedComms careers through short interviews where Peter gets a wonderful variety of people to tell us the story of their MedComms career.

2. Have up-to-date job descriptions across the team

Another great way we can make information about career progression available is to have up-to-date job descriptions for every role in the company. I’d recommend that these should be open access so that anyone in the team can firstly see their own job description and understand what they should be doing and how they should be doing it, but also so that they can look at other roles across the team and understand what’s involved in them and how they could potentially move into that.

Now you might say that in your team everyone can see the medical writing and scientific job descriptions. Why would they need to see the client services ones, and vice versa? If we’re thinking about the three main functions within MedComms agencies as medical writing, client services, and editorial, over the course of my career, I’ve known at least one person go from an initial role in each of these three to an eventual career in one of the others.

Let’s face it, when somebody gets their first job in a new industry, they will probably think that role is right for them, but they don’t actually know. It takes a bit of time for people to see how things work, to understand what suits them and what really appeals about their job or potentially other jobs within the team.

Making it very easy for people to see what’s involved in each role will help make sure that your team are all in the right place and therefore more likely to be performing to the best of their abilities.

Also, where there are clear pathways of progression, for example, from Associate Medical Writer to Medical Writer to Senior Writer and beyond, annotate each progressive job description showing how the responsibilities and the expectation levels for skills and performance develop from the previous role.

It’s particularly useful if you can give specific examples of how this could be demonstrated. This is unlikely to be included in the job description itself, but it can be so helpful to bring to life the progression that people will need to make and probably make the conversation about potential promotions much easier.

This is really somewhere that being clear and concrete is so beneficial so that people can understand where they are on that learning curve. If it’s really vague, there’s no specific examples or clear levels of expectation set, people can get quite skewed perspectives on whether they’re ticking the boxes or not.

Sometimes that means that people push for promotions they’re just not ready for, and then can’t see why they’re not being given them. And sometimes it means that people are reluctant to be promoted into jobs they’re already doing because it feels like a really daunting step. Having clarity will make it much easier to manage both extremes and everyone in between.

Clear examples are also really useful because they can be easily adapted into smart objectives when team members are hoping to progress. Which brings me onto my final microtip.

3. Team members should craft their own objectives

Ideally, each of your team members should craft their own objectives. Yes, they may well need some support with this, and that’s absolutely fine. They may need guidance on the areas they need to target in those objectives, but anyone who writes their own objectives will have a greater level of ownership and commitment to them because they were truly involved in the decision making process.

Showing how each objective is tied to the next step in their career by relating it back to the annotated job descriptions and specific examples from the last microtip will also help make progression tangible, and this also helps people understand how near or far that next step is, making progression conversations more realistic and less tricky.

Now, obviously each team member will need their own objectives based on their individual development needs, but having these examples will also help make objectives more consistent and, well, objective across people at a similar level.

It’s unlikely that everyone at the Medical Writer level, for example, will be line managed by the same person unless you’re working at a very small agency. While obviously example objectives would need to be tailored to the account, and project allocation and also individual development needs, having those examples for people at the same level makes it easier for everyone line managing people at that level to know they have similar expectations and are asking for similar things for people to demonstrate their progression to the next role – another way of avoiding potentially difficult conversations.

It’s also possible to have placeholder objectives that you bring in based on specific requests from your line reports or the type of career goals that they have. These placeholder objectives would then be individualized based on exactly what they’re trying to achieve and their development needs.

A really useful placeholder objective is for people to do a skill swap. They would pair up with another team member, each sharing a skill or a piece of expertise that the other would benefit from.

So maybe one of your writers is fantastic with PowerPoint, but another team member really struggles with making things visual. On the flip side, that writer could be excellent at giving succinct updates to clients and asking questions on client calls that get the answers they need to get the job done, while your PowerPoint whizz gets very flustered on client calls and struggles to get the information that they need.

In the traditional line management paradigm, it would be your responsibility to work with each of those writers separately to help them develop the skills they need, but it’s much more efficient for them to help each other.

This helps them hone their mentorship and leadership skills, as well as listening and teaching skills, and develop whatever skill it is that they need. Plus, it saves you a bucketful of time.

It also gives each participant one-to-one support on something they mig find really tricky or wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to, and helps develop specialists or leaders within the team who can then go on to train other people.

And you don’t necessarily have to have neat swaps like the one that I outlined. It may well end up being a bit more circular or even going outside your team of line reports. It doesn’t matter as long as you are not the one who has to train everybody on everything, and your team members are developing broader skills than simply getting the projects done. Everyone’s a winner!

But bringing this back to the microtip that got us all started – making sure your team members are crafting their own objectives – it’s worth exploring these broader possibilities in a conversation with each of your team members.

Really junior people may not have the confidence or skills to run a training session for the whole team, but sharing some project hacks that they’ve developed on a one-to-one basis with a colleague might be much more palatable and realistic. But it could also lead to them running that training session in the future and eventually developing facilitation skills they would use in client meetings.

Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and making sure that your team members are writing their own objectives means that you can include all of these things and makes it easier to quantify and track the broader progression that they’re making while also making your life easier.

Download the PDF summary

Leading a team of medical writers can sometimes feel a bit like herding cats. But if you follow these microtips and:

1. Help them understand their career options
2. Have up to date job descriptions available across the team and include annotations to show the progression between different levels with specific examples of how these can be demonstrated
3. Support your team members to craft their own objectives using these examples

… you’ll be able to nurture a flourishing team without running yourself into the ground.

I’d also recommend you could point your team members in the direction of my previous video on how to take control of their own MedComms career, because this will help support them with how to make the most of the things that you’ll be doing based on this video.

There’s a link in the description below, and there’s also a link to download a PDF summary of all the microtips from this video to support you every step of the way.

I’d really appreciate it if you could click the like button if you found this video helpful, and please do leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions of things that I could cover in future videos. I’d love to hear from you.