Episode 11: Advocating For Yourself:

Interview Angela Justice

Show notes:

In this episode of the Unlock Your Block Podcast, Robin Cartwright sits down with Dr. Angela Justice. an award-winning C-suite executive advisor and coach who has blazed a trail across varied fields. From an academic, to a management consultant, to the challenging biotech industry, Dr. Justice has seamlessly morphed into various roles, always aligning her professional journey with her unique strengths and passions. As the whip-smart founder of Justice Group Advisors and ex-Chief HR Officer, she unveils her hard-earned wisdom, offering invaluable insights into the fascinating world of biotech and beyond.

Tune in, get inspired, and embark on a step towards unlocking your career potential.

In this episode, you will learn the following :

• The importance of aligning passion with profession and finding a role that mirrors one's strengths and fuels passion.
• How complex roles can actually spur personal and professional advancement.
• Tips on how to build a business case to get your company to invest in your coaching and development.
• The value of coaching in keeping individuals accountable and propelling your career forward.
• How conducting your own research and advocating can bring  positive changes in your careers.

Learn More About Dr. Angela Justice:

Website: https://www.justicegroupadvisors.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelajusticephd

Free book: www.justicegroupadvisors.com/getthebook

Connect with Robin Cartwright:

Website: https://www.hiddengemscoaching.co/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robincartwright

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIGXKZtXOcHTojxFfr4FtYA

Welcome to the Unlock Your Block podcast career empowerment with me Robin Cartwright. Join me as I empower you to shine in your career to up level your life and to go after your dreams. Let's talk.

All right, welcome to the podcast today. We are at the Unlock Your Block podcast with me, Robin Cartwright, and we're here today to talk to my fantastic guest, and that is Dr. Angela Justice. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce her. Dr. Angela Justice is an award-winning C-suite executive, advisor, and coach with a unique blend of expertise and an interesting career path. Most recently, Angela was the chief people officer, one of my favorite people, and the head of medical affairs at TCR Therapeutics, a cell therapy company focused on curing solid tumor cancers, which, you know, that's something in my heart there. Prior to that, she was a chief HR officer at Surgery Partners, a leading operator of surgical facilities and ambulatory services.

So before that, she was at Biogen where she contributed to success of five international product launches. First, as a leader in medical affairs and ultimately as Biogen's chief learning officer. Currently she runs justice group advisors and executive advisory practice for senior leaders in healthcare and life sciences. You can learn more about Dr. Angela Justice by visiting her website at justicegroupadvisors.com. We will have that in the show notes for you folks. And I will hopefully repeat that at the end of it, but it is justicegroupadvisors.com. And you can learn more about how to contact her, information about her.

And Dr. Justice, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Today, we're going to dive into lessons learned. Lessons learned in your career as well as a coach. And what I thought was so unique about Dr. Angela Justice is that she has a blend of a lot of unique experiences and went into my area, which is human resources. So one of my faves. Anyways, thank you for being here. I appreciate it.

Oh, thank you, Robin. And it's such an honor to be a guest on your show. Thank you.

Great. I'm so excited. So tell me kind of a little bit about your progression of your career from, you know, don't dive into 20 minutes, but just from, you know, short to where you are today. How did you get here?

Yeah, good question. So it's been a bit of, I don't know, almost a winding path, I would say. I started out actually thinking I was going to be an academic. So I got my PhD in neuroscience at the University of Chicago and realized in the course of doing my work there that staying in academia wasn't for me. I wanted to do something a bit different, something where I was able to see the impact a bit more immediately and on a bit more people.

So I went to McKinsey and was a management consultant for a time, which I really viewed as my crash course in business, right? Coming from a science background. If I wanted to do something in the business world, I figured I'd better learn something about business and really had a great opportunity to learn from the best at McKinsey. From there, I went to work for one of my clients, which was a patient advocacy group called the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

And that was an incredible opportunity. It really gave me a chance to merge so many things that I love, science, neuroscience in particular, business and impact. So I was able to really do some cool things, work with some amazing people and companies. And one of those companies that I worked closely with was a biotech company called EMD Toronto.

And I ended up going there and worked in their medical affairs department. I was the medical science liaison, which again, phenomenal opportunity to have just tremendous impact, learn a lot and have a lot of fun doing work that I thought really mattered and made a difference in the world. And that was really the first entree I had into biotech, which is where I spent the majority of my career. As you mentioned, I worked at Biogen. I was in their medical affairs department first brought in to build their medical training organization as they prepared to launch a number of products across a number of therapeutic areas globally. And ultimately ended up as their chief learning officer.

That must have been fun.

Oh, it was so much fun. It was an incredible experience. I got to work with just the best of the best and really drive tremendous impact and value. I absolutely loved it was the highlight of my career.

And then, I mean, you were gonna fast forward here, your most recent position of chief HR officer. So you went from learning and then you got into HR and now you're doing coaching as I understand it.

Yeah, so, you know, I really didn't know a lot about HR in the early days of my career. You know, kind of wish I would have known more sooner because as it turns out, it's really that we thought that just married so many things that I'm passionate about. And so many things I think where I have a unique edge that helps me be really impactful. So I was the chief HR officer at a company called Surgery Partners. And then from there, I went on to become the chief people officer.

So, you know, really just a title variant almost of the same role for a small biotech company called TCR Squared Therapeutics. That was my most recent role, again, like, I absolutely loved that role, that company, the team that we built there. It was just an incredible, incredible experience. And then we recently merged with another company, a larger cell therapy player. And that gave me an opportunity to branch out and do something new. And so I founded my practice, Justice Group Advisors, where I do executive advisory and coaching for senior leaders in the healthcare and biotech space.

That is fantastic. So tell me a little bit about, you know, let's talk about the good, the bad, the ugly, that kind of thing. What– let's start with good, because that's always the easiest to talk about, and the most fun. So if you think about your career, from when you know, you really got started with your trajectory, because we all start our careers, and we're working with women here on this podcast that are moving their careers to the next level.

So when you started that out, What were the good points? And if you look back on it and you say, okay, this was the good, this was the good, because I can look back on mine and say, you know, I had some great mentors along the way that were fantastic, that really helped me. I also had some coaches. I mean, I had coaches and back then they weren't really coaches as much as it wasn't a big coaching industry at the time. But I worked in the outplacement. So I had leverage to work with some career coaches and I was lucky and then I had that. Tell me a little bit about yours.

Yeah, that's such a great question. And it really does take some of those early experiences. Those early experiences are formative, right? And having great leaders, great mentors, access to coaches can make a world of difference in someone's career trajectory. Yeah, when I think back to the early days of my career, I was just really motivated to learn, to have an impact.

I was really curious. I've always just been really curious. And I was lucky to work with people who stimulated that and who let me try different things and explore. And McKinsey was a great place for that, frankly, because McKinsey and most management consulting organizations, you don't stay with one client or one project for very long. You kind of move around and get to experience different things. And for me, that was just a gift. Because I saw how different companies operated. I saw what made different leaders successful. I saw what made some leaders not so successful. And those were really formative experiences for me. So I think the opportunity to just kind of exploit that curiosity and that learning early on and really see lots of different things was a huge advantage for my career.

Well, and I think also you mentioned learning. And as we go through our career, realizing like, oh, this might be interesting. I think I might want to do that. And I think learning more about those opportunities is formative with trying to figure out what it is you want to do. And I remember I thought I wanted to go into learning. I thought that's what I wanted to do. And I reached out to somebody and had a conversation. He was a VP of learning for a large retail organization.

And he and I had a great conversation. I learned a lot about it. But when I really had the discussion with him at the time, I had a young son and I was needing to be available to him. It wasn't the right time for me to start doing learning and classes and traveling all over the US doing this, but it was great. I learned so much. And without that, I would have been spinning my wheels looking for a job I wasn't ready to take on.

Yeah. Well, you know, you raised something really important there, learning about different opportunities and really learning from people who tell you the good, the bad and the ugly, right? It's so critical. And just think if you would have gone into a learning role and not known that it requires a lot of travel, not known that it was going to be really difficult for you to manage that and have a lifestyle that you wanted to lead, you probably would have been miserable.

I mean, it would have been... Right. challenging.

Very challenging. Yeah. So I, you know, that's one thing I always work with my clients on is really, you know, investigate research, make sure you understand what it is you're getting yourself into, because you may get yourself into something that's not the right situation for you at this time. It doesn't mean it isn't good for you later, but at this time. Yeah. So that's…

You know, I think that that speaks to you to just knowing what questions to ask. A lot of people like to tell you the good. The good is easy. But to ask the questions about what it's really like, like, what are the challenging parts of this job? What do you love? What's challenging? What's hard? What might be a deterrent?

Right.

I'm not sure. Everybody thinks to ask those questions all the time. And most people, that's not what they volunteer for, first off. They volunteer to do it.

Right, exactly. It's just like if you travel somewhere, I always ask people, what do you think of the place? What did you like? What did you not like? What did you do before I ever go? Because last thing I'm going to do is go buy airfare, get a hotel, pay for a rental car, and then I end up hating my trip. So it's the same thing when you're researching, upleveling your career. So let's dive into a little bit more fun, the bad.

The bad.

I know that I've run into the bad a couple times where I've taken on roles that just weren't really my wheelhouse. And I've had to.. I mean, I was successful in my Maidam work, but I really then had to navigate back to my wheelhouse. So what about you? What has been your bad in your struggles of your career?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. You know, luckily, I've been pretty fortunate in my career. And I've, like you said, I've made everything work. I've been able to be successful in all of the roles I've had. But I'll go back to McKinsey because that was a really challenging role. Seminal, one of the best career moves that I made for sure. But it was tough. I came from a PhD program, right? So studying, learning, teaching, doing research, but very academic, right? really fast-paced, tough world of management consulting.

I knew nothing about business. I mean, I really didn't. I knew a lot about science. I knew very little about business. And then frankly, I approached business as a scientist. And what that meant for me is I had to study, study, study. I mean, just to get to baseline competency, I was doing so much more work, I'm sure, than most people that came in with an MBA, right? They came in with that basic business knowledge.

I had to learn on the job. And so I was trying to learn, do, and try to not look like a fool in front of my team or clients. And I remember it being a grind. I was working three long hours. I was traveling a lot. It was great. I loved it. I learned so much. And for me, that's always incredibly motivating.

But boy, there is a time and a place in your life to do that and a time and a place not to. And I couldn't do it today. You know, I definitely couldn't. It was tough. Really tough.

Yeah, and it's funny, you mentioned it was challenging and you had to learn a lot. And I've had those roles where I took on a role that was more compensation, more benefits related than I wanted it to be. And I'm not an expert in benefits. So that was very difficult for me to learn. And yeah, every night reading up on things, taking classes on the weekends, trying to get up to speed with stuff. But at the same time, even though it's challenging and it can be considered bad or frustrating, I don't ever think anything's really bad. It's a huge growth, right? You grow so much in those roles.

Oh, that's absolutely right. I mean. I think any time where I've had to really just double down and dig in and put in the extra time and work even harder than normal, those are the times when I look back and I say, wow, that really accelerated my career. Like putting in that time, doing that work, going through some of those hardships, that was an accelerant to my career and absolutely critical in getting me to where I am today.

Yeah, so challenges are good. I mean, I really believe that being challenged in a job is important. And I think that's part of the issue with a lot of individuals who want to uplevel their careers. They're excited about the opportunity of the challenge, but they're scared at the same time. So they get an opportunity, they think they want the opportunity. They talk to everybody about it, do all the steps for it, but then they don't quite jump in. So what advice do you have for those who are looking at an intense challenging opportunity, not 100% sure they're ready to do that.

Yeah, well, I don't know. Perhaps as a consultant, I would say probably you need to build a framework and have some criteria to make a decision, right? So I always like to advise people to make a decision matrix and think about what are the criteria that matter, right? In terms of making the decision and how would you weigh those criteria in terms of relative importance.

And then go through the work of putting numbers to the different criteria and the different decision points and taking as much of an objective view and look on the situation as you can. And I think it's a matter of being really honest about what matters. Then frankly, there's nothing wrong with saying, gosh, it really matters to me that I'm home every day by actually doing what I do time or that I'm not traveling or that I'm able to take my weekends off. You know, those are criteria that matter. And you need to be really honest about those. I think sometimes there are people maybe make some mistakes that are trip up. It's when they're not completely honest with themselves about what really matters.

Yeah. No, and I think figuring out your priorities is really important. Like you say, decision framework. I do the same thing with my clients. It's figure out your priorities, where you are in life. Is all this something you can take on like the job with the learning? I couldn't do it because it had too much training and it was all over the place and I had a young son. And yeah, I mean, it's and not to say now I'm doing lots of training, which is great. But yeah, you have to kind of look at where you are in your life at that time. So yeah, I definitely think making your priorities known, your decisions, working on a decision matrix, great idea. Yeah. So then you landed after all this, you went into coaching. How has that been for you?

You know, it's fantastic. I mean, I'm absolutely having just the time of my life and you know, it's pretty early in terms of my practice as an executive advisor and coach. But of course, I've been doing executive coaching for many, many years. I would say I've had a coaching kind of approach to management for my entire career. So doing this now as a profession, doing this, you know, as what I do day to day, it's just incredibly rewarding because you can make such a difference in relatively little time with some people, right?

It's just such a rewarding opportunity to be able to help leaders grow and thrive and help teams really come together to solve big problems and get results. And for me, again, I love the opportunity to kind of dabble with different companies and learn different things. So it satisfies my innate curiosity of learning because I'm learning every day about different companies and industries and clients and teams and challenges. So for me, it's incredibly fun, and the impact is just really gratifying.

Yeah, and you keep saying, talking about learning and I think learning is a big word because it's really what motivates us in life. We go through life and we constantly want to learn. We wanna be challenged, we wanna grow ourselves. And when we're not and we're feeling the stagnation, it's just not exciting. That's when the job doesn't look fun anymore.

That's when the day to day is miserable. That's to me, that's when I would get that pit in my stomach on Sunday night, Friday to go to work on Monday going, I really don't want to do this again. I've already done this. And I think a lot of times companies don't look at their employees in depth enough to figure out, okay, this person's stagnant, they've kind of hit their platform.

There's nothing else going in this career to grow them. And that's where those in HR, we all talk about the career development ladder. And I think a lot of companies just don't put enough emphasis in there with their managers. They might do it on the HR side, but it's working with the managers and the employees to help them understand that just because you're stagnant does not mean it's the end of the road for you, right?

Yeah. No, you're so right. I mean, you know, I have a couple of thoughts on that of came to mind as you were talking. One, I absolutely believe that managers are critical. I tell people all the time and what I've always done as the chief HR officer is really invest in those frontline managers. Managers are the fourth multiplier. You invest in them just a little bit and you get massive results. I mean, that's your point of leverage by far.

So managers really matter. Absolutely the first place to target, I think for most organizations. And then the other thoughts that occurred to me is that of owning your career, right? I think while it's great for companies to provide resources and guidance and really encourage people to grow and learn, at the end of the day, it's up to every individual to own their own career and make that journey. So yeah, I think both of those points that you mentioned are critically important.

Right, and I think those who really grow to the top of their career, like you, like me, who really accelerated themselves, really took on that challenge of owning your career. Because I remember, oh my gosh, this must have been 20 years ago when I was early into my career. And I sat there thinking, well, why can't I get this promotion? Why aren't I moving forward? And I remember a mentor at that time saying, well, does anybody know you're interested? I don't know. I magically just thought everybody would know I was ready and I wanted the promotion, but nobody knew.

No, no. I mean, that and I think that's such a common situation. I think a lot of people think, gosh, if they just do great work, it's going to be recognized and rewarded.

Yep. We recognize, but not that way.

Yeah, and at the end of the day, you know, you have to be your own advocate. You have to not only do the good work and really, of course, you have to deliver, but you also have to let people know what your aspirations are and let them help you, you know? And I don't just mean let them help you get promoted, but let them help you learn and grow and develop. It really does take some self-advocacy.

That's great. You know, this has been fantastic. I really enjoy chatting with you. What would you like to give to our listeners? What advice would you give? And before we get to that, I just want to add a note that in your business, when you talk about coaching, she is constantly coaching individuals and has done that throughout her career. But now it's a little more exciting that you get to see the rewards a little faster with your clients. And I think that is working with them to advocate for their careers and help their employees advocate as well. So thank you and kudos for doing that. I'm so excited. But what would you like to give our advice or nuggets to our listeners that are listening here today?

Oh, such a good question. I think one of the bits of advice that I… and to say a lot. Like I find myself sharing this advice with a lot of people and a lot of people cite it back to me and say this advice really helped them. And it's just like a little phrase which is be the buyer, not the seller. And what I mean by that is every individual, again, really needs to take an active self-advocating role in their career. And it means being really intentional about what you're looking for and how you're evaluating opportunities. Be internally at your company today or externally. It's really thinking hard about what you want, what you need and evaluating the ways that you can get there in a way that's proactive as opposed to reactive.

Right, exactly, exactly. I think far too many people do the reactive because I've already gotten to that point where they're frustrated. And if you do it before you kind of get that gut feeling that you want more. Start making a plan, put your action together, work with a mentor, a coach. Yeah, absolutely.

Go shopping, be the buyer, right?

Right, exactly, exactly. So thank you so much for being here. And do you have any little tidbits for our listeners about your business and organization?

Oh gosh, well, you know, one thing that's kind of exciting, hopefully by the time this airs, it'll actually be out, but I just wrote a book. It's a workbook and guide to help people get their company to pay for executive coaching. So it's really a guidebook to build a business case that will get funded. It's full of insider tips and tricks and templates, like the decision matrix. I have a decision matrix template in there and walk people through exactly how to build it. But the goal is to help people, again, build a business case that will actually get funded to get their company to invest in their coaching and thus their development.

And I believe so heartedly that more companies should help their employees in every way possible. They have all these university programs, but they don't really work with any of the programs on benefits to help employees with therapy. But you don't have programs to help them with coaching. And coaching is so vital, because the one thing that people don't understand about mentors is mentors are there.

They've been in the position the job and the learn, but they're not going to keep you accountable. They're not going to move you forward. They are there just to give you advice. Whereas a coach is working with you day in working with you, giving you homework, keeping you accountable, moving you to the next step. And really companies should personally believe companies really should wrap their hands around this because it's huge. And there's coaching in all different areas, career, health, fitness, lifestyle, everything.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm so glad. I'm going to go buy that book. That's exciting. All right, folks, thank you so much, Dr. Angela, for being with us today. And that is Dr. Angela Justice. And you can find her at justicegroupadvisors.com. She also has a website, a LinkedIn page. I will have all of this in the show notes. But we really appreciate you being here. And folks, I'm going to just go ask you to do the research, to get out there, to learn, investigate, and advocate for yourself like Dr. Justice was talking about. Really advocate for yourself because you're the one who's going to make the change.

That's right. Thank you, Robin.