The Power of Women in the Medical Device Industry with Rob Williamson (PART II)
Rob’s message to all women:
“Don't let somebody tell you that you need to act another way to be successful. You can be successful and will be successful by just embracing who you are.”
In this second part of The Girls of Grit episode with Rob Williamson, they delve deeper into the challenges women face in the industry.
Despite being male, Rob empathizes with these challenges, advocating for diversity and women's career advancement. He advises women to define success individually and offers practical strategies for navigating professional obstacles.
Rob highlights the current opportunities for women in the industry, encouraging them to seek mentors and be vocal about their career aspirations. His emphasis on embracing femininity and leveraging unique skills highlights the value of diversity in driving success.
The episode serves as a compelling resource for women navigating the complexities of the medical device industry, promoting empowerment, and advocating for gender diversity and inclusion.
Must-Hear Insights and Key Moments
Understanding Gender Dynamics: Recognize the gender disparities and challenges women face in industries like medical device sales.
Empathy in Leadership: Learn the importance of empathy and understanding different perspectives, even if you can't directly relate to them.
Advocacy for Diversity: Understand the significance of advocating for diverse candidate pools and supporting women's career growth.
Seizing Opportunities: Realize the current opportunities for women in the medical device industry and the importance of seizing them.
Defining Personal Success: Define success on your own terms, focusing on strengths and enjoying your work.
The Power of Mentorship: Appreciate the value of both personal and professional mentors in career development and growth.
Managing Challenges: Learn strategies for distinguishing between temporary issues and fundamental career obstacles and tackling them effectively.
Leadership Adaptability: Understand the importance of adapting leadership styles based on individual team members' proficiency levels.
Embracing Femininity: Embrace and leverage feminine qualities as valuable assets in sales and leadership roles, contributing to a diverse and inclusive workplace.
Words of Wisdom: Standout Quotes from This Episode
“There's never been a better time for a woman to be able to progress in her career than right now.” — Rob Williamson
“Defining success is finding out what you're good at and doing that to the very best of your ability because you're going to enjoy that job more and everyone around you is going to benefit from you being good at what you do.” — Rob Williamson
“Each person is different, you have to change the way that you manage based on someone's proficiency. So your management style should match their level of proficiency.” — Rob Williamson
“You have to love hard to coach hard.” — Rob Williamson
“Don't let anyone tell you not to embrace your femininity.” — Rob Williamson
“Don't let somebody tell you that you need to act another way to be successful. You can be successful and will be successful by just embracing who you are.” — Rob Williamson
“What an amazing career you can have when you work with people who believe in everything that you believe in and what a great world it is to be a part of something that makes such a difference.” — Cynthia Ficara
About Rob Williamson:
Rob Williamson serves as a Board Member, Executive Advisor, and former Vice President of Sales at Shockwave Medical, Inc., a leading player in the medical device industry. With a career spanning over two decades, Rob has been instrumental in driving sales growth and fostering innovation. During his tenure at Shockwave Medical, he led the US and Canadian sales teams, overseeing a workforce of over 300 employees and propelling the company to achieve revenue exceeding $500 million.
Rob's leadership philosophy revolves around authenticity, diversity, and inclusion, emphasizing the importance of embracing individual strengths and promoting gender equality in the workplace. As a seasoned executive and advisor, Rob continues to make significant contributions to the medical device sector, leveraging his expertise to drive organizational success and mentor the next generation of leaders. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Relations from Auburn University.
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Blog Transcript:
Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies
Anneliese Rhodes: So, I have a question. I'm going to pivot just a little bit with you, Rob because you know, most of our listeners are women, and most of the women are either in the medical device industry right now or want to break into the medical device industry or change where they're at currently.
We talk about this a lot. I wrote a book on it, but why do you think as a male, why do you think that the medical device industry is such a hard place for women, not only to break into but to stay in and be successful in and to get to become a VP of sales or a CEO? Why is it harder for women in this industry than men?
Rob Williamson: That's a hard question for me to answer. First and foremost, because I'm not a woman, and so for me to try to say from a woman's perspective, or try to understand what it's like to walk even one single step in a woman's shoes would be somewhat presumptuous for me. You know, I'm a husband of 26 years. I'm the father to 2 daughters. I love my mother more than anything in the whole wide world. So I have women in my life who mean the world to me. I have lots of employees that are women. I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about why it's hard or why it's not hard. I spend more of that time thinking about what I can do to be a better manager, a better advocate for women who do end up in this industry that I'm in.
I've always sort of looked at this and said, if I have a broad, diverse candidate pool, my job is always to hire the best person for that job. I owe that to my team. I owe that to my customers, but for whatever number of women that we have in that organization, at that point, then it becomes my job to advocate for what they want to do. Now, while fewer of them end up into CEO jobs or VP of sales jobs, some of that just could be that we're just not far along in the curve enough yet, because when you think about the number of people that are in the industry, the ratios are off, so it takes some time for that to catch up.
But I would say, and I hope this comes across encouragingly to female listeners, that the time is right now, there's never been a better time for a woman to be able to progress in her career than right today. It is in the front and center of every hiring manager at every company that's out there.
Whether it's good reasons or bad reasons, that's irrelevant. The opportunities there, so go take that, and what I would say to your female listeners is don't listen to all the noise, don't listen to the “you shouldn't be able to do this or you can't do it or it's a bad industry.” Go find someone who's willing to invest in you and be very direct with them about what you're trying to do.
When you do that and you find good mentors in your life, I think the time is as good right now as it ever has been for females in our industry to be able to get exactly where they want. All that being said, I would also say, don't listen to the fodder out there that says in order for you to be successful, you need to be a leader or you need to be a VP or you need to be a CEO.
If that's what you were built to do, great, but you know what? Not everybody is built to do that, and just because you're a great salesperson doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be a great sales leader or more importantly, that you're going to enjoy that job. So, to me, it's about how we define success.
To me, defining success is finding out what you're good at and doing that to the very best of your ability, because you're going to enjoy that job more and everyone around you is going to benefit from you being good at what you do. That's the first thing, and then what if you figure out through your skill sets and if your mentors also affirm this in you, then what you do is to say, okay, if my desired state is out here somewhere to the top and the right, and my current state is down here to the bottom and the left. Now you've got a starting point and an ending point. You can build a plan between the two and those mentors in your life can help you get there.
Cynthia Ficara: I love that. That is so well said. Also, something we have talked a lot about is having mentors. I’m just curious, can you tell us a little bit about a mentor that you've had that has inspired you in the past?
Rob Williamson: There are 2 kinds of mentors out there and I think people have to be careful that, with a mentor, you should be able to be completely honest, completely transparent, and completely vulnerable. Because if you're asking for someone to speak the truth in your life, you've got to be able to speak the truth right there.
You've got to be vulnerable with them. It is really hard to be completely vulnerable with someone who has the ability to promote you, right? So that's a very tough thing. I would encourage people that you should have personal mentors and professional mentors. Nothing wrong with that, but as a professional mentor, just keep in mind that you're never going to be totally, completely transparent because that vulnerability is a dangerous thing with somebody that you work with, or could potentially be a dangerous thing. So, what I would always say is to have a personal mentor who's that person has no stake in the game with you, except to say, I just enjoy being able to invest in your life.
From a professional standpoint, I think it is key that you're able to find someone who doesn't directly influence your career. To be able to give you good advice, you need to be close enough that they can give you a valuative device, but not so close to you that it smacks of something disingenuous that you're looking for a promotion.
An example for me is Stacey Nzing Singh. So Stacey was our president of EV3, and it's sort of just funny. I mean, it's just a coincidence that we're on the Girls of Grit podcast and one of my mentors is actually a female, but it's interesting. Stacey took a liking to me and somehow I fell under her good graces.
Part of that was because I came up with sort of a slogan to help bring EV3 and Fox Hollow together. We had an atherectomy on one side of the fence and we had balloons and stents on the other. It was almost like a middle school dance, right? Nobody was dancing to the band. We were all kind of staring at each other across the dance floor.
I coined this term called the continuum of care, which brought together these two different modalities of treating peripheral vascular disease, and it became not one versus the other, but both. It's only about the sequencing of those devices, and so for whatever reason, Stacy loved the fact that we were able to find a way to bring these two sales teams together.
And she just started investing in me. It's been sort of an interesting thing that she was never my boss directly, but she would always check in on me and she would ask me, how are you doing? Are you happy? Is everything going well? What are your frustrations? What are the things that are keeping you from being able to do your job to the best of your ability? What do you want to do next?
She would always ask me those same questions again, and I would tell her, Stacey, I don't really have any sort of promotional desires. I want to be the absolute very best at what I'm doing right now. And as promotional opportunities come up, I will evaluate those based on whether I can contribute at a high level or not.
She's like, she would always encourage me, you have to be able to advocate for yourself. She wouldn't say it quite that harshly but what she would say to me was, you got to advocate for yourself a little more than that.
You can't just sit back and so she was that encouragement to me to not just sit back, but to be vocal about the things that I could do and the things that can contribute to an organization more. So, even today, I thought with Stacey yesterday, and I mean, she's still a big factor in my life, both personally and professionally.
Anneliese Rhodes: I didn't realize that you were the continuum of care guy, but that's awesome, and that was a hard thing to marry the two companies together. That was good for you, that's awesome.
Rob Williamson: You want to know the backstory on that? This is country boys, stupid stuff right here. And so we were in a management meeting and our two sales teams hated each other, and we were in Minneapolis and they locked the management team in a room and said, you're not coming out until you guys figure out how to get these teams to like each other, and even the managers were arguing with each other.
And I stood up in the middle of the meeting, I was the youngest manager there. I was under 30 years old at that point, or about, about 30 years old at that point and I stood up and said, hey guys when I was little, we used to play backyard football, we used to draw plays in the sand. I was like, when I'm doing sales pitches with my doctors, I'm drawing things on napkins all the time.
Because sometimes I just can't find the right words to explain what I'm trying to say. I said I think it's time we start drawing plays in the sand, and they're like, Williamson, what the hell are you talking about? And I went up to the dry-erase board and drew two dots and a line in between. On one side, it said healthy leg, on the other side, it said amputation. I drew arrows going one way and I said, if we can agree, guys, the continuum of care means that we've got a progressive disease that is incurable, right? We cannot cure it, our job is to manage the disease process. And you know what success looks like? It's getting that patient to their coffin with all of their legs attached because a heart attack or a stroke or something else is going to kill him.
I said, it's not do we balloon instead, or do we add the rectum on this patient? It's about how we sequence these devices in a way that keeps them away from amputation for the longest period of time possible. Everybody kind of looks at each other and goes so we don't have to fight about which product we use anymore,
I said, not at all. We're going to use them all because, at the end of the day, we're going to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this patient. It's just a matter of, can we prioritize their legs staying attached over what your personal preferences are? That was it, it was that simple and I drew it up on the board.
Cynthia Ficara: It's extremely impressive because you were able to just find a way to articulate the big picture. I think that in our careers, so many times we trip over the little things and you're arguing over, like you said, do we balloon it's done. and it's not even about that. What advice would you give to those who seem to be struggling with that?
Stuck in those ruts of frustration or they can't seem to get ahead. What do they need to do to get pushed past these little things that seem to be frankly honest with you, there are some salespeople out there that it beats them down. They really do get stuck. What advice would you have for them to see past it?
Rob Williamson: This is one of my favorite topics to talk about with sales. I tell them asking this one question, they come to me and they're bitching and moaning and complaining, they're upset about something. I ask them one question, is this a happiness issue or is this a joy issue? And they look at me like, what in the world are you talking about?
And I go, is this a happiness issue? Well, a happiness issue would be, did you get an argument with your spouses for it? Yeah. Was it raining when you got to your car? Was one commission check a dollar lower than you thought it should be? Was one doctor rude to you one day? Those are happiness issues.
The joy issue would be, that I don't agree with the direction that the company is going, or we don't have a product pipeline that's going to support my success long-term, or we're hurting patients as opposed to helping patients. Those are joy issues. I said, so if we can separate the sort of temporal superficial things from deep-seated. Fundamental things about your character are that you can either fight them and be miserable, or you can go make a change.
I said that's the first thing I want you to decide. Is this a joy issue or is it a happiness issue? And 90 percent of the time they would come back and go, this is a happiness issue.
And I go, well, okay, then hold that conversation for tomorrow. And if you're still pissed about it, then I'll talk to you about it, but I guarantee you it'll be better, and you're not going to want to talk about it. If it's a joy issue, let's start talking about it now, because I want to make sure that we have you on the right career path.
And it's amazing that when you would just calm somebody down and just put them into these 2 silos, happiness versus joy. How many of those small things that get people all wound up are actually not that big a deal, and they're going to resolve themselves? So don't get wrapped around the axle over something that's going to change tomorrow, like the weather, one commission check, or one rude doctor.
So I always sort of put it in that context and say, big things will still be big things tomorrow. Small things won't be won't be around the next day. So let's figure that piece of it out. Now, to answer your question, if it is a big thing, you have to break it down into small bites. You eat the elephant one bite at a time otherwise, you choke, and so that's what I always tell people. Let's swim back upstream, let's look for the source, the root cause for this, the source cause for this, and let's break it down into little bites.
Anneliese Rhodes: Can we just hire you every day? Are you ready to start a new thing? We can have a three-person podcast. We're forming a new company. I'm feeling energized.
Rob Williamson: Good. That's what I want.
Anneliese Rhodes: This has been awesome. So, before we close out, I mean, this could literally go on for hours, by the way, but we have a time constraint, so we want to make sure we get everything done.
There are a number of things that we usually ask our interviewees and one of them is, do you have any favorite books that you either love to read over and over again or books that you kind of have changed your life, that have changed habits, that have changed the way you think.
Rob Williamson: There's two on the professional side and on the personal side, we wouldn't even go down that path. I could read a thousand different books. I'm a voracious reader, I have a library of hundreds of books. I love to read on the professional side. There are two that really sort of changed my thinking. One was the One-Minute Manager and Situational Leadership.
So you could read that one once a year and the change that came from me with that book was understanding that each person is different and you have to change the way that you manage based on someone's proficiency. So your management style should match their level of proficiency. So, for new hires who don't have a lot of experience, my job is to be more direct with them because they need that extra help versus somebody who's been in this industry for 20 years. I'm going to be in a more supportive style of leadership because what they need is my support, they don't need my expertise. They need someone to come alongside them and probably take counsel or more than they need a coach.
That's one and I reread that almost every year because I think it's really important to remind myself, even for that seasoned veteran, they may be really bad on the administrative side of the business, and I've got to be direct with them with that piece of it. But when it comes to sales skills, I have to switch hats and go back into a supportive role.
It helps remind me what my coaching style has to be based on what my audience is. The other one is The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell and so I think that one is so good. I mean, it just really is one of those things for foundationally. I'm convinced that you could adopt those into your character as a leader. I tell you what, you can go to the moon and back as a sales leader. People will follow you anywhere. One of the quotes that comes out of that book that I think is great says, you can't move people to action unless you first move them to emotion.
The way I say that in a country voice is simple: you have to love hard to coach hard.
You've earned the right to coach people, but if you don't love them first, you're never going to get them to do what you want them to do. They should do it for the right reasons, but I always try to make sure that my people know that I love them, that I care about them, and that I want them to thrive both professionally and personally.
And when they believe that, and they trust that, then I've earned the right to speak to them professionally. I think too many managers get into this business because I'm entitled because of my position or because of my title, but I can tell them what to do. People might do it because they have to, but you're never going to inspire them to greatness that way.
Cynthia Ficara: You may have an infectious energy like a coach. I mean, like a career coach, you need to be a career coach. You know, just what you had mentioned from the very beginning of how you started in dental and where you got to where you are now, I see that you have been able to just look at a worthy Lisa and I've used before as we call it a North Star.
You just kind of look ahead and you go where you need to go and you find the people on the way who are going to help you get there and your ability to block out some negativity, and really find what drives you is that character and your mission and it's your passion is palpable for this industry.
And I just really would love young women trying to get into this industry and those who are there to realize what an amazing career you can have when you work with people who believe in everything that you believe in and what a great world it is to be in and be a part of something that makes such a difference.
Rob Williamson: Well, and let me say one thing to you, to your female listeners too. Don't let anyone tell you not to embrace your femininity. It is an important thing. I see too many women that get into this business and they want their careers to advance so they start acting like men.
Don't act like men, you're gifting and the skill sets that you bring as a woman to my leadership team or to my sales team are inherently built into your gender. That's the gift that you have that we need and so I want to tell these people to embrace who you are, embrace some of those things that are built into you, the nurturing piece of you, the empathetic piece of you, the listening skills that you have.
Men are usually terrible at that stuff and so when you think about building out salespeople and the culture that we're looking for that's going to be just as world-class as the product we got to sell at Shockwave is the fact that we need that diversity. We need to include a female perspective.
Almost half of my sales team was female. If I didn't have any females on my leadership team, how disengaged were we going to be from that perspective? So we needed people in our team we're acting like women, women who were proud to be women who were feminine in their qualities because they brought a perspective that we missed so many times and we didn't do it on purpose, but it's because we're men.
So, from that perspective, I would say, embrace the fact that you bring different skills. Don't let somebody tell you that you need to act another way in order to be successful. You can be successful and will be successful by just embracing who you are.
Anneliese Rhodes: And with that, we are going to end on that, Rob, because that was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us on our Girls of Grit podcast Secrets in Medical Device Sales. We cannot tell you how much we appreciate you coming on today and you're the first inaugural man.
Rob Williamson: Happy to do it.
Anneliese Rhodes: Thanks, Rob. Have a wonderful day.
