3 personal stories of how soft skills have helped me as a statistician

Transcript

3 personal stories of how soft skills have helped me as a statistician

[00:00:00] Alexander: You are listening to the Effective Statistician podcast. The weekly podcast with Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske designed to help you reach your potential lead great science and serve patients while having a great [00:00:15] work life balance.

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[00:01:30] Welcome to a new episode of the Effective Statistician. Today I want to talk about couple of personal stories of how so-called soft skills help me in my job. Now, [00:01:45] the term soft skills actually comes from the military, where some trainers were. Educating soldiers on things that they called non hard skills.

[00:01:59] They used [00:02:00] the term hard skills because it often had to do with guns and other hard material. And so to say the soft skills were all about things that had to do with humans. Couple of not actually that [00:02:15] much lidars, they regretted if we use the term soft because. These skills are anything but soft. So people skills or human skills probably are better descriptions for [00:02:30] that.

[00:02:30] But you know what I’m talking about. It’s the non-technical skills, but I don’t like something being called non something, but, so let’s call them human skills or leadership skills. The medical [00:02:45] data leaders community is all about these skills. So it’s about better communication skills, better presentation skills, better listening skills, better negotiation to skills.

[00:02:58] Skills to help you [00:03:00] build trust, skills to help you maneuver conflict, situations, difficult conversations. Building teams, leading teams, convincing people, [00:03:15] negotiating with people, all these things that you need to do all the time, and you’re probably using much more than your statistical knowledge, your programming skills, [00:03:30] and these types of things.

[00:03:32] So let’s start with the first case study. I was working for a company and I was relatively new to this company and [00:03:45] I was working in the medical affairs and the HDA team and for preparation for bigger meeting, I needed all the phase three tables from medics that was holding [00:04:00] very close and tight to these tables.

[00:04:03] Other colleagues told me you can’t have access to these tables because they’re currently only for regulatory purposes. And I thought, but we need them for the HTA [00:04:15] preparation for medical affairs preparations as well. And I was told, no, you can’t have them. They are completely under control by this medic.

[00:04:25] So I had the chance to meet that medic in person. I [00:04:30] actually created a chance, I went to the head. Carter and spent some time there, and I also arranged a very short meeting with that person. Actually, that meeting was [00:04:45] only 15 minutes long, so I had this chance to quickly build trust with her so much that she would give me access to these tables.[00:05:00] 

[00:05:00] Now what did I do? I first wanted to understand where that person is coming from, and I saw that person had been working for smaller companies that had been acquired by Lilly, [00:05:15] the companies that I have been working for, and I knew a couple of people who were working on these compounds that were purchased as part of the deal.

[00:05:26] I asked her, do you know this [00:05:30] statistician? And she meant, yeah, I know that statistician. I’ve been working with her quite a lot. And I said, yeah, I know the statistician also very much, we were actually neighbors in terms of our offices and we [00:05:45] worked quite a lot together. And we talked a little bit about that statistician.

[00:05:49] And through that link, I could build some bridge with her. And I talked about the [00:06:00] responsibility of statisticians that make sure that everything is under control, and that data is only shown in places where it needs to be shown. And that regulatory approval, of course, is the first priority. And so I talked [00:06:15] all to the different things that were important to her.

[00:06:22] I could help her understand that I needed to have access to these tables to make [00:06:30] sure that not only regulatory approval, but also access questions will be solved. And she completely got the point that it’s not enough to get a regulatory approval, but it’s means [00:06:45] it’s important to get the drug to the patients ultimately.

[00:06:49] That of course includes access and reimbursement questions. After 10 minutes, I already had her okay [00:07:00] to get the tables. So that was just one story of how, by understanding how you build trust through care, competence, character, and in [00:07:15] this case says personal connection. So I could ensure her that everything was fine if she gives me access to these tables.

[00:07:25] You can also learn this, how to build [00:07:30] trust with someone that you have never met before. So we go into how you build trust in the medical data leaders community quite a lot. It’s a recurring theme because trust is the foundation [00:07:45] of influence and everything you do in your workplace. Second case study is about an advisory report, I had the chance to do a presentation at an advisory board [00:08:00] because I already negotiated myself into the teams that was preparing this advisory report. And for the data presentation, I thought like we always show [00:08:15] the same data in the same way. Always in line, always in charts, and looking at. Different digitalizations of the continuous data that was collected over time, [00:08:30] so different ways of defining response criteria, and with that, showing proportions of response at time points with mar charts or overtime points with Minecrafts,[00:08:45] 

[00:08:45] I understood that the participants of the advisory board. Who are also very much interested how the individual patients are behaving and [00:09:00] where they are actually landing, not just in terms of percent reduction, so response criteria, but actually the absolute value where they are. And so [00:09:15] I created some scatter plots that showed the.

[00:09:20] Follow up data versus the baseline data. So you had, for every patient, you had a dot on the scatter plot, and then for multiple time [00:09:30] points, you had multiple scatter plots. And if you shows them shortly after each other, then you can even see how the individual patients move from higher scores, which means more [00:09:45] severity to lower scores and let’s say even states there.

[00:09:49] Also shows that this kind of happened for the new drug very fast, and also sets the patients irrespective of where they started. [00:10:00] Ended up in very low scores and remains there. This very straightforward, easy, implemented approach. Hep C advisory board [00:10:15] members to understand the data in a completely different way.

[00:10:19] I got actually standing ovations for this way of showing the data, and the advisors [00:10:30] absolutely wanted to fine tune these kind of draft data visualizations, make some kind of animation out of it. They had some suggestion for how further to improve it. How to weave in the [00:10:45] different response criteria, how to color code them, all kind of different things.

[00:10:50] So we had a very good discussion. One nice thing was that key business [00:11:00] people, like the most important European marketing representative, was also part of.

[00:11:10] Because they saw how excited people were [00:11:15] about when I presented the data. They were absolutely supportive for getting more resources into this project and made some really noise promotional clips. We also ended [00:11:30] up publishing these, using these of data visualizations at conference booths in. Promotional material and all kind of different other places that [00:11:45] shows if you really understand what the audience wants, not what they are asking for, but they really want, and you can come up with innovative ways to communicate your message, you [00:12:00] can move the audience much better.

[00:12:04] And if you then seize opportunities for. Getting more budget, getting more resources, [00:12:15] then you can really create some kind of great innovation. And this innovation actually brought me at least two promotions because we further refined it. And it was shown quite a lot by [00:12:30] senior management as an example of bright innovation and how you can better present data.

[00:12:40] Next case study is actually from some time [00:12:45] after I stopped working for any of the big pharma companies. This time it was a negotiation agreement and I was facing a pretty tough negotiation [00:13:00] with a company we were going to provide a training for. The situation was the following. The company wanted to pay us on a hourly basis so you train for, dunno, [00:13:15] 20 hours and then we pay you first 20 hours.

[00:13:19] But of course that didn’t take into account all the time that we invested in preparing the training. Prepar, years of [00:13:30] fine tuning the training, making videos available. Creating different exercises and iterating the content more and more so that it was at the place we had it. [00:13:45] I wanted to have a value-based contract so that we basically get paid for each participant of the training and not just for the hours [00:14:00] we spent.

[00:14:02] It took quite some time, but finally we could convince them because I would say we, you also price drugs based on the value, not based on [00:14:15] the amount of hours you need to produce them. And that clarified, that says also a value in our creation of the training and not just in the delivery of the training.

[00:14:29] In the [00:14:30] end, the company agreed to have some value based pricing. We also agreed some rebates because they bought quite a lot of volume, which is completely fine, but this is [00:14:45] an example for how negotiation can help you to accomplish more, to win more for yourself. Now, as a side note. You might think this [00:15:00] is just fair to price something on the values that you create.

[00:15:07] To be honest, there is no such thing as a fair outcome. There’s just a thing like an [00:15:15] outcome that both sides agree to. There’s nothing like fair because there’s no judge, there’s no rules, there’s no, unlike in sports, no kind of expectations. On what is fair. [00:15:30] So everything depends on how well you can negotiate in the medical data leaders community, we also have a lot of training around negotiation because you also need to negotiate also [00:15:45] time.

[00:15:45] You negotiate about timelines, you negotiate about quality, you negotiate about workload, you negotiate about. New design features you negotiate with the FDA about [00:16:00] what estimate to use. You negotiate on all kind of different areas. So the medical data leaders community helps you also with the negotiation skills.

[00:16:12] So these are [00:16:15] three stories of how the soft skills or leadership skills can help you in your day-to-day job. Presentation skills, building trust, having empathy, good collaboration, [00:16:30] good negotiation are essential for all of us. Whether you’re a statistician, a programmer, a data scientist, or an any other quantitative researcher, our medical data leaders community is specifically [00:16:45] designed for us who come with a much more kind of logical background to help them.

[00:16:52] More influence. The medical data leaders community has three tiers. The first [00:17:00] tier is for individual contributors, so let’s say, so typical study statistician or programmer, such as working with publications and reports and these [00:17:15] kind of things. The second level is more for. Leaders set are, for example, group leaders or team leaders or responsible for a project or a capability area.

[00:17:28] The third level is more for [00:17:30] senior leaders. So these are people that have really strategic input. For example, managers of managers or need to drive change across the whole of the organization or the whole department. [00:17:45] And we have customized the. Different formats and training content for these different tiers.

[00:17:53] So check out the effective statistician.com. To learn more about the Medical Data Leaders [00:18:00] community,

[00:18:05] this show was created in association with PSI. Thanks to Reine and her team at VVS that helps the show in the background, and thank you for listening. [00:18:15] Reach your potential lead great science and serve patients. Just be an effective [00:18:30] statistician.