Elevate: Estelle Natali on What You Do With Your Story

In this Elevate conversation, Vector Talent's James Diemar speaks with Estelle Natali, Chief Growth & Strategy Officer at Cerba Research, about how a serious illness as a teenager set the direction of her career, and why every mentoring relationship she has starts with one question: what do you want people to say about you?

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From patient to R&D

Estelle Natali's interest in drug development started in a hospital bed. At 13 she was treated for a serious illness that had no approved therapy for children, so her doctors gave her an adult treatment and watched to see how she'd respond.

"Nobody knew how I would react. I was already part of scientific publications when I was 13."

The experience left her with a question she's been following ever since: how can a therapy be approved for an adult and not for a child? She went on to study biochemistry and pharmacology, but university showed her the bench wasn't where she wanted to be. What held her attention was the route a treatment takes to reach a patient, which pulled her towards pharma, CROs and R&D.

"People always ask me why I didn't do medicine. I didn't want to be a doctor. I wanted to understand whatever treatment people gave me, and how it got to the point where I could take it."

She followed her science degrees with business and administration, learning the finance, partnerships and alliance work that sit around drug development. Since then she's run operations and delivery functions, including as head of delivery at LabCorp, before moving into her current role leading growth and commercial strategy at Cerba Research.

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No plan, plenty of direction

For someone who's held senior roles acrossseveral functions, Estelle is clear that none of it was mapped out in advance.

"When people ask me what my career planis, my answer is always that I don't have one. I knew what I liked and what Ididn't like, and when an opportunity came, I jumped on it without caring aboutthe title or scope."

What she weighed instead was where shecould make a difference. She's been approached about moves into finance and logistics, but health is where she feels her work matters most to patients. Looking back on her illness, she puts it simply: "It's all about what you do with your story."

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The question at the heart of mentoring

Estelle's approach to mentoring grew out of a mistake she made in her first people management role, at around 30. Like alot of new managers, she modelled herself on leaders she admired, and before long she stopped recognising herself.

Her first mentor asked her something that baffled her at the time: what did she want to be remembered for?

"When you're 30 and you've just stepped into your first people management role and someone asks what you want to be remembered for, you think, what on earth are they asking me? I'm managing a team. Then you start to ask what kind of leader you really want to be."

She calls the answer your legacy. It's what people say about how you showed up each day, whether that's as a driver, someone who unlocks solutions or someone who's always available. If it matches your values, you're on the right track. If it doesn't, something needs tochange, either in how you work or in the leader you're aiming to be.

It's now the first question she puts to everyone she mentors, and she admits her mentees find it a little funny by now.

She's also relaxed about what mentoring has to look like. At one point she had three or four mentors at once, each chosen because they did something well that she couldn't yet do.

"Some people believe mentoring lasts a lifetime. It could be six months. It could be three hours of conversation, and that's enough."

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Knowing when to leave the driver's seat

Estelle separates the skills on your CV from your personality, which she believes never changes completely. What you can do is stay aware of it. She describes herself as a driver, and she knows exactly how that shows up under pressure.

"In a calm environment where everything is going to plan, I'll inspire people and push them to go above and beyond. If there's suddenly a sense of urgency, I tend to put the driver's hat back on, take the driver's seat and go."

That's her cue to stop. If she's doing the work instead of letting her team do it, she's no longer leading the way she wants to. She sees it as a common early mistake among women in leadership, rooted in a belief that success means doing everything yourself and never failing.

Working on it has meant getting comfortable with not knowing. She's deliberately taken on departments and functions where the scope turned out to be different from what she'd expected, which forced her to trust the people around her.

"It's okay to say that you don't know. That's the toughest thing for anyone in an organisation, and for a woman it's even harder to say, well, actually, I don't know."

In those situations she found one question did most of the work: how do you know that? Over time, she says, her leadership has moved away from statements and expectations towards questions, and that's helped her let go of control.

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Stretch with a safety net

People who've worked for Estelle describe her as supportive but willing to push them out of their comfort zone. Her way of balancing the two is to make sure anyone taking on something new has the tools and support to succeed, and knows she's behind them.

"When you ask someone to do something they're not used to, you're asking them to confront their fears, their beliefs, their right to fail or make mistakes."

Without that reassurance, she says, most people will understandably stay where they feel safe. She's equally clear that not everyone needs stretching all the time. Some people do their job extremely well and want a couple of years of enjoying it before they're ready for the next challenge, and she thinks that deserves respect.

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Feedback that doesn't wait for the annual review

Leading large departments, Estelle relies on her leadership team, but she doesn't save talent conversations for the yearly cycle. If she joins a customer escalation call and a project manager stands out, or would benefit from support in one area, she follows up with their manager afterwards, whether or not they report to her.

"For me, every discussion is a talent conversation, or an opportunity to give feedback, whether it's constructive or positive."

It ties into a principle that's run throughher career. One of her mentors once told her that whenever she was brought into a meeting, people knew she'd put the organisation and the customer first. She's acted on that even when it cost her, stepping down from a role during are organisation because it was the right call for the business.

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What she'd tell her younger self

Asked what advice she'd give her younger self, Estelle starts with something she teaches her daughter: you can't control what people think of you or the feedback you receive, only how you respond toit.

The more personal answer was to be kinderto herself. For years she confused introspection with criticism, reviewing what she could have done differently at the end of each day and skipping over what had gone well.

"Most of the time I completely forgot that second step, and it was constantly about the things I should have done differently. That probably affected my self-confidence for years."

She admits she's still hard on herself, but she notices it now and moves on to what she'll do about it. Sometimes that means going back to her team to apologise for a reaction, or telling someone their solution was better than the one she'd suggested. As she sees it, that's a matter of respect for the people around her, because nobody leads alone.

Elevate is Vector Talent's series of conversations with women leading the way in pharma services. You can find more interviews on our podcasts page, and if you're building leadership teams across clinical development, see how we support CROs.