“[L]eadership teams look to HR Leaders for ideas on what they can do to enhance organisational strategy now more than ever. It can sometimes feel as though you don’t deserve the seat at the leadership table, but once you start to see the impact of those activities, that will fade. Always go in confident and just go for it, but be aware of the network and tools out there to help you along the way as well.” – Sharon McKean, Human Resources Director at Clasado, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Sharon McKean at Clasado, who started her Senior HR Leadership career as a Senior Director in International HR at Elan Pharmaceuticals. This was followed by the role of Senior HR Director at Summit Therapeutics PLC, and later as Executive Director for Global HR at Worldwide Clinical Trials Inc.
Sharon joined the team at BioMarin as Director of Human Resources for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia ahead of taking on the same position at Illumina Inc in December 2010, later transitioning to her current role in January 2016.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I left school with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do beyond entering into the workplace and continuing my learning. I got a general office job, and alongside it started studying Business and Finance for my HNC. I loved being in the world of work, and took to the job straight away. After just over a year, I was approached by the Personnel Manager for the company, who asked if I’d be interested in working in Personnel. To be honest, I was quite clueless about the People space at that point, but thought it would be a good move, especially as they said they’d sponsor my CIPD studies. I had finished my studies for the HNC and was thinking about my next steps in terms of continuing to work while starting to learn and study more, and the CIPD was the perfect opportunity to do that.
I took the opportunity, and never looked back from there. The Personnel Manager who thought I’d be good for the job was the best mentor and supporter I ever could have had. I was very fortunate to have someone so experienced seeing potential in me and taking me under their wing in such a kind and patient way. That approach created a safe environment for me to grow and develop, and built my confidence far beyond what it had been at school. It completely changed my life, and I knew from then on that HR was for me. I’ve never even really thought about doing anything else outside it—I love business, and I love that HR has evolved to be such a central part of business since I started out.
My career in Pharmaceutical HR has allowed me to maximise my impact while also realising both my passion for HR and my passion for Life Sciences. I’ve worked with some fantastic people who have a wealth of experience and expertise, and they have really enhanced my interest in the Life Sciences field. Being in the People space within that gives me a real sense of purpose, because the work we do is truly making a difference to people’s lives and health.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
I would say that COVID has been our biggest challenge recently. As an HR function, we’ve been talking about what the future of work might look like for a long time now, but COVID has made us put those visions into practice without overthinking them. The pandemic has had some benefit in terms of bringing about change, but it has been a real rollercoaster. I don’t think anyone was prepared COVID, and I’m not sure it’s something that we could have had a plan in place for before it happened either. Things have moved incredibly fast.
The fact that we have been forced into a new way of working has presented different challenges for everyone. There were initial challenges in terms of accommodating people who didn’t have access to a dedicated home office space or the relevant equipment at home to take into consideration, but as an organisation I think we’ve overcome those quite well. I think our approach to remote working has definitely changed, and I can see us moving to a more blended model that’s a hybrid of home and office based work. I hope that will give people a bit more of a work-life balance and access to opportunities they wouldn’t be able to take up otherwise, as well as encourage flexible working and promote the fact that not everyone has to work nine-to-five. I can definitely see us taking our flexible working approach a few steps further than we had been pre-COVID as a result of it.
The pandemic has also made us more aware of the mental health and wellbeing of our staff, and we’re more committed than ever to keeping a close eye on that aspect. Continuing to evolve our organisational structures, models, and processes around flexibility to manage wellbeing is an immediate concern on our agenda at the moment.
For businesses to be successful, they need to recognise that cultural change is an inevitable result of this pandemic. I don’t want some of the changes our sector has made to be temporary, and I believe that lasting change will lead to some really positive things. Where in the past HR functions have been quite slow to adapt and innovate and haven’t been the most agile, we’re playing much more of a leading role in the operations of our businesses these days. We have a voice at the leadership table much more now than we did early on in my career, and as our businesses really start to look to us to lead the charge, we need to embrace the opportunity and use our influence to ensure people are treated as individuals rather than put under a one-size-fits-all approach.
Moving into 2021, a key theme for us at Clasado will be really focusing on our talent development and making sure we’re bringing the right people into the business. We’re a small company, so we rely on a few skilled members of staff rather than expansive teams. Retaining them for as long as possible is a key concern, but we also need to have robust recruitment and training processes in place to ensure skilled succession when they do leave us.
We held our first People Review recently, and we gained a lot from that in terms of understanding where our focuses need to be. It was valuable in lots of different ways, because it opened up a lot of other business conversations. It helped us come up with new ways of engaging and developing people and making them feel as though they’re getting something back from the organisation in terms of their career progression, as being such a small company we don’t always have a career ladder for every role.
We’re lucky enough to have a very progressive CEO at the helm who is absolutely behind personal development, and we’re hopeful that our commitment to development and cultural change will improve our organisation for everyone.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
If you’re new to HR, I would definitely advocate studying for your CIPD. It’s a great foundation for you to draw on in your HR practice, and it appeals to potential employers if you have your CIPD qualification or are studying for it.
The other thing I would say if you’re going into HR is to really, truly understand your business and the people who are part of it. When I first started out, I assumed that if you’d done one HR programme in one company, you could take it and roll it out in another, but I’ve learned that some things that work in one company just don’t in another. The only way you know what’s going to work and what isn’t is by really understanding the organisation. From a strategy perspective, you need to understand where your business is going, what it’s trying to achieve, the needs and motivations of the people within it, and what makes a fantastic employee experience to them.
There are no stupid questions. Being a successful HR professional takes confidence, and the only way to achieve that is to first have confidence in your environment to allow you to ask those questions and develop personally. When you ask questions, you’re looking at issues from a completely different angle, so asking them may turn out to be useful even if it’s not your area of expertise. Be inquisitive; it’s the only way to learn.
In our role, we have to have the trust of our organisations, so the relationships we build are vital. We talk about cultures of openness and transparency, but we absolutely need to live those values for them to be taken up by our people. When you build strong relationships with people, you gain some invaluable insights, and you can do your job more effectively as a result.
I would also say that leadership teams look to HR Leaders for ideas on what they can do to enhance organisational strategy now more than ever. It can sometimes feel as though you don’t deserve the seat at the leadership table, but once you start to see the impact of those activities, that will fade. Always go in confident and just go for it, but be aware of the network and tools out there to help you along the way as well.
Sharon has been working as Human Resources Director since January 2016, and provides leadership across all aspects of Clasado’s HR function alongside continuing to drive the company’s cultural and organisational change agenda.