Spotting Hidden Strengths in Employees: Lessons From Pfizer — with Jenny Gattari

The Strengths You Dismiss: Jenny Gattari on Spotting Hidden Talent in Your People

In this post: Pfizer CentreOne's Jenny Gattari shares her approach to spotting hidden strengths in employees, from asking what people loved most about a project to handing them stretch assignments. Her goal is a team that sees and taps each other's strengths.

Jenny Gattari's team was overloaded when her manager handed her help. The new team member was a clinician, not a marketer. She had no MBA. She did not know how to price a product, and she did not understand the concept of margin. What she had going for her was that she was free.

Gattari remembers sitting in a meeting thinking, "Are you kidding me?" It became a lesson in spotting hidden strengths in employees.

A year later, that same colleague presented the operating plan at a business review. "I couldn't have been more proud, and she was way better at it than I was," Gattari said on Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group. The nurse by training is now a senior director at Pfizer, and Gattari credits the clinical instincts she brought with making her a strong marketer.

That story sits at the center of how Gattari leads. She is Global Business Development Lead for Pfizer CentreOne, Pfizer's contract development and manufacturing business, which spans more than 30 manufacturing sites. Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: The strengths that matter most are often the ones people wave away, and they rarely find them alone.

The Job She Turned Down

Gattari has lived that argument. She earned an industrial engineering degree from Purdue, started in manufacturing, moved into R&D program management, earned an MBA, and spent most of her career in commercial leadership.

When she was asked to apply for her current role, she said no. They kept asking. Eventually she decided that if they felt that strongly, she should listen. It became her favorite job.

"Clearly somebody saw something in me that I couldn't see in myself," she said. Her advice to anyone in that position is blunt. "If somebody sees it in you, you should listen. Don't be stubborn like I was."

She once believed strengths were role specific. The zigzag career taught her otherwise. "It's sometimes the strengths that you dismiss, that are so natural to you that you don't even know it," she said. "It takes somebody else to put the spotlight on those strengths for you."

Spotting Hidden Strengths in Employees: Look Past the Title

Host Alec McChesney pressed her on the harder case: What happens when a leader sees a strength the employee does not want? Maybe the person loves marketing, but the boss sees a closer, and accepting that means a new quota and a new title.

Gattari's answer is to pull the strength away from the job. "You got to think of them as part of your DNA," she said. "I'm an industrial engineer in my DNA, but I don't work in the engineering department."

The clue, she said, is usually passion. When she debriefs a project, she asks what the person loved most about it. If the answer is pulling together data and presenting it, that points to process, storytelling, or summarizing, even if the person does not see it yet.

She starts in the interview. She asks candidates what they are most proud of, and she asks for one word that describes them and why. Her own answer is a play on her surname that turns it into "glue." She connects people and things to make work happen. "I'm the glue that holds the team or the organization together," she said.

"It's sometimes the strengths that you dismiss, that are so natural to you that you don't even know it."

Jenny Gattari, Global Business Development Lead, Pfizer CentreOne

When Feedback Fails, Assign the Work

Telling someone about a strength does not always land. "Feedback doesn't always work for everyone," Gattari said. "Sometimes you have to give them an assignment."

The work lets people watch themselves succeed. They often resist at first, she said, and the leader's job is to show belief until they believe it themselves. Once they can observe the strength in action, "the strength becomes magnified for them."

To keep a stretch assignment from becoming a sink-or-swim test, she shares an example of something that worked for her, such as a report or an AI prompt. That takes "the gray space" and makes it "more black and white," she said, and it gives the person a place to start. Then the one-on-ones do the work: How is it going, and what have you learned? Jason Casarella drew a similar line in coaching vs. micromanaging.

Spotlight People in Public

Team meetings help too. When a team member was building AI agents for training modules, she did not announce the assignment. She asked him to tell the team about the agents. Colleagues jumped in with ideas and new places to try them.

She does the same when she introduces people in her network, naming what the person is great at or what their hidden strength is. The biggest reward now is watching her team do it for one another, "when they see it in each other and they tap each other's strengths," she said.

That matters because development can turn competitive. Gattari works to build a team that does not try to one-up itself. Her team shares one revenue target, so a won proposal is "a win for everybody, not just whose account it was," she said. The team has overachieved that target. Toni Burkard made a related case about why great teams don't happen by accident.

The Trouble With Doing It Alone

Gattari learned the leadership side of this the hard way. While volunteering with her department at a nonprofit, she started telling everyone what to do. A team member stopped her: This was not her nonprofit.

"It's easy to be a leader that gets others to follow you," she said. "But to be a leader who helps and inspires and develops others to lead, that's the difference."

The same rule applies to her own struggles. Looking back, "it's always when I thought I had to do it alone," she said. She now leans on a wide Pfizer network as thought partners and deliberately seeks out people who think differently. Asking people exactly like her, she said, likely gets the same answer.

Rapid-Fire Leadership Lessons

• Daily habit: Listening. Active listening before answering, because "one more question is better."
• Most underrated skill: Self-awareness. "To create other leaders, you have to be self-aware."
• Stop doing: Jumping in. Let people learn from their mistakes, because "they may not need saving. You just think they do."
• Best advice: "You're not alone, and you don't have to do everything yourself."

The Takeaway: Someone Else Holds the Magnifying Glass

Gattari closed on permission. It is OK to say you don't know, she said, and to ask for help. McChesney added the corollary: Leaders who give themselves grace find it easier to give their teams grace too.

Her career makes the case for both sides of the magnifying glass. She needed someone to see what she could not, and a free resource with no business background needed her to do the same. The best strengths on your team are probably hiding in plain sight. Finding them is your job, and so is admitting you need help to find your own.

Listen to the Full Episode

Hear Jenny Gattari's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Find it on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.