Learning to Revisit the Right Questions

By Dillon Lee

(2025 LYP Program Participant & Scholarship Winner)

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One of the most enduring lessons I took away from the LYP Leadership Program is that leadership clarity does not arrive immediately, but it develops through repeated reflection over time. The program did not hand me a fully formed personal brand. Instead, it gave me the cognitive muscle to think through questions I continue to revisit weeks after the program ended.

When I was initially going through the LYP Leadership Program, I did not have clear answers to many of the questions we were encouraged to explore. At t

he time, that felt uncomfortable. I have since realized that the program’s value lies not in producing instant certainty but in building the capacity to revisit these questions with greater honesty and clarity as my career evolves. I am writing this blog at a later inflection point in my professional journey, with a clearer sense of direction, precisely because I keep returning to those questions.

Over the past several years, I have navigated multiple professional identities and significant transitions. I worked as a clinical pharmacist during the COVID-19 pandemic, served as an Ethics Officer and Internal Auditor at a global pharmaceutical company, and, more recently, returned to school as a law student. Each phase of my career offered valuable skills, perspectives, and networks. At the same time, moving across clinical, corporate, and academic environments made it difficult to integrate these experiences into a coherent sense of direction. While each role made sense on its own, I often struggled to articulate how they fit together or where they were leading.

This is where LYP’s session on personal brand became particularly meaningful for me. Rather than pushing me toward a predefined narrative, the program equipped me with a set of questions that created space for reflection.

• How do you want to be remembered? My answer to this question came relatively easily: I want to be remembered as kind, insightful, and fair. These are values I observed in leaders across my previous professional environments and that have consistently guided me in different roles. Whether working on the front lines during a public health crisis or navigating compliance and ethics within a large organization, these qualities stood out to me as worth safeguarding.

• What do you want to be known for? This question also felt value-oriented. I wanted to be known for rigorous, critical analysis so that when I show up at the table for colleagues and clients, I can focus on providing reassurance. I recognized that I am drawn to roles where I help others make sense of complex information without losing sight of the human relationships that underlie workplace or business decisions.

• Who do you want to be known by? This was the question I struggled with most. At the time, I did not yet have a coherent sense of direction, and without it, it was difficult to imagine a clear audience or community. I remember leaving the program that day feeling a little frustrated. Still, I held on to the LYP materials and kept returning to them, using them as a guide to reflect and filter through the noise.

  
  

More recently, while drafting a paper on how AI has accelerated the transformation of companies, including pharmaceutical companies, into data enterprises, I recognized a consistent thread across my roles. I had developed the ability to understand and work with healthcare data, including clinical trial, patient-level, and business- and compliance-related data. I found myself increasingly drawn to work at the intersection of healthcare data, law, and compliance. I am interested in helping organizations and clients understand not only the legal obligations associated with the data they collect but also the strategic and ethical considerations that come with it.

This clarity did not come during the program itself. It emerged through repeated engagement with the LYP materials and questions, long after the sessions ended. Each time I revisited them, I articulated my experiences with greater confidence. The LYP Leadership Program planted the questions; over time, through continued reflection, they have grown alongside my career.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dillon Lee is a pharmacist and a law student pursuing health and privacy law to contribute to human-centred healthcare and innovation ecosystems. She combines her clinical experience with legal practices to support innovation that meaningfully impacts patients and professionals.