67 | Empathy as a key driver of business success with Pritesh Shah

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

This is definitely something that, that I feel very passionate about, and I think can help our organization. And I'm learning from others who do it well and finding ways to do this well and to establish this opportunity to learn and develop and make sure that every action that we take, we're learning from and we're also capturing it so others can benefit from that learning.

Hi there, and welcome to this episode of Building Better Cultures with me, Scott McInnes. Um, before we kick into today's guests, uh, a couple of quick thank yous. The first one to you all, because this month is the biggest month. April was the biggest month, uh, in terms of downloads that we've ever had on the podcast. So a big thank you to all of you who have listened, who've liked, who've shared social posts. It really, really is very much appreciated. Created. So thanks a million for doing all of that. Second thanks is to our sponsor Workvivo, who've built an amazing internal comms and engagement platform which is connecting people in organizations to their organizations all around the world. If you want to get more information on them, just pop along to workvivo.com and you'll find a load of information there. Today's guests— now, we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the power of people leaders and talking about the power of senior execs and talking about exec-led purposes and leading from the top and all those things that you hear on lots of business podcasts and read in lots of business books. So, I thought we'd better start getting on some people leaders and some senior execs to maybe put them through their paces, to be asked them a few questions and get their perspectives on what they think makes a great leader and the role of internal comms and engagement in building great cultures. So, I'm really excited today to have Pratesh Shah, who is the Chief Commercial Officer from Novocure. They're a US-based company. That is innovating amazing things in the area of cancer treatment and cancer research. So, Pratesh, hello there. How are you?

Hey, Scott. Nice to see you.

Great to see you too. And you, of course, despite the fact that it's a beautiful day here in Ireland, you're in Florida, so I'm never going to trump your beautiful day, I guess, am I?

No, but you know what? Right now it's gorgeous. When it's the summer here, I bet you that your weather is going to be better than ours.

Okay. Less sweaty.

Yeah, exactly.

Listen, let's just kick off. To kick this off, as I always do, I think that guests like to get to know maybe a little bit about you, where you've come from, and maybe a little bit about Novocure, because you'll do a much better job of that than I will.

Yeah, thank you for that. So Novocure is a global oncology company, and our mission and purpose is to help patients with various forms of cancer through our platform technology, tumor treating fields. And today we are indicated to help patients who have rare forms of brain cancer called glioblastoma and a rare form of lung cancer called mesothelioma. Some of you may know this, uh, because it's the form of lung cancer that's tied to asbestos exposure. And then we have a vast pipeline to help patients with many other forms of solid tumors. So we have a lot of work to do to get our therapy to many patients who need cancer treatment across the globe.

And tell me about you, Pratesh. What's your background? Where have you come from?

So my background's kind of boring. I'm a pharmacist, and I don't mean to say pharmacists are boring. I mean to say that my academic training is nothing compared to what I do today. And where it helps me is to put science in perspective for those who may not be as familiar with science. At the end of the day, What I'd like to help people understand is my job is through the teams that we work with internally and the stakeholders that we have externally to really advance the organization's mission. And there, our mission is to ensure that patients who are impacted by these rare diseases today and other forms of cancer down the road have an opportunity to hope, for a longer survival. So that means a longer life ahead of them where they can potentially, again, uh, based on a vision to put sort of cancer at the backdrop of the living that they need to do. And that's where I would say my work is very exciting because I come across numerous people across the organization, stakeholders across the globe who are committed to this cause and this purpose to make sure that that we're doing everything possible to give hope to these patients and care providers.

And I think what's really interesting when you talk about being committed to this cause and this purpose, I'm always slightly jealous of senior execs who work in life sciences or work in areas of work where they're actually helping people directly. Because for me, I talk a lot about purpose. I talk a lot about purpose-led organizations and leading purposefully. And being, of course, in the life sciences, you have a really strong purpose. At the end of the day, the technology that you're creating saves lives. So how do you and other leaders in Novocure use that to, to really engage and motivate your people?

Yeah, Scott, so the first thing that I will say about our organization, like many healthcare organizations, our mission is to put the patient at the heart of everything that we do. So our day starts with thinking about the patient, and our day across the globe ends with thinking about the patient. And that patient-forward centricity allows us to kind of go that extra mile when we feel like we're out of energy, when we feel like we need that boost of that just a little something extra to get going. We think about patient stories and the impact that we have on the larger cancer community. One specific way that we're able to do that is our product is a medical device, which means that it's a physical therapy that is delivered to the patient. There is a level of education and support we provide as a result of that. And the benefit that, that this has brought to the organization and our mission is that we actually get to see what happens. We're in front of the patient, we're having a conversation with them as they're initiating treatment. We get invited into what's happening in their lives as a result of it. And we learn about many interesting individuals, artists, people who are service-driven individuals who are giving back to their communities despite what's happening in their life today, this big thing that they're dealing with, with their cancer. And that is just truly inspirational. When you come across somebody who is motivated and committed to bettering their community or their family or their society, despite the backdrop of what they're dealing with, that to me brings empathy, humility, and just kind of passionate at a whole different level. And I believe that's one of the key reasons why we are the organization that we are, meaning this patient-forward organization. Patients have invited us into their lives, and as a result, we are able to invite them into all things that we are doing, we're working on, whether that be technology innovation, whether that be decisions that we're making on providing new education materials, and sometimes that also means motivating us as an organization, as a team. So at different team meetings, we're able to invite the patient and the caregiver in to share their unique story and the potential impact that we as an organization have made in their lives. And hearing those stories makes our mission that much more real and that much more impactful.

Wow, that is really impactful. I think if I worked in Novocure listening to that, I'd probably just be a bag of tears most of the time.

And that is the case. We provide a box of tissues at some of these meetings because it is heartwarming, right? When you can really understand the true impact you're making, your work is making on somebody's life, how can it not touch you at a very human level? And actually, empathy happens to be one of our core values. And it's the empathy towards what we do, but it's also empathy towards sort of what's happening within even our own lives as we come together to serve this common mission.

And do you find that because you're working in that world where empathy is such a core, a core part of what you do, because I think it's funny that, that sadly cancer is so prevalent that we've all been touched maybe directly, maybe slightly indirectly, maybe a grandparent or a parent. Um, that it does make it easier to empathize with people. But I wonder, how does that show up in Novocure, in the day-to-day work that you're doing, outside of just the patients, the empathy with each other? How do you bring that to life if that's one of your values?

Yeah, and thank you for that question. It is important to reflect on, you know, when I think about empathy, and I used to think about empathy as putting myself in somebody's shoes, and there's so much more to empathy than that. I think it's being mindful about somebody's situation, what may be happening behind the scenes that you're not aware of. I often say assume good intent. It's something that I've learned from my mother. Assuming good intent, meaning that don't assume something is happening from a place of malintent. Assume that the intention by which it's being presented or happening, sort of the actions that are that are a result of somebody's thought process are of good intention. So I kind of mix them together and making sure that when you have a colleague you're working with that is not showing up that day as they normally would, you automatically need to understand and assume good intent that something might be happening that is allowing Joe to show up differently than he normally does. Something might be happening in his either personal life, or maybe he came from a meeting where he was having a difficult conversation with somebody, he's bringing that into the the situation here. So empathy is really important because it helps us dial up our compassion towards each other. And it also allows us to take pause and really think about, okay, why might this be happening? What does this mean? And sometimes it might just mean taking a break from whatever that situation might be to say, hey, you know what? I can see that something else might be on your mind, or maybe let's pause here and let's have this conversation at another point in time. And sometimes empathy can play a role when you have a disagreement, especially with, with the mission and purpose that I just talked about, anchoring to that mission and purpose. Hey, we all have a different point of view here. We're not aligning. Let's think about our stakeholder. Let's think about the patient, the caregiver, the physician, what might make their life easier and how might we be able to get to a solution based on what they may want. And again, now, now you're extending that empathy to different stakeholders, which might help align on resolving a situation or a challenge that you may be facing. So it plays a multifaceted role, both internally, externally, inter-peer, but also inter-stakeholder relationship. And it's been something fascinating to sort of unfold as we've identified this core value. It's something that has been part of our organization from the very beginning as we started as an R&D organization, but it's been very interesting to see how it unfolds holds in practice, in practicality, and sort of the journey that we've taken over the 20 years that we've been an organization to see it sort of manifest into how we apply empathy today, both internally and externally.

And I think, you know, your values are working and your value set is the right value set when you can see them spill over the wall from in the organization to outside of the organization. And they are as relevant and usable in the big wide world as they are within the walls of your organization. Absolutely. That's really interesting. When I think about that whole idea of the way somebody's showing up, you have to be more empathetic, think they're coming from a good place. How much harder, not maybe just empathy specifically, but in terms of your values and just from a people leader perspective, how much harder has that been when you've not really been able to see people that often for the past 12 or 14 months? What issues has that presented?

Yeah, so it definitely, when you're not in front of the individual, your peer, your colleague, a team that you're leading, it makes it that much harder because it's hard to read a screen. When you're not in front of somebody, you sort of get the face and sometimes you can tell something may be happening behind the scenes, but you can't share the stories of what may be happening in your life. You can't catch up. I find that Zoom meetings, it's hard to build rapport. They become transactional. You show up at the meeting, you get the work done, and then you leave, and sometimes you're going to another virtual meeting. There are a few things that I found helpful in these scenarios. One is carving out time to create a space for individuals to connect sort of without an agenda, without a business agenda. So the agenda really is to catch up with the team. And one initiative that we started very early on was this notion of coffee chats. And we would pull a group of 8 to 10 people across the organization. And sometimes they were peers and colleagues and sometimes they weren't. It was just to form what they shared where they were Novocure employees, part of the commercial organization, and they were all advancing the mission forward. And the stories that came out of that, learning about the challenges of educating children over Zoom meetings. Some had younger children, some had older children, So that decision point between transitioning from high school to college in this pandemic was a big challenge for those who had children moving on to that next phase of their lives. Another aspect of that that allowed us to sort of connect more on a human peer level was talking about maybe what we were consuming on social media, or were we on the frenzy of baking sourdough breads, and what were our starter doughs like? I mean, these were just organic things that came up which immediately allowed us to connect with the fact that we were all going through this together and each situation was slightly different and each sort of the camaraderie that we were building as an organization that allowed us to get this sort of virtual support system to say, hey, you know what, my situation might not be yours, however, I know that we're both going through something And in addition to this, we have this big purpose-driven cause and work that we need to get done to ensure that no patient is left behind during this pandemic who needs to gain access to our treatment. So those were some of the ways that I feel like empathy has— you have to find different ways of connection. I'll share with you one of the other things that I've learned just in my kind of journey of learning to make the best of this environment that we're in. And one of the things that I've learned is turning the camera off sometimes helps you connect through your audio senses. And there's a lot of evidence on this front that connecting through kind of hearing helps you actually dial up more empathy than connecting visually and through your hearing and listening skills. That's counterintuitive to me, at least early on. I was thinking, well, that doesn't make sense because if I see somebody, I can actually see the expressions on their face, or I could see sort of the— how my— whatever I'm saying may be landing on the person. I can make eye contact. But this actually one of the aspects why this is true, and there's a lot of research on this front as well, is because when you are dialing up multiple senses, you tend to sort of give up a little bit of each of your senses. So if there's something happening in the background, uh, if, if you have a, a piece of art behind you, if your lighting is off, uh, whatever the case might be, sometimes people have these virtual backgrounds. You're trying to figure out if it's virtual or if it's their real space. All these things, even though you're not aware of them, are happening and you're perceiving this information. And sometimes it can be a little bit of an overload where you may take away from what you're doing at hand. So these little sort of tricks, if you will, or learnings have helped us maintain and keep the empathy alive to make sure that we are supporting each other as we go through this pandemic and as we continue to advance the organization's mission.

I love that. And I've been saying recently, Zoom or Teams or whatever your VC poison is, Webex, people will ring now and say, let's just jump on a Zoom. And my automatic response these days is why? We don't need to, let's just ring each other. Let's go mad and just pick up the phone and have a conversation. How's about we do that? Let's go all naughties. And you know, it is funny, but you know, the whole VC thing has become go-to. I think you're absolutely right. You know, I'm looking at your background now, which I know having had a previous conversation with you isn't a virtual background, but it's a very cool and funkily painted wall. But I'd be wondering, I wonder what that is? And I wonder how that is? And is that curtain stuff? To the right, or is that more paint? Or yeah, and I'm then not listening to you. So I think being able to take away one of those senses, and we know from people who are blind or deaf how much more it elevates the senses that they do have. And I guess in a much smaller way, it's a similar kind of idea.

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Talk to me a little bit about innovation, because that's— that really, as a healthcare company, as a life sciences company, that has to be at the heart of everything you do as an organization. So what is it that leaders, what is it that you as a senior leader in the organization and the leaders that you work with are doing in Novocure practically to try and nurture that culture of innovation?

Yeah, Scott. So innovation happens to be another one of our values because without innovation—

I'm knocking these down. This is amazing. That's 2 down.

2 down. Yes. 2 out of our 6. Let's see if we can get through the rest. But innovation is an important value for us because As we talked about this behemoth goal that we have to— and I'm not just talking about Novocure, but the goal of the cancer community is to strike out cancer, to put cancer at the backdrop such that we can truly make it an acute disease. And in order to do that, we have to continuously innovate, continuously challenge the convention. And our therapy, our technology is a great push towards that because as I mentioned earlier, we are a medical device company. So innovation is at the heart of what we do, at the core of what drives us and we continuously think about ways of doing things a different way. What I found during the pandemic more so than, than ever before is we had constraints. We either had a timeline constraint, for example, much of our organization relies on being able to be in front of patients live as we're educating them about our product, as we're helping them initiate treatment. We had to pivot and make all of those things virtually available. So when somebody had a challenge of getting either, either us getting to them or them getting to a clinic, we have to make sure that all of that support we were providing virtually. So initially we were spending a good deal of time making sure that we were not compromising the quality, the empathy that we talked about, because you lose a little bit of that when you're not live, or even our ability to explain the nuances of what might be happening. Sometimes that's lost when you do that virtually. So we had to be very thoughtful on this front and think about what we can take advantage of in terms of technology that was available, processes and procedures that we could pivot without losing quality and consistency. One of my learnings through this process is that constraints often lead to greater innovation. And let me explain what I mean by that. So if I said to somebody, you have endless dollars, go figure something out. And if I told another team, you have $10,000, go figure something out. 9 out of 10 times when you put that constraint of dollars, your possibilities narrow. And what you're kind of filtering through narrows. So you have less possibilities narrowing, and you can actually come out with a more tangible solution than this team that has endless resources. And this has been a really good learning for me because when I think about time, when I think about dollars, when I think about lots of things that we think about taking sort of that next step forward, how do we fuel the ability to be creative and to be innovative? And one of the ways to do that is to put some constraints. It's almost like tying your hand behind your back and figuring out a way to carry that egg on a spoon as you're going from one to the other. And a lot of creativity comes about when you say you can't use your hands. Similarly, I found that the, the fact that we could not be together, the fact that we could not be live, those types of scenarios, those types of constraints allowed us to be more creative and think differently. And I think that that's what sometimes innovation is about— thinking differently, thinking sort of outside of the box, and really trying to solve a core challenge that may be in front of you.

Yeah, brilliant. And for me, just as something to build on that, for me, I always think innovation is about trying and failing and being okay to fail and being fast to fail. Actually, I was chatting to a previous podcast guest, Denise Black from Invest NI, the other day, and she has the acronym FAIL, and it's First Attempt in Learning. So let's not see failure as a bad thing. Let's see failure as a brilliant thing because we've tried something and it hasn't worked. So we'll now try it a different way. Back to your, back to your $10,000 example. We've tried it that way. It didn't work. It was a car crash. Let's make it $20,000. We know that doesn't work. So really interesting. But for me, the one thing that sits really cheek by jowl along with failure and along with innovation is something that we've spoken a lot about on the Clubhouse chats that I do every week, 4:00 GMT on a Thursday. Cheap advert there. If anybody wants to come and join, feel free. We talked a lot about psychological safety over the past few weeks. And if an organization doesn't have a level of overt psychological safety within its culture, I don't think you can actually be that innovative because people won't be okay failing.

Yes, I cannot agree with you more. And this is a term and a concept that we talk about often in in organizational development because as organizations scale and grow, you— the trust that needs to be in place for this psychological safety sometimes gets diluted because trust is formed over time. You have a lot more new people coming in. How do you build that trust real time quickly such that you can still maintain that level of psychological safety? And it, it's something that we, we think about now as we're at the pivot point of that next scale of growth as an organization. So I could not agree with you more on that front. One of the other things I will add to your thoughts on failure is I also look at innovation in an iterative state. So it's that try once, you learn something, and I like to think of each iteration as a learning. Of course, it may not do what you set out to do, and that's where the failure comes in, but it's an iterative state, and I think that Another concept that many organizations are challenged with today is this notion of a learning organization. So every organization will say they're a learning organization, but what are we doing with the pilots? What are we doing as a, as a debrief from an idea that might not have worked the way it did, or an idea that just completely knocked every parameter out of the park and it just landed even better than you thought? What did we learn from that? Why, why was that the case compared to some of the other ideas that might not have worked? And this notion of debriefing to enhance the organization's learning so that we can bring— even though, let's say, a team that was in place for a particular pilot or innovation were 5 people and there happened to be 50 people across the organization, what these 5 people went through, their experience whether something worked, it didn't work, what they would do differently, the 45 other people can benefit from that when you effectively debrief and bring that learning back to the team. And that's something that we've been instituting more and more of. And I know across the organizations, large and small, this notion of debriefing is becoming very important as well.

And how do you get out— I mean, I guess if that 5 people learn something and then that went out to a 45 group for them to understand through a debrief, if there was something in that that was really pertinent, maybe to a wider group in the organization or maybe to the whole organization, how would you practically go about sharing that learning?

Yeah. So, we actually have formal debrief sessions. We started to institute them actually just last year and we've gotten some rich learnings. We do them— some of the insight gathering we do through surveys. We follow that up with qualitative interviews when we want to learn a little bit more around what was in the survey. And then we hold sessions, sort of sharing sessions across different groups and different functions. We have not gone as far as to hold them organizationally just yet to get to everybody, but the notion, you know, in one organization that I was a part of several years ago, we published a booklet coming out of it. So sort of the, the how it works type of booklet, and it was on something new that the team was embarking upon or a launch, a new product launch. And all the learnings were sort of institutionalized in this little booklet that was published that people could access either on their intranet, if they happen to have an intranet, or it was made available to individuals sort of in the form of a library. So there are many ways to do this to make sure that the word gets out. And this is the concept of this continuous learning to improve ourselves and also our organization comes into play because it's easy to sort of capture if it's a one-on-one, if two people are involved, it's easy to sort of share that and hold that knowledge. But if you think about knowledge being part of a community, then you need to get to the community to make sure that everybody can benefit from it, or at least they know who to go to when they're embarking upon something that's new and something that may look or feel similar. So they now have somewhat of a subject matter expert from from their prior background. So we're— I think we're still new on this front and we're still learning on this front, but this is definitely something that I feel very passionate about and I think can help our organization. And I'm learning from others who do it well. So looking outside of Novocure and finding ways to do this well and to establish this opportunity to learn and develop and make sure that that every action that we take, we're learning from it and we're also capturing it so others can benefit from that learning.

And what I love about that idea of something as seemingly small as a booklet of information, of debriefed information being shared with an organization, isn't only the fact that others around the organization are getting to learn what that team has learned, but also the recognition that the people that wrote that booklet are gonna get the pats on the back, the well done. That was really interesting. Thank you for doing that. That was amazing. Can you do another one next quarter?

Yeah.

That's, that's worth its weight in gold as well.

Yes, absolutely. I think it's a great platform for individuals who have gone through it to get the recognition of being sort of subject matter experts, or at least having that knowledge base where, again, if you think about knowledge being part of that community, they're now tagged as individuals who can help. And who are kind of coming to the proverbial table as individuals who can help either guide or figure out or set some watchouts in place for, "Hey, this didn't work. Here's why. Not suggesting that you don't do it, but keep this in mind because this is why it didn't work." And I think that's really important.

Yeah. Very interesting. Really, really interesting. At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. Let's look forward because it strikes me that certainly for me this weekend, anyway, I've been doing a lot of work. I ran a session on Tuesday on future of work and helping organizations who are maybe a little stuck looking at Harvard Business Review and looking at all the research that's out there from McKinsey's and everybody else about future of work and future working models and all that stuff. And they're really struggling with what practically is it that I can do? I see all the research, I get all the research, I'm trying to do a day job. I've got people all over the place., you know, I'm struggling. So we did a really practical session earlier in the week on what future of work might look like to try and help people to go on that journey. I just wonder, you know, what are you guys planning based on what you've learned? Because I guess, you know, before March last year, you were all in labs and in offices all together, all around the country and the world. That changed last year in March and you were spread to the seven winds like the rest of us. What is it that you're planning to do to learn from that going forward from a future work model perspective? What do you think others could be doing?

Scott, this is obviously on top of my mind, other leaders within our organization, and as you mentioned, across the workforce, we're now thinking about how do we take what happened over the last 18 months and make that— bring practicality to how we move forward. And one of the benefits that we've had is we have a team of individuals who are already in the field, field-based, and we have a team of individuals that are office-based. As you mentioned, they're in labs, they're in our operating centers, which are, which are shipping centers and warehouses, and also office-based. So we have a kind of healthy mix of the two, and, and this was a really good learning for us and an experiment that I don't think anybody would have signed up for willingly, but we had no choice. So we went through this experiment together and we stumbled and we fell upon opportunities that worked well. And then we modified things that were not working so well. So I think here it's going to be taking— and again, these are my views and I will couch them as such— but we're taking sort of two approaches here. One is we want to make sure that we don't compromise productivity. And productivity comes in, in the form of many different things, right? So if you can measure that work product, then, then that, that obviously would be how you measure productivity. But other could be the way that we engage with each other, the way that we engage with our external stakeholders, because that, that is the— at the end of the day, that's the business that we're in, working with people, helping people achieve what they need to achieve, and, and then passing on that value to whoever your stakeholders are outside of the organization, and that can't be compromised, right? So we have to make sure that we are taking advantage of some of the things that we learned during this time, which is virtual workspaces are not all that bad. Actually, some people were able to show greater productivity while they were not in the office. And, and this is very well documented because, uh, imagine an office that's in a metropolitan area and you're drawing the talent pool from across sort of the, the perimeters of that metropolitan area. And you have commute times that are upwards of 2 hours in some instances, which now think about it from this perspective, 4 hours of that person's day. And I'm using a very egregious example here, but 4 hours out of that person's day is spent time commuting. And that 4 hours could be used to either instill, instill a focus and creativity because your mind is focused and it's not cluttered with all the things that are gonna be happening either to the office or, or from the office. So there are opportunities here to take advantage of that enhanced productivity that we saw in some instances. I do think what we compromised a bit on are these spontaneous conversations that often took place. You mentioned earlier that everybody's looking to schedule this virtual call when in fact You could have a 5-minute phone conversation in a very focused manner and you're done with it. You can kind of cross that off your list. Alternatively, what we also saw being missed is a flyby discussion. I happen to swing by somebody's office. Hey, I was just on a call and John told me I have to follow up with you on something. I was going to set up time, but do you have 5 minutes? And all of a sudden that meeting that you don't schedule 5-minute meetings. Most meetings are 15 minutes at best, or 30 minutes, and you can accomplish more. So your productivity sometimes is better on these sort of one-off things that need to get done that end up on your to-do list that you sometimes don't even know you're clearing out when you're in front of a team. So I think that, that's something that we did compromise— these spontaneous interactions that sometimes even— we talked about innovation earlier— even having a short discussion with somebody on a problem that you may be working on resolving and somebody else may layer on another insight or another thought that now all of a sudden gives you a different perspective. Those types of things are not being facilitated by these virtual environments. And that's, I think, for those reasons we will need to, to go back to the office and we will need to work face-to-face with some members of our teams and make sure that we can take advantage of that sort of creative brain thrust and the ability for teams to connect with each other. So this will be really important as well. So in short, my answer to your question and what I am thinking about on this front is it has to be a balance of the two. And I think that's what we've learned during this time, that it's not a one-size-fits-all. It doesn't have to be this or that. It can be both. And that each organization will need to figure out what that formula for success is. And it may even be function-specific, it may be role-specific, and you have to then figure out how much of this are we willing to say, hey, this actually worked better during this time that we were not together in, in one area, and this actually— we lost something here and we need to think about how do we bring it back. And in, in the function that I'm in and in the role that I play Every year we kick off the year with all of our field teams coming together in a national meeting type format, and we did not have one this year, and we feel a loss out of that because that's where we had a chance to see and connect with our team members one-on-one. And in the breaks and the coffee breaks and lunches and dinners and after-dinner environments that we had to connect with people, you don't have the ability to do that. So I think it'll be be a hybrid of the two, and each organization will need to figure out what that looks like for them.

Yeah, definitely. And the way that I've described it is that organizations need to paint out the lines of the pitch and then hand teams and individuals the ball and let them score goals the way that best works for them from day to day and week to week, because it is, I think, going to be that flexible based on needs and what's going on at that moment in time. We started at the very top talking about about the role of people leaders and how we often talk about people leaders being key. They're the jam in the sandwich. They're the glue between their teams and their organizations. We put a lot of pressure on our people leaders in organizations, and you're no different. You have a team and you also have a job to do. And so, that to me is kind of like two jobs. I wonder, you know, when we think about what's going to need to change as we move to, as you described it, more hybrid or more flexible work models where we've got 2 people in this week, 2 people in next week, 2 people in Chicago, 2 people in Florida, somebody in Ireland, somebody in London. The ability of team leaders and people leaders to manage that is going to be tough. And I wonder from your perspective, do you think that generally, not necessarily in Novacure, but do you think that people leaders have the skills and the capability and the confidence and more importantly, the time to do that really effectively? Is that something that's there right now?

Yeah, Scott. So, I think about time more than I've ever thought about before. And I'm actually working on some gathering and collecting my thoughts on time leadership. I'm working with experts in the area to learn more about time leadership because I do think that doing everything on all cylinders all the time is just not possible. There's no way. You have to make trade-offs. Choices and decisions. You have to figure out where your time is best invested. So this is, this is top of my mind in terms of how do I think we, we can help move forward on this front. So one is, we talked about purpose earlier. Connecting everybody to a common purpose is very powerful on this front. Despite of where, where somebody's running and how fast they're running and who they're running with, If they know where they're going and how to— what sort of the destination is, so which is where the vision of the organization comes to life, and then why, why are we going there, those two things are very powerful. And regardless of being at the backdrop or the pandemic being at the backdrop of all that we're doing now and trying to figure out a post-pandemic work environment, I think that is still equally powerful pre- and post-pandemic, maybe even more so powerful today than it ever was because this is what held us all together. We all had a common purpose and we were all marching towards that. So that's one area that I continue to rely heavily on and ensuring that whenever we can, we can bring that to life, not just in words but in our actions and in our business. That means that we can actually bring in the voices of individuals and stories of individuals who are receiving sort of the benefit of all the work that we're doing. So that's very powerful, will continue to be powerful. The second is creating a space. So one of the other things that I've learned, and I just actually held a hybrid meeting, my first one as a management team, and it was challenging for those that were virtually present because first of all, you create a level of inclusion/exclusion, and that's something that you really need to be mindful of. And we did it and we came out stronger as a result of it. And all the feedback that I received even afterwards was, hey, that was better than not having one. So I'll take that as a checkmark. But I also know that those of my colleagues that were participating virtually, listening became challenging because there were lots of— as we do as human beings, we will have sidebar conversations that don't always get picked up by the microphone. So that's, that's an issue that we will need to figure out. So one of my learnings here is try to unify the platform. So either we're all virtual or all live, at least try to do that in some instances. So you create a level playing field where we're not having to worry about some people feeling like they're not part of the conversation or others feeling like, well, how do they keep being mindful of the fact that there are 2 or 3 colleagues participating virtually? So that's something we'll have to figure out as well. When do we kind of make sure that everybody is collectively present either on a virtual platform or a live platform? And the third aspect is making sure that we're frequently connecting with each other. So whether that's one-on-one meetings, if the individual happens to be a direct report, I like to connect with all members of teams that eventually report in through me because I learned so much from that perspective and how it sort of presents itself to me in multiple iterations. And part of it is just sometimes people will self-weed out things. Well, this is not important. Work for so-and-so to know, so I'm going to take this out of the 30 minutes that I have. I'm going to focus my agenda. So those connections are really important. I would encourage all leaders to, to carve out some time. I used to put time on my calendar at the start of each week, an hour block where I would just call individuals and that would be my time to connect with all of the stakeholders. I've not done that of late, admittingly. I need to start getting back into that rhythm, but that also helped me to make sure that while we all may be kind of doing different things to ultimately impact that same objective and the vision, we are doing it in a manner where we're keeping each other informed and we're supporting each other. Where again, I'll bring in the empathy here because we don't know what the situation is at the backdrop of how each person presents. And if we support each other in getting the job done, we can be much more effective and happy actually. We can actually be happier as a byproduct of the support system that we have at work. So those are some thoughts on how I'm thinking about it. I don't have it figured out yet, and I'm sure whatever I figure out, it will iterate over time as we learn sort of how it really works out in practice.

Brilliant. Look, Pratesh, I'm really conscious of time. We started with empathy and purpose and connection. We have finished Scott on empathy, purpose, and connection. And it's been a really, really good conversation. So thank you so much for taking the time out your day. I really, really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. This was my first podcast, as I mentioned to you earlier, and it's been a lot of fun. And I've taken a few things away just from the questions that you've asked me. So thank you for getting me to think above and beyond what I'm thinking about today. Really appreciate it.

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