Empowering Others to Shine - Simmi Singh, Partner and Leader, Egon Zehnder

DR. RISHI DESAI: Hi, I'm Dr. Rishi Desai. Today on Raise the Line, I'm happy to be joined by Simmi Singh, Partner and Leader at the global talent advisory firm Egon Zehnder. She's an expert on governance and leadership development, counseling investors, founders, and boards on governance matters, board appointments, leadership development, and CEO successions. Simmi has a talent for helping companies rapidly scale and maximize their potential as they transform. She has worked in and with some of the most game-changing companies over the past two decades. She has served as Senior Advisor on Health Innovation to the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, and has been in governance roles at the Center of Health Information Management and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. Thank you so much for being with us today. 

SINGH: Rishi, thank you so much for having me. The pleasure is all mine. Thanks for the amazing work you do at Osmosis. 

DR. DESAI: I appreciate you saying that. That's very kind of you. Now, your background is pretty impressive. I think it goes without saying, but I like to say it anyway. Given that it's so fascinating and starts in so many directions, let's back up and maybe you can tell us a little bit about what got you started in leadership coaching and pursuing that pathway for yourself. 

SINGH: Sure. Thank you so much for asking. I think I've been a student of people long before I understood that term or even had thought about it in that way because labels somehow retroactively describe what your life is like, and I think I grew up in a very wonderful nomadic household. My dad was in the military. He reinvented himself all the time. We traveled and moved to different countries. In the 18 or 20 homes that I lived in before I was 30, my entire life consisted of walking into a new ecosystem, listening for a new language, excited about new people. Wondering what made them tick, what made society tick, why they were wired the way they were. Metaphorically, the language of every tribe is different—not just in the linguistics of what they speak, but in how they interact with each other and why they behave and reach out the way they did. 

As a kid who was shy, but also loved connection to humans, that was magnified by my mother's devotion to history. I feel like I grew up studying people and the why of who they were, and what made them extraordinary in their own way. My career took many turns. Like any young kid growing up in the developing world, I didn't have a lot of role models or a clear-cut path, really, to who I was going to be. But what I did know was that I wanted to study humanity in all its forms. 

I fell into healthcare, which I truly loved and have never looked back, and spent time as a consultant and in many operating roles and advisory roles. But I realized that the alchemy of who people are when they come together around a common passion and purpose in an amazing team was perhaps the love of my life in terms of a pursuit of learning. I've been deeply fortunate that for the last 13 years, that has been my full-time pursuit is to be a student of people. 

Coaching, as you know...it's interesting that it's called coaching. I think of it more as learning to be a better student of myself, and learning to be the mirror that others can use to learn about themselves. Going on that journey together is a privilege of a lifetime. 

DR. DESAI: I often think of the relation between math and physics. Math is sort of this more theoretical thing, and physics is the application of it. I think of coaching almost as an applied psychology, sort of like taking the rules that you learn in psychology, and then applying it to a purpose. You describe yourself as trying to work on becoming a better mirror. I'm just curious about that as a craft. How do you get better day by day? Are there other mirrors or other mentors that you look for advice from? Do you read certain books? Do you do certain exercises? How do you get better every day at what you do? 

SINGH: This is such a good question, and it's an interesting comment you make about math and physics because I majored in math, physics, and chemistry. Really the third element of that is the chemistry between human beings. So I think it is that. It's the theory; it's the application; it's the chemistry. 

Look, there are a lot of techniques and a lot of approaches certainly one can use to open folks up. But I think at its most intrinsic level, you have to be a true listener. One of my incredible colleagues and mentors of mine—I've always insisted on having a mentor below the age of 30 and a mentor below the age of 35 every year because I feel like I learn a lot from them—Jay Park talks about seeking to understand, which I think is such a powerful phrase. It's that if you go into discussions seeking to understand both what is really being said, but what is being felt, that's a big thing. 

Not having an agenda is actually huge, because so many times we're such noisy listeners. We have a narrative and a talk track going on in our head, and the other person is nearly an accessory in it. That's what bad listening is at the core; you're just waiting for your turn to speak. I think great listening is being a true student of what is being felt, what is being thought, and perhaps, what should be felt and what is being thought. 

Back to the point of "mirror," I think that we all need someone to lock our naysayer out of the room. Most of us are overachievers. We pick on ourselves. We are so negative, and we get caught up in the swirls in our head, where we can't have a conversation with ourselves. My goal is to be the person in the room who banishes your naysayer, who allows your own inner spirit—that you allow your own inner spirit—to blossom, because we are creating a safe circle for us to have a discussion. 

The idea of the mirror is so that you can reflect without pressure and without judgment on your question. That perhaps, I or anyone else who's there—as a student of you, as a coach, as a protector, as a hand across the table, and perhaps company on your side of the table—to go on a journey of discovery together. So I think it's learning at its best without agendas, but with deep passion and purpose.

DR. DESAI: I'm going to ask you a question that is very personal here, because I want your advice on this. I'm a parent of a five-year-old son, and I've often thought of a person's naysayer as the voice of maybe their parents. Remembering way back when you were criticized for X, Y, or Z. As a parent, I'm just curious, do you have advice for how to raise young children so that they banish their naysayers? So that they grow up to not have to deal—and maybe not to the extreme, but maybe a softer naysayer—so that they don't feel that criticism, or don't feel that kind of pressure coming from their parents, who many people want to please? 

SINGH: It would be so interesting to ask my own children if I did that well. I have an amazing 24-year-old daughter and an incredible 17-year-old son who are wonderful, and teachers of mine every day. I think it is modifying our internal talk tracks. It's learning how to relish, and love experimentation and failure, without it ever devolving into self-criticism, because the destination is so important. So, I think with children it's encouraging curiosity, encouraging wonder and acknowledging failure, and not brushing it away. 

I think that what happens is that sometimes as children, when we're rewarded for being performative and when parents say to us, "Don't worry, that doesn't hurt," we're denying the reality that it does. Or, "Don't worry, you'll get better at it tomorrow. Everybody goes through it." That's denying their reality as well. So I think bearing witness is one of the greatest ways for children to learn to accept themselves, which is to say, "I know. That feels terrible, doesn't it? Tell me more, and let's think about how to deal with it and let's think about how to be better.” 

I think the process of healing from failure, the process of learning to relish, the fact that scars help us be injured less the next time around, and bearing witness to that experience with love, with laughter, with humility, and with truly listening, because sometimes our reactions to the children's failures can magnify what's actually happening, too. 

I've learned, perhaps belatedly—my kids will probably laugh at me, because I used to think parenting was about telling and talking as many of us do when we were younger. Now, I realize it really is about listening. It's being a student of the child and seeing what they need. But encouraging them to relish their own experiences, to love themselves. 

I think one of the greatest inspirations recently, and it's not a surprise to me at all that it's taken over the world, is the Korean band, BTS, which has sort of broken 24 Guinness Book records in the last year. Yes, BTS writes about love, and yearning, and all the same themes, but they write most of all about journeys. They write about despair; they write about suicide; they write about sadness; and yet they do it in an amazing way that talks about how you can map your own soul and love yourself, which is the name of the trilogy of their albums.

I think learning to love yourself is the best and most important thing we can help with our children. If they can love every nook and cranny in themselves, it's the ultimate love language. 

DR. DESAI: So how does that translate to leadership? What do you do with folks who come in and say, "Hey, I'd love to be a more effective leader." The idea of loving oneself, does that translate? 

SINGH: It does, because personal security is so important. A lot of the time, if we don't love ourselves, we create walls and images that are more palatable than the reality of us. When you deny the reality of you, you cannot acknowledge the reality of others. 

So learning to love yourself and learning to be personally secure is so important to the two critical traits that come from that, which are true confidence in your own decision making, your integrity, and your ethic, because who you are and where you stand, and humility which allows us to all understand that we are a speck in the universe. I mean, if Pluto got ejected because the planet was too small, imagine how tiny we are. So the truth of the matter is the learning to love ourselves and the security and the humility and the curiosity, and the collaboration that comes from that, recognizing that others have a right and a privilege of loving themselves too, is super important. 

How does it help leaders lead? I think today more than ever, fostering connection is hugely important. Learning to love and tolerate themselves so as not to get intimidated by what's on their plates. Every medical student that listens to this, every one of the physicians that's on the front lines, being able to reward themselves for what they're doing every day, being able to bear witness to their own passion, their own tenacity, their own integrity, I think is really important. 

People think that coaching, or even learning about ourselves, is really about what are the right behaviors, what are the right traits to express. But I think it requires us to understand our own identity and motivation first, which is: Who are we? Why are we wired the way we are? What are we passionate about? What is our motivation, ultimately? Because if you want to make a difference in a certain way, and you have a passion for a certain thing, then you get there a lot faster because you know who you are and why you're doing it. So, I would say that the what is very secondary to holding up a mirror to the why and the who of who we are. 

DR. DESAI: There's something you've just said right now that I'm still trying to grapple with and understand more fully. So, I'll say what I heard, and then maybe you can try to help explain it to me in a way that will make me better understand it. You said it's important to acknowledge and sort of recognize yourself, and only when you do that, can you recognize others or acknowledge others in a true sense. Why is that necessary? Why is it necessary to acknowledge yourself as you are, and not some belief about who you are, in order to then recognize the truth in others?

SINGH: Honestly, not being a trained psychologist, I bet there's someone really qualified to come up with that. But I love what you said, which is, why is it knowing your self, versus knowing a manifestation of yourself? Our avatars are about knowing ourselves, and so it's okay if your personal understanding is arrived at by an understanding of your roles in life. If you anchor in your roles, if you anchor in your avatars, if you anchor in your values, those are all ways of knowing ourselves. When you want to go deep in your spirit, I think the challenge with knowing all your avatars and knowing your manifestations is that you can understand them descriptively, for sure. But if you don't know why you're wired in certain ways or you don't do that work, it's very hard to figure out what happens on a really bad day when you're triggered or what happens on a great day when something goes to your head and you're unable to deal with it. 

It's at the extremes of our existence that understanding both our gifts and our triggers gives us a true and rich understanding of why we do the things we have. It's being a student of that framework that allows us to be less than literal and much more insightful when we look at other people. Because if somebody is doing something, we can react to them performatively, which is your avatar reacting this way with my avatar. But if you haven't done the work to say, "I think they might be doing that because they're feeling awkward," or "I think this might be wrong in their culture." I think that a study of oneself is the free textbook that we get, to earn the right to be part of the textbook of others. 

DR. DESAI: Yes. That's a nice way of putting it, and I better understand that concept. I guess one of the other challenges is also, even right now, as I'm watching you, I'm getting a lot of information. I get to watch your face, I see your hands moving, and all that sort of richness. Yet we recognize that we're not in the same room, so I'm also missing out on a lot of other cues, like maybe on your side you've got someone yelling outside, or things that I'm not privy to. I wouldn't know, "Oh, that's why she's feeling a little bit frustrated. It's that noise outside," rather than me. 

In communication, sometimes people turn their video off now with COVID, people working from home, especially in big meetings. What is your sense on this interpersonal communication that is now oftentimes lost? How does that affect how leaders receive others and how others receive leaders? You don't get that full richness that you used to get when you had in-person communications. Have you noticed a shift in terms of how that's played out?

SINGH: It's such a great question and I think, like so many others, I've been avid student of that, because, in some ways, this reality came upon us so suddenly. So much of what we have developed by way of coping mechanisms has been our reaction to it. I long for and I celebrate the renaissance that's going to come after these dark years, when we actually can do design thinking, and not reaction thinking alone, to thinking about what the best interactions are like.

Our dinosaur brains on have learned to interact with each other using all of our senses. When I hear people saying, "This is okay, and this works," it's exactly like the Halloween candy story we were talking about before we got on the video, which is, if you take away the human interaction, it becomes about the candy transaction. But actually, the candy was simply a catalyst and an enzyme that was part of that reaction. It wasn't meant to be the main ingredient. 

I actually think that there's an intimacy to voice conversations on the phone now, because in the video we're trying so hard to drink in the signals with our eyes, that our hearing is turned on acutely as well and it becomes more one-dimensional. But when you're sitting with the phone, you have that tool we've been using all our lives when we've read books, which is to indulge in our imagination, to imagine where the other person is, and somehow were freed up to have more of a heart-to-heart. 

The truth is that meeting people is all about trust-building. It's all about interacting and drinking in the sense and the energy of the other individual. In interviews for example, and when leaders are getting to know each other, or even in the process of interviewing each other, the fact is everyone goes into those discussions with high expectations and low trust. It's like a first date. 

The truth is that to raise the trust level and to lower the expectations or to meet them and to be true students, it's very hard to do that on video, because video can be performative. There's a lot of different ways to dull that. I've encouraged candidates and leaders to go for walks in each other's gardens with a camera. To have a cup of tea with each other. To take the camera with them into their kitchen. To not have the fake background in the back. To spend 15–20 minutes getting to know each other as humans, even the few minutes we spent talking about our kids. 

I think that fostering a connection is so much more important than making an impression, and we've become so much more performative and less connective and I mourn the connection. Yet, our resilience is obvious in the fact that some of the greatest friends I've made during the pandemic are people that I haven't met yet. But to know that there is a connection—I went recently to DC, and I met with a couple of the folks that I met during the pandemic that I hadn't met, and we were like sisters, but we realized it was our first meeting, so long live human resilience, but I can't wait for the day when we can hug, connect, and be with each other and drink in the three-dimensional miraculous experience that is human connection in the absence of technology. 

DR. DESAI: Yes, that's a really beautiful way of capturing it. You're capturing my heart and mind on this completely. I often think of humans as animals. We figured out how to walk on two feet, so we forget we're still animals in a way. When I watch my dog interacting with another dog, the hair goes up, the tail wags, there's always cues that you get. There's nothing like, like you said, drinking tea. There's a lot of cues there that you can get into and lower that anxiety, lower those expectations, just be a human-animal again, because we need that. I think a lot of times, sitting at our individual desks, as you said, doesn't meet the needs of that inner animal that we all have.

SINGH: It is so true. I'm so often in a meeting and, some out of necessity, but some out of an intentional love of the human on the other side, I often take my laptop or my phone into the kitchen and open my fridge and pour myself some of this amazing cold brew my husband keeps in stock. I'm fully aware that the fridge probably might have some moldy vegetables in it or something. But it's not performative, it's connective. People react so wonderfully. I tell everyone, “Kids dogs, they're also welcome in the process of the relationship that we're building with each other.” But how is it impacting medicine, Rishi? I can't imagine how difficult it is to be behind all these walls with people whose lives you're saving.

DR. DESAI: One comment you made about how intimate the phone is, I'll use that as a launching point. When we do telemedicine—which is very much part of how medicine is running now, and will likely not go back—it does feel like there's kind of this extra barrier versus the office setting. But for me personally, it's been quite the opposite. When I'm in the office setting, my laptop is literally between myself and the patient, whereas when I'm doing telemedicine, it is the conduit. I often am going into people's homes, and seeing them in their homes, it's very intimate. You're seeing the unmade bed, or the lampshade, or the painting, or whatever it is, and you can comment on it: "Oh, that's a beautiful painting," and they're like, "Yes, my mother sent that to me for my wedding." You have these very natural conversations that don't feel natural in the walls of a sterile office, where it's painted white and sometimes flickering incandescent lights. It doesn't feel very natural at all.  It feels much more normal in that setting, and you can speak more human-to-human than doctor-to-patient, which is what sometimes creates an unnecessary barrier, I would say.

SINGH: I love that because it sounds like even though the interaction is not in person, it's much more personalized.

DR. DESAI: Precisely. Yes, exactly. I think that's the key. The other key is, of course, the way humans connect. Typically you don't meet someone for 30 minutes and then see them again 12 months later on a clock, which is how we've set up our healthcare system. 

SINGH: Exactly. 

DR. DESAI: It's much more as needed. Sometimes you see them a lot; sometimes you see them a little bit. The other thing is, of course, more text-based messaging, more quick five-minute calls, things like that, which technology can facilitate. Which is a little bit more natural than how we've previously set it up. So, in a few ways, I would say, it has gotten a lot better. 

Certainly, there are other challenges as well, especially in this heightened era where people feel like medicine has become a political issue. They come in and have their guard up, like, "What are you going to tell me to do? What side of the fence are you on? I'm on this side, you're on that side," and it feels more antagonistic. But oftentimes, you can bring that down, I think.

SINGH: Fantastic. Back to human versatility and resilience, for sure. 

DR. DESAI: Yes, precisely. Maybe one thing I'd like to then close on is, you have this beautiful career, and this wonderful perspective as a parent. As a coach, you have advised numerous dignitaries and people that have huge political clout. What advice would you give to a student that's early on in their healthcare profession, maybe curious about how to broach a career—maybe not quite like yours, but along those lines—basically following their passion and doing something that they're really excited about?

SINGH: Following your passion is a huge thing. What I would tell my 20-year-old self or any of the lifelong students in us is that we're born with an amazing gut and intuition. I think that we try so much, and we're trained and rewarded so much by the education system to solve problems in our head, that a lot of the time we have intuition about things that we don't listen to. We feel something, but we say, “No that's not what the recipe is, or that's not what the textbook says.” We don't listen to our gut. We don't listen to our hearts.

One of the pieces of advice I would have is, building a resume is very different from building a career. It's very different from building a life. I think that too often early in our career, our head tells us how to build our resume, and yet, we don't listen to what our heart is telling us about how to build a career, or our soul is telling us about how we want to live our life. Learning to listen to those three dimensions in equal measure contextualizes how we approach all the forks in the road, which classes to take. It's less about making mistakes, and it's more about what I'm passionate about. Absolutely have people in your life who check you from the extremes, but I do think it's really important to first of all pay attention to our gut. 

Second, so many of the easy problems in front of us as humanity have been solved. What we have to solve with regard to the environment, what we have to solve with regard to zoonotics, what we have to solve with regard to how to coexist on this planet together, requires a level of polymathic, multidisciplinary, and intersectional thinking. That is perhaps at a greater premium than ever before. What we know is becoming less important every day. What we can learn is becoming more important every day. 

You, the 18-year-old who's already done with college, Rishi, you were driven in so many ways with the curiosity of going faster, of learning more, and learning better. Because you didn't stop to think, "Well, maybe this is what I'm going to do with my life,” or “This is what I'm going to do,” the pursuit led your passion, that advised you to become who you are. I think we become memorable humans if we feed our passion, if we indulge our curiosity, if we think every time we're talking, "How do I put nutrients into the system?" Every time we are absorbing something, are we putting nutrients and nourishment into ourselves? To what purpose are we doing that? Confidence in your purpose, confidence in your choices, lead to nonlinear careers. All of those roads less traveled will make us greater problem solvers and more multidimensional thinkers who can come up with original ideas. 

There will always be those among us who love the tried and true, and God bless them because we need craftsmen. You started this discussion by asking, “What is the craft?” We need craftsmen who work on perfecting a craft, but we also need people who work across the waterfront of pattern recognition to see problems that are not obvious to others in new and different ways. So I think nonlinear and disorderly careers should be a deep passion for anyone curious. Knowing that in every case, we're picking up a skill that we can somehow use later. That, and plain old hard work and less fear, would be my advice. 

DR. DESAI: Yes, I love it. So often, I think folks that are naturally inclined to nonlinear paths are sometimes discouraged. When folks say, "What are you going to be when you grow up?”, or “Why are you doing that? That doesn't make sense," the quizzical look on their face is not curiosity, it's judgment. So, I think that's wonderful to hear from you. I appreciate you saying that.

SINGH: Yes, of course. Jake Scott, who is just wonderful and did a wonderful TED talk at one point, talked about “imaginectomies.” He talked about how, if we value grades and a path that's well-traveled as the only criterion to get in med school, for example, you can't take eclectic classes and you can't do weird things. We are shutting down the imagination that we need in the physicians who are the most talented and brilliant among us. So I truly think that that's the key: permission. Permission to dance in life, permission to undertake the journeys that other people are not taking, permission to fail, and a love of yourself that helps you pick yourself up. I learned that later in life, too, like most of us. You learned that success was something to be celebrated, and failure was something to be ashamed of. But recovering from failure is perhaps the most beautiful skill of all.

DR. DESAI: That's a fantastic point to end on. I appreciate you saying that, and sharing that with our audience today. Thank you. 

SINGH: Thank you so much for the privilege of interacting with you and I hope to see you soon in person, on a trip to California. It would be a pleasure to get together and in three-dimensional human form. 

DR. DESAI: Yes, over a cup of tea. Exactly.

SINGH: That would be lovely. Take care.

DR. DESAI: Well I'm Rishi Desai. Thanks for checking out today's show. Remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line. We're all in this together.