A few weeks ago, I had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Steve Scott, a mentor and friend, on his radio show Leadership Point Radio (LPR). We chatted about numerous topics, from lessons learned from Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable (OBR), CONNECT’s bilateral bridge between Singapore and San Diego, the contrasting styles of business interactions between the US and Singapore, what life in Cambridge (UK) is like, and the importance of mentorship.
Here is the link to our interview.
Below are excerpts on three selected themes:
1. Lessons learned from Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable (OBR)
SS: When we first chatted, OBR was just getting started. You were in Oxford, Cambridge, London. Since then, sounds like you’ve more than doubled the number of participating universities. More than universities, whole areas are now growing. That’s fascinating how fast you’ve been able to grow that. I bet there’s a few leadership lessons that you’ve learned along the way. Because here you are in graduate school, have not had any true jobs where you’ve had to go in and report to the bottom line. I bet you have a bunch of stories. Tell me, whats the most important lesson that you’ve learned when trying to get Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable going?
KC: The key lesson for me was communication. We had to work in a multicultural, very diverse team that was made up of individuals from around the world. A lot of them had backgrounds mostly in science, a lot of them were PhD students and postdocs, but not all of them were from the US. I certainly wasn’t – I grew up in Singapore.
That was the biggest challenge in terms of understanding the cultural differences and the different manners of communication – not being able to sit beside each other and work out those differences and challenges, and actually work across different time zones as well. And it was a substantial size of the team. At first was it was two or three people, we worked together. Eventually it blossomed to 10 people working together. So that presented a lot of differences.
We could have a teleconference with someone from San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Oxford, Cambridge. Every chapter had one representative on the teleconference. Everybody had a voice to be heard. It was important to show that you were actually listening to what their concerns were, being able to address it remotely, brainstorm together on workable solutions and workarounds. I think that was a challenge in terms of being able to communicate your ideas effectively and be able to implement them at another chapter around the world. You had to have a very global perspective in the approach.
SS: So I get the idea that communication was really the big leadership lesson for you. Are there some practical things that you learned that you can share? If we have to be in a virtual communication with a team, how do we survive that, how do we make that successful?
KC: Patience; that’s a huge lesson that I learned. Patience and understanding go hand in hand, I think. It’s important to see the full picture before you jump into any conclusions about what sort of challenges that each leader in each different area may be facing. Take the time to understand that, paint a complete picture before actually making a next step towards that.
2. Life in Cambridge
SS: Cambridge is a small community, you’re outside of London. I bet the pace was different there than you see in either San Diego or in Singapore.
KC: Well in Cambridge I was primarily surrounded by students. It’s largely a student town and I would say the pace there was extremely fast, surprisingly. I was largely focused on the academic setting. We only studied 24 weeks a year. The rest of the time was vacation. During the 24 weeks, we crammed in everything that you could possibly imagine in a college life. If you wanted a First Class Honors degree, which is a GPA of 3.8/4.0, you had to work your ass off. But if you wanted a life on top of that, you had to fit everything in within the 24 weeks of the academic year. And, of course Cambridge being Cambridge, the expectations are really high as well. So, we have the cream of the crop competing with everybody to get First Class Honors. But everybody still wants to have fun. So everybody had good time management. That’s one of the life skills that we picked up over there.
3. Mentorship
SS: At your stage of your career, you received a lot of mentorship you were talking about. You want to talk about how that affects leadership development?
KC: Mentorship is something that I feel that a lot of young people at the early stage of their career may not necessarily think about that much. I was fortunate to be thrown into a leadership position at OBR about two years ago, and that opened my eyes up to the importance of mentorship in developing certain skills and attitudes, which i felt that was important for my personal growth.
SS: Sounds like you’re probably encouraging both mentorship as providers, that we get more mentors out there, but also each student go seek a mentor.
KC: It’s critical to identify mentors at all stages of your career. There are different types of mentors. It could be a one-off chat with someone who is more experienced than you just to have a coffee; or could be someone who follows up with you at a regular time interval throughout your career. It’s important to have that sort of support and direction through any stage of your career.
SS: Do you think someone early in their career can also be mentors?
KC: Yes. That’s peer mentorship.
SS: So, somebody at similar stages of their career are able to mentor each other too, because one knows a little more about something than the other one does.
KC: Yes. I think that creates a very strong peer network. that everybody grows along with each other. They can support each other, and help to troubleshoot along the way.
SS: That sounds like what you were doing a lot of at OBR. There was a lot of peer mentorship. I always like the idea of someone who’s perceived to be a junior person mentoring a senior person, because quite frankly, the senior person may not have as much knowledge in certain areas as the junior person. What do you think about that?
KC: I suppose it depends on the dynamics of the relationship. I think that humility would play a bit part in mentorship. There’s always something that a mentee can learn from a mentor. But going the other way around, whether it’s knowledge, experience or attitude – I think the attitude could be a factor in a mentee being able to share something with the mentor.
SS: So, helping them revitalize their attitudes in life too is useful, yes. I think it’s also helpful for people of all ages to understand that there are those who have the knowledge that you could use, and experiences that would guide you, and has nothing to do with their age. It has to do with their experiences in life and quite frankly, if I wanted to learn how to play a video game, I would go to a 10-year-old before I would go to a 30-year-old in most cases. That’s a weird example but that’s what I think in mentorship – we all should be mentoring each other, and being on the lookout for who could help each other.
KC: I’ve been really fortunate to pick San Diego as a landing spot for myself and my career. I feel that the community in San Diego is really open and very friendly, and allows me to acquire all sorts of different mentors in many aspects of my life. That has really helped me and shaped my leadership personality and skills.