Work-Life Balance is for the Lazy? Dr. Sinha's Bold Take!

Pharma Now: Welcome Dr Sinha to Pharma Now. It's a pleasure to have you here. So let me start with my first question which generated curiosity inside me because when I looked at your visiting card, there were so many degrees. So I wanted to understand what inspired you to take this journey.

Dr Sinha: I'm a Physician by training. I did my MBBS and MD from Mumbai and during my career journey, I realized that I needed to know more than what was taught, not just from the job but also from formal courses. Our work involves both clinical as well as management work so in terms of clinical I also practice. Besides being in the industry, I also teach in medical colleges as an adjunct faculty. So considering all of that, the knowledge upgradation was significant and that's why I went ahead and did some courses which were required for infectious diseases, diabetes and family medicine so that can do justice to the requirements of knowledge. 

The other part was during my industrial career, I realized that a lot of management jargon which I didn't understand during my discussion with the marketing and sales functions. That's precisely why I entered and pursued my executive program in management from IIM Calcutta. My further interest was in hospital management, so I did my MBA in hospital management from BITS Pilani. So these were mainly to enhance my knowledge in management, marketing, etc. those kinds of fields so that I understand at least what is being discussed rather than merely know what EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortization), Top Line & Bottom Line, marketing strategy, and many more, actually mean. It was more of a personal interest combined with the professional requirement that I went ahead and continued to do so. It is not the end I think there is more, I'm also doing a post-doctoral course called the D.Sc., the highest science degree in the land. So it will continue till the end of my life.

Pharma Now: That's very interesting. You wear so many caps and you are already one of the senior leaders in one of the leading pharma companies. How do you manage your time?

Dr Sinha: It is up to you how you use it because there are 24 hours. If you say, “I have to sleep for 8 hours, I have to bath for 1 hour, I have to eat for 1 hour and I have to do chitchatting for another 2 hours”, then you won’t get any time. Sleep is something you should not compromise but every other thing can be compromised. The other motivation is that you have to be an example to your team. If you want to see that you are perceived as superior in terms of knowledge and demonstrate superiority in terms of efficiency and knowledge. So if these things are present, then the team also gets motivated. Last but not least, even my children also see me as an example while they are growing and that is one of the reasons why one of my children is pursuing his studies in medicine. So for him, I have to set an example. These are the multiple reasons for what I’m doing right now.

Pharma Now: Wonderful. There is this buzzword called work-life balance right now. Your portrayal is the complete opposite of that. So what's your take on that?

Dr Sinha: I feel that word belongs to lazy people. I think job satisfaction matters a lot here. And for me, it is the variety that matters and as you see I also do teaching and I enjoy that. If you enjoy what you’re doing then what is the balance that you require? I also teach my children, it's not that I neglect them. I also take care of my family as much as I work so it's not that they are exclusive to each other. You can do both if you want, it’s only your motivation that matters.

Pharma Now: Coming back to your specialization, which lies in clinical trials and medical affairs, I would like to know more about it.

Dr Sinha: Education-wise, that is not the specialization education, rather it is medicine and clinical trials. It is a sub-branch of one of the medical subjects called pharmacology. Clinical trials are also an essential function in the pharmaceutical industry without which no medicine or drug can get approvals or post-approval and they cannot continue to remain licensed, which is why clinical trial becomes an essential function. 

The major place where the physicians get their job is in whatever is related to the medical field. So clinical trials and medical affairs that is medical content, medical training of the field sales representatives. Then there are medical review functions. All of these activities mentioned are a part of a physician’s job inside a pharma company. Along the way, I also understood how to build a team for services because besides in medical there are also pharmacy and life science teams with whom you have to work co-ordinately. Accordingly, I learned the art of building teams for the entire function, rather than solely being a physician or a medical person. So that is why it appears as a specialization, but it is actually a function of the pharma role where the teams that have these physicians also have these functions. So that's how I have come into this function and that's how I built the teams.

My previous three roles were to build such teams. When I came to Hetero, I had no such team. Today, I have a team of more than 120 people. That is because of the management support which they also realized; the need for a team of clinical trials, medical affairs and pharmacovigilance especially in-house rather than outsourcing everything because in-house gives you control over work as well as compliance. So because that was understood, the management supported us to build a team. Similarly in my last two companies, my job was to build teams. So I've been building teams for the last 15 years. So 15 of my 25 years, I've been a team builder and that is what you can say is my specialization now.

Pharma Now: I will come back to the team-building part. Before that, I wanted to understand that in the area of clinical trials, there are a lot of disruptions happening right now. The post-COVID period saw a lot of AI involvement. Clinical trials usually take ages but nowadays through AI, the time of clinical trials is reduced a lot. So what's your take on it?

Dr Sinha: COVID itself was a disruption and it taught us how to do things smartly and how to get things around the standard processes. Let me give you an example; for a clinical trial, there are clinical trial sites which are hospitals, where there are consultants who are typically called investigators. The patients will come to the hospitals, get treated and in the meanwhile, these consultants who are investigators, will convince and educate the patients about the trial. The patient will understand and participate in the trial and keep coming to the site. 

Now in this whole process, it looks all right, but you have to understand that the patient centricity is missing. Because the patient has to come to the site, the patient has to understand, the patient has to take the drug, and the patient has to suffer. Now COVID made us understand, that patients cannot come to the hospital, so what should you do? You have to go to the patient. So patient centricity meant that patients should be the center of your role, not just the data. So we as an industry understood that we have to take this trial to the patients’ homes. Also, the sites have to collaborate and ensure that the data is collected from patients’ homes rather than the patients coming to the site. 

So there are smart technologies that came in to detect blood pressure, ECG, blood sugar, one example is continuous glucose monitoring and the involvement of the local clinics in association with these hospitals to ensure that data is collected locally. So smart technology for patient centricity was required and in fact, I would say that smart technologies like AI did not disrupt, they actually prevented the disruption of the industry. If these approaches were not there, the trials would have been impossible but to tell you the facts, it was exactly the opposite. There were more trials during COVID than pre-COVID, because a lot of drugs and vaccines were necessary during COVID. So how to do that when there's COVID outside with patients unable to come out of the home because of the lockdown? So smart methods and logistics were involved and with that technology coming in, the disruption that would have otherwise happened was prevented. So that was a lesson for the entire industry to involve and implement smart technologies throughout the processes even in clinical trials. In the factory, it becomes easier, because it is a captive site, after all the machines are in your control. But in clinical trials, the patients are elsewhere and the hospitals themselves are outside. 

Now the disruption was prevented with the help of AI, Smart Technologies and related facilities. So I think the word “disruption” is probably a misunderstanding here. It is a disruption which was prevented by Smart Technologies.

Pharma Now: That's an interesting point of view. Let me come back to the team-building part. What are the key challenges to building a team, particularly in the pharma industry?

Dr Sinha: In fact, like any other industry, the key challenge is the skill gap. Unfortunately, in our education system, the focus on skills is missing. We are only focused on didactic learning and a syllabus-wise reading which may or may not be applicable in real life. Many innovations are happening at a very fast pace in the industry and even in the pharma industry, are never taught in the curriculum. That skill gap becomes a big problem making it difficult for college freshers because there are a few colleges and institutions which are affiliated with the industry and are teaching advanced concepts and techniques. Such colleges are easy to take but then they are not available. Most of the freshers that you get are unskilled; they are well-educated but unskilled.

As I mentioned, I'm a physician but I'm into a sub-branch now. Even though I didn't learn it in college, I learned it in the industry, so that is still the case. But now, there are a lot of collaborations with the industry. We also collaborate with the institutions to upskill the students by providing internship programs with medical and pharmacy colleges. We have students pursuing their PG (Post-Graduation) and MD (Doctor of Medicine) come here and do their internship so that they can understand the work that they're going to do in their workplace. This has helped reduce the skill gap to a certain extent. Now as far as the experience gap is concerned, you need a certain degree of experience for a certain type of job and often that is not the case. This is because industries work in silos, so people have a very blinkered vision. They only know till a certain extent, but their role could be broadened to a larger spectrum. For example: as a human being, our brains are not supposed to be focused only on regulatory affairs; the expansion of dimensions is something which is prevented and not encouraging the industry. My approach has always been the reverse, that is, you are supposed to learn everything that is related to your field. Over a period of years, you can actually work on one discipline. 

So anybody who enters my department, whether it is a physician or a pharmacist they learn everything. I have a combined all departments, namely, clinical trial, pharmacovigilance, medical affairs, writing, data management, statistics, and regulatory affairs. Thankfully our management allowed us to not outsource much and do in-house development which bridged the experience gap. We gave exposure to the inexperienced people who came from other companies and even if they did not stay in the company for a long time, they went out with a much richer experience. Many of them came back because they didn't get this type of experience elsewhere. So the main approach in team building is to reduce the skill gap and experience gap.

The last but not the least is the soft skills and motivation. It is often said that “People don't leave their company, they leave their bosses”. So accordingly, not only the colleagues and teams, but the team leaders and heads also equally need to be trained. We have a very good L&D (Learning and Development) Department which provides soft skills training initiatives like leadership training, mentorship, team communication, and many more. There's a whole program for every level and that has helped a lot. In fact, I have worked closely with our L&D department to ensure that our leaders as well as our teams get into this kind of training. That's why I said that just getting a job is not enough, to continue to be eligible for the job requires a lot of personal effort. You cannot give that motivation through high salaries only, you have to provide such conditions like mentoring, and support that every leader should behave like a mentor. Only then your colleagues will stay back and support you. So that is what I have encouraged inside our department and with the help of our management and our supporting departments have been able to do that. Our attrition levels are very low except maybe pharmacovigilance, where a lot of poaching happens from the various CROs and KPOs, but otherwise departments like clinical trial, medical affairs and even pharmacovigilance for that matter, where we have people are staying for a longer time than the average standard in the industry.

Pharma Now: Amazing. The last question for you is being a senior leader, what would be that one piece of advice you would like to give to aspiring pharma leaders?

Dr Sinha: I would say that keep yourself fresh to learn more and be open to ideas, be open to the fact that just because you have a degree, you have not learned everything. Your learning actually begins after you finish your degree, postgraduation or PhD. That is when the learning really starts and I would request every newcomer who likes to be a part of the pharma industry to be open to Innovation, be open to to to rapid advances. It requires you to be on your toes and it is not a job for sitting back on the chair and enjoying the fruits of your degree. It does not happen like that. The pharma industry is changing rapidly in terms of its environment, innovations, automation and regulatory changes. So you have to be adaptive to that. That is the only piece of advice that I would say. Rest will fall in place; you will have your promotions, increments, and positions. Everything will come into place if you are hard-working and you can learn continuously. That's all that you require.

Pharma Now: Fantastic, it was really wonderful talking to you. This conversation is really going to inspire a lot of people. Thanks a lot for being a part of Pharma Now and for this conversation.

Dr Sinha: Thanks a lot!