North Star Leaders Podcast

Rajeev Singh:

Embrace reality doesn't mean you coming in and saying, "You suck your job and you suck your job and if you guys were better, I'd be succeeding." That's not collaborating, that's not being stronger together. And so you have to balance these things out, but where I worry is the over application of one particular core metric for someone to embrace and say, "This is the reason why I behave the way I do." Or that core metric, core value. And that's where I think sometimes you can go wrong.

Lindsay Pedersen:

The world needs what only your business can bring and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus? Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget and your emotional energy? We are learning this together on the North Star Leaders Podcast. I'll be talking to purpose-driven leaders about the choices they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging An Ironclad Brand and host of the North Star Leaders Podcast. Let's get to it.

Today I get to introduce you to my guest, Rajeev Singh. Raj is CEO of Accolade, which helps people and families connect to the right healthcare. And Accolade went public in 2020. Before Accolade, Raj was co-founder, President and COO at expense management firm Concur, which went public in '98 and is now part of SAP. Raj, welcome to the show.

Rajeev Singh:

Hey, Lindsay, how are you?

Lindsay Pedersen:

I'm really well. It's so good to see you.

Rajeev Singh:

Good to see you as well.

Lindsay Pedersen:

To start us off, Raj, what's your favorite thing about what you do?

Rajeev Singh:

That's pretty easy for me, Lindsay. We were lucky enough to have some success in our first venture and what I've learned in that first venture was success is really culture driven. If you build the right culture, it attracts the right people, the right people are everything. And so I get the most joy out of building teams, building culture. As motherhood and apple pie as it sounds, the journey of just constantly getting better every day is really rewarding for me. We're always seeking to get to the top of the mountain, but the journey of getting better every day, the coaching process of making that happen, that's really rewarding for me.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Yeah, that's really gratifying. Describe your leadership style and the culture that you're seeking to instill or breed or encourage?

Rajeev Singh:

Funny you mentioned it. We just published our own little culture book.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Oh my gosh.

Rajeev Singh:

Yeah, it's awesome. I super love it. And in it we talk about our core values and our core values are what you might expect for a healthcare company, but for a healthcare company trying to do things in a certain way. And so we talk about being obsessed with doing the right thing for the people that we serve, which unfortunately in healthcare isn't always true today. We talk about this idea of embracing reality and telling the truth.

So without going through all our core values, Lindsay, we're trying to build a team that can solve a really complex problem. And so we talk a lot about rock stars win games, teams win championships and we need to be a team and we need to all play our part. We need to trust each other, we need to collaborate, we need to tell each other the truth and we've got to care about each other. And I don't think I hit every core value of that context, but those are the elements of a great team in my mind. That's not everyone's definition of leadership and success, but for me, that's the only way I know how to build teams.

Lindsay Pedersen:

I love that you have a culture deck, a physical artifact that makes it real. What was the driving force behind making it explicit and physical in that way?

Rajeev Singh:

We stole some ideas. We looked at Netflix had published their culture deck, Reed Hastings and his CHRO, whose name I forget, but I've read their books. We also looked at a local company, a company called HubSpot here that had published their own culture deck and we loved it, we just loved what they wrote down. Not necessarily that it was us, but the fact that they wrote it down and that you can sometimes look at core values, Lindsey, and it's just bullets on a page and it looks like it could be anybody.

But then when you put some context to it and you say, "Here's an example of what we mean when we say embrace reality, it means we share the data. It means we tell the truth. We're not scared to confront the brutal facts." Because we can only get better when we look at the world the way it really is, not how we wish it was. And those types of things just humanize a set of core values and turns them into something that we think... We want people to make decisions using this. We want people to go, "Hey, Raj isn't going to be in that meeting or the CFO's not going to be in that meeting, you have to decide because if you don't decide and wait until you talk to them next, we're going to fall behind. So decide and here's the tool." Of course they need dashboards and business metrics, but the number one tool is this is what we believe in.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Yeah. And by making it physical and broad and easy to access for everybody, you're democratizing it. You're pushing decision-making down and out so that when you're not in the room, people can make decisions that abide by the values that you would've been insisting are the goal. I love that.

Rajeev Singh:

That's right. It'll go on our website soon. It's not up there yet, but it'll go on our website. If you're thinking about coming to work with us, this is who we are. And if that doesn't sound great to you, that's totally cool and if it does, awesome as well.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Well, actually, I love that filtering mechanism of it as well that just like any decision-making tool, it filters in and filters out. It says what's on the table and what's not on the table. So as they're useful insofar as they do both filter out and filter in, whether it's people or a decision to do something or a message. I love the way that you just put a sharp point on it like that, it's not going to be for everyone, if it were, it wouldn't be compelling to anyone.

Rajeev Singh:

Yeah, I think that's 100% true. I think people talk about the Amazon culture and the Netflix culture and they're all different. No one can argue that Amazon's one of the great business success stories in the history of the universe and yet there's people who would not thrive working there and there are people who would. And this is generally, I guess, a human point. We should be unapologetic about who we are as long as we're proud of who we are and that'll attract the people to us that believe in the same things we do.

All it does, I think, Lindsay, in the context of business is it just creates a shorthand that you get to go faster. If we know we all believe in the same core human principles, then cool, let's not debate that stuff, let's not worry about motives, let's not worry if we can trust this person, let's just go, let's just do the work. And when you get it right... And businesses have to constantly strive to nail their culture because it doesn't just sustain forever if you don't take care of it, it doesn't create itself. It's a constant battle, it's constant work.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Yeah. I think about culture and I don't know what the Venn diagram overlap is between culture and brand, but the circles do overlap a little or a lot. And the North Star of the company, do you have in Accolade, this is our North Star? Is that what the values was or do you have another umbrella?

Rajeev Singh:

We have a mission around every person living their healthiest life. I really think of culture, and I heard this from somebody else so I don't get credit for it. We had an opportunity to meet with the senior leadership team of Chick-fil-A, who can be quite controversial around here because of their social policy stances. But the one thing, if we can just put aside some of those things and say, "Well, we tried to learn from that." We're delivering to 12 or 13 million people, we're delivering a really complex service, healthcare. They're delivering to tens of millions of people, they're delivering a less complex service, but they're doing it with 17, 18 year olds, 19 year olds.

They're delivering extraordinary service, people love that service. More than the chicken sandwich, I think they love the service. We went to go learn from them. We spent a day with their senior leadership team and it was really insightful. But one of the things they said that stuck with me to your point around culture and brand is that, "Culture is the internal manifestation of your brand. It's laying out your brand principles for the people who have to live it and it's that manifestation that it's basically the inside version of your outside brand." And that makes perfect sense. The president of the company said that to me and I'm like, "Oh, shit. I can't believe I didn't think of that before.

Lindsay Pedersen:

I think it's so cool that Accolade, which is a B2B healthcare company and Chick-fil-A, which is a B2C chicken sandwich company or fast food restaurant, where there can be such cross learnings and that there is so much to learn within that. You weren't like, "Oh, we're going to go talk to another B2B healthcare company about how they breed their values and their culture." You went and talked to Chick-fil-A, I think that's so badass.

Rajeev Singh:

We're aspiring to be a lot better than existing healthcare. It's not to say that there's no one we can learn from in healthcare, there is. Of course, there's good companies in healthcare. But we're aspiring to be orders of magnitude better from a service perspective. And what you consistently hear from the incumbents in the space is, "It's just too hard. It's too complex. It's not that we don't want to deliver great service, it's just impossible. It's so complex." And we candidly, I don't want to curse, so we don't think that's right.

Lindsay Pedersen:

It's okay to curse if you want to, but okay.

Rajeev Singh:

That's all right. So we just don't think that's right and what we're proving right now, we think UnitedHealthcare serves 150 million people, we're serving 10 to 12, call it. We're subscale to where they are, but we think it can be done, and that's the aspiration and so we're going to go learn from companies who do it great. And so yes, did we all read Tony Hsieh's book? Are we going to places like Chick-fil-A? Will we go visit places like Starbucks? Yeah, we will because they've operationalized at scale delivering extraordinary service.

Lindsay Pedersen:

I love that. When is the best moment in the life of a company to define what you're going to stand for, what the culture will be, what the North Star will be?

Rajeev Singh:

I think as early as you can, Lindsay. I would say this, as early as you can, and I think you can write it down early and then you have to acknowledge that it's growing, it's constantly changing and to give yourself some permission. When you were 17, you thought you knew who you were. Then you were 22 and you're like, "Oh God, I'm pretty damn sure I know who I am." And then you were 25 and you're like, "I'm not any of that. I'm totally different." You know what I'm saying? You just keep growing and you keep experiencing things and you keep learning about your service, you keep learning about your people, you keep learning about the problem you're trying to solve and you acknowledge, "Oh, we forgot this." Or, "We're not good enough at this to build the company we want to go build, we should push that into how we talk about our business."

And so I think some might take the stance that core values have to stay the same for the history of the business. I think if you were to look at the examples we looked at, the culture deck at Netflix is constantly evolving. The same will be true for us. We'll constantly be evolving because we'll constantly be trying to solve new problems and that will look... I think the best human beings you know, the best companies you know are the ones who are intensely introspective and say, "I'm not good enough at this, I've got to grow. I have to get better." And culture should be the same way.

Lindsay Pedersen:

It makes me think of a human being and like you mentioned, a 17-year old a 20 something, that it's sort of a paradox because on one hand we are always hopefully evolving, we're changing, I'm really different now than I was when I was a teenager. And there is something that's the same that's hard to put your finger on, but if that weren't true about a company as well, it would be harder to bond with, it would be less person-like. There's a soul that transcends that is what it is, it's not stationary so much as it just is. And just like a person who's getting better and learning and becoming more who they are, there's an evolution. So it's both because if you always are changing your values and you're always changing who you are, then you lose trust with your audience and maybe you lose trust with your internal audience as well as your customer audience.

Rajeev Singh:

It's evolution versus transformation. But I think where businesses have interesting moments is when they go through leadership transition. Which is not the case at Accolade, I've been here for eight years, I was at 21 years at Concur. But I do watch those things with a lot of interest. I think that if you're to look at these institutional brands that go through big leadership transitions, I think the ones who are most successful are the ones where the incoming leader studies the culture, embraces the living daylights out of it and says, "This is who we are. I have to live within this brand and we're going to celebrate the brand." It's like I'm a big sports fan, Lindsay, the best coaches come in and acknowledge where they're coaching. If you're coaching in Detroit, it's different than if you're coaching in Los Angeles and you embrace the brand of the city, you embrace the brand of that team. And when you lean into what they've always been or who they are, you're a lot more successful than trying to transform the whole damn thing.

Lindsay Pedersen:

It makes me think of psychological safety that when you're an employee or a customer, but just think for a second of an employee whose leadership is changing. There's a primal response to that alone. And if a leader can come in and allow for people to feel safe again, and continuity may be part of that making them feel psychologically safe, a way to make somebody feel unsafe is to let them not know what's really happening or make it so different that they don't recognize it anymore and they don't trust it anymore. And so with a coach of a team that's in spades and explicitly so because performance and psychological safety reinforce one another.

Rajeev Singh:

I agree with you. Oftentimes business leaders, when they come into brand [inaudible 00:14:52], they're there to transform, but hired by a board or somebody that says," Hey, it's not going the way we want it to, make it better." That's why we change. And so how do you change what needs changing, but maintain the things that make people feel safe about, "I chose this place because it believed in these things." How do I maintain that? It's a really hard job. That's a difficult task. When I came into Accolade eight years ago, the company existed and this was one of my challenges is embracing who the company was, but acknowledging we have a lot to do to build the company we really want to build. It's a balancing act between the work and the culture and the people and they're different.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Right. And to give people credit, it's not like you need to infantilize them by making them feel like everything's okay when it's not, and things don't have to change when they do. But they're adults and there's a balance, there's a dance of those things that make it... It's tricky and people will leave and that has to be part of it as well.

Rajeev Singh:

Yes.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Yeah. What's an example or two of when you've used the North Star, the mission statement, the brand, the values to make a decision that otherwise would've been really hard but was not hard because of this North Star?

Rajeev Singh:

The one I always lean on the most for us, actually, I guess it's two. The first is you've got to tell the truth. And the truth is, when you're building a business, when I first got here, we had five customers and in many ways, things are great, we have more than 1,000 customers today. The journey from here to there is not a straight line and it doesn't always go well. Things don't always go perfect. And a business like ours or any business in that journey has a couple of choices. There's teams that make excuses and say, "Well, it's not our fault, the market was tough and these things happen, COVID happened." Or there's teams that look at themselves and say, "Okay, yes, some things happen in the macro environment that we couldn't control. Here's what we could control and we were about 80% as good as we wanted to be." This idea of relentlessly, constantly telling yourself the truth, "This is what we can control and we will control it." That's part one.

Part two for us is fearlessness. I did not come here, nobody joined this company to marginally make healthcare better. We joined the company because we believed in something big and we thought, "Hey, you know what? Let's take a run at really making a dent in healthcare outcomes and performance for the people that we serve and let's transform it." And this idea of fearlessly questioning the status quo means we're going to take risks. And then we say it all the time inside the four walls of our company, we're going to swing hard, to use the baseball metaphor, we're going to swing hard and sometimes we will strike out. And when we strike out, it will be hard, it will be difficult, people will make fun of us, people will say, "They're out succeeding." But what we will not do is play it safe on a path to try to do something dramatic. It's a $4 trillion ecosystem, playing it safe is just going to get you nibbling around the edges. We're not here to play it safe. And so those two things, fearlessness and honesty, those inform almost every big decision we have to make.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Is there ever disutility to having such a courageous stake in the ground? Do you ever wish you weren't trying to do something so hard?

Rajeev Singh:

No. I all the time wish it was easier and I all the time wish that we were executing... When you sit in my job or you sit in any job of leadership, if you're doing it right, you're constantly looking at what you're doing wrong. There's all this stuff you're doing right and all I focus on is what we're doing wrong. And I wish we were doing less stuff wrong every day for sure, but I take a lot of joy in the fearlessness of the mission.

One of the things for me, I'm in the later stages of my career, I'm 55 years old, and this is the last giant run of me in an operator doing the role. And I was lucky enough, the first one lasted a long time, it went pretty well. This one's got to go pretty well or it'll kill me. But the thing I get a chance to do right now is show my kids like, "Hey, it's hard. You see all these people on Instagram everywhere talking about how amazing their life is and how awesome it is and it's mostly [inaudible 00:19:14]. Real life, if you want to chase big things and do dramatically great things for the universe, it's going to be hard and there's a lot of days that are going to suck, but that's the journey. And so don't pretend, don't let the world trick you into thinking it's going to be easy. It's going to be hard, but it's going to be worth it because you know you're chasing something worthwhile."

Lindsay Pedersen:

Wow. Is the tool of the North Star, and I'm using the word tool for what you just showed me, the culture deck, the mission statement, the brand promise, is the explicitness of that ever a disadvantage? Because it holds your feet to the fire, right?

Rajeev Singh:

And people can weaponize it too. So you have to be careful. There's a reason you have five or six or four core values because one overused will kill you. We can be courageous, we should do crazy things. And crazy things, do them often enough and you will die and you will get killed. And so it creates a level of accountability to each other to debate how they're being applied.

I think the danger of it is that weaponization point like, "Oh, we tell the truth. Well, I'm going to come into a meeting and be a complete jerk because we're telling the truth." Well, that's not exactly what we meant. Embrace reality doesn't mean you coming in and saying, "You suck your job and you suck your job and if you guys were better, I'd be succeeding." That's not collaborating, that's not being stronger together. And so you have to balance these things out. But where I worry is the over application of one particular core metric for someone to embrace and say, "This is the reason why I behave the way I do." Or that core metric, core value. And that's where I think sometimes you can go wrong.

Lindsay Pedersen:

I think it's really interesting because on one hand there's this powerful accountability that it's a backstop. It shines the light on the behavior and the matching or non-matching of the behavior to the intended behavior. And I think of the word authentic, to be authentic here and then to say something mean.

Rajeev Singh:

Right. Exactly.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Right.

Rajeev Singh:

You wrap yourself in the cloak of, "I'm just abiding by our core values." That didn't mean to make anybody mad.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Right. And so a way to kind of offset that is to have a handful that dial each other. There's courage and there's kindness or whatever that-

Rajeev Singh:

Right.

Lindsay Pedersen:

And there're some instances where you lean hard into one side or the other. But just like human beings, it's not just a caricature of a certain personality trait, that's not how human beings are either. Or at least the ones who resonate and attract loyalty and a bond. I love this. Switching a little bit to outside of work just to show up as the leader that you want to show up as. There's a lot of emotional energy that goes into it. How do you fill your tank? How do you allow for the best of you to come out?

Rajeev Singh:

In a leadership position, you are expected to be expending energy on behalf of other people, you're supposed to give energy. So I think it is really important. It's an important question. How do you make sure that you have energy to give? There's a few things that fill in my tank for sure. My kids are now grown, I have a 21-year-old and a 19-year-old, so they're not in the house. Although I'm going to my son's parents' weekend this weekend in LA. The time with them is obviously a thing even though it's not in person with my kids, but my wife and I are now empty nesters here and that time is really important. So finding that time.

There's your body, you have to take care of your body, I believe that. And so that's really important to me, those things that I do to do that. You'll see a table full of books back there. At least half of them I'm supposed to read and I haven't read yet, but I'm constantly reading and trying to balance learning about what I do and improving in the areas of what I do. For example, I've read a lot of books recently about service and scale, Frances Frei, Uncommon Service, Fred Reichheld, Winning on Purpose, to The Three Musketeers, which I'm going to take, I'm leaving for a trip here in a minute.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Love the The Three Musketeers.

Rajeev Singh:

Those things matter. Unfortunately, I don't get the time with my friends and you make trade-offs in life. I chose to be an operator, I chose to work the way I work, I chose to travel the way I travel, to build this company and there are sacrifices that you'd make. But those three areas are the way I fill my tank the most.

Lindsay Pedersen:

I love that. And there are seasons of the relationships that take center stage. I can see that. What is a quality that you want to adopt more of for yourself?

Rajeev Singh:

The capacity to consistently show up with the energy at just the right harmonic of pushing the organization, but acknowledging and rewarding the work that's already been done. I think I told you before, I have a tendency to be really focused on what we have to go do. I'm not mercurial, meaning I'm not somebody who comes into a room and starts shouting and screaming at people. I would never be that person. But I am very focused on what's next, what's next, what's next? And I need to be better at celebrating the wins before moving on to, "Okay, we did that training. I thought we were going to do that." I have really high expectations for our team and so when we do great things, I think, well, I knew we were going to do that because this is a good team. I need to be better at stopping and maybe even less me smelling the roses, but helping my team smell the roses. And that's something I've been aspirational working on for a whole bunch of years.

Lindsay Pedersen:

I love that. Sounds like a worthy one, a worthy aspiration. Okay. Are you ready for a few rapid fire questions? One word answers.

Rajeev Singh:

One word only. Okay, got it.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Try. Okay. What is your favorite kind of candy?

Rajeev Singh:

M&M's.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Your favorite trait in a person?

Rajeev Singh:

One word, Lindsay, that's hard.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Or two, I can cheat.

Rajeev Singh:

Honesty and humbleness.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Your guilty pleasure these days?

Rajeev Singh:

God, maybe two. I can't resist tortilla chips. I can't resist them. I eat constantly healthy, but man, you put a bag of tortilla chips front me, I'm going to put those away. And my wife will kill me for saying this because she can't even understand why I watch it. I watch a lot of intellectual TV and I read books and then sometimes I'll watch Below Deck, I don't know why. Somehow it gets me, I don't know why. I turn it on, flipping through channels and there it is.

Lindsay Pedersen:

There's part of you that needs that.

Rajeev Singh:

I'm too old to be embarrassed about stuff and so I'm not embarrassed about it, but I'm confused by it.

Lindsay Pedersen:

I love it. Well, I'm looking for a new guilty pleasure, so I'll check that out. What's a book on your bedside table?

Rajeev Singh:

I already told you Three Musketeers, so I will do that. I'm about to read the Isaacson Elon Musk book.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Oh, yeah. Your favorite way to spend the Monday of a three-day weekend?

Rajeev Singh:

Oh, at home with the book and my wife.

Lindsay Pedersen:

There is a theme here, people, books. I love it. Raj, this has been so fun. Thank you for joining me. Where can we send listeners who want to connect with you online?

Rajeev Singh:

You can find me on LinkedIn, I'm super easy. You could also get my email address right off the website, Accolade.com.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Awesome. Perfect. Thanks again for joining me today.

Rajeev Singh:

Thanks, Lindsay.

Lindsay Pedersen:

Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. For show notes, transcripts and newsletter signup, visit Ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Please join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.