How do you build trust? How do you meaningfully advance inclusion and diversity? In this episode, YS Chi speaks with Kumsal Bayazit, the first female CEO in Elsevier’s 140-year history, about her learnings and insights into building trust and creating an inclusive mindset. Kumsal tells us how her upbringing in Istanbul shaped her commitment to inclusion and diversity and what Elsevier is doing to support researchers and health professionals who play such a critical role in ensuring societal progress.
This podcast is brought to you by RELX.
How do you build trust? How do you meaningfully advance inclusion and diversity? In this episode, YS Chi speaks with Kumsal Bayazit, the first female CEO in Elsevier’s 140-year history, about her learnings and insights into building trust and creating an inclusive mindset. Kumsal tells us how her upbringing in Istanbul shaped her commitment to inclusion and diversity and what Elsevier is doing to support researchers and health professionals who play such a critical role in ensuring societal progress.
This podcast is brought to you by RELX.
The Unique Contributions podcast is brought to you by RELX. Find out more about us by visiting RELX.com.
Kumsal Bayazit:I constantly think about how we as leaders can lighten that burden, and recognise and reward the efforts of these individuals better, who are really putting their heart and soul into driving positive change.
YS Chi:Hello, and welcome to our second series of unique contributions, a RELX podcast where we bring you closer to some of the most interesting people from around our business. I'm YS Chi and I'll be exploring with my guests some of the big issues that matter to society, how they're making a difference, and what brought them to where they are today. My guest today is Kumsal Bayazit, who is of course the CEO of Elsevier. Born and raised in Istanbul, educated in the US, married to a Frenchman, and working from London and Amsterdam for a global company; Kumsal is very much defined by diversity. In this episode, I'll be asking her how her own experience of inclusion and diversity has shaped her vision for Elsevier. Two years into her job, what has she learned? And what does she want to achieve? And along the way, we'll be talking about building trust within the research and healthcare communities and how Elsevier is contributing to advancing healthcare and progress in science. Kumsal, thank you for joining the podcast.
Kumsal Bayazit:Thank you YS, I am delighted to be here.
YS Chi:Now you're based in London for now and working from home. What is it like to orchestrate 8000 people on your team from all around the world from your home?
Kumsal Bayazit:YS, I think it's obvious that it has been a very, very tough year without a doubt for everyone. And the impact of the pandemic on our people have been profound. Whether it is loss of loved ones, loss of normalcy, loss of social connection, struggles with mental health. Currently, I'm very worried about our teams in Delhi as the situation is quite difficult on the ground now. So as I reflect on the last 12 months, I think for all of us, this has been a year of ups and downs and extreme emotions. But with that, there was a lot of professional and personal growth that came through the challenges. And there has been a lot of silver linings as well. I have been inspired by the strength and resilience, our people have shown how they came together to support each other. And our customers, most of whom are fighting Covid-19 on the front lines as health care workers or researchers. And personally, another silver lining for me is that I'm grateful for the additional time that I have been able to spend with my almost 14 year old and my almost 10 year old.
YS Chi:Well, you know, in your answer just now, you so naturally emanate what I've always called you as a quintessential global citizen. And you grew up in Istanbul, and I believe your grandmother was one of the first female lawyers in Turkey as well. And I know you had an interesting education too, with your grandfather's story. Perhaps you could tell us about your upbringing, and how that has perhaps shaped you as a person we know as you.
Kumsal Bayazit:Of course YS. Yeah, I grew up in a family, a big family and a very close family and a family of strong women. My grandmother, who had a huge influence on me was, as you said, one of the first Turkish female lawyers. She actually went to law school the first year women were admitted to law school in Turkey, along with two other women who became lifelong friends to her. She had five daughters, she lost her eldest at age five. And now my grandmother also lost my grandfather, when my mother was 18 in a car accident, so she brought up the four girls on her own. I have a sister who was then a half month younger than me. So we were extremely close growing up. And on my father's side, my grandfather was an engineer. And until I was about 12, they lived upstairs from us. And he had an attic with all kinds of wonderful junk machinery and tools he used to buy at the American military base that was close to our house. And he used to let me and my sister come along and play wearing hard hats. And he always told me stories of famous scientists. Marie Curie was one of his heroes and he always hoped that I would grow up to become a scientist. My father is an architect and my mother is a finance professional who worked with non for profits, focused on population control most of her career. So she has travelled all around the world and worked with the United Nations as well. So I have a really, I have really happy memories of my childhood with my parents and sister mostly driven by being surrounded by a large family and feeling really loved. Which I think has sort of given me that sense of being grounded, grounded as an adult.
YS Chi:And confident too.
Kumsal Bayazit:Confident too I think. I think I'm very international because I just grew up with a lot of international people around the house. And I was also a very avid reader, and I know your two girls love reading too YS and we have spoken about how important that is. And my children, lucky they love, they love reading as well. So I have, I just remember spending a lot of time reading a book and eating an apple, first in my grandfather's attic and then when we moved to Istanbul in our house in Istanbul.
YS Chi:Well, you are truly international in every sense. And I think it's really appropriate that you are at the head of one of the most international companies that one can imagine. Now, so after Turkey, you ended up at the US first, then to London?
Kumsal Bayazit:Yes, yes. I went to US, first as an exchange student when I was 15, and spent a year in a small town called New Hartford outside of Utica. That was my first experience in America, and then I went back to Istanbul to finish high school. And my parents, especially my father, really encouraged me to apply to universities in the US. And he rightly so felt it would open up my horizons. So I applied to Berkeley as my maternal grandfather, one who died when my mother was 18, had graduated from Berkeley in 1939, with a degree in engineering. Now, he claimed he was the first Turk to ever graduate from Berkeley. I don't know if that's true, but it made for a good story. And I never met him, but he was one of those larger than life figures. So I had grown up with a lot of stories about him. So in 1992, I left Turkey to go to university, and I had been living living abroad since then. And I had a fantastic experience at Berkeley. As you know, which is a very, very diverse university that I think shaped further sort of who I am. And after, after college, I had three excellent years working with Bain & Company in Los Angeles, and Johannesburg and Sydney, learned a lot of strategic skills there. Also made some lifelong friends, especially a group of five women who are a bit of my board of directors for life. And then after Bain, I completed my MBA at Harvard. That's where I met my husband, Stefan, who, as you said, is French and we were section mates. And then I went back to Bain after business school, they had had sponsored my MBA. So I stayed there for a couple of years. And in 2004 April, 17 years ago, I joined LexisNexis in New York City around the same time that you joined Elsevier, I think.
YS Chi:Yeah.
Kumsal Bayazit:Yeah. And I was first hired by Mike Walsh in the Strategy Team, who's now of course, the CEO of LexisNexis. And that started my 17 year RELX journey. And I had many roles in that time frame working at LexisNexis Legal and LexisNexis Risk when those two businesses were one unit, Reed Exhibitions, as head of strategy for RELX, chairing the RELX technology forum and now my my current role at Elsevier. And these jobs had me move across the Atlantic between London and New York a few times in the last 17 years.
YS Chi:Unbelievable. Even at Bain, LA, Sydney, South Africa. I mean, I mean, they're about as far apart as it can get. What an exposure you have. Now, I know I was saying this before, that, if we could, we would have a 16 hour podcast just with you about all the aspects of the leadership, including tech, Elsevier, and, you know, Reed Exhibitions and so on. But unfortunately, we're going to kind of narrow down and stick with one major topic. And then before that, I want to catch a couple points around the two years that you are now CEO at Elsevier. Now I know your mission was to build trust with the research and health communities that Elsevier serves. Now, how is this mission progressing right now, despite Covid?
Kumsal Bayazit:YS I am encouraged by the progress we are making and COVID actually, in some ways accelerated that progress. When I took on my role at Elsevier I spent a lot of time, first on the road in my first year and then via Zoom and the pandemic hit in the second year, meeting all the communities that we serve. Researchers, librarians, research leaders, funders, hospital administrators, doctors, nurses, medical educators, students. All of whom, wonderful people who work hard to leave behind a positive impact, a trace on society. And some of the most disappointing meetings I had were the ones where I could feel the lack of trust. There are many stakeholders I met who trusted Elsevier. Universally, our customers said we stand for quality, and they trust us to deliver. But there was also deep pockets of mistrust within the communities we serve. And pricing and open access were the main reasons for that lack of trust. And to me trust is so critical. It's the route to getting things done, isn't it? I read an op ed by George Shultz in Washington Post recently, which captured, in my view, the essence of trust. It was the wonderful Danny Marti from your team who actually sent it to me because he knows I spend a lot of time thinking about trust. And George Shultz, as you know, is the former US Secretary of labour, treasury and state, and he recently passed away. And he wrote this just before he turned 100. And he said, trust is the coin of the realm. When trust was in the room, whatever room that was, the family room, the school room, the locker room, the office room, the government room, the military room, good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details. And I completely subscribe to George Schultz point of view. And what he said really resonated with my life experiences. And the good news is that we are making progress, I can see the feedback from our customers qualitatively and quantitatively coming through. Elsevier is a mission driven organisation, you know this really well, and our people genuinely care about supporting our customers, and the research healthcare and learning outcomes, the communities that we serve, drive. And our number one operating principle at Elsevier is putting ourselves in our customers shoes. A huge ingredient for building trust is to be able to look at the issues from the vantage point of others. And by doing that we are systematically finding some creative solutions to some long standing issues in academic publishing. And I do have confidence that we are making progress, and trust as you know, builds, and is built over time. But we're on the right track.
YS Chi:So well said. Now one of the values that you espouse very dear to yourself is inclusion and diversity. And you champion those issues, those values, really, from deep down in your heart. And of course, it helps that you have gone through these experiences yourself. For example, as the first female CEO of Elsevier in 140 years history. Can you tell me, can you tell us a little bit about what Elsevier is doing to further inclusion and diversity within our company? And why is it that important?
Kumsal Bayazit:YS, building a culture and practice of inclusion and diversity within Elsevier is at the heart of our strategy. And I don't think I need to advocate for why inclusion and diversity is critical. There is now mounting evidence that shows that diverse teams drive better progress. And that's important. But what is more important is to do what is right. And I think it's critical that people feel comfortable in their own skin, and have equal opportunity to progress in any environment and community that they are a part of. And progress with inclusion and diversity takes time. I love the notorious RBG code on this. And she said, real change, enduring change happens one step at a time. And we're doing a lot within Elsevier to make that change happen. And the credit goes to our employee resource groups here, who really shape and drive the change they want and seek, with support and sponsorship from the leadership. And we're focused on lots of different dimensions of inclusion, gender, race and ethnicity, disabilities LGBTQI+, age and generations. And we do some things that I call as horizontal, it lifts all boats. So we rolled out unconscious bias training, and we're investing in increasing psychological safety now. Our people are sharing experiences and having courageous conversations. I am enabled. I am proud. I am black in my skin. They write beautiful, beautiful stories of how they feel. We are providing mentoring and reverse mentoring for underrepresented groups. We have specific talent reviews with focus on woman and under represented groups. We are rolling out coaching training to all of our people managers this year to support everyone, to be able to get the best best performance out of everyone and set them up for success. And I genuinely believe that what we can't measure we can't progress. So we're setting targets and measuring how we are doing with diversity, psychological safety inclusion. We're constantly working with our colleagues across the globe to identify what are the systemic issues that we need to keep tackling. This is a journey. You know this very well as well, you've been a big champion of inclusion and diversity, and I've known you for 17 years now. And we are committed to this for the long haul. And progress can feel painfully slow sometimes. And I can be deflating for our people who are working very hard to drive the change. I personally feel frustrated by the pace of change sometimes. But what I have come to learn is that when it comes to inclusion and diversity, there are rarely silver bullets. It's the accumulation of many small incremental changes over time that builds up and drives change. And I've also learned that when it comes to diversity, there is no prioritisation. We must push diversity on all fronts; gender, race and ethnicity, generations, disabilities, sexual orientation. Progress for one will lift all, creating a more inclusive mindset and removing systemic issues.
YS Chi:So that's a really, really critical point you just made, because you are at the helm of an incredibly international entity, right? So what is diversity in one part of the world, is not necessarily the focal point of diversity in another part of the world. And so it must be incredibly broad for you to have to manage this whole culture of inclusion and diversity, because you just multiply the complexity by, you know, another X actor.
Kumsal Bayazit:Absolutely. And you do really need to systematically work through that complexity. But that's why I always focus on an inclusive mindset first, because that actually lifts all boats in all cultures across the globe. If you can start with an inclusive mindset and, and really build a culture of that in the organisation.
YS Chi:Can I stop you there and ask you please to explain to our audience. Most people a year and a half, two years ago, we're talking about D&I, diversity and inclusion. Yet, for you, your colleagues and our organisation. You reverse that, you just talked about it a little bit, but inclusion first. Please elaborate a little more for the audience.
Kumsal Bayazit:Sure. And we got to give credit to Adam Travis here who is our our Head of Inclusion & Diversity at Elsevier, because he has educated all of us on this. Diversity is an output and inclusion is the input. So if you, that's why you have to start with inclusion, which leads to diversity. If you focus on diversity, you may actually miss the key ingredient, which is inclusive mindsets. And that's why we focus so much on things like unconscious bias training, and psychological safety, and coaching, and mentoring, because all of those help you build that inclusive mindset. And if you can actually achieve that, a lot of the diversity outcomes you want to drive will come more naturally.
YS Chi:And you see it changing, aren't you, within Elsevier?
Kumsal Bayazit:Absolutely. Absolutely. It also gives a common way of thinking about diversity. Doesn't matter which angle of diversity you're trying to push forward. I said progress for one lifts all, and if you think about inclusion and inclusive mindset that really does lift all.
YS Chi:Right. Have you seen any instances yet where one segment feel like their inclusion elements are being kind of overlooked, while others are being emphasised more? Have you seen that kind of..?
Kumsal Bayazit:Yes, absolutely. And I had long conversations, I had a long conversation on this with with one of our team members yesterday. And I think that it's really important. This is not a competition. It's a collaboration, where we all have to respect each other's views and make progress on all fronts. And when I look at the different aspects of diversity that we're working on, they have very different levels of maturity. Some of them at Elsevier, we've been working on for a decade, and you see some amazing outcomes coming through now, and it took a decade of work. Whereas other dimensions of di ersity, we really started putti g a lot of far thinking and r sources and focus and passi n behind it just a couple of ye rs ago. So they're still at th beginning of the journey. So th re's also a maturity co ponent based on how long our te ms have focused on these is ues and have really gotten de p to understand what we need to change and how we drive be ter outcomes.
YS Chi:Indeed, I think that sense of maturity or the timeline, being all different, makes it challenging. But I really liked the fact that you are trying to lift the entire water level as opposed to one at a time.
Kumsal Bayazit:I think that's the only way you can do it.
YS Chi:Alright, so let's look outside, that's among the employees that are within Elsevier. You have been much more ambitious than that. You want to serve the community, also, not only with what we do daily in science and health contribution, but also in this advancing the inclusion and diversity for the communities that we work with daily, outside of Elsevier.
Kumsal Bayazit:That's absolutely right YS. And honestly, I think our people again take the credit for it. I'm sort of surfing the wave that they've started. But we are very committed to working with our partners to build more inclusive research and health ecosystems. Inequities in academic research and healthcare are manifested in many different ways. And you're very familiar with this too, from the low proportion of women and underrepresented groups of our tenured professors, to the lower rates of grants awarded to woman and researchers who are members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, to the lack of appropriate sex and gender based analysis and research studies and inequities in health care itself, as we have witnessed with the, for example, disproportionate impact COVID had on minorities in the US and UK and elsewhere. And I know both you and I watched the documentary by Shannon Shattuck, Picture a Scientist, a couple of weeks ago. And while we all know inequalities exist, I think the stories Shattuck told in the documentary really brought to life how these inequalities impact members of the research community. And both the research and the healthcare community really is focused on improving improving these issues. And we believe Elsevier can actually make a real impact in three primary ways. The first one is by providing analytics to make evidence based decisions. Our gender reports provide data by discipline and by country on how representation of women are evolving, and identify where there are gaps and where there is real progress. The last one came out last year, as you know, and it shows that Portugal is doing an amazing job, especially with early career researchers. So we're now doing a deep dive on Portugal to understand decades of policy, and culture and processes that help support that so others can learn from it. We also do analytics and sustainable development goals to show the impact of research on the achievement of these goals, and the striking absence of sex and gender dimensions in sustainable development goals such as climate change. So The Lancet as a result included gender perspectives and indicators on the Lancet countdown on health and climate change. So the first one is all around analytics, the first bucket. The second bucket is that we work to ensure that our content and solutions are as inclusive as possible. This comes alive with efforts such as supporting researchers to factor in gender, sex and race to research design. The surreal issue, and one of our board members, Londa Schiebinger, has some great case studies showcasing that. So AI facial recognition technologies failed 35% of the time for black woman, oximeters don't work on dark skin. So I can go on and on with examples. So we really need to factor in sex and gender and race into the research design itself. And we do a lot of training with early career researchers on this. And we work on improving accessibility on all of our products. You know Ted Gies has been leading that with passion for almost a decade for us now. And lastly, we support a rich pipeline of research and health professionals to enhance inclusion. Across gender, race and ethnicity, generations and geographical dimensions too with global, global south. And that comes alive in enabling diversity in our editorial boards, and conference speakers, which supports career progression for researchers. The work that Elsevier Foundation does in supporting woman researchers from developing countries, by highlighting the future generation of brilliant scientists with the Cell Press Rising Black Scientists awards. And so much of this is driven by the grassroots efforts of our people. They have great ideas that can move the needle, and we empower and support them to pursue those ideas. And we put a lot of resources in terms of time, data, content and expertise, as well as formalised funding. And we have two wonderful advisory boards. Elsevier Foundation, which was launched by you YS a decade ago, that really makes a difference. As well as the Elsevier inclusion and diversity advisory board with Richard Horton, our editor in chief of the Lancet. We co chair, Richard and I, the Elsevier inclusion and diversity advisory board. And we have leading scholars from around the world with real expertise on inclusion and diversity that really help us figure out how to move the needle here.
YS Chi:Yeah, I was going to ask about the origin of the inclusion and diversity advisory board concept, because it is really incredibly accomplished people who are, you know, sharing time and expertise and experience with you as you formulate the priorities and directions, right?
Kumsal Bayazit:We are absolutely privileged and delighted to have incredibly capable and leading scholars with deep, deep expertise in inclusion and diversity. And the board has been tremendous in giving us the right advice, putting ourselves in the customers shoes, thinking about it through the community perspective. They all bring very different perspectives, it's a very global board with representation from all regions. And they also come from many different disciplines, which really helps as well. And and I bring, of course with Elsevier, more a view from a partner to the academic communities who served academic communities. And it's lovely to see how we can connect the dots with the board to say how, what else we can tackle or how do we make sure there's real progress that we can measure in the areas that we're tackling. So it's been a wonderful, wonderful addition to our efforts and really step up our game.
YS Chi:Yeah, I'm sure it was extremely valuable. What about the general research and healthcare community? How are our efforts being embraced? How is it mixing and mashing well with those that are already going on, by them as well, because there's so there's so many committed people in our community, right?
Kumsal Bayazit:Honestly, it's been wonderful to see the support of the community. So with our editorial boards now, we're working on improving editorial board diversity, for gender, for geography, and for career stage, which are the three we can measure right now. We're working on if we can, and how we can do race and ethnicity as well. And our editors in chief have really embraced this effort. Are really up for for driving change. So in everything that we do we get real support on the ground, and real good challenge to make sure what we're doing is pragmatic and impactful and drives the right results.
YS Chi:Yes, indeed. And I can't wait to see further progress with your leadership. We've taken enough of your time, but I do have a question remaining that I must ask. You know, it's been just over two years since you took the helm. As you reflect back, what have been the most important lessons that you have learned, you believe, over this period, leading an incredibly impactful company like Elsevier?
Kumsal Bayazit:What has been amazing about leading Elsevier in the last two years, is I have learned so much, I've been drinking from a firehose. So the learning has been absolutely tremendous. And if I think about what are the most profound things I've learned, I think within the larger context, to me, the last two years reinforced and showed with crystal clarity, the critical role researchers and healthcare professionals play in improving societal progress. And how we all need to be working very hard to find new ways of supporting them and enabling them. I mean look at this, I like to look at things in the context of long periods of time, because change can be slow. But in the last 200 years, thanks to the tireless work of researchers. There's been just incredible, incredible progress in society. Things like life expectancy globally has almost tripled. The global population living in extreme poverty has decreased from 85% to 9%. And literacy amongst adults increased from I think, 10% to 86%. I mean, these are enormous developments. And now there's a new set of challenges that the research community is addressing. Of course, climate change, food and water security, helping people live longer and healthier lives, reducing social inequalities while also driving economic growth. So I think it's really just the last two years made it crystal clear for me how important the communities we serve are for societal progress, and how important it is for all of us to continue to support them to the best of our ability. And then personally, again, we've done a lot of work on inclusion and diversity. And I think my lesson learned there is that there is a toll to the activism and the fight that individuals put into driving positive change. And that toll comes in terms of time commitment and emotional energy. And I constantly think about how we as leaders can lighten that burden, and recognise and reward the efforts of these individuals better, who are really putting their heart and soul into driving positive change. I don't have a good answer for that. But that's something that's really top of mind for me, is that recognition of the toll that it takes on individuals.
YS Chi:Well, sometimes I question whether one is able to do that and take the toll because we are performing well, and it gives us the cushion to do so. Or it's the other way around. That you make that investment and our performance gets better and better. But either way, they must be feeding each other. Well, at Elsevier, that's the same with you and your team. I don't know which one feeds the other better. But it's miraculously working extremely well. And we are so happy with your leadership.
Kumsal Bayazit:Thank you. Thank you YS and I know the answer to that. It's the team. It's my direct team. And it's the larger team. It's an amazing group of people. So I am absolutely privileged to be leading them.
YS Chi:Well Kumsal, I would have called you a renaissance woman to mimic the renaissance men expression but renaissance women were very much unappreciated under appreciated, so I think I can't use that term. I don't want to call you a super woman because that just seems a little glitzy, right? So I'm gonna call you the super global citizen. And that seems very contemporary.
Kumsal Bayazit:Thank you. Thank you YS, I appreciate that. I don't know about super, but I'm definitely a global citizen.
YS Chi:I want to thank you Kumsal for your time. And for all these, you know, wisdom you shared with us. Thank you so much.
Kumsal Bayazit:Thank you YS, thank you.
YS Chi:And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to hit subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes as soon as they're released. And thank you for listening.