In July 2014, I was at the time the local co-chair for a very large conference on HIV.
It attracted 15,000 people and 48 hours before the opening of the conference, MH17 was shot
I'm sure you'll remember it.
It was a Friday morning and on that plane were a number of delegates.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review and welcome
to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between
and along the way we're hoping to get some really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Professor Sharon Lewin, the director of the Peter Doherty Institute
for Infection and Immunity.
Hi Sharon, how are you?
Hi Sally, nice to be here.
Now Sharon, as I said, you're the director of the Doherty Institute, which is a research
institute tasked with preventing, treating and curing infectious diseases.
The organisation employs about 1,000 people and has an annual budget of $164 million.
I should also point out that you're a joint venture between the University of Melbourne
and the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Tell me, do you love it all?
I do actually, I feel I've got one of the best jobs in the world.
It's busy and at times stressful, but I totally love it.
Okay, we might get to the business a bit later on.
As promised, we've only got 15 minutes, so let's start the clock now.
Sharon, my first question is, what does your morning routine look like?
Assuming these are days when you're not travelling, what time do you get up, what happens?
I get up early, reluctantly, around 6.15, feed my dogs, two dogs at home, no kids anymore,
which is quite nice.
I go to gym twice a week, because it's the only time I'll exercise if I do it early,
and always read the paper, like reading the paper in hard copy.
I also, I should say, maybe three out of five mornings would have an early teleconference
with the US, but I generally try to get in my car by about 7.30, so I'm at work by 8.
So are you a breakfast person?
Always, three meals a day, I can't skip meals.
And what's on the breakfast menu?
A cup of coffee, piece of toast, bit of fruit, that's about it.
So would you consider yourself to be a morning person?
My natural tendency is night time.
I'm up very late at night, and I would go to bed normally about midnight or 1am.
So I tend to do all my email at night time after hours offline.
That's been actually quite a revolutionary thing to do.
So I'll come home, I have dinner with my husband, I might go out, do whatever I want to do,
and then about 10 o'clock at night I do my email till about midnight, and then I send
it all in the next morning.
So you put all the emails on a delayed sender, so you're not emailing your staff at midnight?
Yeah, that has been a really revolutionary tactic for me.
I've experienced that when I do my email on a plane, in planes that don't have Wi-Fi,
I used to really enjoy doing my email because I just sort of slowly work through it, have
time to think, answer something, go back to it, and you don't have this pressured feeling
that something just bounced back to you again, and you constantly look for the new email.
So the secret was because you're offline.
So it means I can think and work through it progressively, and then complicated stuff
that needs time, deep thinking, I leave for the next day.
But I guess that means it really does mean that you can concentrate on the people and
the projects that you need to do at work if you're not distracted by email.
Yeah, I'm not trying to get to my email.
You know, you sometimes see people constantly on their phone, very senior people, they're
in meetings and they're constantly on their phone, I'm thinking, concentrate, don't sit
looking at your phone, it's very distracting for people.
So if people are on their phones and answering their emails, say, in meetings, does that
Well, it depends what the context is.
Yeah, I think it's a bit rude.
I do think it limits your ability to concentrate on what the issue is that you're listening
Yeah, I quite agree.
So Sharon, my next question is about a pivotal moment in your career.
Can you tell me about a time where something happened, you worked on a new project that
really changed you as a leader or changed the trajectory of what you were doing at the
A pivotal moment for me was in July 2014.
I was at the time, head of infectious diseases at the Alfred hostel, so in a different job.
But I was the local co-chair for a very large conference on HIV.
In fact, it was the biggest health conference ever held in Australia.
It attracted 15,000 people.
And 48 hours before the opening of the conference, MH17 was shot down, I'm sure you'll remember
It was a Friday morning for us.
And on that plane were a number of delegates to the conference, and we got word very quickly
that a very famous scientist in HIV from Amsterdam, Joop Langer, was on the plane, and an unknown
number of Dutch and other delegates.
And so here we were, it was a very big leadership challenge anyway to run a conference of that
Tony Abbott was the prime minister at the time, he was supposed to be the opening speaker.
So I learnt what the challenge is of leadership in a crisis.
When there's all these unknowns, there's a lot of emotion, because people were very
distressed about losing delegates, losing friends, losing colleagues.
Of course, there were many Australians on that flight, as many and many Malaysians and many
And yet, trying to find a way forward to be sensitive to the tragedy and the loss, deal
with the uncertainty, but find a way forward.
And run a conference, I guess.
And run a conference that has a big impact, is what we wanted.
The Australian government, the Victorian government, the city of Melbourne, they've all put millions
of dollars towards this meeting, and a great opportunity for Australia to showcase the
great work we've done in HIV.
So yeah, incredible pressure.
As you might know, in 2020, I obviously had a very big role in COVID.
We saw you on the screens a lot.
I often point back to that moment of 2014 as equipping me for COVID.
It had a very big impact on me and how people look to leaders to lead them through a time
of crisis and uncertainty and the level of empathy, because other people were very distressed
by this event, but trying to navigate that uncertainty to ensure there was a successful
So what was the main thing you had to do?
Was it to remain calm and be empathetic?
Because it was such an emotionally charged time.
Yeah, I think one of the big memories of that time was that I personally felt really
emotional. I knew Joep Langer and his wife, Jacqueline, very well.
It was really a sad moment to lose a friend, a colleague, a great leader in the HIV response.
So I personally was quite emotional about it.
And yet I had to stand up and talk to whether it was a press conference or whether it was
the dinner that we were hosting on that Friday night.
I remember coming back and thinking, you know, I just can't do that dinner.
But anyway, so I sort of learned also to balance a bit of my own emotion.
It wasn't terrible if I was a bit emotional, because everyone else in the room was emotional
too. So that was quite confronting.
But so I don't think I was just sort of, you know, unemotional through that whole period.
That's interesting. So you don't have to be a robot in these circumstances.
You do not have to be a robot.
And I didn't really think what I wanted to be.
I was trying to survive and just do what I thought was the right thing to do.
But the decision making, I should say, was, of course, not just me.
It was shared decision making because I had a co-chair and we had like an executive leadership
team. That really helped.
Wow. Interesting.
Sharon, my next question is, what's the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
Well, I think the best bit of career advice that did change my career was to go away and train in
the best place possible or the best place in the world in your discipline.
And I had the opportunity to do that in the late 90s.
I had finished my medical training.
I finished my specialist training as a infectious disease physician.
I'd done a PhD in virology.
I had two young kids married.
My husband's a lawyer, a busy job.
And I had the opportunity to go and work in New York at a place called the Aaron Diamond
AIDS Research Center, which was part of Rockefeller University and run by a guy by the name of David
Ho, who was time man of the year in the mid 90s for discovering HIV treatments.
And although at the time it seemed like a real hassle to pack up and leave and take two kids to
New York and my husband putting his career on hold for a couple of years, it was an absolutely
transformational experience for me because I had the opportunity to work in the absolute epicenter
of HIV research and met an amazing network of people who then all went back to their home
And it's given me a professional network that I still lean on today around the world.
I used that very same network during COVID, continue to collaborate with all those people.
And at the same time, I also think living in another country with a young family is an
incredible thing to do.
It's an amazing experience for you as a person too, and who could be in a better place than New
On that note, we're going to take a short break.
And when we come back, we're going to open our very famous chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I'm here with Professor Sharon Lewin, the Director of the Peter Doherty Institute for
Infection and Immunity.
Now, Sharon, this is a section called the chatterbox.
It would normally be in front of you, but today it's in front of me.
So you're going to have to trust me.
It's a lovely brown box inside which are a few questions, which I am going to ask you to answer.
So are you happy for me to start foraging in this box here?
Who is a leader, business or otherwise, whom you really admire and why?
I really admired Jacinda Ardern over her leadership of New Zealand.
I really liked that she was very good at her job, but she was very down to earth and authentic.
And combining those two is not easy in leadership and especially for women in leadership,
but she did that really well.
Actually, to your point earlier, there's someone else who's not a robot,
not afraid to show that she's also emotional and people could really connect with that.
As she responded to the Christchurch tragedy at the time and the mass shooting, earthquakes,
COVID, so you saw her very empathetic, very authentic, but highly competent and young,
of course, and one of the youngest world leaders having a baby in office.
She was pretty extraordinary.
Yeah, yeah, she was a real trailblazer, wasn't she?
Okay, let's go back into the box for another question.
What's the advice that you would give your younger self?
I would give my younger self advice on enjoy the journey.
Things that you don't need to rush through life and do everything
at the one time or get nervous that you can't do it all.
So do you think you rushed a little bit?
And if so, which part did you rush?
I had two children during my PhD.
We had two boys who are now 27 and 30.
I pretty much, I didn't rush straight back to work, but at six months I went back to work.
I was desperate to finish my PhD and find out amount of time.
And so I probably rushed that a bit.
I think that would be quite common.
So I often tell younger staff, parents, men and women, don't rush back to work.
It's not going to change.
Whether you're away for six months or 12 months, it's really not going to change.
It might be easy for me to say that from where I sit now.
And when you're much younger, you're a lot less secure about what's ahead of you.
But they're precious times.
And if anything, I might look back and say, what was the rush?
So is it possible to draw a line between being overly driven
and being not driven enough and getting that rush?
It's quite a hard formula to get right.
And I think, well, certainly in science and research, it's very, very competitive.
So you can't not be trying to be your very best.
But that doesn't mean that you should be unhappy or not fulfilled
or not have a well-rounded life.
But you've got to be passionate and driven and committed to succeed
because it's a very tough and competitive environment.
Yeah, but it is all around having a full and vibrant life in all aspects.
My parents, particularly my mother, who really believed in the importance
of being well-rounded, of being part of your social life, of your community, of family,
your interests outside of work.
So all of that was always stressed to me as being very important.
Fantastic values to be instilled with as a young kid.
OK, next question.
I shall start foraging on your behalf.
What's your favourite party story you like to share?
My favourite party story when I'm feeling really relaxed
is when I've misdiagnosed a major medical problem in my husband,
who happens to be a medical defence lawyer.
Oh, that's great.
That usually gets quite a few laughs.
It's not that funny, but...
And maybe it doesn't reflect so well on me,
but many years ago in the early 90s, my husband hopped off a plane.
He was then in his mid-30s and had some pain in his leg.
And he said he thinks he's got a deep venous thrombosis, a DVT,
which of course everyone knows about now.
But I said, don't be ridiculous.
You're just a hypochondriac.
And of course, seven days later, he was diagnosed with a DVT.
So he's never let me forget that story.
Since that time, he likes to call me the defendant.
And never, I'm guessing, seeks any medical advice from you ever?
Well, he still does.
So did he recover from the DVT?
And as it turns out, he has had multiple other DVTs.
He's predisposed to them.
So it's been good to know about that
because he can prevent them when he's travelling.
And I'm assuming you've diagnosed him on many occasions correctly in the years since.
Yeah, I take very good care of my gorgeous husband.
Sharon, that is the end of our chatterbox section.
I now have one last question for you, which we ask everybody who comes on.
And that is, in your case, in the unlikely event that you could have a year off,
what would you do with it if you were unencumbered and could do anything you liked?
I'd go and live in France for a year.
You learn so much living in another country.
The depth of understanding a whole other culture and country.
And there's such a rich history in France.
And would love to be able to speak French better.
So do you think you'd be able to not work for the year?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, that's pretty good.
What drew you to France in the first place?
I've spent quite a lot of time there.
My husband and I have quite a few friends that are in France,
and we've had some very nice times with them.
I've just grown to love the place.
And I think the culture is rich and layered and has influenced the world so much.
Of course, so has English culture, but that's very familiar to us.
So yeah, I like the depth and complexity of it.
And Sharon, that is our time up.
Thank you so much for sharing the challenge of leading a conference
in the wake of the MH17 tragedy in 2014,
and how that experience equipped you to lead with empathy
and balance your own emotions to handle future crises like COVID-19.
I think our listeners will really gain a lot from that story.
And I love your advice to your younger self to slow down and smell the roses.
That work is important, but living a well-rounded life will bring you more happiness.
And yes, I also get annoyed at people who bring phones and computers into meetings.
So Sharon, thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thanks very much, Sally. It's been a pleasure.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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