14 Career Insights and Tips From Women Leaders in Asia (Part 1)

Every August for the last ten years, The Glass Hammer has featured career insights and tips from women leaders and executives in Asia.

In this retrospective feature, we’ve mined the best experience-based guidance across those interviews, and this month we’ll be sharing in two parts!

Here are the first seven tips:

1. Be open to learn from everyone.

“Be open in your career,” advised Pamela Yeo, General Counsel and Senior Vice President at AIG Property Casualty Asia Pacific. “When you realize that everyone around you can teach you something new, and you become receptive to knowledge sharing and connecting, this can have a big impact on your advancement.”

Yeo urged young professionals to put themselves out there to catapult your journey through connection.

Update: Pamela Yeo remains in the position she has now held for nearly 17 years.

2. Do not keep your head down.

As a junior analyst, Kathy Matsui was told to “work hard, keep your head down, and you will go far.”

“This was the worst advice I could have been given as a woman just beginning her career, but when I first began working the idea that an ‘invisible hand’ would simply promote you was widespread,” Matsui told us, previously as Vice Chair, Global Investment Research at Goldman Sachs in Japan back in 2019. “Aside from excelling in one’s job, women need to also identify mentors, connect with others across their organization, and share their accomplishments.”

Update: After over 26 years with Goldman Sachs, Kathy Matsui is a founding General Partner of MPower Partners, Japan’s first ESG-focused global VC fund, as of May 2021.

3. Check your self-limiting assumptions and projections.

Earlier in her career, Kathy Matsui also shared with us the risk of operating inside the framework of your own self-limiting projections, which meant she spent too much time early on spinning her wheels just to prove her worth.

“My client base here was pretty homogenous when I first started working in Japan, in that it was mostly Japanese men who were twice my age,” remarked Matsui. “At the beginning, I felt like I had three strikes against me because I was female, foreign, and young. But this was really a perception that I put upon myself because professionally, nobody actually treated me differently based on my identity.”

4. Claim your voice in the conversation and early on.

“Put it all out there on the field every day,” recommended Padideh Raphael, Partner at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. “Women tend to wait for validation before sharing their opinion, but they should speak up earlier.”

As a first generation American raised with gender-related boundaries by her Iranian mom, Raphael said: “I believe there are no inherent barriers to success in this industry, but in some cases I have seen that women are traditionally raised or shaped to abide by societal norms,” she says.  “To the extent possible, women should be confident in having a place in the discussion.”

Update: Padideh Trojanow (Raphael) remains a partner at Goldman Sachs, now with the firm for over 22 years.

5. Discern your own truth when it comes to work and family.

“Each person has to look inside themselves and make their own choice without feeling pressure from family members, and then ask them to support that choice,” asserted Xing Zhou when it come to work and family life, as Diversity & Inclusion Leader at PwC China. “I view it as an achievement that as the mom of two children, I am able to find the balance and can serve as a role model for others in my firm and industry.”

Zhou discussed how Chinese women face pressure from their husbands and in-laws to shift their focus entirely to motherhood, whereas that is not every woman’s desire for herself and only she can truly decide.

Update: Xing Zhou has been with PwC Hong Kong and Mainland China for 24 years. She has now additionally taken up the roles of North Markets Leader and Beijing Office Lead Partner of Mainland China.

6. Make clear choices to keep evolving.

“There were lots of things I was interested in, and I wasn’t sure what to focus on; I was always hedging my bets. Only when I started to make choices, and others could see what I was about, did it all came together,” stated Ay Wen Lie, Partner, M&A Advisory at PwC in Singapore.

Wen Lie advised getting clear on what you stand for and believe in, both when it come to the work you are doing and creating your personal brand, otherwise you dilute your ability to impact and stand out: “Don’t be afraid to make choices, play to your strengths and focus your energy on where you can best add value.”

Update: Ay Wen Lie has been a Partner at PwC in Singapore for ten years.

7. Constantly nurture your network, internally and externally.

“For women at all levels of their careers, constantly building your personal network both internally and externally is extremely valuable,” said Teo Lay Lim, previously as Country Managing Director of Singapore for Accenture. “Building personal networks helps you to draw on others to augment your own insights [and] perspectives,” she added, emphasizing that Accenture had more than 85 local women’s networking groups in 32 countries to help build up their networks.

Update: Teo Lay Lim is now a Chairperson at Accenture in Singapore, with over 33 years with the firm.

Look out for Part 2 of this retrospective of top advice from female executives in Asia!

By: Aimee Hansen