By Sara Canaday
In July, I had the privilege of delivering a keynote speech to 500 incredibly talented professionals at Working Mother Media’s annual Multicultural Women’s National Conference in New York City. As I took the stage on the first morning and began to share my story, I was struck by the remarkable vibe in the room. These women weren’t just present; they were fully engaged. I was surrounded by current and emerging leaders representing a wide range of industries, ages and cultures, and they were all totally plugged in. The message was genuinely resonating with them.
The theme of the conference was “Vision & Impact: Charting What’s Next.” My work in the area of leadership and development has always focused on the importance of our impact in the workplace. Credentials and years of experience aside, our real career success is driven by how we work with and through other people – how we lead them, collaborate with them, interact with them, and react to them. When we manage that impact and ensure that others experience us in the way we intend, we can accelerate the pace of our professional trajectories.
Here’s the problem… Many times, there’s a hidden gap between what we see and what those around us see. When there’s an impact disconnect (even a very subtle one), our careers can be inadvertently derailed while we are left wondering what went wrong. I call those disconnects professional blind spots. Despite our best intentions, these blind spots may be holding us back or preventing us from reaching our full potential.
Think about your co-workers. Do you know someone who is generally smart, hard working and well intentioned, but still manages to rub people the wrong way? There’s a fine line between decisive and abrupt. Between passionate and overzealous. Between meticulous and annoyingly nit-picky. Between innovative and rebellious. These people might have great resumes, but blind spots are likely the reason they are getting overlooked for promotions or high-visibility assignments. Their intended impact on others doesn’t match up with the actual impact they deliver. Subtle behaviors and unconscious habits are sabotaging their success, and they simply can’t see it.
Quite a few women approached me after my presentation to recount fascinating stories about people in their organizations who were clearly struggling with professional blind spots. Surprisingly, quite a few of these people were bold enough to describe their own “a-ha! moments,” identifying blind spots they never before acknowledged but now see as the culprit behind some of their past career missteps. These women all seemed to understand that everyone suffers from blind spots, but those who end up in the boardroom or the corner office have just learned how to manage them better.
I challenged the conference attendees that day to move beyond their resumes as they thought about achieving their professional goals. I asked them to focus on the impact they have on others, ensuring their intentions were translating into reality. I gave them three ways to do that, and I’d like to share those with you as well.
First, increase your self-awareness. Be honest about your natural tendencies and habits when you interact with others. How do your colleagues feel about working with you? Ideally, how would you like them to feel? Eliminating blind spots certainly isn’t about changing who you are, but about understanding yourself and making conscious adjustments to improve your impact on others.
Second, get specific feedback from your co-workers to find out how you are really perceived. This process might be a bit uncomfortable, but it’s absolutely critical to help uncover any blind spots that could be slowing down your career progress. Besides that, getting feedback will also point out your strengths and the distinguishing qualities that set you apart. If you’ve had trouble defining your value proposition, this exercise can give you amazing clarity. You can gather feedback using a wide range of methods, from formal reviews with your manager to casual conversations with peers. Online surveys are another excellent option. For corporate clients and students in my virtual Career Acceleration Academy, I provide access to my Brand 360 Survey. This easy, online tool allows them to gather rich, anonymous feedback from a select group of colleagues.
Third, compare your ideal impact with the actual impact you discovered by gathering feedback. Look closely at the areas where you are right on target for strengths you can further leverage. Any areas with gaps represent your own professional blind spots. Armed with that knowledge, you can work to close those gaps and actively improve the impact you have on others. Simply being aware of your blind spots and unique differentiators will help you make the small changes that can make a big difference in your career success.
As women, many of us have an innate gift for intuition and emotional intelligence. Research proves that we are “wired” over several thousand years for greater empathy and stronger communication skills. I firmly believe these qualities give us a huge advantage in the workplace when it comes to uncovering and eliminating our professional blind spots. We can use that capacity to improve the way we impact others, to fuel our career progress, and to create greater business success. This nugget of insight truly resonated with the women attending the recent conference, and I sincerely hope it does the same for you.
Sara Canaday (www.SaraCanaday.com) is a nationally recognized leadership expert, corporate speaker and owner of Sara Canaday & Associates, a consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. Sara is also a resource partner of www.theglasshammer.com and to help conference attendees use a systematic, quantifiable approach to improving their business impact, Sara offered an exclusive discount on her popular online course, the Career Acceleration Academy, including her Brand 360 Survey. For a limited time, Sara wants to extend that same offer to Glass Hammer readers. To register and get more details, please visit CareerAccelerationAcademy.com. Use Code GH001.
The Future is Now: Seven Recommendations for Leadership Success
Guest ContributionIn 2002, a colleague, Chris Gilliam, and I wrote a white paper about what big and small companies can learn from each other. During the research phase, we surfaced the book, Rethinking the Future by Rowan Gibson, published in 1998. Gibson predicted that there would be a world where:
• Competition will be fierce and markets will be merciless
• Small companies will outsmart giant corporations on a global scale
• Customers will have infinite access to products, services & information.
In our white paper, based on research and interviews of C-Suite and senior-level leaders, we made the following recommendations for business success in the world that Gibson predicted and has become reality. They are still good advice for leaders today.
1. CEOs must have a purpose/mission and a vision for her company; why does it exist and where is it going? Along with values, these two “must-haves” are the Core that provides unity across silos that gets everyone focused on corporate goals. Here is why you need a well-defined company Core:
• It’s the foundation for all your decision-making, your true north against which everything is assessed.
• It provides a clear, common focus and direction for everyone in your company as long as it is clearly communicated.
2. The CEO needs to know her own strengths and weaknesses in order to surround herself with people on the leadership team who bring different competencies to the table. Too often, leaders hire in their own image which magnifies both the hiring leader’s strengths as well as the weaknesses, which leads to less effective decisions. Different is good to avoid group think by getting varying points of view. Considering the talent pool today and wanting to win the talent war, you will need to hire with diversity in mind.
As you hire leaders, they should have the competencies that are dictated by the company Core. What skills, abilities, and characteristics does a leader need to work the mission, help the company move toward its vision, and act on the values?
3. Together, the leadership team must create a strategic framework, a plan for the future that provides a ‘picture frame’ for others in the company who can paint the picture of how the company will get there. The picture frame provides the limiting outer edges but also the freedom and creativity in the inner space for employees to do their best work. The Strategic Framework should be developed as a reflection of the company Core and remain a fluid document that is reviewed on an ongoing basis. What strategies, goals and actions do you need to take so that you are working the mission, moving toward the vision and acting on the values? It ought to be cascaded throughout the company so that:
• Everyone knows how they contribute and
• Can ask and answer the strategic thinking question: “How is what I am doing in my job today going to affect the company tomorrow?”
4. Based on the plan, core competencies need to be defined. What skills and abilities does the company need to get it successfully into the future? Global Leadership, cross-culture appreciation, technology savvy, and the ability to share or step-up to leadership are but a few examples. Gary Hamel, the most influential business consultant according to the Wall Street Journal & Fortune, said that
• In the future, “…every employee will have a Leadership score.”
• “…your company will be challenged to change in a way for which there is no precedent.”
In this fast-paced, lean organization environment, everyone needs to be a leader, even if it is a leader in their own job.
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Three Top Tips to having a Thriving Career in your 20’s
Life HacksTheglasshammer.com understands that whilst you are building your career, you are also building and managing your life. So many of us are working harder than ever in our twenties and early thirties and we want to give you tips to find the balance between work and play.
Tip 1: Think about what job you want and the job after that one.
Rae Liu is a 28-year-old graduate student of Illinois Institute of Technology. She came to Chicago from China, where she grew up and where her parents were magazine editors.
Liu on the other hand was always interested in the financial services space. She heard Chicago had a healthy financial industry and liked the location, which is “on the shore of the 5 great lakes.”
After graduating with a Masters of Science in Finance, she reached out to her circle of friends and professors to assist her in her job search. After gaining intern experience preparing financial reports and analyzing consumer data, she landed a job as a risk analyst.
Two years later, Liu’s current company, which provides capital, expertise and infrastructure services, advertised an opening. The job entailed studying sales and marketing-related behaviors through customer insights and analytics. Liu applied for the job and received an offer.
Liu has been in her current role for about two years and enjoys the work. She believes she has found her dream job. Fortunately, the career challenges don’t end there. Liu wants to move up at the company and she is in the process of identifying her competitive edge and says she wants to go that extra mile.
“I am looking for projects that will help me gain experience,” she said. “I want to work with different parts of the organization to help me acquire more knowledge and grow professionally.”
When times get stressful, Liu said that it is important to have like-minded people to lean on.
“I still lean on friends when I get discouraged,” Liu said. “My support system is strong, driven and hardworking.”
Tip 2: Speak your truth and look for a promotion inside your current company.
Despite research citing that changing jobs is better for your career, it can also be a good strategy to have the confidence to speak to your employer about moving up at your current company. This was the case for Mary Traina author of book The 20-Something Guide to Getting It Together.
“I felt like I was chickening out because I was looking for the better job elsewhere but not speaking up where I was currently working,” she said. “I felt like I was in a rut.”
Traina who is a producer and writer for the SyFy Channel as well as a regular writer for HelloGiggles tells us what finally gave her the kick in the pants she needed to jump start her career
“When it comes to establishing your career, there are things you need to do but you don’t know what they are,” said Traina.
Traina herself cites that making pathways for other women is an important task and advises you to do it in any way that makes sense to you.
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Voice of Experience: Deborah Ong, Partner, Risk & Quality Leader, Corporate Responsibility Leader, PwC Singapore
Voices of ExperienceWelcome the The Glass Hammer’s “Spotlight on Asia” week! We will be highlighting successful women working in Asia all week long!
Deborah Ong believes that enjoying what you do will help you work efficiently, gain opportunities and rise up the ladder. “I’m very fortunate that I enjoy my line of work, and so I’m still in the same company I first joined as a graduate!”
“I joined the firm on graduation as a trainee and was fortunate to receive many opportunities during my early years to gain exposure and experience in the whole gamut of development – from general audit to more specialized internal and IPO-related audit, to liquidation, insolvency and investigation,” she explains.
“I am very happy I got to contribute significantly to the People journey at the firm. As Human Capital Leader for ten years, my team and I worked very closely with the business to identify and retain talent, train and develop them to the future leaders of the organization. Personally, I am a strong believer in nurturing talent through a coaching culture and I’m proud to say that our mentorship programme is still going strong today.”
Another leadership role she has acquired is PwC Singapore’s Risk & Quality Leader. She still holds this role, which gives her the responsibility to understand and assess the risks associated with each of their service offerings.
Ong describes her journey as colorful. “During my time as the firm’s Human Capital Leader, the firm saw significant shifts in managing the people agenda. I’m glad that I was able to champion the firm’s training and development programmes, and to personally facilitate and share my experience on how to deal with some of the practical challenges of being in the profession with managers and senior managers. I’m a firm believer of nurturing talent through coaching, and I hope that I was able to encourage ongoing growth and development.”
“Being the firm’s Risk & Quality Leader, it is my job to understand and assess the risks associated with each of our service offerings, and with each of our clients. This involves judgment, which is not an exact science but which requires a mix of technical skill and practical experience,” she explains. She has the opportunity to interact with clients and to learn how they view and assess risk, and how they help their businesses solve difficult scenarios.
Career Challenges
Ong believes that most of women’s challenges in this industry are based on time management because their work is organized in projects, which creates tight deadlines and time pressure. “At a certain stage, some women may feel the need to make a choice between career and other aspects of their life, such as family or children, and select to give up their careers.”
To overcome this challenge, Ong advises women to “have the right conversations within the organization with the right people, exploring alternative roles and/or work arrangements and for each person to be aware of the value they bring to the profession.”
She advises young women who are entering the industry to learn developing project management and people management skills. “In order to progress up the career ladder, the support of your team is crucial,” she explains. “You need talented people who can deliver results in a timely manner, and this involves significant investment into their development.”
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Intrepid Woman: Dayle Haddon, Founder, WomenOne
Intrepid Women SeriesDayle Haddon is working to change the world, one woman at a time. The former model, of the 1970s and ‘80s L’Oréal and Estée Lauder fame, began with her own sovereign growth. An act that has helped reshape the cosmetic industry standards, challenged society-based definitions of ageless beauty, and culminated in a redefined commitment to active gratitude.
Haddon’s intrepid story of personal development began in Canada, where the Québécoise began her career with the ballet. She began modeling during her teenage years to help pay for her dance lessons and was soon discovered by Eileen Ford. The young Haddon pursued her modeling career in New York – even though her 5’7’’ frame and curly brunette look were starkly dissimilar from the early 1970s tall-blond beauty standards.
“I was always looking for ways to support myself, and it took me a long time to be successful,” explained Haddon, who was recently honored by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York as an extraordinary leader and role model. “However, at the height of my career, I was working with top magazines, top photographers, and had four major cosmetic contracts.”
While Haddon’s career wove through a variety of high-profile professions, including small acting roles for French and American films, she eventually settled in Paris with her husband and their young daughter. Then, unexpectedly in 1986 Haddon’s husband died, leaving her with little money or support. She returned to Los Angeles desperate to find work to support her teenage daughter.
“This was a life-changing event; losing someone close to me was a painful experience,” Haddon recalled. “But it was transformative. Challenges make you more than you are. You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you handle it.”
Redefining Beauty
Starting over, Haddon found herself at the bottom of the ladder. At the age of 38, she was considered “over the hill,” and not desirable to modeling agencies or her former cosmetic employers. After having worked as a top model, only to be rejected by her profession, forced Haddon into a desk job as an office receptionist – an unexpected but didactic situation.
“It was good for me to recognize at the time that this was a humbling experience. I knew I wouldn’t stay there. If you give me an opportunity, I will work it. Challenges are there to build character and to grow.”
Haddon’s passion for women’s advocacy began as she struggled to climb the “glass walls” back into the beauty and fashion industry. She longed to break down the stereotypical age-image barriers and change the perception of “older woman” from inside the industry. She formulated a campaign and pitched major cosmetic labels the image of evolving, age-defying beauty. After many rejections Haddon landed a job as the face of Estée Lauder’s new anti-aging line and later became the spokeswoman for L’Oréal’s Age-Perfect skin care. The career move, the New York Times later quoted, “shattered age taboos,” and helped to launch the careers of models over 40.
“We were on the forefront of something different, and (at the time) most beauty companies hadn’t caught up yet,” Haddon explained of the early 1990’s beauty-from-within movement. “I researched in libraries and found information that explained that the 43 million female Baby Boomers felt they were more vital than generations before. So I started my own company, Dayle Haddon Concepts.”
For the next 20 years Haddon continued her work in the beauty industry, bringing progressive change to the industry and promoting awareness of the inner and outer beauty of all women. Through her personal company, her contributions to CBS’s The Early Show, the Huffington Post and many other publications, and with her two books, “Ageless Beauty” and “The 5 Principles of Ageless Living,” she has provided women an outlet to explore a balance between their health, beauty, and overall well-being.
A Model Activist
However, central to Haddon’s upbringing was the reinforced message to “give back,” and with her high visibility providing a public forum to elicit change, Haddon seized the opportunity to express her gratitude by pursuing a social justice agenda. She became a UNICEF Ambassador in 2008 and traveled to Darfur to interview women in the camps, visited earthquake-ravaged Haiti to vaccinate newborns, and brought home stories from Angola about the lack of medical equipment in rural clinics. She shared this information in lectures, wrote articles for publications, and helped to raise money for children’s issues worldwide.
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Voice of Experience: Teo Lay Lim, Country Managing Director for Singapore, Accenture
Voices of ExperienceTeo Lay Lim has been working at Accenture for 26 years, and she loves what she does. One lesson she has learned throughout her experience is the importance of networking which, she finds, women are naturally good at because they collaborate and communicate well.
“For women at all levels of their careers, constantly building your personal network both internally and externally is extremely valuable,” she said. “Building personal networks helps you to draw on others to augment your own insights [and] perspectives,” she added. This is especially important for leaders because they need experience, perspective and insight.
Accenture has more than 85 local women’s networking groups in 32 countries which, as she explained, “help them build strong networks.” Lay Lim added that “our global women’s theme, Defining Success. Your Way., demonstrates our commitment to supporting women’s professional goals and aspirations. It’s all a part of our overall commitment to attracting, retaining and advancing women, which supports our broader commitment to an inclusive and diverse workplace.”
Lay Lim encourages women to look for careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). “STEM skills are a business imperative and I believe that women are key in this area,” she said. “We need the intelligence, talent and ability of women to help fill the growing number of STEM jobs and this means encouraging young women to pursue careers in these fields and enabling them to succeed.”
“At Accenture, for example, STEM skills are critical. Technology-led innovation is at the heart of our business – a business in which women comprise almost half of the workforce,” she said.
Working in Accenture
She currently works as the geographic unit senior managing director for Accenture’s offices in ASEAN (South East Asia), and she is also the Country Managing Director of Accenture in Singapore. Prior to this position, she worked as the Asia Pacific managing director for the company’s Analytics and Sustainability Services, and during 11 years (two of them spent in Shanghai) she worked as the managing director of Customer Relationship Management in Accenture’s former Management Consulting practice.
Working in the services industry, she has learned about the importance of showing talent and relevance, which she believes “is a challenge because even though our competitors have changed over time, our client and customer expectations are consistent and ongoing.”
Being different helps a company be more successful than its competition and she offers two pieces of advice that can help companies reach this goal: “Be relevant to what [your] clients and customers need, and be a talent magnet for the best people with the right potential to be developed.” These best people, she explained, learn quickly, are committed to the company and their jobs, and have the character and values that the company is looking for.
Improving the Country
“I love what I do at Accenture and the work I take on in my roles, both past and present, has always kept me on my toes,” she said, “but I’m also excited about the work I’m doing externally, to help my country. I am a steering committee member of the Infocom Media Masterplan, led by Singapore’s Ministry of Communications & Information, which aims to spearhead the development of a single, integrated plan to guide Singapore’s Infocomm & Media sectors up to 2025 in a holistic manner.”
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Change Your Impact, Accelerate Your Career
Guest ContributionIn July, I had the privilege of delivering a keynote speech to 500 incredibly talented professionals at Working Mother Media’s annual Multicultural Women’s National Conference in New York City. As I took the stage on the first morning and began to share my story, I was struck by the remarkable vibe in the room. These women weren’t just present; they were fully engaged. I was surrounded by current and emerging leaders representing a wide range of industries, ages and cultures, and they were all totally plugged in. The message was genuinely resonating with them.
The theme of the conference was “Vision & Impact: Charting What’s Next.” My work in the area of leadership and development has always focused on the importance of our impact in the workplace. Credentials and years of experience aside, our real career success is driven by how we work with and through other people – how we lead them, collaborate with them, interact with them, and react to them. When we manage that impact and ensure that others experience us in the way we intend, we can accelerate the pace of our professional trajectories.
Here’s the problem… Many times, there’s a hidden gap between what we see and what those around us see. When there’s an impact disconnect (even a very subtle one), our careers can be inadvertently derailed while we are left wondering what went wrong. I call those disconnects professional blind spots. Despite our best intentions, these blind spots may be holding us back or preventing us from reaching our full potential.
Think about your co-workers. Do you know someone who is generally smart, hard working and well intentioned, but still manages to rub people the wrong way? There’s a fine line between decisive and abrupt. Between passionate and overzealous. Between meticulous and annoyingly nit-picky. Between innovative and rebellious. These people might have great resumes, but blind spots are likely the reason they are getting overlooked for promotions or high-visibility assignments. Their intended impact on others doesn’t match up with the actual impact they deliver. Subtle behaviors and unconscious habits are sabotaging their success, and they simply can’t see it.
Quite a few women approached me after my presentation to recount fascinating stories about people in their organizations who were clearly struggling with professional blind spots. Surprisingly, quite a few of these people were bold enough to describe their own “a-ha! moments,” identifying blind spots they never before acknowledged but now see as the culprit behind some of their past career missteps. These women all seemed to understand that everyone suffers from blind spots, but those who end up in the boardroom or the corner office have just learned how to manage them better.
I challenged the conference attendees that day to move beyond their resumes as they thought about achieving their professional goals. I asked them to focus on the impact they have on others, ensuring their intentions were translating into reality. I gave them three ways to do that, and I’d like to share those with you as well.
First, increase your self-awareness. Be honest about your natural tendencies and habits when you interact with others. How do your colleagues feel about working with you? Ideally, how would you like them to feel? Eliminating blind spots certainly isn’t about changing who you are, but about understanding yourself and making conscious adjustments to improve your impact on others.
Second, get specific feedback from your co-workers to find out how you are really perceived. This process might be a bit uncomfortable, but it’s absolutely critical to help uncover any blind spots that could be slowing down your career progress. Besides that, getting feedback will also point out your strengths and the distinguishing qualities that set you apart. If you’ve had trouble defining your value proposition, this exercise can give you amazing clarity. You can gather feedback using a wide range of methods, from formal reviews with your manager to casual conversations with peers. Online surveys are another excellent option. For corporate clients and students in my virtual Career Acceleration Academy, I provide access to my Brand 360 Survey. This easy, online tool allows them to gather rich, anonymous feedback from a select group of colleagues.
Third, compare your ideal impact with the actual impact you discovered by gathering feedback. Look closely at the areas where you are right on target for strengths you can further leverage. Any areas with gaps represent your own professional blind spots. Armed with that knowledge, you can work to close those gaps and actively improve the impact you have on others. Simply being aware of your blind spots and unique differentiators will help you make the small changes that can make a big difference in your career success.
As women, many of us have an innate gift for intuition and emotional intelligence. Research proves that we are “wired” over several thousand years for greater empathy and stronger communication skills. I firmly believe these qualities give us a huge advantage in the workplace when it comes to uncovering and eliminating our professional blind spots. We can use that capacity to improve the way we impact others, to fuel our career progress, and to create greater business success. This nugget of insight truly resonated with the women attending the recent conference, and I sincerely hope it does the same for you.
Sara Canaday (www.SaraCanaday.com) is a nationally recognized leadership expert, corporate speaker and owner of Sara Canaday & Associates, a consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. Sara is also a resource partner of www.theglasshammer.com and to help conference attendees use a systematic, quantifiable approach to improving their business impact, Sara offered an exclusive discount on her popular online course, the Career Acceleration Academy, including her Brand 360 Survey. For a limited time, Sara wants to extend that same offer to Glass Hammer readers. To register and get more details, please visit CareerAccelerationAcademy.com. Use Code GH001.
Thought Leader: Alison Maitland, Future Work – Moving to an Output-Oriented Work Culture
Thought LeadersThe Glass Hammer: How is future work different to flexible working?
Alison Maitland: Flexible work arrangements tend to be tactical initiatives by HR, targeted at individuals and disconnected from any strategy being pursued by the organisation’s leadership. They do not fundamentally alter the current work model.
What we call “future work” is a business strategy to move away from focusing on inputs to viewing work as an activity that produces desired results. The focus is on performance and outcomes, not hours spent in the office, and people have much greater autonomy and choice about how, where and when they carry out their tasks.
Communications technology is of course the great enabler of this. Future work is about giving everyone the tools, information and objectives they need and then letting them get on with the job in the way that works best. To become a core part of a company’s culture, it needs to be driven by leaders across the organisation – IT, finance, communications and real estate as well as HR and leadership development.
TGH: Why is future work important now?
AM: The new workforce is looking for something very different from the traditional career and work model. The International Women’s Forum UK recently celebrated its 25th anniversary with a survey asking current and emerging female leaders about success, including what they would do differently if starting again. While many of the senior women said they would not do anything differently, some wished they had said “no” more often during their careers or been less hard on themselves. One said “We have to change the concept of work to make it more relevant to a woman’s life.” The responses from the younger women placed strong value on balance, happiness, fulfilment, and the need to pace and prioritise carefully. These trends are supported by a global ACCA/Mercer survey, which we reference in Future Work. The survey asked over 3,200 millennial finance professionals how they felt about their jobs. It found that this generation wants a much broader range of benefits from working life and that making more money is a less important factor in career success than it was to previous generations.
What does this mean for organisations? Employers can no longer assume that employees will put up with having to work at rigid times in a fixed location if it does not make sense to do so. If employers don’t offer greater autonomy and choice, they will struggle to attract top talent. Future work also allows companies to draw from a broader and more diverse talent pool, which in turn should lead to more innovative organisations. Future work is not a nice-to-have – it should be a viewed as a priority by leaders looking to deliver sustainable success.
TGH: Are leaders really convinced about the benefits of future work?
AM: Those we feature in the book definitely are! But many managers still fear that people won’t work if they can’t see them sitting at their desks around them – hence the jacket-on-chair syndrome. In reality, most people are more productive and motivated when they feel empowered and trusted by their managers to get the work done, regardless of time or place. Through a combination of surveys and case studies, we’ve shown that there is a wide range of benefits for business, including increased productivity, more reliable business continuity, faster access to market, and reduced costs. Organisations need to do a better job of measuring these benefits to see what a difference future work can make.
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Voice of Experience: Karen Loon, Banking and Capital Markets Leader, PwC Singapore
Voices of ExperienceKaren Loon, recently appointed as PwC Singapore’s Banking and Capital Markets Leader, knows that making assumptions based on someone’s gender is a mistake. Assumptions based on appearance are often equally misleading. That’s because while some might assume that Loon was born in Asia, she’s actually a fourth-generation, Australian-born Chinese.
That’s why her interest in diversity runs deeper than just gender. “I am passionate about ensuring that both women and those from culturally diverse backgrounds are given the right opportunities to thrive within their organizations,” she says, which makes her the ideal fit to be PwC Singapore’s Territory Diversity Leader.
A Career in Accounting Added up for Loon
Loon began her career after graduating from Sydney University. Her parents were business owners who had business acquaintances who were accountants and encouraged her to consider it as a career.
She participated in vacation internships with other accounting firms, and decided she liked the culture of PwC, which she joined in 1990. She was seconded to PwC Singapore in 1994 when a one-week training in the Netherlands opened her eyes to the possibility of working outside of Australia, coupled with her growing conviction that Singapore was ripe for a booming economy, and decided to stay for the longer term.
The move was less conventional than one would guess, because as Loon says, “Most Australians have a strong affinity for the U.K.” Furthermore, though she is ethnically Chinese, Loon doesn’t speak Chinese. “It’s very difficult to feel like an outsider. I was fortunate to be coached and mentored by supportive people.”
Climbing the Ladder as a Woman
Becoming a partner was not easy to achieve and certainly ranks as one of her proudest professional achievements. In fact she says that though she didn’t realize it at the time, she had never met a female audit partner when she started in Sydney.
“Women partners were few and far between in Sydney,” she says, adding that Singapore was more progressive in this area with some of the women partners having kids. “There is more family support in Asia. The values in Sydney tend toward mothers staying home.”
During a recent two-year return to Australia, Loon reflected on her values and how she had changed — and how other aspects of the firm had changed. “There are now more women partners, but we are still clearly the minority. It made me more passionate about making sure there are opportunities for everyone.”
Diversity Committee Feeds Her Passion
That’s why she finds her work with her Singapore diversity committee to be so satisfying. In addition to her recent appointment as a Territory Diversity Leader, she is also the East Cluster Financial Services People Leader, East Cluster Diversity Coordinator and a member of the Global Financial Services Diversity Steering Committee.
“Being open to diversity is how businesses can retain talent,” she says, adding that the broader issue facing all organizations is how cultural diversity, not just gender diversity, will continue to dominate the discussion.
“Companies have to be cognizant of culture and open to accepting that people come with different values and backgrounds. Companies that continue to focus with a just a western lens will be at a disadvantage. Those who understand different types of clients and environments will be the successful ones. Otherwise it’s so easy to offend someone without even realizing it.”
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