Leading Women: Fear, motivation and a sense of empathy at the workplace

As part of our Leading Women series, we want to highlight the professional challenges and career aspirations of the women we work with here in Asia.  

In this story, we speak to Connie Chan, Chief Executive Officer of Nippecraft Limited, an SGX-listed company, who speaks of the woman she most admires, how little the opinion of others should matter, as well as how empathy at the workplace leads to better business decisions.   

Q: What are the main challenges that the next generation of female leaders need to be cognizant of?  

I think it is the pressure to conform. Many people are not used to having women in senior roles, and they have a lot of opinions on who you are, who you should be, how you should behave, if you are too aggressive, things like that. And these opinions could come from the family, colleagues or even well-meaning managers. So I think the main challenge is how to navigate that. The way I went through this myself was to listen, learn to adapt and do things your own way, because you may not have too many exact role models out there. So listen with an open mind, but understand people have biases of their own.  

This is an abridged version of the full interview with Connie Chan. For the full version of the interview, click here.