What (Corporate) Women Need – and what I’m doing about it

I have been mentoring corporate women through a variety of channels, including face-to-face programmes and online platforms. Whether it involves our professional lives or our personal lives (or very often, a blurred composition of both), we experience similar challenges. These fall into several common categories.

We seek validation

“Am I good enough?”

Women often question our own competence or abilities before putting ourselves forward for, or accepting, new challenges. We don’t always trust our gut – our intuition – and instead, rely on analysis paralysis before taking action.

We say sorry

“Sorry for interrupting”

“Correct me if I’m wrong”

“If you don’t mind me saying”

Women worry that our opinions and our voices do not matter enough. And when we "soften" our feedback by saying sorry, we may be viewed as being weak, emotional or lacking confidence.

 We feel guilty

… when we put ourselves first

Many women are the breadwinners or the single parent or the child supporting ailing parents. In addition to financial concerns, women also worry about not being there emotionally for our family. We find it difficult to fill our own cup first (even though we know we need to do so), in order to be energized to fulfill our purpose.

During my mentoring conversations, I focus on helping my proteges achieve clarity about their goals, acknowledge their strengths and re-frame their mindset about perceived challenges.

And yet, there is still one thing we don't do enough.

We don’t lean enough on one another

Last weekend, I joined 100 women (and a few men) at the Hong Kong debut of WomenChangemakers. The event provided a rare glimpse into the personal challenges faced by corporate women, and these reflect the issues that I have outlined above.

In addition, from my conversations with the attendees (mostly corporate women), I made the following observations:

1.      Many of the attendees came to the event alone.

It made me wonder why women could socialize with girlfriends for a meal (for instance, have dinner with the gals) and yet not attend such an event with girlfriends or friends?

2.      Many of the attendees did not know other people at the event

I do not expect all of us to be social butterflies. Yet, if we call this city our home, why don't we know more people outside our social circle?

3.      The overwhelming feedback was that many attendees left the event feeling inspired

“This is the only such event where we could hear authentic stories”; these are stories that we could relate to and it appears as though there was a collective sense of sisterhood.

Why then, do women not lean on one another more?

What I am doing about it

There are communities and platforms available to corporate women to address this seeming lack of a network. This enormous world beyond our corporate sphere offers abundant opportunities for us to get comfortable with change, stay in touch with paradigm shifts and allow us to exploit our corporate experience for mutual benefit.

Lean-in Circle

These are organised meet-ups for sharing ideas, gaining skills and seeking advice. The Circle I am now part of comprises alumni from The Women's Foundation Mentoring Programme for Women Leaders. Each month, a member is responsible for a particular topic, circulates pre-work and leads the discussion. This is particularly powerful, for example, if you are working on a corporate project and wish to gain insight from a network of corporate women that already exists and is ready and willing to collaborate.

Offering my Corporate Experience to Start-ups

As a corporate woman, I possess domain expertise and have joined She1K to use that very expertise to help evaluate startups and validate their business models. Ultimately, I will also seek opportunities to join the board of a start-up. My immediate goal is to apply my corporate experience to make a business impact and be exposed to the challenges (and joy!) of entrepreneurship.

Mentoring Women in Business

Through our corporate partnership, I came across the opportunity to become a mentor to women in business and am working on my application for the May 2019 intake.  I can now see the potential for my collective mentoring experience and existing corporate women-cum-entrepreneurship initiatives interact to create even more impact.

There really is a lot we can do for one another, and I hope that this throws light on some of the possibilities.

Please connect with me, follow me on LinkedIn for more content and share your thoughts. Thanks for reading!

Sue Yen LEOW

#fireinmybelly #sueyenleow