Catherine Tan talks about her experience as a female business leader who is still navigating the post-pandemic world of work and embracing hybrid models to accommodate her female colleagues.
Chapter: New ways of working
About: Catherine Tan is the managing director of CIMB, a Malaysian universal bank operating in high-growth economies in ASEAN. She has more than 10 years of leadership experience in the financial industry and is focusing on making CIMB a data-driven organization.
What are the most pivotal lessons in your life that contributed to your career growth?
I’ve been in the banking industry for the past two decades. Getting to where I am in my career today involved much tough love.
The first lesson is to always embrace challenges and to treat everyone with the same amount of respect and admiration. I started out in a small office of a multinational bank where resources were constrained. However, that turned out to be a liberating experience where both juniors and seniors, men and women were given equal responsibility and equal respect.
“One of the most empowering experiences was when gender was never an issue, and my co-workers normalized my existence.”
The second lesson is to be aware that your gestures can go a long way. Four years into my career, I was sent to South Korea where women were mostly in administerial and not professional roles. I was fortunate enough to have an accommodating local superior who was willing to go against cultural norms to help a female succeed. Now, I find myself looking out for my female colleagues to pay it forward.
How can men help create a more inclusive workplace with equal opportunities for everyone?
Working from home presents very good opportunities to cultivate male allies. Male family members can now see the struggle that women go through to balance their roles at home and at work. As I spend more time working from home, my husband sees firsthand how I am a manager and an employee, a mother and a daughter. And now I can joke with my male colleagues about how their wives are juggling multiple roles.
In your opinion, what are the implications of hybrid ways of working? How important is it for organizations to embrace this?
The biggest implication of working from home is that organizations need to take a leap of faith and trust that their employees are equally as productive at home as they are at the office.
Naturally, the older, more conventional companies will have a bit more difficulty adjusting to this. However, all organizations—old or new, big or small, local or global—need to realize that the very fact of you employing someone means that you are already placing your trust in them.
Personally, I would like to see more organizations supporting hybrid working. As a leader, I must be mindful on the blurring of personal and professional spaces. But as long as we are able to adjust for that, I believe hybrid working could be the solution to the personal–professional trade-offs that so many of us, especially women, were forced to make before the pandemic.
With the new ways of working, the space between work and personal life can get blurred. How do you manage that?
One thing I find very useful is to be more flexible and a bit more hands-off in my management style. At home, our colleagues have to deal with dynamics that are different from the office. Working mums who could previously focus on work at the office now have to spend time helping their children with school or preparing for family dinner. So now instead of asking for a report by the end of the workday, I ask for it by sometime that night—whenever they can get to it.
“As long as my colleagues perform as expected and deliver the outcome, it is completely up to them on when they want to get to the task.”
How can companies attract more young female talent?
Young people need role models. Seeing is believing. As a firm, CIMB has been very supportive in accommodating female talent through various corporate and networking events. CIMB made it known that the company is there to embrace women and put high-potential women in the limelight to become leaders. Having such a nurturing environment in turn creates female leaders who then become inspirations to their younger counterparts. We do our best to look out for our younger female colleagues and push them forward.
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