How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
Having started my career at a young age, I’ve been fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to explore various roles across sales, operations, tech, management, and regional assignments where I managed more than 20 countries. The exposure that my past experiences gave me, whether it’s learning how to roll with the punches in difficult situations or adapting to different cultural nuances across markets, played a pivotal role in shaping who I am as a leader today.
As someone who values growth in my career, I map out the milestones I want to achieve every five years using a clear performance indicator – quantity, quality and timebound. These indicators serve as a way for me to ensure that I continuously develop and demonstrate 360-degree leadership, where I strive to create a value across Trend Micro and empower my teams to deliver impactful results.
What traits do you look for in your talent or how do you decide who is right for a job?
While having a solid foundation for hard skills definitely helps someone get noticed for a job, I look out for value alignment and soft skills.
At Trend Micro, we’re dedicated to supporting diverse talent in tech. Our global education programmes, such as our Close The Gap programme – provides scholarship opportunities, financial assistance, and fundraises to advance women and the diverse workforce.
In short, I believe that well-rounded and diverse talent is key to build a sustainable and high-performing team who have the opportunity to become a trailblazer and shape the cybersecurity landscape.
How do you think the industry you are in will evolve?
With cybersecurity being an ever-evolving and high-growth industry, I believe that malicious actors will continue to find new ways to infiltrate networks for financial gain moving forward.
While some may see this trend as a never-ending mountain to climb, I see this challenge as an opportunity to collaborate with my team to build better defenses against nefarious actors. Cybersecurity companies, including Trend Micro, will increasingly work towards staying multiple steps ahead of cybercriminals to improve upon our products, including our extended detection and response technology to enable better, faster protection.
What advice can you offer those looking to start their career/own business?
Start with reflecting inwards to clearly define your passion, core competencies, weaknesses, and your potential. Then, use this as a guide to set objectives for your career. Based on the defined objective, be prepared to seek a mentor to assess the possibility on achieving it and fine-tuning it at the same time. Most importantly, those that are just getting started in their careers should employ an active-learner mindset and try their best to align their passion with their careers.
How has mentorship made a difference in your professional life?
The nature of the security industry requires us to bring in insights and experience from many schools of thought. Rather than having a dedicated mentor, I make an effort to read and listen to successful business people about the lessons they’ve picked up along the way to gain exposure on different business strategies to then adapt the values into my life and my career at Trend Micro.
What do you want to accomplish in the next five years?
My goal is to continue building a sustainable and high-performing innovative organisation at Trend Micro. Ultimately, I’d like to cultivate a strong and cohesive culture within Trend Micro, where knowledge is distributed across the team and every member of the team is self-motivated, collaborative, and employ the mindset of a lifelong learner.
Additionally, I’d like to devote more time to meaningful projects that contribute value to society, especially in terms of developing talent in the cybersecurity industry. At Trend Micro, we’re committed to providing certifications and training courses through Trainocate Malaysia, which is a Trend Micro-authorised training centre available to both novice and seasoned professionals. In the next five years, I hope to make a positive difference in addressing the talent gap here in Malaysia and across the region.
Best piece of advice you ever got on your career.
When placed in a difficult situation, make the decision that will let you sleep better at night. Often, leaders are met with complex circumstances where there are no clear-cut answers for what’s right and what’s wrong.
This piece of advice from my mother has been the rule of thumb when I have to make difficult decisions.
Most-admired business leader? Why?
I believe every successful leader has their own unique attributes, all of which I can learn from. If I had to point to just one trait, leaders who are able to emerge and learn from their failures are those that I typically admire.
How do you manage stress, challenges and mistakes that affect your career?
Stress, challenges, and mistakes are part and parcel of any career – accepting that it’s unavoidable is the first step to overcoming it. While I might not have full control of everything that happens to me or Trend Micro, what I can control is how I choose to react and move on from the situation.
Being driven and setting clear objectives for my career trajectory has helped me significantly when faced with obstacles. When stress looms or mistakes happen, I focus my attention only on reflecting on the situation, learning from it, and taking productive next steps.
A must-read for every business owner/manager is ...
The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The book outlines structured approaches in forming an effective strategy – knowing yourself, your customers, your enemies, and your terrain. It highlights that we do not need the best tools nor the best resources to win – having the right strategy trumps both.
While I’d recommend this book to any business leader, the book would be especially beneficial to small and medium businesses (SMBs), as many SMBs tend to have less access to best-of-class infrastructure, resources, financial power, and reputation when compared to larger companies. A key takeaway from this book that I’ve applied to my personal and professional life is that having the right strategy is always far more important that only having the best tools or resources in place.
What are the top three factors you would attribute your success to?
> Using both my experience and intuition for decision-making.
> Approaching life with a can-do and will-do attitude.
> Having the ability to learn and adapt to changes.
Source: The Sun Daily
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