Leading Women: the art of embracing doubt

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, Jane Lo, Senior Director, Asia at Duracell Professional, talks about embracing doubt, learning from defeats and adapting to life as a stranger in a strange land.

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Q: Do you ever experience self doubt?

As a leader, you are not the only one executing everything. You work with your team, you work with your peers and you work with your managers. So sometimes you don’t know how a decision is going to be perceived, how it is aligned with everything or if it will turn out the way you envision. Also it is inevitable to make mistakes along the way, and you will feel defeated. Maybe it is my personality, but I just cry for a bit and move on.

Take COVID-19, for example. When it first hit, I had just returned from my trip to the US. The shutdown happened five days after I returned, and I remember joking that everything would be open by April last year. When that didn’t happen, we said it’d probably be open by summer, and that didn’t happen either. Now it’s April 2021. So we do doubt our business decisions, if we were making the right call during the pandemic, things like that. Should we continue to grow the business? Where’s this COVID-19 going to take us? Am I going to stay in Hong Kong? Will I have a job? Ultimately, it’s OK to doubt, but I think it is not OK to freeze and stop working.

This is an abridged version of the full interview with Jane Lo. For the full version of the interview, click here.