Vivian Chen

I love solving problems and bringing solutions to the table. When I started my career as a replenishment analyst, I got bored after a couple months because I did my job very well and it became too routine. I'm not good at routine jobs because there's no challenge. I love to solve problems and bring solutions. Even though people might think things are getting easier with AI and technology, it's never easy with international business. Every day there's a new challenge. Some people get frustrated when there's problems and issues, but to me, that's the value of why we're here. I really love to bring solutions to the table, to coach my team, to make sure customers are getting what they need, and our employees and team are being coached and know what they're going to need to do next in their career path. That's what drives me and what I attribute my success to.

I received a couple pieces of advice that have really impacted me, and both are related to people management. The first one is that when you're hiring people, hiring someone who has common sense is very important. The word 'common sense' sounds like a very simple word, but it's much more complex than the simple word itself. When I received this advice early in my career, I couldn't really understand it. I thought, that's easy, everyone has common sense, right? But through the years, I learned it's not easy at all. It's very difficult to even describe what common sense is. It's almost like a gift, though you can always learn it. I learned to ask questions related to common sense to help me understand if this person can be trusted, if they can do their job without someone there watching them, if they'll be able to make the right decision. It's important to eliminate any waste in your process, which means if your team can make the same decision as you would make, that should be the empowerment given to the team instead of spending time where everyone just makes the same decision. The other piece of advice is to hire people that are better than me. That's also important, and it's very difficult for people to get out of our ego to hire people better than us, but it's such a great thing to do. It's hard when people are not doing this, and it makes me frustrated, but not everyone will be able to do it. If you want to have the best teams, then you have to be able to back up each other and compensate for each other in a way that others might do a much better job than myself.

I think it's important to not limit yourself, not be limited by professional or personal constraints. For young women, everyone has different priorities, and that's the most important thing. So don't limit yourself, but also be clear on priorities, because especially for women, we do have different priorities through different years, different ages, or whatever stage of life we're in. For some years, you might want to be focused on your family, your children, and that's totally fine. Don't let it be a constraint. Always prioritize what is important, and then seek for support. Having a supporting system, no matter if it's your friends, family, your company, your HR, your leaders, it's important to ask for help. That's important to have the courage to ask for support and think that you're not by yourself.

Through the years, one of the biggest challenges for me has been traveling to different countries and working in different cultures. The challenge is really trying to learn different cultures and be able to understand and look into different perspectives. That's very important because we cannot assume. That's the biggest mistake, and sometimes when I'm trying to rush through, I assume, but normally it doesn't give good results. The culture-driven aspect is really significant. The pace in the U.S. is different from Asia, so I need to be patient and be able to allow people to work at everyone's own pace. But I also have to manage up the expectations of the leaders and customers, because I cannot do everything myself 24-7 non-stop. I have to rely on my supporting team and everyone to do their job. Knowing that every single individual is different and everyone will have a different pace means that managing expectation is important. It's not just a challenge for now, it's always been a challenge through my whole professional career on how you manage expectations, managing up and managing your team, making sure everyone will be on the same page and understanding each other. Everyone has different personalities, different objectives and priorities. My priority is not someone else's priority, so it's all about managing the priorities and expectations.

Definitely integrity is important to me, doing the right thing even when nobody is watching me. Your credibility and reputation, you only have one chance when it matters. That's very important. And caring about people around me is also very important. Being in this very complex society now, where everything could happen every day, being able to care about people and be loved is very important for me.