Season 4 - Episode 2 | Gender Equality and Entrepreneurial Leadership with Koh Yan Ping (Singapore)

In this episode, Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra, Founder of Talent Leadership Crucible and Impact Velocity, speaks with Koh Yan Ping, CEO of the Singapore Council of Women’s Organizations (SCWO). Yan Ping shares her journey from working in NTUC to leading SCWO, a non-profit championing gender equality. The conversation explores entrepreneurial leadership, navigating crises, sustainability, and fostering meaningful personal and professional connections.

5 Key Insights from this Podcast:

1. Leadership with Purpose: Championing Gender Equality
   • Yan Ping highlights SCWO’s role as a leader in women’s advocacy in Singapore, supporting its 60 member organizations for over 40 years.
   • Gender equality is crucial for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 5, and positively impacts poverty, education, and health.
2. Entrepreneurial Mindset in Non-Profit Leadership
   • Transitioning from NTUC to SCWO, Yan Ping embraced an entrepreneurial approach, balancing limited resources while fostering agility and risk-taking.
   • The dynamic relationship between SCWO's board and its staff supports effective decision-making and innovation.
3. Volunteering: A Gateway to Impact and Growth
   • Volunteering offers youth valuable skills, networks, and insights into meaningful causes.
   • Yan Ping's personal experiences illustrate how volunteering builds character and opens career opportunities.
4. Navigating Personal and Professional Crises
   • Yan Ping shares lessons from a personal health crisis during COVID-19, emphasizing the importance of self-care, support systems, and resilience.
   • Crisis management involves acknowledging challenges, seeking support, and reframing setbacks as opportunities for growth.
5. Women as Drivers of Sustainability
   • Empowering women in household and economic decisions is critical to sustainability.
   • Women’s involvement can lead to more sustainable consumption and resource management.
6. Fostering Family Connection and Balance
   • Family meals represent simplicity and connection but require mindful effort to foster meaningful conversations.
   • Yan Ping emphasizes the importance of balancing professional roles, parenting, and self-care to nurture relationships and well-being.

Host: Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra - Author, Podcast Host, Founder of Talent Leadership Crucible & Impact Velocity
Guest Speaker: Koh Yan Ping - CEO of the Singapore Council of Women’s Organizations (SCWO)

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Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Our guest today is Ms. Koh Yan Ping. She is the Chief Executive Officer of Singapore's Council of Women's Organization or SCWO. She's also someone who has worked at NTUC and she will talk about her passion as well as her experience around women and their empowerment. Yan Ping, welcome to Thriving in the Age of Disruption podcast series. We'll start off having you introduce yourself. Yes, thank you Dr. Ramesh. Well, hi everyone. My name is Yan Ping. I'm the CEO of the Singapore Council of Women's Organizations or SCWO for short. So Singapore Council of Women's Organizations has been around for 40 over years in Singapore and we play the role as the umbrella body for the women organizations here. We really want to work together with all the member organizations that we have and our aim is to push for gender equality in Singapore. Wow, such a lofty goal because there's still that big disparity but we'll get into that conversation later. What I wanted to do was to take you through the essential mindsets for disruption. The first one is about entrepreneurial mindset and I define entrepreneurial mindset as one whereby you're being resourceful, you're able to define the problem accurately, then it's about learning to manage uncertainty and take risks and lastly of course it's about creating value. Value can be both financial, non-financial and you're creating value for yourself and others. You've had an interesting journey, career with a social mission so perhaps you can share your journey. Yeah, well thank you very much. I honestly never see myself as an entrepreneur before but the last two years I started to see myself more as an entrepreneur than before. I previously have had a good 15 years with an organization called National Trade Unions Congress and that's NTUC for short. That's a very big organization, the labor movement of Singapore. The work that I do there, although it's still very much related to women, family but more from an employment perspective. You're just maybe one out of the few hundred employees trying to make some changes to workers' lives but you don't exactly lead the entire organization. But when I joined SCWO back in late 2022, I took on the CEO role and I realized that the E in the CEO actually means everything. That's actually what my president told me, you are the chief everything officer so you have to take care of everything in the organization and SCWO is not a big organization, it's a small non-profit. I have to be really resourceful, I have to find ways to achieve whatever outcomes that we want and usually the resources are very limited. We don't have big finances like the big corporates so we have to find ways and means and tap on different networks like people on our boards, tapping on volunteers, thinking of yeah how can we get to where we want to go but in a way that would not cost us too much money and at the same time I've learned that we need to be very much a risk taker. You need to take risk as a small organization, maybe we are in a better position to take risk. There's less red tapes and bureaucracy that you might get in bigger organizations. For me at least as the CEO, I do have a lot of support from the board and we work very closely. I think that relationship between the board and executive management is so critical and with their trust and empowerment, we are also able to take risk. I would like to think of myself being more agile these days as well, having to make decisions that's very quick sometimes and being able to then also motivate and encourage the rest of the team. Most of our staff, they multi-head, they have multiple portfolios, they handle many different tasks but they all have a great passion for the work that they're doing and there are times where they will feel down because to achieve certain targets when you have very limited resources. Again, I have to then become the cheerleader, I have to make sure that I motivate them and then I realized that I'm kind of becoming an entrepreneur although I'm still trying very much to learn how to be more business-minded. It has been helpful so far in my last couple of months trying to work with many different corporates as well, working with a lot of entrepreneurs in the network. So you're a social entrepreneur with a mission and the crunch around resources, be it manpower or budgets and then managing the risk is something that an entrepreneur has to do every day. What kind of risk do you take at the SEWO level? Do we want to speak about this matter and there could be consequences because when you say something publicly, it can go either way. One form of risk that we take sometimes. It's about doing the right thing, it's the right thing to do but yet you have to also weigh whether when you do that thing, when you say something, how would others interpret that? You are actually representing a systemic issue. People might not be ready to rock the boat. So it does take courage to bring up something that you want to champion it. Yes, correct. Being that champion for the women who are more vulnerable, I think it's very important. I think that's one thing that SEWO has always been focused on. It's something that we focus on. We know that it's important to bring out the voices and the issues that the vulnerable are facing but these issues could be very difficult. Things to talk about publicly or even to surface some of these issues to different stakeholders, they may have their own opinions like I said and not everyone would agree. It's not easy to balance the views but I think for us, it's very important that we remain kind of neutral in wanting to encourage diversity. I mentioned before, I used to be very active in the women's organisation, particularly the Credit Cooperative. In the late 1990s, I was with DEW Credit Cooperative, a member of SEWO and I also served on the SEWO board and I actually cherish those moments because I learnt a lot serving and to do different things like you said which is not resourced properly. The biggest opportunity that I had out of doing all my work in the women's movement was that at one point, I'd wanted to list my company in the stock exchange and it didn't happen. I was feeling a little bit miserable and someone called me up from UNDP in Bangkok and said, would you like to do a gig in North Korea? This was in early 2000 and I said, yeah, sure, why not and so I went to North Korea several times and worked with a bunch of women given support in a cottage industry to groom them into an enterprise. My role as someone familiar with enterprise development was to support them in that journey and I would never have that opportunity if it was not for the work that I did with the Credit Cooperative. What's your advice to young people? Well, I think these days, we see the young people having a mind of their own. When they graduate, they have an idea of what causes the champion, right? A lot of them don't really see it as, oh, my life goal is to just get a job and progress up the ranks and then after that, retire comfortably. I think a lot of them no longer have this mindset and what really drives them is being able to make a difference, right? So even when it comes to their careers and jobs, a lot of them are looking at opportunities that's aligned with this course and I think that's very good but at the same time, a lot of them might find out that easy to find the right opportunity so to make it into a career immediately may not be that viable but there's always an opportunity to volunteer. I would encourage our young people to take up volunteering opportunities with different organisations. It's through this volunteering experience, you gain new perspectives and it widens your network at the same time. I think our government is encouraging corporates to do more volunteering and we do get more of that these days as well, more corporates coming to our organisation to say, hey, we have a team of employees, we want to come together and do something meaningful, what can we do for you? So doing this volunteering opportunity, you might meet your next employer. In fact, I've startled my kids on this. Well, okay, maybe I'm a bit biased because my own organisation is always on the lookout for volunteers so when they're having school holidays, sometimes I'll call them up and they help out at some of my activities and my events and my daughter has helped me quite a bit after her O-Levels. She was helping out at our SCW thrift shop and that thrift shop is an important source of revenue income for us. So I got my daughter to come in and help and she was manning the thrift shop for a while. Of course, her reaction was, why are you asking me to do this, mum? Are you going to pay for this? I'm like, no, I'm not going to pay you but you'll get a lot more out of that because there's experience and you're going to meet people, interact with customers. As you shared this, it brought back memories of my volunteering. My mother was active with Asian Women's Welfare Association. She had four kids, me being the eldest and I remember as a 12-year-old going to Christmas parties and in old folks' homes and wrapping gifts or being part of the organising committee. That was really precious to do that. I was not audacious enough to think about being paid but you can tell your daughter that's a training in entrepreneurship. Exactly. Okay, let's have another conversation. It's another essential mindset for the WUKA world about a crisis-ready mindset. I define a crisis as any kind of a setback and usually in that moment, you can either move forward or die. So the typical response for most people in a crisis is fight, flee or freeze. I'm sure you've had your fair share of crisis personally and professionally. Share with us an example of a crisis and how you dealt with it. I also want to distill for our listeners perhaps some daily practice that you had invested in that allowed you to be graceful during that crisis. I wouldn't say graceful. I think crisis is something you don't expect it to happen but sometimes things happen and then you start asking yourself, oh dear, why me? That's always the first thing, right? Yes. Why me? What did I do? Did I do something that caused this crisis? So I think first of all, we tend to blame ourselves and I feel maybe I'm biased again because I'm a woman but I feel that women are always pointing the fingers to themselves whenever something goes wrong. As for myself, yeah, definitely there's lots of ups and downs personally as well in my career but one thing that I can say is a few years back before COVID or during the COVID period itself, I did not realise that I had been so stressed out at work to a point where my body was sending a lot of signals. I ignored that and I tend to just put myself last and feel that I'm fine. Maybe I just need more sleep. After a while, I realised that, no, it's really a health issue and I had to seek help and when I had to go to doctors, they put you through different tests and scans and then see so many specialists trying to figure out what's wrong with me, right? So that was a terrible period and of course, you can imagine how upset my family was. My husband was actually a great pillar of support at that time. The reason why I think I really managed to move forward and bounce back, I give credit to him because he was very objective. He was like, hey, work is work but work is never done. You have to put yourself first. So I took time away from work for a few months and at that point, it was not easy because earlier, we were just chatting how life in Singapore is so fast-paced and most of us are like really married to our jobs and we can't really disconnect from work but I had to force myself to really and I had to tell my bosses back then that, sorry, I'm not well. I just need this period of time to sort myself out. Thankfully, my employer was understanding. I had the opportunity to kind of take a small break away. After that, when I got back, I began to prioritise taking care of myself more and realising that really, there is always so much that we need to do but you will never be able to finish everything and not to blame myself too much. If I cannot finish, I cannot say that it's entirely a work-related challenge because it's also my own mindset, how I deal with issues myself. So that's something that I have learned and I'm still learning and I don't think I've mastered it yet but what really got me through it was being able to have somebody to share the burden with, being able to speak to somebody. It was my husband in my case but in other situations, it could be anyone in your family or having somebody who acts like a mentor to you, especially if it's a work-related, career-related crisis, having a mentor would be very helpful because you have somebody to share, download and just bounce things off. I feel that most of the time, the crisis exists partly because we put ourselves in it, in our minds, we think that it is something that we created, we beat ourselves up really bad and we need to stop doing that. Thank you for sharing that. It's interesting because you called out a couple of things and I want to emphasise them. The first thing is about blaming ourselves when something goes wrong and yes, that's always the first go-to for most people and it's difficult. You also created for us was to have a support structure. One of the ways, effective ways in which we can navigate crisis is when we have either developed the mechanism to be able to deal with it or we have a support structure. Another option is mentors or coaches, right? And then of course, it's a journey in the sense that if you really want to have a sustainable change, then there has to be a lifestyle change. It can't be that one day off, I'll take time off for myself, just a short few weeks and then you go back to your old lifestyle. I have to force myself, find time to take breaks in between. Even though I know that there are a lot of emails in my email box, I tell myself, okay, it's just going to be one day. I'm like, go away for one day and even though it's just one day, you know, I feel that it helps. Come back a little bit more energized and focus better. What do you do when you take your one day off? Wow, I literally do nothing. Really? Yeah, I stay at home. You watch TV? I do. I should definitely be doing more outdoorsy stuff which I kind of want to do more. When it comes to us aging well, I think being active is important but I find it a big challenge for me because of my schedule. So yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what to do about that. I've tried a few things and I find that if you have a buddy, it helps a lot. I was thinking that too. So, I'm missing a buddy. Okay, I'll call you. I wanted to ask a question about sustainability. I run a consulting practice and we talk about sustainability from the perspective of ongoing thriving of the living system and that means ourselves as a living system. And generally, we'll start with our mindset. From your perspective with the kind of work that you do, how does sustainability become part of it? For me, like you said, my area of work is in gender issues. So, whenever you talk about sustainability straight away, I think of SDG 5. It's goal number 5 which is gender equality. And I think it's very important SDG because when you achieve that gender equality, that goal 5, you actually find the key to be able to achieve a lot of the other SDG goals as well. Because women are at the center of a lot of these issues. From poverty, to health, to education, everything. It revolves around how we can better help and support women. So, if you can actually empower women, helping the women to make good decisions actually have a great impact on the environment as well because a lot of the things that we do, for example, household, who does all the marketing, who does all the purchases, it's always the women. And if they are empowered to make good decisions in buying things that are more sustainable, in being able to use materials and encourage reusing of materials in their own home, it's a little small step, I guess. There's also a lot much bigger aspect of it in terms of the whole economy when you talk about sustainability. And again, women is at the heart of that. There's also a practical reason, right? We make up half the population and we don't engage women as a resource, right? The world is losing out on 50%. Yeah, exactly. So, we say this in SCWO that women hold up half the sky. And because like you say, we make up half the entire world's population. So, we have to be there and we need to have a seat at every table that is talking about important issues that affects humanity. Right. I wonder if you can share with us where you are in your spiritual journey and how that grounds you? When I reflected on the word, what does it mean? Spiritual, right? I feel it is about being comfortable in my own skin because I always struggled with that from young. And I don't know whether it's also something that affects a lot of younger girls and women, but I think we do criticize ourselves a lot. And we're always not comfortable with ourselves. For example, at work, we always have the imposter syndrome. And when we're younger, with school days, you're always comparing yourself to other girls. They are much more cooler than me, look much more pretty than me. So, I had that struggle always. And only now as I aged and I realized that, yeah, really being at peace with myself, comfortable with who I am. And who I am means how I look on the outside and how I feel on the inside. And the way I think, the way I speak, that's something that I find very precious. Being spiritual means, yeah, I no longer feel I'm not good enough. This is something that I feel you can't do this overnight as well. It's something that I guess you grow into as you grow older, my life experiences. And I guess being a mother helped a lot with that as well because you don't want the same thing for your children. I don't want my daughter to grow up feeling insecure about herself and being doubtful about her potential. In terms of parenting, we've always been trying to make sure that she knows that she's good enough. She can do what she wants to do. She don't have to compare with her friends. She don't have to do everything that everybody else is doing. So, when I do that in my parenting preaching, then I realize that, hey, actually, I'm preaching to myself. When I say it to my kids, I'm actually saying it to myself as well. That's how I learned. I also need to stop being so critical of myself. There will be things that I regret doing. But we move on from there and I feel that life gets better once you accept that. That's very profound, accepting oneself as we are. It's a big challenge because we live in a country which is constantly measuring us in terms of our productivity, our contribution, our grades. And the pressure starts at a very young age. To be able to accept all that, just to be ourselves, takes something. Although I say this, I feel that I've not mastered it also. I have to constantly remind myself that it's so easy to just go back to negative thinking, negative thoughts. They just creep up on you. So, it's not easy. It's something that we have to learn. And being in the company of people who you can feel comfortable with, people who encourage you, who see you for who you are, that's definitely going to be very supportive. Do you think it's possible to live a simple life? And what's a simple life? If I had a choice, a simple life would be just not doing anything every day, be at home, just being happy, watching my Netflix, enjoying time with my kids, having meals together. I think having meals together these days is not easy. Everyone is so busy. I mean, the adults are busy, but the kids are busy as well. They have so many activities after school these days and there's extra things outside of school. So, finding time to be together, sitting down for a meal as a whole family to me is the simple thing in life that I wish I can do more often. We do try to do that, but sometimes we sit at a table. But everybody is in their own world. You are thinking about your own problems, your own issues. My kids might be thinking about, oh my gosh, my assignment is not done. And then I'll be thinking about work. My husband will be thinking about his own things, although you're all at the same table. But are you having a conversation? Are you actually connecting? That's, again, another level. Just being there physically, but also being able to connect with each other. I think that's something that I find. It sounds simple, but it's not simple to achieve. I mean, we take it for granted. When we gather at the dining table and we are having a meal and we think that we are connected. Yes. But actually, you might not be, especially if you're not conversing. Worst is, of course, you have people on their phones at the dinner table. That's a big no-no in my family. The TV is always off. No TV in the background, nothing in the background. Mealtime is everybody at the table. But even then, there are also many occasions where it's just silence. You don't really talk to each other. That's because maybe it had been a stressful day for everyone. Everyone's had a tiring day. You just want to get your dinner done and then off to your own bedroom and do your own stuff. So that's understandable. But we do need to be mindful. We do need to connect as well as a family. Because for me, I have three children. So I also find it being able to split my time between the three is challenging. Plus the biggest one, which is the husband. In terms of maintaining the marriage, the relationship with your husband and wife, that's also a huge priority for me. Because like I said, he's my pillars. If I don't actually have a solid relationship and partnership with my husband, I cannot imagine everything else. I think it's going to just fall apart. So that also requires me to really be able to spend time working on that relationship. At the same time, the relationship with my three children and then myself. So ourselves, right? Let's not forget just the me-time that we need as women. That's true. I'm sure men would say the same thing too. They need their me-time. If you had three words to describe thriving, what are those three words? Oh, what are the three words to describe thriving? I would say energy. I would say positivity. I would say resilience. Oh, nice. I'm going to ask you some fun questions. So they're going to be super quick. What's your favorite book? Harry Potter. Oh, okay, great. And what's your favorite travel destination? At the moment, it would be China. I would love to go back to China again. Yeah, it's a beautiful country. It's a very big country. And what's the best advice that you've ever received? Wow. Best advice I've ever received. Speak up. Oh, nice. And the worst advice? Wow. Because I don't listen to them. That's the best way to deal with bad advice. I try. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me here for this discussion. I've enjoyed our conversation. You're most welcome. I had a good time speaking with you. Definitely enjoyed myself greatly too.