Leading Women: Navigate complex teams with respect and effective communication

Our Leading Women series highlight the professional challenges and career aspirations of women we work with here in Asia.  

In this feature, Carol Lee, Chief Supply Chain Officer at KFC and Pizza Hut Malaysia (QSR Brands (M) Holdings Bhd), shares how the role of collaboration and differentiated communication styles are critical in building strong workplace relationships and resolving conflicts, especially when managing co-workers of different seniority in a male-dominated supply chain industry.

Q: How do you empower and engage with your team?   

I strongly believe in freedom, true responsibility. I think it’s important to clearly set the objective, the direction and the expected deliverables or the expectation of the project. And along the way, though, of course, there will be pulse checks to ensure alignment.

And there’s two-way communication if there are any issues. But most importantly in empowerment is to allow mistakes. Allow mistakes because when we empower someone, we have to bear in mind that we are taking certain calculated risks.

Making small mistakes is okay because that’s how we learn; how we grow talent. That’s how we take away the fear factor for people when it comes to making decisions. Sometimes, we often feel that the team members will fear making decisions when there's a blame culture. And that's where you need to empower your team.

So very important, it’s to allow mistakes, learn from the mistakes and move on. And that’s how we improve.

This is an abridged version of the full interview with Carol Lee. For the full version of the interview, click here.