Isobar New Zealand Consulting team GM discusses family, faith & fear with Isobar Global CEO
While Jean Lin was visiting Auckland we were lucky enough to spend an hour with her. We hosted her at the Davanti offices with 60 of the team face-to-face and another 20 dialling in from Wellington. As a Global CEO of Isobar we expected some strong views on women in leadership but what she shared wasn’t the strong themed messages of success, but how authenticity and humanity are the key values that she brings to the male dominated world of global leadership. We talked about her life, her father and her height with a wonderful dose of story-telling thrown in. Below we’ve summarised an amazing conversation that left many of us with intellectual crushes on our Global CEO.
Jean Lin: I was born, educated and grew up in Taiwan, and I started my career in Ogilvy. After studing in the USA I came back when the internet and all the digital possibilities were becoming important. It was at this time that I had my daughter, and in my culture you’re supposed to do nothing while on maternity leave. You cannot wash your hair, because you’ll get a headache; you cannot read books because it hurts your eyes. So my mom was at home watching me because she knew I rebelled. Instead of sleeping I would hide in a room that had the computer, which is when I saw the world of digital. I saw how those things were going to change the way people communicated. This was where it started, after six weeks of maternity leave I knew I wanted to start a company. So I did. Supported by my husband, I put up all my savings in the business and went to the US to try to get some funding for me to start a business, which I got. Fast forward five years and the next thing is I’ve sold my business to Aegis media, just like it.
My first role in Isobar was global strategy which I followed by running Asia Pacific. In 2014 I became Global CEO and the thing that I enjoy the most was going to different places and meeting everybody, there’s such similarity and difference, but more similar than you think. If you walk into our offices around the world people will look different. They will have different props, different fonts, but the feeling and culture behind them is the same. It’s about food, brands and fun; it’s nothing more complicated. If you like to do business with people that you consider friends, you want to share your food with them, and then you can have fun. Then you have an amazing career. I feel that we always think of the world as more complicated than it should be.
What’s the one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self? An 18–20 year old you?
As a teenager I was very shy, I’m still shy today. I’m quite an introvert. When I was younger people would say that you need to become an extrovert in order to be successful, you need to speak up and be more aggressive. I don’t believe in that. I’ve believe in being myself. One thing I’ve learned over the years is you have to be comfortable about yourself, my advice for my younger-self is to be more confident about myself.
I’ve also learned that life is interesting and difficult. That’s always the case. To be successful you need to remember two things; one is that your faith needs to be stronger than your fear. The other is that authenticity is much more important than affection. I don’t know about the culture here, but I can certainly speak to the culture that I grew up with and a lot of places I visit; everybody wants to be perfect. It’s really not important, because it’s impossible to be perfect, authenticity is much more important than that.
How have you managed to engage with the politics of the industry, especially as an introvert?
I think it’s just what exists as natural interactions among people. There are stereotypes and there are assumptions, and you need to remember that all those things are never about you. It’s what the environment is believing and not really addressed to you personally. I don’t see it as politics. The word politics has bad connotations. You have to deal with the situation that you’re faced with and people will have their prejudices, or preferences, or they will just think of things in a different way. Don’t label it as something, just address the situation that’s in front of you.
What is the best decision and what is the worst decision you’ve ever made?
The best decision I’ve made is to marry my husband, my best friend, he always pushed me to do more. He understood what my father meant when he said “what I want you to remember is to be a better person rather than a smarter woman”. He would tell me don’t let other people tell you what you can or cannot do. My worst decision; some of the hiring decisions, but I have a philosophical view where I don’t believe anything is cracked. I believe we learn from everything we do. So when there is something bad there’s always a silver lining.
As a female leader what have been significant barrier to progress and how did you manage to get over?
One of the things that I face is that, as you can see, I’m not extremely tall. When I go out with our male colleagues I can be hidden. I used to feel bad about this and in our industry, especially, where your voice is everything it’s not enough just to be there, you need to be seen. The key thing is not to take it personally. There is a silver lining because no one expects me to be the leader, they don’t expect me to make the tough decisions, they would form questions for others in my team. I can say is that life can be changed by something small, I’m an example of that.
What inspires you?
Working in this industry, it feels like every morning you wake up and you know you know nothing about this world. You’re restarting. That’s the thing that inspires me the most because it feels that every day is a new day, there’s a new star and that you have to unlearn things that you learned yesterday. It’s also the privilege and potential of what we’re getting into it.
As women in leadership we talk about work life balance. What’s your view on this and how have you managed to achieve it?
The first thing I would argue is when you think of balance you’re assuming that there are two things that you have to balance. You have to put them in different places and be weighed against each other. I don’t believe in that, I believe that life is a circle. It’s a continuous process. Therefore I don’t need to sacrifice one for the other. Because at the end we end up in the same place. So this is my personal view. I don’t often think of work life balance because part of me is saying why, why do you want to separate them. It’s another stereotype. You just need to be the best version of yourself in whatever possible roles that you’re in.
What would one change be to impact the Isobar business today?
I really want to launch Isobar Good globally, it’s about using design thinking to help more business brands and people to do good for the society. And I’m really inspired by that. I think that in five years time will be a very important pillar. For our business, if we do it right we can change lives and enable many different things. If we can create this practice to ensure that more business brands are using those skills in designing a better future for the world and for the future generation, this will be something fantastic.
What advice would you have for a father of three young daughters to help pave the way for them to set them up for success as they navigate teenage years and then into the future.
I feel that every child is different, every relationship also. One thing my father taught me was to discover my own answers, he would always work with me on this. We would play unconventional games to help me understand this. He also taught me there is a lot of noise about girls being different to boys. But that is just noise. You can’t ignore it. So a lot of our discovery was his way of helping me with that.
Can speak to if there was either a personal or professional moment that challenged your thinking in a big way?
Not a moment as I will say almost every day. And I think every day, you could be quite afraid because there are so many new things happening. And you truly do not know if the answer. When I started my business there were many days I wanted to shut the door, I doubted myself a lot. The key thing that I’ve learned is, as I said, your faith needs to be stronger than your fear. You need to know what you believe in. And what I believe in is that direction of technology and digital will forever change people’s relationship.
I was struck by a comment about being an introvert, how did you survive in this particular industry?
I need to have time with myself, because that’s where my source of energy comes from. Extroverts energy comes from interacting with people, my source of energy come from interacting with myself. A business should help to create the room that’s required for both the introvert and extrovert to really be the better version of themselves. Getting to know yourself, is important for me too. Some of my own time is spent rereading old books. Every weekend I read one of them. And it is amazing. So to answer, you need to find a way to have room to be yourself.
Please can you share a moment where you feel you grew as a leader?
That was a trip that I had to the US, I was promoted to Global Chief Strategy Officer. My mission was to visit the main offices, and visit the key talent and recommend the talent mapping. Before I took on that role I was running my own business, so I know everybody in the office. 450 of them. I know the name of their partners or children, I even know the name of their pets. It was a close knit community I know everybody, and therefore it was easy for me to customize, to help, to be empathetic. My US trip made me realize that when you are running a scale operation you can’t know everyone. I feel that I’ve grown a lot because I used to run the company as personal human organization, I realise that while I can still keep the best part of that humanity and warm personal relationship there, I have to do that with different mechanics with a scale organization where it’s impossible for you to know everybody’s partner’s name and pets.
How do you recruit now?
The sum of bad hiring comes from the fact that we didn’t take into consideration someones personality traits, we focus too much on the capability. Right now I pay more attention to the personality traits and try to discover who they are. We need to develop questions and understanding, so that we can ensure we really test some of that to make sure there is a true cultural alignment.
You’re a shining light into female representation on your executive, how do we move faster in supporting this representation in the business?
I feel that there’s not a simple way. We nee to consistently hire the right person — whatever the gender, but we need to make sure we support females coming into the business. We’re all more comfortable in hiring people that are more like us, this is not just about gender. But if you judge a fish by how quick they climb the tree, the fish will forever be a failure. There are different ways to get things done. So having that different source of inspiration and lens when we hire will be the most critical first step, it could change things.
Where will we find you at 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning?
If I’m not travelling you will find me playing the piano, piano is my pressure release. My daughter used to say when you want to kill somebody you always play the piano like that! I learned to play piano when I was two and I just love it. As well as doing my reading project. So I will be either playing piano or reading a book.
