Meet Suki from AsYou
Suki Xiao is on a mission to empower women from diverse backgrounds. She works as an ICF credentialed coach to support women in their leadership and career development.
Her business AsYou celebrates the potential of women from all backgrounds, especially those of colour. AsYou was born from her own struggles with finding success and confidence in New Zealand.
Suki has just launched her newest programme, Accentuated, for ethnically diverse women to reach their leadership potential and power.
With a BCom/LLB conjoint degree, Suki worked as a Tax Consultant and Policy advisor before she moved into coaching. After experiencing the loneliness and struggle of being a woman of colour in majority Pākeha and male-dominated fields, Suki embarked on her journey to found AsYou.
It would be impossible to tell Suki's story as well as she does, however we did manage to ask her a little more about herself.
As a woman of colour and an immigrant to New Zealand, you’ve faced cultural barriers that influenced your conceptions of your own background and success. What was your journey to celebrating your own background and taking ownership of your success?
I vividly remember the first time I was able to acknowledge my Chinese New Zealander identity was at the NZCA Leadership Development Camp in 2013 when we discussed the nuances between the terms Chinese New Zealander and New Zealand Chinese. I was in my early 20s, having just finished university.
In this camp, I found myself surrounded by people who look like me and have similar experiences as me. Poet Renee Liang spoke to us about crossing cracks in cultural pavements. With the different cultural identities we have, we have the flexibility to choose to have one foot on either side of the pavement or have two feet on one side. From that point onwards, I became comfortable and more fluent in traversing between the two cultures. My identity of who I am and where I fit in New Zealand became solid yet playfully adaptable.
Then I headed into work and didn’t think further about how my identity affects the way I think, how others perceive me and the opportunities that I get. I didn’t think of myself as a woman in the workplace and was ignorant of the invisible barriers that exist for women and women of colour. There were instances though that I was disadvantaged because I am a woman, a woman of colour, an immigrant, a young person and someone short with a small body frame. For example, when I was Agile consulting in Wellington, I didn’t fit into your stereotypical consultant look in Wellington which was a tall white man wearing a trench coat carrying a suitcase. I felt like people didn’t take me seriously and doubted my abilities. Apart from that, I must admit I was ignorant myself, and tried to “lean in”, change myself to become better.
The turning point came when one of my clients last year, who is also a Chinese New Zealander, told me that I should become the “Best Asian Woman Coach, globally.” My jaws dropped and that was when I started to truly embrace my woman and woman of colour identities, seeing them as a unique advantage. I reflected on my client base and the vast majority is women and women of colour. So it was obvious that clients with similar backgrounds can relate to me and actually there also aren’t many women of colour coaches around the globe.
So now I really own this label of “woman of colour” and take every opportunity to explain to others why embracing this label is important. It is like what Dr Michelle P King said in her book, the Fix: Overcoming Invisible Barriers that are Holding Women Back at Work, if we deny discrimination exists, then we are no where near addressing it. We need to acknowledge that people have different experiences of the workplace and that one-size fits all programmes/policies/coaching only produce the same results as what we have seen for the last 50 years.
Success is a funny word. I don’t think of myself as “successful” in the traditional sense nor do I want to be “successful” in that way. I don’t have a big company that makes a lot of money and I haven’t “achieved” a lot of societal measures of success, like getting married and having children. I define success differently which is about doing meaningful work that makes a personal impact and having the opportunity to learn. Being able to detach ourselves from and question society’s definition of success helps us to have more power to determine and live the type of life we truly want.
How have you dealt with the biggest challenges to running AsYou?
This is a hard question because with owning a business, there are many challenges and sometimes the same challenge comes again at a grander scale. The way I think about challenges is that we crack one level then it unlocks another level. The process of “cracking, unlocking, getting stuck and cracking” doesn’t really end or at least I don’t feel I have mastered this business enough for it to end. So the key has been, as cliche as it sounds, grit.
My definition of grit has changed over time. When I was a kid, I thought grit was about not giving up and sticking with it until the end, which I pride myself for being really good at. Now my understanding of grit has evolved because it is not about sticking it out for perseverance’s sake. It is more about focusing on the outcomes and the impacts we want to make and having the patience to learn from failures and adapt our ways to get there. I have learnt the importance of giving ourselves the safety to learn and experiment and the compassion to tame our harsh self-critic.
Personal development and dealing with challenges are inexplicably intertwined. As Albert Einstein said, “you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” So as I go through my own journey of “cracking, unlocking, getting stuck and cracking” it, I coach my clients to do the same. I help them reflect deeply about how they are acting as a change agent in their own lives, challenge them to redefine beliefs that are no longer helpful and realign them with their values, their passions and their authentic and compassionate selves.
Tell us about Accentuated, your newest leadership programme.
Accentuated is a 6-month in-person leadership programme specifically designed for women of colour to step into their authentic leadership identity and power.
Accentuated was born out of Asian Women Rising Brunches, sponsored by Xero, as wāhine of Asian heritage gathered and discussed the challenges that women of colour face in the workplace and what we can do as a community to tackle these challenges. The top challenges are 1) the pressure to conform, 2) the lack of informal networks, 3) the lack of role-models and 4) being stereotyped. We tackle each of these challenges in Accentuated through transformational coaching and mentoring, learning from and supporting each other.
We have also recognised that for representation to change at the top, we require the help of allies so Accentuated deliberately asks the employers/organisations to become allies for their diverse women by investing in and being part of their leadership development journeys.
In the programme, the participants will:
Define their authentic leadership and purpose, explore what makes them unique as a leader, and understand how their cultural backgrounds are an asset
Cultivate a confident mindset so that they are no longer battling with the imposter syndrome or any minimising self-talks and work habits
Shine brighter by learning to communicate their value clearly, influence fearlessly and handle stereotyping and racism
Expand their network and lead by example to build up the next generation of diverse leaders.
We kicked off in Auckland in July. It has been so powerful already for the participants after their first workshop as they started to view themselves as a leader with their unique points of views and strengths. I am looking forward to kicking off the Tauranga and Wellington editions in September. There are some partial scholarships available now, so please shoulder tap people you know.
In your bio, you speak about having a lack of role models in past jobs that represented you. Do you have role models now?
Yes, I am so glad to say I do now. This has been a deliberate exercise from becoming aware that I don’t have any to go searching for them to getting to know them on a personal level. An effective role model is not only someone we admire but also someone we can see ourselves in.
A great role model for me for ethnically diverse leadership is Meng Foon, the Race Commissioner at the New Zealand Human Rights Commission. He gives so much time to the people, getting to know them and listening to them. He is also fluent in Cantonese and Maori and understands the different world views, which make him an excellent advocate and leader for the people.
The topic of role models is actually one of the modules for Accentuated as I have realised how important it is for our development as women of colour leaders to deliberately look for and acknowledge the role models that we may already know and have in our lives. So that we can learn from them and so that we do not feel like an imposter. In this way, we further cultivate the role model we have within ourselves to impact upon the next generation of women of colour leaders.
