Women leadership series - In conversations with Caihong Liu

How would you introduce yourself?

Hi, My name is Caihong Liu.

My husband, me and our 11-year-old son live / work and study in Chengdu, China. My husband's biased description of me is that I am good at organizing and executing all kinds of work and is super efficient. My son doesn't have a mature description of me yet, sometimes he calls me the best mom in the world, sometimes he is not very happy with me because I am firm on his study and can be pushy in order to keep his time management on track.

One common description of my colleagues towards me is that I am very good at getting things done.

Can you tell me a bit about your career journey? When did you first get into a leadership role?

I majored in Computer Science for both of my Bachelor and Master degrees in a good university (University of Electronics, Science and Technology of China) in Chengdu. After graduation I joined Motorola, and worked there first as a Developer / QA and 3 years later my first Project Manager leadership role. I started to interview candidates, managing teams and teams’ delivery. Motorola passed the CMMI level 5 certificate back then so I was educated in the way of following the process in every step of the software development lifecycle. The 5 years working in Motorola led me into the TeleCOM industry.

After Motorola I worked in Nokia (later changed to NSN) and TietoEnator (later changed to Tieto), with the role of Project Manager, R&D Manager, Networks Director, Site Manager, the size of the teams under my management grew to over 1000 people. I was in the leadership role for another 7 years. Within this period, I was the first batch of scrum masters and started to use agile and lean practices in our daily deliveries.

Then my experience of growing a new site for a foreign invested company in Chengdu got noticed by a headhunter and after the interviews I took the position of the site manager for the Bleum Chengdu office. That is the time I transferred from the TeleCOM industry to a software consultancy company and started to learn to provide the service for all different industries.

Over 7 months in Bleum, the typical conflict between being a “2-year-old’s mom” and a “full time working mom” reached to the peak - My constant traveling and my own mom who took care of my son at that time had to leave us to take care of my brother’s baby. So I had to stop my “full time work” and be the “2-year-old’s mom” temporarily until he was old enough to go to kindergarten.

I created an Elance (it is a freelancer platform) account at that time, doing research, translations, writing articles for my clients in parallel with taking care of my son. My husband complained a lot because most of my clients were from the US and I had to work till very late hours and my husband was concerned about my health and did not think it would be sustainable.

Fortunately 1 year later, my son started kindergarten and I joined ThoughtWorks as a staffing manager first, Later community manager, project manager, I will be with ThoughtWorks for 8 years this June.

What were the top challenges you faced during your journey and how did you overcome them?

One of the top challenges I faced during my journey is things can always be more complicated than they seem to be and I don’t have all the answers, but teams are counting on me for. What I usually do in this scenario is to organize the people who have the best knowledge to break down all the problems, get them analyzed, prioritized and get them tackled one after another. Explain as much and clearly as possible, and be the first person to take responsibility, walk my talk to move the whole team forward together.

The other top challenge I face is to find the balance of my focus and time spent among context analysis, planning, operational and administrative tasks, managing team(s) deliveries, managing up, cross teams’ cooperation etc. The context is changing so flexibility is always required. When I first stepped into my leadership role, I made the mistake of still taking all the difficult tech tasks with me (Because I did them very well in the past), which left the other team members less opportunities to grow. What I do after I realize the problem is to adjust my focus according to the context and support people to own the tasks which could build their expertise and help on their growth.

What motivates you?

Making people’s lives better, it doesn’t matter if it is via Tech or not, I feel achievement when a problem is solved and people benefit from what I do.

Do you have a role model in your life? Can you name a few people who you look up to?

My mum is my life long role model, she did not receive much education, but she is the best at everything she does and is usually super fast at everything, plus she is always kind to all people, even the ones who are mean to her.

Oprah Winfrey (An American host) and Echo Chen (A Chinese writer) are also my role models, I admire their storytelling talents, their energy and interpretation of making the world a more interesting place, and their courage to move on when the world is not so beautiful. I wish to be more like them to tell stories and influence people positively.

What does leadership mean to you? How would you describe your leadership style?

To me leadership means a good facilitator and a transformer, sometimes you need to be a beacon, sometimes an architect, sometimes a catalyst, sometimes just a person. Being a good facilitator helps to put everything together and being the transformer helps to roll in different roles when context changes, with the goal to organize a group of people to get things done.

My leadership style (or my goal) is pretty much the same. I’d like to borrow the words I heard before “We play to win, or we don’t play” as my leadership identity.

What would be your advice to young leaders?

The best lesson I learned from my experience is leadership is about creating conditions that enable others to be at their best. It is easy said but can be hard to do. I find running rehearsals in my head beforehand can help me practice from different angles. It is like playing chess, I get to think forwardly what are those conditions, how they will help other people, from what ways and what are the best shots; Also young leaders might feel embarrassed to reach out for help and support at the beginning, but what I learned is that it is absolutely OK to do so, other people usually would love to offer you the needed help and support, so don’t lose the opportunity to learn from other people.