Women In Business Series: Ms. Lien Pham – Vice President – GSK Vietnam

Hello everyone,

It’s my honor to participate in this campaign to discuss how multinational corporations can train, develop and facilitate female leadership to achieve leading positions in the company.

With my years of working in both Vietnam and other countries, I hope to share with you some interesting tips so that you can apply them to your life. First, speaking of talent training and development, we need to talk about culture and working environment at the company. At GSK, we recommend and encourage all employees to be themselves. It’s the company culture that everyone recognizes your difference and encourage you and other colleagues to proactively integrate into the company. You know, only when you are yourself could you solve the same problem in your own way.

Thus, you will be very creative. Your creativity will be the source for many impactful projects that could elevate the company. Besides, it will be a driving force for healthy competition among talents because when we encourage integration and proactively become parts of it, resonance will be created. Therefore, it is not only you but everyone who can be successful. It will be a professional working environment everyone is seeking for.

Regarding female talents and how to nurture them at work, let’s make it clear by some examples of what GSK has done and is aiming at in the future.

First, at GSK, we are greatly concerned with the gender balance of important positions in the company. The rate of female Vice presidents like me is 37% for 2022, but by 2020, we have reached 38%. Accordingly, we set a new goal that by 2025, we will have 45% of senior positions namely Vice President is women. As part of our success in 2020, I encourage you to be brave and set ambitious goals to achieve high positions in your corporation.

If you want to be successful, you have to find a company that has a nurturing working environment. Once you have an excellent performance, you could start advancing your career. Some multinational companies particularly the top market companies that pay attention to promote their culture and core values have training programs for future leaders. Each of them will be designed flexibly to fit its goals and categories. Therefore, it is critically important for you to understand your own objectives at your personal stages of development. There might be some programs for freshly graduated candidates and some others for experienced ones. The most important thing for you is to understand where you are and what exactly you want. Your goals and objectives for each stage will be different. When you are starting your career, you should focus on fostering your knowledge and acquire new skills in different fields. That would set you a foundation for your next stage as you are more mature and have more responsibilities. Since as a woman, we have a mission – to be a wife, a mother besides pursuing our career which I from my experience, call it ‘the dual goal’

However, as you should know, business is a fair playground. Regardless of your gender, your decision at the administrative level will determine whether the company could attain the highest goals or not. Thus, when you are clear about your dual goal, you should discuss it with your managers and create your own plan to get supports from other people. Also, the family side has as many challenges as the work side. As for family goals, you need to discuss them and have a commitment with your partner so that you will have timely support and reduce unnecessary stress and challenges.

In short, what I want to share with you today is that in order to be successful, fully developed, and achieve leading positions in the corporation, we need to be clear on our goals, we need to choose a nurturing working environment. Secondly, we need to be clear on our goals in each stage of our development. There is no need to sacrifice one for the other because with a meticulous plan we could achieve them both. Third, as chances favor the only prepared mind, we need to well plan, be more visible, and proactive to compete and demonstrate our abilities with support from our family. And that is all that I want you to know.