CEO of CapitaLand Commercial Trust Lynette Leong has spent her career in male-dominated industries, and she hasn’t gotten to the top by behaving like a man.

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Lynette Leong comes from a family of resourceful entrepreneurs. Her maternal grandmother brought up four children on her own after being widowed at a young age, making a living by selling shoes. Her paternal grandfather owned a chain of bakeries famous for its mooncakes, while her father started his own engineering business. “My father had a lot of creativity, curiosity and perseverance,” says Lynette, who credits him for inspiring her to set high standards for herself. “He would never settle for the status quo.”

She once trained at Le Cordon Bleu Paris when she was in between jobs, and toyed with the idea of modernising the family bakery. She might well have gone into the family business, “but my paternal grandma would show me how raw her hands were from the long hours spent in the bakery kitchen”, Lynette recalls. “She refused to let me take on the business as she felt I wouldn’t be making the most of my education.”

Baking remains a passion (Lynette’s husband, an American professional business mentor, loves her pumpkin cheesecake and says it’s not Thanksgiving without it), but she instead became a banker, and later a leasing broker. The transition was challenging. “To go from a banker where people came to me and asked for loans, to pounding the pavement to close deals as a leasing broker made me a lot tougher,” she says. “But I wanted to get back to real estate, which was what I had studied in university. It’s a field where you can really change the landscape of a country by optimising vacant land and creating something of value.”

When you’re young, do everything and anything, but be righteous. Whatever you do, always strive for excellence. Diverse experiences will be foundational, and position you well as you never know what you’ll be doing in the future.

She’s had the chance to work in London, New York, Chicago, and South Korea, experiences that Lynette says has helped to toughen her up. “My outlook broadened, and I felt that the world had so many opportunities and possibilities.” Today, she is the CEO of CapitaLand Commercial Trust, a REIT with a market cap of some $4b that invests in commercial properties in Singapore.

Lynette was a speaker at the HSBC Women Leaders’ Forum 2016 in March, where topics included a survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit. She found it especially striking that the survey results showed that Singapore women — especially those at senior levels — are more likely to focus on their own career progression rather than feel a personal responsibility to help other women.

As a woman who has spent her career in male-dominated industries, “it can get rather lonely the higher you go”, she says. “When I have difficult problems to solve, first of all there are not many senior female colleagues, and also it can be hard to turn to people in your own organisation, for various reasons. I do seek support from a few mentors, most of them are men.”

For her, gender has never been a hindrance. “There is no need to act masculine, but rather we should use our feminine qualities to our best advantage,” she says. When she was working in real estate fund management in South Korea, for instance, she had to appease a roomful of angry chain-smoking businessmen when a deal stalled at the last minute. “I was very nervous, but I stepped in, smiled, spoke calmly and tried to ease the tension and they kind of calmed down. Maybe as a woman, I was able to channel a different set of emotions, to counter their distressed emotions.”

Her advice to young women: “When you’re young, do everything and anything, but be righteous. Whatever you do, always strive for excellence. Diverse experiences will be foundational, and position you well as you never know what you’ll be doing in the future.”

Photography: Max Chan/101Teamwork; outfit: Hugo Boss

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