I was scrolling through my blog and realized I started blogging a lot about my current day to day as this has been meant to be a self-reflection diary for me. However, that doesn't give my readers much insight to where I started and how I came to where I am today. So let me re-introduce myself! 

I'm an Asian American women raised by Vietnamese parents. My parents raised us with a pretty simple rule, get A's in school, go to college and they'd be hands-off.  Anytime a grade slipped, certain privileges would be taken away.  The irony was it resulted in a large part of my teenage years resenting my parents for being so hands-off.  I remember my best friend asking how often I had dinner with my family and my answer was "That's a thing?" What I came to realize in my adult years is my parents were ultimately trying to give me the American Dream they didn't have growing up, and were hyper-focused on their careers to achieve that. Whether it was purposeful or not, their hands-off approach gave me the independence to make decisions, make mistakes, and grow through those on my own; knowing deep down they'd always be there to pick up the pieces and support if anything went awry. In a way, they gave my sibling and I a lot of the skills that have allowed us to achieve in our current careers.  It turns out I was lucky.

Through college, I stumbled through trying to find my identity. My parents recommended the pre-med or pre-pharma route thinking that's what brought in the big money, and big money led to a happy life. They both worked their way into Engineering positions with limited education and ironically didn't realize their positions would end up being the highly sought after ones in Silicon Valley.  I interned in pharmacies for years during college, building up a resume to tailor myself towards that pre-pharma route. However, the passion was never really there. After graduating college, I entered Biotech to "buy-time". 

I came from a public Ivy university and the expectation amongst the faculty and peers was to land a job in a large corporate company.  All my peers who weren't directly going off to their M.S or PHD programs preached going into R&D and were landing these research associate positions.  I applied to probably 100+ R&D positions and got 0 offers. Feeling super defeated, I started looking into other Biotech roles available. This introduced me to the Operations side of Biotech.  By graduation, I had accepted an offer into an Operations role making $17.50/hr, roughly $36k in 2014.  I remember being embarrassed knowing my parents spent $100k+ on my education for me to end up making $36k per year.  As well, all my peers were boasting about jobs they landed that paid $50-$70k per year post-graduation.  I started making up these false stories about my salary, my role as a way to hide the shame and fit in.  Behind the scenes, I started trying to find and do whatever I could to increase that salary as quick as possible. It led me to be hustle hard behind the scenes though. Each year, I was increasing my salary by 20%-30% and am now in a role where I make $200k+ per year. 

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These last few weeks have been busy and I find myself struggling with how to address a team members performance.  I'm conflicted with two questions. 

1. Am I too nice of a manager that this person is trying to test their limits with me? or...
2. Am I overlooking potential personal things that could be going on that's impeding this person's ability to focus at work?

​What I do find is each time performance improvement opportunities are addressed during our 1:1's, I see an immediate shift in the individual's performance. However, I do see that when things get busy and it's harder for me to follow-up, this person's performance starts slipping.  I find myself having to implement new behavioral strategies for the entire team in an attempt to move the needle with one person's performance.  For instance, we hold a daily DM (15 minute) to follow up on action item statuses and I started individually mapping out each person's daily tasks.  Doing this, I saw this individual go from missing key metrics by 30 days to finally hitting them on time.   This I find to be a great achievement. 

However, what I find myself struggling in recent weeks is trying not to micro-manage but feeling like I have to be assertive in not allowing certain behaviors to show up because I'm seeing them abused. For example, this individual got 3x more time to work on certain tasks compared to other team members. They've taken more WFH days then my other teams, and did not address any WFH activities. Thus, I started pushing back on allowing WFH. When I did do this, the taking sick days started popping up.  On one particular day, the individual asked to take a sick day and I asked for it to be properly deducted.  This individual came on-site in the next 30 minutes and showed no signs of sickness.  This made me wonder what is truly going on here. Am I dealing with an individual who may not be fit for the role's requirements? or is there something I'm not seeing? Is there something that I can do better as a manager to tailor this individual in the right direction?

My heart sank when I received a resignation letter from one of my highest performing employees. There were so many questions that ran through my head...

• What led them to resign so suddenly? 
• Am I too young to be leading this complex team of Scientists and Engineers?
  
• Was I not technical enough to be in this role?
  
• Was there something that I did wrong?

Prior to responding, I took a deep breath and responded how I'd like to see a response if I had resigned from a role. "Thank you for informing me. Let's discuss your transition plan and next steps in our next 1:1 check-in.  Thank you for all your contributions and I'm so sorry to hear you go. You will truly be missed!" I tried to sound professional, yet my mind and body were shaking with the thought of not knowing why. 

The following day, we had our 1:1. I started it upbeat and noted that prior to talking about a transition plan, I wanted to further understand why and if there was anything our team could do to keep this person. 

He mentioned that he was becoming a father. His fiance was pregnant and the long distance relationship was starting to strain their relationship. He had to relocate. Being his first resignation ever, I could tell he was also full of nerves in having this conversation with me. He was fearful that I would have taken his sudden resignation harshly and commended my sense of empathy.  I reassured him that if I were in his shoes, I would have made the exact decision. I gave him an advice my mentor had taught me - Your career can always take a pause. It'll be something you'd be able to pick up back up and continue. Time with your loved ones and family is something that you can't take back. Remember to cherish those moments.

From this resignation, there were a number of things I learned about myself and how tough it is to be a manager. No matter how shocking the situation, we will have our emotions but there's a need to mask that to lead our team and build that sense of psychological safety. If I had not kept my upbeat composure and masked my fear, my employee may have not relayed something so personal and opened up to me the way he did.  Not only do we need to mask it around the resigning employee, but I couldn't let it impact my tasks and ability to lead the days and weeks following.  Although there's a sense of uncertainty still moving forward of how I'll backfill and transition his responsibilities, that's something that I will continually have to mask in order to move my team forward. It's strength that I have to portray so that my team continues strong. 

Overall though, I still ponder on if I'm doing the right thing. Did I behave in the right manner. 


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Starting my career and deciding where I wanted to go in life was always an intimidating topic.  Being an Asian American women, I was pressured to pursue a career based on prestige and compensation with no real guidance as to what any of that truly meant.  In my early years, it was the stereotypical pre-med route. I couldn't handle anatomy, so I switched to pre-pharma during my undergraduate years, not really understanding why or what that really meant. 

After receiving a B.S., I started my career in the Biotechnology space.  I quickly learned how competitive the career market was in Silicon Valley and desperately took the first job offer handed my way after 6 months of searching.  These last 7+ years, I went from being an associate at a small start up to a Senior Manager at a Fortune 500 company. What was most important through this journey was finding what I enjoyed and where I wanted to go.  Make Me Happy Career section of my blog will be a compilation of my personal job experiences and what I wish I had known when I started my career journey. I hope that this blog will inspire other women to share their stories. ​