SOS for the C-Suite: Karen Tay is building a first responder model for women in corporate crisis 

Barely into her mid-twenties, Karen Tay found herself leading a team. It was the expected path for Public Service Commission scholars in the civil service, and Karen embraced it with full gusto. Despite this, feelings of imposter syndrome and self-doubt crept in, leaving her questioning her capabilities.

Things improved when she was placed into a coaching programme. “It was so helpful. Then I did a very Asian thing: I decided that instead of paying for a coach, I would take a coaching course,” she says with a guffaw. “Not only would I learn the skills, I would also get coached along the way. You know, investment, not consumption.” 

She balanced the coaching course with her demanding role at Smart Nation, and the skills she learnt proved invaluable as she navigated her government career. “I used the skill to mentor my teams, and I would also run coaching clinics for the managers internally,” she says.  

The ensuing eight years were a whirlwind. She moved to Silicon Valley with her daughter and husband, who had enrolled at Stanford University to study his PhD, and was tasked to recruit tech talent for Singapore. At some point, when her second daughter was just five months old, she was juggling two government roles at Smart Nation and Economic Development Board. She also consulted for various companies within the private sector for several years, and helped scale startups such as Iterative Health from 50 to 200 employees.

Last year, while on a three-year sabbatical, Karen reached another turning point. She decided to channel her coaching expertise into founding Threshold Allies and Her Life Ally (now called Inherent), marking a new chapter in her career.

Karen’s mission transcended helping individual leaders: she aimed to leverage her extensive experience and coaching background to create systems, policies, and structures that could address leadership challenges on a larger scale.

She started a pilot programme called Her Life Ally, inspired by a first responder model, where women who were in a crisis – for example, facing the threat of retrenchment or dealing with a toxic boss – were paired with trained allies. 

“If you’re in one of those really isolating, painful experiences where you feel like you don’t have good options, where it’s almost shameful to talk about it, that’s where we come in,” says the 37-year-old.

These allies are generally leaders in the corporate industry who’ve gone through similar challenges. “I wanted to build a support system. Coaching is a very privatised relationship. This means you’re basically helping people who have the means to pay. But because of my background as a policymaker, I’ve always been interested in systems and building systemic solutions, even if you’re on a downswing.” 

The word “ally” was meaningful as well: “I really like the idea of an ally because, if you think about it in a military sense, somebody would come and fight alongside you. They’d help you really push through this hard time in your life. You wouldn’t feel like you have to go and do all this yourself.’” 

She adds, “As women, we’re asked to keep doing more, be paid more, be more, and do better, right? And I’m not saying those aren’t important, but sometimes the challenges we face are so great that we just want somebody to ally with – somebody we can count on and lean on for a bit. We can borrow their strength.”  

Her Life Ally has now transitioned into Inherent, which is a social enterprise with a similar business model. 

Meanwhile, she has also set up Threshold Allies, where Karen and her team work with executive leaders in navigating high stakes situations and transitions in their teams and personal lives. 

“Life has upswings and downswings; a cycle. I design each programme – the structure, homework, methodology, to meet the psyche and needs of women in these different parts of the cycle,” she explains.  

Changing behaviours 

To amplify her impact, Karen, along with Dr Rebecca Carey, Cyrena Chih and Yuka Childers, designed a research-validated program in partnership with Princeton University. This programme supports women experiencing a wide array of challenging workplace situations, “ranging from having their jobs threatened, being marginalised or bullied, to generalised toxic environments where they feel stuck.”

As Indra Nooyi puts it, “When bias happens in a workforce, it strips away a women’s confidence. When it attacks your confidence, it attacks your competence.”  

Research conducted in connection with the programme reveals these workplace crises affect three core areas of a woman’s life: her relationships and connections, her self-worth and dignity, and her ability to plan ahead. These impacts can be intensified by a lack of preparation (many women believe these situations will never happen to them) and a lack of support (the adage “it gets lonely at the top” rings true).

Karen gives the example of a woman (name withheld) who won a mediation case against a tech giant. Despite the win, the process of mediation was brutal, involving  harassment and character assassination. “She couldn’t pull herself together to go into job interviews,” says Karen, “because she felt she couldn’t move on when her entire sense of self had been shattered.” 

These findings are crucial for Karen’s work in building programs and systems that address the core structural issues and understand the depth of the impact on women. The insights not only enable her to tailor more specific programmes for women but also equip organisations, companies, and non-profits with a better understanding of how workplace crises impact women and how to foster a more supportive culture. 

Initial research reports are promising. Besides achieving a Net Promoter Score of 100 (the maximum), the programme achieved statistically significant effects on women leaders’ motivation (+43%), focus and productivity (+50%), confidence (+60%), reduction in burn-out (-34%), and perception that they had adequate support to navigate their current challenge (+101%).

Karen shares, “I’m happy to report that many of them are in new positions where they are thriving and have received 30-70% compensation bumps. It’s not simply about the money, it’s being in a place where they feel valued and recognised. It started with something in them yearning for their inherent value to be more better recognised.”

Uplifting women 

This kind of work and research is crucial to our current generation of women. In conversations with the women that read and feature in Her World, a recurring theme seems to come up: The career women of the naughties are a sandwiched generation. We are privileged to be standing on the shoulders of giants, women like Indra Nooyi and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who defied convention and made female participation in the workforce a norm, not an exception. 

And whilst their careers were defined by battles and biases, our new reality can be just as confounding. We are a generation that typically has a foot in the door, but there are still, often, invisible barriers that confront us as we climb the ladder. We’re learning that masculine aggression is no longer a defining criterion of success. We’re learning to embrace our womanhood, femininity and the multifaceted roles we play, and that having it all doesn’t mean sacrificing our sanity or our mental and emotional well-being.

This is all to say that while some believe that we have gone too far in our quest for gender equality, the reality is there’s still a lot of work to be done. 

“What’s different about female leaders in this generation is their emphasis on authenticity – living and leading according to their values rather than simply trying to ‘play the role’,” says Karen.

“For example, a common question they come with is ‘how can I demand high standards while exemplifying genuine care?’. What’s exciting to me is that they are actually exploring this question instead of thinking about ‘genuine care’ as a weakness – I saw the latter much more commonly even 10 years ago, when women felt their only choice was to be like men, who generally showed up as ‘tougher’ leaders.” 

Her work is especially current, as Karen has noticed that women are increasingly bucking trends and pre-prescribed roles they formerly inhabited: “Women [are now] playing the long game, not being afraid to take career breaks and giving themselves time to tend to other important aspects of their lives,” she says. 

“Some women have extremely non-traditional paths to leadership, even taking three to twelve years out before getting back into their careers, then becoming tech CEOs! They key is that they had a good reputation for being capable, they were transparent about what they were looking for in each season, and they invested in relationships that resonated with their values continually. The opposite of this approach is trying to be everything to everyone every season, and feeling thinly spread and unhappy. Their identity is less tied to work, which perhaps makes them more willing to break the moulds of what a leader ‘should’ look like.”  

Her ultimate goal is to create a ripple effect of change. “We have to design a society that enables and celebrates more flexible paths for men and women alike and allows them to play the long game, reprioritising as seasons shift. It won’t make our society less economically productive. In fact, I think this approach will naturally add joyful working years to our population, where people are not just waiting for their retirements but having opportunities to scale up and scale down their work and have sustainable working lives.” 

Interested in meeting and speaking with Karen? She has two workshops coming up:

1. Navigating Sticky Workplace Situations, a collaboration with Catalyse/AWARE on 23rd July 2024. It’s a focused workshop equipping women to help each other in navigating a range of challenging workplace situations, including recovering from past situations. They’ll impart extremely practical tools and case studies based on Karen’s work with Princeton University. 

2. Thriving through Shifting Seasons, a collaboration with Rachel Lim of Love Bonito on Sarurday 20th July 2024. It’s a women’s retreat focused on giving women tools to navigate shifting career and life seasons with confidence, clarity and practicality. 

PHOTOGRAPHY Clement Goh

ART DIRECTION Adeline Eng

HAIR Aung Apichai

MAKE-UP Aaron Ng