Suvita Charanwong: Women should voice how they wish to be treated

Suvita Charanwong, a pioneering Martech startup influencer, agreed to shares her experiences, challenges, and ideas for how women can achieve career success.

Going back four to five years, when discussing influencers, few people understood how important they would become to business and industry. Today, we can all see the difference, with every industry requiring influencers and few would deny that people’s purchasing behaviour is due to the power of our favourite influencers.

Suvita, the CEO and co-founder of Tellscore, was one of the first to step in and be recognised as among the top-ten influencers on an Asia Pacific hiring automation platform that connects marketers with social media influencers.

Necessary qualities to succeed

Suvita humbly told The Nation in an exclusive interview that she doesn’t consider herself a successful woman, as she views success as an ongoing process. She shared some of the qualities that brought her to this stage of life.

First, she said, is to think broadly, being informed as much as possible and taking in-depth action. Knowing the execution is a must and one should not hesitate to delve into details and the little things that can help us to achieve our purpose.

Second, she noted her team had adopted a horizontal organisation chart. “I respect every team member whether they are senior or junior, because I think they contribute the most toward our success,” said Suvita, adding, “So I will never say that I am successful, but if you say we succeeded as a team maybe it is more acceptable”.

Women’s empowerment in the workplace

At Tellscore, they have an open recruiting system aiming for no gender bias in the talent pool. They support workforce participation, allowing people to participate in projects or any kind of advancement, and select people based on their skill sets and experience instead of the gender lens.

In addition, Suvita highlights leadership opportunities in the workplace. “People get promoted, both men and women. In fact, in our workplace, there are more senior females than males.

“I’m not sure if that is something that sets the tone in our culture. Despite having a lot of tech guys over here, we can see an emerging trend for female leadership and it comes naturally to our workplace,” she said.

Suvita empowers women to engage in conversations about how they want to be treated. It might be a common thing in the Western world, but Asians tend to be shy and humble sometimes when it comes to expressing our feelings. 

“Women often feel like they don’t deserve the treatment that they do indeed deserve. However, we need to talk about it!,” she exclaimed.

Growth mindset: Fuel in driving to success

Suvita values and encourages her employees to embed a growth mindset in themselves because that is the fuel to drive their lives to reach their destinations.

“I think a growth mindset for me circles itself around knowing yourself and understanding yourself because in this chaotic world that we are in right now with digitalisation, knowing yourself is not that simple. Just knowing yourself is already half of the path to developing a growth mindset,” said Suvita.

She shared that engaging with people at all times will help you build your passion since we were not born with passion. But we can develop it by engaging with people around us.

“Your passion could be anything; it will later evolve to be your strong skill set when you are older, and when it is combined with the first two qualities which are knowing yourself and engaging with people, it will be fulfilled and become the growth mindset.”

Essential new skills for effective executives

Upskilling and relearning is a very important skill that is not only for women but rather for all genders.

According to Suvita, ‘Sometimes we need to unlearn, meaning we accept that the knowledge and skill set we have is already obsolete. We must have enough passion to learn a new skill without feeling it is too much effort or too tiring.”

The main obstacle at this time is that people do not want to upskill, relearn or unlearn because they think they already worked 8-9 hours a day – but the reality is that adding an hour is enough for people to upskill, relearn, or unlearn something within three months. Suvita encourages her staff to apply that.

Barriers to female empowerment

Speaking from her observations, Suvita says “4 to 5 years ago, women were climbing the ladder to become leaders, while we could see that most of the programmers and the tech team are guys.”

Nowadays, she does not see the barriers between men and women, but there are barriers between the straight population and those who are non-binary or LGBTQ+.

Suvita still sees a huge gap to be bridged in terms of creating an awareness of the fluidity of gender.

She saw that males who are LGBTQ+ encounter additional restrictions and barriers not from the legal framework, but from the attitudes of people around them. This something everybody needs to work on, she asserts.

“I think there are a lot of rules and laws that should be adjusted to make a more equal workplace. There are some gaps in the laws that we could approach to make them more equal, said Suvita.

In closing, Suvida thanked independent organisations that strive hard to address these topics.

“We are very lucky as we are one of the most equal countries in Asia. If we pull it together, we can make changes and be proud of it.”