Leong Wee Pheng, senior finance director with Nike Southeast Asia Sales & Marketing

This article was first published in the April 2016 Singapore edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

Leong Wee Pheng may hold the title of senior finance director at Nike Southeast Asia, but deep down she thinks of herself as a coach more than anything else. Her job is, she says, to motivate her team to do their best, so that the entire organisation wins. ‘That’s the job of a leader or manager; we coach our teams for success,’ she says. 

It is perhaps not surprising that someone who has worked at Nike for more than a decade would be fond of sports metaphors, given that Nike is the largest seller of athletic footwear and apparel in the world. However, Leong has taken the idea further, fully internalising Nike’s corporate culture, with its inspirational phrases. 

Fearless, for example, is a line of apparel by Nike but is also a phrase that Leong likes to use to describe how to operate. For her, being fearless means conquering your fear (rather than being reckless). People are afraid of the unknown and they are afraid of negative consequences, she says. The way to overcome this is through greater knowledge. ‘To be confident, we should be more information-seeking, more questioning,’ she says. ‘We should not be afraid to seek the truth.’

She quotes the scientist Marie Curie: ‘Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.’ She believes in constantly asking questions. ‘Asking questions will help you understand what you do not know and allows you to expand your knowledge,’ she says.

Another phrase she is fond of using is ‘There is no finish line’. This was the tagline of Nike’s first advertising campaign in 1977, which described athletes who were working to better themselves, instead of competing against each other. Beyond the constant push towards self-improvement, the phrase implies constantly moving forward and embracing change, says Leong. ‘Everything you encounter will lead you to something else.’

Leong is living proof of this. For example, almost failing a minor exam when she was 17 would eventually shape her life and career in a way she could not have predicted. 

Back in 1984, Leong was a young student who had just entered pre-university education in Singapore. She had opted for the commerce stream in her school and accounting was one of the compulsory classes. Unfortunately, it was one of her worst subjects. After almost failing the first exam, she decided that she needed more help in the subject and signed up for a basic course in accounting. Thanks to the additional hours she put in, she did well and went on to university, where she decided to pursue a degree in business. 

After graduating from the National University of Singapore, she applied for a job as a materials planner with Motorola Electronics in the city-state. Instead, the company hired her as a cost accountant on the strength of her basic accounting background. 

Unique background

This unique background stood Leong in good stead. Over the next seven years, she rose through Motorola, handling cost accounting, general accounting and eventually ending up in a regional role doing planning and analysis. Along the way, she realised that she needed to have a stronger background in accounting, which was when she decided to study for the ACCA Qualification. ‘At some point, if we choose the accounting profession, mastering the fundamentals and developing our core competency is very important,’ she says. ‘One needs to be very well grounded, with the fundamental knowledge and the principles.’

She eventually gained her Qualification in 1997. With this and her experience in Motorola, she joined alcoholic drinks maker Seagram Asia as its Asia Pacific financial planning manager. Four years later, she moved to a locally listed company, Pan United, as its corporate financial controller. Her time at Pan United was a big learning opportunity, she says. ‘I was dealing with the board, learning about the world of corporate finance and about generating shareholder value,’ she says.

Pan United was a conglomerate and at the time the trend was to break up such organisations into constituent parts in order to unlock value for shareholders. Leong was deeply involved in the process of corporate demerger and new listing of its shipbuilding arms and, in the process, learning to think and act like an entrepreneur. Her accounting knowledge was, she says, invaluable. ‘During the demerger, I was able to apply knowledge I had learned, like tax planning, corporate finance, public listing rules, corporate governance and audits,’ she says.

She left Pan United in 2003 and joined Nike, where she has remained ever since. She has been promoted several times and has been given significant regional roles. For a while, she was the financial controller of Nike Taiwan before becoming controller of Nike China in 2008, just in time for the Beijing Olympics.

It was an exciting time to be in China because the country was just opening up. The market was growing rapidly and among the staff there was a deep hunger for learning and self-improvement. ‘They were very aggressive,’ she recalls. ‘They would tell you they want to learn more.’

The dynamic, rapidly expanding market posed its own challenges as well, of course. There was a tendency for people to job hop for a minor bump in pay. This, Leong says, drove home the importance of being a good leader and coach. Instead of focusing merely on financial rewards, she retained staff and kept them motivated by coaching and mentoring her team, incorporating talent development planning. She returned to Singapore in 2009 and, following several promotions, has been in her current position since 2013.

Partner to business

In her current role, Leong sees herself as being a partner to business, supporting the growth of the company. ‘As a finance professional, you have a choice to say, “I am just focusing on my finance function.” With an understanding of business and strategy, you can start thinking about how you merge business strategy with finance.’

In order to be a truly valued partner, she says, you have to understand the strategy and you need to have a knowledge of macroeconomics. You also have to move out of your silo, to think organisation first, rather than functions. In fact, she would argue that it is not even putting the organisation first; it is putting the consumer first. ‘From my perspective, the consumer is at the top,’ she says. ‘When we have the consumer in mind, when we give consumers what they want, it will translate into growth.’

To that end, she spends a great deal of time talking to people from other department functions, whether it is along the hallway, in the pantry or when they are trapped on a flight together. She is always interested in understanding the perspective of other functions so that she can better support their efforts; she calls this having a ‘business partnership mindset’. ‘We have to evolve from being a bean counter,’ she says. We have to think about the other functions and ask, “what can finance do to enable their success?” rather than “Here are the numbers; go achieve it.”’

In her rise to the top, Leong is aware that she is in a minority because of her gender. While there are quite a few women in finance departments, it is still largely a boys’ club at the levels of upper management. She attributes this to the lack of support for women who want to become mothers and society’s own expectation that women will opt for motherhood over a career.

Leong believes that while there are no easy solutions, more institutional support is needed for women who want to become mothers. At the same time, the onus is on the employee to become an important part of the company so that the company is more likely to want to keep them on. Says Leong: ‘The most important part of whatever we do is that we are creating value, for ourselves and for our company.’ 

Jimmy Yap, journalist