Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, EVP of Global Success and Strategy @ Salesforce
Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh is the Executive Vice President of Global Success and Strategy at Salesforce focused on creating sustainable customer success. Neeracha also serves as Executive Advisor for the Salesforce Women’s Network and is the executive sponsor for Asiapacforce, the employee group for members of Asia-Pacific origin and their allies. Before joining Salesforce in 2009, Neeracha held various leadership roles at Oracle. She currently also serves as a board member for both the Girl Scouts of Northern California and for Safe & Sound, a San Francisco nonprofit focused on the eradication of child abuse.
In this episode we spoke with Neeracha about the following:
How growing up as the oldest daughter of Thai immigrants and how she showed up in the workplace early in her career
Why one of the best pieces of advice she received was to state her own needs and ask for what you want
How she code switches when she’s doing business in the US versus in Asia
You can listen to her below, on Spotify or wherever else you get to your podcasts.
On the misaligned perceptions of you if you do not speak up
“I took a class in business school where we learned about our impact on others, their perception of us, etc. It was brutally honest, but in a safe way with a very small cohort. I got feedback that I did not speak. I did not speak up very much. Others told me that they had no idea what I was thinking, and some even thought I was judging their opinions. It was so weird for me because the cognitive dissonance was really high because people’s perception of me was now what was in my head.
If you do not say what you need, no one knows what you need. Nobody is going to spend time trying to read your mind versus everything that is already going on in their own mind. That was a revelation to me; I was just so amazed that other’s perceptions of me and my own perception of myself were so misaligned. It takes some getting used to, but you will be better off asking for what you need.”
Code-switching between Thailand and the US
"I was able to work in Bangkok for six months at a time during these extended internships. So one year, this was years ago, I was staying in a nice service apartment in Bangkok, and I went down to the gym. The guy at the counter checked me in, gave me a towel, looked at me, and said: “you live in America, right.”
I reacted by saying, oh, is my Thai not that good? How can you tell? He said, no it is not your Thai; it is the way you talk. He told me, in Thai, that I have a very hard jaw. I have thought about that translation, and I think he was trying to say that I speak very firm. He was basically saying that the way I speak was not that attractive.
That was a long time ago, but my god, was that a big tipping point for me. That gave me a sense that I did not really fit into my own Thai culture. In Thailand, you speak in a softer tone; your intonation calms down; it is just calmer and quieter. You do not get worked up.
That is not really what you hear in the US. They told me if I did not speak up, then I would not get what I wanted. It was a weird contract for me. Now that I have been privileged to work in the US and do a lot of business in Asia, I can tell I am slightly different from my Asian colleagues that I am in SF.”
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Until next time,
Jay and Angie