18. Three Lessons I learnt at Lazada

In this solo episode,  I share the 3 lessons I learnt during my time at Lazada Nov 2019 - Jan 2022. I had front row seat watching the world rushing to pivot to e-commerce when Covid19 brought the world to its knees in early 2020.

Lazada is one of the biggest e-commerce operators in Southeast Asia. They were founded in 2012 and they currently operate in six countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Opinions expressed in this podcast are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of Lazada, past, current or future organizations that I am part of.

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Transcript

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hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of On My Own Terms podcast. Today I'll be sharing with you three lessons that I learned during my time working at lada. So for those of you who are not familiar with Ladada, ladada is one of the largest e-commerce operators in Service Asia. They currently operate in six countries, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. They were founded in 2012 and they've come a long way since then. So some contacts and background. My tenure in la. spans from November, 2019 to January, 2022, a little over two years. It is my opinion that e-commerce is a fast moving industry further as accelerated by factors like Covid 19 and the competitors' movements and the time that I was at the company. I had two separate roles within my tenure. Number one was, uh, merchant acquisition for Lamore, which is a channel within lada. And my second role was, uh, business development for Lazada omnichannel Solutions. Now, details of, uh, what I did within this tenure are for the two roles are all on my LinkedIn profile. Internally I work with local and regional teams and across functions like customer care, product and tech teams. And, uh, maybe one last, uh, context that's important is that more than 60% of my total tenure was working from home. Finally, uh, contacts, past experiences, organization, culture, and individual preferences matter. So Y M M V, which stands for your knowledge, may vary. So Lesson number one, document and share your work. This is something that I picked up from a line manager in the Shotton that he spent with the team. I was blown away when you shared entire BRDs, which stands for Business Requirements document on Internal Drive. What was even mind blowing was the level of details and rationale behind product and business proposals shared in the documents. I learned a lot just by reading them and beyond this, it also brings everyone up to speed and it forms the basis for discussion and meeting. and it's my view that only by documenting and sharing openly, you capture collective wisdom and allow everyone, which includes existing and future team members to collaborate and be on it so people don't have to start from scratch all over again. In fact, I argue that it is only right for employees to document and share their work as this is the company's intellectual property. Beyond big, heavy project documents like BRDs. I also advocate individuals and teams documenting and sharing. The below items. So for example, um, individual's role and responsibilities. This is, uh, especially recommended for new joiners. Uh, who should the new joiners share this with? With the team leader within the team? Why? So that everyone in the team is very clear about what you are doing. What are your focus where responsibilities. Another item is your key weekly activities, challenges, and focus for following week. I recommend everyone to do this, and you should share this with your team lead and within the team members. And third item, uh, achievements and milestones. Um, I believe everyone should. Of the things I've shared so far, and also to share this with your team lead, I think this is important, um, especially for probation assessment, performance assessment, quarterly and periodic check-ins. With your team lead. Now I understand while it can be hassled to be documenting this regularly, but I believe the pros far outweigh the cons. For the below reasons, number one is transparency. Um, when you document and you share this internally, everyone knows what everyone else is working on. This helps team member build collective knowledge and gather contexts. Second reason, efficiency. When you do this, it's gonna be easy to share knowledge with external teams and onboard new team members. And reason number three for continuity. When you do this, when you share all these documents internally, knowledge is retained even when team members leave or on or on leave. So therefore, this gives you less likelihood for you to be disturbed by your colleagues when you're on leave. Hi, hope you're enjoying the episode so far. I'm interrupting my own episode to tell you that this podcast has launched a newsletter. If you'd like to receive bonus content from this podcast and topics on career change and growth, consider subscribing to our email newsletter. Link is in the episode description now, back to the episode. Now, lesson number two. I've learned that leaders come in different forms, or in other words, I have broadened my definition of a leader. Now, let me explain. Not every leader needs to be an inspirational visionary. One to deliver or get the most out of a performing team. I've always held that leaders need to be of a certain type. For example, dynamic, charismatic, visionary, inspirational in order to be qualified. With air quotes and effective, I'm glad I come across leaders at Lazada who showed me otherwise. For example, I will be the first to admit that I've always doubted the administrator type, right? Uh, meaning these are the leaders that are acquired. Uh, ordinary once again with quotes. Um, behind the scenes, again with quotes, almost kind of like a postman whose main contribution is simply to pass messages from person A to person B and vice versa. But now in a fast moving industry and company like Lazada, in the e-commerce industry, the administrator kind of leader provides stability, tenure connections. and relationships to help his team get things done, and this is very valuable. I've also observed one trait of leaders of well performing teams. That is the leader's ability to hire well. Um, and I define that as having a judgment for people with delicate balance of skills, attitude, and potential. and also being a great compliment to the existing team. I noticed while performing teams tend to be the ones with great team vibes and culture, I believe this text experience skills and maybe a bit of luck to hire well and be, uh, dynamic team culture. Which leads me to lesson number. I have learned to lead a Lazada. I'm thankful for the opportunity to hire and lead a small team of three business development executives during my time there. It was a little daunting for me when I first joined and onboarded Lazada and e-commerce in general, so I wanted to pay it forward by Firstt a group. Start to the careers at ladada and e-commerce or tech in general. As you can imagine, I implemented lesson number one, which is document and share your work within the team. Beyond that below, list some key principles I communicated and practiced within the team. number one, transparency. Again, go back to lesson number one, document and share work. And second key principle I shared within the team is that I identify and communicate the destination that is KPIs or key performance indicators. And I let the team members figure out how they could get to the destination and I tell them, I'm happy to provide guidance and share my relevant experience, but I will not detect the exact path to the destination for the following reasons. Number one, figur out paths encourages ownership of one's own work, and allows growth and challenging status quo. these two things are much needed in fast moving sectors. And second reason is that my path may be outdated. It may not be the best, relevant or applicable for everyone. So even if I share what I've done, it may not be the best in this current time to solve this particular problem. And it may not be best executed by the team members that I have in my team. Uh, um, the key principle that I communicated with my team members, if in. make mistakes on the side of Overcommunication, and this is especially true and valuable in those who work from home days and doing work from home days. It's always about zoom or uh, web communication or web calls. We there, there is no water cooler chats, there's no lunch breaks that we can talk and, and explain context. So therefore, if in doubt, always over communi. Now, key principle number four that I always communicated within my team members is that take care of ourselves. Health and family always come first. Only when you take care of your health and family, then you can be in the right condition to take care of the business. So some of the things that I did advocate and emphasize during my time as a lead in Lazada is that, um, number one, I had two sessions of one-on-one, uh, 30 minutes each with each team member weekly. This was especially crucial when they first onboarded with the team. I also got a team to attend regional meetings with the C-Suites participating in. Third thing that I did advocate and emphasize was the importance of building relationships with other teams and managing the internal stakeholders in order to do their work well. Fourth thing, I encourage the team members to speak up at external meetings with other stakeholders and also to show their work. It's one thing to do your work, but it's also another thing and another skill to show your work. And when you show your work, don't get me wrong, it's not to show off, is not to flex, but it's more. Letting people know, even internal stakeholders what you are doing so that they can ask the right questions. You can set the right context so that they can can do their job well, so that they know who to go to. When they face a similar problem down the road. Now, having said all that on my tenure, which is about around four months as a people lead, wasn't constant long. I cherished the journey and the time span with the team. Summing up. I couldn't be more thankful for my time. The opportunities I had and the relationships I fought at Ladada, the timing of my tenure at Ladada couldn't have been more opportune and important. There are obviously more takeaways and lessons in a tree that I mentioned here. I sincerely wish Lazada the best, and I look for the great initiatives and proof of Lazada.

John Lim: 11:03

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