Dr Susan Chen

Currently based in Singapore, Dr Susan Chen leads HR offices in ten countries from Japan to India for Riot Games, a video game developer, publisher, and esports tournament organiser with a worldwide revenue in the ballpark of US$1.8 billion a year. It’s a big job: the Asia-Pacific arm of the company has been growing rapidly, so Susan has been busy leading international HR transformation, including multi-country consolidations, developing the capabilities of her HR business partners, and supporting the build of scalable talent acquisition. It's not her first big job however; previously, she had been a key part of the Global People and Culture leadership team for Gojek Group, an Indonesian ride-hailing and e-commerce platform valued at US$12 billion with around 7000 employees. “I love jobs that involve organisational change and transformation, as it provides spaces for impactful change. This is the red thread across all my roles,” she says. 

Intriguingly, Susan credits her success to her ability to feel comfortable with “not being liked”. This means she’s happy to ask “tough, powerful questions”. “I'm not afraid to challenge senior leaders,” she says. Through such questions, she encourages leadership teams to use curiosity and grit to meet challenges, rather than just applying conventional best practice templates – she dissuades them from thinking there’s only one solution, only one right way of doing things. When teams get it, “seeing that ‘a-ha’ moment in their eyes is pure gold!” says Susan. 

The title of her book encapsulates this approach: The Death of Best Practices: Reimagining HR Through Cultivating a Growth Mindset. And having rewritten the book three times over four years, Susan has created a text that is an example of its own philosophy of grit and determination.

Born in Taiwan and brought up in New Zealand from age ten, Susan started her “20-year love affair with the dynamic world of HR” because she enjoyed learning about people, particularly “the power of the collective”.  At the University of Auckland, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts and a Postgraduate Diploma in Commerce specialising in Human Capital Development and Organisational Studies. She says her time at the University was “a game-changer”: “It provided a sense of belonging and allowed me to experiment academically.” She exercised her leadership skills even then, as the president of the Taiwanese and New Zealand Students’ Association, and she appreciates the “supportive academic deans” who encouraged her to pursue further studies at the London School of Economics where she obtained a masters in HR management and international employment relations.

Susan has used her HR career to enable global adventures – including in the UK, Indonesia and Norway, where she completed her doctorate in knowledge management and organisational transformation while working full-time. She’s enjoying having the ability to make angel investments, in HR and education tech start-ups, and now she’s keen to see where her new collective consultancy, co:grow, takes her, describing it as “an organisational change project with a global collective of passionate HR leaders”. 

Her parents inspire her, and now Susan is a parent herself – to a “cheeky and curious” three-year-old boy – she says she appreciates her parents’ courage in moving from Taiwan to New Zealand even more. “They taught me the possibilities of building from zero,” she says. Since then, “life has been full of surprises”. Instead of having a clearly mapped-out plan, “I achieved some incredible things just by following my curiosity.”