Leadership, by design

I’m not a pure HR breed.

My first five professional years after university were in sales and marketing, where I learned how organizations actually move—through customers, numbers, pressure, and execution. During that time, I became involved in a performance improvement project focused on shifting how people viewed their work. It was an experiment. The same employees remained in the same roles, but small changes in mindset and communication led to measurable performance gains.

Watching that transformation from the front seat changed my career.

Instead of replacing underperforming employees, we helped them reframe how they approached work—and they became high performers. I saw the power of the HR function not as administration, but as a lever that shapes human potential. That realization pulled me into HR.

I began in learning and development, focusing on manager capability. I loved the work—until a participant asked me a question I couldn’t ignore:

“Hey Shun — are you a leader?”

I had frameworks and language, but not enough lived leadership experience to answer confidently. That gap mattered. I stepped away from L&D to experience the full lifecycle of HR firsthand.

Over the following years, I worked across complex people realities—supporting more than 600 headcount reductions, negotiating with labor unions, redesigning HR policies, and refining retirement and pension systems. I partnered side-by-side with frontline leaders solving real workplace tensions. My work spanned seven industries—from trading and manufacturing to consulting, law, education, and technology—inside organizations ranging from 60 employees to 1.5 million.

That period grounded my understanding of leadership in reality. Leadership is not abstract. It is emotional, operational, and deeply human.

I eventually returned to learning and development with a different lens. I wasn’t teaching theory anymore. I was translating lived experience into capability.

That journey led me to Amazon.

For four years and ten months, I served as APAC lead for Amazon’s Leadership Institute, originally responsible for developing leaders across six countries: Australia, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Singapore. Over time, my virtual programs attracted leaders far beyond my original scope. Participants joined from across EMEA—including Spain, Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Romania, and Egypt—as well as from the United States, Costa Rica, and India.

By my final year, the classroom had become global.

Leaders from 19 countries learned together in the same sessions, exchanging perspectives and building networks across regions. The diversity of participants turned each program into a cross-cultural leadership laboratory—where operational challenges, cultural nuance, and leadership behavior were examined in real time.

Across 251 sessions—virtual and in person—I supported 5,257 participants and contributed to the development of more than 8,000 leaders worldwide.

At Amazon, leadership was never treated as inspiration. It was engineered as a system. My work focused on translating principles into everyday behavior: decision-making, communication, ownership, and execution at scale. That discipline now shapes every engagement I design.

Leadership Design Lab Asia exists because I’ve seen what happens when leadership is intentionally designed—and what happens when it isn’t.

Leaders are not born.

They are built through environment, reflection, and practice.

That is the work I do now.