What Code-Switching Taught Me About Alignment and Authority

The values many of us carry into the workplace were shaped long before our careers began — often at home, long before we understood the environments we would one day lead in.

Every year for AAPI Heritage Month, I write about celebrating our heritage.
This year, I want to explore something more complex: the cultural tension many Asian professionals navigate between the values we were raised with and the expectations of leadership in the United States.

Many Asian cultures emphasize harmony, respect for elders, obedience, humility, and restraint. These values are deeply honorable and often essential within their original cultural context.

But in corporate America, those same traits can create friction.

The American workplace often rewards a different set of behaviors: individuality, assertiveness, visibility, self-advocacy, and the ability to speak with conviction. In environments where leadership is associated with confidence and decisiveness, those raised to be deferential and measured can be misread as passive, uncertain, or lacking executive presence.

I grew up in Hong Kong, a British colony shaped by both Chinese and Western influence, so I was raised with Chinese values alongside Western ideas. When I moved to the United States in 1991, the transition was not seamless, but I had already been exposed to both systems.

That dual exposure gave me a degree of cultural flexibility that many others may not have had.

Still, I can imagine how much more difficult that adjustment is for those raised in a fully traditional Asian environment. The cultural expectations can feel fundamentally at odds with the behaviors rewarded here.

Over time, many professionals adapt by learning to code-switch — to soften some parts of themselves while amplifying others to fit the room.

But that adaptation can create a quiet form of misalignment: a gap between internal identity and external presentation.

As a woman and minority business owner moving across many professional circles, I often observe Asian professionals speaking last, holding back, or waiting to be invited in. While the intention may be respect, the perception is often different. In many professional environments, hesitation is interpreted as a lack of confidence. Restraint is mistaken for a lack of conviction.

This is the tension many of us face: how do you honor your cultural values while operating effectively in systems built around different ones?

For me, the answer is not abandoning who we are. It is learning how to express who we are with greater clarity, confidence, and alignment.

Leadership does not require becoming louder or more performative. It requires reducing the gap between who you are internally and how you show up externally.

Authority is not built through visibility alone. It is built when your external presence fully reflects internal conviction.

And perhaps that is how we change perception — not by rejecting our culture, but by learning to lead from it more visibly.