If you’re looking for a shining beacon of how hiring people from diverse backgrounds builds great teams, Shanghai born-and-raised Helene-YiTing Huang is right here to light the way. While she doesn’t come from a technical background, her intelligence, empathy and curiosity combine to make her unstoppable. In September 2023, she was promoted to become the Project Operation Manager for ABB’s mining and hoisting business in China.
“I majored in German language and literature at Fudan University,” says Huang. “While most people at ABB have a technical background, I have colleagues who like me have pursued non-technical studies and we all find we are a good fit here. I think it says something about the diversity and inclusivity at ABB – they see who you really are rather than it all being about your background. ABB offers a fabulous platform for everyone to develop.”
A pathway to new worlds
Showing her flexibility, she remained open to all opportunities after she graduated. “When I did get into the job market I didn’t actually do a job that is related to my major!” she says with a laugh. Her first job was as a sales trainee for a telecommunications company, looking after corporate customers. “ABB was the client of the colleague who sat right beside me and he didn’t spare his compliments about how nice they were. I got to know ABB quite early and from the very beginning ABB left a good impression on me. It was like a seed planted in my heart and a few years later, when I was seeking new career development, I took the initiative to work with ABB.”
Before that, and after her job with the telco, Huang worked as a project planner for a consulting company providing management training to premium car dealers. “That gave me the chance to travel all around China to meet the management teams of the dealers.”
Huang says that job exposed her to many different management styles, an invaluable learning. “I was surprised because usually leaders give you a feeling that they’re capable of a lot of things and they’re tough,” she reflects. “But in that job I met a female general manager who behaved differently – she was very empathetic and she involved people when she talked with them. I realised that you don’t have to be tough to be a manager – you can be like water and influence people more gently.”
A culture of continuous development
Since joining ABB in 2011, Huang has worked across operations, marketing and communications and health safety and environment in the Process Automation business.
From day one, Huang was delighted to see the leadership techniques she’d learnt about in theory at the consulting company in action at ABB. “We’d done training around various skills to make meetings better and when I joined ABB I found that the meetings were organised like that,” she says. “I thought it was amazing to see it in real life in my workplace. I immediately had a good feeling about working at ABB!”
It was an exciting time to join the company. “In 2011, the mining business in China was very prosperous and a lot of greenfield projects were going on,” says Huang. “Everyone in the mining and hoisting team at ABB had high spirits as we developed the business in China. I grew with ABB Mining and Hoisting in China as we developed our local competencies for this industry and became expert teams. Our hoisting factory in Shanghai was opened in 2012 and since then we have delivered more than 130 brake systems to customers and over 30 full sets of hoists. That’s really something we are proud of. We work hard to evolve ourselves in a market full of challenges. We keep developing our portfolio and bring customers with more electrification and automation solutions to boost their business, as well as the mining industry in China, to a more prosperous and sustainable future.”
By 2014, she was a project manager, proving that her intelligence and open approach to leadership made her unstoppable even without a formal technical background. “Working as a project manager, I have the chance to work closely with engineering teams. It’s true that sometimes I feel a little frustrated when participating in technical discussions,” says Huang.
But she is endlessly inquisitive. “Through asking questions I am able to understand what has happened, what is going on, what the key issues are, and what I can do to contribute to the resolution of the problem. My background has never stopped me from going forward. I like my peers being straightforward with me. I am also very proud to have a lot of colleagues supporting me. They said, ‘Helene, you can come to me anytime – I would love to share my knowledge with you’. So I have always felt supported and I believe as long as you are open and ask questions, you always will be.”
ABB’s commitment to staff education is something Huang sees as also contributing to making her and her colleagues unstoppable. “There are so many internal learning programs available within ABB – you can find all the materials in any areas you want to touch on the corporate website,” she says. “If you’re interested in any area or job function in ABB, there are paths for you to develop your skills and every year a job review where you can express what you want next in your career. There’s a whole big system supporting you.”
Together for the long haul
“I have been working shoulder to shoulder with most of my colleagues in Mining and Hoisting for more than 10 years,” says Huang. “It’s possible that you spend more time with the people you work with than with your own family, so from the years we’ve spent together, I guess it’s a firm proof that we enjoy working as a team. I like the way I get supported just as much as I like the challenges and inspirations from my team.”
Huang says she works in a mixed team and has learnt a lot from her male peers – “they are fantastic people” – but she believes she has been “more influenced by female role models”. She calls out one in particular, a woman who joined ABB three months after she did. “Fei Yu is today our supply chain manager and from the first day I met her, I realised she’s very mature with a sharp vision of her role,” says Huang. “She’s been a role model for me and I’ve learned a lot from her, including how to set a target, aim high and steadily work towards it.”
That description also applies to ABB’s approach to developing mining technology for its customers and another reason Huang is so proud to be in a pivotal role for the business in China. “We have competitors, but we are the best,” she says simply. “ABB has been deeply involved in the mining industry for over 130 years and our functionality and expertise are widely recognised by our customers. We recently had a project review of one of our brake systems. The customer has just changed their system to ABB and told us, ‘We had an emergency stop the other day and there were people in the service shaft in the hoist and it was so smooth that they didn’t feel anything’. So, yes, we are different.”
Helene-YiTing Huang’s own approach to doing the best possible work led her managers to promote her to her role as Project Operation Manager. “My managers gave me a lot of encouragement and left a lot of space for me to explore,” she says. “I’m glad I seized the opportunity and I’ll give it a shot to see what I can be.”
While Huang is not actively using the skills she acquired studying for her German literature and language major, there is a connecting thread. “Language is a tool, so if I don’t need that right now I will develop myself in other areas,” she says. Her university professor told her that languages open doors; whatever language she is speaking it’s clear that Huang has both the heart and the head to make her unstoppable.
