Understanding leadership: a series of interviews from ICC Netherlands

Every successful career has a story worth sharing. To mark the launch of this year’s WISE (Women in Strategic Engagement) programme, this new series of articles spotlights inspiring senior professionals and business leaders. Through candid conversations, we aim to share practical insights on leadership: the decisions that shaped their careers, the lessons learned through setbacks and change, and the advice they would give to younger generations navigating today’s complex business environment. We also explore the challenges and opportunities these leaders see ahead – and how they believe companies and individuals can respond with resilience, purpose and impact.

To kick off the series, we spoke to Fabia Tetteroo-Bueno, a business leader whose career has taken her across Europe, Asia and Latin America. Today, after 28 years at Philips, Brazil-born Fabia has risen from trainee to Senior Vice President. Now based in the Netherlands, she is entering a new phase of her career: one that is defined by creating impact beyond her corporate role.

Fabia’s career began with a setback. In 2000 – two years into a traineeship with Philips in Brazil – she applied for another position: a three-month programme in Germany, but she didn’t get selected. When she asked the hiring manager why, she was given an answer that reflected the reality many women faced at the time in Brazil. “The message was: ‘I don’t like to put women in this kind of role, because if you get pregnant, we lose money’,” she recalls.

She was disappointed, but a week before the assignment started, the man who had been selected withdrew; his girlfriend was pregnant and he didn’t want to leave her behind in Brazil. Fabia immediately stepped forward. “Someone got pregnant and it was not me. You need someone that speaks Portuguese and English; you need someone next week. And that’s me,” she told the manager. The assignment was meant to last three months. Instead, it became the start of a global career lasting half of her life so far. 

Fabia’s career can be defined by international leadership roles and constant change. After Germany, her job took her to the Netherlands, China, the Philippines, Panama and, two years ago, back to the Netherlands. Along the way, she shifted across industries and functions, moving from consumer business, lighting, into healthcare and rising steadily into senior leadership.

Giving more women a board-level voice

Fabia is now preparing for a transition away from her current executive role with a focus on leadership transformation, particularly connected to gender equality in healthcare and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

A major driver of this is what she sees as a lack of women’s voices at the highest levels of corporate management. “I believe that women bring a different style and strength to a company’s board. The healthy company boards are the ones that have real diversity of thought. At senior levels in general, we need to have different voices, different backgrounds and different opinions. That’s how you make governance and strategy stronger.”

Turning her attention to the first topic where she believes the lack of women’s voices has serious consequences – healthcare – Fabia points out how often women are dismissed. “A woman at a doctor’s office hears the words ‘what you’re feeling is normal’ so often. ‘Normal’ is not necessarily ‘good’.” She believes this happens because women’s health has historically been under-researched. “There is not enough research being done on women’s medical care,” she says. “Actually the only research on women that’s well developed is around pregnancy.”

AI is her second major concern. “In AI, you also see bias,” she says, “because most models are based on past standards and past standards are mainly white male dominated, in most industries”

To Fabia, the risk is clear: without change, inequality will deepen. “Otherwise, for the next generation, things are not going to change,” she warns. “We’re going to keep having gaps in medical research; the bias in AI is going to increase exponentially.”

Fabia connects this mission to her own leadership journey. Early in her career, she was labelled ‘pitbull’ at work because of her directness. She didn’t like the label, and asked a coach why people saw her that way. 

His answer stayed with her: “You don’t have enough female role models. You are mimicking a man in your style of working.”

The lesson was clear: she didn’t need to copy a leadership model that didn’t fit her. “How can you be an authentic leader if you’re copying someone else? I had to learn to be myself but also, I made a commitment to myself. I thought back then ‘if we miss female role models now, I want to make sure I can become a female role model for next generations, so they don’t struggle with the same issues I struggled with’.”

Connecting continents

Linking these goals is a parallel mission: strengthening collaboration between regions. Having spent one-third of her career in Europe, one-third in Asia, and one-third in Latin America, Fabia believes she can help close the gap. “There is a lot of knowledge in Latin America and Europe that is not being exchanged; so many companies there would love to expand to Europe and vice versa. Especially in today’s current geopolitical climate, Fabia believes she can serve as a “bridge for businesses expanding across continents, particularly in healthcare and AI”.

A practical approach

In working on leadership transformation, Fabia’s approach is practical, drawing on the many lessons learned during a long international career. “One of the biggest things I have learned is that life consists of phases,” she says. At the beginning of a career, she believes curiosity is everything. “You are building your network and knowledge toolbox so you need to be curious for everything that comes your way,” she says. “You also need to be open to feedback. Feedback is a gift: it’s a way for you to get better.” Later, the focus shifts to sharpening skills and building deeper capability. Even then, learning remains constant. “Now even more, you need to keep learning, keep evolving,” she notes.

For Fabia, successful people share three traits: “Commitment, curiosity and capability: these are really the things that you need to strive towards.”

Redefining resilience

How to deal with setbacks and discrimination is another area where Fabia provides some valuable advice. “I’ve heard so many stupid comments, so many microaggressions during my career,” she says. “In the beginning, when I was younger, I would get so upset. But I have learned not to take things personally. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge; if the person lacks knowledge, the best thing you can do is to give them knowledge by proving them wrong.”

This line of conversation causes Fabia to dive deeper into the concept of resilience. “I  believe there are three levels of reaction when something bad happens to you. The first is a fragile reaction: you break down. Then there is resilience: holding yourself together. And then there is antifragile: the ability to become stronger when something bad happens.”

She uses two examples to illustrate her point. The first is from her time in the Philippines, when a major typhoon devastated the country. “You’re walking on the street, you see debris, you smell bodies. It was horrible,” she says. Her response was to focus on building strength within her team, “building such a bond despite the adversity”.

The second example comes from when she was leading a 6,000-strong team in Latin America during the COVID pandemic, the financial consequences of which were dire: 25% of personnel were at risk of losing their jobs. One way to prevent this was for the entire team to give up part of their holiday pay. “I didn’t take the decision unilaterally. We voted as a team – some of us would suffer a lot or all of us would suffer a little. Everybody voted for sharing the pain – and we became so much stronger as a team because of that.”

Optimism for the future?

Considering the current imbalance in gender representation on corporate boards of directors, is Fabia optimistic about her ambition to level the playing field of corporate decision-makers?

“I was super optimistic until COVID,” she says. “That was a very negative moment; I saw so many good women leaving the workforce. Then you realise that women have so much pressure from the ‘invisible’ tasks related to motherhood and care.” To that end, her answer to women asking her about career advice is direct: “Be picky about your partner: you need someone who shares the load and really supports your career choices. Someone who doesn’t hold you back.”

Despite setbacks, she remains hopeful. “Gen-Z, for example, is more equalitarian and more willing to fight for equal obligations and equal rights.” She also sees potential in technology. “I’m very optimistic about what artificial intelligence can do, if we do it right,” she says. “In theory, everybody could create their own AI tool. This empowers so many people to innovate – to solve a problem in their community – that’s the beauty of this technology.”

But Fabia is clear that progress is not automatic. “It’s not a battle that’s won yet,” she says. “It is still a journey.” For her, that journey now defines the next chapter of her career – one where success is measured not only by personal achievement, but by the impact she helps create for others.