Introduction
A boy sitting next to Jane Hyun in her new American classroom put his hand up and told the teacher he disagreed with her. Jane, eight years old and only months into life outside Korea, froze. In the classroom she had just left, that was a punishable offence. She braced for the boy to get hit.
Instead, the teacher thanked him for having a different thought and told the whole class she wanted everyone to think for themselves. Nothing was said to Jane directly, but something in her recalibrated. She had just watched proof that the rules she had built her whole identity around did not apply here, and if she wanted to survive in this new place, she would have to work out which parts of herself to carry forward and which parts to rebuild.
That moment sits at the start of a career spent helping leaders and organisations do exactly that. Jane Hyun has written three books, most recently updating her defining work on what she calls the bamboo ceiling, and has advised roughly a quarter of the Fortune 500. In this conversation with Sope Agbelusi, she talks about the cost of staying quiet, the myth that keeps people from getting help, and what it actually takes to lead as yourself in a room built for someone else.
The classroom moment that changed everything
Jane Hyun grew up in Queens, having spent her first eight years in Korea before her family moved to New York. The classroom she left behind held up to 65 children under one teacher, and it was silent. Questions were rare. Disagreement was punished.
Her new American classroom ran on the opposite logic. When a boy challenged the teacher without raising his hand, Jane expected him to be disciplined. Watching him get praised instead was, in her words, jaw dropping. It was the first data point in what became a lifelong project: figuring out what to keep from the culture she was raised in, and what she needed to relearn to function in the one she had landed in.
Unlearning, relearning, and the difference between assimilation and acculturation
Sope asked Jane how much she had to unlearn to move through school, college and into corporate life. Her answer complicates the word itself. She does not describe it purely as unlearning. It was unlearning and relearning at the same time, because the values she grew up with, respect for elders, humility, deference, were not wrong. They were simply not the only operating system available to her.
She draws a distinction that runs through the whole conversation: assimilation means adopting a new culture by giving up your own. Acculturation means adapting to new cultural patterns and practices without giving up the essence of your cultural values. The goal was never to become someone else. It was to integrate both without losing either.
The model minority myth is costing people support
Jane is direct about why the model minority myth matters beyond being an inaccurate stereotype. It is the idea that Asians do not experience bias or discrimination and are uniformly successful. She calls it dangerous for two reasons: it pits minority groups against one another, and it hides real need. She points to research from a New York nonprofit organisation showing high levels of poverty among Asian-Americans in the city at certain age groups, a finding that rarely makes the news because it does not fit the narrative. The consequence, she says, is that communities get excluded from government aid because the assumption is they do not need it.
Learning to advocate for her work without losing her values
Early in her financial services career, Jane noticed colleagues actively showcasing their accomplishments while she stayed quiet, because she had been raised to see humility as a virtue. She realised that if she wanted to be recognised and considered for opportunities beyond her current project, other leaders needed to know who she was and what she could do. Promotion in that environment was organic and entrepreneurial. Nobody was coming to find her.
The shift was not becoming louder for the sake of it. It was learning to advocate for her own work in a way she could live with, still giving credit to her team, still uncomfortable with self-promotion for its own sake, but visible enough to be considered. That was the first time she realised she could build a new skill without abandoning who she was.
What the bamboo ceiling actually is
Jane defines the bamboo ceiling as a combination of individual, organisational and cultural factors that affect career progress for Asian professionals. From interviewing 100 executives for her first book, she identified three career phases. The first is the reliable producer stage, roughly the first six to eight years, where the focus is doing good work and delivering. The second is building credibility, which is about relationships and trust, not just output. The third is becoming an influencer at the table, caring about and shaping the whole organisation, not just your corner of it.
Her observation is that many Asian professionals, shaped by a cultural emphasis on doing a good job quietly, stay too long in the first phase. Her guidance is to start demonstrating the behaviours of phase two and three early, rather than waiting to be tapped on the shoulder.
Chess, not checkers: designing your own leadership model
Jane described a strategy she uses with clients for thinking about career moves several steps ahead rather than one at a time, likening checkers-style thinking to a single move and chess to a longer game of positioning, relationships and timing \[CHECK: transcript renders this as "chestnut checkers," almost certainly a mishearing of a "chess, not checkers" framework; confirm the exact name and spelling before publishing\].
That longer-game thinking feeds directly into what she calls designing your own leadership model. She never fit neatly into one leadership archetype and stopped trying to. Her advice to anyone who does not see themselves reflected in their organisation's idea of an effective leader: examine who you actually are, build a leadership style that is genuinely yours, and let results prove it works.
Courage, her father, and speaking up when it costs you something
Asked whether she considers herself brave, Jane hesitated. On a daily basis, she is not sure. But she named two moments without hesitation. The first was recent: her father passed away in January, and she spent three weeks in hospital with him, advocating for him with doctors and speaking up for him when no one else would. She says she found courage there because it was for someone she loved.
The second was decades earlier, at 26 or 27, when she was asked to deliver disciplinary feedback to a senior leader in her mid-40s known for a volatile temper, after complaints and departures from her team. Jane wanted to quit rather than have the conversation. Her manager told her she would keep her job no matter what happened in that room, and arranged a security guard outside as a precaution. Jane had the conversation. The leader did not retaliate, stayed at the company for six more years, and the relationship remained one of ongoing feedback. Jane calls it a transformative learning moment for her career, and the throughline she draws is that courage tends to show up when she is doing something for someone else, or for a cause she cannot stay quiet about.
Burnout, boundaries, and the legacy she wants to leave
Jane's signal for approaching burnout is simple: she stops caring about things she normally cares about. When that happens, she knows she needs a break, not eventually, immediately. Her tools are unglamorous and consistent: walking, sometimes with no destination and telling no one where she is going, exercise, and during the pandemic, nightly hour-long dog walks with a neighbour when there was little else to do.
Asked about legacy, she names two things. For her children, she wants them to feel the same freedom her parents gave her, freedom to become whoever they want without artificial barriers. For the people she has worked with professionally, she hopes some of them are a little better than yesterday at working with people who are different from them, whatever that difference is. Underneath both is the same idea she closes the conversation with: people preparing to look honestly at themselves do not need to be told what to fix first. They need to know they are enough as they start.
