How Boards Can Set the Tone for Inclusive Leadership: An Interview with Veronika Utami, Managing Director of Dutch Lady Malaysia

Women hold 75 percent of board seats at one of Malaysia’s oldest listed companies, and the explanation has less to do with targets than with how the organization builds its leadership pipeline from the inside. 

Veronika Utami became Managing Director of Dutch Lady Malaysia in April 2025, bringing more than two decades of consumer goods leadership across Indonesia and the Asia Pacific region. She spent 20 years at Unilever in marketing leadership roles before being appointed to the Board of Directors of Unilever Indonesia in 2019. She then served as Marketing Director for Consumer Dairy and Specialized Nutrition at Frisian Flag Indonesia under Royal FrieslandCampina, where she led the transformation of the company’s brand portfolio. She now runs one of Malaysia’s longest listed dairy companies. 

In a conversation with Stanton Chase’s Selvarani Param, Utami reflected on how her career shaped the way she thinks about leadership and what organizations need to get right if they want inclusive representation to go beyond policy documents. 

That philosophy is visible in how Dutch Lady Malaysia is run today. 

What Inclusion Looks Like When It Is Built Into the Pipeline

Utami describes an organization where representation is the product of deliberate structural choices rather than a response to external pressure. 

Gender diversity is embedded in how we build our leadership pipeline. Today women represent three-quarters of our Board and around 43% of our management roles. We also have structured succession planning, mentorship and sponsorship programs, and women’s circles that encourage open conversations about leadership and career development. Flexible and hybrid working arrangements also help employees balance professional and personal responsibilities.

The board composition is verifiable. Of eight directors listed on Dutch Lady’s corporate leadership page, six are women, including the chairperson, the managing director, and four non-executive directors. The 43 percent management figure sits well above national benchmarks: the Grant Thornton Women in Business Report found that women in senior management across Malaysia fell to a projected 36.2 percent in 2025, and the number of businesses with no women in senior management at all nearly tripled over the same period. 

What separates Dutch Lady from companies that report similar ambitions but different outcomes is that succession planning, mentorship, sponsorship, and flexible work operate as connected parts of one system. Each element reinforces the others: sponsorship identifies talent, succession planning creates pathways for that talent, mentorship supports people through transitions, and flexible arrangements remove the structural barriers that force talented professionals out before they reach the rooms where enterprise decisions are made. 

Where and Why Companies Lose Women

The mid-career stage is where most organizations see their pipeline of women leaders narrow. Professionals at that point are moving from functional expertise into broader leadership roles, and the demands of that transition often collide with responsibilities outside the workplace. Utami is direct about the cause: 

Many women manage dual roles as professionals and caregivers. Without support systems both at home and in the workplace, this stage can become challenging. 

A UN Women analysis of corporate leadership pipelines confirms the pattern. Women’s representation in middle and senior management sits at just 26 percent, even in markets where entry-level roles are close to parity. The pipeline is not short of qualified women. It is structured in a way that loses them at the point where they are most ready to step into leadership. 

Utami argues that this is where early intervention matters most. 

These spaces allow women to share experiences openly without feeling judged. In the early leadership stages, many women are balancing career growth and family responsibilities at the same time. Having a trusted support network during that period can be very valuable. 

And representation itself creates a reinforcing effect. 

Visible role models also matter. When young women see other women in leadership positions, it helps them believe these opportunities are possible for them. 

Why Empathy and Authenticity Produce Better Boards

The conversation around who belongs in the boardroom is often shaped by assumptions about what executive leadership should look like. One of the more persistent assumptions is that empathy is a weakness at senior level, a quality that signals indecision in environments that reward decisiveness. Utami disagrees: 

This matters for boards evaluating their own composition and the leaders they promote into executive roles. If the default profile for a senior leader is someone who leads through authority and control, organizations will keep selecting for a narrow range of styles and missing what comes from breadth of perspective and approach. Utami’s own experience points to authenticity as a more reliable foundation: 

When you are comfortable being yourself, you lead with more confidence and positive energy, and that energy spreads to the team and organization. 

A study published in Sustainable Futures, analyzing 122 listed companies in Malaysia between 2016 and 2023, found that greater representation of women on corporate boards had a measurable positive effect on firm performance. The relationship was further strengthened when companies also performed well on environmental, social, and governance measures. 

From Mid-Management to the C-Suite

For women approaching the executive level, Utami emphasizes that the required capabilities shift from functional depth to enterprise breadth: 

But individual readiness alone does not determine who reaches the top. Organizational choices matter just as much, and Utami calls on men in leadership roles to move beyond passive allyship: 

Men in leadership roles can play an important role by sponsoring high-potential women and ensuring different perspectives are heard in leadership discussions. 

Compensation is another area where boards need to set the tone. 

Organizations still need to be intentional. Regular pay equity reviews and transparent evaluation frameworks help ensure compensation decisions remain fair and objective. 

The Bigger Ask

Utami’s advice to aspiring leaders carries a message for the organizations trying to develop them too: 

The question for boards is not whether they have the right targets on paper. It is whether they have built the systems that turn those commitments into outcomes. 

About the Interviewer

Selvarani Param is a Partner at Stanton Chase Kuala Lumpur. She has worked in technology recruitment since 2015 and brings experience across a wide range of industry sectors, including technology, banking, insurance, manufacturing, and professional services. Param has a particular track record in filling niche technical, IT, and digital leadership roles, and is valued by clients for her ability to match organizations with exceptional talent. Her entrepreneurial background and HR expertise give her a distinctive perspective on leadership hiring across Southeast Asia.