Pursuing leadership through a Bloomberg News assignment across the world

Aki Ito shares her experience in Bloomberg News’ job swap program bringing her unique perspectives and experience to the table as a young, female, gay journalist.

In the fall of 2015, a couple of senior editors on my team had a proposition for me: Why don’t you go to Tokyo and run the Bloomberg News bureau there for three months?

It was part of a career development program that Bloomberg had just started, where reporters would “swap” jobs with someone in another newsroom for a temporary assignment. The offer seemed so ludicrous that I laughed and quickly declined it. I was 28 at the time, working in Bloomberg’s San Francisco bureau, and there was no way I was qualified to lead a newsroom of more than 100 journalists.

But all of my friends told me it would be crazy to turn down such an incredible opportunity. When my then-girlfriend of only two months (now wife!) offered to quit her job to come to Tokyo with me, I ran out of excuses and sheepishly went back to ask if the offer was still available. From there I lined up a plan to divide up my day-to-day responsibilities among a few reporters and editors on my team, packed my belongings and hoped for the best.

A familiar place
Tokyo was actually where I started my career. I joined Bloomberg’s office there in 2009 as an intern, two months after I graduated from college. At the time I knew very little about business and economics (I was a psychology major) and even less about what it meant to be a journalist (I never even worked for the school paper). It was weird thinking about what it would be like to go back to Tokyo, this time as a manager to the people who had taught me almost everything I knew as a business journalist. I suspected most people would remember me as the naive 22-year-old I was back then. I wondered if anyone would take me seriously.

My job as interim Tokyo bureau chief was a mix of everything: helping to fill holes in coverage on our various teams, mentoring reporters, untangling personnel problems, providing commentary for TV, commissioning and editing stories. It turned out that the job was less daunting than I thought it would be, given that my manager, who oversaw all of our news coverage for Japan and Korea, sat right next to me. I got to watch him in action — jumping into the thick of things when news broke, calming people down when tensions flared, generously giving out compliments for good stories and asking for explanations when things went wrong. That was probably the best part of my assignment there.

Finding a voice of authority
The newsroom in Tokyo was so gracious to me. When I asked for things, hesitantly and apologetically at first, they never gave me a hard time. And as I started to get the hang of things, I found that there were a few things I could uniquely bring to the table as a young, female, gay journalist in a profession in Japan that’s ruled by seniority and dominated by straight men. I guided reporters through a couple of really interesting stories. Even the older journalists sometimes came to me for advice. And I was proud to speak at a company event about being a Japanese lesbian, in a country where the gay community is forced to be so closeted that even I had kept my identity a secret to many of my colleagues for years.

Opportunity follows opportunity
Toward the end of my time in Tokyo, I was approached with another opportunity that was opening up back at home, in our San Francisco newsroom — to help lead the launch of a revamped online technology hub for Bloomberg. Once again it was a job for which I felt completely unqualified and unprepared. I almost declined it. But I remembered the three months I had just spent in Tokyo, how I eventually figured things out and how it made me think that I might be good at leading something.

So I applied, and I’ve been in that role for almost two years now. For the first few months I was constantly overwhelmed and regularly mad at my manager for thinking that I was capable of handling so much responsibility. But now, I’m so proud of the work I’ve done to amplify the efforts of the incredible journalists we have on our team. I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that I’m a better journalist today than I was two years ago.

I’ve worked at Bloomberg for more than eight years now, and sometimes I’m a little embarrassed to tell people that this company is all I’ve known. But it’s because of the opportunities I’ve been given at Bloomberg — jobs that I never thought I had deserved, roles that I was flung into, head-first — that I’ve kept learning and growing.

Read about Bloomberg News Toronto Bureau Chief, Jacqueline Thorpe’s role swap experience in Mumbai.

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