Category Archives: Careers

So a manager was serving quarantine in a hotel on an island off the mainland of Singapore. She just returned to Singapore from abroad and had to comply with the pandemic measures. She wanted to attend her yoga class via zoom but didn’t have her yoga mat.

So she called her staff to go to her home, pick up the yoga mat and bring it to the hotel on the offshore island. Her staff could have said no. But she didn’t. She was concerned about being loaded with unnecessary work, or being picked on, or worse, getting an unfavourable appraisal.

The culture of compliance in our workplaces is reinforced by the continued use of one-way appraisals. This breeds cronyism and favouritism unless there is sufficient checks on the power of bosses.

Why check their power, you ask? Because the cronyism can breed mediocrity and the culture reduces productivity, encourages hypocrisy. Beyond adopting 360 appraisals, a different attitude and approach to appraisal is needed in the workplace.

I’ve written before about public vs private sector jobs or career; and I’ve also shared about the story that we want to craft for ourselves. One of the biggest thing that I would urge all those considering public service to think about is the spirit by which you are serving in. Ultimately, as you enter the service, who are you serving, what are you serving?

Honestly, one of the best perks about being in public service is the claim to some sort of altruism – you’re here to serve the people; you want to help the companies, or the lower income families, or to advance the energy system of the country, etc. And of course, with that perk you will want to be able to take a high view of those in the service. This is perhaps why I think developing and considering the spirit of service is important before and while you are in the service.

Because bureaucracy can be self-serving, or serving the status quo. Because when you want to be fair and good to everyone you might end up having to withhold from everyone. And because when you develop measures to try and capture the intangibles, you can end up either giving up or maximising the metric rather than the genuine outcome. And when you get disappointed, the environment can conspire to make you think you cannot change things. These are hard truths, and the reality is not that close to the claims of altruism.

In the toughest of situation, it is the spirit of service that will keep you there and hold you accountable. When you’re tempted to maximise your career rather than uphold the interest of public. When it is all on you to call out selfish leaders. When political interest seem to overwrite public interest. These are times when you look back at the spirit of service and carry on. So be sure you’ve the right spirit to serve before you join.

Having a good teacher who is appropriately empowered in the classroom can make a difference to the lives of students. If he or she stays in education, generations of students can benefit. The good teacher is not able to make the same impact on many more students within the same amount of time. It doesn’t scale.

But we always think we can scale these things; we create curriculum, syllabus, scheme of work. We think we are scaling good teaching, schooling through creating systems of learning. And then we enforce mass education; and allow it to grow into bigger and bigger parts of the lives of our people.

What exactly are we scaling then? We might not be scaling the good things we are trying to grow; in fact as I write, good teachers are being driven to frustration by the system; good teaching is being sacrificed at the expense of needing to standardise things. We are scaling frustration, suffering and misalignment with the original intentions.

At some single-digit age I came to enjoy books, and stories. And at the age of 6 when I was in a mini-bus that was driving in and out of the Pinnacles Dessert in Australia, I spent hours telling stories to an attentive 4 year old friend I got to know in the tour group. I still recall his name was Marcus.

I seem to enjoy telling stories since young. Teachers repeatedly described me as talkative in class though I was certainly not the extroverted sort. It was also because I had attentive parents who gave me time, aunties and uncles who listened to me, undistracted by phone screens.

When I grew a little older I had a lot of opportunities to listen to the stories of other people because I started doing a lot of community work with the elderly folks. That was when I begin to discover the importance and power of the stories we are weaving, which we tell others and more importantly, ourselves.

Being able to tell positive, powerful and encouraging stories about our lives can make a difference to it. That is why I started working with people to ponder over their story and to discover how they want to write it, tell it and use it to achieve their desired careers. Head to my coaching page learn more about my coaching practice.

We all want to work for good companies. The brand names, the recognisable ones that makes the relatives go wow and continue conversation about what you do during Chinese New Year gatherings. Or maybe actually we just want a good boss who can give us that sense of mission, offer appropriate advice at the right point and empower you to operate independently.

One of the big challenges at large corporations or organisations is bureacracy. They use it well too; such as to relieve employees of certain administrative duties and make respectable specialisations out of them. In fact, for some specialisations, you might be really performing optimally only in large organisations with the structure for you to utilise your potential.

But all of that generally builds upon complexity. Bureacracy generates complexity partly as a product of layers but also because complexity tends to justify bureacracy so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. Do you want to be part of that, to contribute to that complexity, or do you prefer to pursue simplicity?

Do you have a set way of thinking about innovation in business? These days, governments are heavily involved in funding research and development in a bid to help their economies lead the way in one area or two. These are all good except when people come to think of it as a one-size-fit all approach to business problems.

When a product or market becomes commoditised and competition reduces pricing power, the prescription tends to be about differentiation and “innovation”. The nature of the product or service is important to consider what kind of innovation there can be. A lot of commoditised businesses are simply cash cows: mature and cashflow generating but not growing.

The optimal way to grow with less risk is not to try and change the product. It is to consider consolidating the market slowly and one at a time. Find niches to acquire and gain scale, focus on optimising costs to enhance profitability and then use that to make more acquisitions. This is basically what is known as “roll-up” strategy commonly practised by private equity firms.

This sort of innovation is less visible but more profitable and meaningful for those companies. Maybe you won’t be poster child for being a company who went through “transformation”, but that’s okay!

Say your colleague approaches you for help and you offered some directions which he or she has tried. The colleague retorts “Hello, I’m not stupid”. How would you respond?

Not that it happened in my workplace but I brought up this question because I’m thinking about the spirit that drives us to be helpful. Whether it is about being able to solve a problem, provide the psychological comfort (“you’re not alone”) or just to be liked. Almost definitely a combination of all but the litmus test is probably whether you’ll help the colleague again in the above situation – if you’ve proven to be useless and unappreciated on all fronts.

On the other hand, when you ask for help, what are you expecting from the person you ask? Are you hoping for identification, for problem-solving or relationship-building?

Humans are such fascinating creatures.

I once had a lunch at a friend’s place and her Dad simultaneously praised public service jobs for being good, stable places to be (he tries to get her daughters to join) while being critical about the work of public servants (“what do they do?”). I cannot be sure when he was being serious but one thing for sure, our views of public sector work is muddled and often confused.

Likewise I have someone in my family who used to think private sector is bad. Because it’s all about the bottom line and profits. I often say, well, you could also see that public service is often about meeting KPIs, which isn’t that different even if those KPIs are to drive some underlying good for the public. The chase for numbers and quantifiables is evident and taken as a natural product of “scientific management”.

Having been in both I think it is important to see that a large bureacratic private organisation can be not so different from a ministry while a newly set up statutory board can be not so different from a start-up. Often the skillsets valued would not be too different even when they place different weights on the specifics.

So it boils down to what you want to grow in. Public sector work will be more big picture from day 1 while private sector may involve greater dive into details and big picture work only later in your career. These generalisations are not super helpful and as I already made it clear, there’s a need to look at a specific job role and organisation in order to make the decision. Public or private itself is more of a label that tells very little to someone who has not any experience of either.

Being candid without reproaching people is a skill – it is subtle but somewhere along our upbringing we come to associate people with their actions and/routines as much as we allow those things to be part of our identities.

Habits can be changed, personalities can be transformed. It’s not just about believing in yourself but appreciating how the environment you allow yourself to be in, the things you read or watch, the people you interact with have an impact on you. That means when someone criticise your work or actions you can simultaneously take responsibility (knowing you can change and improve), whilst also not letting it assault your identity (seeing that your work is not actually a direct reflection of your whole self).

I think the something along our upbringing is when we try to nudge our children, peers or friends to change by giving the warning about their identity (rather than a perception of it). For example, we say to children don’t be a smoker rather than don’t take up smoking. We say people are geniuses rather than saying they have a genius (which by the way, is the original way of expressing the concept).

Seen in that light, our inability to give honest negative feedback without feeling/acting like we’re assaulting someone is the same thing as when we receive those sort of feedback. We think we’re assaulting because we feel assaulted. We think it’s being judgmental because we feel judged. Being able to do these well are not “soft skills” – they are life skills.

I was reading this interesting take on the woke meritocracy by Blake Smith. The similarities to Singapore is uncanny not least because we have similarly competitive systems that have evolved to take into consideration academic grades and a myraid of criteria for university admissions.

What is more similar, despite cultural differences in our preferred kind of leadership, is the narratives expected of our elites and accordingly engineered into the social consciousness. The point has become to narrate one’s background in such a way as to simultaneously acknowledge the existence of inequality but to subtly suggests the system of meritocracy is still being able to pull up able members of those seemingly disenfranchised groups.

The contemporary ideal, increasingly, is no longer someone so charmingly personable that others forget he is in fact a ruthless competitor, but a person who so convincingly narrates her having overcome some kind of social injustice that others forget she is in fact a beneficiary of systems of privilege.

Blake Smith

These stories are no doubt powerful and casting skepticism do not help with building up the social fabric. But what I want to point to is the fact that we ought to have a more objective view of the meritocratic system and be more aggressive in combating the downside of the system.

One of the key assumption of the system is that merit as defined by the prevailing narrative and system is independent of your access to resources and opportunities. That is just patently untrue. If the inequalities are actually perpetuating structural inferiority amongst the disenfranchised, then how are we dealing with that?