Leadership appointments as an active ask, not as a passive want

One of the things I've mentioned to my engineering teams over and over again is that if you want a leadership appointment (and they assume this to mean simply promotion), you have to ask for it unabashedly. This runs quite counter to our Asian sensibilities, where humility and the wise-old adage of knowing one's limits (自知之明) overwhelmingly dominates our mental model of service within a community or organisation.

As you can imagine, many young officers are quite befuddled by this particular exhortation of mine.

"Isn't a leadership appointment... given? Is not rain bestowed by the heavens?" - Yong Kiat, 2014-2022

Believe it or not, those were the exact words I uttered to several of my superiors in my past postings within the public service. The exact utterance of their wisdom varied of course, but if I could romanticise (and summarise) the gist of their response, it would be something along the lines of,

"Surely the people also pray for rain, as heaven gives."

I had assumed that the appointment of an officer to a leadership position was a unilateral exercise, a rather passive one. Would it not be presumptuous of an officer, no matter how competent he is, to ask for a leadership appointment? But in the past decade of my time in public service, I've realised that the best leaders are often people who have chosen to lead, as opposed to have being chosen to lead. One can't help but wonder why, and it's always worth our time during our first day of work (I start my new posting at the Ministry of Education today) articulating the mechanics of what we have experienced in practice.

Leadership appointments are not the same as job promotions, although the two often come together

One of the things I've had to grapple with is that a leadership appointment is distinct from a job promotion. You could well get promoted, and have an increase in job scope - but there's a certain dimension of your job that hasn't quite changed, those system-accountability, people-influencing and organisation-stewarding portions that characterises so much of leadership.

On the other hand, I'm sure you've seen junior officers command a certain sort of leadership even without the requisite level of authority. It's common knowledge in the 21st century workforce that leadership isn't your authority or designation, but whether you are a person of influence at your level within your community or organisation. But the next leap comes from understanding the implication that a leadership appointment isn't a job promotion.

A job promotion, while it comes with an increase in job scope, also comes with an increase in remuneration that is always to be the case, and never changes the domain of your contributions. It quite literally, is still the same job you have signed up for. A junior engineer is still very much responsible for working functional code as a senior engineer is.

On the other hand, a leadership appointment is a role that you play within your organisation and community that expands the dimensions of your job. It may not be remunerated for, and you should expect that the job should change to the extent that it is no longer the same job you have signed up. An engineering manager, for example, is no longer solely responsible for working functional code, but is also now responsible for charting out longer term business strategies for the company and keeping his team of engineers developed in line with this trajectory.

While a job promotion rewards you in a rather extrinsic way for your competence, a leadership appointment is aligned with your intrinsic want to lead and expand the domains of your job - and we all know from basic psychology that the reward for intrinsic wants is often the task itself. Placing an extrinsic reward for a leadership appointment may well cheapen it, in some sense. Very often, leadership is quite a thankless task, and a very misunderstood one as well. Most leaders quit not because they aren't rewarded more, but because their values are no longer aligned with the organisations they serve.

Of course, things are not as simple as they are and if only we could delink the two. Surely we ought to pay more for good leadership as well, since that's a basic hygiene factor for a job. Sometimes, in order to play a leadership role, you also need to have displayed a certain level of technical competency in your own domain. Indeed, you're right, it's quite difficult to disentangle the two - and that's why most leadership appointments very frequently come together with a job promotion. In fact, if you examine the various rungs of any corporate ladder, you would immediately observe that promotions into certain job grades carry a fundamentally different nature from others. At the lower job grades, a promotion usually doesn't carry along with it a huge signature, but at the higher job grades, it's often the case that a promotion occurs along with a leadership appointment.

But my point still stands, they aren't quite the same thing. We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we conflate the two, even if they almost always happen together.

And so if a leadership appointment does come with a promotion, then this promotion should only be given if and only if the individual desires the leadership opportunity (assuming competencies have been attained).

Leadership arises from an intrinsic want, and suitability for a leadership role is ultimately best signalled by the individual being able to articulate his desire for service

Once we've made the distinction between a promotion and a leadership appointment, it makes sense why we should only appoint leaders if they are desirous of leading. The successful reluctant leader is at best luck, and is mostly a myth.

If a job promotion rewards the technical competency of an individual, then it is true it can be given unilaterally, because the technical competencies of an individual are quite easily observed. But if a leadership appointment is an alignment of an individual's instrinsic want to serve at a higher level, there is no physical way of observing this other than the individual articulating his desire.

Simply put, if you cannot even summon the inner courage to articulate your desire to serve, it is difficult to grant you a leadership position where you would need to summon even more moral courage to lead, influence and navigate difficult situations. And it is in speaking our truest and deepest desires out into the open that truly transforms us as people - we all know this deeply, that there is a difference between having an inner passion for something versus speaking widely about it.

In the words of Peter Thiel, or Daniel Priestly, or actually any entrepreneur, you only become what you want to be when you dare to preach what you want to be.

Here's to a wonderful start at the Ministry of Education for me, and also surviving in my concurrent job posting at GovTech.

Cheers!