Will the real LEADERS please stand up & rise up?

What I am about to share in this article has been something that weighted heavily in my heart for a long while and took me some time to pen it down. For those who read this, I hoped you can share it and may it touches the hearts of all the leaders out there in this earthy world.

To begin, let me share abit about myself as it is related to how I come to this perspective.

Coming from a poor family, I started work at the age of 14, starting as a kitchen helper, newspaper boy and waiter while juggling with my studies. As I entered Polytechnic, I have already worked as a bartender and later pursued a DJ career. At age 18, I am earning more than $4,000 per month and thought that perhaps DJing is my career. Then I pursued a chef career and worked my way to become a Chef de partie. I excelled in each of these jobs as every time I pursued these roles, my mind-set is believing that this is going to be my long term career. My mum seeing me being independent at a young age, decided to take up her hard earned savings together with the sudden profit of selling her flat to allow me to pursue a degree in UK. From there, I excelled further, get a free scholarship (became the top 1% in UK) to study PhD. Thereafter, I came back Singapore to work and look after my aged and sick mum.

The reason of sharing a small part of my early life and my early achievements in those careers is because those success are mainly blessed by meeting all the right bosses. Every time I have a job and being unskilled, my superiors will patiently trained and imparted all their knowledge so that I became a big factor in the success of their businesses.

When I was a kitchen helper, I remembered my superior, the head chef asking me if I want to learn cooking, and I asked him to teach me. The first lesson for me was cooking a sunny side up egg using a giant wok… I fried and threw away 200 over eggs before getting it right (yolk in perfect centre, slightly crisp on the edges, perfect roundness with slight softness and runny around the yolk). The concept behind it was to learn heat control, timing, panning skills, listening to the sounds of cooking and wok-ing skills. Thereafter, I was given more responsibilities to cook fried rice and other dishes, learning the use of ingredients along the way. To me, it was a tough love process, but as I grew up and looked back, my boss invested 200 over eggs and 3 days of his business hours on me.

Whenever I cooked up some food for my loved ones and friends, my heart always remember his love. That’s when I remembered one of his words…

“When you became a boss, remember your responsibility is not just about cooking great food and doing a profitable business, your main responsibility is look after the people who worked for you… their livelihood, their families, their happiness… all depends on you able to look after them… never give up on them… treat them as your own family with all your heart, they may fail you, but never fail anyone that is under your charge.”

Those words still resonance in my heart till today and he is not the only boss who told me that. In all my early careers, all my bosses said the same thing, shared the same VALUE and I grew up strongly believe in this VALUE (remember this word as from now onwards, I will just indicate as value). Sad to say, after achieving a degree, a PhD and later a MBA, I stepped up in the corporate world to realise it is so hard to find this type of bosses. What I came across are bosses who make you believe they are for you by saying the right words you want to hear, and end up a big disappointment. They need you as long you meet their needs but turn their backs on you when their agendas are more important than you.

Hold on a second, you may be thinking “You must have been meeting all the wrong bosses” and my perspective is “narrow and one-sided”. Allow me to stop you for awhile in those thoughts as I did a lot of pondering before. I did meet 2 great bosses in my early career - David Aspinwall from University of Birmingham, who have hugged and cried with me during my challenging period; Robert Benden from Pratt & Whitney who even offered his own home for me to stay and never failed to celebrate my birthday, and was really sad after I left the company. These 2 leaders hold their values and contribute to shaping my career and imparted all their combined of more than 60 years of knowledge to me within 8 years with them in total. I became highly knowledgeable and skilled, thanks to all their teaching and guidance.

Now back to my point, why do most leaders failed nowadays? To me personally, they have lost the value. Let me shared instead what I have come across so far on some similar leaders’ traits. Most top leaders such as CEOs and MDs do not stay more than 3-5 years in the same organisations. When they came on board, their first thing is never the employees… guess what is their first thing?... please the shareholders regardless of anything to keep their high salary job. And what is the shareholders’ main interest? Profit, profit and more PROFITS! Many shareholders are no longer interested in 10 years plan anymore as they just want to sell their shares (when I said many, I don’t mean all, so please don’t reply to me on this). They don’t invest for you and my future, instead, they invest because of their own future. This may seem harsh and blunt from me, but this is a simple truth and you will find out more as you read further.

So how do CEOs and MDs please the shareholders in a really short time while assure their jobs for the next 3 years at least? 3 simple steps to be CEOs – 1st step, demonstrate immediate profitability increase: cutting costs, retrenchments is their favourite strategy; 2nd step, push for some short term projects that give results in the next 1 year. The danger part of these short term projects is that there will be a lot of repercussions that affect the business in the long term but they don’t care as they will not be there when it comes; 3rd step, look into some of the near to completed projects, give it some supports and boosts and claim all the credits; and 4th step as a bonus, push for some exciting long term projects regardless whether it will succeed, just as long it creates a lot of attention and points back to the CEOs and MDs. Usually the next successor will know how to do damage control on such projects when they come on-board.

Technologies such as automation, AI, IT supposed to make people lives better, but they ended up making people jobless. Old saying that technologies replaced employees so that they can improve to do other higher skilled work. Apparently this is no longer happening. Technologies no longer keep jobs… they replaced jobs.

Do you believe the above? I am not going to name any companies but do your own google search. Most companies do retrenchment even when they are making profits, and the key thing to look into is the share price. Projects are materialising a lot faster but not sustaining. Long term projects never seem to materialise because it was never intended to. CEOs and MDs get into news for the things that are not materialised yet and announcements of good results based on shaky grounds. Stock market used to crash every 10 years but now it can happen every given 5 years (you can google this as well).

Because of such trends, many people hardly worked for their companies with their hearts nowadays. Thoughts that come to people’s minds are like the following:

• I am just doing what is necessary to keep my own job. Other colleagues’ problems are their own problems. Unless I get recognition, I am not helping.
• I am not going for extra mile or think out of the box for my company. Look at all the previous staff, their retrenchment package is their main reward.
• Just make my boss looks good regardless of value.
• I will change job for the money, I don’t believe in company loyalty anymore.
• Employee engagement programme? Just another gimmick.
• Another change of CEO/MD, there is hope… everything sounds great… few months later… things have not changed for the better…
• Interesting how we kept having retrenchments and hirings in the same year…
• What is my Company’s mission statement and vision? Can’t even remember it, trying to memorising it is like learning a new joke every day. (This is my personal favorite… most of the time, the word people or employee is included in the mission statement but that value is not withhold anymore, that’s why few believed in mission statement anymore. Some companies’ websites can’t even find the mission statements)

Many organisations are falling apart without realising it because many strategies are personal agendas driven… companies that succeeded are usually filled with great employees and most importantly, strong value… search on these companies… Cisco Systems, Berkshire Hathaway, Twenty-First Century Fox, Google, Facebook, Sanmina, Marriott International, Oracle, Amazon, etc… they usually have long serving CEOs, shareholders, owners, etc.

What made these organisations successful and long term sustaining, with great products, long term realisation projects and amazing breakthroughs? I said it again… strong VALUE.

Leaders and shareholders, if you put your people first, you live a life being well remembered in history when you touched their lives (Great example... "LEE KUAN YEW").

Remember this, all wars are won in history because of values, not profit. Profit is the fruit of the battle won.

“Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave.” (Matthew 20:26-27)

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” (Philippians 2:3-4)