I looked through an analysis of our recent employee engagement surveys and verbatim feedback, talked about it with everyone, and then thought about it again. I’ve been thinking that I should probably just be transparent about how I actually think about work, assessments, and careers in general.
I’ve talked about most of this with people individually over the years, but because I always adjusted each conversation impromptu, to whoever I was talking to and their specific situation, there wasn’t a single version of it that captured everything. So I figured I’d try writing it down.
Disclaimer: These are my own views, not privileged information, official guidelines, or anything remotely that exciting.
How do I assess people?
There’s no easy answer, but here’s what I’ve gathered so far. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and it’ll probably evolve over time, but these are the things I find myself coming back to.
- Impact. Good, big things happen around you in a way that’s measurable and hard to miss. The surface area of what you’ve affected is clearly huge, and outcomes jump out without anyone needing to squint.
- Sharpness in thinking. People who can grasp something quickly, think through multiple possibilities at once, weigh risks and long-term implications, and zoom in and out between the details and the big picture without losing the thread. Logical, pragmatic, fast.
- Competency and technical mastery. You know your stuff, and I can trust your judgement, which means I worry about one less thing. I want to know what people outside our org are doing, how we compare, what you’ve been learning lately, and honestly whether you enjoy this stuff enough to tinker with it outside office hours. That’s a plus point to me (not a minus point if you don’t), because all of that tells me something real about where you are.
- Breadth. People who can connect dots across issues, see links that others don’t, and adapt solutions from one domain to a completely different one.
- Drive and execution. Whatever lands on your plate, you do it well and things run smoothly. You push through difficulty even when it’s hard and boring and nobody’s watching.
- Working with people. I prioritize people who can build bridges while still keeping healthy tension in the room, because too little and we all just get scared of pushing back or saying something uncomfortable, and too much and nobody trusts each other anymore.
- Innovation. Thinking outside the box, making use of scarce resources, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, and then actually challenging old policies or ways of thinking. Pushing culture forward is much harder than just delivering on a work stream or two.
- Management. For managers, there’s the additional layer of management itself, which is its own skillset entirely. Are deliverables on track, can you manage morale, make sure people show up and contribute, handle the admin, vet work, staff your bosses appropriately, manage expectations upward and unhappiness in every direction?
- Leadership. Separate from management. Can you inspire people, foster a real culture, create a psychologically safe environment, develop your people into better versions of themselves than when they walked through the door? Can you model good values in a way that actually influences the people around you, like genuinely caring about value for the citizen or taxpayer even on a tiny project worth a few thousand dollars?
- Heart. This one sounds cheesy, but it’s the most important to me. Do you do what you do for the goodness of the public, for the citizen, for the country? It’s usually intrinsic, and if that fundamental motivation is wrong, then everything else becomes very difficult to sustain in this line of work.
All work is equal, but some work is more equal
Some work is more visible, some people are louder, and some portfolios are naturally more prominent. Routine work tends to be less valued everywhere you go, because something new always catches the eye more easily, while the steady ongoing stuff just blends into the background. The same instinct that makes us bond together and stick together as a group also makes us gravitate toward the unfamiliar and exciting over the reliable.
But we can do something about it, and it takes deliberate effort because we often fool ourselves into thinking we don’t need to. We need to quantify our impact, justify our metrics, and show our value. Sometimes it’s about speaking up in presentations to business owners, other times we need to write well in a submission or report. And sometimes a crisis gives the opportunity to showcase your work, or routine stuff gets done in a new way and that becomes worth shouting about.
This cuts both ways too. People who are less competent will also fail loudly when the spotlight is on them.
There’s a huge burden on leaders here. When work is unclear, when job descriptions and allocation are fuzzy, when morale is low, it naturally makes unfair recognition worse. So we need to clarify more, forge good working arrangements, and give predictability rather than add to confusion. Whatever you do, don’t let your teams stand pat, because by default that means falling behind. The world waits for no one.
At the end of the day, we all need to have value to the people around us. At worst you’ll be tolerated, at best you’ll be celebrated and rewarded. It’s the same idea that DPM Heng Swee Keat and other ministers talk about with Singapore’s place in the world, that we’re finished the moment we stop being valuable and relevant. The same applies to us as individuals in any organization.
“I’m naturally quiet though”
I get it, because I was the same way. People who worked with me in my first six months would tell you that. I trembled when talking to a director, and he wasn’t even intimidating. I was so quiet in meetings you wouldn’t hear a single word from me, and I wouldn’t even push back against my supervisors.
Some people are loud and good, and that’s great. Some are loud and mediocre. Those are the obvious ones.
But some people are quiet and genuinely excellent, and these deserve a tremendous amount of attention, because it’s the leaders’ job and often the person’s own job to speak up and claim credit for good work done. Sometimes it takes both sides working at it, sometimes just one, but either way it needs deliberate effort.
I do empathize with people who are like engineers, or in professions and skillsets that naturally self-select for introversion, and who have a harder time speaking for themselves. They’re often great at what they do, much more comfortable in their technical depth and comfort zone than in front of an audience, and they tend to clam up when it’s anything outside their field.
So I try to compensate by actively looking for the good, rather than letting the negatives dominate. If someone has specialized skills we all benefit from, and they’re effective, impactful, able to innovate and drive things forward, that carries real weight even if they’re quiet about it. If those things aren’t there, then I assess normally. But this also risks being unfair to people who are genuinely good communicators, because communication is a real skill in itself, and I don’t want to discount that either.
How does office politics factor in?
Office politics matter, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Important, senior people got to where they are on the back of all the things I’ve talked about, but they’re also human. They needed to work with people, with their teams, and their teams would have had people who were great. Great people need no introduction, and they get trusted again if their paths cross later. Some people naturally complement each other’s styles, and a lot of the time you build a team to cover your shortcomings rather than double down on your strengths.
It also depends on the leader. Does the leader like you or your style? Do they feel invested enough in your growth to stick with you and give you opportunities?
All of this is to say that some people’s voices carry more weight than others, and some people will have an easier time pushing through their work with influential sponsors or workstreams that happen to be in vogue.
But this isn’t permanent. You can absolutely change your fortunes if you’re down and out, and you can drop a notch or two if you coast or underperform.
This is the opportunity and the risk at the same time. Build allies, work with people, but hold them accountable too. Be fair and firm.
Ultimately, it feels better to have someone who you trust and who appreciates you fighting for your ranking. Someone who you know is fair, who is transparent, who tells you to your face when something is bad or wrong.
Leadership can feel like a burden
It absolutely is, and I hate it too, honestly, a lot of the time. I’d much rather be an individual contributor.
This isn’t about any particular team or person. I’ve felt this across different roles over the years, and I’ve heard the same thing from other supervisors too.
I spend a lot of time going through email submissions, marking them up with comments in red and strikethrough because Outlook doesn’t have tracked changes, then going back and forth a few rounds asking questions and prompting the writer to think through what they actually meant, when honestly I could just rewrite the whole thing myself in a fraction of the time. And that’s just one submission from one person. Multiply that across the team, add in the difficult conversations nobody wants to have because we’re all predisposed to want nice things and happy emotions, and it adds up. I’ll also be honest that over the years I’ve gotten lazier about this. I used to edit everything super thoroughly, but sometimes I fall prey to laziness and just edit directly. I apologize if I’ve done this to you.
And sometimes with a thousand different ways to navigate leadership and find your own style, it’s really demoralizing when what you’re doing just doesn’t work, and everyone around you has a different suggestion for what you should try instead.
I just think we all fundamentally need some affirmation of the struggles we face, the same as an uncertain teenager, a fresh graduate, a working parent, or anyone else going through something hard.
I’ve felt all of the stuff I wrote above. But that’s unfortunately the burden of leadership, in my view. And I don’t even claim to be a top leader.
Closing thoughts
I don’t have all the answers, and I’m honestly still figuring a lot of this out as I go. If you’re on my team and something here doesn’t sit right, or you just need to let off some steam, my Venting Machine FormSG form is always open. And please keep using my Rate Zixian form too, I really read everything.
Look out for the next essay :)