Men in white. The curse of incumbency. Status quo arrogance. Pretentious consultation when minds and decisions are already made up. Patronising to the masses. Paying lip service to open-mindedness. Poisonous groupthink. Elitism or meritocratic aristocrats, and this, ”is he illiterate?”
I guess most of us in Singapore are familiar with the above description of our governing authority - PAP. People’s Action Party could even be seen as People Action-only (show off) Party. We often forget the results produced, because the fish will be the last to discover water - but yes, not always stellar, but at least, predictably stable.
The water flow is however never smooth sailing. We all know that. Sometimes, it is stale (uncreative), still and dead calm. Sometimes it is rushing with pandemic urgency and even the leaders are stumped. Most times, we just go with the flow, too preoccupied with bread-and-butter issues to be bothered with what the big boys or bad boys are doing at the head of the tide.
Anyway, Sumiko @ LunchWithSumiko has managed to fish out a quiet and humble leader amongst the mainstream current, who once described himself as such: “I think I am boringly calm.”
Khaw Boon Wan was a big fish enjoying retirement after 42 years of public service (22 as a civil servant and 20 as a politican). He spent his time sending his grandkids to school, devoting to Taiji and meditating on Buddhist sutras before he was persuaded to return back to public service. The last straw was a lunch appointment with PM Lee on May 10, and the rest is, well, newspaper history.
Well, after a heart bypass (2010), an arm operation due to a fracture (2019), and enduring dengue fever for two days last year, this vegan-diet retiree with almost zilch anger management issue may be taking up his swan song project before he goes quietly into the nocturnal starry skies.
You can read about the interview with Sumiko in today’s paper for the interesting bits about Khaw’s story, how he disliked long meeting, the 300 experts he met up to prep up for the job, and that quirky “twirls of his right foot”.
In one part, you read about what he was reading before coming out of retirement. Anyway, maybe this trivia can be fleshed out here. “He spent several months engrossed in tomes about 500th anniversary of the Reformation, for example, and immersed himself in a book about Egyptian archaeology and European colonialism.”
But, for my post this Sabbath morning, I just want to focus on one small bit, that is, leadership and humility. I read somewhere that leadership is “the art of inspiring others in a team to contribute their best towards a goal.”
And in 42 years of public service, I can’t say that Khaw had been lacking in that department.
In the interview, he however described his new role as “my toughest assignment” and said: "I spent many years in healthcare, so I was not daunted when then Minister Howe Yoon Chong asked me to lead on hospital restructuring.”
“Housing, I volunteered to do the job as I knew the problems on the ground and had clear ideas on how I could fix it. MRT was a bit scary but I understood the engineering problem. I was confident that given time, we could turn it around. With media, I am out of my depth."
As a grandfather, he is no less the grandfather type in leadership, that is, ponderous in thoughts, careful with words, and taking a long lens’ view in perspective. But, what drew me to this leader is his unspoken-for humility.
I felt that that was the freshwater spring point of inspiration a leader today urgently needs to move his team towards a common and mutually enriching goal.
Skills and competency are one thing, but leadership as an art, is a demanding discipline calling for a profound depth of interpersonal touch only those who have worked with people, all kinds of people, have the courage, wisdom and strength to muster up for the long haul.
And holding this bond together is humility, that is, not thinking less of yourself, but as CS Lewis puts it, thinking of yourself less. Because you still have to treasure yourself, before you share your treasure (gift) with others.
Khaw said: “Civil servants can remain faceless, even nameless. I like that more. I was happiest when I was just a senior civil servant, senior enough to make a difference, and did not need to tell the world how I had improved their lives.”
Well, this Mr Fix-it has proven himself on that, and using a train analogy, he prefers to fix it at night, when it is all quiet, with zero traffic and crowd, so that when day breaks, you won’t even know it’s fixed when you travel on it.
That’s humility in the way it is defined - “a humble person is marked by a willingness to hold power in service to others.” (Humilitas by John Dickson).
I guess the world needs more people of that caliber, who in the interview said this before taking up chairmanship of SPH, “my main consideration was whether I was up to the job”, and then took it up, and braving the storm ahead not with a I-know-better attitude, but one where he told Sumiko (technically, his subordinate) this: -
“We are a team and if we can pull together in the same direction, there are no problem that we cannot collectively solve. My job is to support all of you and cheer you along.”
Alas, I have come to know this leadership process as “re-personalization”. That is, taking a person for whom you are leading out of the cogwheels of an impersonal organisation, and then giving him or her a good pat on the shoulder, with this assurance, “we are in this foxhole together, no bullet that comes your way would not also come my way first.”
In the book, “The Power of Giving Away Power - How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go”, by Matthew Barzun, he wrote about a legend of leadership, and no, it’s not a man, but a woman, whom even the father of modern management, Peter F Drucker, modeled after.
Her name is Mary Parker Follett. You can google about her amazing leadership style chariot-led by sheer humility, that is, giving power away and sharing it to empower others towards a common goal, whether corporate or for social justice.
This is what was written by the author Matthew about her leadership as I end this post: -
“...Follett called for re-personalization - to bring the right kind of struggle into each encounter. In what became her standard presentation, she encouraged leaders to allow all members of the team to share their view and study the problem at hand from many angles, with each person bringing their knowledge to the table.”
““If you did this with your teams, then you could avoid the traps of arbitrary personal power and the twin danger of depersonalized power - you would still have power, but it would be what she called “power-with,” not “power-over.””
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