I’ve been in a range of leadership positions in Singapore, and I can shed some light on how it feels like to make decisions for Singaporeans.
For one, we have a common understanding of ourselves as people who complain a lot. What this really means is, we have comments about whatever is happening, but we will take almost no action about it. There is a non-confrontational aspect about this, and many Singaporeans are not confrontational at all. But we will speak, and say what we are not happy about.
So leading a complaining group of people means a lot of grumbling. It usually becomes a huge morale issue, because even though it is just a lack of action and a lot of noise, the noise becomes very disruptive and demotivating for everyone. But it is only when the leader gives up, and agrees with the complaints and changes the action, then the complaining would stop for awhile, but start up again.
In a simple situation, let’s say it’s a football match, and the captain decides on a formation strategy to deploy a strong forward to attack more. How a Singaporean team would react would be to start grumbling about how the captain always makes decisions without listening to everyone first. Then the forwards would feel the captain constantly overloads them with too much. The midfielders feel used, like the captain just expects them to sing whatever song he wants them to sing, not caring about their feelings. The defenders at the back feel under used, and no one appreciates their true skills. After everyone complains about the captain’s decision, then he changes to a triangle passing strategy. The forwards now feel the captain doesn’t trust them. The midfielders feel like they can enjoy themselves, but they are not sure if the rest of the team knows how to play at their level. The defenders feel out of place because the captain is just pulling them out of formation.
At this point, the captain says, I give up! And then he asks them to just tell him what they want him to do. They say, just let us play soccer. He says okay. So they play and nothing goes well. Everyone is just in such a mess. Then they look at the captain and say, look, if you had only let us work this out earlier, we would be able to score more goals.
As you can see, there is no way out for the captain. And that is what it feels like to lead Singaporeans.
The captain takes a seat and looks at his team, their mistakes, and his leadership. Then he says he wants to retire because he’s done enough for the team, and there’s no more he can provide different. The team tells the captain he’s not good enough and maybe he could have done better if had only trained the team more.
There’s no pleasing this team, and there’s really no pleasing Singaporeans.