Photographed at one of their quarterly team-building sessions, the writer (first from right) reflects with gratitude on Ms Poo’s (third from left) leadership, crediting her with playing a pivotal role in his career advancement.
Throughout my career in various corporate environments in Singapore, I encountered superiors with a wide spectrum of leadership styles – autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, visionary, coaching, narcissistic and micromanaging.
From my perspective, I value a superior who embodied a blend of visionary, laissez-faire and coaching qualities; and I was fortunate to have met one – Ms Poo.
Ms Poo was not the sort of micromanager who scrutinised our daily tasks or insisted that we arrive exactly on time and work overtime to prove our worth. Instead, she granted us the autonomy to complete our assignments. As long as we demonstrated progress and delivered results aligned with our team’s objectives, she did not interfere. Should we have required her support, she was always ready to assist and remove any roadblocks.
She was also a flexible and understanding superior. If we needed to attend to personal matters during work hours, she did not object to our leaving the office early. During the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, when I was unable to return to my hometown for two years, she empathetically approved my request to work from Malaysia for a month so I could spend more time with my family – a rare privilege for any employee.
When I joined her team in 2018 at the age of 28, I was soon assigned a task to handle a customer complaint about a long-standing quality issue – the deformation of a product’s plastic clamshells. The escalation had intensified at that point due to recurrence, so I was expected to investigate and resolve the root cause. She gave me great freedom and autonomy to work on the issue while keeping the activities on her radar. After some time driving the investigation with my stakeholders, she came to my desk once and asked whether I could manage it and if I needed her support. I courteously declined and continued my endeavour.
Eventually, after more than two months, I uncovered the root cause of the quality issue – a hot spot at Narita Airport. As a result, I was tasked with flying to Japan alone to conduct an audit at the airport. It was my first audit and my first business trip, but I embraced the challenge.
The audit concluded that the airport tarmac was most likely the hot spot causing the deformation – and with input from my Japanese colleagues, the loading of goods on the tarmac under extreme heat was considered normal according to International Air Transport Association (IATA) regulations. Hence, the quality of the packaging needed review.
I consolidated the information, which successfully persuaded my packaging designer – who had long resisted improvements – to enhance the quality of the packaging. After the enhancement, the unrelenting quality issue finally ceased.
It was a great achievement. Ms Poo appreciated my efforts in improving customer satisfaction, rewarding me handsomely in my year-end appraisal.
Since then, she continued to groom me, giving me more opportunities for career development. I enrolled on a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) programme, which allowed me to fly to Dalian, China, for one-week training before working on a data-driven improvement project and becoming certified as a Green Belt. She gave me her full support without intervention, allowing me to work with my project team and achieve the objectives in my own way – because historically, many projects had been called off due to superiors’ interference.
As time went by, I progressively took up new challenges – becoming certified as a Black Belt and enrolling in a six-month course on Practical Decision-Making Using Data Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS) under her allocated budget. The course enabled me to apply new knowledge at work by establishing a simple predictive model, helping my team determine a realistic goal as our key performance indicator (KPI).
I was also assigned a project to support a new contract manufacturer’s setup in India under her guidance before she gradually allowed me to manage it independently.
“Work hard, play hard” was her slogan. During our quarterly Rest and Relaxation (R&R), we would organise team-building sessions with a sumptuous lunch and light-hearted chat in a restaurant, followed by a leisure activity such as bowling, laser tag or karaoke. It was a quarterly tradition we never missed. Her team was long regarded as one with exceptionally strong cohesion.
All in all, I learnt and equipped myself with a great deal of valuable skills under Ms Poo’s leadership, for which I owe her immense gratitude for my career advancement. Although I eventually left her team to pursue another opportunity, she remains, thus far, the best superior I have ever worked with.
