Chapter 17: Bosses and Their Subordinates

I had an unexpected visitor at my desk when I reached the office in the morning. Kah Leng was sitting at my desk and playing with my crystal globe while waiting for me.

“Beng! You’re finally here!” she pulled my right arm as I put down my document bag.
“Hahaha… I’m not really expecting an early guest,” I jested.
“Accompany me downstairs for some coffee, will you?” she winked at me.

Obediently, I followed her to the lift. Kah Leng was a business development manager from the Singapore Capital Markets team which was seated in the office area next to our team. She was a very gregarious gal equally flamboyant in dress and speech. She had only joined the company six months ago but she seemed to have made friends with ninety percents of the staffs in this Suntec office already.

We walked to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaves café on the other tower. The café was flooded with office workers taking away their first cups of the day. The counter crews were busy preparing cups after cups of cappuccinos, lattes and espressos. We found a table at a quiet corner and Kah Leng made me sit down.

“Just tell me what you want. My treat,” she smiled.
“Erm… okay, just give me a short white then.”

Minutes later, Kah Leng returned with a tray of latte and short white. As she stirred a pack of sugar into the coffee, she said: “Beng, I’ve already decided. I’m going to quit.”

What news to receive first time in the morning!

“Why? What happened?”
“It’s Carol. I can’t stand her anymore,” she sighed.

Carol was Kah Leng’s direct supervisor and Kah Leng had been having problem working with her since day one. That was not a surprise. Kah Leng was a loud person who would greet everybody when she reached the office in the morning, who loved to socialize and joke around, and who loved to join different groups of people for lunches. While Carol was the quiet one who would enter the office with a stoned face every morning, who hated socializing and talking to others, and who usually chose to lunch in. These two women came from two utterly different worlds.

“She did that email thing again!” Kah Leng raged.
“Oh, she scolded you via email again?”
“Yes! And as usual, she cc’ed our boss in that email! Can’t she just turn around and tell me the problem instead? I’m just sitting next to her, for Christ’s sake!”

I agreed that was not the best way to communicate. And I was also not sure if their boss really read every single email of minor matters that Carol sent.

“Have you communicated the problem to her?” I asked.
“You mean the problem I’ve got working with her? Yes! Of course I had! I told her that I prefer her to tell me my mistakes or any unhappiness that she has with me straight into my face instead of through those emails. Each time she’ll say okay, and she did try to talk to me for a period of time, then after some time, she’ll repeat the whole damn process again!” said the exasperated Kah Leng.

I sympathized with Kah Leng. Difficulties in work itself could be solved with accrued experience and time. But difficulties in working with the boss could probably never be solved, especially if communication is a problem.

Ju and Sally were the opposite of Carol and Kah Leng. Though Sally worked in our team with Rose as the team lead, hierarchy wise, she reported to Ju. Ju was a leader who believed strongly in verbal communication. When a job was needed to be done, she would ask Sally over to her desk with pen and papers so that they could go through the tasks together and Sally could ask her any queries on the spot. Ju believed that if you explain a job to your subordinate face to face, he/she will feel more motivated than if you were to assign the job to him/her via email.

Almost once in every month, Ju would also take Sally out for lunch and have some causal talks with her about non work-related stuffs like what were the new restaurants in town. This little gesture had actually made Sally more comfortable in bringing up to Ju the problems she faced in her work.

I guessed we were pretty fortunate to have Rose as our team lead as well. She scored pretty well in motivating everybody with those inspiring talks about our team’s future. And mostly importantly, her “walk the talk”, not her enthralling speeches, made those talks worked. Rose was also a strong defender for the team whenever we were facing outsiders. When the businesses had some issues with the work that we did or mistakes we made, she would apologize on our behalf then followed by sound reasoning to argue for the things we did. She believed in talking to us in private rather than making us look bad in front of the businesses.

There was one problem with her enthusiasm in work though. Rose believed that the best way to solve problems and improve processes was to get all affected and related parties into meetings and conference calls to discuss the issues. That was why our team’s calendars were so full of meetings and conference calls almost everyday.

Our team was fortunate because we had a leader like Rose, but the same could not be said for Rose when it came to her boss, Karen. Rose was directly reporting to Karen, the head of our department. Karen was a cantankerous middle-aged American woman and thoroughly disagreeable to deal with. She was not easily pleased and she wanted to oversee everything and everybody, even for those in the lower level of the hierarchy, like us.

“KZ, could you show me the AP revenues chart for last month and your analysis?”
“Choi, where’s last month’s product report? And where’s the product report for the month before last month?”
“Nicky, have you sent your analysis to the e-newsletter team? Show me that analysis!”
“Dawn, how’s your project? What’s the status now?”
“Ju, show me the marketing events calendar you’ve planned for next quarter!”
“Sally, have all the vendors been informed of our new branding? Show me those new collaterals!”
“Beng, I want to see the Yen, Renminbi and Singapore dollar markets performance charts!”

And being the one directly under her, Karen expected more from Rose. Every morning, Rose was required to call Karen to discuss about any new plans and outstanding issues. Once a week, Karen would come all the way to our Suntec office from her comfortable office in the headquarters so that she could have a meeting with Rose that usually lasted a few hours. For every agreement that Rose had made with the businesses, a detailed report had to be sent to Karen. For every Marketing event that Ju initiated, Karen would require Rose and Ju to walk her through the event plan. If anybody needs to know the meaning of ‘control freak’, forget the dictionary. Spend a day with Karen.

Eventually Kah Leng stayed and tried to make things work. However, I was pretty sure she would throw in the letter the moment she spotted a higher paying job somewhere else. In another department, another nasty boss did drive his staff away.

The FX department had a change in their department head. The original head was promoted and moved up a level and a British guy was transferred over from the Hong Kong office to take over the job of leading the department. Months before this new department head Alex stepped onto Singapore, the staffs tried to find out more about him from their Hong Kong counterparts. From all the phone calls and emails, they gathered that Alex was an adamant guy who will not be easily influenced once he had made up his mind. In fact his unyielding firmness was the quality that the higher management praised about, which meant that the department could look forward to launching more high profile projects. But the Hong Kong staffs missed out one important point. Alex was a guy who was only interested to work with people he was familiar and felt comfortable with.

When Alex arrived in Singapore, he brought with him a couple of his direct reports, including Betty, his public relations manager in Hong Kong. As Amy was already the existing public relations manager for the FX department, Alex assigned Betty to Amy as an assistant instead. Amy assumed that since further expansion had been planned for the FX department, Alex could have placed two public relations managers in the department to share the work load. Unfortunately, a couple of months later, Amy realized that she had mistaken Alex.

“Dude, did you hear about what happened to Amy, that public relations manager from the FX department?” Nicky asked me during lunch.
“Why? What happened?”
“She’ll be leaving the company by the end of the month.”
“Leaving the company? You mean she quitted?”
“No, she didn’t,” Nicky shook his head. “She was asked to leave.”
“Asked to leave? By Alex?”
“Yap! And Betty is going to replace her as the public relations manager for the FX department.”
“Ha! So that was the reason for the department to have two public relations managers!”
“Yeh, it’s a cruel world right?” Nicky sighed.