The Disengagement Crisis: Why Singapore's Workforce Challenge Demands Immediate Strategic Action

Singapore's business community faces an uncomfortable reality: ranking 8th out of 9 Southeast Asian countries for workforce engagement at just 14%, while regional leaders like the Philippines achieve 38%. This isn't merely a statistical anomaly—it represents a fundamental threat to our competitive positioning in an AI-driven economy.

Recent Gallup findings reveal a troubling correlation: as manager engagement globally dropped from 30% to 27%, Singapore's workforce simultaneously reported 43% stress levels, significantly above the regional average of 25%. The implications extend far beyond employee satisfaction metrics.

In our recent interview with Singapore Business Review, we shared our analysis around three critical dimensions that gave rise to this disengagement crisis:

1. Digital Transformation Fatigue

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital adoption across Singapore's SME landscape, but speed often came at the expense of strategic foundation-setting. Organizations rushed to implement new systems without clearly articulating the problems they were solving, creating what I term "process chaos."

The result? Managers describe feeling overwhelmed by "new systems" while lacking the resources to properly integrate these tools into meaningful workflows. We've created digital environments that serve technology rather than enabling human productivity.

2. Generational Workforce Complexity

Singapore's workforce simultaneously manages three distinct generational approaches to technology and work processes: non-digital natives, semi-digital natives, and full digital natives. Each group carries different expectations around technology adoption, communication styles, and workplace culture.

Young managers under 35 experienced a 5-percentage-point engagement drop, suggesting that even digital natives struggle when organizational systems fail to accommodate diverse generational needs. The challenge isn't technological—it's cultural and procedural.

3. Leadership Development Gap

Perhaps most critically, less than half of global managers (44%) have received formal management training. Singapore's rapid business environment often promotes technical experts into leadership roles without adequate people management preparation. I.e. A job title and technical know-how alone does not make one a good people manager.

This creates a cascade effect: 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager, meaning Singapore's manager development deficit directly impacts broader workforce productivity and innovation capacity.

Strategic Imperatives for Forward-Looking Organizations

Time Investment Over Task Execution

The most significant intervention organizations can make is providing people space to think, not just execute. When employees operate in survival mode—worried about job security and overwhelmed by constant change—they cannot engage in the creative, innovative thinking that drives competitive advantage.

Organizations must resist the temptation to fill every moment with tasks and instead create structured time for reflection, strategic thinking, and collaborative problem-solving.

Inclusive Decision-Making Frameworks

Rather than imposing uniform processes across generational lines, successful organizations create safe spaces for all perspectives to contribute. This means acknowledging that different generations may prefer different communication channels, work styles, and technology interfaces.

The goal isn't to invest in multiple platforms to accommodate all of course but to understand and provide time and space for them to learn, adapt and adjust. It's leveraging diverse generational strengths to create more robust, adaptable business processes.

Purpose-Driven Technology Adoption

Organizations must stop adopting technology for its own sake and clearly communicate the "why" behind changes. Every new system, process, or tool should have a clearly articulated business purpose that connects to employee daily experiences.

This requires moving beyond feature-focused training to impact-focused education that helps employees understand how new tools enable better outcomes for customers, colleagues, and personal professional development.

Why AI Demands People-First Strategy

The Creator-Executor Divide

As AI transforms industries, Singapore faces a critical choice: become a hub of efficient executors or innovative creators. The distinction matters enormously in an economy where routine tasks increasingly shift to automated systems.

Engaged workforces naturally gravitate toward creative, strategic thinking—exactly the skillsets that remain uniquely human in an AI-augmented workplace. Disengaged workforces, by contrast, focus on task completion and process adherence, making them vulnerable to automation displacement.

Responsible AI Implementation

Long-term AI success requires organizations that understand both technological capabilities and human behavioral dynamics. This means developing AI systems that augment human decision-making rather than replace human judgment.

Organizations with strong people-development cultures are better positioned to implement AI responsibly because they understand the nuanced ways technology impacts workflow, communication, and strategic thinking.

Competitive Advantage Through Human Capital

Gallup estimates that fully engaged workplaces could add US$9.6 trillion in productivity globally—equivalent to 9% GDP growth. Singapore's engagement deficit represents a significant competitive disadvantage that compounds as AI tools become more sophisticated.

Organizations that invest in engagement and culture transformation now position themselves to tap on AI as a strategic multiplier rather than a cost-reduction tool.

The Strategic Imperative

The window for action is narrowing rapidly. Organizations face a fundamental choice: invest in engagement and culture transformation now, or risk Singapore's competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

Immediate Actions

• Provide management and soft skills training to address extreme manager disengagement

• Create structured time for strategic thinking and collaborative problem-solving

• Establish clear communication around technology adoption purposes

Medium-Term Strategy

• Develop effective coaching techniques to boost manager performance

• Build inclusive decision-making frameworks that optimizes generational diversity

• Implement AI systems that augment rather than replace human strategic thinking

Long-Term Vision

• Cultivate organizational cultures that prioritize people development alongside technological advancement

• Position Singapore as a hub for innovative creators rather than efficient executors

• Establish global leadership in responsible AI implementation

Singapore's business community has built its reputation on strategic thinking and adaptive capability. The disengagement crisis represents both a significant challenge and an opportunity to demonstrate these strengths at scale.

The question isn't whether organizations can afford to invest in people-first transformation—it's whether they can afford not to. In an AI-driven economy, the most sophisticated technology serves little purpose without engaged, innovative human capital to guide its strategic application.

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Advisor for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes. We are the AI Adoption Partners for Neuron Labs and CX Sphere to support companies in ethical, responsible and sustainable AI adoption. Catch our weekly episodes of The Digital Maturity Blueprint Podcast by subscribing to our YouTube Channel.

Citations:

• https://sbr.com.sg/videos/disengagement-crisis-puts-singapores-productivity-risk

• https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659279/global-engagement-falls-second-time-2009.aspx

• https://hrzone.com/gallup-2025-employee-engagement-decline-causing-us438-billion-in-lost-productivity/

Usetiful and Mad About Marketing Consulting Partner to Accelerate AI Adoption and Customer Experience Transformation

In the era of AI-driven innovation, success isn't just about building smarter products. It's about helping people adopt and use them effectively.

That’s why we’re proud to announce a strategic partnership between Usetiful, a no-code Digital Adoption Platform, and Mad About Marketing Consulting, an award-winning boutique firm that helps businesses navigate complex marketing, customer experience, and go-to-market transformations.

Together, we are combining strategic advisory and operational enablement to help companies, from startups to corporates, unlock the full potential of digital and AI investments.

Why This Partnership Matters

AI is transforming how products are built, marketed, and supported. But the biggest challenge isn’t the technology. It’s adoption. Even the most innovative tools will fail to deliver return on investment without the right strategy, onboarding, and user enablement.

Mad About Marketing Consulting provides advisory services to address pain points across process, people, and platforms. We work hand-in-hand with your internal marketing teams or external agency partners to develop sustainable solutions that strengthen your value proposition and drive acquisition, engagement, experience, and retention strategies.

Our services include:

●      Marketing transformation and go-to-market planning
●      Customer experience strategy, martech optimization, and digital channel alignment
●      Change management and leadership enablement
●      Their signature AI Adoption Transformation framework, helping leaders assess readiness, define the right use cases, and prepare teams for longterm success

Usetiful complements this with a powerful no-code platform that helps teams:

●      Onboard customers through in-app tours, checklists, and smart tips
●      Reduce churn and boost product activation
●      Equip Sales and Marketing teams with personalized, scalable user journeys
●      Onboard new employees into digital tools and workflows more efficiently

A Human-First Approach to AI Transformation

This partnership is grounded in a shared belief: successful AI transformation must start with the people who use it. Technology should enhance human workflows, not overwhelm them.

Many organizations are eager to implement AI-powered tools, but few have a structured roadmap that ensures meaningful adoption across customer experiences, employee workflows, and internal operations. That’s where Usetiful and Mad About Marketing Consulting come together.

Here’s how we help businesses drive AI transformation together:

✅ Example 1: Customer Targeting, Acquisition, Engagement and Retention

Mad About Marketing Consulting leads the strategic phase, developing a refined value proposition, identifying high-value segments, and defining detailed customer targeting criteria across B2B and B2C channels.

Usetiful brings the strategy to life through execution, by delivering personalized onboarding flows tailored to each segment, using smart tips and product tours that adapt based on user tags, behavior, and goals. Retention is supported with in-app nudges, contextual check-ins, and feedback surveys.

Goals to achieve: Increased acquisition efficiency, higher onboarding completion, and improved customer lifetime value across key segments.

✅ Example 2: Strategic Planning and In-App Execution

Mad About Marketing Consulting helps a SaaS company define its go-to-market strategy for a new AI-powered analytics dashboard. Our advisory team runs a Value Proposition Workshop, maps key personas, and defines success metrics.

Usetiful then turns that strategy into in-product experiences. The platform delivers personalized onboarding checklists, in-app walkthroughs, and contextual tooltips that help each user segment understand and engage with the new tools.

Goals to achieve: Faster time to value and higher feature adoption for a complex AI rollout.

✅ Example 3: Internal AI Enablement for Sales and Marketing Teams

Mad About Marketing Consulting conducts a Martech Enablement Workshop with a growth-stage company trying to streamline its customer and marketing engagement platforms and identify gaps in current usage amongst its employees.

Usetiful supports internal enablement using in-app onboarding for Sales and Marketing teams. Tooltips and walkthroughs are embedded in the CRM and email platforms to train teams on new AI workflows.

Goals to achieve: Reduced resistance to change, faster team rampup, and more effective sales execution.

✅ Example 4: Global AI Rollout in a Corporate Environment

Mad About Marketing Consulting leads a change management initiative for a multinational launching AI-driven CX automation. We manage training, stakeholder alignment, and team buy-in.

Usetiful handles onboarding at scale across customer-facing tools, ensuring employees know how to use AI support systems effectively through contextual guidance.

Goals to achieve: Smoother global rollout and increased usage of new AI tools.

Through these joint efforts, organizations not only plan and launch AI initiatives they ensure those initiatives are adopted, understood, and optimized by the people who matter most.

Ready to Transform?

If your organization is investing in digital transformation, marketing modernization, or AI-powered customer experiences, now is the time to ensure your people are ready too.

Let’s turn strategy into action and adoption into impact.

👉 Learn more about Usetiful
👉 Explore the AI Adoption Transformation approach
📩 Interested in exploring Mad About Marketing Consulting’s services? Reach out at contact@madaboutmarketingconsulting.com

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Advisor for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes. We are the AI Adoption Partners for Neuron Labs and CX Sphere to support companies in ethical, responsible and sustainable AI adoption. Catch our weekly episodes of The Digital Maturity Blueprint Podcast by subscribing to our YouTube Channel.

Workplace Culture Evolution: Toxic Work Cultures, Gaslighting and More

In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, workplace culture has emerged as the critical differentiator between organizations that thrive and those that merely survive. Let's dissect the key elements of cultural transformation and why it matters more than ever.

The Toxic Workplace Reality Check

Toxic workplace culture extends far beyond occasional office politics. It manifests through systemic dysfunction, where gaslighting and manipulation become normalized operating procedures. Think less "difficult boss" and more "calculated erosion of professional confidence." When managers consistently deny doing what is right then criticize team members for non-compliance, we're not witnessing simple miscommunication – we're seeing tactical psychological manipulation at work.

The Junior Employee Vulnerability Factor

Here's an uncomfortable truth: junior employees bear the brunt of toxic cultures, creating a problematic talent development pipeline. Why? They're navigating a perfect storm of vulnerabilities:

- Limited workplace navigation experience
- Strong validation needs
- Minimal support networks
- Heightened susceptibility to power dynamics

This combination creates a breeding ground for burnout and career stagnation – exactly what forward-thinking organizations must prevent.

The Leadership Imperative: Why Cultural Change Starts at the Top

Remember the garden analogy: organizational culture grows what leadership plants and tends. When toxic behaviors (weeds) go unchecked, they flourish. C-suite leaders aren't just cultural influencers – they're cultural architects. Their actions, not their words, set the template for organizational behavior.

Practical Steps for Leadership Evolution

For C-suite leaders and managers committed to cultural transformation:

1. Model Transparent Communication

- Share decision rationales openly
- Demonstrate accountability
- Create clear feedback channels

2. Implement Structural Safeguards

- Establish robust anti-harassment policies
- Create anonymous reporting systems
- Provide comprehensive mental health support

 3. Develop Leadership Capabilities

- Invest in emotional intelligence
- Build conflict resolution expertise
- Foster inclusive decision-making

The Customer-People Connection: A Strategic Necessity

Here's the business case that gets the CEO’s attention: customer experience will never exceed employee experience. I first learnt of this concept during my time in OCBC when I was part of the pioneer customer experience team. It has inspired my work ever since. The math is straightforward:

- Engaged employees = Delighted customers
- Toxic culture = Compromised customer service
- Healthy culture = Sustainable competitive advantage

Think about it: How can we expect employees operating in toxic environments to deliver exceptional customer experiences? They can't – and that's the bottom-line impact of cultural negligence.

Building Integrated Experience Systems

Modern organizations need frameworks that align employee and customer experiences:

1. Cultural Assessment Metrics

- Track employee experience indicators
- Map customer journey touchpoints
- Measure psychological safety
- Monitor engagement patterns

2. Communication Architecture

- Define clear information flows
- Set response expectations
- Create constructive feedback loops
- Enable cross-functional collaboration

3. Diverse Perspective Integration

- Establish mentorship programs
- Create inclusive dialogue forums with actionable and measurable steps
- Enable cross-cultural learning
- Foster innovation through diversity

The ROI of Cultural Excellence

The investment case is compelling:

- Reduced turnover costs
- Enhanced productivity
- Improved innovation through psychological safety
- Stronger employer brand- Higher customer satisfaction
- Sustainable competitive advantage

Moving Forward: The Integration Imperative

In today's experience economy, treating employee and customer experience as separate domains is a strategic mistake. The most successful organizations recognize these elements as an integrated system requiring holistic management.

Remember: Culture isn't just what you promote – it's what you permit. What's growing in your organizational garden?

The question isn't whether to prioritize culture transformation – it's how quickly you can make it happen before your competitor does.

What's your next move in creating a workplace that drives both employee and customer success?

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Advisor for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Solving The People, Platform and Process Conundrum

When it comes to transformation of any sort, especially digital ones, many business and marketing leaders tend to focus mainly on the packaging, pricing, platform and sometimes people side of things.

Based on my decades of experience working in global corporates, including professional services and consultancies, I have come to observe that the dependency on the 3Ps (People, Platforms, Process) is inherent everywhere I help with transformation, including marketing and organization-wide transformation to upskill, digitalize and restructure the function to be fit for the intended vision of the organization.

However, I have also observed that many don’t fully understand the true potential and are not maximizing the true potential of the marketing function, often treating them as a communication, creative, events or worse, a corporate gifts department.

Due to this lack of understanding and appreciation of how marketing can and should work, they often try to force new technologies, new platforms or restructure the function in such a way that it leaves no room for progress, upward mobility or innovation in the way they think, plan and execute.

This in turn affects their ability to help you actualize your business value proposition to your customers as they can only do a redesigning of your product or service offerings with a nicer tagline and/or visual year after year or come up with gimmicky promotions to entice the customers.

This then affects your overall growth and profitability as you are not addressing the true needs of your customer and in turn, you look to cut the marketing budget and worse, headcount as you see them as a cost centre and not much else. Being short on resources on all fronts, your marketing team begins to churn or go back to doing the same things in trying to cope with all the business demand and the vicious cycle repeats itself.

However, often times we should be looking at transformation in totality to include process as well to check if 1) your existing process is supportive or conducive for the transformation you need to make and 2) what changes or enhancements do you need to make or 3) what new processes you need to create to incorporate the transformation needed.

Take for example, you wish to introduce automated A/B testing within your MarTech capabilities to improve on efficiency and speed to market. There are a few things you need to consider from a process perspective.

This includes:

• What is the current process your team has to go through to create content and offers to enable the A/B testing even if it’s a manual one?

• Will that process change with an automated tool or will there be an additional layer of process needed to enable the testing? This can be approval of the A/B testing logic set-up in addition to the content and offer mechanics for example.

• Are there regulatory restrictions to adhere to from a customer fairness perspective? How about the customer targeting set-up logic needed? Can you use your existing set-up framework and customer targeting attributes or do you need a new one?

• Is there any security risk in terms of data transference leakage or concerns by incorporating the new A/B testing tool onto your existing MarTech stack?

The above is just a rough example of the process and platform side of things to consider when it comes to even a simple implementation of a seemingly harmless tool. Just barely scratching the surface and not even getting into the deep end of transformation.

This is why I founded Mad About Marketing Consulting, to bridge the gap between business and marketing, having helmed transformative roles for several global MNCs, including EY, JLL, Kantar, State Street and most recently, Citibank. I work with your business and marketing teams, creative, brand, media and even business management agencies to bring across that insider perspective of how marketing can and should work as a business enabler. This is to ensure nothing falls through the cracks as you go about your organization wide transformation.

Simply said, no one understands marketing pain points and potential as well as a marketer who has been at the forefront of change, built teams from scratch and nurtured inherited and mature teams.

Check out my credentials here.

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Demystifying Digital and Data

I cringe and roll my eyes internally whenever I hear companies talk about how digitally mature they are because they have a nice looking website, are on all the latest social channels and have adopted a dozen of MarTech tools but not entirely sure how they are measuring success or what they are truly trying to achieve.

Being digital goes beyond just a nice looking website, be on all the latest social channels and buying all the fancy MarTech tools so you look like you are at the forefront of digital adoption. It’s also to avoid creating a data and digital dumpster.

Yes, there is such a thing as too much data and digital tools.

On the flipside, there is also such a thing as over reliance on one single platform/tool, person or process to try and help you make sense of the data you have or enable your business.

“Wait a minute”, I hear you say. “What am I supposed to do if both scenarios are not ideal?.”

I was recently inspired to write something about this after attending a few forums speaking about digitalization, data analytics, Gen AI and MarTech.

It depends on a few factors:

• what are your objectives for using this tool or platform?

• what are you trying to achieve and what insights are you trying to gather with the data collected?

• how does the tool and data help you achieve your objectives?

• what are you current processes like that will either hinder or enable you to fully utilize the tool and data collected?

• what are the current skillsets and mindsets of your people that again will either hinder or enable you to maximize the tool and data?

• what matters most when it comes to choosing the right tool?

• what matters most when it comes to analyzing the data collected?

• have you tested other tools serving a similar nature and what are the test steps you have used?

• how are you collecting your data, storing, managing and analyzing it? What do you do with the insights gathered?

• understand the pros and cons of multiple tools/platforms versus single tool/platform and their impact on your objectives and desired outcomes.

Some companies have chosen to stick to certain tools because they have invested a lot of time, money and effort on it despite it not meeting their needs. Some companies have chosen to over rely on just one or two people to be their so-called power users and are almost at the mercy of these folks.

Both scenarios create what we call bad behavior almost like a bad relationship where you know deep down it’s not quite right but you are so entrenched it feels like you need to live with it. What happens then is they abandon the tools bought or underutilize it (especially in the first scenario) and buy yet another tool without first understanding what is it that is not working well.

The other possibility is to hire an expert to either train your users or join your company and end up being at their mercy especially if you as the function or business owner doesn’t have a clue as to what you are trying to achieve, what the tool is capable of and its limitations, and how you intend to sustain the use of the tool if your needs change.

The way I prefer to work and advise my clients have always been to really deep dive into their pain points, current processes, people capabilities, business and marketing objectives , outcomes they want to achieve and how they want to measure success.

If I know for sure that there is a more effective platform or tool to help them achieve what they need, I will not hesitate to advise them to bite the bullet and consider another tool. Likewise, if I know the issue is not the tool but their current lack of knowledge or a gap in their processes, then I will work with them on addressing that gap instead.

A critical part of change management is mindset and behavioral change, and enablement of the people with the right skillset, supportive processes and therefore cultivating a supportive mindset to adapt to the change.

There is no one-size fits all, so what matters more is to be open to learn about different options available out there, not just what you are comfortable with or what others are using.

Psst - For data analytics, there are - tableau, amazon quicksight, power bi, looker, qilk, apache spark just to name a few commonly used ones. I have my personal favorites but it depends again on the factors I mentioned above.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Communications Made Complex by Colleagues?

In my years of managing and navigating various corporate structures, be it leading organizational transformation or being part of a cog in the wheel of change, I have learnt that:

• changes are often made more complicated than usual due to people

• this complication increases even more when these people get caught up in less than ideal processes

• add politics to the fold and you get lots of resistance, inertia, quiet quitters or passive-aggressive behaviour

I have had my fair share of being the wide eye doe, especially during the earlier days of my career when I thought naively that everyone should see the newbie (aka me) as being harmless.

It took me a good five years at least to wise up about a thing or two and not take things to heart when the going gets tough.

That is why I place huge emphasis on internal communications at the following levels when it comes to transformation of any sort:

• organization-wide

• within departments and teams

• between managers and their one-downs

• amongst working peers

• across functional lines, regardless of seniority

The importance of internal communications and internal stakeholder management includes making an effort to strengthen one’s interpersonal skills.

It is not so much about whether one is an extrovert or introvert. Good interpersonal skills comes with being able to connect and communicate with empathy, active listening and having the bigger picture in mind of what you are trying to achieve.

Just always bear in mind that majority of people are innately fearful of change, disruptions to the familiar and protective of what they care about. Thus, when we are the ones responsible for implementing and communicating that change, we should be prepared for resistance, complications, and people going out of the way to make it almost impossible for you to achieve what you want.

Also important to keep in mind - it’s nothing personal; it’s just business. Focus on establishing that position of trust, impartiality and highlighting the benefits to those impacted by the change.

It takes time, patience, conviction and confidence, and resist playing petty politics.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting

Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Corporate Succession Planning: When the King of the Jungle Vacates and Monkeys Run Amok

I liken the corporate environment for certain organizations to a jungle sometimes in terms of the power plays that come into the picture when the king of the jungle vacates its position for whatever reason.

This happens often in organizations that are undergoing transitions or that lack a good succession plan to prepare for senior movements. This, I have come to observe is regardless of organizational size and years in existence. The situation worsens for sure if both are true for the organization - lack of a good succession plan when you are undergoing a transition.

When it comes to succession planning, just having bums to fill seats is not good enough. It needs to be the right bum for the right seat so you avoid a square peg in a round hole situation. You also need to ensure these transitional leaders are actually capable of leading and not just PowerPoint slide reviewers or campaign and content approvers since both roles can be replaced by Gen AI strictly speaking.

By leading it means, they need to be capable of planning, developing a strategy and capable of engaging their new teams as part of the planning process. In short, treat them like people that matter and not treat them as just arms and legs to do the work that you don’t wish to do or are incapable of doing yourself.

This is also where the power plays start coming into the picture like monkeys having a field day calling the shots and insisting that every animal should only eat fruits and nuts like them and swing around by their tails from tree to tree because that is how they know to eat, live and act. There is a reason why monkeys are not the king of the jungle just as there is a difference between a leader versus a manager by appointment.

Although it’s normal to have layers of reporting lines if you have a huge team of more than 15 people or where you need to split the team into sub functions and appoint team leads or function leads, I personally believe every leader should still remain connected with even the most junior member of their team. This is especially during times of transition and if you are a newly minted lead. Until you are fully confident and sure of your functional leads or team leads’ capabilities as well as alignment on the way forward as a team, you should ensure the rest of the team is not left behind in terms of important communications, planning sessions and not being relinquished to silent executors or you will end up with a bunch of quiet quitters.

The power plays become more evident especially when you have team leads or functional leads who are actually in a square peg, round hole situation and act out their insecurities with a few obvious actions, including:

• pushing down work and delegating all the hard to do stuff to their one-downs, who might not even be able to do the work without guidance or clear direction of how this fits into the intended plan or bigger picture. I.e. they are told to just do blindly.

• fighting for the limelight by focusing on presenting the nice and showy stuff instead of doing actual work that matters to customers. I.e. power point becomes their best friend and their one-downs spent most of their time doing slide after slide showcasing how well they have done, so they can in turn present that to their bosses.

• taking credit for others’ work or worse, not giving credit to their one-downs for fear that they themselves will be made redundant.

• thinking and acting selfishly by not working with other colleagues on projects that they know would be relevant to what they are doing currently and by working together, it would enhance the output. Instead, they choose to shut them off having access to the project so they can be seen as the sole owner for that project though it would create win-win outcomes for their customers.

Organizations therefore should always take succession planning and leadership development seriously, regardless of whether they are in transition mode or not. Succession planning should not be a game of thrones, musical chairs or a case of appointing people you are familiar with or like even if they don’t actually have the capability to be that bum on the seat without breaking the chair.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

Helping Employees Cope with Transitions & Transformation

When companies go through transformation and restructuring, it’s almost inevitable that some roles might be displaced. Similar to coping with loss and grief, some employees are more emotionally and mentally impacted than others, be it whether they are the ones being displaced or seeing their peers or managers being displaced.

Just based on personal experience of what’s been done well and what has room for improvement, companies who are truly people centric will try to do the following to help their employees:

1) redesign the roles that are to be displaced and work with the employees to reskill and realign to the new scope if possible

2) help the displaced employees to look for alternative roles within the organization and options for them to be reskilled if needed

3) help the displaced employees to look for roles outside of the organization and options for reskilling, coaching, counselling and resume reviews where needed.

I have intentionally positioned this in sequential order as I think companies should ideally start from 1) and utilize 3) as the very last resort. I recall when I was involved in a transformation exercise in a previous company, I had to go through this flow and after discussing with the direct manager and CEO potential options, I eventually went with 2) for the employee concerned as it was simply the right thing to do in order to be truly people centric and empathetic. Also from a business viability perspective, as long as your company is still planning to remain in business, you will save more time, resources and money with 1) and 2) as the recruitment as well as onboarding process usually take an average of 6 months to a year in totality, depending on the seniority of the role.

There is a reason why certain talents are hired to join you in the first place and it should go beyond their hard skills or academic background to the soft skills. These employees should also have accumulated new skills and knowledge with you as their employer over the years. If you say these are no longer needed, it’s as good as shooting yourself in the foot and saying you have basically not done a good job with developing your own employees with viable skills to help your company’s growth. The question then you also need to ask yourself is - what have you been doing all this while? What processes then do you need to relook to improve upon that?

In terms of employees who are impacted by other employees leaving in option 2) and 3), it is ideal for companies and their senior leadership to be both transparent and timely in communicating such impact to them. Openly acknowledge the decisions made and consult the outplaced employee beforehand as well if he/she would prefer to be present when the news is shared or would prefer to be the one sharing the news to his/her team concerned.

Importantly, acknowledge the contributions of the displaced employee and be transparent as well if the remaining employees are to expect further displacements to take place. Be upfront of the options explored and offered as well, so they know what to expect if their own roles are likely to be transformed or made obsolete during the transformation process.

Be sure to avail avenues of two-way communications to them, be it directly to the senior leadership or an independent channel similar to a counselling hotline for those who just want a listening ear to voice their fears and distress.

Companies and their leaders should always bear in mind that their decisions and actions, including the way they have handled the entire process and managed the communications will have a downstream impact on their employer brand reputation. Such impact is often longstanding and no amount of employer related awards can help salvage once the damage is done.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

The Sandwiched Leadership

The majority of us who have been working for at least two decades and grown into people management roles can probably identify with what I’m about to say.

Not all of us are able to move into the C-Suite level at this point, meaning the bulk of us would be sitting somewhere in mid to upper mid management with direct and indirect reports.

Concurrently, we would also have both direct and indirect managers hovering above us and around us.

This makes us a sandwiched leadership as we constantly need to think about upwards and downwards management and best ways to manage both without tipping that intricate balance.

Team management is not something for everyone nor does having the title automatically makes you a ‘real’ manager.

Having been in roles where I have inherited teams and grown teams from scratch, each has its own unique challenges but also satisfaction when the team flourishes over time.

Team management is also not about micromanaging or throwing them into the pits and leaving them to their own demise. Again, it’s a fine line as it depends as well between individuals. One man’s meat is another man’s poison as we say.

It’s also not about talking down or talking up for that matter but about paving the way to enable your team’s success while managing your bosses’ expectations and enabling their own success.

We are not expected to know everything and be a specialist in every single area that we’re managing but rather, we need to have the strategic view, forward looking vision and appreciation of the ground up challenges and pitfalls to be addressed.

The majority of our time is spent anticipating issues and identifying ways to prevent or address them. We also need to balance the dynamics of the team’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, chemistry and expectations towards each other. The last part is simply shielding them from the upper management’s own expectations, pressures and politics so they can function seamlessly.

It’s not a walk in the park and one thing at least to me for sure is that one can never effectively lead a team to succeed without genuinely caring for them as people.

With that said, I think the sandwiched managers have it the hardest and it’s also not surprising that many have given up, especially when they don’t get the appreciation or support needed from their managers as well as their own teams.

Some simply decided to go back to being individual contributors while others might decide to just venture out to smaller companies where they can be the top management instead with a more manageable leadership structure.

There’s no right or wrong but companies who truly cherish talent and their people should pay more attention to the sandwiched managers before it’s too late.

In my upcoming post(s), I’ll highlight a few key challenges facing sandwiched managers, the impact they have on business continuity and culture, as well as how companies can better support them.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.

The Dying Empathetic Leadership

In all my years of working, I have come across very few truly empathetic leaders who are genuine in their treatment of their employees and customers.

Some I wish I can work with them longer when I choose to move on for other reasons as I know they would have taught me a lot more than I know now in terms of thinking, doing and communicating with empathy.

Empathy is something not every senior management or leader has unfortunately and it’s very telling in their behind-the-scenes speech and actions.

It’s undervalued simply because leaders don’t really get rated on their ability to connect with their employees and treat them with empathy.

I have witnessed many failures in terms of leaders in 1) not communicating emphatically to their people, 2) not showing true empathy in trying to understand the challenges faced by their workforce and 3) not listening with empathy when their employees provide feedback through forums.

It ends up being lip service or more trying to appear to do what is expected of them to look good and not because they genuinely care.

Classic examples are when there are organizational layoffs or restructuring.

The onset of how decisions are made have nothing to do with empathy but rather the bottom line of cost, profitability and returns.

That is why things never really change for the better in the longer term for most organizations and their leaders that make decisions without empathy.

Over the years, I have been privy to how such decisions are made, sometimes callously and without even sound logic. Rather, it’s more a stop-gap and band-aid approach where true impact on the people are not even considered in the decision making process.

What is worse though is the way such changes are communicated or not communicated to the workforce.

They talk about stock prices, shareholders equity and customers but forget their employees, the backbone of the company carrying that mission on their shoulders and believing in the promises made during the town halls, leadership emails and pep talks.

Poorly worded communications, which is as clear as mud and clueless management sitting around trying to find the right things to say or lend some insights to their team doesn’t help either.

Good, solid, reliable and empathetic corporate communications is a dying art in this sense.

For any self respecting CEO, my advice is to at least make sure you have a solid and empathetic communications advisor if you, yourself are not empathetic by nature.

Empathy might not bring you immediate revenue but it will have longer term benefits to the organization as you will make decisions that actually solve problems for both your customers and employees for the longer term.

Less attrition, less churn and more sustainable growth.

About the Author

Mad About Marketing Consulting 

Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.