Our culture, the best there is
Lee Wenyong & Co. is an aesthetic experience: we are driven by a sense of personal purpose, we feel fully alive, we are engaged in our jobs, & we’re wide awake, resonating with our SME environment.
But we are the lucky ones. The state of the Singaporean job market, & the work cultures offered at many companies, is quite the opposite of what we are at Lee Wenyong & Co.
SMEs & MNCs are both equally guilty of this to a very large degree. Their workplaces are described as anesthetic experiences: Opposite of aesthetic. Their employees’ senses are forced to shut down, in order to cope with the discomfort. In their organizations, employees dull their senses to keep within the dysfunctional culture & tepid job scope. When in fact(!), their HR would do well to make jobs more interesting.
Strategic HR is to wake employees up, not put them to sleep. The workplace has never been more stimulating in the history of the earth, driven by technology, yet employees zombify themselves & drag their carcasses to their workplaces. It is our job at Lee Wenyong & Co. to help SME employees engage with the workplace.
To date, I have studied more than 613 management organization charts in my 9 year career as a corporate man.
If you look closely, organization charts resemble technical drawings, based on the army, with titles like CHIEF executive OFFICER, financial OFFICER, GENERAL manager, bus CAPTAIN, admin OFFICER, etc., it presents the organization as a MECHANISM, where people describe departments as FUNCTIONS.
But, an organization is NOT AT ALL like a mechanism. An organization is a living organism, it’s organic, it is driven by feelings, connections, relationships & motivations. If all the employees left the building where they work, there is no organization left. The organization IS the people & their relationships with one another.
Instead of an industrial metaphor, I prefer to frame the organization in an agricultural context.
I refer to myself as a gardener. As a gardener, I cannot MAKE plants grow. Plants grow themselves. As a gardener, my job is to recreate the conditions & environment so that plants are more likely to grow & flower. The same can be said of organizations. In encouraging & stimulating conditions, employees flourish; in adverse conditions, not.
Organizations should not be about standardization or consistency or committees, but about personalizing & customizing our approach around the talents of the individuals who make up that organization.
If Lee Wenyong & Co. succeeds, I cannot say that I created that success. I only created the circumstances for talents to be revealed, & nurtured the environment for you to flourish in. The talent was buried deep within you, I simply unearthed it. All I had to do was to remove all inhibitions, dogma & fear, to allow for each of your talents to reveal itself & propagate.
As leaders, we must recreate the ideal conditions for our respective teams to succeed. Let us create & maintain the environment at Lee Wenyong & Co. where everyone is able to discover & revel in their passions, where at work they get to do what they do best everyday.