I recently moved to assume a new role in my Division, a policy role. It was initially one I was very reluctant to take up, as policy roles traditionally have been unpopular in my organisation because of a few reasons:
(a) You do not own any domain area in terms of expertise or knowledge, but are expected to contribute your views to "improve" the policy of a line Department, whose people have been in that field for ages,
(b) People in that domain area tend to see you as a source of either (1) someone who talks nonsense, not knowing the ground or having enough technical expertise/experience in that field or (2) a work generator, someone who will give them extra (often unimportant) work and send them on wild goose chases, because you don't know the field well enough, and/or because you are not the implementor and so have no aligned incentive to minimise work for them. In fact adding to their work load scores you points!
(3) Competing with them for limelight, because you often report to a different boss, and so both sides are trying to profile themselves. You can't "value add" without the line department (who has been in this field for so long) looking bad.
So, with the odds stacked against me, I somehow found myself assuming this role as of 1 Jul 2013. But a saving grace (or not, in terms of workload), was that I was still holding on to my previous position in my Department, which I was growing very comfortable with and which I liked very much. It was good in that I consoled myself - if I hate my new policy role, I can always have my Department work to fall back on, and at least I'm not stuck doing policy full-time. Some people felt I was getting the raw end of the deal in terms of workload (and I also acted like the poor overworked officer when people asked me about my new role), but I was actually not too unhappy about it.
What was surprising to me, was how enjoyable and challenging my new role was to me, both in terms of defining the job scope of this new policy unit, what me and my new team (albeit a small one) are each supposed to do, how we would work together, establishing relations with new Departments, and just getting up to speed on the myriad of issues in my work. Some parts are more enjoyable than others, and not every one is as challenging, but I shall talk more on the enjoyable ones (being someone who likes to dwell on the positive, remember the good and forget the bad, haha).
They are the last 2 areas of my work, and the first one on establishing contacts has been a lesson in emotional banks. I realised that in getting in touch for the first time with Departmental staff, that some treated me with surprise (why are you approaching me to ask me all sorts of questions about my work?), puzzlement (so you want me to send you my draft paper? Then what are you going to do with it? How does it affect workflow?) and skeptics (ha! This new policy unit is just a waste of time. It overlaps with what we and other departments are doing and will just add to the bottleneck, further slowing down an already long and cumbersome clearance process. You are just going to add to our workload, like all the other initiatives that have gone before. And how can you possibly value add to our work?). Many of the Directors, in fact, probably all Directors, fell into the last category to some extent. I could see their distrust and wariness in their eyes and from their comments about the policy unit. I was also hearing some of these sentiments from the grapevine.
However, what I have found is that it is very important to gain their trust and establish your credibility by giving good, constructive comments, from the get-go. Let's see, even my own Director, was quite surprised to see me sitting in a meeting where they were discussing another section's work. Having argued with the staff quite a bit before this meeting, where most of my comments were shot down by them (sigh, it's actually a matter of timing, many of my comments were on areas have already been approved, which is a big pity in my opinion), I kept quiet in this meeting until the very end, where I raised one concern with their recommendation. It pertained to how the policy would look to the customers, which would be nothing short of confusing. To my Director's credit, he took it in his stride, and immediately suggested a way to manage this risk. It got incorporated into the slides as a sub-bullet on the last slide, and eventually it all got approved. At the management meeting, they even talked about that sub-bullet, and how that would be an issue on the ground, and my Director spoke up at the meeting to commit the Department (actually my colleagues) to even more mitigation measures, to minimise the confusion. I must say even though I got none of the credit for that, and my policy boss doesn't know this, I felt a private victory inside myself, at having influenced public policy in Singapore in a small way.
Another similar incident happened at another meeting with another Director. Once he realised my comments were on-the-ball, he started asking his staff to amend the slides to reflect my comments, and was decidedly warmer in his interactions with me afterwards. With a third Department, a Deputy Director who was initially quite snarky with his comments on the policy unit, started sharing some problems he had with his work. It was a philosophical one - where they had to promote something which people all agreed was a good thing to do, but simply was not cost-effective. Why should government do it then? He mused. I overcame all my hesitation and uncertainty about what I was about to say (a lot of it when it comes to Singaporeans!) and asked him what was in his cost-benefit analysis. Apparently, he did not take some future long-term cost into account, which the government would have to fork out if they did not promote what they were promoting. So if they took that future cost into account, would the cost-benefit analysis actually become positive? He looked like a light bulb had gone on in his head, and immediately turned to his staff and started giving instructions on how to tweak their numbers. After the meeting, the gruff Deputy Director was still telling me about some other issue he was facing and how he may need policy's help in the future. I felt like I scored another private victory and won another person's trust.
All these are emotional bank accounts, and as they are all new, I am wary of putting too many negative deposits into it at the beginning. According to Stephen Covey's book, when a relationship has been built up over the years, with many positive deposits, you can make a few withdrawals in a row, and the trust level is still very high. But not so for fledgling relationships. You have to kind of make sure the deposits outweight the withdrawals, or you run up negative feelings all the time when you encounter the person. I had also made up my mind, shortly after I assumed this new role, that I wanted to be known for a few things, namely simplicity, clarity, insight and innovation. As a unit, I wanted us to be known for humility, going back to basics and fundamentals, and an ability to get the policies approved by presenting the facts in a convincing, persuasive, easy-to-understand manner. I suppose I arrived at these because of my dislike of their opposites. I dislike unnecessarily complicated, messy writings, which display no insight, no clarity of thought, no creativity. I am aware that things like insight and creativity in new fields of knowledge take time, but they are goals I aspire towards.
Another thing I am enjoying in my new role is learning the work. As my new boss promised me, the work in my policy role certainly is interesting. What he didn't tell me was how technical and scientific it was. I found that out when I organised a workplan seminar recently for my Division. From the workplan presentations of the 5 departments, I found out that I was going to have to brush up on my science again, if I was to comment on the work of certain Departments. For another Department, it was heavily engineering-based. Disliking fluff and having a preference for going back to fundamentals, I think I better brush up on my engineering too. Thankfully I liked science in school!
Every day is bringing with it new challenges, new issues to understand and new people to meet. I am having a fun time. I thank God, as my hubby once said, the ability to enjoy your work is a blessing from God.
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