Letting Birds Fly

Father’s Day has come and gone. It was a time when we all try out best to be nice about the men who contributed a tinny cell that made us into something living. My experiences of fatherhood have been pretty good. You could say I struck it lucky when God decided to give me parents who couldn’t stay married forever. My dad did an awesome job of keeping in style. My stepdads, Lee and Thomas ensured that I understood that the qualification for being a father wasn’t necessarily biological.

When it comes to my natural father, I’m often wax lyrical about the fact that he provided the funds for a pretty cushy lifestyle and  I am an  “educated man” because of him. As my mother used to say, “No matter how bad his business situation, he’s seen to it that your school fees were paid.”

However, what I can’t thank my dad enough for was his ability to let me grow. It was just after the tragedy in New Zealand, when Ronnie and Yin Tit had been blown away by that terrible tragedy. I had pushed for the army to cancel the exercise for my battery and expressed my unwillingness to go for a living firing that had sent my good friend to an early grave. I spoke to my mother, who called my father, who then proceeded to make life hell for the SAF. He told me, “If they want you to fire a live round, tell them, you won’t and I’ll see to it that they won’t court martial you.” He also told my battery commander that as a father, he kept looking at Ronnie’s obituary picture and kept seeing my picture in his place and explained to the battery commander that it was an exercise that every parent was going through (my battery commander ended up becoming a father to three girls).

Well, after fighting tooth and nail to get me out of the exercise, I decided to join the live demo in Thailand. The powers that be in the army insisted I speak to my parents. Dad looked at me, told me his reservations and then told me to speak to my mother and then said that if I insisted on doing the live firing. In that moment, I really felt I had the coolest Dad around. It was this simple, I was telling him that I wanted to do something that could kill me (and remember the evidence that this was potentially lethal had just hit home) and his words were “I will respect your decision, no matter what.”

I look back at this incident because it reflects one of the things many of us forget to do in our roles as people with responsibilities – namely to let go and to let our charges fly or sink according to their merits. In a way, our first experience of leadership comes from our parents, who are programmed to look out for us and if you read through enough job sites, you’re always told that “good bosses” are the bosses who “mentor” and “nurture” you. In short, a good boss is like a parent.

There is however, a point when parents and other “leadership” figures stumble and fail the ones they are supposed to “look after.” That point of failure is usually when they forget to let go. At best, that analogy is annoying – I think of my ex-girlfriend, who, in her early thirties needed her mother’s approval to be with me (Needless to say, her mother loathed me  even if I was and am the only man she’s been involved with who works for a living.) This is silly.

In businesses, the inability to “let go” or “bossitities” has probably been a leading cause of business failures. The worst cases of this come from “entrepreneurs” particularly the very successful ones who built businesses from scratch. The “founder” forgets that his (most are usually men) somehow ends up committing the sin of not grooming a capable successor (hence leaving the business to vulnerabilities to human frailty) and/ or not really leaving their successors to get on with it, thus making it nearly impossible for the man in charge to be really in charge.

I live in Singapore, a country where the founding father was imminently brilliant in so many ways. He even made a song and dance about wanting to step down while he had his marbles around him and then stepped down. Well, he didn’t quite do that. Instead of stepping down, he stepped aside. Both his successors (one of them being his son) couldn’t escape his shadow. I was at a seminar where a prominent journalist said “We’re in the era of Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Hsien Loong may be the Prime Minister and Goh Chok Tong may have been the Prime Minister for 14-years but it is still Lee Kuan Yew’s era.” While, we’ve been materially OK since his demise, you can’t help but feel that Old Mr. Lee’s inability to let go has created a sense that there is a lack of direction in Singapore now that he is no longer around.

My mum used to say that as a mother, she had a duty to ensure we could live without her (a point that I try to make to Jenny). She reminds me that we had a handy man in England (Mr. Cook) who could do all sorts of things and trained his boys to do housework – the cause of this was simple – Mrs. Cook died. Mrs. Cook ensured that her boys could get on without her.

What is true of parenthood should also be true of other forms of leadership. A leader who makes him or herself indispensable is doing his or her followers a disservice. PN Balji, the former founding editor of the Today Newspaper, takes pride in the fact that the paper started making profits once he left. His argument was simple – he a duty to ensure that the paper would be better without him. If only more “leaders” around the world understood that.