Stop Fixing Culture. Renew the Soul at Work.

Good leaders want to do good work but often settle for managing surface issues, keeping the peace, and enabling the very dysfunction they want to change. 

In this episode, Shiao-Yin Kuik names what that avoidance actually costs, and offers one concrete practice, forming the throughline, to help you align your daily actions with the values that actually matter to you.

About The Soul at Work Podcast
Close the gap between what you value and how you actually work. If you're the person in your organisation who sees the human cost and is done with solutions that treat the symptoms of the problem, not the source, this show is built for you.

Ready to go further than a podcast — training programmes and consulting calls are available at www.ourcommonground.com.sg.

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Transcript

Welcome to Soul at Work

Shiao-Yin Kuik 0:03

Welcome to Soul at Work, I'm Shiao-Yin Kuik. This podcast is for every leader out there who sees the gap between what they deeply value and how they actually work every day. So if you're done settling for all these surface fixes and you just want to go to the root of your work issues, then please join me. Each episode, I'll take you through one theme all the way through the good, the bad, the ugly, and I'll leave you with one beautifully practical strategy you can bring to work tomorrow. This is not all talk. I built this podcast for practice. So let's go. If

The One Thing: Stop Settling for Surface Fixes

Shiao-Yin Kuik 0:40

there's one thing I want you to take from this episode, it's this. Stop settling for short-term culture fixes that feel safe and easy and cheap, but you know they don't actually deal with the deeper issues you have at work. Instead, I dare you to renew the soul at work. What that means is: Align your daily actions with the core values that really, really matter to you, your people, and your organisation.

The Good: More Good Leaders Than You Think

Shiao-Yin Kuik 1:06

So I've been working in the field of culture change for more than 20 years. I've worked with organisations on leadership development and culture strategy. I did a brief stint as a Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP), and I've had long-term partnerships with funders on these experimental social impact projects. So this is the very, very good thing I have seen across all of that work. I want to assure you, there are more good leaders out there with genuinely good intentions than we think. I mean, I've worked with them in government, in business, in nonprofits. And when I say good leader, I mean leaders who entered the work because they really believe in it. They really see the impact your organisation can have, not just on the people inside the organisation, but the impact on the sector and the wider community beyond them. These leaders actually want to do good. They want to help their team stay true and faithful to the mission and vision and values that are stated on the organisation's walls. So these people are not cynics. They're not going to be dragging their feet to work. They bring not just their heart for the project, but also their heart for the people. They want to bring their skills and their will. They want to bring their smarts and their soul. These are great people to work with. And if that sounds like you, you are totally my people. You're my tribe and my vibe, and I see myself in you. And this really matters to me because change work requires leaders who are ready and willing to go there and bring their whole self to

The Bad: Why Good Leaders Stick to Surface Solutions

Shiao-Yin Kuik 2:35

work. Now, more often than not, what leaders initially booked me to do is some form of short-term intervention. It looks like coaching a key change leader, facilitating a crucial team conversation, running a workshop, you know, effective communication, shape up their executive presence, psychological safety, polarity thinking, all of the usual stuff. Now these are all worthwhile and good things to do, but they can stay a bit on the surface. So I always want to check if these are the right interventions for the right problem. So usually before we go further into the project, I will ask the leaders to tell me the real problem they face. So it might sound like, okay, tell me about the stuff that you can't put in an official email, you can never put it on an official project brief, but you absolutely know that's what's at the root of why things aren't quite working around here. And that's when I will hear the real stuff. It might turn out it's not really about the team's lack of skill in giving feedback. It's more about there's a senior leader who's so intimidating that feedback is not welcome, and even when given, it's not gonna land. Or it turns out it's not the organisation's lack of teamwork. It's the organisation's persistent refusal to discipline an incompetent leader that has everyone scrambling to do work around them, which are very, very inefficient. So that's when I discover that good intention interventions that I've been booked to do may not actually solve the issue. It may make the surface function a little bit better, look a bit better, feel a bit better, but it's just going to be for a while. The deeper issues will still persist. So the bad thing I have seen is this. Good leaders with genuine awareness of the deeper issues at work may still choose surface -level fixes. And they don't do it out of apathy or malice or ignorance, but they do it out of very human, very understandable reasons. We want to preserve harmony, we want to protect people's reputations, we want to give people the benefit of the doubt, we want to respect authority and not speak out of turn, we want to honor what was done in the past. And all of these are not ignoble instincts, but they don't change things. Good intentions left unexamined and unchallenged can keep us imprisoned in old ways of work that no longer serve us. In Singapore, where I've done most of my work, the instinct to protect harmony runs really, really deep. It weeds through our family culture, our ethnic culture, our national culture, and harmony is a wonderful good thing. But too much of any good thing becomes a pretty bad thing. So for us, excessive harmony can look like people pleasing. It can look like let's offer a polite nicety instead of a necessary truth. Or let's show up not as our whole self, but as a more politically correct version of ourself. We offer each other a fragment of who we really are inside, and we offer each other a fragment of the reality that we already

The Ugly: Avoiding Deeper Issues is Costly

Shiao-Yin Kuik 5:33

see. So all this creates a false peace or a false sense of reality. We are polite on the outside while we quietly fracture on the inside with the truths that we hold. So there are real professional consequences to refusing comfortable surface fixes. And I want to acknowledge that it's not easy to ask your organisation to explore the deeper issues at work. Because going deeper also means I have to first confront my own complicity in the problem. I've got to be willing to own my part in creating the current conditions before I can ask anyone else to go there with me. So I get it, it is professionally vulnerable. I may not be ready for it, and it's hard. And wanting to address deeper issues at work also means you have to be willing to stand alone from time to time because you should expect pushback. There are gonna be people who don't want to rock the boat, they want to keep things simple, they are like frustrated that you want to complicate their life so much. So you can expect to be judged or isolated or misunderstood from time to time. It comes with the territory of challenging the current status quo at work. So the professional costs are real, and I do not want you to ignore them. The ugly thing is this: when we avoid the deeper issues, it's going to have a compounding effect. When we keep normalising dysfunction, it's not going to just disappear because we're not looking at it anymore. It's like this treatable cancer that went from stage one to stage four because we all wanted to just pretend it's not there. And when systems built on unaddressed dysfunction finally do collapse, they will collapse surprisingly fast. And in that collapse, we still have to confront the horrible truth anyway that was always there, waiting to be seen. And we will ask ourselves, what did we do? Did we quietly enable any of this exhausting, extractive, or unethical behaviours that got us here? Why didn't someone say or do something earlier? Why didn't I say or do something earlier? And I care about this because I had my own vivid front row seat to such a collapse. I definitely do not ever want to experience that again, and I do not want to see others go through it alone. I was a co-founder of my own organisation that thrived for many years. It survived many economic downturns, even one big global pandemic, but what eventually killed us was an internal crisis. A very big one. When deeper truths surfaced one by one in that horrible crisis year, it became starkly clear, within a few short months, that there could be no future forward together. So a 20-year business partnership ended in less than a year, that's how fast it can happen. But before the crisis that ended my organisation, there were small signs of things that were going wrong. I did see people behaving strangely over time, getting more evasive or more distant, harder to read. I did see cliques forming within cliques. I also saw people without formal roles in the organisation being treated as insiders, consulted on key decisions while actual people in the organisation, who should have been in the room, were etched out. So I did raise concerns from time to time. But when people rallied to defend rather than listen, I was the one who let it go much too quickly. I got caught up wondering, was it just me? Was I being sensitive? Maybe I'm wrong. So I didn't push hard enough. I accepted surface fixes that seemed to smooth things over for a short while in our culture, but I knew it was doing nothing to ease my ongoing deep discontent, and it didn't do anything to change repeated behaviours that I didn't agree with, but still persisted. So in that year, as I led my organisation through the crisis and eventually into a critical decision to dissolve the whole partnership, I had to sit with difficult questions for myself in those months. Where was I complicit in the behaviours that took us down? What could I have done differently? I may not have caused direct harm, and I may say I have the excuse of, "Well, I didn't know". I didn't have the language then, I didn't have the information then, I couldn't fully recognize what was happening. And while that may be true, I have to recognise nevertheless, as a leader, that I could have and I should have exercised a lot more moral courage and conviction to address what I was already able to see, that I already did not agree with. And there were many seemingly small, trivial-looking actions that I already knew was grating on me because they were so misaligned with my own core values as a person and as a professional. And if I had been a lot more direct and challenging of these norms that I found questionable, maybe I might have made some difference much earlier. I don't know. But it helped me understand this is what complicity can also look like for well-meaning leaders. It isn't always conscious malice or indifference or ignorance. Sometimes we contribute to the brokenness of our systems because we choose to back down way too quickly on our own convictions whenever our concerns meet some kind of relational resistance or social pressure. So we learn to keep our deepest opinions to ourselves, we minimise our own discomfort, we doubt our moral compass, and we choose instead to fit ourselves into a system we already sense is just not working.

The Beautiful: Integrate Yourself, Form a Throughline

Shiao-Yin Kuik 10:55

So the beautiful thing I have seen from us leaders who have faced the truth of our own crises is this : We become very, very clear about our core values and actions we will no longer tolerate, and we also develop more moral courage than before to name the gaps that we see around us. So the most practical thing I want to give you here is something I call forming the true line. It is a starting point for you to practice renewing your own soul at work. First, let me show you the difference between speaking at a more surface level and speaking a lot more deeply and clearly from your soul. Most of us have been trained to just offer a polite, palatable little fragment of ourselves at work. We will surface our thought, but not our feeling. We will surface our concern, but we'll hold back our conviction. We will surface our observation, but hold back our demand. And we call this, "I'm just being professional here". But I think it's fragmentation of your person. Fragmented communication like this hides more than it reveals. And it's really important because when it comes to consequential situations and consequential leadership decisions, we deserve to communicate our soul's truth about what's going on under the surface instead of settling for these polite surface fragments. Good decisions need good, deep data. So we should not be holding back from naming what matters to us. So here's what speaking a palatable fragment might sound like: I think firing Alan on such short notice is a very bad idea, we shouldn't do it. So that's me offering a thought with a little bit of action. And I want you to notice that a thought is actually quite easy to deflect, because it becomes a matter of perspectives. My perspective, your perspective, someone can share their mind and change yours. And that's why these surface exchanges of thoughts that we do in organisations can often lead to confusion rather than clarity, because we can very easily talk each other out of our own opinions. Here's what speaking the soul's truth can sound like. You slow it down a bit, you don't rush, so that you can name a lot more intentionally a core thought, a core feeling, a core desired action, and a core value that is relevant to the situation. So it would sound more like this. I notice you're considering letting Alan go on such short notice. I think it's a very bad idea because it disrespects his right to know and it's going to damage the morale of the team that's left behind. And I'm feeling really frustrated right now that you're even considering this path. I want us to communicate a lot more transparently with him about the business challenges, maybe bring up his work performance issues, and let's just work through our decisions with Alan. I deeply value honesty, and this approach we're taking just contradicts what I care about. So here, you're not holding back parts of yourself. You're communicating what matters to you in a more integrated, whole way. You presented a core thought, a core feeling, a core desired action, and a core value that matters in this particular situation. You're not holding back these things that are so core to you just to keep the conversation comfortable for yourself or the person who actually needs to hear the real truth to make a much better decision. This true line is inspired by a philosopher Dallas Willard's definition of the soul. I was personally struck by it when I was going through my own organisational crisis. He describes our soul as the thing that integrates all our separate parts, our will, our mind, our body, our values, our relationships, into a single, unified, functioning life. So when we practice integrating the deeper truths of what we already really think, feel, want, and value at work, we will feel a bit more whole. And this is good for our soul. But when a workplace culture compels us to consistently suppress our feelings or act against our values or perform a version of ourself that just isn't true, we're not just going to burn out. In the end, we're going to feel kind of broken inside because we're being asked to live a fragmented life. And it can feel like you're not just losing yourself at work, you're losing your soul. So

The Practice: Your Five-Step Throughline Exercise

Shiao-Yin Kuik 15:07

if you want to start practicing forming that true line, start by recalling a past or a present work situation that you already feel deep disagreement about. Then practice forming that true line for yourself. I notice: Name one core indisputable fact about the situation. I think: Form a core thought or interpretation about that fact. I feel: Name that core emotion that lives underneath that thought. I want: State that concrete action or change that you're asking for. I deeply value: Now anchor that whole true line in a core value that makes this matter. And as you practice forming this coherent, aligned, true line, thoughts, feelings, desired action anchored in your core value, you will start to find your way back home to what matters most to you. It's not always going to be comfortable, but it might be the beginning of something deeply healing for you. I want you to practice this because I've seen what it looks like up front when people can no longer do this for themselves. When we fragment ourselves for too long, we can't bring our thoughts and feelings and values into one unifying true line so easily. And trying to connect our truths can feel a bit like trying to bring together two opposing magnetic poles together. It's just going to repel and it just can't come together. And it's very, very painful to watch from the outside. People, I have learned, may minimize and dismiss their own truths so that they can accept and survive a broken state of things as normal. They may even end up protecting and defending the broken system that is damaging them. Because to name the truth would mean they themselves have to finally sit with what has actually been happening and acknowledge their own role and complicity in it. And that is a very hard place to be. It's a very hard thing to take in, and I get that it will take a lot of time and vulnerability.

The Closing: Focus on Value, Not Price

Shiao-Yin Kuik 16:49

So I do know some of you might still be tempted to stay with the surface fix. Let's not go there, let's not open up that Pandora box of deep cultural issues because naming my soul's truth is just way too costly and a bit inconvenient right now. And I get it. But my favorite client who specializes in long-term investment taught me a principle I've never forgotten. Focus on value, don't be distracted by price. Too often we make consequential decisions based on the short-term price we'll pay rather than look at the long-term value we'll gain. Dissolving my old organisation cost me a lot in the short term, and cost me relationships that I had built over years, cost me a brand that I had invested 20 years of my money, energy, reputation into building. And if I had focused on all of these losses and the price I would pay, I might have chosen to tolerate things as is. But there was also so much I valued a lot more than what I was losing. I valued telling the truth. I valued protecting the vulnerable. I valued mutual respect and I valued genuine partnership. And if keeping my organisation as is would not allow me to experience or uphold any of that, then it was not going to be that big of a loss and okay to lose. Because most of all, I valued my freedom to rebuild a work life, a team, and an organisation that was a lot more aligned to who I am, who I want to be, and what I believe. So I cannot promise you that the short-term consequences are going to be easy to bear. But I can tell you that when we make contact with the deeper truths, there is a joy that can coexist with the potential short-term losses. It doesn't cancel the grief, but I promise you that there are profound long-term gains that can happen when we stay true to what our soul already knows. So focus on your values, practice forming the true line, and I want you to discover for yourself and decide for yourself whether the price you'll pay is worth the value you'll gain. Because ultimately, this is your soul at work. And I believe with you that your soul is worth fighting. Thanks for listening. If you want to go further than a podcast, join us for our training programmes or you can book us for an online consulting call at www.ourcommonground.com.sg. You can also find links to our current training schedule in the description of our bio and in every podcast episode. Hope to see you.