The Soul at Work

Stop Underselling Your Work. Tell Your Impact Story.

• ourcommongroundsg • Episode 2

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 23:17

Being humble about our good work is honourable — but staying too silent has a cost. When practitioners don't tell their best impact stories, unhelpful cultural orthodoxies persist: the myth of the self-sustaining nonprofit, the bias that business knows best, the prioritisation of for-profit values in non-profits

In this episode, Shiao-Yin Kuik shows why we need more effective impact storytelling from the ground — and introduces the R.E.A.L. framework: four principles for telling impact stories that help practitioners and funders stay human, honest and humble about doing complex change work.

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.

LinkedIn | Common Ground Consultancy
Instagram | @oursoulatwork
YouTube | @oursoulatwork


Shiao-Yin Kuik

Welcome to Soul at Work. I'm Shiao-Yin Kuik.

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.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

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.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

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 B eautifully practical strategy you can bring to work tomorrow.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

This is not all talk.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I built this podcast for practice. So let's go. I f

The One Thing: Tell your best impact stories

Shiao-Yin Kuik

there's one thing I want you to get from this episode, it's this.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Stop assuming your good work will speak for itself.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Instead, I want you to put your most strategic impact stories out there into the world.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

That means tell everyone what's changing on the ground, how you're doing it, and show them how to make more of that good stuff happen.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I want you to let every impact story you tell just fly like this arrow of insight straight into the heart of the audience you most need to reach.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Let it pierce through all our unhelpful assumptions and outdated beliefs we have about what it actually takes to create change.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Your impact story can totally open up new ideas and new ways that will work so much better for everyone involved in the field of impact work. The communities we serve, the funders we partner with, and our fellow impact practitioners doing the hard work on the ground.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So don't keep your amazing insights a secret. Okay,

The Good: There’s humility in staying under the radar

Shiao-Yin Kuik

let's start off with the good.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I want to be super clear here that I see a lot of good in humble practitioners who just want their impact work to speak for itself.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I deeply respect that some of the best impact practitioners I've worked with and learned from over the years. Not that many people actually know them, and they are perfectly fine with it.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

After all, they didn't get into this work to be seen.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

They got into it because they genuinely care about what happens to people and communities, and that care shows up as humility. Right? It's a quiet style of servant leadership, and they adamantly refuse to cast themselves as the hero.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

They don't want their contributions to outshine anyone else's because they understand change work is deeply complex.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Whatever impact they make cannot be attributed to them alone. They know it will take a whole ecosystem, not just one person, to raise a child, alleviate poverty, support team well-being, and cruelty to animals, etc. etc. good cause.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So they know that they are but one actor in a vast web of interconnecting players and factors, and they refuse to be grandiose about inflating the story of their work in the ecosystem's efforts.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

This refusal to broadcast one's impact work can come from a very good place.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

It's about patient faith and quiet confidence that in the end the truth will prevail.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

If I do my good work with integrity, it will bear good fruit and it will stand the test of time, and I do not have to boast about it.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So to say, let my good work speak for itself, I don't have to tell my impact story, I get that.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

It takes some humility, it takes some courage, and I will have enormous respect for that. Okay,

The Bad: Silence Lets Wrong Stories Win

Shiao-Yin Kuik

now for the bad part. Remember, too much of a good thing, always a bad thing.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And there is such a thing as good practitioners having way too much humility and keeping way too quiet for their own good.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Not putting ourselves out there and not telling our impact story is costly for the practitioner, for the communities, for the funders who really want their money to achieve real meaningful impact.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

There is a price that we will pay for continual lack of good impact stories. That price is continual public miseducation. Everyone's gonna keep misunderstanding about how complex and hard and costly impact work is, and they're gonna keep misunderstanding how change really needs to happen.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

If us practitioners who understand most intimately about what works and what doesn't work do not persist in putting better, much more nuanced impact stories out there into the public conversation, we're gonna get a vacuum.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And vacuums do not stay empty. They get occupied by the same old, same old, simplistic approaches, biases, and cultural orthodoxies that keep the field of change stuck.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Okay, let's back up a bit. Cultural orthodoxies. That's a big word, very difficult word. But what is that?

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Cultural orthodoxies are just the unchallenged, unspoken beliefs that we generally accept as truth in our society. You can think of them as deep myths from which a lot of mainstream beliefs and behaviours flow.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And some of these myths need to be challenged because, you know, some of them are harmless, but some of them are really at the root of some really harmful dysfunctional practices in our field of impact work.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

There's a really funny kind of rude non-profit guy in America called Vu Le. He's infamous for co-founding the Crappy Funding Practices (CFP) movement that calls out harmful philanthropic behaviours that he sees in America.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

In his new book, Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy, he identifies some persistent myths that he sees in America's non-profit sector. Now, although he writes from an American perspective, I can see that these myths are also alive and well in the Asian and Singaporean non-profit scene.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Let me just name two.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

The first, it's the Myth of the Self-Sustaining, Self-Sacrificing Non-profit. . This is the belief that non-profits must just do good for goodness' sake, don't expect a high pay for it, but meanwhile also work towards financial independence.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So this myth can sound like, hey, you know, if you're a really good person, you should be more than happy to do good work for free. And if you're really that good, you can also stand on your own two feet and one day stop depending on us funders for grants all of the time. So I think this belief has a very unhealthy assumption in there that non-profit workers do not deserve to be paid like for-profit workers. And I think there's also a belief that some non-profits are really freeloading and parasites and cheats, and that's very, very unhealthy to believe in.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

In Singapore, some funders still operate from an unspoken assumption that we must guard against potentially greedy practitioners who want to make a profit from grants.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And that is why some grants in Singapore to this day do not allow practitioners to pay themselves. They can spend the grant on community needs, on rent, on hardware, on photocopying, all of that stuff, which is, you know, good to spend on, but they cannot give themselves something from the grant.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

There is a general reluctance to fund overheads as if that is a bad thing. And this has led to underpaid, undervalued practitioners burning out and leaving the non-profit feel for good.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I find it strange to ask non-profits to be both self-sacrificing and self-sustaining. I mean, many non-profits are sincerely just trying to solve really hard, complex, expensive problems that they didn't create. And these problems, by the way, are very, very costly and they were left behind by governments or the rest of us in society. So, non-profits, I mean, they are providing a really invaluable problem-solving service here, and they ought to be fairly paid for taking on very hard work that few of us want to do.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

We don't tell a chicken rice hawker, I love your work, I want to support you, but I will only pay you $5 for your chicken rice if you show me a five-year sustainability plan and how you intend to cut your overheads. And by the way, don't charge me five bucks. Charge me two since you say you're passionate about feeding people good food.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I mean, we wouldn't speak like that to a business, we'd think it's silly. So why would we speak like that to a non-profit?

Shiao-Yin Kuik

A chicken rice store becomes sustainable when it focuses on making really great chicken rice, offering great service, and telling great stories about your work. And when we like the chicken rice, we pay them fairly. We don't make them jump through like weird hoops to prove themselves worthy of our money, and we don't make them fill up like some like 20-page proposal before we decide, okay, uh, you deserve my money right now.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So I think non-profits also deserve that respect. Like if they do good work, just pay them for it.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Second, the Business Knows Best Myth. This is the belief that non-profits are these charming, lovely, but kind of naive organisations, and they need like a big, strong, smart business leader to come in and just show them what to do.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Look at how mainstream non-profit boards are put together, and you can immediately see who is missing from the table. Usually trusted practitioners from the field and members of the communities being served. And these are precisely the people that you need to balance out the board a bit, and they can help the board and the general public understand a more balanced and grounded story of how impact must be supported, made, and measured.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Non-profit boards tend to be over-stacked with people bringing wealthy connections, corporate acumen, white-collar expertise, and institutional weight. And you can see how such imbalance on the board can lead to for-profit values dominating non-profit strategy.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So non-profit leaders on the ground receive a lot of what some of us call 'Bizsplaining', which means corporate trained board members advising non-profits how to act more like a business and less like a non-profit. And the non-profit conversation then becomes predominantly about how can we be more efficient, productive, cut more costs, bring up the numbers, adopt the latest tech, and scale very big.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Now, all of this corporate wisdom, it's not useless to the field. It's relevant, it's needed in non-profits, but not all of the time and not in all circumstances.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

You cannot apply for-profit logic wholesale to carry out a mission that is fundamentally built around totally different outcomes.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Non-profits are not called non-profits because they hate profit or are lousy of money. It's because the whole end goal of non-profits is impact, not profit.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Supporting lonely old people is not always going to be profitable. Affordable health care for all, not always profitable. Making sure kids can read, not always profitable.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

But they are valuable, they are meaningful, and certainly well worth paying for.

The Ugly: When For-Profit values dominate Non-Profits

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Now let's talk about the ugly stuff.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

When for-profit narratives continue to dominate non-profit work unchallenged, we're gonna stop asking the right questions and we're gonna start asking some deeply wrong ones.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Like, oh, what is the ROI of walking a senior citizen to the clinic? Hmm, how do we extract more value and energy from our volunteers in the first few months when they're all at peak enthusiasm? Ooh, tell me what is the unit cost of a counsellor? What? Then why don't we just get all these grieving people and lonely old folks to talk to an AI friend instead of these expensive counsellors? AI is cheaper, it's not gonna ask for a raise.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I mean, these are real conversations happening in real organisations doing real impact work, by the way.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And it's the kind of ugliness that we normalise when the immeasurable stuff gets disdained for not being measurable enough, the long term gets sacrificed for the short term, the relational stuff gets replaced by the transactional, and human solutions get dismissed as less cost efficient than technological fixes.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And the practitioners, the people closest to the work, the ones who know exactly why none of this is gonna make sense, stay a little too quiet. Because they don't believe anyone's gonna listen to their impact story. They don't believe that, you know, their their views, their insights are worth sharing. And I think they totally are.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Good work does speak for itself, but sometimes it speaks very softly, and it's gonna need some skilful storytellers to raise the volume together because there is strength in numbers.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

You know, like when I was like preparing for this uh podcast, like I remembered a story about how I was once in this room listening to uh let's just call this person a practitioner, okay? And they were reporting on an impact programme that they were doing. And this programme was designed to help obese students from less privileged backgrounds lose weight. But the intervention was let's get health coaches to make these cost-efficient 15-minute calls asking a standard list of questions like, What did you eat today? How much do you weigh now? Do you know bowls of rice are bad for you?

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I hope you can see where this is going.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I was getting quite horrified as the report continued, and it was super obvious to me that the programme was set for failure from the start. And it had been allowed to persist for years at considerable costs. And the final outcome was not only did all of the students not lose weight, but they actually gained weight.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And I could sense that the practitioner who was doing the reporting out actually disagreed with this approach. And to this day, I still wonder why they choose to report it out to the room in this bland business as usual, oh, what can we do, way, rather than share it as an honest, impactful story about here are the hard lessons that we won from mission failure. It would have been so much more impactful to say, here are the facts of what happened, this is where we went wrong, these were the myths that we were operating on, and these are the lessons that we learned about what we cannot afford to keep doing if we are serious about students' health.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

That would have been such a great impact story.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Very uncomfortable, but it's honest and it's also genuinely educational for everyone in the room and everyone in the sector. Impact storytelling is not meant to be a public relations exercise. It is not for showcasing our heroism and it's not about making mistakes look good, and it's definitely not meant to be a bureaucratic reporting exercise just to fend off some pesky funder who wants to see paperwork.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

If we keep doing our impact reporting in this cynical way, then let's just prepare for things to get uglier.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And I don't want that to happen.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Great impact stories are insightful, vulnerable, honest, humane, and very, very educational for the whole sector.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

They help us to make contact with the truth about change making that change is hard, change is costly, many factors are at play, and we're gonna fail in some unexpected ways even as we try to do good. And that's why we can and must learn to do better together.

The Beautiful: The R.E.A.L. Framework for Impact Storytelling

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Okay, so here's the beautiful part. Don't lose hope yet.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I want to share with you like a story of uh what's been happening in this project that I've been involved in. So, one of the most complex social impact projects I've taken on is a nine-year partnership with the government to run a civic centre in Singapore. We're at the tail end of the project, about like last one and a half years, and I have learned so much from it, usually the hard way, making mistakes.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Anyway, the greatest learning that I got from it is the part of the work that centers on helping practitioners in this civic centre report impact. In the first few years, the reports that me and my team helped our practitioners put together were written more like case studies, factual, technical, full of jargon, and lots of quantitative data. It was more on the cool and analytical side because I assumed wrongly that objectivity and numbers were what the funder would have wanted. Instead, the funders' feedback was quite interesting. It was, uh, these reports, they're not that easy to read, and it doesn't really help us understand what's working on the ground about like how do we, you know, um have sustainable impact and encourage like active citizenry. So could you change up the reports a bit?

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And meanwhile, our community of practitioners were also miserable every time impact reporting season came around. They were like, oh, this is so not fun to put together, it's not fun to read, and then you give us this case study, it's not very helpful to us. And more importantly, they felt that the report fell flat in capturing the heart and soul and magic of what their most impactful work was actually about.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So I took that feedback to heart and I changed our approach entirely. Instead of forcing practitioners to write a report, we got them to just share with us a story instead.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

We asked them: what are some unhelpful beliefs and practices your work keeps running up against, what are you choosing to do differently, what are you proudest about, what are you learning, and how is all of this panning out on the ground for you?

Shiao-Yin Kuik

We would then shape these answers into something that felt a lot more like a magazine article or kind of like a piece of photojournalism. It's written with a bigger system picture in mind, but it's still very much grounded in the smaller human experience.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

We wanted it to feel a bit more warm and relational, so there were a lot more quotes, reflections, and photos from practitioners, members of the community, and any funders involved in their story. So the result is funders and practitioners actually enjoyed reading these impact stories a lot more. And because they read it, they could actually learn something from it, right? So they could see themselves and their work with a fresh lens. Uh, they could also recognize shared systemic patterns across their different fields, and they could learn from each other what needs to be done differently.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And because the stories were designed to also be aesthetically pleasing, they could actually share these stories now to potential supporters, partners, and funders who were also curious about their work.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So the impact story stopped being about a compliance document, it became more like a relationship-building and learning asset. It was validating for the practitioners who produced it, it was useful for us as the steward, providing impact storytelling as some kind of support service, and it was also insightful for the funder who really wanted to understand how to do work with more impact.

The Practice: Keep your Impact Story R.E.A.L.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So, the Civic Centre experience is what gave birth to the framework that I now use and teach in our Strategic Storytelling workshop.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

I call it the REAL framework because I want us to keep impact work and impact storytelling real. So think of it as like four very practical principles to help us test whether the impact story is doing the work that it needs to do.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Okay, so R.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

R stands for real human being facing real power dynamics. So you want to make sure that your story has a specific person with a specific experience of system dynamics that is at the heart of your story. It shouldn't be a composite figure or some anonymous demographic.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

It should be a real person and all of the stuff that they're going through, the constraints, but despite that, they have real changes. This will help make your impact story not just more concrete, but also very relatable to your reader.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Then there's E.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

E is evidence of change.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So for this, you need both qualitative and quantitative evidence. If you only have numbers but no warm emotional story, it's not going to be very persuasive. And you have your warm emotional story, but you don't give any like hard numbers, it's going to feel a little unaccountable. So you need to have this cool data and warm data because you want to appeal to both the head as well as the heart.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And evidence, by the way, is where most of us practitioners fall a little short because of our own biases about what's needed or what's priority, right? So we tend to collect evidence from only the part of the system that we think is important. So, like in our case for the civic centre, we prioritise quantitative over qualitative at first until we were corrected. Okay, so some of us are just going to get quotes from the community, but we forget to get quotes from our funders about how they changed through working with us. And some of us are not going to ask our team what they learned, we're not going to ask our partners whether they shifted their own processes because of our collaboration with them. And I think all of these changes actually matter because it tracks like how the whole system may be shifting, right? Not just like the specific part that we were focusing on.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

A stands for agency of all stakeholders.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Our impact story needs to show that all of the players are active participants in the change. This is especially important when we're talking about the community, right? You want your community to be showcased as not just a passive recipient of your intervention. They, you know, they definitely brought something to the table, they made decisions, they may even have resisted you. And you want to tell a story where you are not the hero, your funder is not the hero, and the community is not just like some grateful beneficiary. It's not an honest or useful impact story. You want to let your story surface what everybody, funder, practitioner, and community, all had to bring to the table for change to happen.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Finally, L.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

L is levels of systemic impact.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Your story needs to connect the individual's experience to the team or the organization or the systemic conditions that made change easier or set up constraints that made change much more difficult.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Because remember, impact doesn't happen in a vacuum. It has to contend with the context, right? And the context is made up of all these like cultural orthodoxies, biases, outdated beliefs. You know, you want to show that.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Your impact story should show how different parts of the system are changing or have to change. You don't want to just make all of the focus be on the person. You want to show the person in context of the system that created the problem.

The Closing: Story as a Mustard Seed of Mindset Change

Shiao-Yin Kuik

So this week, why not just take one impact story that you've told recently? It could be a report, a case study, funder update, and just, you know, run it through these four principles and ask yourself, uh, where did I pass? Where did I like kind of like drop the ball a bit? And it's fine, you know, it's a it's a process, right? We're all gonna learn.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

And whatever gap that you find, just see that as that's my area of practice. We're not after perfection here, we're after practice.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Basically, keep your impact stories real, R-E-A-L, and very, very importantly, keep putting your stories out there.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

The only way we get better at telling stories is to just keep putting them out there, right?

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Every story that you tell, think of it as it's like a little power-packed mustard seed of mindset change. And it just needs to get scattered out into the world so that new and more fruitful approaches can just take root and bloom across the whole field of impact work.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Just thinking of that, I don't know, it just makes me excited, right?

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Because I have no idea what kind of change your particular impact story can see. So just go out there, scatter it.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

You really, really never know what you'll get until you just put it out there.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

Thanks for listening.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

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.

Shiao-Yin Kuik

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.