Yee Mun
Well, said goodbye to Yee Mun yesterday. Its always hard saying goodbye to family. For better or worse she has been family for several years now, through the good and bad. I still remember when she first came down for interviews from Singapore. She was brought in to interview for general insurance, with us just tagging along to see how she was. In the end she came into our team. Her first job was an appraisal in Taiwan, which was fun to see a bit of the culture there. She also got to do quite a bit of conventional work for Malaysian companies, mostly in valuation and RBC. Funny enough she didn't get to do much takaful at all, unlike Wei Ying and Khai Au, who know more about takaful than at least 80% of the people working in takaful companies. Its always a hard decision as to whether to keep takaful work with the muslim staff and conventional with the non-muslims, but in the end the muslim staff deserve to learn conventional insurance too, in order to apply it to takaful, and the takaful companies deserve the best staff, whether they are muslim or non-muslim.
Through my discussions with Yee Mun over this last month or so, I have learned some excellent points I need to work on for the future. One is to be extremely careful with what I say, and to be very direct. I had picked up the habit of being indirect, which works well to avoid conflict and is great when dealing with clients, but does not work well with staff. Staff need to know exactly where they stand and deserve to get direct comments rather than indirectness. Indirectness works great in client situations as it softens the blows and helps the client to save face. With colleagues though it can easily lead to misunderstandings and misinterpreting what I say or feel. Another point I need to work on is to have very clear definitions of what is expected of each person in their role, and the expectations of people at a higher level, to give people something to work for. Without this people like Wei Ying (or myself at times!) will feel bullied by the newer staff and seemingly having to clean up their messes. With clear expectations in place this should reduce or be completely gone, and will allow younger staff to learn more as well, as their roles and expectations will be clear. My unwillingness to fight with staff came up, but this is hard as my staff is a lot smarter than me! The concept of spending time with every staff also came up, as I tend to spend more time with some staff than others. This is a tough one for me, as the time in the day is limited. Some people have less technical skills and need my time. Other times there is pressing work which requires my efforts.
All in all it was a good time for Yee Mun here, and I know she goes away with:
Through my discussions with Yee Mun over this last month or so, I have learned some excellent points I need to work on for the future. One is to be extremely careful with what I say, and to be very direct. I had picked up the habit of being indirect, which works well to avoid conflict and is great when dealing with clients, but does not work well with staff. Staff need to know exactly where they stand and deserve to get direct comments rather than indirectness. Indirectness works great in client situations as it softens the blows and helps the client to save face. With colleagues though it can easily lead to misunderstandings and misinterpreting what I say or feel. Another point I need to work on is to have very clear definitions of what is expected of each person in their role, and the expectations of people at a higher level, to give people something to work for. Without this people like Wei Ying (or myself at times!) will feel bullied by the newer staff and seemingly having to clean up their messes. With clear expectations in place this should reduce or be completely gone, and will allow younger staff to learn more as well, as their roles and expectations will be clear. My unwillingness to fight with staff came up, but this is hard as my staff is a lot smarter than me! The concept of spending time with every staff also came up, as I tend to spend more time with some staff than others. This is a tough one for me, as the time in the day is limited. Some people have less technical skills and need my time. Other times there is pressing work which requires my efforts.
All in all it was a good time for Yee Mun here, and I know she goes away with:
- A solid understanding of the appraisal process, programming, and Taiwanese products and regulations
- An in depth understanding of the valuation process, with her documentation of procedures and processes being her legacy to the team
- A good understanding of Risk Based Capital, which is useful for Malaysia and knowledge of which other countries will find useful as well.
- A ton of new friends and firm foundation in KL after having moved from Singapore