To Grow, Stay Uncomfortable
In this new leadership role, Aaron pushed himself to embrace discomfort to become a better supervisor.
“For someone who was an ordinary staff officer till this point, it required a change in my mental model,” he shares. “As a supervisor, I had to keep the bigger picture in mind.”
This meant trusting his teammates to act according to the “wider policy intent”, while enabling conversations with various stakeholders and adding value by providing different considerations.
Seeing his colleagues doing the same motivated him as they navigated around the challenges, putting aside differences and individual interests to achieve the same goals. For example, when setting up the Changi Exhibition Centre CCF, each MRO took charge of one aspect of the operation. Despite not having previously collaborated, they worked around their own internal and whole-of-government protocols to accommodate each other and focus on the task at hand.
Collaborating on Complex Issues
This spirit of collaboration was even more apparent when developing travel protocols. This was early in the pandemic, in April and May 2020, and during the height of dormitory-based cases, with a high risk of incoming travellers leading to local spread in the then-unvaccinated population.
“The question was how to define which groups should still be allowed into Singapore, and how this group of travellers would be managed,” Aaron says.
The variables were endless: who would be eligible for outbound travel; who could enter Singapore; how they could enter; how they would be managed; and importantly, how to balance MINDEF’s needs against that of other agencies for the travel quota.
MINDEF sat with the Ministries of Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs and Trade & Industry to define the parameters and determine eligibility for allowing entry for a very small group of essential overseas guests, as well as balance the allocation of the limited quota to account for all agencies’ needs.
It took a fair bit of negotiation and was “much harder” than one would have thought, Aaron says. “Every agency had different considerations and thresholds for how to treat foreign guests, because each of us interacted with foreign guests in very different contexts. We also had to give and take on the number of guests we needed to bring in, because everyone else also had pressing needs to keep essential functions going.”