DXB Stories part 3: what kind of people do you want to work for?

Hi guys, in my next story from Dubai, I'm contemplating a fundamental question about the kind of work we do, especially in regards to the kind of people we have to deal with on a daily basis. This was based on a conversation that I had with my family and how we had a very different perspective on the kinds of people we work with as well as the kind of relationships we have with the people at work. So I was telling my sister about all the many duties I had on this business trip to Dubai and my sister's reaction left me somewhat frustrated - she used the term, "他们全靠你" (they are completely reliant on you) which I found quite disrespectful and disparaging towards my bosses because it implied that without me, they would have been entirely hopeless in Dubai (which I don't believe to be true). The fact is my bosses have a lot to do when they run a company, thus they can delegate certain tasks to me like taking care of our trip to Dubai, to make sure that we have the most productive meetings with the right partners on the ground whilst we're in the UAE. It doesn't mean that they're completely hopeless at doing what I did but part of managing a team means appointing the right people to the right task and that was why I was trusted to do this job (modesty side, I did that rather well). But I hated the way my sister insinuated that my bosses would be sitting in the hotel room, staring blankly at the walls, unable to find the exit without me holding their hands and guiding them through Dubai. No, my bosses are very rich and have traveled around the world, they have visited so many amazing places - after all, I work in investment management, I am not their tour guide! 

I hate to be blunt but the kind of idiots who would sit in the hotel room and stay at the walls are my parents - my sister has been on holiday with them before and they are completely reliant on her. She told me about this incident years ago where she was in a shopping mall in Spain and she spotted something in a shop; so she asked my parents if it was okay if she went into the shop to take a look at it. My parents said okay, so she left them on a bench outside and went into the shop. During which time, my father needed to go to the toilet but he was so scared about getting lost that he didn't dare try to find the nearest toilet and remember, he doesn't speak English and they were in a place where no one spoke a word of Mandarin - so when my sister returned a few minutes later, he was bursting for the toilet and my sister had to quickly help him find the nearest toilet. She then stood outside the men's toilet until he was done - yes that's the kind of thing she has to do for my parents because they are completely dependent on her for everything including finding the nearest toilet. But my bosses are nothing like my parents - I apologize for being so brutally honest, my parents are hopelessly stupid whilst my bosses are really quite intelligent. I like working for intelligent people, I am not like a carer at the nursing home who takes care of senile elderly folks who cannot go to the toilet on their own. So when I do take care of my boss's needs, it's not because they are unable to do those tasks themselves but rather they have no time to do those tasks and they are quite happy to trust me to do a really good job with those difficult tasks. I did talk to my husband about that uncomfortable conversation I had with my sister - he pointed out that she was probably just trying to pay me a compliment that I am so important in my company, rather than insulting my bosses for being stupid and useless without me. But actually, I am not entirely convinced by his argument though, he tends to give my sister the benefit of the doubt. 

Let's compare and contrast two kinds of jobs: one where you work for people who know much less than you, who are dependent on you for your help and the other kind where you work for people who know a lot more than you and you're there to serve them as you have certain skills that they would make you a good addition to the kind of team they are trying to build. My job is definitely the latter whilst a primary school teacher would be the former. If you have a 40-year old teacher facing a class of seven year old students, the teacher is in a position of power to impart knowledge and educate those young children. So even if a student in that class was particularly smart, that child would at best earn some praise from the teacher but that student would never be smarter than the teacher. Even if a child did then ask a teacher a very difficult question like, "teacher, how does a mobile phone work? How is it I can get the internet on my phone?" The teacher could simply say, "I'm afraid we simply don't have time for that kind of question today, we have to prepare for the exams which are less than two weeks away and some of you are not ready yet!" That's exactly the kind of job my parents did for their entire working lives until they retired. I think the prospect of working for someone a lot smarter than you might be daunting for some people, I know my parents would probably think, "what if the boss asks me a very difficult question? What if I don't know the answer to that question - would I be ridiculed for being stupid or sacked for being useless?" Thus I think it takes some confidence to be in that position but I know that my boss would get the best out of me if he lets me do what I do best (such as by finding new business partners and nurturing those relationships) rather than forcing me out of my comfort zone by giving me tasks where I lack a lot of the technical expertise to perform well. If a boss does force an employee to do a task like that, then that is a rather illogical arrangement and awful management. 

Allow me to talk about one excursion that I did on my trip that left me really frustrated when talking to my sister about it: as mentioned in my previous post, I did a desert excursion which is actually quite a common day trip from Dubai. The tour guide would take you to the desert just outside Dubai where there are incredible sand dunes for various activities and I truly recommend it. However, my sister said that if I went to the desert without a guide, I would die - I had to point out to her that she was incorrect. I do speak some Arabic, I have worked in Dubai before, I have navigated my way through very similar desert landscapes before in other places like Tunisia, Morocco and Oman. But I wouldn't just jump in a rental car and drive out towards the desert without a plan, if I were to design a day out in the desert on my own, I would make sure I do all my research beforehand and thus I would know exactly where to drive to, which activities (like visiting a camel farm) I would select and where I would have my meals - it's called planning ahead, that's not rocket science and I have already done so much planning for this trip to Dubai already. It's something I could have done on my own given that I have do have all the right skills to organize something like that, it's just that I was already so busy on this business trip it was just a lot more convenient to join a tour. This is also the same reason why I buy bread from the supermarket - I actually know how to bake bread but it is quite a time consuming process for a product that is quite cheap so I simply do a cost benefit analysis and decide to buy my bread instead of baking it myself. So that was why I resented my sister for insinuating that I had to join a tour because I would die in the desert, I wanted to say to her, "no you would die in the desert but not me, that's because you're ignorant, you don't speak foreign languages the way I do, you hardly ever travel anywhere. I'm so much cleverer than you, so please don't assume that I'm stupid like you." Yeah that's what I thought, but I couldn't bring myself to say that to my sister, that's too cruel. It's tough having to censor myself like that all the time. 

Thus the line isn't always clear - imagine if my sister came to join me on Dubai on that trip and I took her with me on that desert safari. Our relationship with the guide would be different, I would merely be a tourist who is trying to save time by getting someone else to do all the hard work whilst my sister would be entirely dependent on the tour guide to keep her safe and alive in the desert. You may wonder what kind of job my sister does: let's put it this way, whilst she's not dealing with the elderly in a care home who are dependent on their carers for every need, she is working in a civil service job where the people who are dependent on her service are unable to do it for themselves. So there is some similarity to the kind of work my parents had done all their working lives: they were primary school teachers. You can't just give a group of 7 year old kids a bunch of textbooks and expect them to teach themselves the syllabus, no the teacher has to instruct the children. Thus for my parents and sister, they're used to doing the kind of job where you're providing a service for a customer who needs your help as they just can't perform that task themselves. But it is not just primary school teachers who find themselves in that kind of role - allow me to use the example of a dentist. This is a highly skilled job, but a dentist obviously cannot perform dental surgery on themselves. If they needed dental treatment, they would need to go to a fellow dentist for their services. I don't think there's any shame in turning to an expert like a doctor, a lawyer or any other specialist when you require their help - it makes sense to take advantage of their expertise rather than try to do it yourself. I found this when I was trying to teach my nephew how to ski, oh dear. I found myself shouting at him a lot out of frustration when he simply wasn't responding to my instruction whereas the ski instructor was a lot more experienced in coping with learners like that and thus in this case, paying for those ski lessons for my nephew was money well spent. 

There is one other aspect of my work that my sister has misunderstood and despite the fact that I had explained it to her many times - allow me to share this with you here. I have two directors, one speaks English flawlessly (albeit with an accent) whilst the other struggles a bit with English as a second language but it's not like they speak no English at all. When I was in Dubai, they were both quite happily speaking in English with my husband who doesn't speak Spanish. Some of the meetings in Dubai were in English and whilst I had offered to translate, they were quite happily participating in an English speaking work environment; thus it was only once in a while they may say something like, "I'm not sure how to say it in English", I would ask them to say the technical term in Spanish and then I would translate that into English but this was really limited to the most technical jargon. Like many people in the world who don't speak English as a first language, they have mastered English to a high enough standard to not just survive, but to really thrive in an English speaking work environment. My sister doesn't get that, she thinks that I'm employed to help translate for them as they barely speak English which isn't true. Whilst I am quite capable of doing that, that's not my job and that most certainly isn't what I was employed for - honestly, if you knew how much I was paid, you can get a great Spanish-English translator/interpreter for a small fraction of that! Thus whilst it does help that I do speak Spanish well, my job isn't dependent on that and even if I spoke no Spanish at all, I would still be able to contribute a lot. There are times when my bosses give me a very complex matter to deal with and they require a quick answer, so that is when I would simply email or text them in English because I know that they would rather see the solution instantly in English. After all, I am hired for my problem advanced solving skills within the investment management industry, rather than for my great language skills.

I was shocked when I pointed something which I thought was very obvious out to my sister - I told her that I simply wouldn't work for stupid people. What kind of future would I have if the boss in the company was an idiot who was less intelligent than me? No, I want to work for someone smarter than me than I can learn from my boss and improve. What my sister said to me in response to that was, "but when you apply for a job and go for a job interview, how do you know if the boss is intelligent or not? How are you going to check and find out? What if you get a new job and the boss turns out to be stupid, then what?" Oh yeah, I had been in that situation before when I was in the army and I had worked for so many people who were of superior rank but clearly less intelligent than me. I had to point out to my sister that highly successful companies in financial services do not allow incompetent people to rise to the top - this is an industry where failure simply isn't tolerated. In some small companies, yeah stupid people can get away with it. Let me give you an example of this: when I was renovating my house, my interior designer ordered some mirrors from a supplier but she made a specific request, "if you let your son do this delivery, I will not pay for it." It turns out that the boss has a son who is fat, stupid and clumsy - the fat idiot had a record of dropping and breaking loads of mirrors on job sites but because he is the son of the boss, the father doesn't have the common sense to say, "you're really bad for my business! Go work somewhere else and make another business owner frustrated with your incompetence." So in small businesses like that, incompetent people can still be employed but this really does not happens in my industry. But in any case, I got to know my current bosses in my previous job when I was the account manager for their company and so I got to know them pretty well then - well enough to know that they are very intelligent and not stupid. But is that rocket science? No, I don't think so, I thought I was stating the obvious with my sister but her response made me wonder if she is working for idiots. 

Allow me to share this childhood memory from when I was about seven years old - I went to visit my grandmother with my parents and my grandmother had received a letter in English from the government. Of course my grandmother doesn't understand a word of English, so she handed the letter over to my mother and asked if it was important. My mother than puffed up her chest with pride, opened the letter and started to read it, she then explained the contents of the latter to my grandmother in Hokkien - I can't recall the details of the letter but I do remember how my mother was delighted to do that task, it made her feel so superior to my grandmother. I did encounter another scene that was similar some years ago, when I fly into Singapore, I have to fill up a landing card upon arrival at Changi Airport. This card is now filled in online prior to your arrival but back in the day, you still had to get a pen and fill in a paper card in the airport upon arrival. I saw a group of tourists from China and clearly, none of them spoke any English and that form was entirely in English - no, you could not complete it in Chinese and if you didn't speak any English, then you need to ask for help. So this helpful Chinese-Singaporean guy comes along and offers to help these Chinese tourists complete that form in English and that look on his face, that sheer glee in feeling smarter than these Chinese tourists who didn't speak English, that brought me right back to that childhood memory of when my mother translated that letter for my grandmother. I get it - if you are working class and not very highly educated, then such opportunities to feel cleverer than the other party don't happen very often and that's why some people become thrilled when given that chance to actually feel quite accomplished. But surely that kind of admiration would mean so much more if it came from a really intelligent person? I remember when a professor at university I had a lot of respect for praised me for one of the essays I had written for her - it wasn't easy to impress a top expert like her and therefore that all meant so much more coming from someone like her. 

I would like make it clear please, it's perfectly fine to want to help others and if you feel good about yourself for having helped someone else, then good for you - that's a little form of reward to make sure that people go on being helpful to others and that is why many people (like myself) volunteer for various charities and organisations. We expect nothing in return apart from that warm glow, to feel good about ourselves having been kind and helpful to another person. So like that Singaporean Chinese guy I saw at Changi Airport helping those tourists from China, it was an altruistic act of charity. And if people like him find joy in helping totally uneducated folks with simple tasks, that's fine but what is frustrating is when my sister (who is a lot more educated than my mother) compares the kind of work that I do in investment management to helping very stupid, uneducated people with very simple tasks. After all, there is a huge difference between doing something relatively simple for a (sorry for being blunt) a very old or stupid person and doing something really complicated for someone a lot more intelligent than you. After all, that is what we do at university when we conduct some complicated piece of independent research on a topic - we then write our thesis and submit it to the professor who is the expert on the topic who would then evaluate the quality of our research. Now that's a completely different process to win the praise and approval of someone who is a lot smarter than you. Some people make a living from helping those who are more stupid than them (a primary school or kindergarten teacher is a classic example of that), whilst people like me make a living from helping those smarter than us. My sister could have been wondering, if your boss is so smart, why does he need your help then? Well, the answer is rather simple: my boss has only 24 hours in a day and he can't do everything himself; thus he needs to create a very strong team around him and delegate some tasks to people he trusts. I'm happy and proud to be a part of this dynamic team, I do wonder why my sister finds that concept hard to understand. 

Okay so that's it from me on that topic. I'm sorry it wasn't specifically about Dubai but I promise you I will get back to discussing another aspect of life in Dubai in my next post. But what do you think? Why do you think people like my sister have the misconception that intelligent, capable people would be able to do everything themselves? Or have I been way too harsh on my sister and took what she said out of context? Or could it be that a civil servant like her simply has no idea what happens in the world of business where successful people build elite teams to accomplish even more as a team rather than as individuals? And can you see why I am very frustrated when my sister compares me to a tourist guide taking some totally uneducated and stupid tourists to another country and taking care of their most basic needs? Or is this just a reflection of my frustration given that my family have no idea what the heck I do for a living? Or is this all my fault for not explaining this clearly enough to my sister? Please do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.