Culture May Be the Culprit

This weekend, Joseph Schooling became the first Singaporean to win an Olympic gold medal when he beat Michael Phelps and 6 other swimmers from around the world. It was a huge moment for Singapore, which pretty much ceased all other activity for the 50.39 seconds that Mr Schooling was racing through the water.



The nation’s first-ever gold medal, and its winner, are being justifiably celebrated. At the same time, some in Singapore are using it as an opportunity to bash foreigners yet again, pointing to the system known as the Foreign Sports Talent Scheme, which recruits foreign athletes and helps them migrate to Singapore so they can compete for the small city-state. As one Facebook poster put it,

Singapore’s first Olympian champ is the epitome of ‘Work. Work until your idols become your rivals.’ And he made a very powerful statement. A statement which shows that Singapore does not need to import foreign talents to represent us in sports, or anything else for that matter.

Grew up with the mindset that local talent ‘cannot make it’. Local athletes all ‘kayu’. Foreigners are better than us. Yesterday, a man named Joseph Schooling changed that mindset. Local talent and athletes not ‘kayu’. We are every bit as good as any Ang Moh or Ah Tiong. We just lack support, funding and the opportunity to nurture and bring out the best of ourselves. Time to wake up, government.

Singapore’s challenge, though, is not necessarily a lack of government support for local athletic talent. The Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth provides funding for some coaches and athlete stipends and more through Sport Singapore, and offers scholarships for local athletes to study and train at overseas universities (though in Mr Schooling’s case, his scholarship to the University of Texas came from the school’s athletic department, not from Singapore). These are resources that are not available in many other countries, such as the United States, where an individual’s athletic pursuits, whether to be a power forward in the NBA or a Greco-Roman wrestler, are privately funded. Rising world-class athletes may also be eligible for a deferment of their required National Service so they can train uninterrupted for major events such as the Olympics. There has always been potential athletic talent in Singapore, and the government has resources, so why would they have been looking outside?

One answer may be the social culture. Athletes are not highly revered in Singapore as they often are in other countries. Sports heroes for Singaporean youth are more likely to come from the English Premier League than from their own Olympic teams. That’s not a surprise; a country that consists of a single city cannot give rise to the kinds of professional sports leagues you see in large countries with many major metropolitan areas, so the celebrity culture of athletes has not really had a chance to emerge. That may not be a bad thing in itself — why the US treats professional athletes as being so special is something I have never quite understood — but things could be different if some of the featured celebrities at events in Singapore or in advertisements were athletes rather than some “MediaCorp personality” (which, yes, is a title that is used in advertisements).

The lack of local professional sports is not something that’s likely to change — geography has pretty much settled that — but there’s another key cultural factor that could be changed: parents. There seem to be very, very few parents in Singapore who support their child’s pursuit of a career as a professional and/or Olympic-level athlete. Singaporeans we have spoken to recently about this suggest the stereotype about parents pushing their children into high-paying or highly-regarded careers — think doctors and bankers — have some truth to them. For some parents, they may be concerned about their kids’ financial ability to care for them as they get older. Others may be thinking about how they will look in front of their peers when their children’s careers are compared. Whatever the reason, relatively few parents will support their kids’ desire to be a world-class athlete. There are certainly exceptions to this — the Schoolings, of course, and the Sohs and the Liews and many others — but when the culture largely is unsupportive of a certain kind of behavior, then it’s hard for that behavior to happen

(Incidentally, we hear about the same issue from many young entrepreneurs. Their parents cannot understand why they don’t get a “real job.”)

The same thing could be happening in your organization. You may want a certain kind of behavior from your employees, such as more innovation, stronger collaboration, better planning, or something else you think is important. But if your organizational culture doesn’t support it, it’s not going to happen. For instance, if you want your team to collaborate more effectively, but your performance reviews emphasize individual work and your bonuses are based on individual targets, guess what? People are not going to worry about collaborating, because your actions have said it’s not important even if your words say it is. Even if you do put policies in place that support the behavior you want, you rely on front-line managers, the ones facing your employees directly, to follow through and put them into practice. If they don’t follow through, if your managers don’t actively encourage and facilitate the behaviors you want, then even if you have the talent, it may not get used effectively.

There is a phrase that says “Culture eats strategy for lunch,” which basically means that you can have clear goals and available resources, but if your culture doesn’t support the use of those resources toward those goals, you can forget it. Maybe Singapore cannot change parents’ perspectives on what makes a good career for their kids, but if you are looking for changes within your organization, then perhaps you can have better luck changing the culture there.