In this episode, we have a very special guest. She has worked with clients from across both the public and private sectors in the defense, industrial relations, consumer goods, telecommunications, and airline industries. She’s currently the co-founder and director of Change Voyage Consulting, a multi-consulting firm that provides tailored solutions in the areas of organizational and individual change.

She is also an adjunct lecturer at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at the Singapore Management University (SMU). She has obtained a Ph.D. from SMU. Her dissertation topic centers around her part-time employees managed non-work time to reduce the tendency to work overtime.

Dr. Yong, is known as a “glue”, when asked to elaborate on this, this is what she said: 

(3:19 - 48) I realized that using the glue analogy, is something that resonates with people. So imagine your organization is going through a change. Maybe a new system, new performance appraisal system, merger acquisition, etc. But at first, people are all thinking about the change in different ways to see the management, and uses, even the people who come in to do the project. They are all in a space of themselves.

(3:49 - 04:02) So what our company does? Is that we go in and we try to glue them all together, for what? So that they can move towards the goal in a concentrated manner that they can move together.  

(04:03 - 4:20 ) But I also don’t want to be the glue for too long. What I want to do is that I hope that one day they will be able to produce their own glue, and they will then glue themselves together to move towards the goal that they want to do. So essentially, that’s what I do for a living.

Dr. Yong shared strategies in order to optimize things. 

(05:00-29) So one thing at a time, firstly. Secondly, telling myself it’s possible. So a lot of times we are constrained by our paradigm and constrained by what other people tell us that we can or we cannot do. So if we want to just dissect and peel the onion and think about critically how do I fit things in, how do I reorganize my time to make things possible it can be done.

(5:39-6:01) The first strategy is better optimization of my time. So for me a lot of times I spend working either very early in the morning where there is no disruption and before I go to work and also doing times where I’m waiting for my kids to come off from their enrichment class.

(06:08-32) The second strategy is to leverage other people to collaborate with you to be able to juggle. So for example when I did my dissertation I had to be away from the office for a long period of time. Sometimes for a whole week from Monday to Saturday and I had to work closely with my clients and my team members to be able to continue the work even though I was not around. 

Being passionate will lead us to do the impossible and get the expected results not only for ourselves but for the people we are influencing and working with, Dr. Yong shared: 

(07:16-8:09) my passion is in creating knowledge as well as delivering knowledge to people. The part that keeps me going is to understand how do I make something so simple that it is very, very easy for the students to consume. So the topic that I teach is around business model design and for students who haven’t been outside into the real world and they need to deal with the real clients is really tall order. So it’s almost like describing a color that you have not seen before. How do I simplify the complex to make something that seems so insurmountable to be something that is really within the comfort zone of students is a challenge that I post to myself and that’s what makes me tick.


Life-changing decision

Not all the decisions we make in life are easy. It will require courage and the ability to see the bigger picture.

(08:46)So I was about 40 years old when I hit a roadblock in my career so at the point in time it was endless juggling with work and with my family, my two children who were very young then. I remembered every time during the journey out to work  I would always have this voice in my head, “I wish I could quit”, and very quickly there was another voice that came up in response to that voice which says “why not?”

(09:23)So the list was very long in the beginning but as a very structured person, I tried to cross out the list one by one to clear the hurdles off, to justify and clear the hurdles in terms of why I should or should not quit. After a while, I realized that I was holding myself hostage. Fear was holding me hostage because I was concerned about a loss of financial comfort I was fearful of the loss of professional structure because I was somebody and if I left I would become nobody.

(10:03)After quite a long struggle, I decided to set myself free. So what do I mean in setting myself free? So, there is a book, one of my favorite books which is Hostage at the Table and is written by an ex-police officer, I believe his name is called George Kohlrieser. So what he said was in a hostage situation, you need to understand the needs and wants of the hostage in order to satisfy and establish a bond between the hostage.  

In life, sometimes the greatest obstacle is our own self. But breaking away from the comfort zone can lead us to do greater things than where we are right now. 

(10:36)So for me, the person who is taking hostage of myself is me and therefore I have to come to terms with the fear and also come to terms with how do I overcome the challenges. So eventually I come to terms with that and even on the day that I left, I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. But I had convinced myself enough that I had to take that challenge and I was game to learn new things and to live in some form of ambiguity. 

(11:15)So I took the step forward and the first thing that I did was to take on a Ph.D. course.

(12:40)I’m glad I took that step because it has led me on to think about how differently I wanted to deliver change management services for my clients and I was exposed to a network of people that I would have never been able to be exposed to entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders of companies, who gave me very different insights from what I would have gotten if I were to stay as an employee. 

 

The impact of the new network
With new connections come new opportunities and different avenues for personal and professional growth.

(13:40)These people helped me to think about things very differently. My favorite quote is from Dr. Wayne Dryer “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
 (13:53)Because of the people that are in my new network, my classmates and my fellow course mates. The way that they think about problems is very different from how I would approach them and this gives me the inspiration to do things differently.

(15:08)Because their network is very vast and varied this has also exposed me to a lot more opportunities in terms of my business.

 

Here is what Dr. Yong explained about the work she does.

(15:23)How do you get your entire team or entire organization to move towards a goal in a concentrated and integrated fashion? Everybody the same, everybody aligned to the vision, everybody geared up to reach to the goal. That is the goal and objective of change management.

Of the F word, freedom is Dr. Yong’s favorite

(19:42) Definitely Freedom 
 (19:46)The reason why I started this company with Stacey my co-founder is precise because of the F word, Freedom. Freedom to be able to deliver what we are considered as the best service and the best value to our clients without the constraints of typically lighter set-ups and secondly, the flexibility to decide where and how I want to use my time.