An Adventurous Dove

I attended a presentation cum feedback session organized by my JC friend’s start-up company this morning till afternoon at Fuji-Xerox Towers at Anson Road. The company is just 6 days old, started up by my SFC Ex-Co friend Leung Ming & his other NTU engineering counterpart.

They named the company ‘Job Match’, a HR consultancy private limited firm that performs similar functions as other job search agencies. Perhaps, a difference in this company is because it takes it a step further than just assisting job seekers in their job search, but also offers industry assimilation services that help bridge the gap between recent graduation & a person’s first job. In short, helping new graduates with their first start into their career.

As such, these two guys organized & invited their friends to attend this 4 hour session, where they did a mock presentation about their company & its services, & asked for feedback regarding their PowerPoint slides, presentation style, group games, personality profiling test, etc. In fact, they have just landed their first client with a manager in charge of a particular Prudential agency.

The audience was a small group of about 11 people, all whom are friends of either Ming or Gerald (his other co-partner). There was a recently graduated medical student named Angela who just became a doctor at Alexandra Hospital. The next odd-one-out was me, a business admin graduate who is currently unemployed at the moment. The rest of them were all either undergraduates or graduates from NTU mechanical engineering. It was a rather skewed combination of people as everyone found out during a short 1 minute self-introduction about ourselves.

But what really made an impression in my mind was my relative ease & ability to assimilate into a group of strangers whom I did not know at all, especially when almost everyone is from NTU & from engineering. It made me wonder if there was some sort of personality evolution taking place within myself, coz I found myself able & comfortable in taking the initiative to relate, chat & laugh with Sean’s group of friends at his recent birthday celebration.

This kind of struck me, coz I always thought of myself as quite an introvert & many of my classmates telling me that I’m always so serious in secondary school & JC. I guess I really only let myself be myself when I’m with my own family, Rebecca & my best friend Sean. Apart from that, normally I would tend to be quite aloof & keep much of my thoughts to myself.

Perhaps it could be because I’m financially ‘confined’ to being at home most days of the week, which may result in my greater initiative in talking with strangers. But still, feeling lonely & bored at home doesn’t necessarily make me more open to relating with strangers… so I’m not really sure if there has been some bit of change in my personality recently, since I left my previous job at StarHub. Or maybe I felt so oppressed working under Gladys that this experience working under her kind of shook up a change in my personality after ‘liberation’ from her. I really don’t know… my mind’s been pretty mixed up with lots of thoughts & feelings since I left my last job there.

As part of the program, each participant had to do this personality profile test which categorizes each individual into one of the four birds – peacock, dove, owl & eagle. Each bird has its own nature, strengths & weaknesses, as I learnt when first did this back during my Leadership & Management Skills (LMS) module back at SIM. Back then, my results showed that I have a dove & owl personality, with a very low scoring in peacock & eagle personality tendencies.

This time, I rated a very high dove (16 pts) personality, with a very low score of owl (7 pts), peacock (6 pts) & eagle (2 pts) characteristics. And like the title of this Blog entry, perhaps I find myself an adventurous kind of dove that finds challenge & variety working with people, even though some can sometimes be annoying. Adventurous also in the sense that I like adventure sports e.g. trekking, kayaking & who knows… maybe even scuba diving, in future! Aha! Simply put - activities that get me in touch with nature.

Anyway, even though this result wasn’t shocking to me at first, it became a bit more shocking when I realized that I’m have the highest extreme rating in the entire group of people & this quite extreme personality results (as compared to before) kind of made me a bit worried about this change.

The result showed & confirmed that I have become an even more people-oriented person, rather than task-oriented. Which kind of puts me at quite a bad extreme state coz jobs nowadays focus A LOT on performance… & not just subjective performance, but on measurable performance.

And these thoughts also made me wonder if that’s why I felt so oppressed when working under Gladys (a very high eagle personality) & in such a dilemma as well as getting all upset from being chased by Gladys concerning so many things, even when its something as straightforward as coming out with distinct & measurable key performance indicators which determine how my job performance is being assessed.

To be really honest, I felt so much happier making friends at StarHub, even when tyrannized by Gladys. I wonder if this should be the kind of job which I should be exploring towards – those people-oriented kinds of jobs that involve building relationships with people. I wouldn’t say that I have very good interpersonal skills, but I guess building relationships with people give me a lot of satisfaction in life, than just hitting goals & targets alone… which sadly, is emphasized largely as the bottom-line intention of every money-making company, even unfortunately for a not-so-profit organization like the NKF. Sometimes, I guess it’s really the kind of people that counts…