(Office UPDATE) This Is Not My Job. He He

Last week, a fellow towkay client called me. Very frustrated.
He shouted at me: “Bro, your people told me, this is not my job!”
Then he asked: “Mr Koh, how can this happen in your firm?”

I apologised left, right and centre.
Because in KTP, this sentence is almost a mampus word.

Normally when I hear “This is not my job” inside my office, my blood pressure already naik one notch.

Now my staff said it in front of a client. Confirm the whole bottle of Panadol also not enough.

In KTP, this kind of talk goes against everything we stand for.
One of our culture is one word. Accountability.

I always tell my team.
The moment you say “This is not my job”, you have already failed as a leader.
Doesn’t matter your title. Manager, supervisor, senior.

Later, I gathered my management team and shared my favourite analogy as usual.

Imagine you send your car to the service centre. Engine got funny noise.

You ask the foreman, “Bro, what happened to my car?”
He says: “Not my job. Go ask the mechanic over there.”
You walk to the mechanic. He says: “Not my job. I only follow what the senior mechanic write.”
You walk to the senior mechanic. He says: “Wait ah, I check with manager first.”

How? Geram? Steam sure coming out from your ears, right?

That’s exactly how your client feels when your staff push problems around.

So why people love to say “This is not my job”? Three real reasons I see in 30 years of practice:

Fear of blame. Safer to push than to own.
Silo mentality. “My department, your department”. Forgot same boss pay salary.
Bad example from above. Even manager also push, so why not me?

But as leaders, I must fix this culture.

Because once “not my job” becomes normal, the company slowly becomes very dangerous.

Nobody owns the mistake.
Nobody owns the client.
Nobody owns the outcome.
Everybody only owns their own table.

Here’s the thing, towkay.

When SME bosses ask me why they should pay KTP fees when other firms charge cheaper, I tell them straight :
“You are not paying for the audit or tax report. You are paying for a team that will own your problem.”

That’s the difference.
That’s the culture we built.
Because in the end, accountability is not a poster on the wall.

Towkay,
has your staff ever told you “This not my job”?
How did you handle it?

PS : Authored by Mr Koh Teck Peng, the group principal, in his personal LinkedIn post

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