A plain-language glossary of management terms

It is one of the most ordinary facts of Singapore working life, and one of the least often treated as a management subject. Switching is neither a lapse nor a lack of fluency: it carries meaning. Dropping into Singlish or a shared mother tongue can close distance or take the heat out of a moment; moving into careful, formal English can create distance, or simply signal that the conversation has entered the register of the official record.

What a manager gains from seeing it: the same switch that eases an exchange for three colleagues can quietly shut the fourth out of it, and a person who follows every word may still only be willing to contradict in their own first language. A team’s informal groups often form along exactly those lines — which is why this entry sits in a management glossary rather than a linguistic one.

Delegation rarely fails because the person was incapable. It fails because the level of autonomy was never stated: the manager believed they had handed over a decision, the other person believed they had been handed an execution, and each holds the other responsible for the misunderstanding.

The symptom to watch for is taking the work back. A manager who reliably reclaims the file on the third day does not have a delegation problem but a level problem: they delegated higher than they could bear, and it is better to delegate one level lower and hold it than to delegate high and take it back.

In a team where people are reluctant to tell a senior person that an instruction is unclear, stating the level out loud matters even more. Silence after “can you handle this?” is not confirmation of which level was understood.

DISC describes behaviour rather than personality, and describes it in a working context specifically. It is deliberately simple: four preferences, observable in a meeting, usable within minutes of meeting someone.

Its value is practical rather than diagnostic. Knowing that a counterpart wants the conclusion before the detail changes how you open a conversation. It says nothing about what they are like as a person, and treating a profile as a verdict is the most common way DISC gets misused.

In a multinational team it has one further use: it gives colleagues a way to describe friction in terms of working style rather than nationality — which is usually more accurate, and always less charged.

Where DISC describes what a person does, the Enneagram looks for what makes them act: the core motivation of a base, and the avoidance that is its other side. That is what explains reactions a behavioural model does not predict, particularly under pressure, where each base shifts in a fairly regular way.

Two limits are stated upfront. The Enneagram is not a scientific instrument and predicts no performance: it therefore has no place in recruitment or appraisal. And a base is not assigned from the outside — it is recognised by the person themselves, which is precisely what separates the model from a test.

The discipline of the format does all the work. In an ordinary meeting, advice arrives before the situation is understood, and the person presenting defends themselves instead of thinking. Co-development forbids advice during the first two steps and imposes a period of questions: most often it is the person themselves who reframes their problem at that point, and it is the reframing that unblocks things.

Three roles rotate from one session to the next: the client, who presents; the consultants, who question and then propose; the facilitator, who holds the sequence. An experienced group does without an outside facilitator after three or four sessions.

The idea is simple and rarely applied: the same person does not call for the same style on every task. Experienced in their own trade, they want to be left to it; on a file they have never handled, that same “I’ll leave it with you” is abandonment.

It is what makes the question “what is your management style?” less useful than it sounds. The relevant answer is not a style but an ability to change style, and the main obstacle is not knowing the model but habit: most managers apply the style that is comfortable for them and call it a conviction.

Team coaching differs from a cohesion seminar in its starting point: it treats a collective that has stopped working, where a seminar strengthens one that works. Confusing the two is the most expensive mistake in this field — a seminar placed on top of untreated conflict enforces a warmth nobody feels and leaves the team worse off than before.

The entry condition is rarely negotiable: the sponsor must accept that the diagnosis may call their own way of operating into question. Without that agreement, given before anything starts, the engagement stops at the diagnosis.