From Managing People to Designing Work - The Future of Leadership in Singapore
Our first three articles looked at how you attract, develop, and retain talent in Singapore. This one looks at the job underneath all three: how leaders design the work in the first place.
For decades, good leadership was measured by how well managers supervised their teams, monitored performance, and ensured work was completed on time. The assumption was simple: people needed to be managed.
But what if the real leadership challenge is no longer about managing people?
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded in everyday work, alongside shifting employee expectations and the rise of alternative work arrangements, leaders are now confronted with a different question.
How do you create a work environment where people and AI complement each other, and the business stays agile, innovative, and productive?
Getting there takes four shifts in how you lead, manage, and design work.
Shift 1: From status to meaning
Work has long been a route to financial security, career advancement, and social status. Those still matter. But employees today want something more: a sense of purpose in what they do.
You can see it in Singapore. A recent Ministry of Manpower survey shows that the meaning of work is one of the key reasons employees stay passionate about their jobs. Work is no longer just a bread-and-butter issue. People want meaning from it, and they increasingly expect it.
As younger generations come through, meaningful work stops being a differentiator and becomes table stakes. People are asking not just “What do I do?” but “Why does my work matter?”
Building that environment is part art, part science, and it can backfire if handled badly. A recent Singapore Human Resources Institute’s article sets out what it takes: deliberate organisational practices, supportive leadership, and a culture that connects individual contributions to a bigger purpose. When people can see the impact of their work, they are more motivated, more committed, and more resilient.
Shift 2: From supervision to trust
Command and control worked well when work was predictable. Today work is knowledge-intensive, collaborative, and technology-enabled. People work across locations, across functions, and alongside AI systems. You cannot oversee every decision or approve every action. What you can do is set clarity of purpose, establish boundaries, and let people make good calls inside them.
A report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that trust is a fundamental ingredient in healthy, sustainable organisations, and that it needs to run through every part of the business. It is linked to better outcomes across the board, from individual attitudes to team dynamics.
So how do you move from supervision to trust?
- Shift from monitoring activity to measuring outcomes.
- Provide autonomy and set clear decision boundaries.
- Build psychological safety.
- Develop managers as trust builders.
Shift 3: Use AI to enhance human judgement, not replace it
In recent months, job cuts at Shopee, layoffs at Oracle and, more recently, a workforce reduction at Visa have all been framed around restructuring and a harder push into AI-enabled technology. Each has fuelled the same worry: that AI is replacing people.
But treating AI purely as a substitute for labour misses most of its value. AI is excellent at processing data, spotting patterns, and automating repetitive tasks. What it cannot readily replicate is critical thinking, ethical reasoning, creativity, empathy, and contextual judgement.
Economists Falk and Tsoukalas at Wharton Business School recently coined the term “The AI Layoff Trap”. Their argument: Companies that treat AI mainly as a way to cut headcount may bank short-term savings while undermining long-term performance. Heavy layoffs erode institutional knowledge, damage trust and morale, weaken innovation, and strip out the very human capability needed to make AI pay off.
The better move is to redesign the work so AI augments people, freeing them for tasks that need creativity, judgement, collaboration, and problem-solving.
So the question is not “Which jobs can AI replace?” It is “How can AI make our people better at their jobs?” The aim is simple: move people up to higher-value work that needs human insight, collaboration, and decision-making.
Leaders also have to equip people with the skills and the confidence to work alongside AI. That means investing in AI literacy, redesigning workflows, and building a culture where employees see AI as a collaborator rather than a competitor.
Treat AI as a partner in human performance rather than a cost-cutting tool, and you are far more likely to get sustainable productivity gains without trading away trust and engagement.
Shift 4: Don’t underestimate autonomy, relatedness, and competence
One of the most useful ideas in motivation research is Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. It holds that people are more motivated, engaged, and resilient when three basic psychological needs are met: autonomy, relatedness, and competence.
Autonomy is the freedom to make decisions and exercise judgement. Relatedness is the need to feel connected and to belong. Competence is the drive to build skills, master new challenges, and perform well.
How do you put that into practice?
Start with autonomy: manage outcomes, not activity. Rather than monitoring how work gets done, set clear goals and let people work out the best route. But autonomy needs boundaries. A “free for all” approach creates false expectations, then friction, then counterproductive behaviour.
Then strengthen relatedness by building a culture of trust, collaboration, and inclusion. More technology and more hybrid work has made people lonelier at work. A Gallup study found 20% of employees feel lonely, with younger and fully remote workers hit hardest. Leaders who invest in relationships with their people simply outperform those who don’t.
Finally, keep building competence. As AI reshapes roles and creates new ways of working, continuous learning and reskilling are not optional. Beyond technical skills, people need room to develop critical thinking, creativity, communication, and ethical judgement. These are the strengths that stay distinctly human.
The bottom line
The leadership job in Singapore is changing shape. It is less about supervising people and more about designing the conditions in which people working alongside AI. . Meaning, trust, augmentation, and the basics of human motivation are not soft extras. They are the design specification.
What to do next
- Make the purpose of the work explicit, and connect individual contributions to it.
- Manage outcomes rather than activity, and give autonomy inside clear boundaries.
- Equip managers to build trust and psychological safety, not just monitor performance.
- Ask how AI can augment your people before asking which roles it can replace.
- Invest in AI literacy alongside critical thinking, creativity, and ethical judgement.
Sources
1. Ministry of Manpower, Labour Force in Singapore 2025: Job Mobility and Job Change Outcomes of Residents. https://stats.mom.gov.sg/iMAS_PdfLibrary/Labour-Force-in-Singapore%202025-Job-Mobility-and-Job-Change-Outcomes-of-Residents.pdf
2. Singapore Human Resources Institute, “Meaningful Work: A Blessing or a Curse?”. https://shri.org.sg/meaningful-work-a-blessing-or-a-curse/
3. CIPD, Trust and Psychological Safety: Evidence Review. https://www.cipd.org/en/knowledge/evidence-reviews/trust-psychological-safety/
4. Channel NewsAsia, “Shopee job cuts”. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/shopee-job-cuts-layoff-employees-software-engineers-6173816
5. Forbes, “AI Cost 21,000 Jobs At Oracle This Year”. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/06/23/ai-cost-21000-jobs-at-oracle-this-year-and-more-layoffs-could-be-coming/
6. Channel NewsAsia, “Visa to lay off 7 per cent of jobs”. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/visa-lay-7-cent-jobs-cut-efficiency-push-6283421
7. Falk & Tsoukalas, “The AI Layoff Trap”, SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6448898
8. Center for Self-Determination Theory. https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/
9. Forbes HR Council, “Employee Autonomy: A Blessing Or A Curse For Employers?”. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2024/03/28/employee-autonomy-a-blessing-or-a-curse-for-employers/
10. Gallup, “Employees Worldwide Feel Lonely”. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/645566/employees-worldwide-feel-lonely.aspx
Author Bio: Dr Tan Kim-Lim is a Senior Lecturer at James Cook University Singapore and Head of the Centre for International Trade and Business in Asia (CITBA). His research develops actionable interventions that drive sustainable behavioural change on the most pressing issues in organisations, with a focus on the future of work, employee attitudes, and human–technology interfaces.
This four-part insights series is developed from Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore, a Workforce Strategy Playbook on navigating talent management, launched in May 2026. The Playbook and this insights series are prepared in partnership with Center of International Trade and Business in Asia (CITBA) and James Cook University Singapore. The report includes aims to address the challenges that businesses in Singapore, particularly Australian businesses, face in finding the skilled talent they need.
See other stories in this series: