The Leadership Japan Series By cover art

The Leadership Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • Leading in Japan is distinct and different from other countries. The language, culture and size of the economy make sure of that. We can learn by trial and error or we can draw on real world practical experience and save ourselves a lot of friction, wear and tear. This podcasts offers hundreds of episodes packed with value, insights and perspectives on leading here. The only other podcast on Japan which can match the depth and breadth of this Leadership Japan Series podcast is the Japan's Top Business interviews podcast.
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Episodes
  • 557 How Effective Is Your Team In Japan?

    557 How Effective Is Your Team In Japan?
    May 1 2024
    As the boss, we are always super busy. We have the management of the team and the results to work on. Everything has to be progressing on cost, on time and on quality. At the same time, we are setting the strategy, the direction for the team, communicating that so that everyone understands, establishing the values, and we are coaching and building the team members. Phew, I get tired just thinking about all of those boss roles. It is rare though that we can take a breath and reflect on the effectiveness of the teamwork. When problems arise, we tend to work on those in isolation and never have a moment to see the team as a unit, as a whole. Here are three things to look at in your team and reflect on if you are happy with the effectiveness of the team. 1. Conflict In a Western context, we might think we need to have constructive conflict which will help us to make better choices? In Japan, disagreements are more likely to be ignored because if we surface them, we have to publicly deal with it and discretion is the better part of valor here. Nevertheless, we cannot leave things fester and as the boss, we need to take action and sort things out. However, the Western idea of getting the two people in the room and thrashing it out will never work here. You might force people to get together, but no one will say anything in that meeting. Conflict resolution is best done individually, privately, and quietly. We have to take an entirely different approach to sorting out conflict in Japan. We talk to each person many times and, like war time negotiators, we move them toward an armistice that can stick. Hostilities will cease and the conflict will become muted, although never forgotten. Japan is better at working together to come up with solutions when everyone is involved and has a sense of shared ownership. We should concentrate on creating these occasions and the idea of creative conflict becomes replaced with creative cooperation, which suits the Japanese psyche much better. 2. Cooperation In teams, there can be contradictions where it can be difficult to square the circle. Sales teams are being measured on sales results and the numbers tell everything. There can be an issue though, depending on how the salespeople are paid. If they are on salary and bonus, then there is a natural preclusion to cooperate. Japanese salespeople would love to have no individual responsibility. They always vote for salary and a group bonus, related to a group target. This is great for hiding and avoiding accountability and these are two aspects where the Japanese salesforce can operate at ninja levels of accomplishment. We don’t do this in our organisation because we know we will always underperform and no one will be accountable. We want individuals to have specified numbers against their targets and for them to be held responsible for hitting those numbers. As you might imagine, this is not a popular idea here. If they are on individual commissions with a base salary, then there is an inbuilt resistance to cooperating with anyone else. It becomes “everyone for themselves” very easily. This is where values and culture need to play their part and glue the unglueable together. The boss has to work hard at gluing the team together, even when there are these fundamental contradictions at play. It can be done, but it takes a lot of consistency, brand building and communication. 3. Communication Working from home during covid definitely impacted the communication levels in our organisation. We were all operating in our bunkers at home, and the level of clarity and common understanding went down in my observation. Introverts like me loved it. You didn’t have to see or talk to anyone. For the organisation, though, it was not good. We have returned to the office and when we have people chatting in the office, it shows that what was missing before has been reclaimed. Japanese culture is an impediment to clear communication. The language is highly circular, purposely vague, very cautious about what is being said and against declarative or strong statements. “Telling them how it is” just doesn’t fly here and people from overseas who do that are seen as children, unable to compose themselves properly. The nuances of the message are what we have to focus on in communication in Japan and we have to keep checking what we think we understand is being said. Does this suck up a lot of time – Yes. Is it going to change – No. So how did you go analysing your own organisation against these three items of conflict, cooperation and communication? Working on our businesses rather than just working in our businesses is always a struggle. We have to proactively make sure we step back from the fray and take a cold hard look at what is really going on from time to time.
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    11 mins
  • 556 Defining the Team's Purpose In Japan

    556 Defining the Team's Purpose In Japan
    Apr 24 2024

    Managers manage. That means they make sure everything runs on time, to cost and to quality. The leader does all of that, plus some additional important things. These include setting the strategic direction for the team and building the people’s capabilities. Part of the leader’s role is to unite everyone behind the direction they are setting for the team. There can be a lot of detail at the micro level about how to make the strategy a reality. One key component which needs to be set at the start is to re-clarify the purpose of the team. You would think that was pretty obvious. However, if the leader doesn’t work on defining it, there could be 10 people in the team and eleven different purposes.

    Here is a simple six-step guide to setting the purpose.

    1. What is meaningful about what your team does, from the perspective of the organisation as a whole (such as in relation to the stated purpose and vision)?

    The team operates within the framework of the firm, but the leader must break that down to the team level and create a local version which matches the team’s reality in the field. How does your team fit into the big picture? Which colleagues from other departments are key partners and where is the coordination most required? There is often a firm wide Vision Statement which can be a good starting point and the task is to take that and create your own local version for the team.

    2. What is meaningful about what your team does from the perspective of your clients?

    We know what we sell, but sometimes we forget what the client is buying. They are not always the same things. For example, we might think we are selling leadership training, but what the client is buying might be succession planning or greater productivity. It is always important that every person in the team has a clear understanding of the client's needs.

    Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” was an excellent guide to the importance of making sure the entire series of contact points with the client were aligned and operating at the same quality levels. An example would be the person who answers the phone is pleasant and professional, but the person the client is then transferred to is rude or grumpy. The firm brand went from heavenly clouds to depths of hell in one second.

    3. How should your team members behave as they are delivering what matters?

    This comes back to what are the team and organisational values? The leader will always have a wide spread of values scattered across their team and their job is to unite everyone behind the core values of the team. The value set defines how everyone thinks about the clients and that, in turn, defines how they interact with the clients. There is also the issue of how the team members interact with each other? Is there a strong level of mutual respect or we are in a pit of vipers with corporate politics run amok?

    4. What are the expected results for the team and what are we doing when we are acting according to our purpose?

    We are establishing KPI, goals, targets etc., to make the outputs needed clear to everyone. Does each individual have a target or are there team based goals? In the latter case, do people within the team understand their role in delivering the team result?

    5. What actions do you, as the leader, need to do to help fulfill the purpose?

    Taking care of the logistics, resources, permissions, interdepartmental cooperation are common leader roles. There is also the key role of coach to the team members to bolster their motivation and skills. Often though, as busy, busy leaders, we transition from coach to mad pirate captain barking out orders and making people walk the plank if they don’t perform. We set the tone for the team and we set the role model of how we are going to operate in this team.

    6. Who do you need to be as a leader to fulfill the purpose (characteristics/ qualities?

    We should never forget that every single member of our team is a ninja level “boss watcher” and they are constantly scanning us for any signs of crumbling between what we say and what we do. We set the pace and the quality levels for the team. That means we have to be lifetime learners, very well organised and totally professional in our work. It also means we have to be calm in the midst of the raging storms which hit our team from time to time and be the rock around which everyone can shelter.

    Use these six prompts to create the purpose for your team, either for them or with them. I would recommend “with them”, because the team who designs the purpose together has the best levels of ownership of the outcomes and is more likely to execute well on what they have produced.
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    11 mins
  • 555 What Is Different About Leading In Japan?

    555 What Is Different About Leading In Japan?
    Apr 17 2024
    There is a debate about whether Japan is any different from anywhere else when it comes to leading the team. Intellectually, I can appreciate there are many similarities because people are people, but I always feel there are important differences. One of the biggest differences is how people are trained to become leaders in Japan. I should really clarify that statement and say how they are not trained to become leaders. The main methodology for creating leaders in Japan is through On The Job Training (OJT). I can see there is a crisp logic to the idea of OJT back in the day, however it is now a flawed system in the modern world of Japan. In the West, leadership training is a given, because the value is recognised and so the investment is made to better educate the leadership cohorts through each generation. The first problem with Japan OJT is it presumes your boss knows about leading. There is very little formal leadership training going on in Japan. I don’t believe it just about investing the money. There is no great tradition here for corporate leadership training. Before we dive into this subject, I believe we should clarify what is a leader in Japan and what is a manager and what is different. Japan, in my observation, is full of managers, and there are few leaders. A manager runs the machine on budget, on quality, and on time. The leader does all of that and two very important additional tasks. The leader persuades the team that the direction they are advocating is the correct one and, secondly, they build up the capabilities of their staff through one-on-one coaching. By the way, barking out orders like a mad pirate captain doesn’t qualify as coaching. OJT probably made a lot of sense up until about fifty years ago, when it started to be disrupted by technology. By the 1980s, desktop computing became common in Japan and gradually the boss lost his (and they were mainly men) typist and had to start doing his own typing on the computer. The advent of email in the mid-1990s was the real death blow to the boss’s time management. Now the boss had become super busy and time availability for coaching staff became much diminished. What this means is that we have had been through multiple generations of staff mainly educated through OJT and who have been short-changed on the leadership modelling by their “manager” boss. Each corporate generation passes on how to be a manager to the next generation and unless there is some intervention through formal leadership training, there is no real progress. Of course, there will always be exceptions who prove the rule and some managers who make it out of that gravitational pull of OJT and become real leaders. This is the lightning strike theory of leadership development and isn’t a great proposition to ensure that the firm’s leadership bench is stacked with professionals. The key plank in leadership is no longer task experience. The old model was the boss had done all the tasks of their subordinates and knew their jobs inside out. Today, there is much more speciality and technology is making sure it isn’t experience alone which will carry the day for the boss. Many companies in Japan are moving away from the old model of age and stage and instead promoting people based on ability. Just rotating through various jobs in the machine won’t be enough anymore. Leaders have to become expert communicators and masters of environment building, such that individuals can motivate themselves. How many leaders receive any training to assist their communication and people skills? Very, very few and everyone else had to work it all out through trial and error. That hit and miss approach is very expensive. The younger staff want different things to their parents and the modern boss in Japan has to adjust. The bishibishi or super strict model of leadership is now cast out on to the rubbish tip of leadership history in Japan. Bosses still using this model will see their younger staff departing in droves. Already 30% are leaving after three to four years of employ and that number will only get worse as we run out of people to hire and the younger generation all become free agents. The younger generation wants a psychologically safe environment and a lot of personal encouragement by the boss. One of the greatest elements to gaining engagement from staff is that they feel the boss cares about them. The way they know that is through the boss’s communication skills. If you believe that given people are getting paid, they should be engaged, then there is bound to be a lack of the needed communication of “I care about you” going on. If you don’t have well-developed communication skills, then being the boss is only going to get harder and harder. How much communication training do bosses get? Very little and they certainly don’t get much value through OJT, because their own bosses were crap communicators, ...
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    12 mins
Management Economics
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