“I think that there is a greater need for face-to-face interaction – it’s a very hands-on management environment. The staff takes a lot of a manager’s time. The amount of time spent face-to-face in Japan is probably double or triple what a Westerner would expect from their manager. There is an expectation that you will provide that and you’ll get negative feedback if you don’t. On the other hand I think that Western employees like to have a bit of distance from their manager. In Japan it’s an almost paternalistic situation. When you grow up in the organization your main role is to keep harmony and make sure everybody is happy. So the whole conversation around development planning and setting goals and personal targets is a little bit different to that in the West. It’s hard to get an individual employee thinking in terms of any real change in their working career and they don’t seek that as actively as the foreign employees that I have supervised.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“When you are a country manager overseas, you can short-cut a lot of that. If you want to do something that isn’t directly touching the customer, that doesn’t need head office funds, then you don’t really have to have the same degrees of people involved in the decision or have the same formal gateposts. Something like the office move is similar to the client facility in scale so there are processes for that, but more locally. If we wanted to run a campaign or something we don’t have the administration to go through and we don’t have to seek approval of directors x, y and z. I suppose it’s because we’ve got the whole train set to play with on a smaller scale, and the risk to the company if we make a bad decision is not as financially damaging as spending a whole lot of money on a company wide scale. We can move more quickly with less bureaucracy if we have a creative idea here.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“Although it is a performance based system people are driven by different motivators. People don’t perform well in order to get a move or a promotion; they do it to get recognition for a job well done. This is why we don’t give tips in Japan – you take pride in your work. Those kinds of things are intrinsically different.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“Foreigners may have an edge on the change management roles because it is recognized that it is difficult for an internal person to be the nail that sticks up. Sometimes it’s just easier to find people who are willing to come in and go through the learning curve of the organization – there are more foreigners who enjoy that. I love learning a new organization but I haven’t met too many Japanese colleagues that welcome that challenge (C: why is that?) Well, mid-career hires are still very rare. It’s become a phenomenon only in the last five years or so. This is because it is ingrained into people that you work for a company, you are a company man, it’s your security, you have to support yourself so you take the secure path and you are loyal. This is a socio-cultural based thing. In the west, people will change careers up to five times. That’s a normal career path but it’s still very unusual for a Japanese person to change careers more than once or twice….if that often.
I don’t think that it’s any easier for us to come in, I just think that we’re more willing. It’s possibly easier for an organization to imagine a foreigner going into that kind of role and being successful, because there is a motivation to do it for the challenge. Japanese nationals who also have that quality would probably get the job – and there are a number of those around as well. But, if you have the skill set, you’ve got the motivation, and you’ve got the cultural understanding then that’s a plus.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
