“I suppose that I would let them know that people management is quite a big part of the job here. I wouldn’t talk about individuals at that point because they need to form their own opinions on the team – who’s good and who isn’t. But the team here has worked together for a long time – staff turnover is very low, so whoever comes into the job will find that you don’t get shouting matches in the office or anything like that. I suppose that someone who doesn’t know Japan needs to understand that that doesn’t mean that everything is completely cake and roses and that there are tensions between certain people, or historic questions about who is supposed to do which job. You won’t pick these things up if you stand here and look around the room. You won’t really spot it at first, but then 3 months in you’ll get someone coming and knocking on your door saying “did you know that this person did this?” That’s one thing that I would highlight, that HR and people management is probably going to take up a lot of time.”
“Certainly in my career history this has been the job where people management has been the most challenging. Part of the reason is that it’s the biggest team I’ve ever had. When I was here last time it was a big team and it was challenging then, but when I’ve not been in Japan I’ve only ever had one or two people reporting to me. But beyond that, one thing is that turnover is quicker in other countries so if two people don’t get along you can grin and bear it for a year if things really can’t be resolved and typically after a year or two years in my home country someone will be promoted or change jobs or whatever. So the longevity of service here makes it more challenging - put you and me in the same room for 18 years we’d, y’know… And that’s what these guys have had. They’re like a family, they know each other very well but at the same time there are embedded issues because of the length of time they’ve spent together. That’s one. And I supposed in Europe people are more vocal. Well, they’re not more vocal but they are more direct. If they have an issue with someone then they are more likely to discuss it directly with that person whereas here they are more likely to shy away from raising it directly but they will talk to their own boss about it, and gossip in the coffee room about it – that kind of stuff. Sometimes you have to deliberately bring the issues to light whereas in my home country it would naturally come to light. We are basically a happy team though, I just mention it since you are asking about differences.”
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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
“There are office routines that are quite uniquely Japanese. Like for instance every morning there is a ‘chorei’ which is like a stand up, quickie meeting, just to get everyone on side, introducing media clippings and that kind of thing. This is a very healthy thing but I think that very few Western companies would have anything like that.”
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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
“Take it easy. Take a good look around before you change anything. Don’t come in like a tornado – unless of course there is some kind of crisis and you have to do something in an emergency fashion. Go through the process. Make sure that the staff sees that you are trying to learn, you are listening to them. Take their advice, don’t make unilateral autonomous decisions, try to reach consensus before changing anything. So take time. Really analyse. Get their buy-in. Realise as well that they see you as a gaijin (foreigner) so they expect certain funny things to be going on.
For example, I think that they will assume that you don’t understand Japanese culture, that you’re going to be doing things at the last minute, changing your mind at the last minute, not booking meetings a month in advance. These are some of the things that they expect. They are quite amazed that people can change hotel bookings two days before they arrive but in the west, I don’t know if it’s the same in all British companies, but it’s quite normal to arrange to fly somewhere or to change flight plans the week before. In Spain it was quite common to do it the day before or even on the day. Here, we try to book all key meetings one month in advance – with a Shacho (President) of a company that would be a minimum. So, I imagine that there would be some assumptions that a foreigner head of office would not have that understanding and I think that you need to demonstrate that. (CB: Do you mean that it is important to toe the line for a lot of things?) As much as possible I think, they have been employed with bi-lingual capability generally and they have joined a foreign company so there must be some kind of expectation that it is going to be different, and some of them might want that so I think it would be a mistake to try to be a Japanese company. But I think that it is necessary to acknowledge that there is still an expectation that they will want to be treated like Japanese, at least understood and not walked over, and have things explained to them, to try and reach consensus.”
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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
“There is a lot of non-verbal communication in Japan and you can’t expect a new foreigner to come in at senior manager or CEO level and understand all of that. They can, however, understand having a cultural interpreter is essential and very often a foreigner who has been in Japan for a long time is a better cultural interpreter than a Japanese advisor. Somebody who has really lived and worked with Japanese is very often able to explain some of those confusing behaviours and I guess that in a sense that’s the kind of role I have had”
****************************************************
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
“Creating an innovative environment of change in Japan is a tricky cross-cultural thing. You have a foreign manager driving change and potentially creating discord. If you do it well maybe you don’t have to be disliked though, as long as everyone understands what you are trying to do. That comes down to good communication.”
****************************************************
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
