“The difficulty with this is that, if you really want to manage change, you have manager who has been rewarded his whole career on creating harmony and we know that it takes some positive dissonance to create any change. You have to push people out of their comfort zone to create change of any kind, and creativity and innovation are kinds of change. So it would be very difficult for a Japanese manager to reverse his whole set of behavioural characteristics and suddenly become a change agent. You might be able to take that same manager and drop him into another corporate culture where he doesn’t have all this history and maybe he would have the personal capabilities to do it, but in his own organization it’s very difficult. So Japanese managers have to rely on some external motivations to effect change; in a sense they have to blame other people for having to force their people to do these things.”
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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
“The first characteristic is probably the ability to receive advice – the ability to identify allies and build a team of people who are able to influence the organization. It is also important to be able identify who the opinion leaders are and who the change agents might be, and to work with them effectively.
I also think that the ability to create positive dissonance but still maintain harmony is important. In a way that has to do with generating goodwill, so it’s a personal characteristic - being warm and human and at the same time creating understanding of the need for change. I guess a lot of that comes down to good communication skills. But before communication comes listening, so the ability to listen well, and listen well across cultures is important. I think you can learn that in other countries, not just in Japan. I’ve worked with CEOs who have never been to Japan before, but who have a lot of global experience. The successful ones have the abilities I just mentioned.”
“The leadership characteristics are not so different from what you would require for success as a leader in any other culture, but there is probably a heavier emphasis on the ability to trust and rely on others, and to listen intuitively.”
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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
“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
“Japanese employees in my experience place a very high value on pleasing a manager. A lot of that is appearance, being there, face-to-face, and being on time. How you do things really matters. But they put less emphasis on pushing the envelope, on challenging, on doing anything they haven’t done before. There is an innate difficulty with managing something they haven’t got a formula for, that they haven’t got a template for. If you as a manager provide a template or formula and say ‘go for it’, they’ll do a beautiful job. But if you just say ‘here’s the problem, find a solution’, they’re lost.”
****************************************************
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.”
****************************************************
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
“Look at the development of a Japanese manager. You’re growing up as a colleague. Promotion is based on age and stage seniority. It’s still not (although they do have some merit-based systems now) driven by performance bonuses. Your actual performance is not the real indicator for your promotion; the real indicator is just being there and your relationships, your rapport with the senior management. The reasons for becoming a manager are intrinsically different from in the West. You don’t need to be a bringer of ideas or a creative person to be a manager. You need to get along well with people.”
****************************************************
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
“The purpose of meetings is intrinsically different in Japan. Westerners go to meetings to brainstorm, discuss, and hammer things out and decide things. Japanese go to meetings to confirm what has already been agreed, and I think a lot of foreigners never figure that out. So as a manager it’s absolutely critical that you get that you don’t go to meetings to decide or discuss – you’ve got to do that outside. Anybody who misses that is not going to get the most out of their team. You have to provide a safe environment where people can experiment where people won’t be embarrassed. Then you can start getting the idea flow.”
****************************************************
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
