Managing for Creativity in Japan » change

A Hands-On Management Environment

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:00:34 +0000

“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.”

Being a Change Agent

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:00:13 +0000

“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.”

People First

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:00:28 +0000

“In Japan, the most successful managers are people that care about people. I think that you can make a lot of mistakes (and get away with it) if people think that you are doing it for the right reasons. You can create a lot of change and discomfort if people understand that your motivations are not manipulative or self-serving – that it’s really for the good of the organization or the good of the individual concerned.
Also, particularly in Japan, people won’t push back very much. They won’t challenge a lot so you have to be careful that you don’t railroad people and force people along a path that they haven’t bought into. Go more slowly than you otherwise would or you’ll miss the signs that they aren’t on board and get the passive aggression at the end.”

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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

You always get what you always got

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:00:37 +0000

“The old adage “if you always do what you’ve always done then you always get what you always got” is very true in Japan. You get very consistent results, but where does that leave you on the creativity and innovation barometer?”

****************************************************
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

Following the Person Before You

Chris Berthelsen — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:00:23 +0000

“Initially however, it was assumed that the way they were doing it was the only way to do it. We had to sit down and say “no, you are free to do what you want as long as you meet the needs of these internal customers”. To assume that the person before you must have been right, to never question that older more experienced person or office manager was a very Japanese mindset – “how could she have been wrong? She actually taught me for the first six-months in this job.” Well yes, but now she’s gone, she retired after 18 years service so some of the requirements that were around 18 years ago – before computers and before these software packages – are irrelevant.”

The Passive-Aggressive

Chris Berthelsen — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:00:56 +0000

“If you look at change models, you know on average, about 2% of the population enjoys change, but another 16% will go along with it because they can see that it’s required. Another 30% will go along with it if the key opinion leaders do, because they are just kind of followers and another 30% will go along with it because it’s reached critical mass and they have no choice. But you will always have a 10-15% group at the bottom that in a Western company would quit, but in Japan they don’t – they’ll just be disgruntled and passive aggressive……… These people are the greatest inhibitors to creativity and innovation; passive-aggressive people who actually work as a counter against innovation.”

“In Japan there is never really any overt opposition to anything because harmony is the goal but there is what we call passive aggression, where people will agree to your face and go ahead and undermine through the nemawashi – create the allies and divide the team. That’s really inhibiting to the creation of high performance teams in Japan and a lot of foreigners don’t even know that it’s going on.”

“In the West those people will be vocal, and they’ll put out the word and they’ll leave. They’ll do a mid-career shift. Japanese won’t do that. They’ll stick around and they’ll stay for 20 more years – literally. They’ll even take a pay cut. You can’t fire them. They’ll let you demote them, cut their pay and shove them in a back room. They’ll take whatever dusty old job you have and they’ll just wait for their pension. It’s a different orientation. They’re in the job for security, not money or personal ambition. They derive their status from their business card. They work for the company.”

Foreigners and Change Management

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:00:55 +0000

“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.”