Managing for Creativity in Japan » harmony

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.”

Characteristics of a Successful Manager

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:00:57 +0000

“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.”

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.”

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