Managing for Creativity in Japan

Patterns Tagged ‘relationships’

In-Betweens add the Polish

“….It takes a long time to build trust and relationships. You can’t just walk in and do it overnight….”

Be Respectful or Be Shut Out

“….you really have to play the game right otherwise you won’t be able to do business, people will shut you out….”

On Building Trust and Relationships

“…here, it doesn’t matter if you can say that you are going to bring them the biggest idea they’ve ever had…”

Client Relationships

“…The flip side of that is that in the relationships you do need to work much harder….”

“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 […]

Employee Turnover

“The stability of the relationships is a really good thing. If you have worked with someone for a long time it does make your work with them more efficient. You don’t have to discover how they work and you don’t have to train them. It’s terribly time consuming when you’ve got someone new and turnover […]

Building Trust

“It is a real challenge for a foreign manager to build that kind of trust. If you enter any organization where the employees have a 20 year working relationship you are not only the newcomer but you are a foreigner. You don’t socialize in the same ways and you have a different need for relationships […]

Long Tenure

“Many of the employees have worked together for a very long time, between 10 and 20 years and sometimes on the same team. This means that there are old, established interpersonal relationships on the teams, which is increasingly rare in a Western company. Very few westerners would be satisfied in that context. So there is […]

Relationships

“One of the benefits would be that our Japanese staff has the ability to make relationships like no foreigner could, even with all the entertaining and the best Japanese language skills. It’s very difficult for a foreigner to get under the skin of a Japanese person. I would expect (and I think we have achieved) […]

Advice to New Managers

“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 […]

Development of a Manager

“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 […]

Stable Relationships

“We are very reliant on a couple of key clients, so the relationship with those clients is very critical to our business. That’s one of the funny things about doing business in Japan. The relationships are hard to establish but once they are established they tend to be quite enduring. On the surface there can […]

Personal Relationships

“First of all you don’t have those personal relationships so you need get out socialising. You need to do the Japanese thing. You need to go out in the evening and you need to drink. You need to drink and you need to go to karaoke. You need to do whatever it takes to get […]

Managing for Creativity in Japan Talking with Foreign Executives in Japan