Episode #578: “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会) Cherish The Moment Leaders

This Japanese expression “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会), linked to Zen, focuses on transience and can be translated as “one time, one meeting” or “treasure an unrepeatable moment”. It is often closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, which is certainly never a hurried affair and the devil is definitely in the details of how the ceremony is conducted. Contrast that with our modern leader life in business. We are constantly in motion, always time poor and harassed for 24 hours a day by an avalanche of emails. We migrate from one meeting room to another, confronting an endless assortment of meeting details. We have many agendas in our minds when we meet people and our shrinking concentration spans make a lot of what we do a blur, bereft of reflection.

This is a poor contextual background for dealing with people. Being so time challenged, we are constantly cutting corners and shaving off minutes to try and get it all done. Being “efficient” with people is a bad idea for leaders, but often once we are on a roll, that efficiency bug takes us over. The Ichi-Go, Ichi-E idea is that we treat each moment of interaction as special rather than just serial.

If our team members felt that we were treating them individually as “special”, their engagement levels would be at very high levels, in what is increasingly becoming a tech driven, impersonal world. But often we are galloping too fast on horseback to smell the flowers, as we fly by. If we break each staff interaction down to a single defining unit, we will change the pace we interact with people from busy and tormented, to calm and caring.

I remember a terrific example of Ichi-Go, Ichi-E by Ian Mackie, my old boss at Jones Lang Wootten In Brisbane. It was after 6.00pm one evening and I was sitting in his office having a discussion about a deal, when one of the secretaries was walking past on her way home and she popped her head in the door to say something to him. In those days Directors were like Gods compared to humble secretaries in that hierarchy. Yet Ian stopped what he was doing and he gave her his complete and entire attention for that one moment. He was showing his respect for her as a person, and it was a powerful experience for me to see how he handled that encounter.

Often, as the boss, we don’t show enough respect because we are rushing, preoccupied with what we need to get done and our people can become cogs in the fly wheels of our business. Like Ian, we need to slow it down to a stop. Focus on the person to the exclusion of everything else, stop our brain for racing ahead and give that person our full attention. It sounds easy to say, but actually doing it is very difficult. We are usually caught up in the moment of what we want and what is important to us. We are perpetually rearranging things to suit what we need, when we need it.

I am the first one to raise his hand as guilty of trying to do too much, in too short a time and just constantly cramming stuff into my day, such that my interactions are very “businesslike”. That is not a great idea when we are dealing with people. Ichi-Go, Ichi-E as a concept, reminds me to stop doing that and instead treat every staff interaction like a treasure. Once I switch my mindset to that “treasure” construct, then everything changes, especially around my time allocation. Just mentally slowing down while I am speaking to my team member, allows me to be more considerate, less selfish and self-centered. Instead of being “me focused”, I can switch to being “them focused”. I can ask about things that are important to them, rather than making sure that brief conversation is all about what is important to me at that moment.

I have learnt to stand my keyboard up, so I can’t use it, when one of my team comes to me to talk and this helps me to focus my eye contact on them. I was reminded of how important this is when I visited a doctor here recently. The head of the clinic was sitting slumped in front of his screen and typing when I entered his office, he didn’t greet me, didn’t even look up at me and kept his face toward his computer keyboard and screen. Frankly, it was unbelievable, especially in this modern age. It made me feel unimportant and irrelevant.

This is how we make our team members feel when we don’t stop what we are doing and don’t focus on that one moment with them. So, from now on, remember Ichi-Go, Ichi-E and practice treasuring every interaction with the team members and build their engagement and commitment one meeting at a time, one person at a time. Do this instead of rushing through life in an often meaningless and unfulfilling scramble. People do make the difference and how we treat them is what stands us apart as the leader and how successful we are in that role.