Episode #200: Fear And Loathing In Japan

The Spa magazine in Japan released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. The Lehman Shock in 2008 opened to door to job losses in larger companies, something which only had been possible in smaller forms in the past. The sense of lifetime employment as a given was removed and a brand new world of work emerged.

Feeling unappreciated is a construct of leadership. The Japanese system of hierarchy in companies has followed the lessons proffered during the military service experienced by those who participated in World War Two. Brutalisation was widespread and everyone was expendable. Postwar leaders in the West were also the graduates of battle as well. Things changed in the late 1960s however and modern economies moved away from the old military models of leadership, to seek best practice based on research.

Japan has not even started on that path yet. The post war years were a frenetic effort to rebuild a devastated economy and to catch up with the rest of the world. When I first came into contact with Japanese businesspeople, I remember their joy as Japan knocked off one Western economy after another, to climb to the rankings to number two in the world.

The bubble economy saw Japan go completely crazy and lose all sense of proportion, as the Plaza Accord Agreement sent the yen into the stratosphere of supreme value and everything, everywhere was a bargain. I was back in Australia during that time and wondered why those lovely Japanese people I had met pre-bubble, were now replaced by these rude, arrogant, overbearing types?

During all of this transition there was no driver to change the management systems in companies away from the war-time model, because things had worked out pretty well. It wasn’t broken, so no fixing required and anyway nobody likes change because of all the risk attached to it, so steady as she goes.

Here we are decades later and life has certainly changed, but the leadership mentality has not caught up yet.

Bosses were schooled in the Tough Love Academy of Leadership. Communication, coaching, feedback, encouragement – all the key soft skills were never in that curriculum. You probably can’t beat Japan when it comes to hard skill education. Their perfectionism, combined with a relentless curiousity for small incremental kaizen style improvements is a wonder to behold. Soft skills not so much.

Japan always bottoms the charts whenever firms do engagement surveys. Japan is the global leader in the bottom rung of microscopic scores for percentages of highly engaged staff. Yes, there are cultural issues with these surveys, given Japanese humility, conservatism and circumspection. But just ask any Japanese firm if they think the low scores are fiction and everyone agrees that directionally, they are correct.

So we need some solid work here for Japan to catch up and join the rest of the advanced world of work. The HR function in Japan, apart from its policeman role in having the rules followed, is there to move you around the organization so that you can become a jack of all trades an a master of none. One The Job Training (OJT) is the main methodology of leadership instruction.

Just passing on what each boss experienced to the next generation, without any structure, excellence, best practice capture, design, doesn’t sound too smart does it. Yet that is exactly the problem, not enough thinking has gone into what Japan needs from it’s leaders going forward. Soft skills and hard skills are both called for, but you need a mindset change to appreciate that they are both important. The Spa survey shows that the areas of greatest demand are for soft skills solutions. Have a good look around your own operation and see just how much time your leadership group are spending on encouraging, coaching, recognising and praising. My guess would be not a lot, because they simply don’t think these areas of attention are so important. What a lost opportunity. It is time to turn that around and get this country going.