Episode #303: Leaders Need To Recognise Their People's Work In Japan

The Spa magazine in Japan previously 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. Salaries are a function of deflation and commercial success, as well as the tightness of the labour market. Feeling unappreciated and underevaluated though are both boss failings unrelated to the economy and cannot be esily dismissed. This outcome is the direct result of decades of neglect of the soft skills of leadership.

How do we improve on this situation? We need better leader eduation. The feeling of being valued by the boss and the organisation is the trigger to producing high levels of engagement for your work. Japan is renown for always scoring poorly on international comparative engagement surveys. APAC as a region usually trails last across the world and Japan is usually situated at the very bottom for engagement scores in APAC. The global study on engagement by Dale Carnegie showed that feeling valued was the key factor. The results for Japan were the same.

Good to know that we have the answer at hand to improve levels of engagement. By the way, disengaged or hardly engaged staff are not going to add any additional extras to their work or be motivated to come up with a better way of doing things. Innovation requires some sense of caring about the organization. So work productivity and innovation both need higher levels of engagement to help us get anywhere. In any competitive business environment, the abilty to out innovate your rivals has to be a very high value to the firm.

Fine, but so what? How do we get leaders who were raised in a different world of work – the bishibishi (relentlessly super strict) school of leading to now switch to becoming more warm and fuzzy? Telling them to do so is an interesting intervention by senior management that will go precisely nowhere. This requires re-education on what we need from our leaders. The most widespread system of education in corporate Japan is OJT (On The Job Training). How does your bishibishi boss change mindset alone? They can’t. That is why training is required to better inform bosses about how to gain willing cooperation from subordinates, instead of just pulling rank on them to drive their obedience.

In the modern era, young people have all become free-agents, like the baseball stars. In their parent’s time, staff were fearful of being able to get another job, if they strayed from the beaten path and quit where they worked. Not today. There is an army of hungry recruiters scouring firms to lift people out and place them in another company. They can click the ticket for 40% of the first year salary on the way through this change of employ. By the way, the individual recruiter gets 50% of the fee. It is a highly lucrative profession and relatively young, unremarkable people make a lot of money so the incentives to take your people and place them somewhere else is super high. In this circumstance, there is no need to make it any easier for the recruiters by treating your staff badly.

How to deal with mistakes is a key to the future in a society that hasn’t worked out that mistakes are the glide path to learning. Japan is a mistake free zone and this is a big disincentive to experiment, to try the new. Locating oneself in the middle of your comfort zone makes the best sense, so you want to avoid all change efforts. Here is the contradiction. If you want innovation, progress, creativity, then change must be embraced. That also means embracing risk - the risk of error.

If the internal evaluation process for promotion is used to focus all the failings and insufficiencies of the staff - the dreaded HR little black book of staff mistakes - then don’t expect your shop to become a hotbed of innovation anytime soon. What should we be doing? Leaders need to be helping staff lead intentional lives. Goals, strategies to achieve the goals, milestones, targets all come as part of the package. This is different from being Mr. or Ms. Perfect and holding the team to standards you yourself can never possibly achieve.

Encouraging people to come out of their comfort zones, take some risks and try new things requires a lot of communication skills. It requires feedback, but not critique. Telling people they are wrong, may make the boss feel superior and good, but it kills staff motivation and interest in doing things any differently. Good/better feedback is a better strategy. Tell them what they are doing that is going well and praise them for that. Tell them what they could do to make things go even better. The point is still communicated, but in a much better way and will be received in a more positive frame.

Because of the old fashioned style of management in vogue here, Japanese bosses are actually untrained in how to give praise. Telling staff “Good Job” is not praise by the way. That comment is a very vague reflection on a piece of work. Tasks have many facets, the staff know that and so which part of that project did they do well? We need bosses to be very specific about which bit was done well and how it was done well. Leader then need to explain how that task fits into the big picture of the organization and encourage the staff member to keep doing that.

Clearly, the leader in Japan has to do better. The soft skills area is where the greatest productivity gains will come from, because hard skills education in Japan is already maximised. This is the next frontier of leadership. If Japan can unlock the full potential of the working population, we are in for an exciting future. If it can’t, then things look bleak.

What is happening in your organisation at the moment? What are your leaders focused on? What is current your staff attrition rate? How long does it take to hire in new people and what is ther quality like? How expensive is it to replace people? Do you have strategy for all of this? The best time to start was yesterday.