Episode #491: The Japanese Concept Of Shu-Ha-Ri and Leadership

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離. Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals. Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing. Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us. This transition matches what we go through as leaders. When we start we are unsure of exactly what we are supposed to be doing but over time we mature as leaders and can raise our effectiveness t greater heights. Well that applies if we have been properly trained on the way up, which probably makes it difficult for most Japanese leaders to make the cut. On the Job Training (OJT) is great if your mentor leader provides an excellent role model on which to base your own leadership style. This is very much a long shot at best in Japan. Getting proper training however is a much better proposition to create the base for Shu-Ha-Ri progression.

Leadership at the practical level rotates around some core skills, such as communication, coaching, personal time management and dealing with different types of people. Usually we enter leadership through the path of personal capability and results achievement. Senior leaders are never going to promote a dud or average performer into a leadership role, unless they are totally desperate for a warm body to fulfill a temporary role. Having abilities in a functional role is not much help though when it comes to leading others who may be totally wired differently and variously motivated to do the work. If we get a base of leadership training we can work on the proper skills to be an effective leader.

Knowing what to do and how to do it is a big advance on trying to work it out yourself. If we understand the principles of communication, we can practice and hone those skills until we become excellent in mustering our powers of persuasion. This opens up new vistas for achieving results, because now we are getting more and more of the team onboard and they are pulling together with improved teamwork and heading in the same direction.

Coaching is a similar area of strong need and one of the most challenging tasks of the leader. Trying to work out how to be an effective coach by yourself is asking for trouble and will waste massive amounts of energy and time yielding very minimal return. Once we know what to do we can start turning our work environment into a massive laboratory to see what happens when we take certain actions.

Naturally if you are a shambles because you are not well organised, you won’t have enough time for communication and coaching with the team members. As we get more practice, we naturally get better and this is where the Ha segment of the journey allows us to try new things and to expand the scope of our perspective on what is possible. We can get into greater and greater depths of personalisation with our communication and coaching. We can better tailor what we are doing to the needs of the team members, treating them as individuals and being able to respond accordingly. Our innovation ability also increases as we have a stronger base to work off. We start to see patterns, whereas before we just saw a confusing mess of variables, which we couldn’t get into any legitimate order. As we improve our people can feel more trust and closer to us. Coaching in particular requires an enormous amount of trust to be effective. Maybe at the start of the boss-subordinate relationship the team members are not that keen to open the kimono to a boss, who they are not sure of.

That consolidated pattern recognition combined with practical leadership training provides the right toolbox for us to be effective in a leadership role. At the Ri stage we start to create our own unique leadership style, which is the product of many additions and deletions over time. We also begin to create a portable system which can be applied in any work environment, with any crew. We are no longer having to think what we should be doing in certain circumstances, because we now know what will be the best course of action or maybe we decide we should be taking no action whatsoever. This ability to find a system which we can apply universally is a big advantage, because it means we can be given more and more complex assignments and we will be successful.

Problems for our people come up and after a while, we realise it tends to be same types of problems. We also find that problem people keep popping up, who all look basically the same. The solutions needed are now second nature to us and so we can get straight into action without suffering any self-doubt. We don’t have to expend a lot of nervous energy on the process. We are that swan gliding across the lake surface now.

Shu-Ha-Ri is a good concept for us to realise where we are in the process of maturing as a leader and therefore what actions we need to be taking at each stage.