Episode #505: Managing Staff Different Commitment Levels

Business owners have a total stake in the enterprise and a commitment level that is always peaking at maximum. They have their wealth enveloped in the business and they take on debt, risk and the trials and tribulations of business cycles. Executives are rewarded with salaries, bonuses and profit share depending on the organisation. If you are an executive in America, the leader packages can get up to eight and nine figures. Your commitment is going to be massive with that amount of reward involved.

Yet, we read about leaders who fire the bottom ten percent every year or weed out all of those who are not peak performers. What about Japan? Executives here are modestly remunerated and the vast majority of privately held SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) don’t make a profit by design, so they can avoid paying tax. Instead they run as many personal expenses through the business as possible. The idea of firing non-performers as an architectural feature of the organisation isn’t a consideration in Japan. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is loyalty is highly valued. The boss has to take care of the team and the team reciprocates with their loyalty to the boss. What does staff loyalty actually mean? It encompasses being committed to the firm and conscientious in your work. Staff stick with the organisation, in preference to jumping around every couple of years chasing more money.

Legally, the firm has to fit the person, not the other way around. This is quite the opposite of the Western model. In Japan, you are going to have a hard time winning in court on the basis that the person you fired was incompetent. The court expects the firm to find a job which can utilise this person’s talents, even if it is different from what they were hired to do.

The market has also spoken and said “bosses, make the best of it” because we aren’t producing as many Japanese as before and the low rates of unemployment have moved the whip hand to the employee away from the leader. Getting staff at all has become fraught. In my experience, very few Japanese staff have any idea how to interview for jobs. In the West, this is an art form and the most useless people can come across as geniuses, because we are all trained for mastering this point of entry. After they get through probation, their true colours are struck and sometimes it is the skull and cross bones. Then we have to work on getting them out, before they do too much damage.

In Japan, few people interview well, so you have to become a sleuth to uncover their abilities. I am often struck by the fact that they leave things out of their resumes which have a high value, such as courses they completed or time they spent overseas. When you spot a gap in the timeline, you ask what they were doing and then you find out they spent that time studying in a foreign country, but you wouldn’t pick that up from the resume.

The bottom line today, as the boss in Japan, is you are happy to get staff at all. If they have talent in line with what you were expecting that is a bonus. If they don’t, then you have to spend the time and effort to train them. The University system here is weak. The entry point for high school kids is horrendous, but the exit point of getting a degree is relatively easy. There are few expectations that you will shoot the lights out during your studies. If you need to take a qualifying exam for entry into your chosen profession then that is different and people study hard, but for the majority of students, they just smoothly glide out the varsity main gate with a degree.

We need to recognise that in Japan, the commitment level is different to Western firms and it needs to be managed properly. The team is a powerful motivation machine for staff. Holding up your end of things is expected and valued. Letting team members down is not respected and will draw a negative collegiate response. The whole culture here is designed to make sure we all fit it and that means fitting in with the team at work and being accountable to each other.

Yes, loyalty is a plus in Japan, however the boss should never expect that the team members have the same level of commitment and motivation. If they do, then heartbreak is next, because they will be disappointed on a regular basis. Rather mysteriously, sometimes despite all of that loyalty and conscientiousness, things still don’t get done at all or are not done to the quality level or timeliness leaders expect. We need to be on top of everything in a well organised, regular, self-disciplined way. Yes, there is the danger of micro-managing people but in Japan, I would recommend more of this than you would normally apply to a Western organisation. Yes, people are loyal, but I have found that they are also quite capable of missing deadlines and even forgetting tasks completely. If we don’t follow-up, stuff just fails to get done and the enterprise slips behind.

The idea that they are getting paid to do their work is a partial truth. Frederick Herberg’s research on motivation said that salaries were a given, an expected part of the puzzle and he called getting paid well a “hygiene factor”, not a feature. This is even more so when labour demand outstrips supply, as it does in Japan. So we have to be able to go beyond transactional thinking of exchanging work for money, to look for other ways to get people committed.

Adjusting our expectations is a good place to start and diligently following up is a key arrow in the boss quiver. The leader makes more money as the owner or as the salaried boss, so naturally the commitment level is going to be higher. Just don’t get caught up with how things should be and instead look at how things really are and go forward from there. Work hard on emphasising teamwork, culture, care, empathy and understanding. Start by forgiving yourself that you don’t have perfect people working for you and try and find ways of attracting and retaining people, because that is the zero sum game going forward.