Episode #299: Change Agent Leaders Are Highly Vulnerable In Japan

The Japan business has been around for many years, but it never seems to live up to the expectations the firm had for the initiative. They employed an aging Japanese CEO thinking, ”well a Japanese person is the obvious one to lead the business in Japan”. It seemed logical at the time and the individual chosen had many years experience working in the industry. Gradually the penny drops that this very expensive CEO is not much of a leader and isn’t up to the task to take on the market and win in Japan. This is where you come in. You are selected for the Tokyo assignment. You are honored to be selected and off you go, bringing the family to this new and exciting country.

You don’t speak the language, so you have trouble being able to directly discuss issues with the staff. Your assistant doubles as your interpreter and off you go to change the world. Headquarters keeps reminding you they expect you to get the business to start performing, after many years of it going absolutely nowhere. You don’t know what to change at first, so you take some time to understand the lie of the land, the people, the clients, the market, competitors, etc.

Gradually it dawns on you that the sales team are not doing a good enough job. They only like seeing the same clients and make no great efforts to go and source new clients. You also start to realise that your leader group are not much good at leading. They have made it to these positions through dint of age and stage and haven’t had any real training on being a leader. You start to suggest some things you think will spark more sales, but you immediately run into heavy resistance. You are told you don’t understand Japan and things can’t change very easily here and we should keep doing what we have always done. You also notice that people are guarded with you and won’t open up.

As you get to know Japan better and speak with more experienced fellow expats running businesses here, you start to doubt what you are being told and doubt the people telling you. You start to think that the only way to change the business and get it out of the rut it has fallen into, is to change the people. Meanwhile headquarters are saying rude things like, “you have been there for nine months and there has been no change in results”. They want to know when you are going to get things moving in Japan. You try to explain that Japan is “different”, but they have no idea what you are talking about and these pleas fall on deaf ears.

The global engagement survey results come out and APAC is the worst performing region in the entire world and Japan is the worst performing country in APAC. Headquarters want to know why you are not getting the team properly engaged in their work and how you are going to lift these engagement score numbers. They expect to see a big improvement by the time of the next survey (or else!).

You feel the pressure and realise you have to make major changes or you will be sacked. The kids have settled into their new school and you don’t want to uproot the family and head back home in failure. So you try to fire some of the people who are non-performers, blockers, deadwood. Immediately you are told by the local HR that you can’t fire people in Japan and that they will have to stay. You dig in a bit deeper and realise you can fire people, but the cost of paying them out is considerable. You bite the bullet on the money and fire them and bring in new blood, hoping to spruce up the team. The new people are a disappointment too and seem to have decided they would rather fit in with the existing team, than join the revolution. You couldn’t afford to hire A players so you had to go with B and C players. The new people quickly realise that you will leave after a few years, but they will have to continue to work with their new colleagues. They decide to assimilate with the existing culture and not join your revolution.

You suddenly get an angry call from your boss back at headquarters. He wants to know “what are you doing over there in Japan. The Board has received a series of handwritten, unsigned letters from members of staff, complaining about you. They are being told you are lazy, incompetent, don’t understand Japan, are ruining the brand and destroying relationships with clients. And you are sexually harassing the staff”. Your boss has been designated with the task of dealing with this by the Board and they are taking the accusations very seriously. Especially the sexual harassment claims. You are astonished and protest your innocence to no great avail.

Your breath is literally taken away by these accusations. Your body is trembling. Who would write such a bunch of blatant lies about you? You start thinking through the members of the team and try to figure out who are these assassins. Everyone shows you respect, they don’t openly display any hostility toward you. It is so puzzling. You ask for copies of the letters and have some handwriting experts help you to identify the perpetrators of this massive injustice. Unhelpfully, no clear conclusions can be reached, so you are still in the dark about who is moving against you from within.

Your boss, feeling the pressure from the Board, is mainly worried about his own backside. He wants to know what you are going to do to fix the mess you have created. You try to explain Japan and how it works to him, but you realise he is just not listening. To you, it feels like they all seem to think Japan should operate like back at home. You have no support locally and no air cover back at headquarters. Your rivals back there are having a field day with your troubles and are taking advantage to push themselves forward as future leaders, instead of you. Your wife expects you to fix it too, because the kids have made friends at school, she has formed a nice support group for herself and she doesn’t want any disruption to the family unit.

The latest engagement survey has been delivered and the results are even worse than the previous one. Again the pressure from headquarters becomes intense. Your mind is in a fog. If you try to incorporate the changes you know need to be made, various local staff will be threatened and will knife you in the back. They have strong vested interests in seeing things stay just as they were. Further, they have no compunction and no moral restraints on doing anything in order to get rid of you, to stop the process of change. They know they can outlast you. All they have to do is freeze the results by doing nothing different, keep up the pressure and wait. The letters keep turning up and your boss is on the phone again, but now with a cold, non-supportive attitude and clearly no tolerance for more of the same.

You have been in Japan for a couple of years now and you know better how things work. You now know that most of what your people have been telling you is not true. They say changes can’t be made, but what they really mean is, they don’t want to make the changes. Well except one and that is changing you as the local President.

Finally, your boss calls you and tells you your assignment is terminated and you have to return to headquarters. You wife is very unhappy, because you have to pull the kids out of school. She asks you how you will find a place for the kids in a decent school back home, at this stage of the year. You are utterly defeated by your team, who are silently smirking and triumphant. The door slams hard behind you. In a few weeks your replacement turns up and round two gets under way. Your assistant quits because her protector has been removed and she can’t deal with the team on her own. The score is “locals” one to “expats” zero.

The moral of the story is if you want to be a change agent in Japan be very, very careful.

First of all, understand there are absolutely no rules here. This is a vicious, brutal street fight with only one winner and the odds are stacked against you from day one. Before you even accept the assignment, get guarantees written in blood by the hierarchy at headquarters, that you will get air cover once you start making changes and begin to upset the deeply entrenched vested interests in Japan.

Tell them that they can expect unsigned handwritten letters accusing you of anything and everything, in order to discredit you. Instead of being alarmed, they should see this as an indicator of progress. It means you are making substantive changes for the good of the business. They should ignore them entirely and count them as a cost of change. They have to understand this is a rear guard action by a bunch of loser hold outs, who do not have the firm’s best interests at heart and will stop at nothing to maintain their cushy positions.

Have the leadership accept that this change process will not succeed in just one or two years. This is major cancer surgery and will have to be sustained over time, if the business is to be saved. Get them to agree to a fund for staffing payouts in Japan, as you start to cut the deadwood and replace them. Also get monies put aside to work with head hunters, to source higher quality A player leaders who will support what you are doing. You need your own loyal crew in there to help you drive the change and switch the odds in your favour. You want people who are equally committed to change, to do the heavy lifting with you. Ask that no engagement surveys be conducted in Japan for five years, because that is how long it will take to see the results of the changes.

Once you get these agreements in place, then take the assignment. If they don’t go for it, then decline to go to Japan. You will only face massive stress, sleepless nights, family disruption and it will leave a nasty stain on your, until now, excellent unblemished work record. Let some other ambitious executive go and try. Wish them luck. They will need it.