Episode #353: Leading Your Japanese Team In Lockdown

Your team are sitting at home, unable to go outside and so as the leader what are your priorities? Crunching out work, pushing people to perform, driving results? Are you concerned about your people’s mental health? They are used to working together in a group for 16 hours a day and now they are at home, either on their own or jammed together with the family, in their small home. What are your expectations and what is the tone of your communication?

This has never happened before, so the road map doesn’t exist for us as leaders. Where do we start and how do we cope? Let’s start with the identification of the possible and the impossible. If you were able to go through this exercise in the office, while everyone was still together great, but if you didn’t, then you need to do it now. The technology exists to group people together on video calls. A massive town hall of everyone might even be possible, but probably division by division, section by section will be much more effective.

The first thing we need to realise is that we need to spend just about all of our leader day in communication with the team. This is our new job. Checking in on people to hear how they are going, to know they are healthy both physically and mentally is key. That is very time consuming and so classical management of task completion has to be shunted down the priority list.

What do we talk about? We should spend most of our time listening, rather than telling. The 80-20 rule is a good one here, they speak for 80% of the time and the 20% is for us to talk. Ask how we can help them, what are their concerns, do they have enough resources, how do they feel they are dealing with this isolation? How is it going at home trying to work with the family who are stuck at home too, especially if there are young children going stir crazy? Do they have noise cancelling headphones, a suitable place to work from, enough tech support to work remotely? How are they approaching their work, what type of routines they have developed, are they able to truncate the work day, so there is a clear distinction between work time and non-work time?

With regard to how to work remotely, this is where gathering team members together virtually, either as a whole, depending on numbers, or section by section, is valuable. Rather than being the font of all wisdom concerning a situation with which you have zero experience, get the team to come up with ideas and to some conclusions together. We are looking at the joint sourcing of ideas, experiences and insights, as well as getting them to own the conclusions.

The technology, in some cases, can allow people to split up into groups to brainstorm in breakout rooms and then report back to the main group, just as we would if we were all face to face. If that is not the case, then have everyone make a comment in order to share their ideas. Regardless, don’t ask people to come up with something genius on the spot, you are unlikely to see lighting strike on that front. Instead, give them all some thinking time in silence, so they can gather their thoughts and then ask them to share their ideas. By the way, in Japan, don’t ask “well what is your idea”. Instead ask something more tangential and less confrontational like, “So what did you write down?”.

As with any brainstorming session, when we get to the reporting component, don’t judge, fillet or criticise the ideas as they emerge. If the technology exists on-line for you, have someone designated to get these ideas up on the virtual whiteboard, so everyone can see them or if not, then get them on to a slide that can be shared with everyone or just have someone scribe them so there is a record. In this initial stage, we are looking for quantity of ideas, not quality. That individual’s crazy, impractical, stupid contribution can be the spark to a genius ideas from someone else. It would never have emerged however, without the original dud idea being there in the first place. Unleash the crazies at initial idea generation time!

Once we have been through this process, we can either discuss which ideas we want to go forward with or we can take the ideas to a smaller working group, to decide where to put the resources and to define the activities required. The point is to involve everyone, so that they feel they own the outcome. None of us like being told what to do, but we will happily execute our own plan or a plan into which we have contributed. As Dale Carnegie said, “People support a world they help to create”.

The ideas can be directed to very practical issues, such as how shall we all arrange our days, when will we start, when will we finish. Shall we start and end each day with a video conference, so we can see each other and not feel so isolated? How will that video meetings be run? Will there be a standard written down agenda with items to be covered or will some just be a social chat opportunity to keep in touch? What is the cadence of the meetings? What work will be done by which teams and inside those teams, who will be responsible for which tasks. What will be the Key Activity Indicators, milestones and deadlines for that work?

What are the opportunities for the business relative to the competitors? We want to help lift everyone’s thinking from a scarcity mentality, to an opportunity mentality. How can we get on the front foot and be better organised than our rivals. How can we gain clients, or maintain existing clients and stop them being stolen by our rivals? What are realistic revenue targets in this situation?

We need to break the business apart and rebuild it in a new format, one which works in lockdown mode where everyone is working remotely. The key is to do it together and expect this will take some time, be laborious and difficult, because we are doing it at a distance. We need to factor that in to our expectations of how much we can expect to get done, in the same amount of time as if we were doing it all together in a meeting room. We need to change our thinking at the most fundamental level.

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e