Episode #311: How To Have Executive Presence In Japan (Part One)

As a training company we are often asked to assist with helping Japanese executives to have “executive presence”. This term is a broad descriptor, but essentially we all understand what they are talking about. They want their Japanese executives to be seen as professionals and to have them listened to and taken seriously. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but its star is fading. In my observation, on the world stage of conventions and conferences, APAC executives from China, India and Korea are having greater impact. One of the issues is linguistic expertise imbalance, with Japan usually at the back of the bus. This is a self-induced limitation though, which doesn’t have to be such a negative factor.

The Japanese mindset is one about perfection. There should be no defects, no mistakes and having set the bar so high, they have made it extremely difficult for themselves to deliver when speaking in English. Chinese speakers have an advantage because the grammar is similar to English with a subject-verb-object configuration. International Indian executives are educated in English and the main barrier for them is the degree to which their strong accent plays a role in making communication difficult, combined with the rapid speed with which they speak. When we get to the Koreans though, the comparisons become a bit harsher, because Korean language has the same grammatical structure as Japanese – subject-object-verb. So, why are the Japanese not doing a better job speaking the international language of business – English?

Actually they can do it, but they have talked themselves out of it and as a consequence they hesitate to speak up in English, which of course means yielding zero “executive presence” in the global arena. This is one of the reasons they love to use slides when presenting and pack those slides with massive amounts of text, which they then insist on reading to us. Given we can all read, this is very boring and we switch off and escape from their talk. They are also allowing the screen to dominate the proceedings and their potential executive presence has now been surrendered to the slideshow. Remember, we want all of the attention on us and we want to dominate the slides, not the other way around.

When we are coaching Japanese executives to have more presence, we have to deal with this linguistic issue head on. They have made a fundamental assumption that linguistic perfection is needed to be effective in communication. Therefore, they fear failure and embarrassing themselves by speaking less than perfect English. The best way not to fail is not to speak at all or to speak as little as possible.

This fear of failure runs through the society. Karl Hahne, who runs Hafael here in Japan, was a recent guest of mine on my Japan’s Top Business Interviews podcast. He made an interesting observation, which hadn’t occurred to me about failure and how it permeates itself in Japan. He noted that in ancient times, if a samurai failed his lord, he was expected to commit seppuku or ritual suicide. In the modern business world, we sometimes see executives committing suicide to take responsibility for mistakes. In some cases, they even kill themselves to take responsibility for their superior’s mistakes. The aversion to making mistakes runs deep in Japanese society and as coaches, we have to work with that fact in mind.

We work on switching their mindset to encompass the idea that you can still have effective communication, even if there are errors or imperfections. I demonstrate this by mangling the Japanese language, using an English grammatical structure with Japanese vocabulary. I say, “watashi Tokyo eki ikimasu” and then ask them what I said? They tell me, “you said you were going to Tokyo Station”. I get a bit melodramatic about this stage and feign shock and ask them how they could have possibly understood what I said, when it was imperfect Japanese. The point I make to them is that just as they adjusted what I said into correct Japanese in their mind, we do the same thing. They don’t need to limit themselves by fearing mistakes, because this hesitancy in speaking up is guaranteed to erode their presence in a meeting or when making a presentation.

To get attention we need to be confident when we speak. All of us buy the confidence generated by others and we receive the message they bear as a result. If we fear mistakes, then we just don’t speak up and even if we do, it usually isn’t convincing, so it is ineffective. Getting over this mental barrier is hard for Japanese executives and this is where they need a lot of coaching. In my own experience, they certainly have enough grammatical knowledge and enough vocabulary, so that is not the real barrier. Their perfectionism has to be replaced with confidence that their message is getting through, even if there are mistakes.

In Part Two, we will look at some of the tools available to these executives, to have greater executive presence.