Episode #119: Bill Hall, President at Ipsos Healthcare Japan Ltd

William “Bill” Hall is currently the President at Ipsos Healthcare Japan Ltd. Mr. Hall has a long-standing history with Japan. He first visited the country in 1969 on a scholarship for post-graduate research, having majored in Japanese and Economics at Sydney University. After graduation, Mr. Hall worked in the consulting and marketing research field, starting his own market research company, and eventually leading Sterling Winthrop, a pharmaceutical company. Mr. Hall then worked for Kodak which had acquired Sterling Winthrop at the time, before becoming the Japan President of ISIS, a medical market research company. After selling ISIS to Synovate, Mr. Hall then expanded the health care division within the new organization. Finally, after Synovate was acquired by Ipsos, the global marketing research company, Mr. Hall stepped into his current leadership role at Ipsos.

Mr. Hall recalls one of the first leadership challenges he encountered was finding the right people and building a team from scratch. He found it especially difficult as a foreign company to convince people on the longevity of the organization. To overcome the issue, Mr. Hall tried to provide opportunities for people who joined the company to be exposed to the discipline of market research, such as conducting interviews, which is still not seen as a profession in which people study for years to be in. Mr. Hall also was fortunate to find foreign workers who spoke Japanese. He says the key is to sometimes take a gamble and try to see the potential of the person, instead of trying to find someone who is already well-developed.

A common problem many leaders of foreign companies in Japan have, is explaining the difference in employee engagement scores across different country branches to the head office. Mr. Hall says, this is a complex matter, as there are many cultural factors that need to be taken into account, and companies are “reading the scales wrong.” For more information on engagement scores and cultural bias, please contact Mr. Bill Hall at william.hall@ipsos.com and he will be able to provide a whitepaper regarding this topic.

Mr. Hall finds that engagement depends greatly on the history the employees have with the company. For example, he says that people who are initially engaged when a company is in the start-up stage, may not be as engaged 20 years later when the scale of the company has grown. Mr. Hall adds that sometimes handling long-term staff can be complex. It is important to pay close attention to these worker who have helped the company become what is it today, while finding the balance between the long-term staff and younger employees and adjusting the organization structure accordingly.

Mr. Hall advises people to learn basic Japanese if they are coming into Japan in leadership positions. He agrees that Japanese can be a difficult language to learn. He understands someone in a senior leadership role will have multiple aspects to juggle in their life such as family commitments, generating revenue for the organization and others. Yet Mr. Hall suggests learning a little bit of the Japanese language will enable foreign leaders to better communicate with the local staff within and outside the office. Basic communication is important, however Mr. Hall also suggests having a bilingual assistant to translate the important business materials, so that the individual is not dependent or pressurized to learn fluent Japanese quickly.