Episode #8: Dominic Carter, CEO, Carter Group Japan

If you come into Japan with the idea that you're going to give orders and people are going to follow your orders to the letter, that's not going to happen. People have very strong ideas on how things should be done. I've always found it useful to talk about what needs to be done, rather than how to do it.

Everything that you know isn't necessarily useful in Japan.

Generally speaking, I think Japanese have a good sense of how to manage issues among themselves. As long as the basic objectives of the business are being met, I've always found it is best to leave people to work out things on their own. I've found that people have a lot of wisdom, even at a very young stage, in how to get stuff done.

My rule on delegation is essentially, if someone else can do it, I get them to do it. Delegation is not just dividing work up and passing it among people. You actually have to understand what the process is that the person needs to go through to deliver what it is they need to deliver. Because if you don't understand that process, you don't know how to check whether they're actually doing their job or not. If you wait until a task is supposed to be done to check whether it's been done or not, generally speaking, that does not work. I like to check in maybe a third of the way through, halfway through, and three quarters of the way through.

If people are motivated towards the same goal that you are, they'll go to the ends of the earth and you won't have to be actively motivating them the whole time because they will self-motivate. So, you have to have the right people in the team. And if you don't have the right people in the team, you will not be able to achieve anything.

You also have to be very clear to the people that you're leading, where the company's going. You have to tell them. You have to set a vision for the business, and then what you need them to do. What you need to do with them is to map out that vision and what their role is in achieving the overall vision. It should be pervasive in all your communication.

I think that trying to create a single company culture when you have people from different cultures doesn’t work so well. There are always going to be cross cultural challenges. You need to always really be looking at people and their differences, then accounting for that and adjusting while you build a kind of shared dialogue. Honesty and dialogue about values is a must.

The Carter Way is 5 values we work by: success thinking, respect for relationships, being proactive, excellence, and collaboration and teamwork.

I always want people to be thinking about how they create successful engagement with our clients. It's not about just doing your job, it's about creating success for our clients. It's about creating success for our team, success for the company, and success for yourself. It should filter through everything you do and the way that you think and the way that you approach every situation.

I think it's good to have some turnover in your team. It's natural for people to want to move on, and that also creates opportunities for people in the team. A team at a company where the personnel never changes is not necessarily a healthy business. Mistakes are something that we need to address because if we do have problems in our processes or we try something new and it doesn't work, we have to learn from that. But, punishing people for mistakes is not the way that I do it. Managing by fear is not useful.

Dominic Carter, CEO of The Carter Group.