Episode #52: Upping The Team's Care Factor

Cooperation is a key request within organisations. Within small teams it tends to work well but it gets more challenging when you are trying to get other sections or divisions to cooperate with you. This is where our people skills come into it. We need to know what are the communication approaches which will have the highest propensity for success in getting cooperation from others? Often these types of soft skills are the things not taught in schools, colleges or in-house company training. Hard skills always get the glory but the real work of moving organisations forward comes down to getting the people to move and that is where these soft skills really start to apply.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

In the late nineties Japanese computer game developers dominated the industry. Western games caught up and when Forbes listed the best selling games in 2017 only three Japanese games were listed. What happened? The trigger was when the Xbox introduced a Windows based development environment. Japanese developers started to lose ground because they were not used to working in a Windows environment. The Japanese developers were used to working with propriety formats like PlayStation 3, the PS2 and the Sega Saturn. Japanese developers not being adept at working with PCs the shift to Western game maker domination started. In other news, the Japanese Government is promoting their “flying car” project. Electric drones booked through smart phones pick people up from office rooftops, shortening travel time and reducing the need for parking and reducing smog. All Nippon Airways and NEC corporation and more than a dozen companies and academic experts hope to have a road map for the plan ready by year’s end. Google, drone company Ehang and car maker Geely in China, Volkswagon of Germany have all invested in flying car technology. Toyota group companies have invested in a Japanese startup called Cartivator that is working on a flying car. One idea is to fly a car up and light the torch at the 2020 Olympics. Can’t wait to see if they can pull that one off. Fumiaki Ebihara the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is the flying car chief for the government. He was quoted as saying, “this is such a totally new sector Japan has a good chance for not falling behind”. I wonder how many other Governments have a flying car chief working on this sector?

This is episode number 52 and we are talking about Upping The Team’s Care Factor. Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going. “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys”. This Polish proverb made me smile. A handy phrase for whenever the needle on the “ridiculous meter” is hitting red and overloading. While it serves as a great smarty-pants one-liner, it actually invites some reflection on the difficulty of getting people and teams to work together. Another great zinger is the “not invented here” attitude of disinterest, when you are trying to introduce change into organisations. Reflecting on working in small project teams, big divisions, across divisions, and ultimately across industry sectors, this “not my circus” disclaimer pops up all the time. It is funny, but painful.

Japan throws up a number of challenges around getting cooperation or innovation when it is not that person’s “circus”, not their direct responsibility. The social ramifications of failing or making a mistake in Japan are such that people have become geniuses at micro-defining their roles and responsibilities.

A hoary old tradition of “tough love” Japanese bosses lambasting subordinates for errors and shortcomings, has had a salutary effect on subsequent generations, driving them deep into their Comfort Zones. Keeping a low profile (teishisei), never volunteering, favouring group responsibility over individual accountability, carefully drawing and defending boundaries around the scope of one’s job, are some of the outcomes. Not terribly helpful if we seek cooperation and innovation across our teams.

In any organization, anywhere, we get issues between sales and marketing, sales and production, the back office and production, IT versus everyone, etc. Japan just manages to take it to another level of sophistication, hence my smile when reading about circuses and monkeys. So what can we do about it? Here are some proven principles to improve cooperation and up the “care factor”. By the way, we know all this stuff, we just forget to do it!

The first idea is “Arouse in the other person an eager want”. We become so preoccupied with what we want, we are blind to the perspective of the person whose cooperation we seek. Our Western communications skills are often skewed to strength of will, to pummel the other party into submission to our predilections, rather than through persuasion. A handy related principle is“talk in terms of the other person’s interests”. If we do that, then the understanding improves and the likelihood of getting their cooperation and ownership for a task goes up dramatically.

Aligning our mutual interests is a winner and the way to do that is to “Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves”. Whoah…check yourself – when you want cooperation are you babbling on about what you want and why it is important to you? No wonder we get the “not my circus” response or the “not invented here” reaction. When we really listen to others, we can find more points in common and construct a better base on which to build a joint effort. The word “listening” glides easily across this page but real listening takes serious work. Are we actually good at listening? Be honest - usually we are rubbish and all need to improve in this area!

Two principles that work well in tandem are “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”and “Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers”. The latter idea is not about manipulating people. Rather, when we have a sense of their situation, values, aspirations, fears and concerns we are better able to find the most convincing argument to support a line of action. We can frame the context of the decision in a way that they can more easily identify with. If we give people a big enough WHY, the WHAT and the HOW flow naturally. The power of that context, that WHY, is often so strong they recognise it themselves and come to their own conclusion, which agrees with ours. That is good communication and persuasion, not brute force or skullduggery.

All of us are being driven to do more, faster, with less. Cooperation, ownership, accountability, innovation can be won – use these principles and enjoy the payoff!

Action Steps

Use these principles:

1. Arouse in the other person an eager want
2. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests
3. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves
4. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view
5. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or her