I’m -non Japanese- run a several hundred people large team at a very successful, 100 year old, Japanese industrial manufacturing company. I was brought in to establish new business areas and slice-dice the ongoing innovation projects. A lot of them were technology driven and didn’t had much of a business case or real customer need for the product or service.
So over the last 3 years I introduced methods to build business cases, design thinking etc. So teams can better evaluate and develop their business opportunities.
Some picked it up and learned but many others did not. They tried but especially for the 35 or older ones, it seems that they simply grew up and were too long exposed to work in a top-down culture where creativity and free thinking was not fostered. They cannot adapt to use the new tools (none of which are anything difficult or special) and get completely stressed out. Many work long hours and still deliver disappointing results. Clearly in any other country they would have been fired or simply left on their own.
This now leads to stress levels that clearly are unhealthy and some suffer from depression and other mental health issues.
Would love to hear if anyone has similar experiences and can share what worked/did not work to improve the situation.
11 comments
I’m not sure, but I definitely want to see what others have to say about this.
In most cases, when the CEO/President deems it important, leaders under him will make it work or part of the daily SOP. In other words, the top-down command will make everyone on the same page.
On the other hand, I’ve seen other leaders try to implement things from the bottom-up, but in the end, if their 評価 won’t get affected, why bother doing it.
Sounds like you have an impossible task.
This is what happens when you inherit teams instead of being able to build them from the ground up.
Do you have any areas where the work is better suited for top-down where you could put team members who are unable to adapt?
I assume building business-cases it not the only work and building prototypes and setting up test environments is also part of your division so it might make sense to put them there. The work there should be much more clear, e.g. procurement of parts & machines, vendor meetings, QA of parts, customer visits to gauge interest, misc. work, setup and paperwork to streamline these processes. This however would probably put them under some managers who are younger than them and leads to its own problems…
The only thing you can do IMO is mitigate their influence and shuffle them around. There’s no way you can change dozens of people’s behaviour without them being highly motivated to do it themselves or investing millions in 1 on 1 training for years to come with no guarantee of success.
As a manager you’re prob aware that the one thing you can’t really do is change people’s character. You’re fighting granite with a wooden chisel.
I had to deal with change management/kaizen on a far smaller scale (a single dozen people). I don’t think you can reasonably ask everyone to be creative. Only a few people will be the motor. Brainstorming sessions, unintuitively, should be quite moderated/guided, with questions asked in advance to give time for preparation.
Is separating the business case creation not possible?
You could have a team charged with thinking of new business opportunities and gathering requirements, with your imaginative resources (even part-time responsibility).
While the less innovative could be in charge of managing the projects after requirements are gathered.
That’s kind of how Japanese work culture is. Working long hours isn’t in the prospect of delivering good results, it’s because culture dictates that people who stay at the office longer are better employees, whether they are delivering results or not. Free thinking and creativity is taken away starting from elementary school. Changing their cultural mindset is sort of an impossible task. The best case scenario is that you have a few leaders that are open to change and your influence on them can possibly have a slight domino effect on the others.
I also work in Japanese industrial industry.
My team members are very unmotivated to learn anything because they’ve been able to coast for so long on basics. “My pace” mentality.
I gave up trying to teach them. Maybe a new kpi/goal would help? But I get the impression that after 40 years old you are a made man, and it’s easy street to pseudo parrot/boss land.
I think it’s better concentrate on younger people and just give the older guys simple tasks. Anything you try to do for them will be zero sum so don’t waste your energy.
A big issue in making any change is scaffolding: if you introduce concepts to people who don’t have a supporting conceptual structure, they’ll whoosh over their head, so you need to figure out where they are and build from there.
Try to locate mentors in the social strata of your problem children, and have them gently introduce the new concepts. If you can find one they can train others who can then become mentors too.
It’s not a problem unique to Japan. “Who Moved My Cheese” may have some pointers you can use too.
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Hope this helps.
welcoem to japan. where stubbornness is the death reason.
What if you split the teams up into sizes of under 12 with a creative person that is able to adapt to the new way of business acting as team lead for each team? This allows the people used to top down management work styles to do what the team lead needs them to do and the team lead can focus on ensuring the work being done fits the business case
Just follow Carlos Ghosn’s method. They deliberately hired an outsider so he could cull people and save the company. Le Cost Killer.