Change is hard to create anywhere in the world. Getting things to change in Japan also has its own set of challenges. The typical expat leader, sent to Japan, notices some things that need changing. Usually the Japan part of the organisation is not really part of the organisation. It is sitting off to the side, like a distant moon orbiting the HQ back home.

There are major differences around what is viewed as professional work. The things that are valued in Japan, like working loyally (i.e. long hours) even with low productivity, keeping quiet, not upsetting the applecart, not contributing in meetings, getting deep into the factional constructs of the organisation, are not seen as positive.

Inefficiencies seem to beg for correction. Innovation seems to be a foreign concept in both senses of the word. Doing what we have always done, in the same way as we have always done it, has eliminated most of the opportunities for making mistakes, so why change anything? Doing things in a new way is inherently risky, because there is no reliable road map. We are going to have come out of our comfort zone to do that and we might make a mistake – not appealing whatsoever to the Japanese staff.

Meritocracy is a given to the new expat leader and so personnel changes are a prime interest. People are where they are for many reasons and merit is not always the reason. Longevity, who entered the company first, who is your patron, always have a big determinant on whose who in the zoo in Japan.

Talented people are supposed to keep in line and do what they are told. Showing too many smarts seems they are getting uppity before their betters and the hocho, that is the razor sharp Japanese knives, rapidly come out. The “nail” sticking out is about the get a good whack from everyone who can hit it hard.

Nevertheless, ignorance is bliss, so our expat hero or heroine plunges in and starts shaking things up. Entrenched interests, who have created this current system to suit themselves, now feel threatened. They are not stoics. They make a very keen calculation. Can we outlast this clown, who is so rude, so ignorant about how to properly lead in Japan, so annoying and so dangerous to our vested interests. If the answer is “yes”, then a guerrilla war commences, where those most threatened band together to slow down progress, obfuscate the vital issues, hide key information, isolate out the new leaders pets to weaken them and look for petards on which to hoist the expat.

If the answer is “no”, then it is a bare knuckle street fight. There are no rules. Classic weapons are looking for points of failure with new innovations to blow them up on purpose. Anyone close to the boss becomes a target internally and all sorts of societal pressure is brought to bear, to “turn them” into a spy for the “good guys” against this lunatic from outside. They are reminded that our hero won’t be here forever and the rest of us will be. “We will get you. You are going to be toast when the boss heads to the airport for departure to the next foreign assignment. You aren’t going anywhere sunshine, remember that”.

Out of nowhere and nothing, headquarters starts to get anonymous communication about various crimes and misdemeanors that are pure fiction. Sexual harassment is a favourite, because they know Western companies are really sensitive to these types of allegations. Power harassment which was a preferred, traditional boss leadership technique, has now made it into the upper ranks of crimes, as this has become something flagged in Japanese society.

Unsuitability for leadership in Japan. Ignorance of the market, clients, business practices, damage to the reputation of the firm locally are all trotted out to paint a dismal picture. The staff engagement survey for Japan is always the lowest score in the world and this shows what a miserable job our expat hero is doing. It is always the lowest in the world, but HQ isn’t usually that smart or well informed enough to know that.

HQ is demanding Japan’s results improve, but are not happy to see any pushback when changes are introduced. The expat boss has to keep everything as it is, the exact same structure but produce greater results and they have to keep everyone happy about achieving that. The boss is on a hiding to nothing here. Welcome to Japan!

Life is busy, busy today. Communications has sped up business to an extent unthinkable even ten years ago. Every company is a publisher now, due to social media’s pervasiveness. Content marketing is driving original content creation and release. LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook are favouring live video, so we have to become television talents. Voice is the next big thing, so podcasting requires us to be radio personalities. If you are in business, your personal information is out there, easily searchable and found. We check out the buyers and they check out the sellers, before we meet.

When you turned up at a client meeting eighty years ago, you came with some good jokes, some market information, some competitor intelligence, etc. You did this to break the ice with the buyer. Even if they were an established client, you needed to break the ice for that day. Buyers then and buyers now have a lot going on inside their heads when we turn up and almost none of it has anything to do with us and what we want.

In Japan, meeting room space is always at a premium, so getting time with buyers has some automatic limitations placed upon it with certain companies. After thirty minutes you are given the bum’s rush, because that space has been booked for the next meeting and they are loitering with intent outside the glass wall waiting to get in for their meeting.

That doesn't give us much time to carve out some mind space with the buyer, get into questioning mode, talk about the solution, deal with any objections and seal the deal. If the first part of the meeting isn’t well planned then there won’t be any result. We cannot let the first few interactions be random events. We need to plan in detail how we are going to establish some rapport with this buyer or reestablish some rapport if they are an existing buyer.

We will have checked some of the media aggregation sites to see if there has been anything released in to the public arena about the client company, which we can then refer to. If it is a first meeting then checking the annual report is a must. There will be a glossy coverage of the CEO’s vision and strategy for the enterprise, with photographs in a swish corporate setting. We are looking for things we can ask about in this meeting.

Our objective is to get the client talking as soon as possible. Most salespeople still cling to the idea that they have to dominate the airwaves, so they just keep talking, talking, talking. We don’t want that. We only have a limited amount of time, so we want the client talking as much as possible. When we do that, the client will have stopped thinking about all of the other things going on in their work and private lives. We will be concentrated on the business at hand and that is exactly what we need.

We hopefully will be able to check whether some insight we have found is relevant to what they are doing. We deal with that industry vertical so we are picking up ideas across companies on what is working and not working. We share these ideas as a means of demonstrating we provide value to their enterprise. They may not go for it, but they will go for our intention to assist them to make their business more successful.

A discussion with a drill manufacture company I called upon, prompted a suggestion by me that they copy Blendtec’s “will it blend” phenomenon, but for drills not blenders. Blendtec’s CEO Tom Dickson video’s the blending of iPads, golf balls, whatever and post it on YouTube and they get massive views. My idea was to copy this for Japan and create some buzz around the product line up. They didn’t go for it in the end, but I have no doubt that I have a closer relationship with the President today, because of my effort to think out of the box for them. I had his attention for our discussion.

Getting the full attention of the buyer is no longer a given. They are permanently distracted today and we are competing with so much noise, more than ever before. We need to have a strategy to get their attention. We cannot leave it to chance or expect that, “of course they will be paying attention – we have an appointment”. That concept is way too indulgent.

Ask well thought through questions to get them talking, bring insights and valuable market intelligence. Today, we have to do this every time, even if they are an established buyer. Just because we have a relationship with them, doesn’t mean we have automatically broken through all the completion for their attention. Start fresh every time as if it were the very first meeting. In this modern age this is the new normal.

Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence. Japan can be a bit tricky though because people are shy to ask questions. Culturally the thinking is different to the West. In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more. We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question. We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around. We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question. We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publically announced to everyone we are an idiot.

Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks. They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic. They don’t mind being moved along to an off topic point by the questioner. The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question. They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained. There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic.

This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up. They also must be good time managers when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time. In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience. Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A. Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point. Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question. The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk.

The advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk. You may deal with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk and the Q&A allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience. It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order. The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides. Of course if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk. Nevertheless the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme.

Time control becomes much easier. We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A. If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge. Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say. We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say. The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker. Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions, our credibility can crumble. A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look.

So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it. For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.

Teams are fluid. People move or leave and new people join. Targets go up every year. The compliance and regulatory requirements become more stringent, the market pivots and bites you, currency fluctuations take you from hero to zero in short order. Head office is always annoying. There are so many aspects of business which line up against having a strong sense of team. We can’t be complacent if we have built a strong team and we have to get to work, if we are in the process of team building.

Sports teams are always high profile and successful sports coaches are lauded for their ability to produce results, especially when they are always dealing with tremendous fluctuations in the make up of the team. Vince Lombardi is one of those much heralded coaches and he noted: “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity”.

Sterling stuff, but how do you do that? Vince had access to some of the most highly paid and motivated team members on the planet, but what about the rest of us? We often haven’t chosen the team. We have inherited someone else’s criteria and selection model. People come to us from different companies or different sections and so how do we address the issue of establishing a common purpose?

We need to make sure each individual has a clear sense of the reason the team exists, their individual role and the importance of their role to the team effort. If you suddenly asked your team members about the reason the team exists, you might be dumbfounded to receive so many disparate answers. We assume everyone knows and that we all in sync, but we should check. And we should do it regularly, as the team composition changes over time and new people may not know.

Establishing an agreed set of team values is an important glue to hold the whole team together. Whenever we do this exercise for ourselves or for clients, we always get a huge range of values being nominated. This is helpful but not particularly helpful. We need to do it in two parts, starting with our personal values and then do the team values. Ideally, each individual’s values will also be part of the team values so that the ownership factor is sky high.

A team vision is the next stage and this is where many people start to weep. They are heartily sick of the word vision. So many vision consultants, articles, videos and podcasts covering this one little word. It bogs down and eventually all the fluff associated with the word, collapses under its one weight. Regardless, you still need a team vision, so get over it.

Jack Welch pointed out, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion”.

A vision is a future picture of what could be and what should be, regardless of what is today. The vision is stated in the present tense, as if we were already at the final state of development and success that we are aiming for. The visualisation is positive and optimistic and the words both powerful and specific. We need a vision to define where we want to be, in order to work out how we will get there.

Our mission is the other building block. It describes what we do and by definition, what we don’t do. Clarity around objectives and goals means counting out some shiny objects that are not core requirements for the team. The vision tends to last long, as do the core values, whereas we have to keep revisiting the mission. This is because things change and we may need to change tack and go in a different direction. In which case our mission has also flexed and we need to restate it. We do this so that everyone in the team has clarity around what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Successful teams have achieved great clarity throughout the entire organization about what the team is trying to do. This is not an accident, but the product of good leadership work to establish a base and then good ongoing work, to keep the ideas alive and relevant.