Follow this Japanese Leadership Trait to Gain the Respect of Employees
How many American business leaders would do this?
Japan’s reputation in the business world took a major hit when its bubble burst in 1991, and it’s been downhill since. Today it is fashionable to criticize the shortcomings of Japanese management (much of it deserved), specifically the aspects that don’t translate well to other cultures.
And yet, at least one powerful Japanese leadership trait plays well with my American compatriots. A personal experience at a Japanese-owned subsidiary in the mid-1990s tells the story.
Lessons in Leadership from a Snowstorm
At the time I was living in the Chicago area, working at a Japanese productivity-improvement consultancy. Unfortunately, most of our clients were in the rural Midwest and Deep South, which means I was on the road 99% of the time living out of a suitcase.
I woke up early one morning in rural Indiana to find that a blizzard had completely blanketed the sleepy little town of Greencastle. Lucky for me, the customer’s plant was just a five-minute drive from my hotel. Under normal conditions.
With the roads frozen and unplowed, my five-minute commute ended up taking 20 minutes. I managed to get to the plant right before the start of first shift. All the Japanese managers were present, but roughly half the American workforce still hadn’t shown up.
One of the projects that our improvement team had been working on was the dashboard assembly line. It had rampant quality problems and, for this reason, our client was always dangerously close to missing shipments.
This also put the client at great risk of shutting down its customer’s production line, a looming nightmare with potentially dire financial consequences. Our challenge that fateful morning then, was to figure out a way to keep the dashboard line up and running with half the workforce out of action.
While the improvement team was assessing the situation, the Japanese president burst into our meeting room in a tizzy and said, “We have to get the dashboard assembly line running right away. Can you work on the line with us?”
Since Japanese are incapable of refusing a customer request, my boss said without hesitation, “Of course we can!” And out the door we ran to save the day.
We had analyzed that line from every angle imaginable, so knew the product and assembly methods intimately. Unfortunately, we had little experience actually assembling the dashboard, so we decided to put an experienced line operator in charge of us, a wise move in retrospect.
At the time, the Japanese president’s call to action didn’t surprise me at all since I understood the collectivist nature of the Japanese mindset, not to mention that most Japanese managers in the manufacturing industry start out their careers working on the production line. To them, working on an assembly line isn’t at all a radical notion.
But to the uninitiated American managers working for our client, the Japanese president’s call to action came as a shock; it had never occurred to them that putting a manager (much less an outside consultant) to work on the production line was even an option.
So there we were―three high-paid management consultants (two Japanese and yours truly), the Japanese president, Japanese vice president, and several grumbling American managers―clumsily assembling dashboards while an experienced production associate kept us out of trouble.
Truth be told, we were (to quote my late grandmother) “slower than molasses in January.” But we plugged away as best we could while our newly deputized supervisor mocked us for being so pathetically slow. It was truly a humbling experience, but it had an unexpected upside: our willingness to get our hands dirty and make utter fools of ourselves actually helped us earn the respect of onlooking associates.
What struck me at the time was the overwhelmingly positive responses from line workers who slowly trickled into the plant that day. One operator told me how impressed she was to see the Japanese president working on the production line and said something I’ll never forget: “An American president would never do that!”
That’s when it hit me: with all the cultural differences in how Japanese and Americans lead and manage subordinates, and all the pesky communication gaps that inhibit cross-cultural cooperation, we had stumbled onto a powerful Japanese leadership trait that truly endeared the American workers to their Japanese bosses: the executives’ willingness to get their hands dirty when the situation called for it.
Below is my analysis of one American manager’s reaction to the Japanese president’s call to action:
Communication Breakdown Analysis
To the Japanese president, keeping promises―in this case, delivering product on-time ―was his top priority. As is the case with most managers employed by Japanese manufacturing companies, the president had started his career working on the production floor, the very place where money is made and lost.
Because he had walked in the production associates’ moccasins, the president had developed genuine empathy for the production workers, and did not believe that manual labor was beneath him. In fact, in his mind, it was the backbone of his company’s success. And since he saw the organization as a single collective with loosely defined and fluid job descriptions, he believed everyone should pitch in to get the job done, himself included.
In contrast, the American manager wasn’t as concerned as his Japanese counterparts about keeping the company’s promise to ship product on time.
While he believed on-time deliveries were important, he also believed that their customer would cut his company slack on a missed shipment due to the extenuating circumstances created by the snowstorm. He believed this because he had a good relationship with his American contacts at the customer (also a Japanese-owned subsidiary), and deemed them all reasonable people.
What he didn’t know is that the Japanese bosses of his American contacts were not nearly as forgiving, and that his own Japanese company president would be raked over the coals if a shipment were missed, and raked over for eternity if they shut down their customer’s production line even for a minute.
The American manager had also never worked on a production line. He valued a meritocratic system that rewarded education, hard work, and ambition, and for this reason, had pursued a college degree specifically to avoid ever having to do manual labor.
I’d be remiss not to mention that I’ve worked with some great American leaders who routinely got their hands dirty when the situation called for it. But in most cases, they had either worked their way up through the ranks, or had experience working for a Japanese manufacturing company where it was expected.
When it comes to white-collar, college-educated American managers, the willingness to pitch in and work alongside the laborers is more the exception than the rule. No surprise, many of my compatriots in management have trouble relating to and winning the respect of employees working on the front lines.
Circling back to the original point of this piece, even with all the well-deserved criticism directed at Japan Inc. these days, the Japanese still have much to teach the world, lessons we can all benefit from.
Getting our hands dirty isn’t a bad place to start.
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© Tim Sullivan 2022
