Glimpses of Corporate Culture Through How We Dine
And the power of kikubari
Did you ever consider how many questions you have to answer just to eat at a restaurant in America? The interrogation begins the moment you walk in the door: Booth or a table? What to drink? What kind of beer? Can I see an ID!? Appetizer? Soup or salad? Dressing? How to prepare the burger? What kind of cheese? Curly or steak fries? And so on.
How we break bread together speaks volumes about our values. It also reflects patterns of behavior found in the business world.
To illuminate the different ways Japanese and American teams behave at work, I like to compare how the two cultures approach the dining ritual. As strange as it sounds, we work much like we eat.
Individual Choice in America
The American pre-meal interrogation is a natural outgrowth of a culture that values individualism and personal choice. American culture assumes that everyone should have plenty of options to choose from so the meal can be customized to the individual’s specifications.
When the food arrives, the meal commences with unspoken assumptions about who is supposed to eat and drink what at the table. Even the beer bottle is sized for the individual to accommodate the American love of personal choice. A by-product of individual-sized packaging is that it clearly delineates each person’s area of responsibility: This is MY beer!
And the beer-drinking American would never think of filling someone else’s glass. The exception would be when a group shares a pitcher, but even then, the level of attentiveness toward others is no match for Japan. (If you experience it just once, you’ll understand.)
As an American, it’s self-evident to me that “my responsibilities” are to drink my own beer and eat my own entrée, and ditto that for my fellow table-mates. Focused and efficient, Americans consume their customized entrees and individual beers with little regard for the needs of the people around them. And it’s all good, of course, since everyone at the table implicitly agrees on the rules.
How do the Japanese dine?
First, few questions are asked up-front because the Japanese meal is less concerned with individual choice than with anticipating the overall needs of the group. Besides the obvious goal of enjoying good food, dinner is considered the ideal setting for building and nurturing relationships.
A typical Japanese business dinner will begin with several large frosty bottles of beer that are set in the middle of the table.
Each diner gets a small, empty (soon-to-be filled) drinking glass, a condition that renders the boundaries of drinking responsibilities unclear from the start. How much of that beer belongs to me?
In a culture where harmony rules and the individual is but a “fraction of the whole” (the Japanese word for “self” is jibun 自分, literally, “one’s part”), it would be highly inappropriate for the Japanese diner to put a personal desire above the needs of table-mates. God forbid pouring yourself a glass of beer!
Instead, each person at the table focuses on attending to the needs of everyone else. This mindset is key.
The low-ranking employee is especially vigilant in filling others’ glasses when the opportunity presents itself, always before being asked to do so. Senior-ranking members will reciprocate, so beer is poured almost non-stop during the course of dinner.
Years ago an American friend, thoroughly overwhelmed by his first Japanese business dinner, leaned over and drunkenly whispered in my ear, “I drank fifty-three half-glasses of beer!”
Parallels in the Workplace
Just for fun, let’s superimpose the dining behavior described above onto Japanese and American group behavior in the workplace.
Like the American diner’s entrée, job responsibilities in a typical American organization are predefined via detailed individual job descriptions. Just as American diners are expected to focus on consuming their own food, American employees are expected to “consume” their assigned tasks.
No surprise then that American employees’ top priority is to fulfill the requirements set forth in the job description (admittedly for some, the bare minimum), as it likely will form the basis of the dreaded annual performance review.
And just as the employee assumes without question that “this food is mine and that is not”, so goes the delineation of responsibilities at work: this job is mine, and that is not.
In the American workplace, employees respect the boundaries as defined by coworkers job descriptions. (Exceptions exist, of course; small American companies, for example, tend to be less territorial due to the necessity of employees to “wear many hats”, etc.)
Japanese group dynamics take a different approach. In a dining context, meal portions are ambiguous from the start since much of the food is set out in common dishes for everyone to share.
This parallels exactly how Japanese behave in the workplace. Just as collectivism is baked into their dining rituals, so it goes for how they organize and allocate work. Employees do not adhere to a strict, predefined individual job description. Rather, they draw from a common pool of work, from a fuzzy group job description.
And the proactive nature of the beer-pouring ritual is analogous to how the Japanese employee is expected to interact with his or her teammates. The employee must stay alert, be observant, identify any “half glasses of work” that need to be filled, then promptly take initiative without being asked to do so.
Kikubari, customer care, and precious human connections
The Japanese beer-pouring ritual offers a glimpse of Japanese-style customer-service as well, namely, the practice of observing people’s needs then proactively fulfilling them. This is standard practice in the Japanese service industry, admittedly to a fault sometimes. (For all the gory details, check out The Dark Side of Japanese Customer Service.)
The Japanese have a word for such proactive behavior — “kikubari”. ANA Airlines describes it perfectly in this old ad:
At ANA, service isn’t just a reactive endeavor. It’s steeped in centuries of Japanese culture. That’s why our flight attendants take great pride in delivering outstanding service even before you’re aware you need it. Whether it’s a cold drink, a warm duvet or any other touch of Japanese hospitality, we’ll be there faster than you can hit a call button. After all, we’ve been training for a thousand years or so.
Japanese and American team dynamics are so different that you might wonder how the twain could ever meet. The answer is by practicing kikubari, a simple, effective way to strengthen human connections and improve group cohesion in the process.
And if you’re dealing with folks who don’t speak your language? No problem! Kikubari removes the pesky language barrier from the equation altogether since kind acts require no words.
At the most basic level of interpersonal interactions, for any two people struggling to connect, my advice is to seek out ways to practice kikubari — to proactively do something helpful and considerate for the other person. Imagine the world we could create if we all behaved this way.
Can’t think of a downside to practicing kikubari at work, at play, and at home. And the upsides are as beautiful as they are practical: kikubari injects positivity into the world, requires no special skill, costs nothing, can be done immediately, leaps wide culture gaps in a single bound, and makes people feel damn good about themselves.
Kikubari has the power to make the world a better place. One human connection at a time.
© Tim Sullivan 2022
If stories about my cross-cultural triumphs and failures in Japan sound like fun, you can read all about ’em here.
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