The innovative way to avoid a fuss

“Japanese business culture condemns leaders who cause loss of face”

The Napoleonic tendency to publicly demean our employees is the ‘brute honesty’.  However, this is not a technique that is part of the innovation culture, as scolding workers in public when we lose our temper can play tricks on us and can lead to a tense atmosphere.

The faculty director of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Alan Goldman, witnessed how Japanese bosses went to great lengths to keep strongly negative criticism always out of the public eye.

He says Japanese corporates understood how public disrepute can fuel employees’ fear. This would cause them to lose self-confidence and lower performance, which would ultimately have repercussions for the company and its profits. Moreover, humiliation is a metastasize that employees retain in mind and try to retaliate, destabilising solidarity among colleagues and leading to a toxic atmosphere.

To avoid this atmosphere, leaders must firstly distinguish between public and private venues for correcting underlings. It is more appropriate to have a conversation behind closed doors than in public, because it gives us more freedom to point out problems at work.

But leaders must learn also to avoid the Napoleonic ‘brute honesty’. That is, that not every criticism or form of criticism is valid, even if it’s true. Think about emails. It would be just as toxic to write a reprimanding email with several recipients as it would be to use a private email with venomous words and attacks. Nor would it be indulgent to lock an employee against his will in your office and accost him with complaints. Furthermore, it is always better to soften the dialogue and, for example, point out other positive behaviour and prepare the employee for the feedback meeting without being intrusive through phrases such as “your performance on this project is very interesting and we should speak more later when we both have had a chance to reflect.”

So, what Alan learned was that in Japan, leaders want to inspire rather than embarrass; are your motives the same?

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