The Secret World Of Conflict When Leading In Japan
Japan doesn’t like conflict. As the foreign boss you will be super busy and may be missing some areas of conflict operating within the team. You can’t deal with it, if you don’t know about it, so the difficulty scale can get high here quite quickly. You are also often tied up in meetings or visiting clients, so things may be boiling over and you don’t hear about it. As is the case with any part of the world the boss is always the last to be told about bad news.
Conflict can be situational. Something was supposed to happen or didn’t happen and someone is now unhappy with someone else. Words are exchanged and now we have a tense situation between people in the team. It might be a communication trigger point that leads to the conflict. Attempted humour is often the offender in this case. An amusing remark isn’t amusing at all to the person on the receiving end and they take offense. It might be a miscommunication. We meant one thing, but they take it in an entirely different direction and now we have a problem. It can be expectations. We think something should be done in a certain way and when it isn’t, we take issue with the perpetrator. Or we expected something to happen, it didn’t and now we voice our unhappiness.
The Johari window provides a useful snapshot of where we are with conflict. There are conflicts which are known to us and known to others. These can be worked on because everything is out in the open. The case could be where there is a conflict that we see, but nobody else has picked up on it yet. This is also relatively straightforward, as we can work on solving the conflict because it is known to us.
The other two quadrants in the Johari window are where it gets tricky. Conflicts unknown are time bombs which could explode without warning. It may be because we have designed things in such a way that inevitably, conflict must arise. We might have a commission bonus structure that will ultimately generate conflicts between team members. It might be that we are under resourcing one area of the work and eventually the chickens will come home to roost when things blow up. We might be putting unrealistic time completion expectations on certain work which will causes stresses between all the interconnecting pieces of the business. Things don’t get done in time and people become unhappy with each other as a result.
The worst is when the conflict is known to others but not to us. This is very common in Japan, where everyone else knows what is going except for the boss. As bosses we need people who will tell us what is going on. A good practice is to assume you don’t always know what is happening between members of the team. Just because you don’t know about it, doesn’t mean it is isn’t occurring. We have to regularly check in with our sources to see if something is bubbling away under the surface that we need to address, before it grows into epic proportions.
When we are preparing to deal with the conflict, we can use the same Johari Window framework. We need to look for what is known to everyone, what is out in the open, what is common knowledge. For example, the project is not progressing smoothly and there is a lack of coordination, resulting in deadlines being missed.
Now we have to think about what do we know about the situation, that one of the individuals involved may not know. For example, we may know about a particular personal situation in the background for Yuki the project leader, which is making her rather short tempered.
Similarly, we might may know something about Taro, one of the project team, that Yuki does not know. He may be very perfectionist and keeps everything to himself, so he is not sharing with others in the team enough. We may have realised that Taro, being a very technically focused engineer is oblivious to the fact that the way he is speaking to Yuki, is what is irritating her.
As the boss, we may be unaware that Yuki and Taro, have some work history in the past and there is some underlying bitterness between them. This last type of information is important, but is often hidden to us. Before we try to get involved and solve the conflict issue, we have to dig deep to find out as much as we can about the relationship between the two people. We need to know what we are in fact dealing with here, before we try to do anything.
This Johari Window framework is a useful tool to examine conflict within the team and especially useful to remind us that there are factors not known to us or others, which we have to find. Also, the other annoying one is “known to others but not to us”. We need one of the team to be our guide on these matters, to get someone to fill the boss in on what is really going on. Before we start taking any action, a quick construction of the framework will give us a guide as to where we need to direct our efforts to solve the conflict.
