Japan is a country where accountability and responsibility are avoided at all costs. This is most often seen in staff engagement surveys where Japan usually comes last in the world. One of the key questions western survey designers use for these global questionnaires is, “would you recommend our firm as a place to work for your relatives and friends?”. Japanese staff will not give this question a positive score. They worry that if they introduce their relative and it doesn’t work out, it will create a problem for their own career within the company. They also worry if their relative hates the place, they will blame them for introducing the firm and this creates problems within the family.
The Japanese have come up with clever ways to reduce accountability for individuals. Decision-making uses the ringi method of consensus gathering so that we are all accountable and therefore no one person is individually accountable. This is genius for staff. At different times, though, we as the boss ask individuals to do a certain task. This has very little currency, though. Every Japanese worker knows that inability and incompetence are not legal grounds for getting fired, so “best effort but don’t too excited about the results boss”.
As the boss, we have to allocate tasks to our team members and we have to hold them accountable for the successful completion of those tasks. We do this because we can move some of our workload across to members of the team we wish to elevate to a leadership role in the future. When they go for their interview for the promotion, they can reference the fact that they have been doing part of the boss’s duties and therefore can be trusted to step up into the new role. There might also be specialised skills which our team members hold and we can best complete the task using their expertise. Today, the business world is too complex to expect the boss can do everything by themselves. Also, by distributing the work, we can get through it faster. Often the boss is the chokepoint on tasks because they are so busy and can’t get through everything fast enough.
How do we choose who to give the tasks to? Often, the boss looks around at who they think isn’t super busy and gives them the task. This is not a great selection process. We would be better to choose who has the best ability to compete the task effectively and who would benefit the most from being given boss responsibilities for their future development. We also need to consider how we will evaluate the successful completion of the tasks.
Not everyone is sold on the idea of doing the boss’s work. They may feel they are already busy enough without being given additional tasks for the same pay. Clever people have worked out that if you do a poor job or screw up the early stages, the boss will panic and take the task back. As leaders, we say dumb stuff like, “Leave it with me” or “I will take care of this”. We might take the task off them, but do nothing ourselves, because we are already overwhelmed by our own tasks. Now no one is working on this project and nothing is getting done. Our role is to make sure they keep doing the task and that they do it well.
How do we make sure they take accountability? First off, we need to sell the task to them. We need to clarify that we are giving this work to them for their sake. They will gain an advantage to do this work as it will help them step up in their career. Those who are not interested in stepping up are a poor choice for the accountability because they don’t care. They just want to keep a low profile, collect their monthly salary and have a quiet life. We need to know who is motivated inside our team and talk to them about taking on this project.
In western society we say if you want something done, give it to a busy person. The logic is that they are capable and fast and will knock it out in good time. There is a logic for this in Japan, because someone who is motivated will take on the additional work if they feel there is some gain for them. Most Japanese companies, however, only advance their people based on age and stage, so there is little leverage in that system for delegating the boss’s work. Even the motivated won’t care because it makes no difference to their career advancement. In more modern Japanese companies or multi-national companies, this will work much better.
Once we delegate the tasks, we need to monitor the progress. We don’t want to drown them in love by pulling the roots up all the time to see how things are growing. We need to leave them to get on with it. We don’t micromanage, but we manage. We may imagine they are taking the task completion in one direction, but discover too late they took it in the wrong direction. We need to check in regularly to make sure that never happens.
The key is our selection process and our regular maintenance of supervision of the task. If we get these two aspects correct, then our accountability system will work well.
