Urgency in Japan

This Monday I got a call from one of my clients, a medium sized European Hi-Tech company with their Asian headquarter being in Hong Kong. I have been working for this client already for some time doing consulting and coaching work. I was also working with their regional country managers in Asia in order to support their organizational development.

The general manager of this company sounded quite disturbed and asked me whether I could fit in a short trip to Japan still in October as he was really worried about what’s going on there.

My schedule this month was already quite packed and the only possible time for me to squeeze in such a visit by moving some appointments was to leave the very next day in the afternoon and meet with the Japanese country manager – let me call him Pete - today.

Since last Monday was a public holiday (National Sports & Health Day, which was established upon the start of the Olympic Games in Tokyo on 11 Oct 1964), I could not reach the person I was supposed to meet today. Nevertheless, I made the flight reservation and luckily, Pete could spare the time to meet with me.

To cut a long story short, it became pretty obvious during our 6 hours meeting today that Pete is overwhelmed with all the tasks at hand. He is an outstanding connector and doubled the business for this company in Japan within the first 6 months after his arrival and is likely to increase it by another 60% this year.

Even though he possibly has the required general management capability, he faces a no. of problems;

* lack of time to drive the business AND develop the company
* lack of competent co-managers to support him with the operational tasks
* lack of patience with his co-workers leading to high staff turnover (some key persons already indicated that they won’t take that for very long anymore – and most Japanese employees have a rather high tolerance for suffering)

Of course, all these problems are interlinked and we came to the conclusion that the only way around this problem is to search for a competent chief operating officer who takes off the burden of handling all the daily operational tasks at hand. Due to the strong growth of the company, it will be possible to afford a 2nd strong manager. The benefits to be expected are:

+ Pete can focus better on what he is really good at, and that is to bring in new business

+ the morale of the other employees is likely to considerably improve leading to less turnover and higher productivity – Pete is normally a quite relaxed and funny person but turns into a rather cynical and dominating boss under high pressure

+ the headquarter can feel more secure because it is safe to assume that reporting will be more regular and they don’t need to fear anymore that the operation will depend only on one key person

For me it was again interesting to experience how people often can’t see the forest anymore because of all the trees around them. Being not directly involved in their day-to-day business, enables me to look at the forest from outside and see the dynamics which lead to the current problems.