Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Meeting with a group of Japanese

Jul 12, 2004 09:21 am / 1 comment

Con­fer­ence, meet­ings, work­shops with many par­tic­i­pants pro­ceed dif­fer­ently between for­eign cap­i­tal com­pa­nies and Japan­ese com­pa­nies (exclud­ing Sony and a few other west­ern­ized com­pa­nies) in Japan.

With for­eign cap­tial com­pa­nies, they are used to west­ern way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing. Most of the peo­ple try to respond to any ques­tion in speedy man­ner. In that sense, peo­ple in Japan­ese com­pa­nies “try” too. But the blank, silent moment wait­ing for these peo­ple to respond is excrutiating.

I’ve recently had that sit­u­a­tion in tele­con­fer­enc­ing. I’ve tried to cre­ate space for one of the key Japan­ese par­tic­i­pant to make a com­ment, but the US side could not tol­er­ate the silence for more than a few sec­onds. The tol­er­ance level dif­fers by per­son, of course. Some Amer­i­cans are very good at giv­ing space (giv­ing a minute, even two for response!), but major­ity are not.

I remem­ber a feed­back given to me by my work­shop part­ner a year ago that he wanted to have more “ma” (space) for response. At that time, I was shocked because I thought I was giv­ing him more than enough time for response.

Then in a recent meet­ing out­side of Tokyo in a very Japan­ese com­pany, I wit­nessed some­thing amaz­ing. It was a pre­sen­ta­tion given by their col­league in other branch, and there were about 80 atten­dants. After the pre­sen­ta­tion, he del­caired that instead of sim­ple Q&A, he wanted to have open dis­cus­sion. I froze. No, not these peo­ple! Man­agers sit­ting sparcely in the three front row. Staff sit­ting tightly packed in back of the room. They couldn’t see or hear the pre­sen­ta­tion well. How could there be a discussion?

In the begin­ning, after a long minute, some man­agers made com­ments. The place seemed DEAD to me. But the pre­sen­ta­tor calmly waited, mak­ing eye con­tact with the par­tic­i­pants. Then although at about 1/50 of the inten­sity and speed, the staff started mak­ing com­ments. In the end, some very good points were aired out, big progress was made.

If it was me, I would never have been able to draw out any thoughts out of the par­tic­i­pants. I would not have had the nerve to ride out the silent moments. But now that I have expe­ri­enced it, I can do it.

The les­son learned: Stay calm and con­fi­dent, and make silence my friend dur­ing Q&A ses­sion in a Japan­ese company.

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