Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Professional Japanese Women

Jun 29, 2004 23:13 pm / Add a comment

It is still a rar­ity when a woman strolls into a giant Japan­ese com­pany as a con­sul­tant. But because it is still a rar­ity, women can take advan­tage of such sit­u­a­tion. I did just that recently when I con­ducted a series of work­place design/ change man­age­ment work­shop. When I put together a team of 4 peo­ple of most appro­pri­ate com­bined skill sets, we turned out to be all women.

Two inte­rior designer/architects, one busi­ness coach and me. It was funny how the client com­pany exec­u­tives reacted when one by one, they arrived at the con­fer­ence room. We had the con­fer­ence room all re-arranged to suit the needs of work­shops, so that threw them off for a start. They have been with the com­pany for 20 to 30 years, but they have never seen any con­fer­ence room fur­ni­ture moved around like that. And then when they saw women greet­ing them, they acted really sur­prised. They all first stopped at the entrance. Cou­ple of them walked back out of the room. (To gain their com­po­sure?) And when they were seated, they were vis­i­bly rigid, uncomfortable.

I bet the way we approached them helped. We didn’t flex our mus­cle and say, we’re the boss! We sim­ply asked them ques­tions, and within few min­utes they begun to relax, and we had great ses­sions. They didn’t want to stop when the time was up, and we ended up talk­ing through­out the lunch hour until they absolutely had to go to their next sep­a­rate meetings.

Things are chang­ing among pro­fes­sional Japan­ese women, at least around me. Many pro­fes­sional Japan­ese women in their mid 30’s and older tend to be thorny, abra­sive, try­ing to prove them­selves. But younger ones, espe­cially women in 20’s are relaxed, more inter­ested in help­ing peo­ple around them than mak­ing state­ments. I love work­ing with these women, and I think this past work­shops with very tra­di­tional Japan­ese com­pany proved peo­ple in gen­eral love work­ing with these women. And because we are still rar­ity, the impact we make is greater.

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