Being the country manager or senior leader in any business is a tough job. There are many opportunities for immediate, or longer term disaster! The reality at this level, is that it can take at least 1 year, maybe longer to discover whether the person in charge is performing. It is also a highly complicated job, with millions of tiny decisions made that can have an impact on the success of an organisation Through trial and error, CEOs here have kindly explained to me what they believe the best leaders in Japan do to ensure success:
- Build Trust With HQ – Very few companies except for big tech companies have come to Japan with huge budgets ready to hire a lot of people. Typically, the expectation is to hire 1-10 people and see how it goes. It is incredibly expensive setting up here so head office wants to see how their initial investment goes and hear reports on how big the opportunity is likely to be. So if it is just you and a couple of other people initially, you must build trust with head office by agreeing to goals, adjusting the global strategy to the local market and delivering on timescales agreed so you will receive more flexibility next time. Increasing the autonomy given to you bit by bit over the months
- Lead by example – Do not sit in an office and just tell people what to do. Be the hardest worker in the room. Of course, you have to be involved in creating the strategy but show your teams how to do a sales call, meet a client and get involved in some grass roots level marketing efforts
- Headcount – Similar to the above, you may only have a couple of people initially. You may look at other companies and competitors with envy. But what have you done in order to get increases in headcount? Have you proactively sourced multiple “rockstar” people and made a compelling case to head office that these people must be hired?
- Marketing budget – Whether it is B2B or B2C, you may not have much marketing budget to begin. So what do you do? 1) Ensure your website brings traffic through writing daily blog posts, focusing on the one thing your company does better than anyone else so you appear in Google searches 2) convert these into sales leads 3) utilise all social media channels available, producing platform specific content 4) Create high quality webinars, podcasts and once the pandemic is finally over, full scale events
- Ideas & Solutions – A well cited phrase in Japan is that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. There have been cases where this has been used as an excuse by underperforming leaders to their foreign counterparts overseas. At face value, this is true. But there are many ways to get things done in Japan. If country manager is not able to adjust and find creative ways to reach their objectives, they shouldn’t be a leader at an international company. The best person comes up with great alternative suggestion that reaches head office objectives but is localised to work in Japan.
- Culture – Creating a culture of high performance is essential. This means driving a positive, entrepreneurial, highly motivated team. Ultimately it comes down to hiring the right people and exiting the wrong people from your business. In order to attract talent, you need to passionately describe your vision to as many of the right people as possible, they are often not searching for a new job.
- Investment – This will come as a result of the trust head office places in you as a leader. You get increased investment by putting together a clear business plan, agreeing on clear goals and ideally overachieving
Now you have the trust from head office, a track record with your clients, an exciting growth story with your team, increasing revenues and a whole lot of positivity, it is important to continue to innovate. Because someone, somewhere is working hard to take market share away from you. Certainly, there is time to congratulate your team for getting the business to this point, but looking to the future to innovate around new products, sales channels, adapting processes and sourcing bigger opportunities will ensure that the ship continues heading in the right direction.
