The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

 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