Go for the Gemba

October 4, 2007

Hirotaka Takeuchi is the dean of Hitotsubashi University’s Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy in Tokyo. Self-awareness, self-control, empathy, humility, and other such emotional intelligence traits are particularly important in Asia. They are part of our Confucian emphasis on wah, or social harmony.

When books on emotional intelligence were first translated into Japanese, people said, “We already know that. We’re actually trying to get beyond that.”We’ve been so focused on wah that we’ve built up a supersensitive structure of social niceties, where everyone seeks consensus. In the Japanese hierarchy, everyone knows his

or her place so no one is ever humiliated. This social supersensitivity – itself a form of emotional intelligence–can lead people to shy away from conflict. But conflict is often the only way to get to the gemba – the front line, where the action really is, where the truth lies.

Thus, effective management often depends not on coolly and expertly resolving conflict, or simply avoiding it, but on embracing it at the gemba. Japan’s most effective leaders do both.

The best example is Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn. He not only had the social skills to listen to people and win them over to his ideas, but he also dared to lift the lid on the corporate hierarchy and encourage people at all levels of the organization to offer suggestions to operational, organizational, and even interpersonal problems – even if that created conflict. People were no longer suppressed, so solutions to the company’s problems bubbled up.

Balance the Load

Linda Stone (linda@lindastone.net) is the former vice president of corporate and industry initiatives at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

Emotional intelligence is powerful – which is precisely why it can be dangerous. For example, empathy is an extraordinary relationshipbuilding tool, but it must be used skillfully or it can do serious damage to the person doing the empathizing. In my case, overdoing empathy took a physical toll. In May 2000, Steve Ballmer charged me with rebuilding Microsoft’s industry relationships, a position that I sometimes referred to as chief listening officer. The job was part ombudsperson, part new-initiatives developer, part pattern recognizer, and part rapidresponse person. In the first few months of the job – when criticism of the company was at an all-time high–it became clear that this position was a lightning rod. I threw myself into listening and repairing wherever I could.

Within a few months, I was exhausted from the effort. I gained a significant amount of weight, which, tests finally revealed, was probably caused by a hormone imbalance partially brought on by stress and lack of sleep. In absorbing everyone’s complaints, perhaps to the extreme, I had compromised my health. This was a wake-up call; I needed to reframe the job. I focused on connecting the people who needed to work together to resolve problems rather than taking on each repair myself. I persuaded key people inside the company to listen and work directly with important people outside the company, even in cases where the internal folks were skeptical at first about the need for this direct connection. In a sense, I tempered my empathy and ratcheted up relationship building. Ultimately, with a wiser and more balanced use of empathy, I became more effective and less stressed in my role.