Optimising Success
Transferring to the Tokyo headquarters is essential to a foreign talent’s success in a Japanese company. The Japanese culture is an implicit one, which makes the ability to pick up on tacit understandings very important. This poses a challenge to foreigners who are unable to read between the lines. Some may argue that frequent business trips are an adequate substitute for transferring to the Tokyo headquarters. I doubt this. I believe that non-Japanese talents in Japanese companies should be sent to Japan as early as possible to absorb the atmosphere and culture of the headquarters. The implicit culture of Japan cannot be readily picked up otherwise.
After a Tokyo headquarters stint, foreign talents should be career-managed or rotated across different overseas offices. Mitsubishi is trying to do this across Asia. This can be challenging, as Asian talents do not embrace mobility as much as talents from other parts of the world. Those in Singapore, for instance, are comfortable and often do not wish to move to ‘hardship’ countries. I think talents must ask themselves, “Is piloting from a comfortable base, such as Singapore, sufficient to develop my knowledge of the region?” In my opinion, the answer is ‘no’.
I believe that non-Japanese talents in Japanese companies should be sent to Japan as early as possible to absorb the atmosphere and culture of the headquarters. The implicit culture of Japan cannot be readily picked up otherwise.
The Importance of Bilingualism
I am not an advocate of Japanese being the only language of communication at Mitsubishi. In fact, I am a strong believer in ‘bilingual competence’. Compared to Tokyo headquarters, our overseas offices have a deeper knowledge of their geographies and certain business sectors. Japanese management must then listen to the global talents in these offices – in their local language. Hence, bilingual competence is not just a matter of our non-Japanese employees learning Japanese, but of our Japanese staff – particularly those in overseas offices – learning the native language of their overseas offices. It is a bilateral flow. This has to be carefully managed. In the 1980s and 90s, some companies such as Sony tried to use English as their ‘official’ language. This failed, largely because most Japanese staff lacked aptitude in English.
This differs from country to country. For example, Indonesians can generally pick up English more easily, as Bahasa Indonesian has a sentence structure based on the Roman alphabet. Convinced that bilingual competence is critical to the globalisation of Mitsubishi, I established a bilingual team in my last stint as Head of Global HR Development in Tokyo. I recruited a Canadian, American and Singaporean who were all bilingual English and Japanese speakers. They translated every strategy paper in our department, and organised all our seminars in both English and Japanese.
Developing Global Talent
Mitsubishi is working to create a supportive environment that will help our foreign talents thrive. We start with the managers who are rotated to our overseas offices. We are developing these managers to be adept at managing and motivating their global talent pool. They must attend at least one three-day seminar to cultivate the skills and abilities to engage local talent in career conversations and performance assessment discussions, as well as understand local cultural nuances and interpretations.
The Mitsubishi Group also achieved a recent milestone. For the first time in its history, Mitsubishi Corporation has established the global headquarters of a subsidiary outside Japan. Located in Singapore, the subsidiary’s staffing will be made up of around 50% Japanese and 50% non-Japanese by the end of 2013. For the Group, this is a brand-new experiment, and I hope that it will be the first of many such milestones for Mitsubishi.