We all know by now that diversity provides huge benefits to organizations and individuals alike. It’s been proven that diversity leads to increased innovation, better problem solving skills and better profitability.

However, achieving diversity and then harnessing it are still huge challenges for a lot of organizations. Let’s look at how to achieve diversity and then how to benefit from it. Instead of a general look, we will look at it from the perspective of a foreign capital company and their subsidiary in Japan.

How do you achieve diversity?

As an organization it is important to set up a recruitment strategy that drives diversity. That can be achieved by utilizing multiple hiring channels and a consistent check of criteria that the organization set for their diversity targets. Another option is implementing semi-blind interviews where managers do not for instance know the university an applicant graduated from or other factors such as age or other aspects that tend to be skewed in that particular organization.

When recruiting from global or regional HQ for a local key position, it is important to keep in mind who the person will mostly be working with. Sure, it is necessary to be the bridge to HQ and good communication and language skills are required. However, if an applicant is for example very “americanized” it will most likely delight the stakeholders at the US HQ. However, the person will struggle locally if their subordinates or external counterparts are conservative Japanese. The person will not be effective and despite the great relationship with global HQ fail sooner or later. Therefore, it is important to understand the broader context the person will be working in.

So it is important to remind the managers during the process who they are recruiting for. Of course the relationship with the manager is important but what about their team members or clients? 

What we see in Japan very often is that, firstly, people get divided into Japanese and non-Japanese assuming that all foreigners are the same, especially the English speaking ones. That is obviously far from the truth and can be addressed with cross-cultural training.

Secondly, depending on the customer base, the closer you get to the customer the more conservative Japanese it becomes while the higher up the hierarchy where interactions with global HQ are common, culture is a lot more aligned with global. However, there is usually a huge gap between the people on the ground claiming that people at the top don’t understand Japan or their customers etc. while the top claims the people on the ground just don’t get the global company’s values, way of doing things etc.

Now it’s easy to point fingers but that will not solve any problems. It’s important to raise awareness across all levels of the different approaches caused by the different cultures and learn to benefit from them.

There will always be things companies will have to adjust when doing business in a different cultural context. It’s the responsibilities of the leaders to work with the people on the ground to identify these aspects and then work out which ones can be adjusted and which ones cannot.

How do you harness diversity?

In an attempt to play it safe, managers might still lean towards hiring people who are similar to them or other team members. Therefore it’s important to support them from an L&D perspective as well. “Go ahead and manage a diverse team” is easier said than done. How a company can support here is by providing cross-cultural communication training. Investing in cross-cultural communication training substantially improves the manager’s communication skills overall by increasing awareness and providing frameworks and tools for them to use on a daily basis.

In addition, it is important that also non-managers receive this kind of training. The reason behind this is they might be dealing with co-workers in their own department or other departments with diverse backgrounds or with external parties such as clients. So they too, equally benefit from this.

Learning, however, doesn’t happen only in a classroom or by watching a LinkedIn Learning course. The big question is how do you apply your learning?

What has proven very successful is running individual team meetings and having the teams together with their manager discuss their learning. Once the team has an increased awareness and an understanding of the framework it is a lot easier to verbalize the differences.  After the team meeting, the frameworks can also be used during 1 on 1s between the manager and individual team members. Generally, we tend to like people with similar backgrounds because we feel connected, share the same values and have instant rapport, sometimes even trust. 

What these sessions on a team and individual level achieve is they create understanding, a shared pool of knowledge and ultimately trust.

Lastly, if you are managing a sales team, you can also utilize this when assigning accounts. If your counterpart on the client side is a rather conservative Japanese with limited to no English skills, it probably does not make much sense to assign a foreigner who just got to Japan, does not know anything about the culture and only speaks English.

With a more and more globalizing world, diversity is here to stay. It could be internally where the teams become increasingly diverse or that the client base regionally expands. In Japan we see that companies are increasingly hiring foreign talent especially in IT as there are not enough Japanese IT professionals with the right skill set. In addition, many Japanese companies are facing a shrinking population and therefore market in Japan. Their strategy is expanding overseas. In addition to basic language skills, cross-cultural communication skills will be key to their long term success.