1st Post:
R==
The choice of the topics of your blog is wonderful. This article is as absorbing as other articles in your blog.
You pointed out the “concise statements and non-verbals to carry messages” found in communication of the Japanese. Well, I just wonder if it is so. Let’s just call these things as “implicit codes of communication” here.
Imagine a well-trained basketball team. They may discuss, before games, how they lead the games. But probably the discussions are quite brief, with not many members asking questions and with not many members presenting opinions. Let’s just think about a platoon in the battlefield. I assume the same thing happen here.
I think the implicit codes of communication is found everywhere in the world, i.e. even outside of Japan. The Japanese people may be unique in using the codes in their daily life. The basketball team and the platoon do not make everything clear by verbal communication in order to materialize efficient group dynamism. The Japanese culture in the long historical time has successfully made the people behave using the codes. It set the Japanese people’s behaviors so strong that even inside an elevator the “group dynamism” is immediately formulated and that the codes loom.
To me as a Japanese person, lack of the codes in daily life communication is very much annoying and exhausting. If you have time, please enjoy reading my blog titled “My Life in Klamath Falls.” It is a collection of what I wrote in my college days 20 years ago. The article “Questions: in Search of Politeness, Hospitality and Courtesy” illustrates what I thought back then.
http://tales.msi-group.org/?p=7
And the codes of a particular group continue to guarantee an efficient group dynamism as far as the environment of the group stays fairly stable without forcing the group member to create a new set of codes.
Even a Japanese person who first steps in a long-lasted group would have a hard time to comprehend and to master the codes there. But once the new comer learns them, everything becomes smooth in the daily life.
So I believe that a new Gaikokujin manager may have to be delighted to see the Japanese subordinates tactfully using codes, as it possibly proves that the group could function efficiently. All that the Gaikokujin manager has to do is to lead the efficiency toward the designated group goal, unless the basketball team all of a sudden has to play volleyball.
2nd Post:
R==
I missed to comment on the last part of the article. It says…
“After you are done, why not just ask the other person “Was that clear?”,”
Probably if you use closed questions to them, they will immediately say yes or no to avoid expressing their opinions. If the person being asked is not a senior or at a social status inside the group, he would hesitate to express the opinions or the questions. If he does so, the conduct may distrurb the atmosphere by making clear of something that should be left unmentioned.
I suspect that the better way of asking in this case is to give open questions that one could not respond with yes or no. The questions will be effective. But they are so effective to make the risk of breaking the wanted group-atmosphere.
To manage the risk, you have to carefully choose who to ask and when to ask.
This is what I always make myself sure of, when I begin the very first meeting of the employee learning sessions at the new clients.