To watch the full interview on YouTube, click here. Interview starts at [02:11]
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A full transcript follows.
Welcome to Vol. 16 of Diversity rocks innovation! Darren Menabney helps individuals and organizations learn how to collaborate, communicate, and create remotely and across cultures. Darren was born in Belfast in Northern Ireland and moved to Toronto as a small child, finally moving to Japan for study and work. His global perspective has been one that was seeded early on and has continued to be utilized in his life and work, including now as he teaches business students and organizations about global business leadership, and the future of work. We are thrilled to have Darren as one of our speakers in the men’s DEI executive education program: Wolfpack.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- How Darren’s childhood gave him a foundation in thinking globally
- Darren’s experience volunteering for the G20 and G8 summits with the Japanese delegation
- Why Darren chose to do his MBA in Japan
- Why innovation requires an environment where it is safe to fail
- How global companies can use the lessons learned during COVID to offer employees more flexible work conditions and autonomy
About Darren:
As a remote work communication and creativity consultant, Darren helps individuals and organizations overcome the challenges of communicating, collaborating, and creating when working with hybrid and remote teams.
His mission and passion are to help individuals and organizations harness their innate creativity and, through storytelling, share that with the world.
Darren spent over 20 years working for the Canadian federal government, working with startups, and running programs to boost Ontario’s innovation ecosystem. In 2011 he decided to take his career in a new direction by moving to Japan.
Darren has extensive experience teaching to corporate clients through the corporate education department at GLOBIS University and through his own practice. He has created and taught sessions on Leading Global Virtual Teams, Storytelling, Leading Hybrid Teams, Design Thinking to leaders and executives at Japanese and global corporations like Cartier, NTT Data, RAC Insurance of Western Australia, Chugai Pharmaceuticals, or public sector entities such as the US Navy.
As a professor and partner faculty at the Graduate School of Management, GLOBIS University, he teaches international MBA students, with an average student satisfaction rating of 95%.
He loves sharing knowledge and insights to help others get better. As a contributing writer for Forbes.com and FastCompany.com, he writes articles on storytelling, presentations, and working remotely or across cultures. As part of the IDEO U teaching team, he delivers online courses on design thinking, storytelling, and presentation skills.
In his day job, he leads global human resources projects at Ricoh Company Limited, strengthening employee engagement plus diversity and inclusion and building a stronger global culture among Ricoh’s 90,000 employees.
Connect with Darren:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmenabney/
Connect with Jackie:
Website: https://en-joi.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-f-steele-phd/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enjoidiversityandinnovation
https://www.facebook.com/jackiefsteelephd
Instagram: www.instagram.com/enjoi_diversity_innovation/
Transcript
Jackie: Welcome to Diversity rocks innovation! Volume 16. My name is Jackie Steele, Canadian political scientist, living and teaching in Japan and also the CEO and founder of enjoi Diversity and Innovation. enjoi is a Japan based global facing business, working in English, Japanese, and even in French sometimes.
And we support leaders and corporations in Japan to build out a diversity positive workplace and an inclusive corporate culture.
We know, and I think everyone who’s joining today knows, that in fact, diversity rocks innovation, but there are certain conditions under which that holds true. And we’re going to get into that through this live stream. We are interested in basically showcasing why we think that inclusive innovation is what can amplify and support equality for the long game, and that can power our people processes, our people systems not only for personal wellbeing but also for the collective good. And of course for the bottom line, which is what companies are interested in. As well as I think, showing up in terms of building a legacy as the corporate philosophy video hinted at. So this live stream is going to shine a spotlight on the very many enjoi Diversity and Innovation thought partners in our thought partner network.
And we’re going to engage in a thought partnering out loud, an exercise where we just show up as two human beings and we throw away the business cards and we throw away the sempai kohai hierarchies of gender and nationality and age and race and all of that, that sometimes can constrain our ability to just think out loud, ideate in solidarity and learn from one another.
So I am very pleased to welcome today my guest for Volume 16 of Diversity rocks innovation!, Darren Menabney. Welcome to the show and thank you so much for your time joining today, Darren.
Darren: Hi Jackie. Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be here finally after all this time and be having this great live interaction, I’m looking forward to it.
Jackie: Yes. And I know you also teach at IDEO. So I know that, you know, ideating is really something that you are very comfortable with and enjoying. And you’re also in your teaching at GLOBIS, as well as in your actual career in many different hats. So I’m really excited that you are a thought partner within enjoi.
And I certainly have learned tremendously and I wanted to give a shout out to Junko Nagao in the United States who introduced us, because it’s really through that introduction that we as two Canadians in Japan, managed to meet up. We didn’t know each other prior to that. And then also learned that we’re both in the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and that’s also been another excellent space of overlap that we didn’t know about.
So thank you, Junko for connecting the dots on that.
Darren: Yes, thank you Junko.
Jackie: I think I’m excited to have our listeners learn and experience all the different insights that I think you can bring to the table, on so many issues, but in particular maybe we can get into eventually the idea of global remote teams and how to lead that and lead that with inclusion.
And I think you’re certainly leading the way on that piece, but before we dive into that sort of professional side, I would love for people to get to know who is Darren the individual. Where did you start off as a young boy growing up in Canada? And what would have been the sort of facets of your identity and maybe the way you think about your own diversities that you see as pivotal markers or I guess, the ways in which you frame your identity now?
They always have an origin, there’s some origin stories and foundational stories. So could you maybe first, in the context of a self-introduction “jiko shoukai”, maybe start with that?
Darren: Yeah, thanks. So, I mean, let’s even go before Canada because I was actually born in the UK, in Northern Ireland, in Belfast. And when I was four years old, that’s when my family moved to Canada, moved to Toronto, because of course not to age myself, but in the late 1960s, early seventies, because of the troubles going on in Belfast , not the best place in the world to be raising a family.
So my parents said, let’s move to Toronto, had some family connections there already. And so basically I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, but you know, it’s nice to still have that identity, that little bit of that British identity going on in the background.
But I really say, like you said, growing up in Toronto, growing up in Canada, that was such a huge formative part of who I am for a lot of dimensions. One of them, of course, is it was just fun growing up in the suburbs and having all this free space and woods to play in, and that freedom as a kid.
But also growing up in the mid 1970s or in the 70s in Toronto, that was after I think the, as an immigrant myself, but probably growing up in Toronto, half of my classmates were also immigrants from different parts of the world as well. And so I think, I’ve always in the back of mind, it seemed natural to me to be surrounded by people from very diverse backgrounds.
That’s just the environment I went to school in, I worked in and we’ll talk about that later, but this has always been very natural to me. So I think, the act of moving from a different country when I was very young, four years old, I still remember, I think that really helped me think bigger, biggerer, if that’s a word. Think more broadly about the world.
Because I was always thinking about my family in Ireland is five hours ahead of us. So we’re making phone calls. I’m always thinking about time zone differences and I’m five years old already. And the fact that I did come from a different country and I have very good memories of flying in the plane over the Atlantic and here.
So I think that almost helped me think in terms of space and time very broadly. So that was one I think, definitely formative moment. And that’s really helped define who I am in terms of time and space, and space will take a much bigger role later as well.
Jackie: I think that’s fascinating that, of course, this is obviously pre internet boom and pre everything going virtual and in the cloud and people really relating.
But even in that process of, when we think back to people who had families and if they did immigrate and they did have families in other time zones and countries, you were navigating that already in terms of a cosmopolitan, not maybe a full on cosmopolitan view, but being conscious that there’s more than what is in your own country.
And there’s more than what is in your own surroundings and maybe cultural and national identity surroundings. And then just thinking through how you navigate to realize there’s multiple time zones, even at such a young age. I feel like it’s foreshadowing your current role.
Really interesting.
Darren: And so, yeah, and then growing up in that kind of, again, my elementary school in virtually, in the suburbs of Toronto, again, all my friends and classmates were all from different parts of the world and it just seems very natural to me as well.
And growing up, I have a very vivid memory of, this is more in junior high school maybe, but like one of my friends invited our whole class to her Chinese new year’s party. And that was really fun. I love food, so looking at the food. But I remember she said something like, yeah, it’s the Chinese year 4,500 or something like that.
Like, wow, that just blew my mind in terms of, we’re in the future. And then my other classmate said, well, in Hebrew, it’s the year 5,500. Wow. Even bigger. So it kind of gives you a new perspective and it kind of challenges your assumptions. And I think that’s one of the great things about growing up in such an environment, having your assumptions challenged, but what is common sense or kind of the reality around you.
And it just influences me, and again, thinking more broadly in terms of lots of different dimensions, lots of different scales.
Jackie: One, I think, I know that certainly for me growing up, I mean, my great grandparents immigrated, so when we would ask, and all of my actual grandparents had passed away before I was born.
So I didn’t know any of my grandparents let alone the great grandparents, or the origin stories. And it was handed down in bits and pieces. But generally the idea was that we were just Canadian mutts in terms of coming from a bit of Eastern Europe, Hungary, Hungarian descent through my mom, and through Czechoslovakia and then sort of through my dad, we think maybe somewhere in Britain, but we’re not really sure exactly.
And there’s a sort of ambiguity, so you don’t ever really, we didn’t really, we didn’t think about it. And given that we were obviously white Canadian living in a predominantly white neighborhood, but very multiculturally, growing into highly multicultural over the next 30 years. We didn’t know where we came from.
And that’s a privilege certainly to not have to worry about it. And just to not think about it and not have people ask, you know, where are you from? Right? And then that is that sort of benefit that you get when you are in those demographics in Canada. But I think as you rightly say, this idea that having those multicultural experiences, of the people in my classroom too, that were of all different walks of life, and different descent, second generation, third generation, 10th generation, all mixed up, and first generations clearly.
You, in some ways, have to de-center your own experience as no longer being the norm. Like you’re just not the norm. And there is no norm that you can claim in that space. And although racism and sexism and homophobia, all attempt to recreate who is the normal citizen, and we still have those elements plaguing us as a society at the individual interpersonal level, you really do experience sociologically every single day that actually you’re not the norm.
And so I remember when I came to Japan and they would ask me, what’s Canadian or what’s Canadian food? And I’d say, I guess it depends on which family you’re talking about and whether they’re Chinese Canadian, Japanese Canadian, Indo-Canadian, British Canadian, French Canadian. Can you define the question a little bit more precisely because I can’t really give you that easy answer. There’s not sort of a quintessentially Canadian food, and I know that people say maple syrup, but can we move beyond that stereotype?
But it’s true. Our experience ends up being that kind of a dynamic, of not having this one thing. We have a lot of de-centered, hopefully increasingly de-centered and normalized experiences of the mosaic, but are all equally Canadian hopefully. And that’s, I think that’s the homework we have ahead still, right?
Darren: Yeah. To work on that a bit. So, I mean, and that’s, I think, a big part of who I am growing up in an environment. And then as I got older, I think about university, going to high school in the suburbs, I always loved Sci Fi and space.
I remember when I was a kid, my dad let me use his binoculars he used for when he’s out fishing and stuff. And some summers I looked up at the sky, the stars. I was like, wow, there’s so much more out there. Again, back to this theme again. And so I think that kind of has always given me an interest in, as I see those things, I’m always interested in things that are very far away, whether that’s travel, or cultures, or remote work, or space.
And so when I went to university, I ended up studying at University of Toronto and astrophysics. So I got my bachelor’s degree in astrophysics, and that was also very formative because I was, in my entire extended family I was the first one to go to university. From both my parents’ sides of the family as well.
So when I graduated, my grandmother was so happy because I was the first one in the whole extended clan to make that leap as well. And so, like I said, tiny things, connecting the dots back. There is this element I’ve always been interested in things that are gaps or distances, or shrinking those gaps, whether that’s knowledge or space or time. It’s always been really kind of a fascination of mine, things that are very far away, literally or figuratively as well.
So that takes me to, I graduated from University of Toronto in 1990. And naturally the first thing you do when you have a degree in astrophysics is you go work for the tax office in Canada. It’s a very logical career move as well. So graduating into a recession at the time. Career choices were limited.
I originally wanted to work for the foreign service, in the federal government. Towards the end of my university degree, I became interested a lot more in social sciences, history, political relations, international relations. And so I got interested in that. I thought it’d be great to work in the foreign service, travel a bit, see the world.
I wrote the foreign service exam. Didn’t make it to that. I got interviewed, but I didn’t make it. But Revenue Canada tax office called me about a job. I said, well, I’ll work there for a year or two, you know, maybe I’ll go back to graduate school. And I think I had a 21 year career in the federal government in Canada.
And it was nice because in the typical transition to other jobs, I was able to use my science background. So I ended up working for a large part of my career in, I was a good tax guy in the sense that I gave money back to people. So they liked me. So I was working in a research and development tax credit program.
And there, leading to something else, I had to give these public presentations on this R and D tax program to accountants and lawyers. And it’s kind of a boring topic, tax policies, but I really enjoyed standing, I’m an introvert, but I really enjoyed standing up there and talking to crowds of people around this topic.
And as I did, I got better and better at it, even though I hated public speaking, but I really enjoyed it. So that again, it’s something that I, for whatever reason, I like having an audience and sharing information with people, sharing knowledge with people. And I got a sense of that, giving these very boring tax program talks to suburban chambers of commerce, for example.
Jackie: I find it interesting. And I want to pull on two ideas that you’ve mentioned. One, I think it’s so interesting that we take for granted in Canada maybe, and maybe in other countries as well, having access to a university degree back in the day.
And I think even today, if you look at the rates and access to not only undergraduate degrees, but higher degrees, and how to build a knowledge economy and a skilled workforce, highly multi-lingual and post-secondary graduate holding, the access to that undergraduate degree as a first get-go. And I think in Canada, back in the day, they used to say that 80% of the university undergraduate degree was actually being subsidized through the taxpayer.
And our generation, and I haven’t looked up if that’s vastly shifted in the percentages, but we had a real inheritance from the public tax support system into all of the universities. That then we actually were only paying for about 20% of our four year degrees in principle.
And that opens up a lot of different possibilities for then, second degrees and masters and whatnot. And how that equals, not only does it change your ability to think about, you studied in astrophysics, but then we’re also interested in, could pivot that into other fields, but it gives an equalization of bringing up the level of the whole population in terms of a public infrastructure investment, right?
That you get a much higher educated population on average, because more people are all graduating university degrees because it really lowers the bar to only cover 20%.
So I’m interested in how that factor can be, particularly in an immigrant country like Canada, if we don’t really rectify those inequalities and make sure there’s economic equality and higher degrees being gained and accessed by all different parts of Canadian society, including immigrants to Canada. We don’t really leverage all of that tremendous resource and wealth of population.
Darren: It’s definitely easier than a lot of other countries to get into university in Canada.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy for everybody who wants to, and that’s always the tragedy is, who’s the person who’s going to develop the next great medicine or technology or write the next great opera or novel, but they can’t get into the university? So this is something that I think a lot of countries struggle with.
I hope we’re doing a bit better at that in Canada with some government support, but like anyone else we’ve got a long way to go before we are there.
Jackie: Exactly. Exactly. But it is, I think, such a huge public infrastructure as you say, for the foundational pieces and the building blocks, we all need to have that next stepping stone, in particularly with multilingualism being so strong, given the immigrant base and the different levels of multilingualism, right?
And more in the immigrant Canadian population than perhaps in the traditional, British descent, Canadian populations, and certainly different levels in the first nations communities too, miss that diversity. But yeah, I think in terms of how do we leverage? How do we think about that in terms of economic and global talent management? Which I think we’re going to talk about later as well, and we’ll get into that.
But my other question, I was going to say, you think taxes are boring? Oh my goodness. I think tax law is so fascinating. And the reason why I say that is there’s so many ways that the tax system incentivizes inequality, or can be used to incentivize empowerment and economic equality and like a level playing field.
And I remember being brought into one of the feminist scholars in Canada’s presentation about how tax law was really, how we were delineating the household revenue and how you declare two income earning prior to eliminating the breadwinner model in Canada and taxation on that basis, we didn’t really have a structure for individual taxation.
And so it really was reproducing gender based roles and norms by disincentivizing women to work and earn to their maximum capacities. Until we finally shifted away from that breadwinner model, and I know that’s still a pain point in Japan, very much so in terms of the tax system really incentivizing, in all the wrong ways, the reinforcement of patriarchal gender roles of the family.
So I just thought, and it blew my mind when I thought, I thought taxes were boring and then I heard that presentation and I went, wow, the things that you can do with statecraft and a taxation system to incentivize certain kinds of behaviors.
So can you just maybe give me a little, and give our listeners a little insight? Is there something that you found that was the most exciting tax area or incentive that you got to work on during that 20 years in the federal government?
Darren: Well, yeah, look, it was only about eight or 10 years I was in this R and D tax credit program. But I mean, I guess back to the word incentivizing, this is really what it was all about.
I know it’s a bit off topic, but governments should probably not pick which companies are the winners and losers and fund them. But this is a program that’s open to anyone who is doing broadly speaking research and development in Canada, Canadian companies doing that. You’re eligible for it.
You could get 35% cash back from the government on your R&D expenses. And all of our peer competitors, the US or the EU, were doing the same thing. So it was also a way to lure for FDI. So I was, sometimes I would give talks on the program with the Ontario government, for example, when they’re giving a presentation to representatives from the local consuls in Toronto, to help them to understand, the consul of whatever countries, help them talk to their people saying, Hey, you know, if you come to Ontario, you can get this 35% R and D credit on eligible work.
It’s not a cash grab. There are rules to it. So I think that was great to see how that was able to lead to some really good innovation and development in Canada. So I think that that’s an example of a very good way to use the tax program as well. It is very neutral.
The credit was based on just the merits of the work you did. That was it. So if you, if you met the rules and the rules were a little bit byzantine to figure out the intricacies, but if you did those, then you were in. And I think we helped really then support a lot of innovation in Canada and employment in Canada, at the same time as well.
So maybe boring was not the right word, but it’s not the thing that would be, it’s a good way to, reading the tax manual is a good way to sleep.
But, yeah, but I did that. And then I just said I had a career change in the government.
I moved to, I wanted to do a bit more, something different, but staying in this R and D. I really enjoy working in this R and D ecosystem in Canada and Ontario and Toronto specifically. And that was in the late, early 2000s. When I think, after the .com bubble crash. Then we had to rebound and there’s more money coming back into startups, and entrepreneurship.
And so a lot of organizations in Toronto were pushing that and I worked with them and one thing led to another, I got a new job working in the government, this time in the defense department working in an R and D center. And I was in charge of business development for the R and D center and technology licensing.
So bringing in revenue. I was in the profit center with absolutely no private sector experience. I was in charge of profit for an R&D lab. So that’s kind of a fun thing. And so this ties into later developments because I always thought, you know, I really enjoyed it, but I always thought it wasn’t quite, I was missing something, I didn’t have the right background.
I was doing the job as well as I could. I really enjoyed it. It was nice working on a bit of a global stage now as well, because I was working with universities in different countries, or licensing technologies overseas, things like that. But then after about the 18 year mark in the government, you know, it’s comfortable.
It’s a bit limiting in a sense, I thought. I was working in a more business focused, private sector focused role. I was studying a lot more about business and listening to more podcasts on the drive to work every day. And I thought, one day I’d like to get an MBA, wouldn’t that be great? And up my business skills that way.
Which takes us to 2010. And my dream finally comes true and I get to work for the Department of Foreign Affairs. Now of course called Global Affairs Canada. But back then, Department of Foreign Affairs.
Jackie: I totally remember when it was called DEFAIT.
Darren: So back in the DEFAIT days, I had some dealings with DEFAIT in my role in defense, but the G 20 summit came to Toronto in 2010 and it was a big event. So within the federal government, a call for volunteers to work in the G20 summit, I thought, now that will be cool.
So I raised my hand, got interviewed, and I got stuck in the delegation of Japan for the G20 summit and the G8 summit as well. Back then it was the G8, Russia was in back then and it was the G8. Right? So there were a team of three of us working at the G8 and the G20 summit as liaison to a Japanese delegation.
So that was a very interesting, very cool experience. I would find myself in the elevator, me, the prime minister of Japan, and the bodyguard, and we’re going to meet president Obama, for example, right? I had the little secret radio in my ear, like I’m whispering into my sleeve, like in the spy movies, it’s cool.
I’m riding in the limousine with the flashing lights around and everything is a motorcade. And it was great, and I really thought, this is such an experience I could never get anywhere else, except for working in government as well. Such a wonderful experience.
Therefore it’s time to quit. End on a high note. I thought, now it’s time maybe to make this shift, and also working in such a global event literally, I wanted to work on a higher global stage I thought as well. So I thought, okay, time to get the MBA. Don’t get the MBA in Canada, I had this Japanese connection with Tokyo, get the MBA there, which is what I did.
So I came to Tokyo in 2011 to get my MBA. Famously I arrived here March 13th, 2011, two days after the tsunami and earthquake. And so that was a bit of a welcome to Japan as well. But I came here and stayed here. And so I moved here basically to get the MBA and to get the MBA at GLOBIS Business School.
And I took a two year unpaid leave from my government job, basically to do that as well.
Jackie: What was, you mentioned in passing that you, because you had a Japan connection, you thought you would opt for GLOBIS and Japan.
Darren: And family connection here. I’ve visited many times and I always wanted to live here really, and experience. So I wanted the MBA, but not an MBA in Canada. So Japan was kind of a logical choice. So I came here for that purpose as well, with knowing, I’ve been to Japan before many times. So I was enjoying visiting and I wanted to try living in a country is nice.
I just wanted something different as well. At the same time upgrade my skill set as well. So that’s basically what brought me here. And 2011, 2013, I did the MBA. Part-time MBA while working part-time at the various different jobs here in Japan as well.
And so I guess that really helped me realize, back to my previous points around I had this real passion, I realized, for teaching and training and sharing information. That’s what I had an inkling of when I was doing these tax talks back in the 10 years prior. And so I realized, being back into the university, back into a learning environment after like over a 25 year gap between my bachelor’s degree and my MBA.
I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I realized quickly I loved it. I love being in this learning environment, soaking up knowledge. And then sometimes leading discussions. I really liked getting up and being the one at the whiteboard sharing with the class, Okay, our group has started this blah, blah, blah. And then having the debate with the other classmates, it really was enjoyable.
And then as I was finishing my MBA here in Tokyo with GLOBIS, I’d done some corporate training, a little bit with Ricoh company limited via GLOBIS. They wanted some of the English language MBA students to come and work with their staff at Ricoh to give some training on how to work globally, for lack of a better word, to globalize some sales and marketing stuff.
And they really liked my sessions. He said, are you interested in working for us to help us take this? And I said, why not? Right? I mean, I’m here. I’d like to stay in Tokyo. So one thing led to another. And so shortly after I graduated from GLOBIS in May of 2013, I started working for Ricoh from July of 2013.
Jackie: Wow. And I mean, maybe you can talk me through a little bit. I can imagine arriving in Japan post “Dai shinsai” post triple disaster is not an easy pivot, I think. And I think Japan was also going through, reeling from the effects of that and still is in some ways in, Tohoku 10 years later.
Was there also a decline all of a sudden in the enrollment, in the MBA program you were in, and there were fewer foreigners staying in that program because they were exiting?
What was the context that you sort of experienced as a result of the impact on the economy?
Darren: I think we may have had one or two fewer foreign students coming to Japan for the program and they may have deferred to the next year, but it didn’t have a major impact, as I recall.
A majority of the students, so the MBA program basically, it’s probably 50% Japanese students, 50% non-Japanese. Back then, it was just a part-time MBA program. So 50% non-Japanese were mostly people who were already established, someone like yourself who was living in Tokyo, living in Japan for a while, has a job, has a business here.
They would join the MBA program. Very few of us, so just myself, two classmates from Thailand, one from Malaysia, that was it from outside Japan for that program as well. And you know, it had, it did color my first experiences living in Japan.
I remember volunteering to go up to Rikuzentakata to do some work a few months later. And speaking with that. And it also gave me a bit of resilience for living in Japan as well. After moving and living through all that stuff, especially just after the aftershocks and with the nuclear scares, life is pretty good.
It’s all going to be better after that. It’s much more comfortable living here as well. So it didn’t have a big impact on the enrollment, but it did color maybe what we talked about in our discussions, in the MBA program and maybe what could we do as students to help entrepreneurship in Tohoku, for example, things like that.
That’s one of the things I worked on when I was an MBA student as well.
Jackie: And I suppose it might’ve even also trickled into discussions on how do we rethink economic resilience in the context of these kinds of huge external shocks or natural disaster shocks.
Also I think paired with that, the quiet shock that we’ve had, I think, now of the declining birth rates and aging society phenomena for 30 years as a quiet phenomenon. No one was coming in, is coming in, and has been now chronic for years. And that is gradually creating a boiling point in terms of a shock on the economy that Japanese companies are particularly feeling.
Darren: Yeah. And people say the labor market in Japan is quite inflexible, or there’s not a lot of labor mobility. I think that’s changing now. And I think that might’ve been one of the shocks that led to it, but I can talk a bit more about this later and remote work. But this is great because I learned a bit about Japanese business culture, corporate culture, which really helped me when I moved to working in Ricoh.
And it was interesting because I almost draw parallels between working in the federal government and working for a big Japanese company. They’re both jobs for life. They’re both very hierarchical and they have like low risk tolerance. So this kind of, there was an easy jump to make from a culture perspective.
Jackie: It’s true. And I think that’s an interesting thing that I’ve also been grappling with since pivoting out of my political science, academic track, and really focusing on global talent mobilization and supporting companies.
Because the things that we traditionally in Canada would say about government, it’s a big institution, like you say, it’s rigid, there’s a lot of protocols and rules because they’re attempting to maintain high ethics and avoiding conflict of interest. And so there’s all of the safety mechanisms around ethics and governance and oversight, and that leads to a heavier process that takes longer.
But it also, I think, makes for a more rigorous process.
But it’s often contrasted to the wild and free rolling private sector that can just do what it wants and pivot, and is agile, and yet many big, large corporations also in North America, are equally bureaucratic and have all their protocols and their rules and oversight and the ethical elements of the multi-stakeholder engagement rules they have to comply with, particularly around first nations.
And I mentioned that because we just had our Canadian chamber of commerce indigenous engagement panel this morning around understanding, what does multi-level governance in Canada mean in terms of understanding the relationship building with first nations, and understanding treaty implications, and understanding provincial government jurisdictions and federal government, and how to work across all those different sectors.
There’s a lot of constraints in both private sector and public sector, but we don’t give that impression, right? The discussion is that the private sector is so agile and efficiency oriented, and the government is so inefficient and is a waste of tax dollars. And that very sort of neo-liberal like rhetoric we’ve heard for almost, I think, 20 years now in Canada in particular.
And then I look at the Japanese market and I think about the big Japanese companies or the big multinationals, and I think there’s a lot of layers in those companies in terms of constraints and bureaucracy and mechanisms and protocols, that also means it’s not such a freewheeling private sector all the time in all companies.
We really have to be thinking about maybe the small and medium tech companies and their 50 people or a hundred people in their agile model. And they don’t have that level of red tape if you will, but that’s not all companies. And so, like you say, I think that’s so interesting that your pivot, of course, out of federal government to a large Japanese corporation really was quite seamless on that front because you’re using those working protocols.
Darren: Yeah. And I mean, of course it’s not apples to apples, something I just remembered what you said about the kind of these protocols and rules in the federal government. I was always proud of these things. The fact that we had everything in two languages, I think now it could slow things down, but you know, it’s part of who we are.
We did have to consider when we do contracts things like, yes, let’s look at this for Aboriginal businesses, for example, look at some contracts for Aboriginal businesses, these are good things. And then it also reflected in working in HR now in Ricoh, working the talent development and the recruiting process was the epitome of meritocracy.
You can only advance in your career, it doesn’t matter who you know, it’s not gonna make a difference. And getting ahead, and getting ahead in government, it’s based on being qualified, writing the tests, doing the interviews, blah, blah. It really is a meritocracy, and that’s why being able to know that there is a steady career path there, it’s slow, but it’s steady there. And it is really based on merit, more than anything else.
So nature of the beast, but I will always defend government. If anyone says lazy government workers, I will always defend Canadian government at least because I know that.
Because I think your stakeholders are, I always considered my customers, well, 35 million Canadians, that’s kind of who I’m working for. It’s very easy to feel a sense of purpose, mission and belonging working in such a role.
And that’s very important of course, for feeling motivated and engaged in work. It’s something which now I’m realizing working with employee engagement now.
Jackie: And maybe if you could shift a little bit towards then how your role at Ricoh from doing these trainings, a little bit in the beginning, but then also having this full-time position, and how that has, I think, expanded particularly through COVID to an even more future of work type of framework that now you’re also developing and are teaching on. So maybe you could walk us through those shifts as well.
Darren: I think so. I was originally hired as a project lead for a global employee engagement survey.
And I did have very little HR background. So any HR I really had was how to write a job description, what I learned from the government and staffing, and what I learned at the MBA HR courses as well. But Ricoh said, we think you can lead this project and pick up the HR stuff, learn that on the job.
So it’s a very positive attitude as well to think that, again a very overtly traditional Japanese company would hire a non-Japanese speaking, former government worker. And not young as well. That’s a very good sign, I thought, of the company culture as well.
So yeah, I led the first global employee survey, 95,000 employees we surveyed, boom. Great. But that led me, that gave me a much better grasp of how to lead a global project, how to understand the importance of cultural differences, time zones I already knew about, but understanding the different ways of leading and managing across borders and across time zones and across, I like to use now in my own teachings, geographic distance is one dimension of social distance, is the other dimension, right?
And how do we get across those? And we often focus on the geographic distance, which includes time, but it’s the social distances that we feel from different cultures, different ways of working, power distances, whether that’s real or perceived. These are the things that I really learned a lot about leading that project as well.
And so my career shifted a bit over time. I still look after employee engagement, we just did our last survey, second survey last year. But I think this really has helped me find kind of a niche or a specialty, or my own personal brand around leading global teams, leading cross-cultural teams, understanding how that dynamic affects how corporations or individuals can be more effective on these kinds of global teams.
So then luckily a year or two after I began working at Ricoh, GLOBIS where I got my MBA said, Hey, would you like to teach a course for us? We remembered you loved giving presentations in the MBA class, and we want someone to teach the presentation course now. Sure. Why not? And that was an unexpected treat as well.
I never in my life would’ve imagined I would be a business school professor, but here I am seven years later as a full professor teaching several courses at GLOBIS. And one of the courses being this course I created myself, called Innovation through Virtual Teams and we created it three years ago.
It was very prescient. It was a course we created a year ago, and suddenly enrollments shot up after COVID hit on this course, because it was a course we created three years ago about what I do in my job to lead virtual teams. Global virtual teams, there’s a cross cultural element, and how to get innovation and creative value out of those teams as an output.
And I’m teaching that for the third time currently right now. I love it because I was able to create the entire course content myself. Three month MBA program. 18 hours of content using case studies from Harvard, using my own experience, using simulations online, you kind of show the tools we can use online as well.
So focusing on the technology element, I like the cheesy framework I created called TLC, technology, leadership, and culture. Those are the three real leverages you have to control, influence I should say, the effectiveness of any kind of global team. So that’s kind of the framework we framed the course around, technology is the smallest part actually because technology is only as good as how you use it and how well people are using it to facilitate or lead it.
So we were talking about, we hear about zoom fatigue a lot, but that’s not, that’s not Zoom’s fault. It’s just people, like you used to hear about death by PowerPoint, PowerPoint’s not bad. PowerPoint’s actually pretty good. People just use it the wrong way. And so people are using the Zoom just in the wrong way or not facilitating properly or having endless Zoom meetings.
It’s not Zoom’s fault. It’s the human side of things that’s failing.
Jackie: Killing the medium, like killing the messenger, it’s killing the medium. It’s not the medium’s fault. Yeah.
And I would love to hear you talk and maybe show, tell us a little bit more. I mean, I love this idea and certainly you’re speaking my language when I think about all of the diversity and inclusion, innovation conversations that enjoi’s trying to build forward.
It’s really about, and we were very, I was very conscious in choosing the D and the I to be diversity and innovation, because really, I think there’s a mechanism that’s not being broken down and really articulated to show diversity can be a driver of innovation, we know that, but there are certain conditions under which that holds true, and there’s a whole bunch of ways you can screw that up.
And diversity does not spontaneously lead to innovation. And certainly the TLC approach that you just mentioned is a case in point that if you don’t have leadership, and you don’t take care of your culture elements, if you don’t take care of social distance and particularly the power difference in the room, then you don’t necessarily obviously have that virtuous cycle.
So can you talk to us a little bit more about your definition? I know that social distancing in a COVID era has a different meaning. It’s been used in kind of an unfortunate way because it’s not really social distancing, it’s physical.
They want us to be physically distanced, but not socially distanced. And so this term is actually not accurate. And I think it was Daniel Eldridge who commented that, that we actually want social proximity to continue, but we want physical distancing from a crisis perspective, crisis management perspective.
But in your context of what you see as managing social distancing or social distance and in particular power distance. You’re speaking my language. I’d love to hear you speak more about that.
Darren: So to tie it all back to innovation, if we consider that kind of output or whether its a process is debatable, but no, you want to be able to create something.
When you put people together, that’s the whole point of why we work, whether that’s private sector, public sector, academia, whatever, that’s the purpose. Innovation has a high risk of failure. It’s never a done deal, and so you’re never going to have innovation unless you have that environment, or psychological safety where it’s okay to fail.
And of course that is based a lot on trust. But I think how you build trust in a remote environment can be very different. Especially a global team is very different because each culture builds trust in very different ways. If it’s relationship, cognitive trust or emotive trust, it varies even to the individual level as well. So ultimately for any team, especially a remote, global, virtual team. GVT I call it to be innovative. You’ve got to work on that. Understanding of how the people on the team operate as individuals in their context, backed up from common sense.
How does person A in my team who works over here in this part of the world, how do they understand trust and build trust with me? And how am I going to build trust with them and the other members of the team? Without that trust and the psychological safety, you’re not going to get the innovation. And it’s awareness of what is the social distance dynamic at play between a team leader and the people in the team.
I hate the word subordinates. So the team leader and the people in the team and the people horizontally, working holistically, I guess, in the team as well. How do you understand that? Without understanding that you’re not going to, you may succeed by accident, but you can’t be intentional about how you’re planning the work.
So person A over here works best heads down, person B over here works best in a kind of common collaborative environment. Knowing these things about the people that you’re working with will help you structure the work better and time zone differences maybe can go away, if you find the people in your team, some of them are evening people, some of them are morning people, but then some of them, Hey, they’re going to work together no matter what the time zone differences are maybe if you can schedule things properly as well.
Jackie: I think hearing you speak, it’s interesting because of course, one of the core elements that we’ve been rolling out for now two years is this concept of intersectional thinking. And it’s really building on Canadian public policy and legal expertise around how we do policy analysis in Canada.
And it’s really thinking through the multiplicity of intersections or identities, and social situation, the contextual background that forms each individual and the power differentials that also are functioning in the background of society at a systemic level, and all of that intersecting all of those different identities of course, frames and helps shape who each individual not only becomes, but how they self perceive and how others perceive them.
And so it’s a really relational context. And so trying to, we’re doing workshops, and we’ve been leading workshops on helping global leaders think intersectionally, and use this Canadian business and public policy high-performance tool, right? Because it really works really well in Canada, and the way it’s being practiced in social movements using it, certainly it’s come out of feminist legal scholarship and feminist public policy, but it’s really had an amazing penetration in our local governments, I mean, the city of Vancouver committed to doing intersectional, gendered analysis of everything that comes through city hall in Vancouver.
The federal government recommitted, they started with a gender based analysis commitment in 1997 I want to say, or 1995. And now they’re doing a full on commitment to intersectional analysis at the federal level as well for all facets of these intersecting identities of diversity. And so we’ve had, I think, amazing rollout over the last 20 to 25 years at different levels in Canadian corporations, in the local governments, in the federal government, and in social justice movements to build competence in this practice and this critical thinking skill.
It is more work in the sense that like you suggest, it means actually understanding the individual, taking time to slow down and say, what is this person beyond the fact that I want to put them in the girl box, and in the Canadian box, and in the gaijin box, or in the queer box? Can we move beyond putting people in the boxes and saying, I don’t care who you are, and leave your, park your identities when you come to the door and just be a salary woman or a salary man.
And that’s your only identity when you walk through the door, can you just hang up that coat of everything else, you know, of your humanity? Can you just like park that at the door, your gender, your everything else? Cause we don’t really want to manage that messiness. We don’t talk about it or deal with it, just park it at the door and then just be a salary woman or a salary man and work like a dog.
And I think we can no longer do that, right? It doesn’t work, but it does take a lot more intentionality and flat relationship building to say, I’m actually going to care enough as a manager, to know who my people are and to know who’s on my team and what their individual strengths are and preferences are and how that can be really leveraged for the organization.
And then when you see all of the strengths and maybe the vulnerabilities, because we can really leverage that, but then maybe there’s this vulnerability that this other teammate they can have, they can cover those blind spots. Cause that’s their sweet spot. That’s their zone of genius, right? Then you get full coverage.
Darren: Yeah. The complimentary skillsets and mindsets and behaviors.
Jackie: You get this coverage across the team that’s gorgeous. But you got to know those things about your people. Right?
Darren: One thing I included in the course, but also I’ve done with my colleagues at Ricoh is there’s one of my favorite books on cross-cultural communication in businesses, The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. And there’s an online tool that lets you evaluate yourself using the culture map framework, all my MBA students take that.
And then we plot it on a map of their class. And I always contrast it with what the score would look like if we just took all the countries in the class. And everyone says, Oh, I learned I wasn’t very Japanese from this, or I wasn’t very Thai.
Great. That’s the whole point. Right? And then when you see all the individual scores, you see who’s high context, low context communicators. It’s a huge range. And that’s how you see yourself as a group. Not as someone who is from Nepal, Thailand, Japan, Canada wherever, it’s these range of behaviors.
And so tying into the point around remote work and diversity, we have to understand the workstyle diversity of our teams and individuals and ourselves now. How do we work best? Some people just love remote work like me because we work better at it. Some people don’t. But you know, knowing that will help you.
Knowing how well your colleagues or your team members work remotely, understand their work style, and then using that to structure, maybe the team to the projects or the work, then you can harness that diversity more effectively of your individual team members by looking at their different styles of work, which ultimately it’s just a behavioral diversity.
Some people are more, again, collaborative. Some people are more creative when their heads down. Some people are more confrontational. Confrontation is not always bad because innovation comes from confrontation. Sometimes understanding all these different dimensions or intersections, as you said, can help you create a much more cohesive global team, project team, cohesive trust, psychological safety.
And that’s how you’re going to get the innovation at the end of the day.
Jackie: And I’m going to circle back to the beginning of our conversation in terms of, when we first talked last year, I felt such a sense of alignment with your thinking and vision. And I thought it’s so interesting that increasingly I’ve been finding more Canadians in the greater Tokyo area, because I was mostly in the regional parts of Japan, I didn’t really run into that many Canadians, but as I ran into more Canadians I was finding there was a certain experiential foundation that seems to be quite similar in terms of just a presumption, that there was a decentering of themselves as not being the only possible form of humanity out there, or the only possible walk of individuality out there.
And so there was in a sense a foundational openness and curiosity, and just seeing diversity as that positive, because it’s something that we’d grown up with. It’s something that surrounded our reality and became a source of who we were and how we self identified maybe too, in terms of not putting ourselves in a box.
But in terms of how we then, I think the challenge for, if we can bring it back to the conversation on Japanese global companies from a competitive edge perspective in the global market, companies, and I would say that’s also including companies in North America and Europe, frankly, but not having a cookie cutter approach to how you do your work.
How do you do your work? How do you show up as an individual human, what is right? Like there’s no wrong way to be a human, right? So, I mean, unless you’re violating the law and being violent, but I mean, beyond that, can we get to a point where we really can have an open-heartedness towards the full spectrum and the full range of individuality and humanity that is right and understood to be right? And then decentering any kind of hegemonic norm, or presumption about stereotypical behavior that is the right way to do things. And I think that the next piece is the laws and policies, the rules, right?
All the rules in the bureaucracy of these companies or HR or wherever they’d sit, all of those rules need to de-center towards really placing, and that’s what we’re trying to say is building a diversity positive environment means you’re de-centering that really toxic norm and assumption and stereotype about this is the way to show up.
Darren: Exactly.
Jackie: And be right, you know, to be a good salary woman or a good salary man needs to work X numbers of hours, and productivity equals X or Y. And we’re really trying to decenter, and to put diversity and diversification of that individuality at the heart of it, of the DNA of that company’s processes, people’s thinking, and also I think the corporate culture. And I think you’re doing that in a really beautiful way with your leading global teams virtually leadership, and thought leadership on that.
And we need to bring you into the Canadian chamber to also probably talk about that. That would be really fun for the global diversity management committee. That would be, I think, a certain sweet spot for definitely including that perspective. And I intended to ask you, what is the special sauce in how you’re teaching that, without wanting you to give it away, cause I know it’s what you teach at GLOBIS.
But is there a hint you could give us to what’s the secret sauce?
Darren: Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down, so tying everything together and this great point made around rules and process, the future of work will be remote work one way or the other.
We’re not sure it’s going to be a hundred percent remote or it’s going to be hybrid work, but companies that won’t let their employees do that, they’re going to lose out on the talent game in the end because people, even in Japan, majority of people want to work in some form, not maybe every day of the week, but some form of remote work.
And so to do that, you’ve got to structure your company and your HR processes and your managers, especially differently. You have to have a much higher level of, back to the point about trust, autonomy, give a high level of autonomy to your workforce. So that means things like process is secondary to outcomes, which can be very hard in some Japanese companies where processes came.
But you know, let people do the work the way that they work best. First they might not know that yet, but we can help them understand that themselves. And then just look at the outcome which we’re getting as well. And because we’re working remotely now, well, we can look, our teams can be more globally diverse.
Now I think what hasn’t been appreciated yet is with this move to remote work with technology advancements, like ability to better AI translation. Our competition, each of us as individual workers is global very soon because we’re competing with people around the world now, because we can work remotely.
We can work virtually, and with technology lowering the language barrier, that goes away as well. So I think the companies that can focus on giving a choice about when, where, how to work, can bring in that global talent as a consequence of that and focus more on outcomes than process, and giving autonomy to workers, they’re the ones that are going to win the talent race.
And when you have the people who are happier, more engaged, engaged workers are more innovative or more creative as well. It all comes back to that. So I think if we’re able to convince our employers, or even ourselves bottom up, we can do this in our own workplaces, we will see a bit of a nice revolution, and maybe companies will not be considered to be Japanese so much and more just a company headquartered in Japan as opposed to a Japanese company.
Jackie: You’re echoing a conversation I had with Bryan Sherman in an earlier live stream. So I’m going to have to introduce you two, cause that I think is a common area.
And I think it’s interesting, this idea that we would trust the local, and the individuals in the teams to actually innovate and find those best ways of working together.
And that trust, I mean, we think about Canadian federalism being born of this desire and necessity in a huge country, you know, a huge geographical distance to be governed from Britain and eventually the decision to say, we need to put into place a practice of home rule. And that philosophy was that they were going to, in some ways, devolve responsibility for those decisions to the colonies that were then the British colonies that eventually became Canada to make sure that there was self-government.
And then there was the struggle for self-government and Canadians wanting to decide for themselves, if they were paying taxes, they wanted to have their own representation locally with their own people. And it’s really, I see this interesting kind of process of democratizing in our internal processes, albeit in a private sector environment, but seeing that trusting to the local and trusting to the people and the actors who are the stakeholders and the first and foremost affected and letting them be a part of that self-government rule of decision-making.
But I think at the HR level, so fascinating to think about what global companies will need to do. If you wanted to harness the global talent around the world and say, we don’t care where you live, we will offer you health care coverage, we will offer you all of these kinds of benefits if you living in Bulgaria, if you’re living in Sweden, if you’re living in Tokyo, if you’re living in Nova Scotia, Canada, this is our benefits package.
You are the best talent that we think would be great for our company, live where you wish to live. We’ll figure it out when there needs to be in person, if it’s a hybrid dynamic for the role that requires it.
Darren: And the tax laws or whatever.
Jackie: Right? So then think about how HR processes and how companies then need to think through and across the national borders and the tax systems, and then the healthcare systems.
That’s really exciting, in terms of thinking about the future of work and all of the policy and law conversations that will then shift in terms of corporate policy and corporate rules. And that’s exciting to think about.
Darren: We’ll shift to work from home, WFH, to WFAA, work from anywhere, anytime. Yeah. So the time dimensions in there as well. Right? So again, when you work, where do you work? We don’t care. Just do the work, show us the outcomes.
Jackie: And then the kind of, like you suggest the managerial or leaders that need to have high emotional intelligence to be able to coordinate, support, engage, understand individual differences, and be sort of that cross-cultural individual, and multi-lingual agility as well as emotional intelligence agility, that’s a high bar in terms of that leadership skill that we would need to be developing. And I think we need to invest in more heavily.
I recently did an EQI 2.0 Canadian emotional intelligence certification. And it’s mind blowing. And I think it’s a really amazing tool. But I think thinking forward, I’m trying to imagine all those implications for, like you say, work from anywhere, anytime, as a new strategy for diverse talent mobilization, rather than managing top down, I talk about mobilization, right? And helping those individuals be a part of that conversation and decision making as well.
So your final last message to our listeners today, what they should think about a little bit more or what you want to impart.
Darren: I think I go back to what was just said, consider that in the future of work, you want to be able to work for an employer that lets you work anywhere anytime on your own, at your own pace as well.
If not, go look for work somewhere else, because I think you’re going to find the next few years that there is a lot more opportunities out there to find an employer who matches your preferred way of working and living. And if that’s working from home, working remotely, working on a beach somewhere, you know, you’ll be able to find somewhere to do that.
And the companies that don’t do that, they’re going to be gone maybe in 10 years or 15 years, or they’ll get the B grade talent, which means they’ll be gone 10 or 15 years as well.
Jackie: Wow. Now that’s a warning shot across the bow right there. Thank you for these amazing insights and for sharing all of your radical individuality and zone of genius, and all of your diversities that really have, I think, shaped such an interesting conversation today and ideating real time.
Thank you so much. This has been enlightening.
Darren: Thank you Jackie.