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A full transcript follows.
We host Tove Kinooka, the co-founder and director of Global Perspectives, a company helping create sustainability driven organizations and leaders on Diversity rocks innovation!
In this conversation you’ll see how Tove’s immersion in the natural world from an early age, and her various journeys in work and travel, led her to co-found Global Perspectives in order to promote sustainability in the corporate world. She also shares some insights on how COVID has actually helped shift the conversation around sustainability in Japan, and shines a light on the benefits of flexible working arrangements in Japanese companies.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- About Tove’s early life growing up in rural England and Scotland
- How Tove’s studies in biology, focusing on ecosystems, helped inform her perspectives on sustainability
- Tove’s Japan story and how teaching English segued into a corporate role developing global mindset programs
- Why Tove and her business partner Gavin decided to start their own company, Global Perspectives
- How COVID has broadened the conversation around sustainability in corporations, to include people and social systems as well as the natural environment
About Tove:
Originally from the UK, Tove has worked in Japan developing people and organizations since 1998. Transforming leaders and organizations for positive impact is her “ikigai”, bringing together her combination of scientific training, business experience and people skills. She is an Executive Committee member of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan, where she is involved in designing strategy and delivering events on sustainability, leadership & organizational change. She is also a Director of One Young World Japan.
Useful links:
Mothers as Leaders by Steliana van de Rijt – Economu
Connect with Tove:
Website: http://www.globalperspectives.biz/
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 17. My name is Jackie Steele. I’m the CEO and founder of enjoi Diversity and Innovation and a Canadian political scientist living and teaching in Japan for many, many years. enjoi is a Japan based global facing company working in English, Japanese, and sometimes in French.
And we support leaders and corporations in building out a diversity positive workplace and corporate culture and ecosystem.
We believe, and I think most of us here on the call and also those listening in, also know and believe that diversity really rocks innovation. And we are interested in building out inclusive innovation that amplifies and supports equality, and that powers our people systems for personal and collective good.
And that being for the long game, which means it has to be sustainable. This live stream is shining a spotlight on the beautiful diversity of enjoi thought partners who are bringing the change in favor of inclusive, diversity positive, gender equal and sustainable leadership in Japan and around the world.
And each week I invite one of my collaborators, thought partners, who I learn from tremendously, in life and in business. And we just show up as two human beings with no business cards, no senpai kohai, or hierarchies based on gender or race or nationality or age or any of the other things that can come in and interrupt our ability to just cross pollinate our lives and our identities and our zones of genius to really move the dial.
So we are excited, and I am very excited, to welcome today a really awesome friend, a business mentor, someone who has really supported me in so many ways, along my new journey as a CEO here in Japan, a wonderful thought partner. I am pleased to welcome Tove Kinooka.
She is the co-founder and director of Global Perspectives. And we met, I want to say, three or four years ago through a WIM conference that was held at IBM. And that was really shining a light on women’s leadership. And then we met again at the deepen the dialogue event at IBM. And then we’ve met through FEW Japan at many occasions, and then we’ve had so many wonderful family get togethers and learned about each other, both in a more deep and personal sense as well, through those collaborations at the family level.
And I’m so excited Tove, to finally welcome you. Welcome to Diversity rocks innovation!, Volume 17.
Tove: Wow. What an intro. Thank you, Jackie. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here today and to watch you and the enjoi journey. And you know, it’s a real privilege to watch that kind of unfolding as we speak and this series I think is fantastic.
So thank you so much for having me.
Jackie: Thank you. You’ve been a big part of that journey and helping me figure these pieces out along the way, failing forward and finding my niche and my way as a CEO and as a new entrepreneur in Japan. So thank you, definitely for all of that support that I have really called on you in various ways and really you’ve offered, I think the kind of, person to person support.
How do you do this and how do you do that? And, well, what did you do when you were setting up? And just those behind the scenes things that, unless you have somebody who’s willing to open their books and say, well, this is how I do it, or this is how I think of my business model.
Until you have people really willing to share that, and I think it’s being vulnerable to say, this is how I’ve done it, and this is my way, there’s other ways, but not everybody’s willing to do that. So I was really, really grateful on so many occasions for the advice and the mentoring you gave me.
But today we’re going to dive into a little bit more of the backstory of who is Tove Kinooka. And I would love, I mean, I obviously think that you bring so many different, interesting ideas and projects, and diversity points from my perspective of what I see in what you’re doing in your journey. But for the listeners, maybe we can roll back time and start with a deep dive into what your background is.
Where are you from? What was your upbringing? And when you think about what are the core elements of who you are, and what shaped you, and the values that made, or the identities that made you who you are today and what professional journey you’re on. How do we go back and situate those original core elements and where did they start from?
Tove: Wow. Okay. So that’s going back into the dim and distant past, so let me think where to start. As most people would probably guess from the name, I sound British, but my name’s not British, which always confuses people a bit. So I was born and raised in the UK. My passport says I’m British, but I’m also part Danish.
My father’s side of the family is from Denmark. And so growing up in very, very rural Southeast England for the first half of my childhood and then very, very rural Northeast Scotland for the second half of my childhood, with a name like Tove, was an interesting experience.
My surname growing up before I was married, was Junker spelt with a J, which is actually German, which is even more confusing because the Danish side of the family originally, you know, there’s German connections further back. So I’ve always felt slightly like a square peg in a round hole a little bit growing up because where I lived, it was beautiful, beautiful area, Southwest England. I mean, it’s like if you watch, what’s the thing? Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit or something, the shire all green and hilly and stuff.
That’s what it looked like, where I grew up. It’s absolutely beautiful, but it’s not very diverse in any sense of the word. These were farming communities. Both my parents were not farming originally. My father’s background is agricultural engineering. He wanted to be an architect, but he was told that there were too many out of work architects so he went for engineering instead.
My mom’s background was as a biology and PE teacher, an interesting combination. But we lived in the middle of nowhere, outside a tiny, tiny village. And it was a very rural community. So growing up, I have a sister and brother both younger.
We spent all our time playing in the woods, grappling around in the mud. I was either on a horse or pretending to be a horse most of my time. And so that was very idyllic in many ways. Very, very fortunate to have that space with that natural beauty around. But I was always conscious of the fact that, whenever I’m out with friends or other people, I’m a little bit different because you know, I’m not called Emma or Kate or any of those lovely English names.
I’m this, this funny Tove, Tovey, Tovay how do you even say this? People just couldn’t quite get their heads around that.
Jackie: We sort of underestimate how significant a role names play in, not only of course, identity formation over the years, but also in terms of how people interpret and whether or not we are intelligible to them.
And in what frames are they interpreting us through. And I think it’s, I mean, this is something that I discussed with Darren also on the livestream with Darren and he was talking about his backgrounds and his name, and that there’s sometimes an assumption that we’ve simplified the diversity conversation to black, white, yellow, indigenous, but there’s this whole diversity of whiteness and across Eastern Europe and Western Europe.
And we still within Europe would dis-aggregate, that, oh, you’re British, but your name is German, or Danish or what are you really then? So I think we’ve not really broken down and started thinking, I think, enough about the complexity of Britishness and the complexity of whiteness across Europe and across North America too, and how our names signal that so clearly.
Tove: Yeah. And it’s interesting, cause it’s something that, you know, as you know, I’m married to a Japanese man and when we had children and were thinking about names, this was something that we talked about a lot. We wanted to reflect their cultural identity of English, Danish, Japanese in their names, but have names that were not going to cause them hassle and difficulties through their life
Because I suppose now I can look at my name and think, okay, well, Tove, Tove Junker, Tove Kinooka, I’ve made my peace with that now. And living in a much more, or working in the last sort of 20 or so years in a much more diverse sort of context, I think it’s easier with that.
You know, people just go, oh, how do you say it? Okay. That’s how you pronounce it. And on we go, it’s not an issue. But when you’re a child dealing with that, actually it can be very, very challenging. Kids will unintentionally single somebody out who has a funny name and the fact that no teachers could ever pronounce it.
So in class, I had one teacher at secondary who taught me for probably four years straight and never, ever got my name right. And it got to the point she’d be like Tovey and the rest of the kids in the class would be like it’s Tove, and they all could say it. It’s like, why can’t you just say my name right?
Yeah. And it really impacts you as a kid. Why am I different? Why can’t anybody pronounce my name? So I think we don’t necessarily see how much that impacts I think. So I’m always really conscious when I meet new people, of trying to say their names correctly, you know?
Jackie: Right. I mean, from a diversity, equity, inclusion, innovation conversation perspective too. I really think, I mean, I know people don’t like the P word, but like power is a thing and interpersonal power is communicated in how we make the effort to learn a person’s name or not. Whether we deem that, you know, I think there’s a majority rule complacency factor that, oh well, if you’re in Canada and it’s English and French is the dominant two languages, then those are standardized.
And we know sort of how to read those. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe English is really the hegemonic. And so Anglophones in Canada can be pretty complacent in not making the effort. It’s like, Ugh, I’m the majority here, can you make it easier for me to read your name? Can we like anglicize that into something like a nickname that I could, can you help me out?
Right. And I think there’s, it’s a power play, but it’s not always understood as a small P power play that is really, make the effort to understand that each individual has the right to have their name recognized and pronounced the right way. Right. That’s just step one of individual mutual respect.
But I think we forget those entitlements that we carry when we’re a part of the majority language group. And so yeah, it definitely carries over. And I mean, I think I agree that kids can be really mean, right? Like they just, it’s like they single you out for whatever things they can.
And I remember being harassed when I was a little girl, because at the time Jackie Robinson was like this big, really famous pro baseball player in the United States. And so this one little boy on the walk home from school, he would tease me incessantly that I had a boy’s name. Why do you have a boy’s name?
And I’d be like, I don’t have a boy’s name. It can be for a boy or for a girl. And then of course Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Onassis, Jackie Kennedy came along in the United States and that changed and put Jackie back on the market as a girl’s name. And I was like, see girl’s name too. But like these things where people needle you every single day and it’s the repetition, it’s the repetitious microaggression, we call it now.
Tove: Exactly, it kind of chips away at your self-confidence doesn’t it?
Jackie: And why can’t, why can’t I be seen for who I am and why can’t you just learn my name?
Tove: Yeah. I used to get super excited as a kid watching, so the author of the Moomins is also called Tove and she’s Finnish, not Danish, but that’s the only other Tove that I’d ever heard of.
So as a kid, watching the Moomins on TV, I’d wait till the credits came up at the end and it would say based on the books by Tove Jansson. There’s another Tove in the world. I’m not the only one with this weird name. And it was just really reassuring.
Like you say, otherwise these constant, you know, even if they’re not sort of malicious in intent, it’s just constant mispronunciation, or why have you got, that’s a funny name and you can’t possibly be British with that name.
Jackie: It really prepared you for a life in Japan being constantly othered as a foreigner, as a gaikoku jin, right? Person from another country, you’re a foreigner, you’re an outsider.
Tove: Having grown up the first 11 years in rural England, at least I had the right accent and so I was okay. But then when I was 11, my family, my parents decided they wanted to go into farming full-time.
It’d been kind of, we lived on a little sort of hobby farm, I suppose you’d call it, when we were in Devon, but we moved to Scotland and they sort of went all in on farming. So we moved at age 11, well, my age 11, to there. And all of a sudden we had the same passports, but I had the wrong accent.
And so, wow. That was a whole new level of other.
Jackie: And you’re the colonizer, you’re the colonizing side of England.
Yeah, a lot of like power politics in that room in terms of the experience of colonization of Scotland and British Scottish relations. Cause at that point you didn’t have, the Scottish Parliament didn’t have devolution and robust powers to legislate for itself and have more autonomy.
Wow. Yeah. A lot of resentment probably in those, and it bubbles down to the children, even though the children are oblivious to the politics, but it bubbles down through their parents, they learn it.
Tove: Yeah, very much so. And I think for my sister and brother who were younger when we moved, it wasn’t such an issue.
They were still in primary school. I was just starting secondary school where I think as sort of preteens, teens, you’re beginning to state your opinions a little bit more and think about what you believe in and where your alliances are and things. I think, yeah, that age was particularly difficult.
And like you said, a lot of the people who were making the negative comments, it’s not that they had any negative experiences themselves, but this is what they’re hearing around them from the adults. And that was transferred to then me. A, you’ve got a weird name, and B, you’ve got an English accent.
What are you doing here? So yeah, that was difficult. That was a real shock. I think for me. I was so excited about the new school and the move, and then to be slammed in the face with that, it was like, whoa, okay. I was not expecting that at all.
Jackie: I think you’ve mentioned to me, I feel like there was maybe a bit of not only the British, Scottish dynamic, but also kind of a class conflict in that there was an assumption, or at the time there was a trend of wealthier English going out into the countryside and like recolonizing and buying out the beautiful farmland.
And that maybe you were being mislabeled, your family being misunderstood in that dynamic, when your parents were obviously wanting to build up and contribute to the regions for this farm in a very holistic way.
Tove: Yeah. So kind of lots of things interconnecting. So it was a whole, a very unsettled time, I think, for me.
And until I found, after a couple of years, I found my friend group at school that was a mix of Scottish and English, other outsiders like me, but often we were all actually, when I think of it, the kind of kids who maybe didn’t fit the mainstream images. There was all something which made us a little bit different from the mainstream.
And so we kind of banded together and became very close and we’re still good friends now, 30 whatever years later. But until that, it was a very kind of unsettled time to try to work out, who am I actually? What is my identity? I don’t know anymore. And that’s unsettling. It’s hard enough being a teenager anyway, but when you’ve got that thrown into the mix.
Jackie: And you know, everyone just wants to feel they belong and are liked and have a friend like anybody, any adult, any child.
I mean, that’s kind of the unfortunate part of how we let all of these dynamics interrupt the ability to really build friendships. Because if we could get outside of those stereotypes and prejudices about each other, that we are making face value judgements based on your name and what you look like, what your passport says, how do you speak? Do you have an accent?
I kind of just wish we could get into the relationship building and have more of a possibility to move past all of that politics, because it does slow us down. Ultimately it just, it’s like we’re making a lot of really wrong assumptions about people and then you have to unlearn it first before you can then actually get to know them.
It just seems like a waste of time.
Tove: Yes, it really is.
Jackie: But see, you’ve obviously then really had a couple of insider outsider dynamics. You understand what it’s like to be a part of the majority in England, but still sort of an outsider with your name being Danish or German origin sounding, then as a minority in Scotland, but technically a part of the majority English political power, I guess, hegemonic class, but within Scotland, you’re just like one little child just trying to survive.
How did that lead to what you ended up pursuing in terms of your studies and how did you end up in Japan?
Tove: Wow. Okay. So in terms of studies I, because growing up in a very rural area, natural environment was something that was very much part of our everyday lives, and animals as well.
So I went to study biology, biological science, and looking particularly at immunology, but also sort of ecosystems, literal Marine ecosystems and so on. So that for me, I’ve always found that fascinating in how systems interact with each other and the impact that has.
So that was a great subject to study, but then what I discovered through studying it was that actually I’m not sure I want to work with this afterwards. With all the jobs when you do a science degree like that, you can either come out and teach science, or you can come out and go into further research or something involved with, whether it’s medical research or taking on a further degree and deepening your specialization.
And I didn’t really want to go with any of those options. So I was really kind of just at a loose end after university. Although I was determined for a while, I wanted to be a professional horse rider. I was going to be at the Olympics and that was going to be my thing. So my parents agreed that, okay, you go to university, get the degree under your belt so at least you have something to fall back on.
Of course I didn’t think I needed that, but that was the deal. So I went and then after university I went for a while to a former professional, well she was professional, but former Olympic rider as her working pupil, which is kind of a euphemism for slave labor basically that you do shed loads of work and they don’t really pay you.
They just give you accommodation and training.
Jackie: Also sometimes called an apprenticeship.
Tove: Yeah, that’s another way of looking at it. And I tried for a while, but I didn’t, it was just not going to work out. I had no money and I got to the realization that really, if I wanted to be a professional horse rider, I either needed to win the lottery or just be so exceptionally talented that somebody decided to sponsor me and neither of those things were going to happen.
So at the end I started looking around for, okay, what can I do connected to horses? Ended up working in a race course on the corporate side actually, of the management, running a race course as an assistant manager, kind of lowest rung of that for a while, but then was made redundant when my race course merged with another one and they merged staff.
And so again, I was sort of floating around going, well now what do I do? I don’t really know what I want to do with my life, but I’d quite like to go off and see different places. I traveled a lot in Europe as a kid, but I’d never been outside Europe. And I was, at that stage I was getting a little desperate for money and applying to anything and everything that I was vaguely qualified for, just thinking, okay, just need something to keep me going.
And one of those things was a job teaching English in Japan. I saw the advertisement in the newspaper and went, yep okay, apply for that. And I just got in from riding one morning and got this call saying, so tell us why do you want to go to Japan? And I thought, oh Japan, what job was that? I had to quickly think about, ah, come up with a cultural experience, I really hadn’t thought very deeply about it.
I was just 22 years old. I was not sure where I was going, what I was doing, and I was just open to anything. So I ended up signing a one-year contract to come here and teach and all that. Why not go for it? I’m single. I have no ties. I can do this. And I do remember coming in, the plane coming in to land at Narita after a long flight, just kind of thinking, what am I doing?
I don’t know how to teach English. I don’t know anything about this country. I only know that they eat raw fish and I don’t like raw fish. What am I going to do? But yeah, that’s how I ended up here. And that was 1998.
Jackie: That was exactly the Nagano Winter Olympics year.
Tove: Right? It was, it was. Maybe that’s where I’d heard of Japan?
Jackie: Right. I mean, the Olympics were on. Nagano was very much a very big production of course, the Winter Olympics. But I think it’s also so fascinating. I mean, I’ve come to the JET program myself, but not for the English teaching position, but for the coordinator for international relations position where you have to speak and read Japanese before you go into a government office.
And I always thought it was such a fascinating if a bit horrifying, that we were having like 5,000 young university graduates to come across and teach English to the junior and senior high when they had zero teaching training. There’s no teacher training.
You just needed to have a degree in something to be eligible to come into the JET program for that role. And often for a lot of the teaching positions, it’s like, do you speak English as a mother tongue? Yep. Okay. Tick a box. If I had to teach English I sorta thought, that’s really hard to all of a sudden try and teach something that you’ve learned over the years by socialization in a very natural process, an organic process that you’ve never actually been taught it officially.
It’s just organically absorbed.
Tove: Exactly, I remember trying to explain grammar points thinking, I have no idea why we say it this way and not that way. I never thought about it. We just do. And it was, it was really a very humbling experience and also terrifying at the same time.
Jackie: You learn a lot about your own language that you didn’t already know.
They do say that you have to actually teach something to really master it as a doer. Even if you think you’re doing really well until you actually have to break it down and teach it to somebody, you don’t actually know it as well as you thought you did. So I guess that maybe improved your English skills.
Tove: Maybe it did, maybe it did.
Jackie: And how long did you stay in this role, with the one-year contracts end, and then what happened?
Tove: So I did one year with that company. And what I discovered in that one year was that I absolutely was not cut out to be an English teacher. It was really not my thing, explaining grammar points.
But I really enjoyed the interaction with the people, being in that kind of facilitator type role. And also I just, I really enjoyed living here in Japan. I met a great bunch of people. Several of them are still really close friends now from that first year in that first experience working together. And so I thought, okay, well I want to stay in Japan, but I don’t necessarily want to do that.
So I did take one, after the end of that contract in order to get my visa, I took one more teaching job to get me started. But then I started to, as I was doing that, and that was in Saitama, started doing the corporate training a little bit. So sort of going back to that very short stint, again it was, I really didn’t have a lot of experience, but you know, in the corporate world in the UK, the little I had, bringing that to do a different kind of, so it wasn’t Eikaiwa anymore.
It wasn’t English conversation. It was looking at going into companies. And then it suddenly got interesting for me, because although I was going there sort of technically to teach presentation skills, or effective communication, team communication, or whatever it was, what often ended up happening is that you were looking at the mindset and stuff more than the language.
And that began to really, really interest me. So if somebody is, acting this way in a meeting, and saying this kind of thing, where is that coming from? And what are the behaviors driving that? And how is that impacting the dynamics of the group and the atmosphere and the culture of the team and the company and things?
So that sort of whole mindset and behavior thing began to really intrigue me. And so I started studying more on that, and taking on more work and contracts that were around that, and then moved to the section of the company that was working specifically on what they call the global mindset programs.
And then together with a couple of other colleagues, we developed a whole new program around that. So it moved totally away from language, which was a huge relief. It didn’t have to explain grammar points anymore. And actually started digging into, what are our value systems, and where do these things come from, and how does that play out in a workplace?
And how do we feel about leadership, and what the expectations of a leader are, and what is good or bad leadership, and things like this. So that became the area that I very much focused on. First of all, in developing the programs and delivering them as well. First of all, delivering then developing better ones, but then also sort of moving into the sort of train the trainer bit.
So rolling that out across, so that other instructors could go and teach it as well.
Jackie: How many years were you doing that then? Wait, was it mostly in one company?
Tove: I joined that company in 2001 and I stayed with them for the just a couple of years at the beginning, because then my husband was transferred to London with his job, so we moved to London.
And I thought that was it. I thought my Japan period was done then. It had been great fun. It’d been about five years at that point and I thought, okay, wonderful experience. And I can take this back and I can use that in London because obviously it’s a very multicultural hub, the global mindset and skills was also very necessary there.
So I managed to work in a small company in London, actually doing corporate training around that as well, which was great. And then I became a mom for the first time.
Jackie: Momentous occasions.
Tove: So that sort of adds another whole level of complexity and intrigue into your life.
Jackie: Intrigue, I like that. Intrigue.
Tove: Constantly discovering. And again, sort of goes back to questioning values and things, and what are they. And what values do I want to impart to my children, and thinking about how we communicate with them as well. So I was really fascinated by watching her progress with language growing up, and how there were a lot of these kids programs that all sort of make funny noises like Teletubbies or whatever it is, but they don’t actually speak real words.
And I remember a lot of other kids and their parents think, oh, this is wonderful. We just plant them in front of this and they can sit and be mesmerized for ages. And I thought, where’s the value in that? I really, what if I just spoke to her like a normal, intelligent human being and didn’t use baby language, how would that work?
So I’ve never, ever used that sort of baby language there. And her speech seemed to develop very quickly and she was pretty articulate for a little person. And now a bit of a smart ass, so maybe it’s backfiring.
Jackie: I hear your pain.
Tove: Then it brings in different angles as well. It makes you think more about, okay, how do we communicate? And what are the dynamics between parent, as it’s a kind of a leadership role in a way, and there’s a wonderful book I’m reading at the moment called Mothers as Leaders by Steliana van de Rijt-Economu.
Jackie: Yes, Steliana. We saw her speak at the WIM conference where she first launched. So exciting to see her journey too. Shout out to Steliana.
Tove: So yeah, all of these things have built up and then we came back to Japan in 2009, and again, as I said, I thought that bit was over and it wasn’t part of the plan, but then the whole Lehman shock thing happened. And all of a sudden the job that my husband was hoping to do in the UK was gone.
There were no jobs. So we came back to Japan with his company here, and I went back to my old company thankfully. But at that point I was back as a mother. So it was like, okay, well I can’t go and do a week long, intensive, deep dive. And I can’t do early starts and late finishes when I’ve got hoikuen runs to do and things.
So I went into the office side then and moved more into the management role, and working more with the client, in between the client and the facilitators on understanding the client needs, working out what they needed in terms of a program, and then creating that sometimes, or pulling together from other pieces, and then briefing or training instructors depending on their needs, and rolling that out.
Jackie: Yeah, interesting thing now to have a much clearer view of how you were in the business initially as the trainer and the facilitator, and then you were able to be working on the business side and really learned those angles. And so it makes so much more sense to me now that then you had all of this breadth of skill development and perspective on the full ecosystem, perhaps, of what it would look like to then launch something of your own.
So I would love to segue then how you decided at some point that, hey, I should just build my own company and do my own offerings of my own trainings that I would want to lead, and what spurred that desire and adventure to pivot out of a corporate role and to be in this new journey as an entrepreneur.
Tove: Okay. So I suppose there were two things really that influenced it or perhaps three. So one was around lifestyle because I was commuting an hour and a half each way into Tokyo. So it was literally a case of, drop my daughter at the hoikuen the second the gates open. And literally they watched the clock.
If you dropped before 7:30, they’d be like, no, no, no, it’s too early. So wait. Okay, 7:30, in the gates, go, see you later, into Tokyo, hope the train wasn’t delayed, arrive, sweating, punch my card in and then sit down, and then the reverse rush back the other way. And that, I mean three hours of your day, everyday doing that.
And then if she was sick or anything, there’s that whole, oh my God, it’s going to take me an hour and a half to get back. And can I just drop, I’ve got this meeting or that. So that was one factor. And actually the company was just moving it’s office. So it was going to be even longer.
It was gonna be an hour and three quarters commute. And at that point I thought, you know… And we’d had the conversation about, could I work from home? And the company wasn’t ready to consider that then, you need to be in the office to be effective.
Jackie: We don’t trust that you’re working if we don’t see you at your desk with your head down sleeping, we don’t trust that you’re working, but you can put your head down and sleep.
It would just astonish me when I was working in city hall, and people would be just, I’ve worked so hard, I’m so exhausted. I’m going to lie down and have a nap for two hours in the afternoon. I’m thinking, don’t you feel embarrassed that someone will see you, that you’re sleeping. And it was like, I’m not tired, but that’s the signal I’m sending, but I’m like, that’s ridiculous.
But you don’t trust me to go do my work from home? And that I’m going to go off and like, I don’t know, have a picnic instead of doing my work because you can’t see me at my desk. It’s so paternalistic. Right? Of all the people to not need a paternalist oversight. I mean, mothers? Come on, mothers have to be so organized, right?
Like, as you say, it’s a leadership role. And fathering too, fathering too is a leadership role when seen in that light, and the men who do that and bring that seriousness to it absolutely are phenomenal. And our partners I think are phenomenal in that way. But I mean, come on, of all the people to not really absolutely at all need any paternalistic oversight on how to manage our time and make sure we’re getting our work done.
I mean, mothers are multitasking and figuring out so many pieces of the puzzle, and juggling that. So I was going to recommend another shout out. Everyone read Steliana’s book, Mothers as Leaders, and we’ll post it in the show notes as well. Yeah, absolutely. Just understanding what a leadership role that is.
Just in terms of personal ethics. How do you want to show up in the world? What are your ethics? What is your view on how you treat and speak to your children, or discipline them, or not discipline them? All of those are such core issues about leadership that then you bring into your corporate roles.
Tove: They are directly transferable skills, they really are.
Jackie: Directly transferable. So then to the loss of your company, that didn’t have the foresight to realize that you were such a tremendous leader and they should have honored that and figured out a way to let you work remotely so that you can manage this particular point. Cause I mean, the other thing we’re seeing, obviously in the DNI conversations, is this is a life cycle issue.
This is not rocket science. We know that there’s a certain period when women and men will reproduce and have children. And when the employee is probably going to need some flexibility in their schedule to multitask these elements of caregiving, and they’ll need it for elder care, as they’ll need it if they have a child with a disability. We know this, why can’t, why don’t, why has this not been solved by the senior most leadership of every company in 2021?
That’s what baffles me. This is not unknown to us. We know that there’s going to be a moment when women and men will all of a sudden have little appendages that are adorable and that will need to be the focus of their attention. The most important thing in their lives that only they can caregive.
And daycare is one option that helps, and helps provide balance. But at the end of the day, when a child is sick, it’s mother and father and or co mothers or co fathers or whoever the parenting team is, who is the ultimately ethical responsible person, who is going to show up for that child. And we need to support that element in every single corporate philosophy out there.
And the fact that we don’t support it means that we’re in a talent decline in Japan, we’re in declining birth rates for 20, 30 years now because companies have not reoriented in Japan to be family friendly, caregiving friendly.
Tove: It’s interesting, because I think until COVID, there was an excuse almost in that, oh, we’ve never done the working from home thing or the flexible work, and it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work in corporate Japan. It wouldn’t work for, I remember speaking to a friend who works at a law firm here in Tokyo, and he said there was a feeling amongst the senior partners that lawyers couldn’t possibly do their work from home. No, no, no, no. That wouldn’t work at all. And then COVID happened and all of a sudden we had to, and I think it’s blown that excuse entirely out of the water.
I really hope that this is going to give companies, I mean, it’s pulled the rug out from under that reasoning, hasn’t it? So it’s an opportunity to say, look, we’ve proven that we can work from home and be effective. And yes, there are some roles where it might be helpful to be in the office sometimes. And depending on the type of work you’re doing, I love getting together with my team at my company to do creative sessions, and you get really so much more done very often in those sessions when you’re all together.
But so much of the work can be done really effectively, sometimes more effectively outside. So I think now that that has been proven and it’s going to force companies to really rethink, as you say, people don’t necessarily want to go back to the office five days a week and from morning to night, So they’re going to need to rethink if they want those people to come back and if they want new talent to join.
So it’s a silver lining.
Jackie: It is. And I think, I mean, I would love to have you weigh in on just even the value added from a sustainability factor. I mean, I think it’s kind of ridiculous that we’ve burnt so much time, energy, money, consumption of fuel and electricity, schlepping people from one end of the country or one end of Tokyo to the other end, just so that they can all show up and do face time in a given office when realistically having that be really strategically only used for the creative meetings, the times when really we’re going to do, or the team building meetings where we’re building our vision together and people need to discuss actively and have a deliberative dynamic and participatory exchange in person and build trust together.
Those moments you have to be, and I would say I would always prefer it to be, in person if you can do it. But that’s not most of the work that we’re doing all day long. And so if it’s more rationalized that we’re thinking a little bit more intentionally about, when do we do our commute on the train and go an hour away from our families, knowing that there could be a major earthquake, and how do we get home to our families if there is a major earthquake?
Can we be rational about the disaster risk elements in Japan, but from a sustainability factor, you work on sustainability leadership and your company, global perspectives, has been specializing in this, and leading companies and supporting corporate entities and leaders in thinking critically about this.
How do you also view, is there a shift now that COVID has forced work from home, that companies are also reframing sustainability and how they think about that?
Tove: I think it’s highlighting an area that people didn’t necessarily think of as being connected to sustainability. I think very often, particularly when we always talk about sustainability transformation as a journey, right?
So it starts at the beginning when people have zero awareness or understanding of what is the connection to ourselves, to our work and our companies. And so on through to the other end where it’s up front and center in everything they do. And if you look along that continuum, then I think, depending where the company is, they often jump to, okay, sustainability equals environment, and you’re like, yes, that’s a massively important part of it, you’ve got the planet, but you’ve also got people, and social issues are an equally important part of sustainability.
That’s why, when you look at the SDGs, many of those are around social, people issues. You’ve got poverty, you’ve got equality, decent work, and things like this. So I think up until COVID happened, the main focus perhaps rightfully so, had been on climate crisis. It is a massive issue that we need to deal with, or we’re not going to be here much longer as a species.
So that’s important, but it’s also surfaced things like mental health, things like inequalities and access to, you know, some schools were able to turn around and go online in a day or two, others, it’s like, okay, well we don’t, the kids don’t have access to the technology they need and that nobody knows how to use it.
And actually they don’t have wifi, so we can’t do this. And if people are working from home, but they live in a tiny space with their kids and they’re having to sit on the floor. I mean, one of our clients was telling us that all, that shinnyu shain, that they bring in 200, 300 new recruits every year, sort of new graduates.
And usually they will come into the office for their training and they have their desk and they go through all of that sort of onboarding process. And instead they had to send out computers to all these new employees living wherever they were. And a lot of them, they’ve just finished being students, right?
They’re living in a tiny one room place. They don’t even have a desk or anything. They were sitting, working on the floor with their laptop on their lap. And then you’re into back problems and this, that, and the other, and you can’t, there’s no privacy if they’ve got a boyfriend or girlfriend there in the background, also trying to work and things. It really highlighted, I think, a lot of issues that are absolutely fundamentally part of sustainability, but people hadn’t really connected before.
And I think that’s been very positive because it’s opening up that conversation now in the companies that we’re working with. They’re saying, yes, on the environment side, we need to be doing this, this, this, and actually having people not flying all around the world every five minutes or commuting in and out of Tokyo every five minutes, that’s helping the carbon footprint.
Great. That’s a good start. But also on the people side, what are we doing around mental health? What are we doing about ensuring that our people are supported in their family, their personal life? So they’re able to do the work that we are asking them to do. So, yeah, it’s surfaced a lot, I think.
Jackie: And I think it’s been a huge learning moment for Japan to, I think, have to acknowledge the diversity of needs of the employee base, that up until now there’s sort of been a corporate warrior model, that you’re supposed to just be emulating and brought into and socialized into emulating long working hours, you know, hierarchy, top down.
You wait and learn and see what other people are doing. And you learn from observation a lot, but you don’t really speak your peace or your mind or your opinion. You wait until you have a little bit more knowledge, but it’s like, how long do you have to wait before your ideas can contribute to the company?
Do you have to be a manager before you really can have a say, or how do we carve out space? Not only for the needs, but the diversity’s and the different, like you say, living styles. Family dynamics are also different. Yeah, the living space dynamic in terms of just sheer space of, you know, Tokyo is really expensive.
So tiny apartments not conceived with the idea of, the two parents are going to be now working from home, side-by-side, in a one bedroom. And the children are there playing too. And so some people I’ve heard, who were in the washroom, sitting there with the door locked to get a little bit of privacy and quiet on a zoom call. Cause that was the only opportunity to really not be interrupted by children or someone or the noise. And so, yeah, I think it’s really shaking things up in a really positive way.
I’d love for you to just give us maybe, could we hear from you for two more minutes or three more minutes about what global perspectives is leading, in terms of your vision and where you want Japan, or this whole era, I guess not just limited to Japan, but to shift and move the dial on sustainability.
Tove: Okay. So we specialize in the people side of sustainability transformation because we started the company six years ago now. And we started off in the organizational change space and leadership development space, sort of looking at, how do leaders influence and lead the organizational culture, and to create a more inclusive space there.
But because both my business partner, Gavin, and I have a very strong personal interest in sustainability and the natural world and stuff particularly, we began to realize that this was something that we could really help with. We could bring that personal passion and knowledge and interest together with our expertise in the leadership development and organizational change, because companies are struggling with this side of it.
There are a lot of companies out there who work on the process side of sustainability transformation. So once a company decides, okay, you know, this is something we need to take seriously. We want to be more sustainable, whether that comes from investor pressure or governmental regulation pressure from outside, or simply within the company saying actually we want to attract better talent. So we need to actually step up and do something and have a more positive impact on the world.
Wherever that’s coming from, there are two sides to the transformation. There’s the process side. You need the strategies, you need the policies, you need the systems to deal with that, you need to be measuring things, and have the right reporting systems in place and whatever. So that’s the process side of it.
But often less importance is often put on the people side of that transformation. But actually when you look at it, companies are just large groups of people. And if you want these new strategies to work, and if you want people to change their behaviors in their everyday work so that you can meet these goals you’re setting as a company, they need to understand why are we doing this as a company?
How does it connect to me and the work I do every day? If I’m working in procurement, or if I’m working in marketing, or if I’m working in sales or finance, whatever it is, it’s connected, but people often don’t see that, so that they’ll just be told from the top, okay, oh, now we’re doing this.
We have a zero carbon goal and we’re going to be zero carbon by this date. Gambarimashou!
And the process side, there may be goals and targets, but there’s often very little support on the people side so that people know, intellectually they understand why this is important and what they need to do, but they also need to be emotionally engaged with it and understand why for me, why for our company, why is this important? How do I need to shift my behavior and my thinking?
So that’s the side we work on, helping align the people, the organizational culture with the strategies, but also building the leadership capability within the company to make that happen.
Jackie: I feel like global perspectives is just sustainability leadership.
What enjoi is doing for the DEI leadership, different sectors, but similar challenges on how do you build out? Like how do you build leadership around DEI from the top and all levels there below for the leadership, but then also how do you retrofit the processes and the policies that can sustain, right?
That will make this sustainable, change behavior, be incentivized in the ways that you can then measure and track, and be held accountable internally. So it’s very exciting to see all that you’re building around sustainability leadership and certainly I’ve enjoyed watching and hearing you talk about it over many years, about what you’re building and what the impacts are.
So wishing you every success in the next six years at your company and building with Gavin. And if you have one small takeaway, learning point, message, or hope, or something you wanted to leave the listeners as our close off message, what would that be?
Tove: So I think the legacy GP as a company, and I would really like to leave is one of ecosystem thinking.
We hear a lot of talk of systems thinking, and that’s incredibly important, but to me, systems still feels mechanical and it’s leaving out the human side of this. And going back to my biology roots there, and growing up in the middle of nature, you really recognize how deeply interconnected and interdependent our systems are.
So if we can start to think of ourselves, individuals, as leaders, as organizations, as active players in an ecosystem globally. You can zoom right out and look at earth and then zoom right back in again, to find yourself and your company. You do that and you realize there are no borders in the ocean, yes, there are artificial borders that we’ve placed on as a society between countries, but actually the land, the other things, those things, there are no borders.
And if we can understand that and understand that as active players, everything we do impacts to some extent either directly or indirectly on the people and the planet that we’re part of, the system, the ecosystem we’re part of. And in return, we are impacted as well.
So if we can understand that ecosystem, how it works, and that impact relationship both ways, then I think we can begin to find the intrinsic motivation and the empathy for that.
So, that is a very, very powerful motivator.
Jackie: Absolutely. I could not agree more, speaking my language. I love, I mean, the challenge is the nation state has been so superficially brought in as the boundary, and then multinationals kind of violate that as well by being everywhere. And then we don’t have a global governance system beyond the UN and it’s not really got a compliance mechanism that’s effective.
So we have this ecosystem, but we don’t have the governance at the ecosystem level to help us think with a hive mind kind of a perspective on, you know, if you pee in one part of the pool, you’re peeing in all parts of the pool. Can we not, can we think about that just for a little bit? You know, there’s a microaggression in one part of the world, or there’s colonization in one part of the world, or if women are subjugated and denigrated in one part of the world, it all comes back and depresses and hurts the whole ecosystem of our planet and of our relationships with one another in a very direct way.
And I couldn’t agree more that helping, how do we help share that perspective to help people zoom out a bit more and see the interdependence? Because you’re right, it absolutely is the key to that empathy. And then feeling motivated that you want to be a part of, do you want to be part of the problem or do you want to be part of the solution?
Tove: That’s the shift right. It’s seeing it from an obligation, are you being told you need to change, you do this, to here’s an opportunity actually, and that’s a massive mindset shift. It really is.
Jackie: Yes, it really is. Well, I encourage that full forward in terms of me needing more of that. So more global perspectives. Yay.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts today on this live stream. It has been so lovely to host you today. And so many learnings for the listeners who are tuning in from all parts of the world. We tend to have people from United States, Canada, sometimes from Europe, different places. So it’s very interesting to see what comments that come in and I’m sure this will stimulate a lot of comments as well.
I wanted to just close on just giving a quick shout out to the team, the enjoi team that helps put this together and is in the background, my little ecosystem, for the enjoi ecosystem of putting this all together and all of the zones of genius from so many individuals who really are making this possible for us to deliver every week.
Next week we will be sharing an actual, a very special interview that was recorded in Tokyo at Legacy Lounge, one of our partners with Legacy Foundation. And it will be featuring Akiko Dōmoto, she’s a former journalist, a former parliamentarian, a former party leader, a former governor of Chiba, and also the current president of the Japan women’s network for disaster risk governance, and a long time research collaborator with me and my research in the last nine years on Tohoku and also just a dear mentor.
So that will be aired next Tuesday. So on that note, thank you everyone for joining, and I’m going to kick us off for our parting song. Thank you Tove, for joining us today.
Tove: Thank you!