Teambuilding

Our teambuilding sessions are designed to help Japanese and North American counterparts enhance communication and mutual understanding. Conducted bilingually, they provide a space in which there is a high density of communication, enabling the group to make significant progress on sensitive and complex issues in a way that is efficient and impactful. Our teambuilding sessions are designed to be culturally comfortable for both Japanese and North Americans and to achieve active participation by everyone in attendance.

Achieving Cross-Cultural Collaboration

This 1-day session uses case studies as a way to jump-start dialogue between Japanese and North Americans about the cultural issues that impact their work. Through direct interaction and discussion, participants, gain a better understanding of their colleagues' viewpoints. A "space" is created where cultural issues that are difficult to broach during the daily routine can be discussed in an open and carefully-facilitated environment. Participants leave this session with important insights about cultural differences, concrete strategies for improving their relationships, and an enhanced sense of camaraderie.

Executive Teambuilding with Action Planning

This 1 to 2 day session is designed as an intensive offsite activity for executive teams. It begins with our unique Group Mirror activity, which surfaces the group's key issues in a culturally comfortable way and examines their roots in cultural differences. Then, the group prioritizes these issues, and works together to develop action plans for addressing them, including "projects" to make specific improvements and "customs" that involve changing interaction patterns on an ongoing basis. At the end of the session, the group will have a concrete plan for improving how it works together. Longer sessions also include exercises that enable the group to examine both cultural differences and individual personality differences to increase mutual understanding, trust and teamwork. These sessions can be customized to address specific situations such as post-merger integration, leadership changes, or changes in company strategy.

Developing a Hybrid Culture

This activity is appropriate for an executive team that wants to define its company culture and values, or for divisions, departments, or other work teams that want to create a blueprint for how they will work together. This activity is based on the idea that the most successful operations of Japanese firms consciously choose to combine the best aspects of the parent company culture with the best aspects of North American business approaches. The participants go through a process that helps them identify what factors they believe are most important to ensuring their company's success, with the end result being a definition of their company's culture that can be shared throughout the organization.

Mission Statement Development

In this session, participants engage in an interactive process to create a mission statement for their firm that reflects the values of both Japanese and North Americans. Since many Japanese are unfamiliar with the mission statement development process, this session addresses why mission statements are important, and how they can be used to ensure that the entire company is moving in the same direction.