What if you were doing something that drove your Japanese colleagues crazy, but you didn¡¯t realize it? Conducting seminars for Japanese businesspeople who work with people from other countries, I found a common theme that comes up every time I ask what behaviors of their foreign colleagues are hard for them to deal with.
Comments like ¡°They don¡¯t take responsibility for their mistakes,¡± ¡°They try to blame others for things that are their fault,¡± ¡°They make excuses¡± and ¡°They don¡¯t apologize when they have done something wrong¡± have come up consistently. This was puzzling to me, as I didn¡¯t personally feel that I or any other non-Japanese person would be particularly likely to go overboard on excuses or blame others for things they did.
I spent some time looking into why these Japanese workers felt this way about their foreign colleagues and discovered an expectation I wasn¡¯t familiar with, and that you might not be either ¡ª hansei. Because non-Japanese employees tend to skip this one thing that the Japanese feel is essential, negative perceptions tend to arise. By learning how to do hansei whenever you have made a mistake or there is a problem, I believe you¡¯ll be able to avoid generating negative feelings and get yourself back in the good books much more quickly.
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