You’re a manager, you’ve got a business to run, or you’re a department head with results to produce. You’ve got a subordinate whose mistakes and lack of initiative are a spanner in the works. How do you tell him off in this day and age when a raised voice, a sharp word, is promptly denounced as “power harassment?”

Bosses of the old school face a dilemma. When they were young, their bosses screamed at them, berated them, sometimes embarrassed them in front of others. It wasn’t fun but it was, to those tough enough not to wilt, educational. You learned, you grew, you became a boss in turn and treated your underlings the same way.

But today’s underlings are a different breed, says Aera (March 25). They don’t grit their teeth, dig in their heels and resolve to do better in future. They sulk, or file complaints, or quit. That’s what kept happening to Koichiro Machimoto, 54-year-old deputy department head at a Kobe rubber manufacturer. His young subordinates kept quitting on him. Nor was he the only one. Six years ago it was such a problem that meetings were held on the subject. Coaching seminars and study sessions were launched. The theme: how to chew people out more or less gently.

It’s a fine line. If you’re too gentle, your admonitions have no effect. Too harsh, you’re infringing on newfound human rights. There are three tricks, Machimoto discovered, to being a successful scolder in this altered climate. One: take a deep breath; hold your fire until the worst of your anger has passed. Two: focus on the mistake, not on the person making it. Three: erase from your manner any trace of elitism, condescension, superiority of rank. You are equals having a discussion, not a boss giving orders and a subordinate humbly receiving them.

It may even be a good idea to drop the Kansai dialect in favor of standard (Tokyo) Japanese – the latter is cooler, the former more emotional.

Machimoto found it hard to get used to at first but claims now to be a more effective scolder. He has 10 people working under him, and no one has quit in a while.

A poll Aera co-conducted of 500 bosses found 75% of them feeling that scolding is necessary and 60% saying it’s become difficult. “Until the mid-1980s,” explains Nahoko Kida of a Kobe-based NPO which dispenses counseling on employee development, “standards of living were rising, motivation was high, you didn’t care if you got yelled at. Now, salaries aren’t going up, motivation is low, and bosses need to refine their scolding techniques accordingly.”

There’s another factor. Junior employees today are different from past ones. They grew up differently – in a stagnant economy and in a so-called “relaxed education” setup (“yutori kyoiku”) that downplayed competitiveness in favor of fostering original thinking. (By 2010, after eight years, it had been judged a failure and largely scrapped). This is the so-called “herbivorous generation,” lacking the appetites and drives of their “carnivorous” predecessors.

So bosses like Machimoto must don kid gloves in dealing with them. The gloves don’t always fit comfortably, but bare-knuckled scolding is apt to be met with a shrug and a resignation. If you don’t want to be constantly rehiring and retraining, you have to adapt.

© Japan Today