I recently watched “Jiro dreams of Sushi” and, not only do I highly recommend watching this film, but I found a few lessons Jiro can teach us about high performing organizations.

If you haven’t watched the documentary, it’s about Jiro Ono - a sushi master chef, also described as a shokunin, who owns and operates a small sushi restaurant (only 10 seats) in the basement of a Tokyo building.  At the time of filming, Jiro is in his 70’s and has no plans to retire. Jiro really loves making sushi - he doesn’t like holidays because it forces him to close his restaurant, and even when he travelled to accept his Michelin 3-star award he was keen to get back.  Jiro is at the top of his game and is recognized as one of the best sushi chefs in the world. As a behavioral and organizational psychologist, I'm fascinated by high performers like Jiro, so as I watched the documentary I noted a few things that Jiro exemplified with his cooking and his organization that would benefit organizations:

1. A humble dedication to perfecting one's craft

In the very beginning of the film, Jiro says:

This quote encapsulates Jiro's philosophy, and sets the tone for the rest of the documentary.  I’ll put a caveat here - It’s perfectly fine and admirable to switch careers or complain about work if something isn’t right. There are plenty of professionals who have decided to do something completely different mid-life and don’t regret it, so take what Jiro says with a grain of salt.  Having said that, there is something powerful to take away from his allocution. If you’re going to do something for 2,000 plus hours a year you should strive to be good at it, or at least not bad at it.

If you’re wondering how common it is for people to be less-than-stellar performers at work, just ask someone you know if they work with someone who’s bad at their job.  It’s frustrating, exhausting, wasteful and can have a ripple effect through teams, departments, and entire organizations.

You don’t want to be that person, do you? So how do you know if you’re bad at your job?  It’s likely you have some self-awareness and realize areas you can improve upon. But even if not, you can ask coworkers, direct reports, and/or your manager for feedback on what you could improve upon. If your organization provides resources for it, enroll in a 360 feedback process to uncover potential areas of opportunity.  Stay ahead of the game, be proactive in learning new technologies, software, or new skills that will make you a better teammate, leader, or individual contributor. See if your organization will invest in professional development and skill building activities. If they do, take advantage of them.

The prerequisite for being (or wanting to be) good at what you do is humility. Jiro is regarded as one of, if not the, best sushi chefs in the world, but that doesn’t stop him from striving to improve, even in his 70’s.  

Jiro is described as “relentless in his pursuit of perfection” by his staff. Do you need this level of dedication? Well, probably not, but the notion here is to not rest on your laurels and always strive to improve. There are always more things to learn, more perspectives to think about, and different ways to try things. If you met someone who told you they could get no better at their profession, would you believe them?  Perfection doesn’t exist; there is always room for improvement.

This has ramifications in most of the elements in the workplace. If you share this mentality of always trying to improve and not being satisfied with the status quo, it will be easy for your coworkers, direct reports, and leadership to see that mentality in your work and in your relationships. It’s impossible to be arrogant if you show that you still have things to learn and skills to improve upon.

2. Build trust with crucial partners in your organization

Jiro is a sushi man - he makes sushi, and he is really good at it.  But he needs raw material from which to make his sushi. Jiro doesn’t have time to learn about the intricacies of tuna and squid and rice.  He has “guys” that are experts in those raw materials and he trusts them to provide him with the best ingredients. I don't know what it takes to be a tuna expert; apparently you can feel how good a tuna will taste by rubbing the flesh between your fingers.   About a quarter of the film is devoted to the markets and the vendors for Jiro’s ingredients.  Jiro has “a guy”, it seems, for each critical ingredient. They have built trusting relationships that go back decades.

This is the trust that makes high performance organizations high performing.  In a culture where everything is needed yesterday and efficiency is key, there is wasted time in second guessing critical inputs and outputs of systems and departments.

For example, I worked with a client who had major trust issues with their organizational partners.  Department A was responsible for checking the work of Department B. Department C's safety relied on the work that was set up by Department B and checked by Department A.

There were several issues that lead to mistrust between the departments:

• Department B knew that Department A's purpose was to catch any issues that they missed, which led to lapses in work quality

• There were no consequences for poor quality work by Department B

• Department A was inconsistent in how they checked Dept B's work

• Department A started collecting secret data on the performance of Department B

• Dept C caught wind of the above issues and were concerned about the implications to safety

I’m sharing this example to illustrate how far reaching the consequences of distrust can go. What started as a small quibble turned into whole departments worried about employee safety.

There are a few survey results that show that trust in leaders and organizations are low. The fix here isn’t easy.  I found this article on the interweb and thought it was a good distillation of trust in organizations. The authors break trust down into 5 dimensions:

1. Competence

2. Openness and honesty

3. Concern for employees/stakeholders

4. Reliability

5. Identification

All are fairly self-explanatory, except for “Identification” which they define as “… when individuals believe their values are reflected in the values the organization exhibits in day-to-day behaviors.”  Do you trust your organization (leaders, peers, partners, management)? If you don’t, does the reason fit into one of these categories?

3. Simplicity

One of the themes of Jiro’s sushi mentioned early in the film is the simplicity of his work.  His food is simple - most of the sushi he serves is a slice of fish on a molded piece of rice (see above).  There are no frills, no elaborate displays, no artistic sauce drizzles, no rolls with 10 ingredients, no flare on food.  But what he is able to create with that simplicity is inspiring and sought after. A food critic describes Jiro’s approach to simplicity as the following:

Jiro even says the techniques he and his staff use are not secret methods, they are known methods they have perfected. There is something to aspire to here, and in the business world simplicity is the holy grail.  How many things do you have going on in your work that need your attention? How many of those things are needlessly complex?  

As an organization it’s easy to make things more complex than they need be. Take, for example, employee evaluations, or what is typically referred to as “performance management”.  These can go so many ways and can get very deep and unnecessarily complex. How many formal evaluations should we give our employees? How should we evaluate them? How many competencies should they be proficient in? Should we rate or rank? How much time should we spend on these activities?

Case in point, Deloitte realized this at their own large firm years ago.  They decided to skin the entire performance management system and start over fresh.  They determined that the goals of the system weren’t being achieved by what they had put in place and that something different, and simpler was the answer.

Creating simple solutions is difficult and few are good at deriving simple solutions to complex problems. It’s a process that is learned by doing. The strive for simplicity in solutions is often expressed by an acronym we've all heard:  KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid. This acronym can be traced back to Kelly Johnson of the US Navy in the 60's. He challenged engineers to design an aircraft system that could be fixed in the field, by an average mechanic, with a small set of tools. This concept is still used today, and has been championed by software developers.  

We know from behavioral research (Friman & Poling, 1995) that if things are too effortful or complicated, people won't use them. If you want people to adopt something new, make it easy to do first, and then, when they are engaging in the activity, shape the fluency and mastery of the tool or process. You can shape complex repertoires but there needs to be a soft and rewarding entry that builds a foundation to work from.

I like to think back to Occam when complexity arises in the workplace.

In summary - if you haven’t see the movie and you like documentaries, you should watch “Jiro dreams of Sushi”. Watch the above 3 lessons of high performing organizations in action as Jiro massages fish onto rice for his customers.  The film inspired me to write this article, perhaps it will inspire you too.

Reference:

Friman, P. C., & Poling, A. (1995). Making life easier with effort: Basic findings and applied research on response effort. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 28(4), 583-590.