Yih-Teen Lee Professor of Managing People in Organizations IESE Business School
Recruit also puts extraordinary trust in young people, allowing them to generate new ideas and implement them. Furthermore, Recruit is open to confronting its mistakes and learning from them, in order to become stronger. This unique quality, which proves elusive for many companies, has the potential to propel Recruit to corporate leadership on the global stage.
In my view, Recruit's culture is the critical mechanism to balance its results-focused approach with an orientation toward caring for human beings. Recruit emphasizes in its vision, mission, and values statements (VMV), the social value and purpose in all the business activities and innovation of the group. Most executives and members of Recruit share such understanding and implement this ideology in fulfilling their roles. In effect, Recruit's members channel their desire to serve society into individual initiatives which bring innovation and generate value for the company and the society.
It is also interesting that Recruit has been mindful of empowering business leaders to operate autonomously. This is certainly prudent, given the varied nature of business activities in each SBU, with some very dependent on local context. Furthermore, Recruit avoids intervention of HQ during international acquisitions, a tendency likely informed by the company's unsuccessful Chinese expansion in its bridal magazine business in the early 2000s. At the first sight, this approach seems to show great respect for diversity as it allows each business to operate on its own.
However, pushing too far into this direction may cause Recruit to miss opportunities to leverage the group's rich diversity and generate more synergy for business innovation. Connecting seemingly unassociated dots is the essence of innovation. Connecting Recruit's people across business units and cultures, formally or informally, may allow such opportunity to be realized. Interviews with several members of Recruit have also revealed the wish for such synergy.
If you effectively connect your diverse people and businesses, that can foster opportunities for fruitful interaction in the company, creating new opportunities for synergy generation and business development. To make it happen, executives and leaders of Recruit must enact strategic cultural bridging, involving actions creating alignment at cognitive, emotional, and behavioral levels. Certainly, such an initiative needs to be carefully introduced so that Recruit maintains its spirit of empowering its people and businesses to generate innovative ideas and make critical business decisions.
I believe the culture of Recruit, embodied by the VMV, can play a critical role, serving as a common ground to unite people under the same purpose and principles. By so doing, Recruit's members would be enabled to connect and contribute to the organizational mission of serving society in unique ways. Ensuring that all members of Recruit share a clear understanding of its culture and live up to it, is the key. This would make Recruit Group a truly global company with strong Japanese roots.
Yih-Teen Lee
Professor of Managing People in Organizations
IESE Business School
Yih-Teen obtained his Ph.D. from HEC, University of Lausanne. At IESE, he has taught leadership and cross-cultural management since 2006. His article on culture and person-environment fit won the Best International Paper Award at the Academy of Management 2006 Annual Meeting. Currently, Yih-Teen is conducting research on companies globally successful with unique cultural bridging processes different from traditional theories in order to find out a new cross-cultural management method. He identifies himself as a multicultural individual, growing up in Taiwan, trained as a scholar in Switzerland, working for a global business school based in Barcelona, and spending family time in Paris.