MESSAGE
Our NAKAMA Are Diverse.
We Need Each Other’s Strengths and Mutual Understanding.
What do I care about in my work? What is most important?
UNIVA To answer these questions, I reviewed the UNIVA CAPITAL Group homepage. The following passage caught my eye. If you read Japanese, you can find it here:https://univacap.com/ja/. The English translation is as follows.
“The UNIVA CAPITAL Group is a federated corporate group. Its members are valuable companies that recognize each other’s strengths. Joining together to take advantage of those strengths to create synergies, they increase their ability to compete and overcome the challenges of these difficult times.
Our goal is, by combining our diverse strengths in human and knowledge capital to increase our financial capital and built a more powerful group. Our aim is to create relationships that enable our NAKAMA to understand each other thoroughly. For without that mutual understanding it will be impossible to create group synergies.”
The keys to our success are taking advantage of our strengths and promoting mutual understanding.
According to management guru Peter Drucker, developing yourself as an individual means improving on your strengths and finding a way to minimize your weaknesses. Instead of working on our weaknesses to achieve an ordinary standard, to achieve outstanding results we should instead concentrate on our strengths.
According to Drucker, results can only be achieved by strengths. He recognizes, however, that human beings also have weaknesses. Display your strengths and regard your weaknesses as meaningless, he advises. But this requires a team united by mutual understanding. The reason for creating teams is not whether the task is large or small but, instead, to take advantage of the members’ diverse strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. Teamwork makes possible great power that cannot be achieved by individuals acting alone.
Going a step further, by proactively revealing your weakness to the team, you can receive support that makes the weakness meaningless. It should be clear, however, that simply asking for the team to overlook your weakness will not elicit the support you need. To make the weakness of no meaning to the team the following steps are required.
- You must have a deep understanding of the other team members, their strong and weak points, strengths and weaknesses, what they are good at and what is difficult for them.
- You must reflect sincerely on the trouble that your weakness will cause for the team, accept criticism, and be grateful to your critics.
- While receiving the team’s support to compensate for your weaknesses, you must multiply the contribution of your strengths, thus contributing through your strengths and strong points to the team’s success.
We should go to work every day conscious of the need to take full advantage of our NAKAMAs’ strengths and to promote mutual understanding.
Managing Director, UNIVA Health Limited
Managing Director, Naturally Plus Hong Kong Limited
Hiroaki Hayashi