FEW Japan
Helping time-strapped team members improve communication and motivation
How can you cultivate a deeper understanding between time-strapped team members from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures—especially when they are seldom together in the same room?
This was the question faced by FEW (For Empowering Women) Japan, a not-for-profit community led by and for accomplished, diverse, and globally minded women across Japan. The organization—which supports members’ professional and personal development by organizing programs, networking events, workshops, and seminars—was also eager to work out the best ways to motivate people juggling full-time careers with their (unpaid) FEW board of directors responsibilities.
“We wanted our board members to understand each other’s motivations, gain empathy for each other, and be more coordinated and efficient in their collaborations so that each of us can optimize our joint projects and deliver more smoothly, based on better communication, equitable contribution, and enjoyable co-conspiracy with each other,” says Jackie F. Steele, President and Representative Director.
Ultimately, the search for a solution that addressed all these challenges led Steele and her co-President, Terri MacMillan, to try Attuned.
L-R: The FEW Japan Board of Directors for 2022-2023; President Jackie F. Steele and Co-President Terri MacMillan; the FEW team at the 2022 Strategic Planning Day in Tokyo.
Pathways to Deeper Understanding
The FEW Japan board of directors is multilingual and international, with both Japanese and non-Japanese directors from multiple countries and cultures. This means that standard assumptions based around nationality or background rarely hold true, making it crucial for each person to understand each of their members on an individual level.
The FEW executive team had also started planning more investments in strategic planning retreats, team-building, and upskilling, recognizing that retention was crucial to ensure organizational continuity and the maintenance of institutional knowledge within the nonprofit’s leadership team. But with everyone working their volunteer board of directors roles all remote, all the time during the pandemic, they required a new paradigm for forging deeper human connection and understanding, as well as navigating board-level people dynamics and strategic growth of the organization into digital community-building and nationwide engagement of global-minded women. These two priorities were a heavy lift for an all-volunteer board, given that directors all concurrently held full-time professional paid work commitments, and often had family responsibilities as well.
“We are all in nonprofit service as unpaid directors, with an expectation of five hours a week of service, so directors have to be motivated and self-motivating. Our executive team and all directors have to learn to influence each other to get collaboration and caring, and that subtle insight into the political psychology of motivation is what can help our directors stay motivated and foster team solidarity to deliver the best events and community-building for our members,” says Steele. “Attuned seemed like a fast, deep way for the board to build empathy across our differences and to depersonalize any inter-personal churn by situating the different motivation-based insights we all could gain about each other’s top priorities and values towards their volunteer board work.”
“Attuned seemed like a fast, deep way for the board to build empathy across our differences and to depersonalize any inter-personal churn by situating the different motivation-based insights we all could gain about each other’s top priorities and values towards their volunteer board work.”
Turning Insights into Action
According to MacMillan, when the FEW team first tried using Attuned, they were surprised at just how accurate it was in showing their individual motivations. Initial feedback was that they found doing the Intrinsic Motivation Assessment an illuminating exercise, and felt that it was an exciting step in the right direction, having found that the old ways of fostering understanding and nurturing relationships within a professional environment were no longer feasible nor effective for their organization.
MacMillan and Steele both felt that the workshop hosted by Attuned helped the team better understand their own motivators and the motivational gaps with others, and this helped build healthier, more empathetic team insights early on. “Everyone felt it was a positive experience, with great value for our team-building and gaining more transparency with each other about our core values,” says MacMillan.
“Attuned made us feel that we could learn about ourselves and each other in reliable, tested, and objective ways, while honoring all kinds of diversity of motivation, which helps us better work with, and have empathy for, each other’s predispositions,” says Steele.
Board members with souvenirs commemorating FEW Japan’s 40th anniversary.
Steele says that directors are perhaps now more confident when navigating conversations or feedback. “For the executive team, it has been very useful to be able to prepare for a project conversation or to provide feedback to a board director with an understanding of the best way to motivate and center her work style, values and priorities, or her reasons for investing in a women’s empowerment nonprofit in Japan,” she adds.
Improving Relationships & Communication
MacMillan says that Attuned has also helped enhance relationships of trust between members in the executive team by giving them the tools to understand themselves and their colleagues better, enabling a more intentional use of different communication styles, and vastly improving team alignment. Looking to the future, FEW is planning to use Attuned to improve internal communication still further.
“We would like to use Attuned to create clearer communications, guide the governance oversight responsibilities of the executive team in light of the teams and directors they support, and to be more evidence-based on how to motivate directors to ensure relationships within our board of directors are set up for success over the long term,” says MacMillan.
For Steele, the goal has been to strengthen the impact of the nonprofit by ensuring a robust leadership pipeline and helping the team of volunteer directors enjoy the journey of investing in this much-needed space of community-building through servant leadership. “These tools will help us execute well for our colleagues on the board, for our members, and for our organizational and corporate partners as well, all of whom are supporting our social impact in Japanese society to advance women’s empowerment.”
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