Takashi Tsutsumi has seen brilliant individual contributors crash as new managers. His solution? Stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and start listening to everyone else.
In his second year at Tokio Marine Fire and Insurance, Takashi Tsutsumi faced a daunting challenge. Fresh out of university and still trying to prove himself as an individual contributor, he was suddenly tasked with supervising three to four senior employees—some with 40 years of experience. The weight of managing people who had decades more experience than him could have been crushing.
His mentor offered two paths to building trust: prove himself through stellar individual performance, or focus on being sociable and approachable. “I definitely chose the second path, because I wasn’t anywhere near a top performer in my first year,” Tsutsumi admits. “But I realized in my second year that I really enjoyed working with people.”
That early lesson shaped everything that followed. After graduating from Kyoto University and starting as a claims expert at Tokio Marine, Tsutsumi’s career has spanned multiple industries and roles: organizational development consultant at GLOBIS Corporate Training, recruiter and HR operations at Eli Lilly Japan, and now head of GLOBIS Asia Campus, where he provides training and development programs to corporate clients across Southeast Asia. His PhD from Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Management bridged his transition from practitioner to educator.
Across industries, he’s seen the same paradox: the very abilities that earn someone a promotion often prevent them from succeeding in the role.
Most organizations promote their best individual contributors into management roles. After all, it seems logical to reward top performers with advancement. But Tsutsumi argues this creates a fundamental mismatch. “The career of an IC and the career of a manager are totally different,” he says. “You don’t need to compete with the ICs on your team, but you need to build trust.”
The skills that made someone a star performer—deep expertise, self-reliance, direct execution—often work against them as managers. “A lot of first-time leaders I’ve seen have tried to prove their own results, like they were still an individual contributor,” Tsutsumi observes. “A leader needs to show performance of the team not through themselves, but through others, the members on their team.”
This shift in perspective proves especially challenging for high achievers. They’ve succeeded by working harder than everyone else, by being the go-to person for complex problems. Suddenly, success requires the opposite: stepping back and enabling others to shine.
During his time in HR at Eli Lilly’s diabetes business unit, Tsutsumi witnessed a pattern that revealed everything wrong with first-time leadership. At district sales meetings, he watched team leaders dominate conversations while their teams sat quietly. “Communication in those meetings was 90% driven by the leaders and managers, not from the employees,” he recalls. “That’s not two-way communication.”
The managers would share strategies, analyze problems, and dictate solutions. Team members got maybe 10% of the speaking time, mostly to report results. “Even if they did speak up, it wasn’t always easy, because immediately the team leader would say, ‘okay, I have an answer. Please do this,'” Tsutsumi says.
His solution is deceptively simple but requires genuine courage: flip the ratio. “Change the ratios. 10% is from you, the leader, and 90% is from your employees,” he advises. “It’s very useful for you to understand the market situation, your employees’ situations, their understanding of the strategy. So please refrain from talking too much.”
This shift serves multiple purposes. Leaders gain crucial ground-level insights they’d never access otherwise. Team members feel heard and valued. Most importantly, the team develops problem-solving capabilities instead of becoming dependent on their manager’s answers.
Tsutsumi recalls working with a leader who epitomized everything wrong with the traditional command-and-control approach. When a team member left, the manager looked around the room and asked aloud, “who’s next?” He treated employees like “self-motivating machines,” showing no interest in their careers or personal development.
“This attitude eventually affected their careers in disastrous ways, and for that I feel sorry for them,” Tsutsumi reflects. The contrast with effective leaders is stark: “What stands out to me are the managers who are truly interested in other people’s lives.”
This interest goes beyond surface-level pleasantries. It’s about recognizing the fundamental exchange at the heart of employment. “Everyone sacrifices time with their families or friends or private life to work,” Tsutsumi explains. “We shouldn’t adopt the attitude that we’re buying their time, but rather that they’re sharing their time with us.”
This perspective shift changes everything about how managers interact with their teams. Instead of viewing employees as resources to be maximized, they see them as people making daily choices about how to spend their limited time and energy.
First-time leaders often struggle with authority. They worry about being too friendly or too strict, about losing respect or creating distance. Tsutsumi’s answer is transparency. “Being transparent. That means sharing the current situations: what’s urgent, what’s changing,” he says.
But transparency doesn’t mean dumping every piece of information or pressure onto the team. Middle managers, in particular, must learn to filter. “From an HR perspective, I’ve seen that the best leaders don’t simply pass all the pressure from the top down to their teams,” Tsutsumi observes. “Front-line employees already work hard and overwhelming them with every directive or stress from upper management can be damaging.”
The key is selective transparency—sharing context that helps the team understand their role and make better decisions, while absorbing unnecessary pressure that would only create anxiety without adding value. “A good manager learns to absorb some of that pressure, interpret what’s really important, and then communicate it in a way that motivates rather than discourages,” he explains.
Managing down is only half the job. First-time leaders must also manage up, often with little preparation for this dual responsibility. Tsutsumi emphasizes thinking beyond immediate team goals: “You need to show interest for the company’s results, what’s happened around you, and especially what’s happening around the director-level.”
The most successful managers develop what he calls a “two levels above” perspective. They don’t just understand their own team’s challenges—they grasp how their work fits into broader organizational objectives. “Those who rise quickly through a company are the ones that are easy to adapt and who keep those top-level perspectives in mind,” he notes.
This upward awareness enables better decision-making and makes middle managers more valuable partners to senior leadership. It also helps them filter information more effectively, understanding which pressures and priorities truly matter for their teams.
Working across the Asia-Pacific region has taught Tsutsumi that leadership fundamentals are largely universal, but context matters enormously. “90% of leadership may be universal, but that remaining 10%, the cultural or industry-specific nuances, can make a big difference,” he says.
For leaders, this means learning not to ignore crucial cultural differences in communication styles, hierarchy expectations, and decision-making preferences. “Every country is different. Thai culture, Singaporean culture, Malaysian culture, they each have unique values and ways of working,” he notes.
For first-time leaders, especially those working in global or multicultural environments, developing cultural intelligence becomes as important as emotional intelligence. “That’s why at GLOBIS we also teach cross-cultural management, using Hofstede’s Six Dimensions as a framework. It’s a powerful tool to understand a country’s typical values and work styles. The key is not to stereotype individuals, but to use these frameworks as a starting point for understanding and adapting your leadership across different cultural contexts,” Tsutsumi adds.
When pressed for his single most important recommendation for new leaders, Tsutsumi’s answer reflects everything he’s learned about the transition from individual contributor to manager: “Listen to your team. Really take the time to observe and understand them. You don’t need to prove how talented you are. You’re already in the manager’s seat.”
This advice cuts to the heart of the transition challenge. New managers often feel they must justify their promotion by demonstrating superior knowledge or capability. But leadership success comes from enabling others’ capabilities, not showcasing your own.
For practical application, Tsutsumi recommends situational leadership as a starting framework—adjusting management style based on team members’ readiness and eagerness for specific tasks. “It’s a very powerful, practical framework,” he says. “You adjust your style depending on your team members’ readiness and eagerness to take on the work.”
Takashi Tsutsumi
CEO, GLOBIS Asia Campus
Takashi Tsutsumi has significant expertise in human resources, especially within the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, he worked at Eli Lilly Japan as a human resource business partner for the Diabetes Business Unit and at Tokio Marine Fire Insurance as a claims expert. At GLOBIS University, he served as an organization development consultant before becoming a senior researcher. He is now responsible for program development in the discipline of human resource management and teaches Service Management for the MBA programs.
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