103: Meghan Barstow, President, Edelman Japan

Meghan Barstow currently is the President at Edelman Japan. Ms.
Barstow is originally from Alaska and Japan and Alaska were
strongly connected through the fishing industry and the airline
industry, as many international flights land in Anchorage. The
Japanese economy was booming when she was in high school, so she
decided Japan was a good place to be.


 


Ms. Barstow first came to Japan exactly 30 years ago which was
the obvious step as she majored in English Literature with a
minor in Japan. She first came to Japan as a third-year
university student, she studied at Osaka from Kansai Gaidai for
her year abroad. Prior to university, she studied at a school in
Middlebury with an immersive Japanese program prior to coming to
Japan in her third year of university. She completed her degree
back in the US before returning to Japan through the JET program.
She was in Japan in a very rural area in Japan for 3 years for
the JET program, she was an ALT teaching English for 2 years and
the last year as a CIR working for the local government. She was
the only ALT in that region, so it was a wondering immersive
experience for her. After completing the JET program, she
returned to Seattle in the US, and she again wanted to use her
Japanese skills and she worked for Kyoga prefecture in the
Business and Culture centre and later she also taught Japanese at
a local public high school filling in for someone on maternity
leave. After this she retuned to Japan again for her third round
in Japan working as an editor creating business textbooks and
English textbooks at Time Life.


 


At this time, she had many friends that were expats, and they
were doing communications for automobile companies such as
Mercedes and Reno and it sounded like many of the skills Ms.
Barstow had such as meeting people, writing, editing,
communicating but also strategizing. This led her to apply for a
job in an English Language newspaper and that’s where her journey
in PR started.


 


It can be hard to earn the trust of colleagues and especially as
a foreigner coming in during COVID Ms. Barstow found this to be
quite difficult in Japan. Ms. Barstow feels that Edelman is doing
very well with regards to having female leadership and equity in
the firm. Traditionally, you’ll find that more women are present
at the junior levels and as you go higher up, there are less and
less women. At Edelman, Ms. Barstow says that there are a lot of
strong female leaders, and she has felt very supported by the
female leadership at Edelman.


 


Ms. Barstow has found that Edelman is very creative in many ways,
the team often call themselves entrepreneurial, by constantly
thinking of new products, new evolved techniques, and new and
creative ways to do things. She feels the staff is constantly
learning and innovating. For creativity and one of their passions
is to be constantly curious as every day is new, and she finds
herself learning every single day. She feels to be creative;
employees need to given freedom and time to become creative. At
work, they have various working groups in various topics, such as
an ESG group and an Olympic working group. Staff join these
working groups based on their area of interest, for example
someone interested in the environment, might join the ESG working
group.


 


Advice that Ms. Barstow would give to someone coming into Japan
would be that listening is very important and asking for feedback
and spending time 1-on-1 with the staff. Building trust and
understanding that change takes more time in Japan. She says that
Japan seems contradictory to her that though Japan tends to seem
a hierarchical country but in other ways it can be a country that
is very bottom-up, so striking that balance is hard and
navigating that as a foreign leader can be challenging as well.
She ends on the powerful note that leadership is not about the
leader but is the power of those who report to you because the
organization is not about one person.