297 Bart Wakabayashi, Managing Director of State Street Bank and Trust Tokyo

"First and foremost, trying to remain human myself."

"It was very important for me to let them know we are working together."

"Trust is important. We trust each other, we recognise each other, we thank each other."

"I constantly tell my team this: I want them to complain up."

Bart Wakabayashi is Managing Director of State Street Bank and Trust's Tokyo branch, where the principal business is foreign exchange trading. He has spent more than 26 years with State Street and has built an unusually international career spanning Japan, Australia, Canada and Hong Kong.

Born in Japan to an American mother and a Japanese father who was born and raised in Canada, Wakabayashi grew up in Japan before attending college in California. After returning to Japan, he eventually entered finance and joined State Street. His career subsequently took him to Sydney, Toronto and Hong Kong before bringing him back to Japan.

That combination of Japanese upbringing, North American education and extensive international experience has shaped his approach to leadership. He describes himself as thinking very much like a Japanese person while simultaneously recognising aspects of Japanese business culture that can frustrate him. Rather than seeing this bicultural background as providing a simple advantage, he treats leadership as a continuing process of adapting, listening and building trust.

As one of the relatively few locally hired executives to become branch manager in State Street's history in Japan, Wakabayashi has also experienced the challenges surrounding career mobility for Japanese employees in multinational organisations. That experience informs his interest in creating opportunities for local employees, building open communication and establishing an environment where people feel able to raise problems before those problems become crises.

For Bart Wakabayashi, effective leadership in Japan begins not with authority but with trust.

As Managing Director of State Street Bank and Trust's Tokyo branch, Wakabayashi operates in an environment where trust has unusually tangible consequences. Foreign exchange trading is fast-moving, financial institutions are heavily regulated and mistakes cannot simply be ignored in the hope that they disappear. Yet his philosophy of leadership is strikingly human: remain accessible, communicate constantly, demonstrate ethical behaviour personally and create an environment where employees feel safe enough to tell the leader what is actuall