The blow torch has never been applied more ferociously to how leaders lead than what we see today.  Once upon a time, there were resumes pilling up to consider who we would hire.  We had the whip hand, and the applicants felt the lash.  Now the roles have been reversed and the applicants are interviewing us, rather than the other way around.  I have done my weekly podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews now for over five years, talking to CEOs here about one topic – leading in Japan.  It was never intended for this when I started five years ago, but many of the leaders tell me it is having a positive impact on getting people they want to hire to join the company, in preference to another firm.  The reason is that my style of interviewing allows the leader to be authentic and talk in their natural voice.  There is no corporate propaganda being issued or false flags being flown. This is what employees want from their companies and, in particular, from their supervisors.  It is easy to proclaim your superior values when times are good.  When times get tough, that is when you discover if what you have been told by your boss is real or fake.  I had this experience, and it was very disappointing.  I heard all about the importance of our customer, but when the economy went off the rails, the customer was instantly propelled overboard and everything was about the sole interests of the firm.  Short-termism took over, and many bridges were burnt to the ground.  Promises were retracted and customer collateral damage was waved away as “unfortunate”.  Any faith I had in the senior leadership and their commitment to the stated values of the firm evaporated. As the boss, we have to be very careful about the congruency between what we say and what we do.  If we talk about wellness, but we expect people to drive themselves to ill health, then we are revealed for who we were really are.  Our interests are the real priority. Over the years, when looking through people’s resumes, I would ask about some blank spaces. They would tell me they had to quit the company because the horrendous overtime had made them ill. As an Aussie, I always thought to myself “how ridiculous”, but that was the norm in Japan back in those dark days. If we talk about work/non-work balance, but we push people to work long hours, we are hypocrites and, even worse, obviously stupid hypocrites to boot. If we talk about work ethic, but we are cruising along as the boss, while whipping the troops along, it is clear to everyone that we are applying an indulgent, different set of rules to ourselves.  We can be clever and come up with all sorts of justifications and corporate double speak, but nobody is fooled by our deceit.  Treat others how you want to be treated is the most basic level required for boss-subordinate interactions.  This is commonly called the “golden rule”. The actual true target level should be to treat subordinates how they want to be treated and is called the “platinum rule”.  Let’s go for the platinum rule, shall we? This sounds easy enough, but there is no necessary uniform idea on this and every person can have quite different expectations.  As the boss, we need to keep enquiring about what our people want.  We may have had that conversation once before, but a lot can happen in the space of a few years, and these desires are not stagnant.  Changes can include getting married, having children, taking care of aged parents, buying a home, paying for the kid’s education, etc.  The list of changes are long and we need to appreciate that our subordinates’ needs change. Taking the view that it doesn’t matter because we pay them is an antiquated idea stuck back in the day when resumes were numerous and boss choices were many.  Money is important, of course, but as life speeds up time becomes in short supply.  Flexibility can create the time our people need and we can help them achieve things they need.  If we are dogmatic about the rules and procedures, that may make us feel powerful, but it will be counterproductive inside the culture.  Our research has clearly shown that the key to getting teams engaged is that they feel the boss cares about them.  The way they know that is actually the case is through the way the boss communicates and the boss’s capacity to be flexible and supportive of the needs of the staff. As the boss, you can’t fake this stuff.  You are either supportive or you are not.  The basic posture has to be an inside out job, where the natural instinct is there to support our staff in every way we can. Prancing around as if you are supportive and using sweet words and pleasant smiles isn’t going to cut it if just fluff.  When the decisions get attached to real money, this is when we all see if what the leader says and does is the same thing or not.  People are not stupid.  They can tell what is smoke and mirrors and what they can trust and rely upon, so let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence.  

We recently completed an in-house Leadership Training for Managers programme for a local Japanese firm. The President founded the firm as a spin-out from a well-established international accounting company many years ago and has successfully grown the organisation. He is now considering succession planning and aims to develop his senior leadership team. He had an internal survey conducted on the training programme, which he then shared with the trainer who delivered the course and myself. Survey results on training can sometimes be challenging, and this case was no different. Some participants felt the training was too long, while others thought it was too short. Some found the content very challenging, and others not challenging enough. As is often the case, the majority were neutral, while we mainly received strong feedback from the outliers. However, there were some particularly intriguing comments. A few participants mentioned that they found the training exhausting, claiming it impacted their ability to perform their work after the sessions. The core training involved weekly 3.5-hour sessions over seven weeks. Concentrating on new content, which differs from daily tasks, can certainly be demanding. Several participants also noted that the programme contained a lot of content, which is true – it is a course with substantial material. However, I wouldn’t describe any of the content as particularly complex. Dale Carnegie training is highly practical and addresses real-world needs rather than being theoretical. New concepts require the brain to engage, which some participants found challenging. We also employ the Socratic method, encouraging self-discovery through questioning. This approach differs from the standard Japanese educational method, which still leans on Confucian principles of memorisation and rote learning. Our approach often surprises new participants, who arrive prepared to take notes on whatever the instructor says. Instead, we plant seeds of information, prompting participants to reflect on their beliefs, experiences, and ideas. When they share their thoughts, we ask them to explain their reasoning. This is much more demanding than simply reproducing what the teacher says, so it’s no surprise it can be tiring. Some participants also mentioned fatigue from needing to speak up during the sessions. We incorporate extensive group discussions, often in small groups where there is nowhere to hide; everyone has to actively share their ideas and experiences. They can’t be passive, sitting silently – they need to think on their feet and articulate their ideas. This can be mentally taxing, as there is pressure to communicate clearly without appearing unprepared. Many also discover they are not naturally succinct, logical, or well-organised communicators, which can add a level of stress. They may observe peers expressing themselves well and feel a gap in their own skills, creating additional pressure. They also realise they haven’t engaged their minds this way in some time, so it can feel like dusting off mental cobwebs. When I go to the gym, I push my muscles to lift heavier weights and increase repetitions. This is tiring and sometimes even painful. Challenging the brain is similar – it can be tough if you’re not doing it regularly. Many leaders in this team have been performing routine tasks that they have already mastered, so they haven’t faced much challenge in their work so far. Their focus has been on managing their teams, and the broader aspects of leadership have been outside their experience. This training has been an eye-opener, revealing what leadership should entail. The idea that training should not be mentally taxing is interesting. Growth requires stepping out of your Comfort Zone and engaging with challenging content and new methodologies. This is how we grow. Expecting to progress without stepping beyond what’s familiar is a quaint notion. If we continue to do what we have always done, in the same way we have always done it, we will achieve the same results we have always achieved. Stepping up means trying new things or taking on different tasks – both of which are challenging and tiring. And that’s exactly how it should be.    

Are you sitting too much and for too long at your desk every day?  Are you eating too much every meal because your mother told you when you were a kid to finish everything on your plate.  Are you hitting the booze after work with your mates or at home to rid yourself of your stress?  Are your kidneys and liver in good shape? Are you carrying around too much meat and making your muscles and organs work much harder than they should? Is your blood pressure elevated and too high every day?   Are you constantly thinking about all of your troubles at work?  Are you having trouble getting good quality consistent sleep?  Are you promising yourself to get to the gym, but don’t make it as often as you need to in order to make any progress? Well, I have pretty much described myself here.  Knowing about it and doing something to fix it are two universes separated by infinite space.  Intellectually I know what I should do, but practically I struggle with a lifetime of negative habits which all need work.  I do a lot of pontificating in my content about what to do and how to do it, so I can imagine I can come across as Mr. Goody Two Shoes pseudo perfect. This time I will use myself and my failings as the mirror for you to think about yourself and what you are doing if you share these same attributes.  Ironically, as I sit here writing this, I have been sitting at my home desk writing my weekly blogs for the last three hours and haven’t once stood up.  I know just sitting is bad, but I get into a concentration zone and I forget to stand up. Right, I am going to use a timer with an alarm and set it so that I stop what I am doing and stand up and walk around at set intervals, a bit like the pomodoro method of twenty-five minutes work, five-minute break and then after four pomodoros take fifteen minute break. Eating less is a choice.  Leaving parts of the meal unconsumed is a choice. Another irony.  I am sitting here in Tokyo writing this blog and we have the “hara hachibu” tradition here in Japan of only eating until 80% full. This idea originally came from Okinawa and they are one of the longest lived peoples in the world. I have to break that habit driven deep into my mind by my Mum and not feel compelled to eat everything on the plate.  I had lunch the other day with my mate Tak and I noted he left most of his chicken uneaten, which was quite a feat, as the main meal was chicken.  Growing up in Japan, maybe he didn’t have to break free of the gravitational pull of “finish everything on your plate”. Roughly once a week, over a meal with my wife, I like to drink Australian wine at home on Fridays after my hard toil at the Dale Carnegie Siberian Salt Mines.  I used to finish a bottle between us, but actually I was drinking most of it.  Today, I am down to a single glass to give my blood pressure, kidneys and liver a rest.  This is extremely hard because I want to keep drinking.  It is a weekly battle with myself to stop at one glass. At one point back in the 1990s, when I was working in Nagoya, after many months of wining and dining and being wined and dined, my weight blew up to 90kilos.  I didn’t notice it, because it was gradual.  After one event where we were having a meal sitting on tatami, some kind soul sent me a photo from the evening.  It was taken from the side, so I got a full appraisal of the profile of my massive girth.  I was so shocked.   Today, my weight floats around 82-83 kilos at the moment and I need to get it floating around 80—81, and those last couple of kilos seem so hard to evaporate.  For reference purposes, when I was competing in karate competitions, I was fighting in the 75-80 kilo weight division, so getting close to my fighting weight is a good goal for me to have. Switching off from work is a pain.  I think about my problems at work all day and night, and that black monster is always sitting there in the darkened corner of my mind.  Lately, I am also adding to my woes by not getting good quality sleep.  I am not sure why that is, but I think part of it is not enough exercise.  I need to be more tired at night so that I drift off to sleep quickly and smoothly.  I was walking every morning, then I caught a cold with the change of the seasons, so I took a break.  Then I tripped on the stairs at home, smashed my toe into the stair rise and it is a miracle I didn’t fracture it, but boy has it been sore.  Consequently, no walking in the morning. I need to get back to that routine of awakening at 5.50am, get out the door, walk for an hour while listening to podcasts and then get off to work.  Getting to the gym regularly is a difficulty because I am often at networking events at night, but I know I can do better.  What about going to the gym on the weekends?  I can do better. One item you may note that is prominent by its absence is smoking and the quitting thereof.  Both my parents died of lung cancer and my father at age 51, so I have never smoked.  If you are a smoker, then I haven’t got much to say from any personal experience.  I have read that as soon as you quit, the body starts to rebuild and you can repair the damage you have been doing to your lungs and broader health.  Apparently, after a year since you quit, your risk of heart disease is halved and after five years, your chances of a stroke and cervical cancer are the same as a nonsmoker.  Worthwhile thinking about I would say. Everything I have talked about today is within my grasp, if I choose to grasp it.   I don’t need a Life Coach, a Personal Trainer, Ozempic or anything else but will, determination, consistency and making some decisions and sticking to them. How about you?  

We know that AI has gone from the domain of geeky people in white lab coats to the mainstream of business in a nanosecond. Such speed is difficult to keep up with and the roll out of new options continues unabated. As the leader how do we surf this tech wave and prepare our people for this AI enabled future/  Making data backed decisions is always preferred in leadership and AI has the power to crunch large amounts of data and provide answers very quickly.  As long as it isn’t lying to us with so-called hallucinations about the results, then it is a big help.  Direction on using AI in our businesses is not going to bubble up from down below and we leaders need to get to work to harness this beast. 1.        Audit We can start with an audit of where we think AI can bring savings in terms of time, money, effort and quality.  Doing this process with the team is required because we want them to own the process and the results.  There may be fears that certain jobs will disappear because of AI and we need to face that reality head on.  It doesn't necessarily mean the person leaves the firm because finding staff in Japan is at a premium, but it may mean their job content changes.  There will be flow on effects about required retraining and thought has to be put into the feasibility of doing that with the resources we have available.   2.        Strategy & Innovation Having completed the audit we now have some insight into the opportunities and difficulties working with AI will bring, rather than relying on our imaginings of the future.  Where is the intersection of AI capabilities and the goals we have set for the firm?  The goals are usually revenue related and these won’t change much, but the way we deliver the results could.   People will have to work with AI, there is no escaping that fact, so what is the strategy to determine how this happens?  We don’t want to leave everyone to their own devices to wander off and somehow work it out by themselves.  Which AI platforms do we need, how much should we budget for them and who will take care of what, are leading questions we need to find answers for?   For some staff, AI may never be an immediate part of their world at this point, although that may also change.  We need to do an analysis of who needs it the most and who needs it first.  Which jobs will benefit the most from applying AI’s capabilities to the work?  That simple question may be difficult to answer because we have to explore the possibilities AI introduces. We may need to appoint champions to drive the usage of AI inside the company, so that we can break the task up into smaller pieces. The scale of AI can be overwhelming.  How can we find ways of having AI help us with becoming more innovative or at least set out some frameworks for us to explore by ourselves?   3.        Staff Training A lot of the training for the use of AI will be internal with people dedicating time to play with it.  If we think of AI as external to our work, then we won’t nominate the time for people to experiment and learn on the job.  The explosion of AI means that no one can keep up with the latest developments as functionalities are superseded by new alternatives.   There is also the issue of the broad range of platform variations and upgrades which are emerging every month.  How can we navigate this breadth and speed?  We can’t but we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed we don’t start.   We should select a few platforms which seem to have the greatest application for what we do and start there, realising we may need to jump on to the back of faster racehorse, once the gun has sounded and we are off barrelling down the track.    We should block out a certain number of hours per week for our team members to play with AI and see where they can apply its power to the business.  If the leader nominates 4 hours a week, for example, then that gives people permission and time from within their work day to experiment.    4.        Reporting Naturally, we want to have reports and updates on the progress and learnings these hours experimenting are yielding.  This requires some time scheduling changes for everyone and for the boss too.  These ideas are all difficult in an already busy life, but we have to grant AI the priority or it will all just be hot air from the boss and there will be no follow through.  We are all touching different parts of the machine, so getting together to share makes a lot of sense and the boss can nominate a couple hours in a month to make sure that happens.   5.        Data We will unearth and collect a host of data, but what do we do with it?  This seeking data for data’s sake is tremendous fun for some, but it all has to connect back to driving the firm forward.   There will be financial data we can use to try and pick up trends or patterns which will aid us in trying to set budgets and allocations for spending.  There will be customer data which can reveal aspects of our service we need to work on or areas where we need greater investment.  There will be market and buyer data we can get access to which may not have been available before, which can better inform the strategies we develop and the decisions we take. Can we find data which will help us maximise our efficiencies and drive the effectiveness of the business?   6.        Clients Can we get deeper insights into our client’s situation?  Obviously clients don’t share everything with us and often we are working blind to the realities they are facing.  How can AI help us to better understand the buyer’s sector of the industry, what is happening with their competitors, government regulations, currency fluctuations, etc.   AI is here to stay and we are all riding the wave whether we like it or not.  Have we decided yet to deal with it intelligently or are we going to keep doing things in a sporadic fashion?  It is time for the leader to lead the firm’s AI revolution.

Recently, I was teaching a class of APAC executives on how to handle pushback to their ideas. Some participants were senior legal counsels, who frequently had to say "no" to their salespeople. As a salesperson myself, being told "no" is something that comes with the territory and is not intimidating at all. In fact, we often hear "no" most of the time. We're tough and have learned to persist until we achieve a "yes." These executives spoke about how challenging it was to get the other side to accept their advice or point of view, which made a lot of sense. Think back to your school days—was there ever a course, or even a fragment of one, that taught you how to argue with someone to get them to agree with you? Academic debating is different; it's an arbitrated intellectual exercise. But the dynamics within a company are entirely different, and most of us aren't trained for these real-world, practical needs, even through corporate education. Here are some key steps to successfully navigate resistance and disagreement, especially when you're battling over ideas, policies, direction, or decisions. 1. Truly Listen to the Other Side We often think we are listening, but when we hear the word "no," it looms large in our minds. We become preoccupied with crafting our counterargument and, as a result, stop fully listening to what’s being said. People often make a statement we dislike and then provide their reasoning. If we've already stopped listening after the part we didn’t like, we can’t fully appreciate their logic. 2. Pause Before Responding Before blurting out our disagreement, we need to pause and think. There are a few ways to do this. We can remain silent and think before speaking, although this can be tricky, as silence may prompt the other party to press harder and add more information. Another method is to use a "cushion"—a neutral, non-committal statement that neither agrees nor disagrees. This buys us valuable thinking time. Even a brief pause of five or six seconds can significantly improve the quality of what we say. Without that pause, we risk saying something we regret because we haven't had enough time to formulate a proper response. 3. Reflect Briefly Use this pause to have a brief internal conversation about the topic. Ask yourself: What do I believe? And why do I believe it? Usually, our opinions are formed based on some personal experience, or something we’ve read, heard, or seen. Recalling the origin of our belief helps us structure our response. 4. Share Your Story Once you've reflected, tell your story. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should clearly outline what happened, where, when, and who was involved. This method reminds me of Japanese grammar, where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, determining whether the action is positive, negative, past, present, or future. You can’t interrupt someone in Japanese until they finish their sentence because you don’t know where they’re going with it. In English, listeners often anticipate the conclusion and jump in or finish the sentence for the speaker. You can't do that in Japanese. By telling your story, you provide background and context. While the listener can disagree with your conclusions, they can’t argue with your background or experience. Given the same context, they might reach the same conclusion. If you tell your story well, they might even reach your conclusion before you do. By holding off on the "punch line" until the very end, you prevent interruptions and ensure they hear you out. Even if they still disagree, they’ll have a clear understanding of why you hold your views. By following these four steps, you can persuade others to consider your ideas and ensure you're heard and understood. In the worst-case scenario, even if they still disagree, at least they will fully understand your reasoning. This allows for a civil discussion without heightened emotions, preserving relationships and enabling you to agree to disagree.  

Pulling rank on people is clearly the fastest and easiest way to get people to fly straight and do what we want. It is also a very dangerous choice in Japan in an era when the demand for people is so strong and the supply so limited. Mobility today means people have choices. If you are not interested in what they have to say or their ideas, they will jump ship to somewhere they think they will be better appreciated. The problem is their ideas are rarely much chop.  They don’t have the experience, sufficient information, enough understanding of the context or the weight of responsibility on their shoulders if it doesn’t work. In a busy boss life, the simplest thing is to tell them “that won’t work” and just keep moving forward because there is so much to do. Here are some human relations principles we can  employ to do a better job in our communication with our people. 1.        The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.  This sounds a bit counterintuitive.  Does it mean I just fold and let them have their way? Not at all.  However we know that people rarely yield once they get into an argument and graciously accept our viewpoint.  Rather they have their ego wrapped up in what they are saying and they won’t let go, so they just keep arguing with us.  Our best response is to not respond in kind and try a different track. 2.        Show respect for the other person’s opinion – never say you are wrong.  This is a red flag to a bull.  One of my trigger words is to be told “no” and another is “you are wrong”, which is basically the same answer. We have to learn to disagree in a way which maintains the relationship.  Telling people they are wrong isn’t going to help with that aim. Whenever the urge seizes you to tell others they are wrong resist the temptation. 3.        If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.  Leaders have ego, position power, pride and status and admitting we are not perfect is not easy for us. If we admit it won’t we be eroding our power?  That fear is fair enough, but what we will find is that by giving up the God mantle and admitting we are human makes it easier for our team to emphasise with what we are trying to do.  The secret is all in the communication of how we admit we are wrong. 4.        Begin in a friendly way.  This sounds easy except when we are busy, harassed, pressured and under the gun we forget this part.  We bring our businesslike self to the conversation rather than stepping back and thinking about first impressions for this conversation. 5.        Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.  Manipulation was the first thing which sprang into my mind when I heard this Principle.  That obviously is a losing proposition.  What is meant here is that our communication skill is operating at a very high level.  We package up the idea and do it in such a way that the other person finds themselves in agreement.  This is a high level of communication skill and takes a lot of practice, but it works well when done correctly. 6.        Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.  Leaders love to talk.  They love to hog the limelight and dominate the conversation because they are such amazing individuals. Rather by giving the floor to others they in turn will feel appreciated and valued.  We already know what we know, so this also invites the opportunity for us to learn things we actually don’t know and broaden our perspectives. 7.        Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers.  Sounds like more manipulation, but it isn’t.  We remember that Socrates was famous for getting people to go deeper in their thinking by asking a series of questions which drove the quality of their understanding.  This is the same idea.  We communicate in such a way that the other person self-discovers the same thinking that we came up with and now we are in perfect agreement. As the leader we can always do better and usually, it is our poor communication ability which leads us into trouble. By changing our approach and how we express ourselves we will have much more impact on getting others to follow us.  Brute force is not going to work in Japan anymore, so we need better tools. 

Have you ever had the experience of leaving a job and seeing your successor screw it up?  We spend so many hours at work and we are trying hard to lift the bar through our leadership.  However, if we do well, we get promoted or we join another company seeking a bigger job.  It is very disheartening to leave and see the place go backwards under your replacement.  You wonder what all those weekends spent working and long hours were al about.  We expect that we add to the cause and the firm progresses and moves forward, improving over time.  We expect those who come after us to be doing the same thing. So it was very confronting to read some statistics recently about how short the term at the top is these days and thinking about what does that mean for the leader’s legacy?  According to data analysis firm Equilar, the median term for a CEO in the 500 largest US companies, is now down to 4.7 years, having dropped twenty percent over the last ten years.  Russell Reynolds says globally, for CFOs, the tenure is down to a five year low of 5.7 years. If you are sent from Headquarters to Japan to run the local operation you don’t have much time.  If you realise this and decide to go gung-ho from Day One and drive change to get the results faster, then you will probably blow up the firm.  On the other hand, if you wait to understand the market, customers, the staff and the culture, then years of study will be required.  By the time you get it, it is time to pack for the next assignment or another job change. The analogy I like is leading in Japan is like swimming in warm lake.  You land here from headquarters and you are immediately placed in a warm, nice lake, but the surface is covered in a heavy fog.  You can hear voices and vaguely make out shapes.  Over time, the fog lifts a little as you understand Japan better and you can make out the shoreline and some islands.  After about three years the fog lifts and it is now time to leave for your next post. What did you get done, what legacy have you left? If we go too fast the Japanese team cannot keep up and we have new internal troubles.  This might include staff writing to the Chairman anonymously informing headquarters that you are ruining the business in Japan and destroying the firm here.  It might mean key staff conclude you are an idiot and they vote with their feet and join the opposition. In today’s society in Japan, job mobility has changed an enormous amount and shifting firms doesn’t have the same stigma it once had which used to ensure lifetime employment with the one company.  It might mean you decide to become “efficient” with customer relationships and after overcoming stubborn staff resistance, you force you will on everyone only to see your buyers depart and not come back. On the other hand, headquarters are contacting you because they are not seeing the spike in revenue numbers they sent you out there for.  The staff engagement survey results are a disaster. Your bosses are not happy with your performance as a leader. You try to explain the subtleties and nuances of the Japanese market and how business is done here, but it all falls on deaf ears.  They are fully preoccupied with themselves and nobody cares about your problems. There are no simple answers unfortunately.  Listening is a good idea at the initial six month stage, especially listening to customers.  Finding allies within the staff of firm who can get behind your changes is going to be vital.  You can pontificate and shoot out orders, to only find those below are sabotaging your efforts and are not doing anything to carry out your commands. This country has a lot of informal lobbying going on underground and the big meetings are there to rubber stamp what has already been negotiated prior with the relevant parties. That means we have to persuade, rather than order, to coalesce rather the remonstrate.  Sadly, none of this is fast and your bosses want fast. We are fighting two fires on two fronts at the same time. We are pushing headquarters to get behind what we are trying to do and we are persuading the team to do the same thing, but at a faster pace than what they are used to.  Staff are terrific at telling us what won’t work and why, if they are involved.  They are less help in coming up with creative solutions to overcome problems.  Often, we are the one to think differently and be prepared to try something new.  Bite sized experimentation suits Japan, given the general fear of failure and risk aversion. Change takes time in Japan, lots of time and maybe it just isn’t possible in one rotation of your term here and you have to rely on your successor to pick up the gauntlet and keep pushing the strategy through the changes.  If you don’t get headquarters to sign on for it and therefore get them to engage your successor to keep going, then there will be lots of effort exuded by you and none of your legacy to show for it in Japan.  You leave the county feeling unfulfilled and ashamed you didn’t make a difference.  Something you have been known for in your previous positions and one of the reason your were selected to go to Japan in the first place.  Your mouth is full of the bitter ashes of years wasted, as you head for the boarding lounge to catch your flight out of Japan. Or you approach it differently and get a better outcome.  Trust me,  it won’t happen by itself, so you have to box smart while you are here.    

You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed.  Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients.  Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk.  A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level.  Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise.  Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”.  At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains.  They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality.  There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand. When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice.  When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available.  The young lady checking me in, tells me she doesn’t know.    I ask her for the name of the General Manager.  This is where it gets very interesting.  Her response - stone motherless silence.  Not one word in reply.  Nothing!   So I asked again.  More total silence.  I elevated the volume of my request to try and illicit a response.  More pure silence.  This low level of client service has now morphed across to the ridiculous zone. Finally I get a whispered “Andrew Zou”.   So what am I thinking now?  Wow, this Andrew Zou character is a lousy General Manager, because his staff are so poorly trained.  There is no room ready for me and no indication of when it will be ready, so in that great Aussie tradition, I head for the bar and wait.   Any number of things can go wrong with the delivery of a product or service.  We all understand that.  The problems arise when our client facing team members are not properly trained in how to deal with these issues.  Hotels have guest complaints all the time, so they should be absolute gold medal winning, total geniuses at dealing with them.  This would have to be a key area of training in that industry.  The poor training is a direct result of poor leadership.  If the leaders are working well, then the staff service levels will be working well.    The Westin brand is global and I have stayed in a number of their properties in Asia.  The Taipei property was killing their global brand and that is an expensive thing in the world of cut-throat competition amongst leading Hotels.  From this experience, I realized that I need to be very vigilant about the service levels in my own company.  Are we fully geared up for trouble, should it arise?  How do we protect the brand across 220 locations worldwide?  Can people get to me easily if there is a problem?  Are we doing enough training in client complaint handling?  The Westin Taipei leadership did a poor job.  We should go back a take a long hard look at our own operations.  We may be incorrectly assuming things are working, when they may not be functioning properly.  We have to protect the brand at every touch point with the clients.  That is the job of the leadership team, starting with the boss.

Is change good or bad?  When I was promoted or received a big bonus, I liked the change from my previous situation.  When the big boss changed at the very top, the person who hired me got fired the negative ramifications ultimately cascaded down the line. Eventually I had to look for another job and I didn’t like that change much. Often organisations go through major internal changes and the middle level leaders are expected to rally the troops behind the change.  How do you do that if you don’t agree with the change or don’t like the change yourself?  If you buck the system and refuse to follow the changes, then you are automatically identifying yourself as someone who has to leave the organisation and the machine will crush you. Change is such a tricky area for everyone, but it is so common in business.  Markets change, clients change, supply chains change, currency rates change – the list is long.  You would think that with all of these “normal” changes in business, we would all be excellent in adjusting to change.  However, that is not true, is it? The status quo is so attractive to most of us because it is known and safe.  We have been doing the same thing for quite a while and we are good at it. We are doing skilled work in the current formation and suddenly we are being asked to change and are being pushed out of our Comfort Zone. Japan, in particular loves continuity and no change, because all the risk has been shaken out of the system and what we are left with is the lowest risk alternative. As leaders we have to make a decision.  If we fundamentally disagree with the new approach then we should find another place to work, where we can be happy and in agreement with the direction.  The chances of us doing our best work there dramatically improve, compared to if we stay and conduct an underground personal resistance to the changes.  Ultimately, we will be outed by an ambitious rival or subordinate and probably fired. If we are not willing to move companies, then we have to be willing to go with the new direction.  Here is the issue – a half-hearted compliance isn’t going to work well.  Our team members will feel the lack of commitment and enthusiasm to the cause. They in turn, will not rally around us as the leader and charge into the fire together.  How can we make this change work within our small cog in the machine?  The big bosses set the direction back at headquarters, but they can never get their hands dirty with the daily minutiae at our section level.  That application piece is within our control.  We may be buffeted by the winds of macro change, but the micro where we deliver the change is within our grasp. We have almost total control over how we do it. What we are feeling about the changes is no doubt being felt by the team members as well.  Turning up one Monday morning as some mealy mouthed, apparatchik mouthpiece of the machine isn’t going to go down well.  Cynicism is already rampart in modern society and this will push some people over the edge, as we try to order them about what they need to do.  All we can expect is resistance if we take this road. How can we approach this to get everyone behind us and the changes? Rather than being definitive about how to make the needed changes, we need to have the “change” discussion with the team.  In Stage One we need people to be able to air their concerns and fears and be taken seriously.  Stage Two is where we move on to how we as a team can implement the change in our world.  Getting from Stage One to Stage Two is no easy feat, because many will remain unconvinced and unmoved. They will want to keep going with the old way of doing things. For the “never changers”, we need to have private one-on-one discussions and have them make a decision about stay or go.  If it is “stay”, then they need to be part of the team decision-making process and contribute to practical solutions to make this work in a way we can all live with the changes.  Just telling them to “suck it up and get back to work” is always a bad idea. It communicates you are not important. We are saying, “I have three stripes on my sleeve and so you have to do what I say, because I am pulling rank on you”. They may in fact stay, but they will join the underground guerrilla movement against the changes. We will wind up fighting each other internally when we need to form a united front against our competitors in the market. We need converts not resisters. So as the leader we need to get the discussion out in the open and get team ownership of the way forward.  Maybe we all have to hold our noses against the stench of the changes, but we will hold them together and find a way through.

This Japanese expression “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会), linked to Zen, focuses on transience and can be translated as “one time, one meeting” or “treasure an unrepeatable moment”.  It is often closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, which is certainly never a hurried affair and the devil is definitely in the details of how the ceremony is conducted.  Contrast that with our modern leader life in business.  We are constantly in motion, always time poor and harassed for 24 hours a day by an avalanche of emails.  We migrate from one meeting room to another, confronting an endless assortment of meeting details. We have many agendas in our minds when we meet people and our shrinking concentration spans make a lot of what we do a blur, bereft of reflection. This is a poor contextual background for dealing with people. Being so time challenged, we are constantly cutting corners and shaving off minutes to try and get it all done.  Being “efficient” with people is a bad idea for leaders, but often once we are on a roll, that efficiency bug takes us over.  The Ichi-Go, Ichi-E idea is that we treat each moment of interaction as special rather than just serial. If our team members felt that we were treating them individually as “special”, their engagement levels would be at very high levels, in what is increasingly becoming a tech driven, impersonal world.  But often we are galloping too fast on horseback to smell the flowers, as we fly by.  If we break each staff interaction down to a single defining unit, we will change the pace we interact with people from busy and tormented, to calm and caring. I remember a terrific example of Ichi-Go, Ichi-E by Ian Mackie, my old boss at Jones Lang Wootten In Brisbane.  It was after 6.00pm one evening and I was sitting in his office having a discussion about a deal, when one of the secretaries was walking past on her way home and she popped her head in the door to say something to him.  In those days Directors were like Gods compared to humble secretaries in that hierarchy.  Yet Ian stopped what he was doing and he gave her his complete and entire attention for that one moment.  He was showing his respect for her as a person, and it was a powerful experience for me to see how he handled that encounter. Often, as the boss, we don’t show enough respect because we are rushing, preoccupied with what we need to get done and our people can become cogs in the fly wheels of our business.  Like Ian, we need to slow it down to a stop.  Focus on the person to the exclusion of everything else, stop our brain for racing ahead and give that person our full attention.  It sounds easy to say, but actually doing it is very difficult. We are usually caught up in the moment of what we want and what is important to us. We are perpetually rearranging things to suit what we need, when we need it. I am the first one to raise his hand as guilty of trying to do too much, in too short a time and just constantly cramming stuff into my day, such that my interactions are very “businesslike”. That is not a great idea when we are dealing with people.  Ichi-Go, Ichi-E as a concept, reminds me to stop doing that and instead treat every staff interaction like a treasure.  Once I switch my mindset to that “treasure” construct, then everything changes, especially around my time allocation.  Just mentally slowing down while I am speaking to my team member, allows me to be more considerate, less selfish and self-centered.  Instead of being “me focused”, I can switch to being “them focused”.  I can ask about things that are important to them, rather than making sure that brief conversation is all about what is important to me at that moment. I have learnt to stand my keyboard up, so I can’t use it, when one of my team comes to me to talk and this helps me to focus my eye contact on  them.  I was reminded of how important this is when I visited a doctor here recently.  The head of the clinic was sitting slumped in front of his screen and typing when I entered his office, he didn’t greet me, didn’t even look up at me and kept his face toward his computer keyboard and screen.  Frankly, it was unbelievable, especially in this modern age. It made me feel unimportant and irrelevant.  This is how we make our team members feel when we don’t stop what we are doing and don’t focus on that one moment with them.  So, from now on, remember Ichi-Go, Ichi-E and practice treasuring every interaction with the team members and build their engagement and commitment one meeting at a time, one person at a time.  Do this instead of rushing through life in an often meaningless and unfulfilling scramble.  People do make the difference and how we treat them is what stands us apart as the leader and how successful we are in that role.  

Recently, my social media has been full of short videos of various politicians and supporters giving talks at the Democratic National Convention.  It always begs the question for me about what are we doing as leaders in business?  We have the same goals.  We want our message to be heard and to be convincing.  The difference is, I am sure, all of these speakers have been well coached and have been practicing hard for their moment in the spotlight, given a global audience of massive proportions.  In business, we have our own team at our Town Hall or perhaps an audience at a business conference or maybe a small Chamber of Commerce gathering.  Actually, it doesn’t matter about the venue, because skill is skill, image is image and credibility is credibility. I was reminded of this when one of my son’s friends complained about the organisation’s leader, when he has just joined the firm after graduating from varsity.  Being at the very bottom of the pile, young people are there to stay quiet and listen to their elders and betters.  The issue though is, they are not stupid. In this case, the top person was a poor speaker and so the new entrants first thought is, “have I made a mistake?”.  They worry that this company isn’t as good as they imagined it was.  If the top dog, the “face” of the organisation is a dud, then maybe the whole artifice is a problem too. As business leaders, it would be rare that there is a lot of effort put into the talk preparation beforehand.  Smart, successful, assured people are confident about winging it.  The problem is we can become excessively confident over time and neglect the basics.  Here are seven points to reflect on when giving your next business talk to ensure you do a much better and more credible job. 1.         Rehearse.  This step is always the victim of tight schedules, but the downside of neglecting it serious because our personal and professional brands suffer.  Even if it is a minimalist approach on the prep front, at least do a run through before you launch forth in front of your listeners.  Remember they are judging you and your firm, on what they see you do. 2.        Eyes.  Make eye contact with your audience.  I don’t mean the usual fake eye contact, where the speaker dramatically scans the crowd but in fact doesn’t look at any one person.  I mean hard core, full on, six seconds of riveting eye contact, with as many people as possible, but delivered one by one,  maintained over the entire course of the talk.  Our listeners need to feel we are speaking directly to them and that we want their 100% attention.  Six seconds is enough to engage them without pulverising the audience into submission and coming across as being too intrusive.  3.        Face.  We make the mistake of thinking that our slides are the most powerful visual tool in our armoury.  Not true.  Our face shines through much more brilliantly and powerfully.  Our facial expressions are absolute commanders of nuance, meaning and impression.  Many business speakers remind me of Noh masks, which are frozen in carved wood with only a single countenance.  Don’t be like that.  We need to use our face to amplify the emotions – belief, sincerity,  empathy, care, humanity - behind our message. 4.        Voice.  I noticed that many speakers at the Convention were loud, loud, loud  all the way through in their speech.  They were trying to speak powerfully, to inspire, to motivate.  That is all very well but modulation is a critical piece for really being heard. It allows us to amplify certain words and phrases, such that they stand above the other words placed around them.  Dropping to a whisper, after bellowing away in your talk, is the ultra power play in messaging.  That contrast pinpoints everyone’s attention to what we say next during the whisper and that is what we want to have happen for the key points in our talk. 5.        Gestures.  They are another amplifier.  Fifteen seconds is the maximum length for holding any gesture, before it becomes stale, dull and lifeless.  Eye power combined with voice power, combined with a powerful gesture is an unbeatable combo when speaking.  I see so many CEOs speaking with a vice like grip on the podium and thereby denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures to strengthen their key points.  It is a big mistake.  When I have a podium, I purposely stand back from it, so that my hands are not tempted to touch it.  Be careful with podiums, because there seems to be a magnetic facility drawing our hands to grab it and hold on to it, so it won’t escape. 6.        Pause.  We saw many good examples at the Convention of the better speakers employing pauses. These allow us to differentiate between what we have just said and what we are about to say. We create a small break, before we say the next thing.  That small gap allows the words to be heard clearly and gives the audience enough time to digest the previous content.  Pauses also create anticipation of what we are about to say, which is a great way of drawing the audience into us and our message.  7.        Posture.  Stand up straight, don’t slouch, don’t kick one hip out and don’t look casual. A tall, straight back emanates authority and credibility.  It shows confidence and commitment to what we are saying.  These are subtle physical signals. We are all finely tuned into these signals, because that is how we have learnt to survive dangers over the centuries.  Our eyes spot some physical action in front of us, we then anticipate what comes next, as well as making a judgement about what we are seeing.  Slouching signals “unprofessional”, “casual”, “not serious”, “lazy”.  By going in the other direction and thinking to carefully control our posture, we can determine the signal the audience receives and make it a winner for us. These seven elements are not difficult or beyond mastery. By the way, the bar for public speakers in Japan is super low.  Just by mastering these simple elements, we can catapult ourselves into the top 5% of speakers.

Twelve Steps To A Win-Win Conflict Resolution Part Two We have looked at some of the steps in Part One, so let’s continue with the last six elements.  7. Deal with facts, not emotions In sports, as I have noted earlier, we say “play the ball, not the man” and in business we need to look at problems, not personalities. This sounds fair enough, but it is not easy to do. We may find we are attacking the person, their ideas and opinions rather than looking at solving the problem. Maybe we don’t like them, their manner, their attitude, their values, their style of speech, their rivalry. That situation is unlikely to change in a hurry. They won’t become our best buddy any time soon or ever. Nevertheless, we have to work with them and overcome this conflict. We need to switch over to “outcome focus” and logic. This will take the personalities component out of the equation and help us get to an agreed solution faster. We bite our tongue, swallow our bile, gird our loins and get on with it, regardless of how irritating they are. In these situations, I keep telling myself, “Greg - big picture, big picture”. 8. Be honest Politicking, game playing, one upping are all well known in business, but stay away from these pursuits. Focus on the reason everyone is working hard in the company. Remind yourself what we are we trying to achieve relative to our competitors. We need to come back to the basics of the vision, mission, and values. Dale Carnegie’s human relations Principle Number Seventeen is useful here: “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”.  Strip out the emotion and be objective about their viewpoint. We also need to see our own perspective equally in an honest way.  Why do we hold our view?  What is really driving our position? 9. Present alternatives and provide evidence Compromise is the assembly of other means of solving an issue. Things that make sense and are workable are very hard to argue against.   Concessions in non-core areas should be made to build trust and the cooperation muscle. Look at options in terms of the other side’s interests. When promoting your own ideas, make sure these are backed up with strong evidence, so that they are easy to agree with and hard to argue against. Opinion is terrific, but it is just an opinion.  Data can contradict opinion in a way which is more acceptable than simply arguing the toss. Storytelling is the most effective way to introduce data.  Wrap the numbers up in a story and you will be heard. 10. Be an expert communicator Communication skills are essential to finding resolution to points of difference and can be done in a way that the relationship is maintained. Really listen to the other side. We often think we are listening, but actually inside our brain, we are formulating what we will say next and so are not really taking in the other side’s points. If you find yourself jumping in, finishing their sentences, or cutting them off when they are speaking, stop doing that.  Hear them out. Hold your points instead of being in a rush.  We are rarely short of time for the discussion. Often our counterparty in the conflict feels they are not being listened to, treated fairly or taken seriously. We can do all of those things by just remaining silent and letting them talk. After they stop, feeding back that we have understood them is a good habit to develop. By letting them talk, we may find out some additional information or angle we didn’t have, which can change our perspective on the situation and lead to a resolution.  Just bullying the other person with our opinion doesn’t lead to this type of win-win outcome. 11. End on a good note Win-win means feeling like we all did well. Shake on it, agree the next action steps and milestones. Nominate who is responsible for what and how progress and success will be measured. Also decide how further disputes which may arise during the execution phase will be handled. 12. Enjoy the process Companies benefit from having a range of views and diverse experiences when it comes to solving problems. The process of resolving disputes educates us on how to see things differently and to entertain other ways of doing things. We can often build stronger relationships having gone through this type of dispute resolution because we have come to know and understand each other much better than we would have otherwise. Resolving conflicts is not easy, but most people pour their energy into winning the conflict rather than trying to find the win-win. The latter is the better option every time if you want to win in the market. Fighting amongst ourselves makes no sense, and we can do better than that. These 12 steps will get us pointed in the right direction.    

 “Remember that other people may be totally wrong, but they don’t think so”. This quote from Dale Carnegie sums up the problem. All those other people we have trouble with had better fly straight. All they need is a better understanding of why they are wrong and we are right. By force of will, strenuous, sustained argument and politicking, we will win the day. Or will we? Actually, getting a clear win in internal conflict situations is rarely the result. Battles may be won, but wars are lost. Energy that should be directed at the competitors is instead turned loose on our own team members, to no good outcome. We need to be able to deal with internal conflicts in a way that resolves the issues in a positive way. Not so easy! Conflict is with us everywhere, every day. That is the nature of the human condition. We have different desires and thinking. Some conflicts can be very low level and minor and we continue to cruise through the day. In other cases, however, it becomes a lot more problematic. In any organisation, when the machine is fighting against itself, progress becomes suspended. Instead of concentrating on beating the other guy, we have suddenly become locked into an internal battle against ourselves. In large firms, these can be driven by powerful personalities thrusting themselves forward to get to the top. They bring their divisions with them into the fight and a lot of energy and time is wasted dropping large rocks on our own feet!  We need to see the bigger picture here and look for how we can marshal our strength, access the diversity in our ranks and maximise the creative possibilities rather than concentrating on the battling ourselves. People tend to gravitate toward extremes. They either fold and don’t stand up for what they feel is right or they try to bulldoze everyone else and make them bend to their will. If we want progress, we need a better way forward, achieved through compromise and collaboration. In Part One we are going to cover six fo the twelve Win-Win steps we can take to turn things around. 1. Have a positive attitude Our attitude is a big factor. If we shift our thinking to how this conflict situation can be converted into a learning and growth opportunity, we will have more success. Easy to say, but not so easy to do!  We have to step back from the fray and think about the bigger picture.  Our rivals are not dead, the market ignores our internecine feuds, and clients don’t care.  How can we afford to be focused inwards when there is so much happening on the outside of the organisation?  We have to become positive we can put the conflict into context and deal with it on that basis. 2.    Meet on mutual ground Find a neutral location to remove all the residue of the past from the front of your mind. Meeting rooms are rarely the best choice for a meeting when we are in conflict with someone.  There is a formality about the situation, which can hinder gaining the flexibility we need to resolve this disagreement.  Go outside to a coffee shop or meet over lunch and try to “change the air”. Find a mutually agreeable time when you won’t have interruptions. Turn the phones off and give each other the time to be understood. Don’t try to deal with complex conflicts over the phone, online or by email warfare – always, where possible, do it face to face. 3. Clearly define and agree on the issue We might be arguing at cross purposes, so let’s clarify precisely what the real issue is and concentrate on that. If it has many facets and is complex, let’s break it up into component parts. Attach priorities and start with the most pressing core issues. Misunderstandings based on language usage happen all the time.  We need to agree on the thing at stake in a way which both sides understand.  You meet people who are hard to understand.  Their way of expressing their thoughts is unclear to us and we struggle to get their point. We need to get clarity on what we both mean and what we are worried about. 4. Do your homework Think about the issue from the other side’s perspective, as well as from your own. Normally, we don’t do this because we are fully focused on ourselves, what we want and why we want it. Some points are must haves and some are nice to haves – let’s be very clear about which is which. Also, at the very start, define your BATNA or Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement – basically your walk away position. There may be no way to resolve the conflict and we have to push it up the hierarchy for resolution. This is usually not appreciated by the big bosses. They expect us to thrash it out amongst ourselves and let them concentrate on their own work. 5. Take an honest inventory of yourself You know yourself. You know your own “hot buttons” that need to be reined in. Are your feelings leading the charge or is your brain determining how this should progress?  Being told “no” is usually a powerful trigger for the adrenaline to hit the bloodstream, as we go into fight mode.  It always works with me!  I know that, so I have to control myself and calm down before I say something on the spot which I will regret at leisure. 6. Look for shared interests Conflict pulls you to the extremes and compromise meets in the middle. To get agreement, we need to emphasise where we are similar, have shared interests and objectives. Move the discussion to the future, rather than raking over the coals of the past disputes, crimes and misdemeanors.  Usually there is a small percentage of the issue which is the real sticking point.  Rather than butting heads on that difference immediately, we can isolate out the areas where we agree or where we can compromise.  This builds up a positive energy of cooperation and it is no longer an all-or-nothing conversation. We will continue with points Seven through Twelve in Part Two.

Business is more fast-paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained.  Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely irritated. Twenty years ago, we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations! Imagine our forebears who, when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super slow snail mail ping-pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity. Not today. We want it all and we want it now baby and look out anyone who gets in our way. We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace. We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention.  1. Process Conflict. Is this what we are dealing with? Processes are required by managers to do their job and by Compliance to protect everyone. Sometimes the process can be very directive, constrained, and inflexible. When times get tough, a lot of processes get screwed down very hard. When things improve, they are still left like that even though they should be loosened off. They no longer fit the circumstances we are facing at the coal face. Let’s calculate how much process control we have in this particular case we are facing? We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner. They may not be aware this is causing problems for others down the food chain. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and to get their ownership, come up with a joint action plan to fix it. 2. Role Conflicts. These easily arise in flat organisations. Turf wars can be legendary, as ambitious individuals duke it out internally for promotions, power, and control. Where are the boundaries of authority, accountability, and responsibility?  Besuited corporate pirates try to board us and have to be seen off. What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue? We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead. This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is. We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. Role clarity is critical and must be clarified, or confusion can reign. This fix may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!). 3. Interpersonal Conflicts.  These are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actual actions, behaviours, words as well as the reported versions from others around us.   There may be some prior negative history there clouding our vision. We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Also, are people around me telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason?  Sycophants and corporate politicians see internal conflict as an opportunity and a ladder for themselves. They are keen to create trouble for us and a leg up for them.  There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are, but actually we don’t want to do them. However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself. This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the issues. Before you do that, though, forget about what you want for the moment and put yourself in their shoes. Reflect on how you would see the issue from their perspective. This will make it easier to have a successful one-on-one conversation. 4. Direction Conflicts.  These arise when the path forward is unclear. Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone, at the same time, about what needs to happen. Working at cross purposes is both expensive and damaging. Check that you are, in fact, clear yourself on the organisation’s current direction or vision. Bring up the discrepancy between you and the other party in respectful terms, in a neutral way. This is not about establishing blame (although we often like doing that!), but about getting joint clarity about what is the aim and how it should be delivered together. 5. External Conflicts. These are tough because, by definition, you lack power and control. Ask yourself whether you have a dog in this fight or not? Choose your battles carefully and concentrate on what you can do to improve things, rather than wasting energy and effort whining about what you cannot control. As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control, stop! Instead, re-set your mind around how the situation can be improved. Ask yourself, “in what way can we continue to move the organisation forward?”. In the words of the self-appointed “hardest working man in show business”, Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”! We need to move our psychology to positive mode.  We should start making adjustments to cope with the degree of control we can bring to this external process or situation which is inhibiting us. Conflict is part and parcel of corporate life, but usually we are not strategic about how to deal with it.  We get locked into a stimulus-response loop, which means a constant flow of tactical solutions rather than looking for strategic solutions. We are also rarely trained on how to deal with conflict, so we are usually making it up as we go along.  Analyse the situation and decide which one of these factors is the main one at play and then start working on solutions from there.  Sometimes there may be more than one factor we have to consider, so we have to prioritise where we should start, but we must start.  Getting overwhelmed or paralysed doesn’t fix the problem.  Focus on the key problem and get to work on that. Momentum will work in your favour.      

I saw a video recently from Rampley and Co in the UK featuring Caryn Franklin, a Fashion and Identity Commentator, talking about something called “enclothed cognition”.  When I saw her work title - Fashion and Identity Commentator - and the reference to psychology, I was dubious.  I was thinking, “here we go, more psychobabble”.  She referenced a psychology study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky, published in the journal of Experimental Social Psychology in July 2012. They looked at the “diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors - the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them”.  In short, the influence of clothes depends on wearing them and their symbolic meaning. For the leader, this means to me that what I choose to wear impacts how I feel about myself and how I am perceived by those around me.  For men in business in Japan, if you are a white-collar worker, that means wearing a suit.  If the choice of suit and all the other accoutrements like shirts, ties, pocket squares, cufflinks, watches, shoes, etc., are important, how much thought do we normally put into it? We all know old sayings like “dress for success” and intrinsically, we get it.  Wearing a suit like a slob, with food stains on the tie and down at heel, scuffed shoes, is sending a message about our own self-worth and our professional brand to the public.  On the other hand, if we wear a well-cut suit, with an overall smart appearance, we feel more confident and more capable and the research bears this out. If this is the case, then should we be better educated about what we are wearing?  When I moved from being a Griffith University Modern Asian Studies Ph.D. candidate to graduating and getting my first real corporate job, I had no idea what to wear.  I never saw my father wear a suit to work and I didn’t grow up with any concepts about men’s classic clothing.  Brisbane is a hot and humid climate, so generally, everyone dressed for the weather and I did too.  One small blessing was that I had the self-awareness to know I was clueless.  I went to see Mitchell Ogilvie, who at that time, had his men’s clothing store in upper Edward Street in Brisbane and it had the dark wood panelling, leather chairs and was very swish.  I explained that I was about the start work at Jones, Lang, Wootton, but had no appropriate clothing to suit the work.  Mitch assured me he was dressing many of the Directors there, so he knew exactly what I needed to buy, to blend in.  He did a good job (thanks Mitch) and I always felt I was one of the better dressed employees there and this helped my confidence and how I was regarded. Around that time, the Prime Minister of Australia became Paul Keating from the Labor Party.  He, like me, grew up in modest circumstances and yet he managed to get the highest position in the land.  I read somewhere that unlike his predecessors, he didn’t wear suits made in Australia, but wore Italian suits by Ermenegildo Zegna.  When I would see him on television, in the Parliament, giving speeches, he always looked very sharp and better dressed than his Tory political opponents. I decided I would wear Zegna suits too and have been a client for thirty years and their size 52 fits me like it was designed for my body. It gave me confidence, even when I was out of my depth, that at least I looked like I knew what I was doing. Had I ever planned my wardrobe with my personal brand in mind?  Not really.  I had just accumulated suits over the years, especially when travelling to Italy on holiday.  I would wear them out and simply buy a replacement. Over the last decade, I have started to add more custom suits and have started to think more about what I am wearing and why. I wish I had done this much earlier, given the psychology of how you feel based on what you are wearing and how people regard you professionally, regarding your public brand. I often get compliments about how well I am dressed and earlier this year I started a blog on social media called “Fare Bella Figura – Master First Impressions, Be A Sharp Dressed Man”.  I was highly hesitant to launch it, because I had never seen a businessman like myself, completely unrelated to the clothing business, talking about what he was wearing and why.  The premise was that people make snap judgments about us, based on how we look, before we even get a chance to open our mouths, so why not do more to control that first impression?  At that time, I wasn’t aware of this research by Adam and Galinsky, but instinctively felt what I would choose to wear was impacting my confidence and my image with others before I had a chance to speak with them. If it makes a difference, as leaders, we need to make the most of this opportunity to increase our strength internally and externally, vis-à-vis our business rivals.  It requires study and dough to do it, but if we take the long-term view, it is doable.  Don’t be like me and work all of this out too lethargically.  Instead, work on assembling your classic men’s clothing armour in Japan and wade into battle, duking it out with your competition and win!  

I meet a lot of CEOs in Japan.  I am always out there networking and looking for clients.  If they cannot become a client, then I try to encourage them to be a guest on my podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews.  I get two groups in particular who will refuse the offer – women and Scandinavians.  They say that women are more reticent about putting themselves forward than men and my own unscientific survey would seem to bear that out.  If a man only has 60% of the qualifications for a job, he will raise his hand whereas a woman will only do so, if she has 90%.  This is what I guess is happening with my invitation to come on the podcast and talk about one topic - leading in Japan.  The women are lacking in confidence to talk about the subject, because they are not feeling they are perfect enough. The Scandinavians I know here tell me that their culture is to not push yourself forward and to stay in the background.  Their podcast guest refusal rate stands out, so I guess this is what is happening with their thinking.  So far, 213 leaders have managed to spend an hour with me talking about leading in Japan for the weekly podcast, so I am finding enough of those in agreement.  It isn’t as if I cannot get guests, because no one wants to join me on video and audio to talk about leadership. I think both groups reflect a misunderstanding of what their leader role is in Japan.  The leader here is the face of the business and particularly in this social media age, we need to be masters of this new universe.  I get it.  Taking your photo or even worse – video – is not something we all welcome.  We are very self-conscious about how lacking we are in terms of being photogenic or how awkward we look on video and when we hear our own voice, we shudder.  In life, I have found I am particularly unable to be photogenic, so I totally sympathise.  You know when you take that group shot and when you get it back you look for yourself – it is always a disappointment for me. In this modern world of work, however, we are all in a life and death struggle to attract a declining demographic of young people and mid-careers hires to join us.  We must be competitive, and that means we need to be getting some clear messages out into the world about who we are and what are our values. We need to be good communicators and also add our image to go with the words.  If we can speak the words on video and audio even better. I have been told by numerous guests on my podcast that they found that they were successful in attracting new staff who had checked them and seen the video interview.  I can believe that, because the nature of the interview is very authentic and no one so far has succeeded in pushing forth a fake version of themselves to fool the masses.  I don’t say much during the interview and just let the guests talk. Occasionally, I will dig down on a point to go a bit deeper, but the bulk of the time is theirs.  People watching the interview get a very clear picture of the boss and then can decide if this is the type of place where they want to work. Clients also check us out and they are making decisions about us too in terms of do they want to have a relationship with our company.  They want to know who we are and what we stand for.  This is an important chance for the CEO to become active and provide the content the buyers are looking for.  They want to know who the boss is and what they are like. Hiding in the background is not a clever option.  It is much better to work on mastering the medium.  Looking straight down the barrel of the camera lens is not that easy and for many people, it is a formidable obstacle.  Video is difficult to come across naturally, I find.  Using teleprompters is not easy either and getting the right rhythm is a challenge for me. I always have trouble with photo shoots because I manage to look like a dork more often than not.  I was watching something on TikTok where a male model was demonstrating how to move and stand, to get the right shot and I realised I have no ability to do that. Fortunately, Tia Haygood, who is my local photographer here, manages to make me look presentable enough to squeak by. What I have found is that the more you do it, the better you become, and refusing to participate is a guarantee that you will never master the medium.  The CEO shouldn’t be hiding. Instead, they should be pushing their message forward at every opportunity.  So find Tia if you are in Tokyo and work on your official portrait shots to use on social media and on your website.  Get a videographer like Rionne McAvoy, who I use from Japan Media Services, involved to help you with creating quality videos.  I have been using Tia and Rionne for years and I trust their work, which is why I am mentioning them if you are looking for help locally here in Japan. The point is the leader has to lead from the front and be the face of the business.  We need to break down any potential barriers to getting staff or clients.  Get the photos, the video, the audio, go on podcasts, do the interviews – do every possible thing you can to control the image you are projecting.  If you can’t speak confidently or coherently, then come and do some training with us and we will fix that for you.  There are no excuses anymore because there are plenty of people around to help. Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader whose team gets results? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources.There is a perfect solution for you- To LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43sQHxV ) To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj ) To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK) If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. About The Author Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training Contact me at [email protected] Bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery".  He has also written "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めましょう) and his brand new book is “Japan Leadership Mastery”. Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki. He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Has 6 weekly podcasts: 1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series, 2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え 3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series 4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト 5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show 6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube: 1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV 2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery 3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo. Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.      

Being an Aussie I don’t have the right to select the next US President or get involved in American politics.  I will steer clear of this minefield and concentrate on what we can all learn from the Biden train wreck. One moment he is a contender and in an instant he is struggling to hold on to power.  Why?  Because he gave a rambling speech in his debate with Donald Trump, viewed by over 50 million Americans. He was prepped for this debate by his handlers and yet it was a debacle. What happens in business?  If you are the CEO of a listed company, there is a lot of public scrutiny of what you say and how well you say it.  If the company is not listed, then the internal team are studying the CEO to gauge how the firm is faring and if their jobs safe or what are the chances to do well within this company.  One of the young people I know who has just finished university and has entered his company mentioned how shocked he was to hear the President speak in public for the first time.  Usually new entrants are vetted by HR and their initial supervisor, so their opportunities to hear the big boss are few and far between, until they have joined up. His feedback was an instant concern that he had chosen the wrong firm.  The President’s inability to make a competent professional speech was a coffee stain moment.  We all know that old saw about if the tray you pull down on your flight has coffee stains left there from a previous flight, it means this airline can’t be trusted and they are probably not maintaining the engines properly.  We judge firms by what we see. If the leader is a shambles on their feet speaking to the troops, then doubts light up immediately. What is remarkable, though, is how few CEOs are excellent speakers.  I attend a lot of public speeches by corporate leaders here, covering a range of nationalities, and it is rare to hear a leader acquit themselves professionally.  Recently, I was shocked to see a local leader of a major global firm have to read his self-introduction to convince the voting audience to elect him to the organisation’s committee. This gentleman wasn’t some fresh faced kid.  I am guessing early fifties.  That means he has been in business for around thirty years and yet he can’t even get up and promote himself for selection to a prestigious position on the committee.  I doubt he is anymore effective in rallying the staff around his vision for the future of the organisation. He was bad, but the other contenders weren’t impressive either. All of us in Japan face a growing nightmare of Darwinian proportions as we compete for a diminishing resource of capable staff, in particular those who can speak English.  Being able to rally the team is only going to become more critical as the recruiters start hitting our people like sharks in a feeding frenzy.  They will be luring people way and picking up 40% placement fees of first year salaries on the way through. The substantial financial rewards for this very average group of individuals is way out of proportion to their actual business competencies and abilities.  That doesn’t matter though, because all they have to do is be a better siren to your people than you are and lure them across to greener pastures. Most CEOs are in that position because they were technical people who made it to the top or they have been in management positions and have shown capabilities to get things done in their previous postings.  Japan is different and a track record overseas is not a real currency here.  The ability to adapt yourself to how things are done here and to be effective with a Japanese workforce are the critical make or break skills. Communication skills are at a premium and it is more difficult here because the number of people who can understand English at a high level is limited.  Few of these foreign CEOs have sufficient Japanese skills to be effective.  To get a combo of Japanese fluency and high level speaking skills is an even more demanding recipe for local success.  I know plenty of foreigners here who are fluent in Japanese, but I don’t know so many who can carry a crowd, who can be persuasive and effective in Japanese. Nevertheless, as Joe Biden has demonstrated, if you can’t make it as an effective communicator, your whole claim to the crown is in doubt.  What do I do about the unfortunate CEO who had to read his own self-introduction?  I would like to suggest that he do High Impact Presentations with us and learn how to give a talk and be a success.  This is a sensitive conversation, because I am saying he is a dud and we all have ego.  The key for CEOs is to realise that there is no point in letting your ego restrain your ability to become better as a presenter.  Communication skills are only going to get more important, particularly storytelling. None of us want to be on the wrong side of the demarcation line between competency and longevity and train wreck and removal.  

I am a maniac.  A less charged descriptor might be an “enthusiast”.  Now Japan is a country chock full of enthusiasts.  They win best pizza maker, best sommelier, best hula dancer, best shoe maker awards, etc., out gunning the Westerners who supposedly should be winning these home town advantage awards.   This is a country where work is taken very seriously.  Growing up in laid back Brisbane, we didn’t live to work, we worked to live.  At 5.30pm most people were in the pub, the gym, the ocean, or at home getting ready for dinner. Japan took a different track. Back in the day, working late wasn’t about productivity, because it was all about devotion, being part of the team, pulling your weight, in order to be taken seriously. In the late 1970s, I taught English at night while I was a student here at Jochi University, usually from 6.30pm – 9.30pm. I was always amazed to finish the classes and walking out see all of these people still there working.  Many of them, though, I observed, were seemingly engrossed in reading the sports newspapers or magazines, rather than doing anything productive.  But they were there, waiting for the boss to go home so that they could do the same thing, demonstrating their solidarity with the others, also in wait to depart. Thirteen years later, I was going through piles of resumes for salespeople here in Japan looking to join our organisation.  This resume review process of mine has been going on for the last thirty-two years now. I noticed people would have blank periods in their employ.  Job mobility today is better, but that is a fairly recent phenomenon after the collapse of Yamaichi Securities (1999), the Lehman Shock (2008) and the pandemic (2020) had all thrown people out on to the street and over time, allowed the mid-career hire to become acceptable.  Back in the day, leaving a job meant a steady spiral down in socio-economic terms and so most people hung in there, no matter how bad it was. When I would ask about these blanks in their resumes, a surprising number of people, particularly women, said they got physically sick from working until the last train every night and had to quit to recover their health. These were not isolated cases and many of the blanks were for months at a time, which made me really wonder about the cost of getting a salary and holding down a job in Japan. We have made a lot of progress since then and I think that there is much higher awareness about getting the work done in less time and allowing people to have a life outside of work.  Young people are now all the equivalent of baseball free agents and can sell their services to the highest bidder, including demanding and getting, better work/life balance.  We should all be throwing rose petals in front of them and waving palm fronds above them, to thank them for allowing the rest of us to be more clever about how we work. The problem we face now is not externally induced pressure for working long hours, but the internally driven ambition to get ahead and in the process work like Trojans.  Thanks to technology, there is now no longer a clear “work/non-work” break in the day, because we are checking our emails all day and night.  We are addicted to being in constant contact with our work demands.  I mentioned I am a maniac and this constant checking of emails is what I am doing, too.  I could try to manufacture the justification that because we are a global organisation, email is arriving all the time and I need to be on top of what is happening in other time zones, but is that really true?  Would a few hours delay really make that big a difference?  Are there actually real fires occurring which require me to don my big coat and grab the fire hose? What is happening is habit formation and combined with screen addiction, creating a toxic cocktail for all of us.  One of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principes is “rest before you get tired”.  On first blush, it sounds ridiculous.  What are we wimps?  Do we lack ambition, the guts to pay the price for success? No, we have to push through the pain barrier and keep driving. Allow no indulgence, no mercy, no regrets, no stopping. If we hit the pause button though and consider how much more we know today about psychosomatic illnesses than he did back in his day, we can see the prescient wisdom of his advice. It doesn’t mean goofing off; it doesn’t mean delinquent behaviour and work avoidance.  He was talking about monitoring our condition to always aim for maximum productivity, and that means sustained productivity. I think I have improved now, but I would work like crazy and drive myself hard, get sick, then be off work for days and once recovered, rinse and repeat. What if I had taken his advice and rested before I got tired?  Now I have broken that cycle and placed myself in a better position to have sustained productivity, rather than manic bursts followed by zero. Japan keeps us busy, the tech is making us even busier and these issues won’t go away.  We have to play the long game, not the blame game. If you are a fellow manic like me, then stop the noise for a moment and seriously contemplate what “rest before you get tired” actually means for your life.  

They are not making as many Japanese as they used to.  Every year we get these headlines about the new lows in numbers of births in Japan.  The demographic trend is obvious to everyone.  What is not obvious is how this is going to force a change in the way we lead.  Until now, we have all applied the like it or lump philosophy to staff working for us.  They were infinitely replaceable – lose one and go get another one.  Not anymore. It is hard to understand, really.  The economy is not doing remarkably well.  The prospects for future growth are also not looking great, so why is it we are not seeing a parallel step down in business needs which translates into less need for staff?  I am not sure and I will let the economists duke that one out, but it is an interesting question to ponder. We are certainly seeing an uptick in demand for people and a corresponding downturn in their availability.  That translates into higher costs, which is only starting to happen now and increased competition for people.  This isn’t only related to the hiring, it also covers the retaining bit as well.  The recruiters are having a field day with the revenues being generated from us for hiring staff and there isn’t much we can do about that in a staff bull market.  What we can control is the retaining piece of the puzzle.  Delegating work to staff is a critical part of that effort.  Young people want to advance in their careers and they want to be given responsibility for their work.  Delegation serves both purposes well.  The issue with delegation is that when done poorly, it can lead to problems. The biggest failure is selling the delegation to the person receiving it.  This sounds simple, but so often this is not done at all or not done very professionally.  Usually, the delegation process is a series of orders – do this and do that type of thing.  The person on the receiving end already has a job and may be thinking, “wait a minute, I am already busy and why do I need to do your job as well?”.  That would be a legitimate and logical conclusion of having your boss dump their work on your desk. The selling component is making clear the benefit to the person receiving the delegation.  There is usually a selection process for internal promotions and the people making the decision want to know the new person can handle the tasks and are not going to blow anything up.  If we are changing companies, when we get to the interview stage, they will ask about our experience.  We are trying to step up and being able to reference completion of work at a level above where we are now is an advantage.  When it is put like this, people can understand how they can leverage these tasks at a future point and make it an advantage to themselves. The other negative aspect of delegation is boss abandonment.  You are handed a bunch of tasks by your superior and that is the last you hear about it until the completion deadline.  This is very dangerous because if the person takes the project off on an incorrect tangent and you hit the deadline, then there is little which can be done to salvage the wreckage.  Now there is a balance between the boss interfering and micro-managing the delegated project and keeping an eye on how things are going.  The latter is obviously the way to go, but where is the line between them?  One good idea is to discuss how they are going to approach the task.  Get them to tell us what they think about running this part of the work. We want their ideas because that is where the ownership is located.  We still need to monitor progress, though. Agreeing a regular check in is a good practice.  All the boss is looking for is whether the project is on track.  There are many ways to the top of the mountain and we have to let the delegated person find that out for themselves, as part of the learning process, rather than being proscriptive about how to get there. If we get both the sell the delegation part and the shepherding component right, then the delegation will be successful and help us to retain staff.  The team member will feel empowered, trusted, and valuable. These are all brilliant and required elements to keep people with us and not straying off to greener pastures.  We must deny the siren call of ravenous recruiters trying to lift our people out of our companies.  If we don’t start delegating, we will lose staff, find it hard to get new staff and gradually shrink in size. In turn, this will make us less attractive as a work destination, as we become too flat to be able to accommodate ambitious people.  It is a cycle which ultimately leads to oblivion.    

Tough Love Or Fake Praise To Motivate Staff In Japan This tough love or fake praise alternative is a dubious construct. Are these two alternatives really the only options?  For some leaders they may feel that the staff are getting paid to do a professional job and their corresponding need is to get on with it.  The boss doesn’t need to be pandering to their needs.  This is especially the case toward these self-indulgent, coddled, spoiled brats who are now entering the workforce.  Giving this lot praise is fake and not needed, is the view. I certainly grew up in the “tough love” era of business leadership.  Praise wasn’t heard, and all you got was a hard time about not doing things well enough or fast enough.  They weren’t singling me out for a hard time, because this is what we all got.  In that sense, it was very democratic.  When you are raised that way in business, you think that is normal and how things are done, because the most experienced leaders in the company all operated that way. Today, the problems arise thick and fast when you take this as your own operating standard and start handing out tough love to your own people.  Combining this mindset with youthful ambition is a powerful and potentially highly toxic cocktail which can end in disaster.  Today, Japanese young people are in short supply and they are not interested in tough love or fake praise. It sounds silly to raise the question about “how to praise people”, but if you are not raised that way in business, it is not natural to you.  The danger is you try too hard and it comes across as completely fake. Flattery is instantly dismissed.  Your standing goes down the drain too, as you are perceived to be an idiot. There are many opportunities where we can look to praise our staff.  One is “things” and although it looks easy, it is actually the most tricky.  Frankly, I would avoid this one altogether, even though it looks like the simplest thing to do. They may have in their possession something very impressive or nice.  Today, men commenting on how women are dressed or do their hair or whatever is bound to be seen the wrong way from what you intend. The next thing you know HR is involved concerned about your “sexual harassment” of the female staff. You might comment on your staff’s watch or pen or briefcase or some object they have chosen.  This is definitely on the cusp of fake praise, so it has to be handled very delicately.  For example, I am not particularly into watches, so me praising someone for their watch may easily be revealed for what it is – desperation to find something to be positive about.  Better to find something you are knowledgeable about and recognise they have done well with acquiring an object you can recognise. Praise it and be able to back it up with some insider knowledge. Recognising people’s achievements is safer ground and more relevant in the workplace.  The point is “good job” is highly dubious, as praise and reeks of flattery and insincerity.  You might think this passes muster, but believe me, it does not.  Every person has multiple projects underway, and their job content is incredibly various. “Good job” is by no means specific enough to get anyone excited about receiving that style of praise.  Exactly what was it they did that you want to recognise?   Call out the precise achievement, such as a report they prepared or a contribution in the meeting or anything solid and concrete. Personal strengths and characteristics are powerful fodder for praise, but again, be very careful about wandering into what sounds like flattery.  “You are very intelligent” will set off alarm bells immediately in the recipient.  It is like “good job” and so is broad and fuzzy.  No one has a clue regarding what you are talking about.  We have to link the praise to the action.  They may have come up with an insight in the meeting and it may have been a very intelligent observation.  When you connect the dots like that, then the praise will land. If you say, “you are resilient” that again is tremendously vague.  What did they do which demonstrated their resilience?  How did this come to your attention?  Why do you know they are resilient?  Bring the evidence and paste it to the praise. Otherwise, the whole effort will be tossed out as fake.  In fact, you wind up creating more problems for yourself than if you had just kept your head down and concentrated on doing your own work and praised no one. In all of these cases, we need to relate the recognition to something we have witnessed, describe it and then encourage them to keep doing it.  Tough love won’t fly anymore and trying to replace it with “praise light and fluffy” will be a train wreck.  We need to be very careful to make sure we do praise our people and be particularly careful about how we do that.  

APAC always ranks low in global engagement surveys. At the very bottom of the APAC calculation sits Japan. Part of the reasons are language and cultural. The translations from English can sometimes be off the mark and lead the Japanese to score lower.  I always recommend carefully checking the translations to try to tighten them up and make the meanings clearer. Other hurdles can be cultural.  One question often asked is “would you recommend the company to your family and friends as a place to work”.  This is a straightforward question in most countries, but not in Japan.  The sense of responsibility and accountability here is high and those taking the survey will answer this question with a low score.  It isn’t because they don’t like the company, but they are risk averse.  They worry if they recommend the company, their family or friends may complain to them and quit the company because it is not a match.  Alternatively, they worry the company will complain to them about the person they recommended.  They see no upside here and so the best course of action is to score low on this question. There is hope, though, to see those scores go up.  They may never reach the zenith of your Brazilian or Indian colleagues, who always seem to shoot the lights out when answering these engagement surveys. There are three leverage points for gaining greater engagement amongst employees.  1.        Relationship With the Supervisor This is obvious as it covers one of the most high contact relationships inside the company and, as we say, we don’t quit companies – we quit bosses.  Has the leader made clear the purpose of the business?  This is often assumed to be understood, so there is no conversation on this point.  Let’s not assume anything and make it clear.  The goals and objectives are critical to the organisation’s success, so let’s make sure we keep repeating what they are. The leader’s job is to understand how the staff feel about their work and the company, and the only way to do that is through conversation.  Sounds simple except that time is so limited and we are all cutting corners and being “efficient” with our time, which means not a lot of opportunity to ask staff about how they are feeling. Taking orders from the boss makes for a dull day and a dull work environment.  Not many people want to be micro-managed that way.  As the leader, we need to give people direction and the freedom to decide how to achieve the goals. 2.         Confidence In Senior Leadership Business is a cutthroat struggle for survival.  In the days of sail, everyone entrusted their lives to the skill, knowledge and experience of the captain to deliver them safely to their destination.  In 1834, my ancestors sailed for months across the raging seas from Bristol to Tasmania. Luckily they made it or I wouldn’t be here writing this blog.  Today, our sailing ships have been replaced with company formats to make sure our job security and therefore our livelihoods are protected and made safe. Do the big bosses walk the talk about the values they promulgate?  Are they communicating changes and constantly reinforcing the purpose?  Do we feel like cogs in the wheel as the organisation grinds out shareholder value and enriches the bosses?  Or do we feel valued as a priority in the success of the enterprise? Are they competent enough to make sure the company can survive and even better prosper so that we have career opportunities to grow and flourish?  If the answers to these fundamental questions are not positive, then our people will not be engaged and, in fact, may be actively seeking greener pastures. 3.        Pride in the Organisation In Japan, when people think about joining a company or changing companies, their spouse, parents, in-laws and grandparents will all have opinions about the decision.  This becomes even more important as a consideration when we are talking about foreign enterprises.  The gold standard are the biggest, safest Japanese companies, then comes the less big, but still safe middle size Japanese companies and bringing up the rear are the foreign companies. Knowing this, as leaders we have to work hard to make sure everyone is motivated and proud to work in our organisation. Purpose has to be stressed over and over to smooth out the bumps which confront every company.  The public persona pf the company has to be one of a good citizen adding value to Japan.  Japanese staff are very focused on their relationship with customers and the company has to respect that. Foreign based CFOs come up with crazy ideas which destroy that trust.  A common idea is that if we have a 100% no defect rate, we will make less profit than if we tolerated a 3% defect rate, so let’s go for the money.  This is abhorrent to Japanese staff and is a huge demotivator.  The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) idea may be popular in Silicon Valley ,but it doesn’t have a place in Japan because the buyers expect it to work perfectly and completely from the get go. Japan is different in many ways and engagement of employees is certainly one area of prominence.  We can improve the engagement scores, if we know what we are doing and can consistently execute on the basics.  

Alan Mulally has had a very successful career at Ford and Boeing.  Over his 45 years as a leader, he developed an approach called “Working Together: Principles, Practices and Management System”.  His number one principles is “People first….Love them up”. This type of declaration is simple to make, but not that easy to live when you are facing quarterly reporting of results and the full glare of the stock market.   We see so many cases of CEOs firing people, the stock price getting a big boost and that axing of the people turning into many millions of dollars for the CEO personally, as part of their stock-based remuneration package. Mulally believes that “working together” must be based on a supportive culture propping up the headline.  Culture alone won’t do it, though.  His system has a governance aspect directing how the leadership team should work together and which maps out how to create value.  His review process is central to translating aspirations into realities.  The basis of all of this is the philosophy of building a “people first” culture, which is driven by the company structure and the management processes adopted.  He insisted that as part of that “people first” idea that “everyone is included”. He arrived at a formula in three parts, which all operate in lockstep and which generates profitable and or successful growth for all.  To get to that end game, Part One is “everybody knows the plan”.  When you read this idea, like me, you might be thinking “so what?.  Of course, everyone knows the plan because I have told them already – end of conversation”.  When we dig a bit deeper in our thinking, though, we recall that just because we have told people the plan doesn’t mean they accept it, agree with it, or want to execute on it.  At the top levels of the company, we come up with the purpose and strategy and then we expect everyone else to deliver what we have envisaged.  A Town Hall presentation and a broadcast email may have detailed the plan and we think everyone knows what to do.  Where we fall down is in the follow-up to make sure the message actually got through. We are all business minimalists, shaving time off activities wherever we can, because we are super busy, all the time. We need to double check that what we think people know is fully understood and they are beavering away on it as we expect. Part Two requires that everyone knows the status of the plan.  Often, though, access to sensitive information in companies can be restricted.  Not everyone may see the real numbers and the full picture.  My predecessor never showed the Profit and Loss numbers to the team. When I took over, I decided to make the financial situation totally transparent.  The only protected numbers are salary and commission information relating to individuals. If they wish to share that information amongst themselves, then that is their choice. Part Three is everyone knows the areas that require special attention.  Business is lumpy.  Some parts of the business are flying and other parts are limping along.  Again, sharing such sensitive information may be restricted.  We need to keep referring back to what we stated was the purpose and strategy for the enterprise and keep measuring how well we are delivering against what we have set out for ourselves. If things are going well, we feel motivated to do more.  If things are not going well, we are motivated to try harder to turn things around.  When things are not going well, this situation begs the question about how much open knowledge of the pain should be shared.  There is the fear for the leader that if the full extent of the problem is made known, the more capable people, who always have options, will exercise them and leave.  This is a tricky balance, and there are no clear parameters for leaders to follow. I would suggest that the leader share enough to galvanise the team to action without scaring the daylights out of everyone and people start abandoning ship. Mulally’s viewpoint is based on many years of hard-won experience.  It is straightforward in its formulation.  The daily execution against the plan, though, is another question.  This is the role of the leader, to take ideas and turn them into living breathing systems which can maximise the potential of the people in the firm.          

I was having lunch with an expat client who has been here about a year and a half.  We were talking about people not performing.  In passing conversation, I happened to mention that incompetence is not an acceptable reason, as far as the Japanese courts are concerned, to fire someone.  Japanese judges believe that it is our fault, because we have people in the wrong job and we should fix that problem, rather than fire them.  That was a total revelation for this client. Nevertheless, we still have to deal with underperformance.  Here are some guidelines for doing that. 1.        Research Do we have all the necessary information in front of us, before we raise the issue with the person we feel is not matching expectations? Sometimes, we are the problem.  We haven’t been clear enough about the KPIs or our expectations, and they are not aware that they are falling short.  We have to find objective measures which we can reference to underline the gap between their current and expected performance.  2.        Begin with rapport Our people are never 100% perfect nor 100% imperfect.  There are bound to be some areas where their performance is acceptable.  In Japan, the workforce is very serious about their job and they do their best.  We should start the conversation on a positive note recognising what they are doing well. 3.        Reference the Performance Deviation We take the personality out of the equation at this point.  We are “paying the ball, not the man”.  We are not saying that they are a bad person, but that their performance is not matching our needs.  In some instances, this “not matching expectations” will be news to the staff member.  The reason for that is we have never flagged it before, even though we have long thought it.  We didn’t bring it up until now in previous performance reviews and it can be a surprise. We need to get their view on this issue.  There may be factors we are not aware of, which are preventing or impeding their ability to do the job we want them to do.   This is a “moment of truth” where if the lack of performance is measurable and a legitimate issue, we will see if they are going to take responsibility for their lack of performance.  Does that happen, or do they want to argue the point and make excuses, blaming everyone else for the state of affairs? 4.        If they take the fork in the road of resistance, then we need to deal with it.  We have to restate the problem and the consequences for continued underperformance, which is code for: “we will fire you if you don’t get your act together”.    5.        Continued denial, resistance and obfuscation is pointless, but that doesn’t stop people from doing it.  Fortunately, in Japan, there is such a high demand for staff that the old hysteria and bias toward mid-career hires has completely vanished. They know and we know, they can easily get another job.  This also dampens the court’s antagonism to us removing people who are not performing. 6.        Hopefully, they will decide to “fly straight” going forward and recover from this.  Naturally, having to confront your own removal from the business is very demoralising and impacts people’s confidence to do the work.  If their heart is in the right place and they have the will to succeed, then we need to work on restoring their confidence that they can do it. 7.        Reassurance must be backed up with support.  This may mean individual coaching and/or being sent off to get the additional training to give them the skills they need to succeed. 8.        Retention of people is now at peak need in Japan. The population decline is creating staff shortages in many industries and a Darwinian struggle amongst companies to recruit enough people to run their businesses.  We want the staff member to stay with us and overcome this gap in their performance.  This requires advanced people and communication skills on the part of the boss and our efforts must be ongoing.  A “one shot and we are done” approach won’t work and we need to make the time for these conversations. There is no doubt that dealing with poor performance will become an even more important tool in the boss toolkit.  By definition, with less people to choose from, we will be voting to take ”anyone” rather than being left short staffed.  Companies which can learn how to play in this new world of work will find a way through and others will fall by the wayside of either diminishing prospects or outright failure.  Frankly, the prospects don’t look good for any of us in business, so buckle up for a bumpy ride.  

Effective leaders actively coach their staff and move them through four stages. In Phase One, they create a psychologically safe environment.  In Phase Two, they engage the team members. In Phase Three, they evaluate the response to those engagement activities and finally, in Phase Four, they empower their subordinates. Let’s choose some of the most appropriate Dale Carnegie Human Relations Principles to help us execute on these four phases as a coach. Phase One: Psychologically Safe Environment. Principle 10 recommends that the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.  This makes sense because how often do those arguing with us become convinced we are right? Never.  Rather, they dig their heels in and argue the point with us.  If we want to keep the relationship with our staff and create a calm atmosphere, it is better to not go there. Principle 11 says to show respect for the other person’s opinion and to never say they are wrong.  Bosses often think they have to coach people who hold a different viewpoint.  No need for that, because remember, we don’t have to make decisions based on their opinion. We can come to our own conclusion and we certainly don’t have to belittle their perspective and demotivate them. Principle 12 is a difficult one for the boss.  If we are wrong, we should admit it quickly and emphatically.  The boss can get tied up with their own status and infallibility as prerequisites for being in charge of others.  If we can admit our own mistakes, it allows us to grant our team members the scope to make mistakes.  The process of innovation is often messy and mistakes will happen.  If we want people to come out of their comfort zone, then mistakes are bound to occur.  We have to see mistakes as part of the learning process and we can begin with being humble ourselves. Phase Two: Engage The Team Members Principle 13 is beginning in a friendly way which at first blush seems ridiculous.  Actually, we think we are friendly, but we may be very outcome oriented.  We get straight to the bottom line and forget we are talking to people.  Instead of going for the results, we could begin with some friendly banter and build the relationship first and then get to the numbers. Principle 14 is getting the staff member to say “yes, yes” immediately, which can sound like manipulation.  What we are talking about here, though, is to make it easy for them to say “yes” to what we propose.  We do this through using our communication skills to frame the conversation in a way which makes agreement simple.  This is a key coaching skill. Principle 15 suggests letting the other person do a great deal of the talking.  This is a boss special to avoid. We like to do all the talking.  Rather, we should let the person feel ownership of their work and hear their ideas and opinions, rather than rattling off orders like a mad pirate captain. Phase Three: Evaluate The Response Principle 16 is let the other person feel that the idea is theirs and this also sounds like manipulation.  What we really want is for them to come up with their own ideas.  We may need to seed that idea formation, and that is much better than telling them our idea.  Given the same context, it is natural to reach a common conclusion.  We bosses often go directly to the punchline and forget to share the background and context with them. Principle 17 says to walk in their moccasins and see things from their viewpoint.  As the boss, we may have a very strong viewpoint and will always be driving for results.  Their position is different from ours and we need to keep that in mind when they may not respond as we expect.  It becomes easier to coach people when we understand what they think and what they want. Principle 18 recommends to be sympathetic with their ideas and desires.  There can be one mountain top but that doesn’t mean only the boss has the path to the top.  There can be many tracks to take and perhaps they choose one different from us. That doesn’t mean we are right and they are wrong. Phase Four: Empower The Team Principle 19 says appeal to their better selves. The majority of people want to do a good job and want the company to succeed.  If we make this our starting point, we will talk to our staff in a positive, forward looking manner.  We give them a high reputation to live up to and they do the rest to fulfill that expectation. Principle Twenty says we should dramatise our ideas.  This makes sense in a modern world where so much is coming at us and at warp speed.  If we want to have an impact, we have to break through all the brain clutter and grab their attention. Principle Twenty One specifies to throw down a challenge.  Stretch goals are often set so high that everyone just concludes the goals are impossible and they give up.  There is a line in there somewhere that allows everyone to push further, believing it is possible to get the result.  This is another key skill of the coach. We have to know our people well and be clear about their individual capabilities to get the settings correct. The Dale Carnegie Principles are easy to understand, but not so easy to live.  If we work on them, though, we will do a much better job to coach our team members.    

Ideas are free and sometimes frivolous.  We can brainstorm anything we like and we will come up with a bunch of ideas. Often that is where things grind to a shuddering halt.  I have been in those rooms, where we covered all the walls with ideas great and mighty.  What happened thereafter?  Nothing. In Australia, in the 1990s, the government tightened up their regulations on company expenditures and particularly looked more carefully at “off-site” session expenditures. In many cases, these were boozy get away weekends for the Directors and they could put the tab on the government’s bill by claiming it as a tax expense.  One year, the Directors decided to have an actual offsite with intention.  They gathered a group of people christened “game changers” and called in a consulting company to run the weekend.  It was a phenomenal experience. We came back from that off-site ready to conquer the world.  Some seriously good and extremely practical ideas emerged.  They were all duly put into a canvas bag by the Directors and taken down to the river, and with rocks attached, plunged into the dark depths, never to be seen again.  I still don’t know why they never used our ideas, but the feeling of deflation and subsequent decline in motivation on the part of we supposed “game changers” was pronounced. Here is what should have happened with our genius ideas.  1.        The outcomes should have been more clearly defined and tied into the strategic plan for the company. 2.        The current situation analysis needed more effort to better highlight the gap between where we were and where we wanted to be. 3.        Concrete goals needed to be set based on the ideas generated. 4.        Next steps needed to be carefully articulated. These must be defined in clear terms and should have been very specific. 5.        Time frames must be attached to the goals, because goals without a time limit are just a dream. There will be various goals and these will include both short-term and long-term outcomes. There needs to be a roadmap created in order to realise them. 6.        Ideas always attract money.  Maybe this is why our ideas got killed off.  The Directors all shared in the proceeds of the business, so perhaps they preferred to allocate the dough amongst themselves, rather than invest it in our thoughts and suggestions.  Money isn’t the only resource required.  There is time and staffing required to back up the application of the ideas and if they are in short supply, nothing goes forward. 7.        Obstacle anticipation often gets neglected in idea generation, because we are at the front end.  When we get to the execution stage, though, this is when the problems emerge.  Rather than just dealing with these as they arise, it is good practice to try to scope them out at the start.  There will always be some means for overcoming problems. We can find ways to compensate for time, money and staff issues if they are insufficient to sustain the task execution. 8.        Measuring results is boring.  It is much more fun to brainstorm and then rush around like bees in a bottle executing.  Was it all worth it?  The only way to know that is to have milestones and measurables against which we can track the amount of progress we have made or not made. Getting the ideas into reality is never easy, because so many actors have to get involved and it requires substantial cross-platform cooperation.  The NIHS or “Not Invented Here Syndrome” is a pain.  Our colleagues, who were not selected to be “game changers” or to get involved in the execution piece, are uninterested observers.  They have to work on our idea, but they resist being dragged into the work and are happier to lambast what is going on from the cheap seats. Idea generation and idea application must come as a set.  It is better not to start at all, if the ideas cannot be applied.  From my experience, I know how devastating it is to waste your valuable time and effort to see your hard earned ideas squandered and slaughtered.  

Japan has a lot of wisdom to share and one of my favourites is to not start with the solution to a problem.  In Japan, the idea is to start with making sure you have the right problem to solve.  This is not easy, because often we are super busy and moving at warp speed all the time, so just jumping in to fix a problem sounds like the best approach.  There is a follow-on metaphor of the scaling of the wall. We work hard and progress rung by rung up the ladder, getting us to the top - the solution – only to find our ladder is up against the wrong wall.  We don’t want that, do we? Problem definition is sometimes obscured by having a number of factors to confront and not enough insight into which are the priority items.  This might be for a lack of a data or from conflicting opinions. The issue remains a large one, though, which we must deal with at the very start of the process.  Here are some steps to consider in problem definition. Step One: Silence Is Our Super Power Once we get into an open discussion about identifying the problem, we can find we waste a lot of time and basically get no progress. We argue the toss on what to solve and can get stuck.  Instead, have around six people in a team and have them all sit in silence and think.  Now thinking is seriously hard work.  It is particularly difficult for us today, because we are being corralled by algorithms spewing out one minute videos, fostering shorter and shorter concentration spans. Ask the team to sit there for fifteen minutes in Round One and do nothing but think and write their issues on Post-It notes. This will be torture for some and very challenging for most.  Nevertheless, as the organiser, we have to have guts to ignore the fervent and persistent impatient glancing at watches, head shaking, eyes rolling, yawning, etc., that will go on, as the team is possessed by a wave of boredom. Step Two: Prioritise Issues After the first fifteen minutes, everyone stays in silence and now we spend 3 minutes to arrange what we have come up with into a broad priority listing of where to start. Step Three: Share Together - Round One Now we start putting our ideas up on a chart or a wall.  We attach the Post Its in priority order to the wall and explain our thinking to our colleagues.  There is no judgement allowed at this point, because we are still on the journey and we don’t need any decision being taken yet. Step Four: Whole Team Sharing Once we get our teams idea’s out, we share it with the other teams and they do the same for us. We try to cross pollinate the thinking going on.  There is no evaluation of what has been produced at this point. Step Five: Think and Prioritise After that stimulation, again, in silence, we keep thinking for another ten minutes.  This is very hard because all the easy ideas have been tapped. Now we have to really dig to find the gold.  We will adjust our previous priorities based on our new ideas. Step Six: Share Together - Round Two We bring our Post-It notes and add to what we came up with in the first thinking bracket.  Again, we share the content with our teammates. Step Seven: Whole Team Sharing Round Two Again, each team presents what they have come up with, so that all the teams can share in the ideas. Step Eight: Each Team Makes Selections By this stage, we will have had a lot of information shared and we will have a pretty good idea of where everyone has placed their priorities.  Now we have to make some decisions about which will be the issues which we will take forward to solve.  Each team will coalesce the possibilities into a short list. Step Nine: Whole Team Makes The Final Selections Each team presents their selections and then decisions are taken on which issues are going to be picked up to work on. There is usually a strong raft of similar issues which will have been highlighted.  These commonalities make it easy to drive decisions about the final problems to work on.  Remember, we are not after perfection here, so if we get good selections, then we are on the right track.  We have created a hierarchy of issues to work with and we can get to them all over time.  We start with what we consider the most burning issues. The next stage is to use creative thinking to work on how to solve the issues once clarified and we covered that in a recent episode already.    

Founded in 2000, Baidu has 39,800 employees and is one of the largest global AI and internet companies.  Based in China, its major success has been its search engine business.  Its quarterly revenues ending June 2024 were $4.67 billion, so it is a substantial company.  The Head of Public Relations and Vice-President, Ms. Qu Jing, posted a video on social media demeaning Baidu staff, telling them she “can make you jobless in this industry”.  She told staff she demanded they must be dedicated enough to travel by her side for 50 days straight and she doesn’t care about the impact on their families and personal lives, noting, “I’m not your Mum”.  Her mantra to the staff was “I only care about results”. She was proud to say she was so devoted to Baidu, that she didn’t know what school year her son was in.  She publicly posted her video outlining her leadership philosophy as an example to her PR team of how to use social media to promote Baidu!  Her professional skills in PR seem dubious to me. Also, her EQ or “emotional quotient” - her people skills - seems abysmal.  From a Dale Carnegie “How to Win Friends And Influence People” viewpoint, this is a shocking leader mentality. As a so-called PR professional, her genius use of social media created a firestorm of virulent criticism of Baidu.  She had to take the video down and apologise, saying she would “earnestly read people’s opinions and criticisms” and “deeply reflect” on them.  Days later, she was gone.  The company wasn’t saying the circumstances of her departure, but given the apparent brutality of their corporate culture, you can expect they had no hesitation in firing her.  Ironically, hoisting her on her own petard, so to speak. There are so many things wrong with this Baidu story, it is hard to know where to start. Fundamentally, she was making a basic leader error to think that the staff wanted what she wanted. Her case may be extreme, but often as leaders, we do assume everyone wants to work as hard as we do, that they want to get promoted like we did and that they want to dedicate themselves to the business like we are.  I don’t know why she was blind to the reality that actually staff do not necessarily want what we want and that they have their own goals, motivations, and desires. However, sometimes we can suffer from the same malady as Ms. Qu.  The enterprise has goals and values and as the leader, our job is to get everyone to fly in the same direction, in formation.  That means finding out what our team members want and then aligning the way we do the business to deliver what is important to the staff.  It also requires us to understand their value system and again find lots of cross-over points where the organisation’s values fit in with the staff member’s values.  The only way to do that is to communicate with the staff and through casual conversation, uncover what is important to them.  Interrogating the team like a crime solving detective on their deeply held values isn’t the way to do it. Over coffee or lunch in an informal situation and built up gradually over time is the better approach. Creating a threatening video is definitely not the way to go and 99.99% of people would get that, even if Ms. Qu didn’t.  Nevertheless, ask yourself, are you making an assumption about what your team wants, based on your imagination and no actual conversations with them?  As the boss, we get busy and we are working away in the business and so are too busy to work on the business.  This is a how things can slip by us and before you know it, the last time you have a meaningful conversation with your staff was years ago.  That is okay, except that people’s lives change.  They get married, have children, have to take care of aging parents, age themselves and what was important to them five years ago, isn’t the same today, but we don’t know that. Using fear as the driver for motivation like Ms. Qu does work, but it is a very blunt tool.  Ms. Qu’s outburst is remarkable in an economy where there is a lot of job mobility.  Those staff suffering the mad ravings of a demonic leader, can move to a better company, because they have choices.  Japan is just the same and job mobility has never been higher or easier in this country.  As the boss, we have to be aware of that and make sure that what we do and what we say are working well, to keep our people engaged and with us. What is the culture of Baidu?  I don’t know, but if Ms Qu can become head of PR and rise to VP, then it would seem things are pretty rotten inside the organisation.  What is the culture inside your organisation by comparison?  In our case, we have set priorities around our values: number one is your health, number two is your family’s health and number three is the company health.  Making that statement is one thing and living it is entirely different.  This is where leadership comes in by being congruent with what you are saying, by doing it. I doubt we can find any framed posters inside Baidiu which say the company values are: number one – treat people like dirt, etc.  I am sure many of us have highfalutin value statements beautifully framed behind glass and placed in prominent positions within the walls of the company.  Fine.  What about the “walking the talk?”.  Are we living what we preach?  I doubt Baidu is doing that, but before we get too deep in schadenfreude, let’s take a cold hard look at ourselves.    

The era of the boss who had done all the tasks in the section and was the main expert on the business has well and truly passed.  Today, it is more of a team effort and there are a lot more specialisations required than in the past.  Collaboration is the key to creativity by grouping all the brain power in one place and unleashing it to solve the problem. To my surprise, very few firms have any clear methodology on how to unleash the creative ideas of the team.  So far, I have done over 200 interviews with CEOs here in Japan for my podcast “Japan’s Top Business Interviews”. I ask them all about their house methodology to harvest the ideas of their teams, and I am struggling to recall anyone who could answer that question well.  Here are some things to think about to create your own house brand on idea development and creativity. Step One: Begin with the end in mind. What is it you want to achieve with this exercise?  We are going to tie up the valuable time of a lot of key people, so the end must justify the means. What would success look like from doing this exercise? Step Two: Gather what we already know.  We rarely start with zero knowledge of the issue.  We have all built up experience and insights into this problem.  We also have data we can access to provide some deeper perspectives on the issue. We need to create a common understanding amongst the team about the issue and it ramifications. Step Three: Clarify the question we are asking.  Japan has a great insight about problem solving.  Unlike in the West, in Japan, the answer to the question is secondary.  Here deciding what is the right question to ask comes first, before worrying about any potential answers. That is quite smart isn’t it.  There can be so many layers to the issue as well and we need to spend some quality time at the beginning to really clarify what is the main issue we should be aiming to solve while being washed around in a sea of competing issues. Step Four: Harvest the ideas.  We start generating ideas with a strong proviso. There is no such thing as a dumb idea or crazy idea.  Yes, of course, some ideas will be better, more practical than others, but we want to bring forth as many choices as possible before we start allocating priorities about which answers we will pursue.  My crazy idea won’t go forward, but it may stimulate a better idea in your mind. This idea would never have come to light without the stimulation of you saying to yourself, “well that is a dumb idea but if we tweaked it like this, then we could….”.  This is how idea generation works. We bounce our ideas around and fire each up to come forward with a better alternative. Step Five: Select the best ideas to take forward. Many ideas will emerge and at a point in time we have to make some selections.  This is the most difficult part, because this is where we need a decision-making system which works well.  Usually in Japan, the better ideas are harmonised and moved to the top of the tree.  A good methodology is to find common themes and then isolate these themes out and rank ideas within those themes. Now we may have a disagreement about the order of the ideas generated, but if we take the top five ideas in the most commonly grouped themes we are in the right spot. Step Six: Find the money, time and authority to move forward. Ideas are great, but only become really great when applied. That takes investment. It might be dough or people’s time or the freedom to run the idea without interference or the means to overcome the idea killer - the NIHS – “Not Invented Here Syndrome”. We have to promote the ideas generated to the big bosses and convince them to get behind what we have come up with.  There is absolutely nothing more soul destroying and spine decalcifying than to have your hard won ideas spurned by the machine and those who command it at the top.  You feel you have wasted your life for nothing and are very reluctant to take part in any future creativity sessions. Step Seven: Start. We don’t need to be perfect, because we won’t know everything we need to know at the very start, but we can adjust as we move forward.  This is a hard step for Japanese teams because they like to make sure everything is perfect and there is zero chance of failure.  They would prefer to never harvest the future benefits, if there was a possibility of failure occurring on their watch.  We have to make sure we give them permission to fail and make sure there is no blow back on anyone if it doesn’t work, otherwise it will never start. Step Eight: Tweak the ideas. Once we are underway, we learn so much more and we need to be flexible to analyse the results and to draw the right conclusions.  Often we have insufficient data to really know what we are looking at, so we need patience to give the innovation time to work. As we better understand the situation, we can make adjustments to improve the results or the performance. Step Nine: Determine Benefits We said we would start with the end in mind and did we achieve that or did we go off on a tangent that yielded something even more valuable?  Did we gain from the exercise or not?  Did the results of the organisation improve as a result of the implementation of the ideas we came up with?  We need to draw a line in the sand and make that judgement.  Step Ten: Recognise the team Whether we hit it out of the park or whether we made no gains, we still need to recognise the efforts made and the input provided from those involved. We never lose because we always learn. A wrap up party is always a good idea and if there can be awards attached to that, all the better.  Some people may have been drawn off to other work and not be there at the end, but they should be brought back too. Recognition is the key. These ten steps are a good template to use when setting up your house brand of idea generation.      

The leader has a different role to that of the manager.  The manager makes the business run on time, to quality and on budget.  The leader does all of those things, plus sets the strategic direction for the business, crafts the culture and builds the people.  If we want to control every aspect of the firm, then we have to micro-manage everything.  Obviously, that is a choice, but as the leader we need to develop our people too and so we need to delegate work to them so that they can grow.  In fact, as the leader, the ideal situation would be that we are only working on the most high-level things that only we can do. If possible, we want to set the parameters of the business so that the team can self-manage themselves.  Those parameters come in the form of some very useful tools called Vision, Mission and Values.  Some people may think that Vision, Mission and Value are rather flowery, fluffy, flaky statements of little use, but they are denying themselves some important leverage points as the leader. The Vision is a call out to what is the purpose of what we are doing.  This is a fundamental thing, but in many companies the staff have an unclear idea of the purpose.  We can recall the classic building the wall metaphor. Three stonemasons are asked what they are doing, and the first says, “building this wall”. The second one says, “I am building a new faculty building for the university”. The third one says, “I am building a facility to better educate future generation”.  The metaphor makes the point that the understanding of purpose is different, even though each person was laying stone blocks to build a wall.  We need to make sure that our team is clear on what is the purpose of why we are putting in all these long, hard hours. The Mission is a clarification of what we do and, by definition, what we don’t do.  Making the main thing the main thing sounds simple, but there are so many bright shiny objects and fashionable trends which can divert us.  We need to make sure everyone understands what we need to concentrate on and not allow the business to be drawn off course. The Values are the glue which bind us together. The leader’s job is to find out the common values of the team which will correspond with the values of the organisation and have everyone flying together in tight formation going in the same direction. The other important point is to make sure that the organisation lives the values and that the team lives the values.  When the organisation rhetoric strays from the stated values, the cynicism becomes a cancer which eats away at the morale and teamwork of the firm. Once we have set the guide rails, we can set the strategy to achieve the Vision.  There will be a series of goals to be achieved to get us to where we want to be.  Obviously, revenue and profit goals are going to be critical to the health and longevity of the firm.  There will be quality considerations which relate to our brand and its positioning in the market.  Cost of customer acquisition and the success of our marketing to help grow the business will bring their own sets of goals.  Who we recruit and how we train them will have a major impact on the success of the company.  Business is a one team against another team head-to-head struggle and the best team wins in the long term.  Our sales team versus the opposition, our marketing prowess against that of so many rivals, our factory staff against the competition, our leadership bench strength against all comers in our industry sector. We need to measure our progress and success in attaining our goals. There are activities and outcomes which we need to track.  We break these down for each financial year and for longer term considerations and they must add up to attaining the Vision we have set.  They must be objective and correct numbers, because incorrect data can hurt us and cause us to make poor decisions.  Getting correct data is not always that easy and we must have systems to keep checking that what we think is happening is actually the case. So think of this strategic plan as a funnel.  The mouth of the funnel at the top is where we pour in the purpose, and gradually we keep refining the execution of the purpose by specifying more and more concrete details needed for its attainment.    

As the boss, we are always super busy.  We have the management of the team and the results to work on.  Everything has to be progressing on cost, on time and on quality.  At the same time, we are setting the strategy, the direction for the team, communicating that so that everyone understands, establishing the values, and we are coaching and building the team members. Phew, I get tired just thinking about all of those boss roles. It is rare though that we can take a breath and reflect on the effectiveness of the teamwork.  When problems arise, we tend to work on those in isolation and never have a moment to see the team as a unit, as a whole. Here are three things to look at in your team and reflect on if you are happy with the effectiveness of the team. 1.    Conflict In a Western context, we might think we need to have constructive conflict which will help us to make better choices?  In Japan, disagreements are more likely to be ignored because if we surface them, we have to publicly deal with it and discretion is the better part of valor here.  Nevertheless, we cannot leave things fester and as the boss, we need to take action and sort things out.  However, the Western idea of getting the two people in the room and thrashing it out will never work here. You might force people to get together, but no one will say anything in that meeting.  Conflict resolution is best done individually, privately, and quietly.  We have to take an entirely different approach to sorting out conflict in Japan.  We talk to each person many times and, like war time negotiators, we move them toward an armistice that can stick.  Hostilities will cease and the conflict will become muted, although never forgotten. Japan is better at working together to come up with solutions when everyone is involved and has a sense of shared ownership.  We should concentrate on creating these occasions and the idea of creative conflict becomes replaced with creative cooperation, which suits the Japanese psyche much better. 2.    Cooperation In teams, there can be contradictions where it can be difficult to square the circle.  Sales teams are being measured on sales results and the numbers tell everything.  There can be an issue though, depending on how the salespeople are paid. If they are on salary and bonus, then there is a natural preclusion to cooperate.  Japanese salespeople would love to have no individual responsibility. They always vote for salary and a group bonus, related to a group target.  This is great for hiding and avoiding accountability and these are two aspects where the Japanese salesforce can operate at ninja levels of accomplishment. We don’t do this in our organisation because we know we will always underperform and no one will be accountable.  We want individuals to have specified numbers against their targets and for them to be held responsible for hitting those numbers. As you might imagine, this is not a popular idea here. If they are on individual commissions with a base salary, then there is an inbuilt resistance to cooperating with anyone else.  It becomes “everyone for themselves” very easily. This is where values and culture need to play their part and glue the unglueable together.  The boss has to work hard at gluing the team together, even when there are these fundamental contradictions at play.  It can be done, but it takes a lot of consistency, brand building and communication. 3.    Communication Working from home during covid definitely impacted the communication levels in our organisation.  We were all operating in our bunkers at home, and the level of clarity and common understanding went down in my observation.  Introverts like me loved it.  You didn’t have to see or talk to anyone.  For the organisation, though, it was not good. We have returned to the office and when we have people chatting in the office, it shows that what was missing before has been reclaimed. Japanese culture is an impediment to clear communication.  The language is highly circular, purposely vague, very cautious about what is being said and against declarative or strong statements.  “Telling them how it is” just doesn’t fly here and people from overseas who do that are seen as children, unable to compose themselves properly.  The nuances of the message are what we have to focus on in communication in Japan and we have to keep checking what we think we understand is being said.  Does this suck up a lot of time – Yes.  Is it going to change – No. So how did you go analysing your own organisation against these three items of conflict, cooperation and communication?  Working on our businesses rather than just working in our businesses is always a struggle.  We have to proactively make sure we step back from the fray and take a cold hard look at what is really going on from time to time.    

Managers manage.  That means they make sure everything runs on time, to cost and to quality.  The leader does all of that, plus some additional important things. These include setting the strategic direction for the team and building the people’s capabilities.  Part of the leader’s role is to unite everyone behind the direction they are setting for the team.  There can be a lot of detail at the micro level about how to make the strategy a reality. One key component which needs to be set at the start is to re-clarify the purpose of the team.  You would think that was pretty obvious. However, if the leader doesn’t work on defining it, there could be 10 people in the team and eleven different purposes. Here is a simple six-step guide to setting the purpose. 1.         What is meaningful about what your team does, from the perspective of the organisation as a whole (such as in relation to the stated purpose and vision)? The team operates within the framework of the firm, but the leader must break that down to the team level and create a local version which matches the team’s reality in the field.  How does your team fit into the big picture?  Which colleagues from other departments are key partners and where is the coordination most required? There is often a firm wide Vision Statement which can be a good starting point and the task is to take that and create your own local version for the team. 2.        What is meaningful about what your team does from the perspective of your clients?  We know what we sell, but sometimes we forget what the client is buying.  They are not always the same things. For example, we might think we are selling leadership training, but what the client is buying might be succession planning or greater productivity.  It is always important that every person in the team has a clear understanding of the client's needs. Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” was an excellent guide to the importance of making sure the entire series of contact points with the client were aligned and operating at the same quality levels.  An example would be the person who answers the phone is pleasant and professional, but the person the client is then transferred to is rude or grumpy. The firm brand went from heavenly clouds to depths of hell in one second. 3.        How should your team members behave as they are delivering what matters? This comes back to what are the team and organisational values?  The leader will always have a wide spread of values scattered across their team and their job is to unite everyone behind the core values of the team.  The value set defines how everyone thinks about the clients and that, in turn, defines how they interact with the clients.  There is also the issue of how the team members interact with each other? Is there a strong level of mutual respect or we are in a pit of vipers with corporate politics run amok?  4.        What are the expected results for the team and what are we doing when we are acting according to our purpose? We are establishing KPI, goals, targets etc., to make the outputs needed clear to everyone.  Does each individual have a target or are there team based goals?  In the latter case, do people within the team understand their role in delivering the team result? 5.        What actions do you, as the leader, need to do to help fulfill the purpose? Taking care of the logistics, resources, permissions, interdepartmental cooperation are common leader roles.  There is also the key role of coach to the team members to bolster their motivation and skills.  Often though, as busy, busy leaders, we transition from coach to mad pirate captain barking out orders and making people walk the plank if they don’t perform.  We set the tone for the team and we set the role model of how we are going to operate in this team.  6.        Who do you need to be as a leader to fulfill the purpose (characteristics/ qualities? We should never forget that every single member of our team is a ninja level “boss watcher” and they are constantly scanning us for any signs of crumbling between what we say and what we do.  We set the pace and the quality levels for the team.  That means we have to be lifetime learners, very well organised and totally professional in our work.  It also means we have to be calm in the midst of the raging storms which hit our team from time to time and be the rock around which everyone can shelter. Use these six prompts to create the purpose for your team, either for them or with them.  I would recommend “with them”, because the team who designs the purpose together has the best levels of ownership of the outcomes and is more likely to execute well on what they have produced.  

There is a debate about whether Japan is any different from anywhere else when it comes to leading the team.  Intellectually, I can appreciate there are many similarities because people are people, but I always feel there are important differences.  One of the biggest differences is how people are trained to become leaders in Japan.  I should really clarify that statement and say how they are not trained to become leaders. The main methodology for creating leaders in Japan is through On The Job Training (OJT). I can see there is a crisp logic to the idea of OJT back in the day, however it is now a flawed system in the modern world of Japan.  In the West, leadership training is a given, because the value is recognised and so the investment is made to better educate the leadership cohorts through each generation. The first problem with Japan OJT is it presumes your boss knows about leading.  There is very little formal leadership training going on in Japan.  I don’t believe it just about investing the money.  There is no great tradition here for corporate leadership training.  Before we dive into this subject, I believe we should clarify what is a leader in Japan and what is a manager and what is different.  Japan, in my observation, is full of managers, and there are few leaders. A manager runs the machine on budget, on quality, and on time. The leader does all of that and two very important additional tasks.  The leader persuades the team that the direction they are advocating is the correct one and, secondly, they build up the capabilities of their staff through one-on-one coaching.  By the way, barking out orders like a mad pirate captain doesn’t qualify as coaching. OJT probably made a lot of sense up until about fifty years ago, when it started to be disrupted by technology.  By the 1980s, desktop computing became common in Japan and gradually the boss lost his (and they were mainly men) typist and had to start doing his own typing on the computer.  The advent of email in the mid-1990s was the real death blow to the boss’s time management.  Now the boss had become super busy and time availability for coaching staff became much diminished. What this means is that we have had been through multiple generations of staff mainly educated through OJT and who have been short-changed on the leadership modelling by their “manager” boss.  Each corporate generation passes on how to be a manager to the next generation and unless there is some intervention through formal leadership training, there is no real progress.  Of course, there will always be exceptions who prove the rule and some managers who make it out of that gravitational pull of OJT and become real leaders.  This is the lightning strike theory of leadership development and isn’t a great proposition to ensure that the firm’s leadership bench is stacked with professionals. The key plank in leadership is no longer task experience.  The old model was the boss had done all the tasks of their subordinates and knew their jobs inside out.  Today, there is much more speciality and technology is making sure it isn’t experience alone which will carry the day for the boss.  Many companies in Japan are moving away from the old model of age and stage and instead promoting people based on ability.  Just rotating through various jobs in the machine won’t be enough anymore. Leaders have to become expert communicators and masters of environment building, such that individuals can motivate themselves.  How many leaders receive any training to assist their communication and people skills?  Very, very few and everyone else had to work it all out through trial and error. That hit and miss approach is very expensive. The younger staff want different things to their parents and the modern boss in Japan has to adjust.  The bishibishi or super strict model of leadership is now cast out on to the rubbish tip of leadership history in Japan.  Bosses still using this model will see their younger staff departing in droves.  Already 30% are leaving after three to four years of employ and that number will only get worse as we run out of people to hire and the younger generation all become free agents. The younger generation wants a psychologically safe environment and a lot of personal encouragement by the boss. One of the greatest elements to gaining engagement from staff is that they feel the boss cares about them.  The way they know that is through the boss’s communication skills.  If you believe that given people are getting paid, they should be engaged, then there is bound to be a lack of the needed communication of “I care about you” going on. If you don’t have well-developed communication skills, then being the boss is only going to get harder and harder.  How much communication training do bosses get?  Very little and they certainly don’t get much value through OJT, because their own bosses were crap communicators, as were their bosses, and back we go through the generations. Japan needs to raise its white-collar worker productivity and investing in boss leadership and communication training makes a lot of sense.  OJT is a dead duck and won’t work as the vehicle to get the needed progress on the leadership front.  We need a change in thinking about leadership here in Japan to take us forward. Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader whose team gets results? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources.There is a perfect solution for you- To LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43sQHxV ) To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj ) To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK) If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. About The Author Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training Contact me at [email protected] The bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery" and his new books "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めま Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki. He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Has 6 weekly podcasts: 1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series, 2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え 3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series 4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト 5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show 6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube: 1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV 2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery 3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo. Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep adding more and more certainty to what they say is important, correct, valuable and needed to produce the best return on investment. With an army of sycophants in the workforce, the leader can begin to believe their own press. There is also the generational imperative of “this is correct because this was my experience”, even when the world has well and truly moved on beyond that experience. If you came back from World War Two as an officer, you saw a certain type of leadership being employed and the chances are that was why there were so many “command and control” leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. The Woodstock generation questioned what had been accepted logic and wanted a different boss-employee relationship, where those below had more input into the direction of the company. Technology breakthroughs made hard skill warriors the gurus of leadership. Steve Jobs abusing and belittling his engineers was accepted, because he was so smart. Technology has however democratized the workplace. The boss is no longer the only one with access to key information. Being smart and abusive isn’t acceptable anymore. The boss-employee relationship has changed. It is going to keep changing too, especially here in Japan where there are 1.5 jobs for every person working. Recruiting and retaining people becomes a key boss skill. The degree of engagement of the team makes a big difference in maintaining existing customer loyalty and the needed brand building to attract new customers. Social media will kill any organisation providing sub-standard service, because the damage travels far, wide and fast. The role of the boss has changed, but have the bosses kept up? Recent Dale Carnegie research on leaders found four blind spots, which were hindering leaders from fully engaging their teams. None of these were hard skill deficiencies. All four focused on people skills. Leaders must give their employees sincere praise and appreciation We just aren’t doing it enough. With the stripping out of layers in organisations, leaders are doing much bigger jobs with fewer team members. Time is short and coaching has been replaced by barking out commands. Work must get done fast because there is so much more coming behind it. We are all hurtling along at a rapid clip. The boss can forget that the team are people, emotional beings, not revenue producing machines. Interestingly, 76% of the research respondents said they would work harder if they received praise and appreciation from their boss. Take a reality check on yourself. How often to do you recognise your people and give them sincere praise? Leaders do well to admit when they are wrong The scramble up the greasy pole requires enormous self-belief and image building. Mistakes hinder rapid career climbs and have to be avoided. Often this is done by shifting the blame down to underlings. The credit for work well done, of course, flows up to the genius boss who hogs all the limelight. The team are not stupid. They see the selfishness and respond by being only partially engaged in their work. In 81% of the cases, the research found that bosses who can admit they made mistakes are more inspirational to their team members. Effective leaders truly listen, respect and value their employees’ opinions Who knows the most? Often the boss assumes that is them, because they have been anointed “boss”. They have more experience, better insights and a greater awareness of where the big picture is taking the firm. So why listen to subordinate’s mediocre and half baked ideas? Engaging people means helping them feel they are being listened to by their boss. Sadly, 51% of the survey respondents said their boss doesn’t really listen to them. Ask yourself, am I really focusing 100% of my attention on what my team are telling me or am I mentally multi-tasking and thinking about other things at the same time? Employees want leaders they can trust to be honest with themselves and others There are two elements to this – external and internal reliability. External reliability is the boss does what the boss says they will do. They “walk the talk”. In the survey, 70% said their boss couldn’t be depended upon to be honest and trustworthy when dealing with others. That is a pretty shocking result. The internal reliability focused on being consistent with your own core beliefs. Again, 70% said their boss fails in this regard – another shocker! Obviously, bosses are not employing their full self-awareness about how they are being perceived. You can argue people have it wrong, but perception is reality. We need to pay more attention to each of these leadership blind spots if we want to engage our team members. Only engaged team members can deliver the highest levels of service to clients and that must be our aim. To achieve that, we have to take a cold hard look at ourselves and lift our game.      

Here is a handy success equation which is easy to remember: our mindset plus our skill set, will equal our results.  This is very straightforward and unremarkable, but we get so embroiled in our day to day world, we forget to helicopter above the melee and observe the lay of the land.  A great mindset coupled with lacklustre skills, won’t get us very far.  A poor mindset with great skills won’t do it either, so we need both. What is our mindset composed of?  How we think is critical.  Are we operating with a positive mindset?  If we are deep in depression about the circumstances of the business, we are stuck in a hole from which it can be hard to emerge.  We are what we think, so control over what we think becomes so important. That also means being strict about what we put into our minds.  Stay away for fluff, endless scrolling on social media and negativity.  Find the useful, positive and valuable and make that the diet for our mind. Our opinions influence how we see the world.  Where do these opinions come from?  They are usually the product of our access to quality, correct information.  There is a tricky balance here because a lot of the news we need to consume is laced with negativity and that can pollute our positive attitude.  So we need to curate the information we take in, to help us make informed decisions, based on correct data. Our beliefs are similarly formed from data, personal experience and what we hear from people we trust.  Our degree of success can be impacted by our self-belief. It can be a drag on our progress if we are limiting how we see our potential. We believe we are operating logically, except we often make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. Being in control of our emotion is a fundamental first step to getting ourselves into a position to be successful. Wild mood swings make us a difficult person to work with or get close to.  A short temper can have us explode in haste and repent at leisure, after we have created havoc all around us. We are all drowning is a sea of information today as the internet propels constant updates and new content at us.  When I was at University we went to the stacks in the library to find the few books available there and if someone else had that textbook you needed you dipped out. Microfiche was the big innovation to access information in a non-paper format. For the younger generation out there, microfiche was an ancient method of taking microphotographs of physical pages and putting it on to film you could scroll through, using a special microfiche reader. I noticed with my son’s education, his problem is the constant assault of data and the difficulty of working out which information was valuable amongst the flotsam and jetsam battering his attention everyday. Getting insight becomes the game of success because we don’t lack for content anymore. Once we have the mindset correct then we have to take action.  This is often easier said than done. We are so busy and translating insight into outcomes is not a given in this constant rabid struggle against the demands on our time. Behaviour determines outcomes and the formation of good habits is the key here. If we form the right habits then we take the right actions and we form the right default behaviour which adds to our success. The way we communicate flows from these habits and behaviours and we should be seeking inclusivity.  Business is too complex for relying on the hero worker who can do it all by themselves – that ship has sailed.  We need to be persuasive and able to garner collaboration in the workplace today.  There is so much technology available today and it spews out endless choices.  How do we get others to follow our ideas and adopt our suggestions? Our degree of cooperation from others is a compilation of our interactivity.  If we have good people skills then we can interact with other in a constructive and positive way which adds to our success. Often technical people struggle in this area because their education hasn’t focused on the human interaction dimension.  Communication and people skills are new sets of complexities they need to master otherwise they will always be soldiers and never become generals. Our mindsets and skill sets combine to offer us opportunities to influence others and to direct the way forward. That is what it means to lead.  If we are busily working in our business, we may neglect to work on ourselves, so that we can work on the business.  It always good to step back and regroup around the fundamentals and refocus on where we need to put our energy and passion. Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader whose team gets results? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources.There is a perfect solution for you- To LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43sQHxV ) To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj ) To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK) If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. About The Author Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training Contact me at [email protected] The bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery" and his new books "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めま Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki. He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Has 6 weekly podcasts: 1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series, 2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え 3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series 4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト 5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show 6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube: 1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV 2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery 3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo. Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.  

It is very common to hear from expat leaders here about their frustrations with leading teams in Japan.  They get all of their direct reports together in a meeting room to work through some issues and reach some decisions.  All goes according to plan, just like at home.  Weeks roll by and then the penny drops that things that were agreed to in the meeting are not happening.  “Why is it so hard to get people who are being paid good money to do their job?”, they ask me. One reason is that some of the people in the meeting room looked like they were in agreement because they don’t want to single themselves out as disagreeing with the boss in a public forum.  They keep a low profile and choose not to execute on a piece of work they think is a bad idea.  The Japanese methodology is the exact opposite.  Before the meeting, the boss checks in with the key people about this idea they have and gets input and feedback.  Once these consultations have taken place and any necessary adjustments have been made, then the meeting is called.  The attendees rubber stamp the decision and then get busy making it a reality, with great haste and no resistance.  Which is better?  Well, in Japan, the nemawashi or groundwork method works very well because this is how things have been done around here for thousands of years. For leaders, the preferred follower is both independent and highly engaged.  They know what to do and think about what they are doing, adding in extras without waiting around for the boss to tell them how to do things.  Another variety of follower, which by the way, is very common in Japan, is the dependent variety who are engaged, but need a lot of guidance.  Part of the reason here is that everyone is highly risk averse. The safest course of action is to do extremely well what the boss asks for, but don’t take any initiative. In this way, the buck stops with the boss and if things go pear-shaped, then there is no blow back on the staff member. The more problematic types are the dependent staff who are disengaged.  In Japan, in big companies, the staff advancement method is based on age and stage, rather than outputs.  This breeds a uniformity which is easy to control but which does not generate great results.  They do their job at the minimum and that is it.  They do what they are told, but no more. The much, much more worrying variety is the independent staff who is disengaged.  They are unhappy working for you, are capable, but are not aligned with your direction.  Maybe they think you are a dill and not adding any value here in Japan and the sooner you get on a plane and buzz off to your next posting, the better. They can be internal bomb throwers sabotaging you.  As the leader we have many power plays we can utilize to get the team to follow us.  The obvious one is the three strips on the sleeve which says “I am the Boss, got it!”.  This authority power is backed up by the machine and gives us access to money and decision making.    Most staff get it and will respect the position even when they have doubts about the incumbent. Expert power is a strong one because we show we bring firepower to the team and the operation.  People realise we have a lot of expertise they don’t possess and we are adding value to everyone’s efforts.  This type of authority is hard to push back on. Reward power makes a lot of sense because we can facilitate pay rises, promotions, bonuses, study trips to cool brand name universities, choice projects, etc.  In Japanese we have the ame (飴) and the muchi (鞭) – the sweeties and the whip – this would be the sweets part. Role model power is also effective.  We are the very model of a modern leader; we tick all the boxes.  We are skilled professionally and also with working with all different types of people and are excellent in communication.  We are a star who no one can deny. The other power play is coercive power.  Those independent, disengaged saboteur staff may need a dose of this one.  If they don’t want to be part of the team, then go and we will help them out the door.  Very few staff need to experience our coercive power, so we are talking about the exceptions here.  The point is there are many ways we can engage our staff and have them want to follow us willingly.  A good place to start is to determine which of these categories each of the followers fits into it.  Then we can arrange the power structure which is the best fit for that person.  Leading everyone in the same way is how amateurs approach it.  The professionals lead people one by one, with total customisation.  

I was reading an article by Anjli Raval in the Financial Times about the transition for CFOs to the CEO job. She quoted a survey by Heidrick & Struggles which showed a third of CFOs in the FTSE 100 firms became the CEO.  This is up from 21% in 2019.  Raval makes an interesting observation, “research shows that CEOs promoted from the CFO job do not drive top-line revenue growth as quickly as those from other backgrounds, particularly in the first few years”.  Why is that the case? The article offers a few reasons about these promoted CFOs having a “cash-preservation mindset over a drive to pursue new opportunities”. Also, as the CFO, they had been making tough budget allocation decisions which had not been popular with their division head colleagues. Now they are the boss, but not everyone is happy about it.  As Yogi Berra said, “Leading is easy. It is getting people to follow you, which is hard”. That skill set isn’t taught to people trained in finance and accounting.  Analytical people, in general, are not particularly people focused.  They are focused on the numbers and protecting the cash flow.  Nothing is wrong with that but the leader’s role is different.  They need a defined set of skills and usually they are promoted to CEO, but given no training on the areas where there are bound to be gaps. Sales skills are not part of their academic curriculums and usually nothing they have ever done themselves.  If you are the boss of an organisation with a salesforce, then your accounting credentials count for nothing.  No one in sales will take you seriously as having any opinion worth regard.  Salespeople are a tough crowd.  They are self-sufficient, robust, resilient, self-made in their careers based on their success in selling solutions to buyers.  From their point of view, someone who just counts up the numbers, but has never sat across from thousands of ornery buyers, won’t command much respect. Fancy degrees and letters after your name are irrelevant to salespeople. If the new CEO wants to get salespeople behind them, then they had better spend a lot of time with their salespeople visiting buyers and hearing firsthand how tough the profession of sales is.  I am thinking back to all the CFOs I have worked with and in my experience, most of them looked down on salespeople.  That attitude won’t win any hearts and minds and as the boss, we need our salespeople to be fully committed and firing on all cylinders.  Treating the salespeople as the great unwashed may make the new boss feel superior, but salespeople are experts at reading between the lines and summing people up very quickly.  They won’t be fooled. The other usual skill gap is in dealing with all different types of people.  When you spend your career in technical specialty areas, there is a common language and understanding with your immediate colleagues which is not shared outside your division.  Lawyers, engineers, IT people spring to mind.  Their education didn’t put much emphasis on communication and people skills and when they become the boss, that gap is highlighted. Does the organisation recognise that and give them any training?  Usually “no”.  Somehow it is imagined they will just magically transform themselves after a long career path in a box and become hale fellow well met types to the masses. I am thinking of a lawyer I know here.  I see him at a lot of networking events and always wonder about what he is trying to achieve?  Presumably he is looking of potential business as a lawyer.  Interestingly, when I engage him in conversation, he is stiff, awkward and definitely does not make you feel welcome, comfortable or relaxed in his company.  The contradiction of aims and reality is quite profound. If you make the leap from technical person to leader, then you need to work on yourself.  The company might give you an Executive Coach, but unless they are experts in communication and people skills, they will just ask a bunch of deep, meaningful and searching questions and provide no answers.  Very unsatisfying in my experience. Take personal accountability and get help on improving your communication skills pronto.  Also, make a bigger effort to learn how to get on with people who are just not like you and never will be like you.  We can’t fire everyone who is different to us, as much as we may think that is a good idea.  It is better to change ourselves and become more skilled in working with people than eliminating the very people we need to make the organisation a success.  If we don’t get the people and communciation parts right, then we will struggle to have people follow us and our time at the top with be brief.    

It sounds very obvious, doesn’t it, to remind the team what we are trying to achieve, but are we doing it?  Yes, we had that team Town Hall a few months ago and as the leader we outlined where we need to be at the end of the financial year. After that session, we have all been head down and getting on with it. “They know right?  I told them everything they need to know, to get on with it” is what we have ringing in our internal conversation with ourselves.  Is this true, though? Yes, we know the number we have to achieve, but what about the strategy to get there?  Is that clear enough to everyone? Do they all remember the details or have they been consumed by the minutiae of “doing” and have been neglecting the big picture of what we need to do to deliver the result?  The daily grind makes us small.  We are worn down by the doing and the bigger picture gets shoved into the background.  The leader’s job is to brush the dust off the plan and keep reminding the team what we have to do and how we are doing it. The other issue we face is, as leaders, we are perfectly clear and we know what needs to be done, but have we properly communicated this to the team?  In Japan, we are working across two languages all the time. Even though we think we have been clear, we know that even amongst native speakers, there can be cases where we haven’t been clear enough.  Multiply that possibility when we are operating in imperfect Japanese or our team are using imperfect English and there are endless possibilities for a lack of clarity. It happens all the time too, that what we expect to happen doesn’t happen at all or doesn’t happen when we thought it would happen.  Our staff member didn’t actually understand what they needed to do, but it is embarrassing to admit that to the boss, so they smile nicely and disappear. We find out weeks or months later that something key has been missed or done incorrectly.  Whose fault was that?  We might want to blame them, but we had better take responsibility for not checking that our understanding of what would happen next was shared by the staff member who was going to do the work. I always keep in mind that “I don’t know” is a code phrase in Japan for “I don’t agree”.  No one in this country believes that direct confrontation with the boss is going to get you anywhere, so everyone operates at ninja levels of obfuscation.  “Why didn’t that project get done on time” is greeted with “I don’t know” and that conversation takes us precisely nowhere. We may have explained the rationale for the thing we wanted done and to us, that made perfect sense, but to the staff member that may represent more work and they already feel overwhelmed by what they have on their plate right now.  That project gets pushed to the back of the cue.  Conveniently, their boss is super busy and distracted by numerous other projects, so there is a strong chance the boss may forget about this imposition entirely and they can keep doing what they want to do.  When we do circle back and find there are problems, we then hit this wall of denial. We should always assume that what we said wasn’t entirely understood, in whichever language we were using.  That means we have to be well organised time wise to be able to check on progress on the way through, rather than neglecting the process and turning up at the end expecting results.  We should also have a regular cadence for reminding everyone what we are supposed to be doing, in terms of getting results and also referring to the strategy on how we are going to make that happen.  Yes, we told them before, but let’s assume they have all been busy and have forgotten some of the finer points.  In particular, the WHY is a big factor which we need to keep reminding everyone about and not just the what and the how. If we are well organised, we can do this and we can smooth out a lot of wrinkles.  We can make the work process much better.  This drops the stress levels and increases the joy of work for us and for everyone else.  What’s that, “no joy at work?”.  Well, if that is the case, then go back and have a look at some of the basics and make sure they are in place. If they are not, then get busy and re-introduce them.   

Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment.  Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer.  That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect.  Mid-career hires were frowned upon. If you bolted from your employer, you had almost zero chance of joining a competitor. You entered a dark forest and had to find your way through the brambles and undergrowth to meet out a living on the lower rungs of a netherworld of small firms willing to take you on. In 1997, the venerable Yamaichi Securities blew up and a lot of competent, hard working finance industry people suddenly found themselves in the street without a job.  Other firms in the same sector employed them, because they were skilled and this was the first tear in the fabric of the stigma of the mid-career hire.  The Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 added another slash to lifetime employment in Japan, as many people lost their jobs.  The 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear power plant explosions disrupted many industries, throwing people out of work.  Covid did a similar job on particular industries like tourism and hospitality as borders closed. The downturn in population has meant there is a strong demand for workers with a growing limitation on the supply side.  This throws up options for staff which were not there before and it impacts the loyalty factor of the worker-employer construct.  Thirty percent of young people in their third and fourth years of employ, after having been trained by the company who hired them, jump out and go somewhere else.  No loyalty and no qualms about leaving their employer. A client of mine sent me a note the other day about doing some training and as an aside, he mentioned that one of his key people involved in that decision, who had been with him for 14 years, was suddenly leaving.  This is very disheartening because you lose the experience, their contacts and the continuity with their colleagues and clients.  That takes a long time to re-stitch together. Sometimes it is the stupidity of our own construction.  An organisation I used to work for had a new leader appear.  He was not the usual standard of experience or capability for that complex work and decided to fire one of the staff who had been with the organisation for decades.  He had no conception of the network he was letting walk out the door.  Twenty-plus years of deep relationships with buyers in his industry was just vaporised.  It is not something obvious you can notice, like a chair has gone missing in the office, but the loss to the business is still there and manifests itself later when you least need it. What can we do about this?  Sadly, not much.  We do our best to align the direction and values of the organisation with the staff’s interests.  It won’t always be a perfect fit.  Also, their interests change.  They now have aging parents, get married, have children, start to think about retirement, etc.  Covid has crushed many companies and those pressures can speed up changes, which lead to staff leaving. When things are rolling, there is less taste to leave because the rewards are coming thick and fast.  When things have been tough and you are crawling out of the hole together, the rewards are all in the future. Two of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principles come in handy here. One is to cooperate with the inevitable and the other is to expect ingratitude.  It is inevitable that in a strong demand economy for staff, we will see people moving more and more than in the past. The old mid-career hire stigmas have become less potent and the era of the “free-agent” employee is upon us.  We have to face the reality and not pine for the good old days of a desk groaning under the weight of resumes of people seeking employ.  I should have photographed that phenomenon, because I will never see it’s like again in my working life. The ingratitude aspect of no loyalty is also a bitter pill to swallow.  We do our absolute best to be fair with our people and give them as much as we can of the rewards, but they still up and leave us.  The departure event is one struggle, but our reaction is the bigger struggle.  If we get caught up in expectations which are too high or unrealistic for a changing market, then we are setting ourselves up for depression and stress. If we believe we have been fair, but it hasn’t been enough, then we should get over it and go find a replacement, no matter how fraught, expensive and difficult that may be.  We also had better get used to it, because this has already become our reality from now on.   Loyalty Is Now Tenuous In Business In Japan Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment.  Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer.  That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect.  Mid-career hires were frowned upon. If you bolted from your employer, you had almost zero chance of joining a competitor. You entered a dark forest and had to find your way through the brambles and undergrowth to meet out a living on the lower rungs of a netherworld of small firms willing to take you on. In 1997, the venerable Yamaichi Securities blew up and a lot of competent, hard working finance industry people suddenly found themselves in the street without a job.  Other firms in the same sector employed them, because they were skilled and this was the first tear in the fabric of the stigma of the mid-career hire.  The Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 added another slash to lifetime employment in Japan, as many people lost their jobs.  The 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear power plant explosions disrupted many industries, throwing people out of work.  Covid did a similar job on particular industries like tourism and hospitality as borders closed. The downturn in population has meant there is a strong demand for workers with a growing limitation on the supply side.  This throws up options for staff which were not there before and it impacts the loyalty factor of the worker-employer construct.  Thirty percent of young people in their third and fourth years of employ, after having been trained by the company who hired them, jump out and go somewhere else.  No loyalty and no qualms about leaving their employer. A client of mine sent me a note the other day about doing some training and as an aside, he mentioned that one of his key people involved in that decision, who had been with him for 14 years, was suddenly leaving.  This is very disheartening because you lose the experience, their contacts and the continuity with their colleagues and clients.  That takes a long time to re-stitch together. Sometimes it is the stupidity of our own construction.  An organisation I used to work for had a new leader appear.  He was not the usual standard of experience or capability for that complex work and decided to fire one of the staff who had been with the organisation for decades.  He had no conception of the network he was letting walk out the door.  Twenty-plus years of deep relationships with buyers in his industry was just vaporised.  It is not something obvious you can notice, like a chair has gone missing in the office, but the loss to the business is still there and manifests itself later when you least need it. What can we do about this?  Sadly, not much.  We do our best to align the direction and values of the organisation with the staff’s interests.  It won’t always be a perfect fit.  Also, their interests change.  They now have aging parents, get married, have children, start to think about retirement, etc.  Covid has crushed many companies and those pressures can speed up changes, which lead to staff leaving. When things are rolling, there is less taste to leave because the rewards are coming thick and fast.  When things have been tough and you are crawling out of the hole together, the rewards are all in the future. Two of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principles come in handy here. One is to cooperate with the inevitable and the other is to expect ingratitude.  It is inevitable that in a strong demand economy for staff, we will see people moving more and more than in the past. The old mid-career hire stigmas have become less potent and the era of the “free-agent” employee is upon us.  We have to face the reality and not pine for the good old days of a desk groaning under the weight of resumes of people seeking employ.  I should have photographed that phenomenon, because I will never see it’s like again in my working life. The ingratitude aspect of no loyalty is also a bitter pill to swallow.  We do our absolute best to be fair with our people and give them as much as we can of the rewards, but they still up and leave us.  The departure event is one struggle, but our reaction is the bigger struggle.  If we get caught up in expectations which are too high or unrealistic for a changing market, then we are setting ourselves up for depression and stress. If we believe we have been fair, but it hasn’t been enough, then we should get over it and go find a replacement, no matter how fraught, expensive and difficult that may be.  We also had better get used to it, because this has already become our reality from now on.    

Leaders now face a pivotal moment in business in Japan.  Do they continue to cling to the past? Do they replay what they went through when they were younger and lead as they were taught by their seniors or do they change the angle of approach?  Japan rebuilt itself after the devastation of the war.  The workers slaved away, adding a notch to their collective belts as they slowly overtook the GNP levels of leading European countries. I remember how proud some Japanese company employees were when they overtook the UK. They were winning the post-war economic battle after having lost the wartime military struggle. Getting to global number two status was built on the 6 days a week working dedication of today’s retired great grandparents. Not only six days a week, but incredibly long hours and long commutes. Sundays were spent playing golf with clients.  Company holidays were shared with colleagues, as well as beers after hours.  In a nutshell, men worked at the same company until retirement and married women had to quit their jobs to raise the kids. For the men, there was not much family time, and the women were basically raising the kids on their own, like single mothers, but with more stable incomes. When I arrived here on April 1st, 1979, it was still like that.  School and work were six days a week endeavours. There were few women in business after marriage and usually only one breadwinner in the household. While I was studying at university, I used to teach English at companies at night. Sure enough, they were still there, the salarymen reading the sports newspaper at their desk, wasting their time waiting for the boss to leave, so they could go home.  Even when I came back for the third time to work in 1992, when interviewing sales staff for jobs, often they would tell me they quit their company because the long hours made them exhausted and ill.  When I heard that same story repeatedly, I connected it back to my earlier experiences of the 1970s and 1980s and knew they were telling me the truth. These are the people who have been doling out the OJT - On-The-Job Training - to each succeeding generation.  What about today, though, when there are many more job openings than enough people to fill them?  The drop off in overseas study has made the competent English-speaking Japanese staff member a rare bird, compared to a few decades ago.  This young generation of Japanese staff holds the whip hand in the current employment configuration between boss and workers. Are companies doing anything about this, other than whining about how hard it is to hire people?  From what I can see, they are focused on whining rather than taking the right actions.  OJT has been a smokescreen for doing very little for a long time. The spread of the personal computer drove a stake through the heart of OJT.  Let me explain why. Bosses now had to do their own typing, rather than having female secretaries do it for them.  I am going to digress and tell an interesting story about how much things have moved on. The average age of my fellow Rotarians in my Tokyo Rotary Club is 70.  It is changing now, but twenty years ago, it was not uncommon for these gentlemen (and until very recently they were all men) to give me their business card, but sans an email address. Why?  They were captains of industry, but not computer literate. They depended on their secretaries to take care of all their correspondence, including this newfangled thing called email on a computer, involving something called the internet. Their Middle Managers were also under attack. Their time was increasingly being consumed with emails and meetings.  In this messy mix of modernity and technology, time became tighter, and that meant the coaching component of OJT was truncated down to the bare minimum.  Over the last twenty years, the number of young Japanese has halved.  That process has been gradual, like a creeping demographic rust in the corporate machine. Now the Middle Manager class is waking up and discovering that there is a shortage of young people. OJT hasn’t properly trained them in leadership and here they are, facing a dilemma which has never been confronted before in the post-war period.  This generation are the first free agents in the Japan working world, able to pack their stuff up and jump ship without stigma, hesitation or remorse.  Until Yamaichi Securities went under in 1997 and put a lot of hard-working people on the street, there was a reluctance, a taint, to hiring people mid-career.  That event changed the stigma, as those staff were picked up by other companies in the finance sector.  The Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008, was another dam burst of good people losing their jobs in a bad economy and having to join companies as mid-career hires.  Today’s younger generation have grown up in a completely different world and have no problem with changing companies after a few years.  The Dai Ni Shin Sotsu or second graduation generation has seen 30% of the three-to-four-year new entry staff quit.  This was unthinkable in the past and that number will just continue to grow.  Are today’s Middle Managers in their thirties and forties able to handle this major change in work culture and rise of free-agentism?  Are companies giving them training to deal with this changed reality?  My observation is “not yet”. Clever companies will dump relying solely on OJT and provide the required training. They will be able to harvest a wave of available, mobile talent by creating environments attractive to these in-demand young people.  This war for talent is real. It is a zero-sum game in Japan of winners who can recruit and, importantly, retain key staff, and the losers who will become the training grounds for the staff who simply move to the winners.  

 As leaders, we are busy bees.  We are buzzing around, going from meeting to meeting. We are getting together with clients over lunch, touching base with HQ, handling the media, talking to HR about our people and a host of other important activities. Usually poor time managers, we are constantly hemmed in by the demands on our schedules.  The upshot is we are constantly looking for corners to cut, minutes to be shaved off regular activities and feeling oppressed by the overwhelming workload we face. The common victim in all of this is our leader's communication with our team.  We have found we can save time if we get straight to the point and then we can move on.  We are packaging up orders to be given to get the team moving.  Orders are given and we move on to the next activity.  We commonly forget to talk about the big picture, the background, the context, the WHY of what we want done.  We give the staff the short headline version of what we want done. We expect them to fill in the detail themselves, as we sleekly glide off to our next meeting, leaving them flummoxed in our wake. We are saving time, but in reality, we are slowing everything down.  If the staff don’t understand what we want, they will do a version of it.  Later, we find out that is not what we expected. We immediately get cranky because we have lost time and now we have to unwind what they have done and replace it with the correct version.  This is doubling the workload, including our own.   Recently, I introduced a new project which had elements required from a previous project.  I had told the team members what I wanted and a couple of years sail by.  When I wanted some elements from the previous project, I found out that they had not done what I wanted.  I thought I was clear about it, expected they understood my needs, but I made a fatal error – I didn’t check.  I was busy. I had already moved on to the next thing. Ouch!  On reflection, I saw I had just issued an order which was crystal clear to me, but that was all I did.  I didn’t spend enough time with them at the outset to explain the WHY behind what I wanted.  I didn’t make time to communicate the context to them.  Even if my explanation wasn’t genius, if they have the context, the chances are high they would do what I wanted automatically, because they got it.  None of that happened. I should have made remembering and understanding what I wanted clearer by wrapping it up in a story.  We are only so so at recalling facts, data and numbers, but we are really excellent at recalling stories.  Did I do that?  No.  I just blurted out the order in double time and promptly departed.  Don’t you know I am a busy boss?  Did my story have to be a substantial precis of War and Peace?  No. I could have spent two minutes telling them the Why, wrapping it up in the context, told as a compelling story.  I could have aligned the reasoning for the project with the background.  I could have mentioned the necessity for this project, how it came up, who was involved, where I was when I first got involved, who I was with, etc.  All of this little detail is important because our objective is to mentally transport the listener to where we were at the time.  If we can get them to come with us in their imagination, then we will be very successful in also getting them to support the WHY.   When we have the same context and background, we usually come to the same conclusions.  In fact, before we have even gotten to the part in the story about what needs to happen next, they have already raced ahead and worked it out for themselves.  There is no convincing needed by us, because they have concluded the appropriate course of action – surprise, surprise - the same one we are recommending.  They may come to a different conclusion after all, but that is fine.  They may actually come up with an idea which is better than ours.  The chances of their idea being radically different from ours, given the same context, would be possible, but rare. When we next feel the urgent need to lurch forward with an order, let’s exercise some self-restraint.  Instead, we should hark back to the roots of this project or task and recall why we came to the conclusion it was important.  Instead of telling them what to do, we just re-run the story of how we came to see this as the way forward and share that context with them.  At the end of that exercise we will find they will be very receptive to our suggestion, not order, on what should happen next.  This is a type of verbal jiujitsu.  We draw them in the direction we want, by getting their momentum to go where we want it.  It is a much superior method to barking out orders like a mad pirate captain – our usual leader reprise.  If we can help them to self-discover the conclusion, then we have been a very successful communicator. We will see ownership and commitment on their part.  This is so much smarter than the usual brute force of issuing orders backed up by the stripes on our sleeve pulling rank.  

 There are many paths to the mountaintop in the leadership area.  Today, let’s go back to the practical realities of getting others to listen to you and, even more importantly, to follow you.  My favourite quote on leadership is from Yogi Berra, the American baseball coach rather infamous for murdering the English language. He said something profound though, when he noted: “Leading is easy.  It is getting people to follow you, which is hard”.  If nobody likes you, what are your chances of uniting the team behind you?  Pretty dismal would be the obvious conclusion.  How many bosses are likeable, though? Often, they are demons, autocrats, channelling Genghis Khan for ideas on how to lead the team.  They enforce compliance, but don’t foster engagement. Their influence on what is possible for the team is limited in scope. Understanding the members of the team and what each individual wants is a good place to start to reverse the lack of engagement.  When they scold staff, this creates barriers and subterranean resistance.  Handing out praise may not have been a feature of how they grew up in leadership, but in today’s modern business world, they need to learn how to do this.  Being a good listener and encouraging others to talk, rather than barking out orders all the time, is the smarter move.  Smiling, rather than maintaining a permanent frown, would be a good change to make. Communicating the value their staff brings to the organisation is a key to helping them feel what they do is important and that they are important. Getting the team to accept your ideas can be achieved by pulling rank and threatening staff with removal.  It doesn’t get anyone particularly enthusiastic to do what the boss says though, let alone go the extra mile.  Resentment and discouragement become the order of the day.  In this permanent war for talent in Japan, the allergy to mid-career hires has evaporated and they can walk out the door to the warm embrace of your competitors. We can show our humanity by not holding the team to a standard that we don’t apply to ourselves.  If we are wrong, we should admit it quickly and emphatically.  This says to the team, “I am not perfect and I don’t expect perfection from you either”.  We should never say, “you are wrong” when they venture forth an idea or proposal.  That kills the creativity spark right there and creates resentment. Let them do most of the talking, even if it is killing us to shut up.  This encourages staff to have ownership of the execution of our ideas.  Trying to see things for the staff member’s point of view will help them feel understood and therefore more committed to reach the team goals. We need excellent communication skills to let the staff members feel the idea is theirs rather than ours.  We can use the Socratic Method of asking questions to lead them to self-discovery.  This is very empowering, and they will get right behind their own idea more than getting excited about executing on our direction on what needs to happen.  When they suggest things to us, we shouldn’t be dismissing their idea out of hand.  Yes, we may have more experience than them and yes, we may have tried that failed idea before.  The point is, we want them to be engaged. Taking their idea seriously is a key step to making that a reality.  Being a leader isn’t about having the baton tucked up under our arm and issuing orders right and left.  Asking questions is a much better way to get people to follow us.  They feel included in the decision-making process.  That sense of ownership brings more energy to the completion of the tasks.  Again, our communication capability is critical to have our team happy about doing what we suggest.  We should try to avoid having to use position power to get things done.  We want volunteers rather than the “volunteered”.  Mistakes will always happen and how we handle them makes all the difference.  I have seen a seriously senior executive explode in instant white-hot rage, up close and personal during a staff meeting.  It was horrific. No one in that room regarded him as their leader after than volcanic eruption. He should have shut up and instead reflected on all the mistakes he had made in his career. In particular, he should have recalled those he made at the same age and stage as his hapless victims assembled in that small meeting room. If someone makes a mistake, in 99% of cases, they feel bad.  They also feel useless and lose their confidence to get back on the back of that bucking bull and keep participating in the corporate rodeo.  We have to show them they can recover from this and they can be successful here with us.  We need to encourage them to try again.  We need to restore their self-belief.  We have to look for the opportunity for them to regain their face.  When we ask people to step outside their Comfort Zone, they will feel naked and vulnerable.  We have to look for the slightest improvement to praise and for each subsequent improvement.  We can communicate to them we see them as a winner and as a capable person. We purposely give them a fine reputation to live up to. None of the things I have covered here are complex or difficult. It may, however, require some re-wiring of the mindset about leading others.  We often get the wrong idea and information from previous bosses and from the media.  Try these ideas and you will find success in being liked by your team, be able to have them follow you and gain their respect as the leader.    

 You would think that organisations choose their leaders because they are skilled in communication.  What is the job after all, but communicating with the team to make sure everyone is clear about what they have to do and to encourage them to do it?  Well you would be wrong!  Leaders are usually selected for promotion because they are very good, often the best, at their current job. It is assumed that they will be the best person to lead the team on that basis.  Just as we know that the talented sports person doesn’t necessarily migrate those skills into leadership roles as a successful coach, neither does the talented functional specialist transform into a successful leader.  The gun sales rep doesn’t become a great sales team leader.  The best architect doesn’t make the best choice to lead other draftsmen and women.  The list just goes on and on and we wonder why we keep repeating the same errors?  One aspect of that difficulty is that it is hard to see the immediate results of leadership, unless they really screw things up and people start quitting in droves.   There is the rub.  In the “goode olde days”, it didn’t matter.  You just lose one and simply get a replacement.  In the 1990s, I remember getting twenty or thirty resumes to go through, to fill a sales position.  Now, if you can find anyone, you feel blessed.  The competition for talent is a remorseless zero-sum game.  As leaders, if we cannot communicate well with our people, we will face irreconcilable supply and demand issues.  We will have to spend a lot of time and money to rectify our mistakes as our people will vote with their feet and leave the organisation.  How can leaders improve their communication skills?  There are tons of things to work on, but let’s look at two specific items. 1.     I try to synchronise with the staff member when they are speaking by putting myself in their shoes.  Bosses have poor memories.  They conveniently forget about how they were at the same age and stage as their staff.  They imagine they were perfectly formed and with no blemishes when they were coming up through the ranks.  Not true. Like everyone working for us, we also made a host of mistakes in our careers, and that is how we educated ourselves.  Rather than putting on the superior boss hat when speaking to staff, let’s try to cast our mind back to our own shortcomings and inadequacies at the same point in our career.  This is a humbling exercise and bound to make us more sympathetic with the people who work for us, rather than getting annoyed with their work progress. We can change the tone of how we speak with them to be less abrupt.  We can be more keen to have them relax with us, so that they can feel confident sharing their ideas or issues.  We can stop telling them what to do and how to do it.  Instead, we can ask them for their opinion on what and how we should do things around here. We don’t cut them off when they are talking and we will encourage them to try things, even though we doubt that it is going to work.  We do this because we know that is how we learnt. We tried stuff and then sorted out the successes from the failures.  We are communicating a lot of trust when we do it this way, rather than micro-managing the hell out of the team. 2.     I observe the staff member for non-verbal clues  Busy bosses are prone to shortcut everything.  They are moving from meeting to meeting, trying to squeeze in their own emails between slots and generally feeling frustrated with the overload. Feeling totally time poor, they like to get to the meat of the issues straight away. They want to cut out any down time, like having to listen to a detailed explanation from staff, when they could get the summary much faster.  This tends to become an internal dialogue between the boss and themselves, where they are concentrated on their frustration with their own lack of time and not with the person with whom they are speaking.  This self-absorption means they are stuck with hearing the words of the staff but are not conscious of the non-verbal messages.  In professional card games, they talk about the players having “tics”.  These are patterns of unconscious behaviour that are linked to attitudes and thoughts.  The successful card players read their opponents in detail, looking for these clues as predictors of decision-making.  Bosses need to do the same. We should slow down and carefully look for patterns in our staff beyond the words we hear.  We have all experienced this.  When we said something, we noticed they winced or moved in a certain way. Their body language was saying “I don’t like what you just said or you”, but there were no words coming out of their mouth.  When we are busy laying down orders like a mad pirate captain, we can miss the verbal clues and continue on our merry way, oblivious to the carnage we leave in our wake. We may not have meant what we said to come across the way it did, but if we don’t spot the negative reaction, we cannot go into damage control.  In this war for talent, if we continue to make these types of mistakes, then we will try to fill job posts far too often, as people simply pull up stakes and leave.  Communication is a skill and it must be mastered.  The worst time in Japan to be a boss is today and the bad news is that it will only get even more diabolical.  We have to face the reality and gear up accordingly.  If we don’t, then we will be the one leaving and not of our own volition.    

Leaders may not even be aware that they are poor listeners.  They are very focused on telling others what to do. Being time poor, they are very focused on their own messaging, rather than the messaging efforts of others.  In the war for talent in Japan, that could be a fatal move.  One of the biggest factors driving engagement in Japan is the feeling that the boss values you.  If the leader isn’t really listening to the team members, they are not stupid and they will pick up on this.  Before you know it, they have fled to greener pastures.  They are off to your competitor, and the arduous and expensive task of replacing them begins.  We don’t want that. Here are some hints on making sure you are a gold medal winning listening boss. 1.        You display an open and accepting attitude toward the speaker This sounds easy, but are we doing it?  Have we stopped the noise in our own brain to refocus on the person in front of us and not let that internal message competition diminish our capacity to listen to what we are being told?  Are we in a neutral mindset and not bringing up silent annoyances from past associations with this person?  Maybe they screwed something up recently and your mind is having flashbacks while they are talking to you and you are thinking about what happened.  How is your body language control?  I remember I caught myself shaking my head in disagreement while someone was telling me their idea.  It was something I didn’t agree with and I was showing it.  It was an automatic physical reaction. I realised right there that I couldn’t allow that to happen again. Now, I try to keep a strong lock on my body language, in case I am communicating a negative message. 2.        When someone approaches me with a question, I stop what I am doing and give them my full attention I worked with a fellow Division Head once who was a shocker. When I visited his workstation, he had three screens set up and while I was sitting there talking; he continued to multi-task.  He would type away, reading the screen and listening to me, all at the same time.  It was a total insult in my mind.  His self-awareness was dismally low and I remember how it made me feel.  So, I made a pact with myself to never do this to others. Whenever my staff comes to me while I am typing, I physically lift the keyboard up and rest it against my computer stand to show I am not doing anything else but listening to them.  I find this a good discipline, because when I am concentrating, the temptation is to type and listen at the same time – bad idea! 3.        I concentrate on what is being said even if it is of little interest to me I saw a dramatic demonstration of this by my old boss.  He was a senior Director in the firm and had a very big job.  One evening, I was sitting in his office as he was explaining something to me, when one of the secretaries popped her head in the door to say something to him as she was leaving.  It was a light comment from her, nothing particularly important, but he stopped talking to me immediately and gave her his 100% concentration.  I thought “Wow, that is impressive”. He made her feel like a million dollars. No wonder he was one of the most popular leaders in that hierarchical, tough, hard edged, cutthroat world of serious big ticket real estate. It is hard to focus on things we don’t consider important, because so much of our day is taken up with Quadrant One urgent and important items.  The interruption seems like a waste of our valuable time.  It might be important to them, but not to us. We have a lot to do baby, so the temptation is to brush them off and get back to the grindstone.  We have to overcome that habit and really appreciate that this topic is important to them. If they are important to the firm, then we have to give them our full attention to show we value them. 4.        I try to understand the viewpoint of the person who I disagree with This is not easy.  Leaders are often very forceful people, used to breaking down walls and pushing forward regardless of the obstacles.  When we get pushback, we overcome it and drive hard toward the outcomes we want.  That becomes an automatic reaction and when combined with impatience, it can be a lethal cocktail. The person we are talking to has come to a conclusion based on a series of factors – their experience, what they have read, what they have heard, etc.  They feel their viewpoint is valuable and legitimate. Here we are sloughing them off and not taking them seriously.  This will drive people out the door at breakneck speed to the welcoming arms of our rivals.  It is probably killing us, but we have to suspend judgement and accept that there may be many paths to the mountaintop and they may have discovered an alternate route.  Maybe we are unmoved by their idea, but at least we have to afford them the respect of taking them seriously and listening carefully to what they have to say.  As leaders, we think we are good listeners, but often we are good tellers and poor listeners in reality.  How did you fare with this short checklist about your listening skills?  We can all do better. These little hints are excellent reminders of best practice to retain staff.  We need to build the culture internally where people feel valued and want to stay with the firm.  The alternative is expensive, disruptive and very time consuming, if people leave us during this Japan war for talent.  Listening to our people is a vital skill we need to improve to protect and grow the business.      

The S-Curve is a very simple concept.  Over time, a newly promoted employee goes through distinct stages in their performance achievement.  Initially, their performance declines as they grapple with the new set of responsibilities.  Gradually they get the swing of things and start to do well at their new accountabilities.  After a period of becoming comfortable with their role, they start to stagnate as they stop growing. Within these stages are many nuances.  We select people for promotion based on their history and our hope for their future.  We expect that good work and result production in the current role is an important indicator of talent and ability and that these attributes can be transferred into their leadership role.    One of the astounding things about modern business in Japan is that firms abandon these individuals at this point. Puzzlingly, they do not provide their newly promoted leaders with any great assistance to succeed.  The newly promoted are given the baton of command and left to themselves to use trial and error or copying what their previous bosses did, to work out how to lead.  Sounds like a plan except what if their previous boss role models were totally mediocre leaders.  This is how to create generational decline in a business and nobody would be voting for that. You really have to wonder how we could still be using such a failed model in this modern day and age, in such a sophisticated country like Japan?  This country has a constant, savage battle for market share, going on across all industries.  The struggle for survival is real and yet the development of the people in middle management who can make a difference is being hamstrung by inertia.  Companies just keep doing what they have always done.  That is not very smart if your competitor is making the changes to succeed and you are not. Part of the issue is that promoting one person doesn’t fit into any comfortable time frame for the machine. If ten people get promoted at the same time, then perhaps some group training can be arranged.  The green eye shade types hunkered down in the accounting department run the numbers, calculate the per head cost, the per hour numbers and conclude that this is doable. However, if it is just one person, then the calculations blow up and the required training gets the thumbs down as too expensive. Consequently, there is no mechanism for developing these new leaders to play the role they have been handpicked for.  Individual coaching is ruled out as too expensive for such a low-level position.  For the senior Directors of course, an Executive Coach is deemed an acceptable expense, but not so for the newly minted section head. It is a case of “congratulations, work hard and good luck” and that is the full extent of the training programme.  Here is a hint for everyone - look for training companies like us, who offer public classes on leadership, where you can ship the newly promoted person off to a class with others in similar situations, assembled together from other industries and companies.  This is not hard and it is not expensive. In the meantime, the new leader is struggling to work out what they should be doing in this unfamiliar leadership role.  Of course, the section targets haven’t been adjusted down to account for their struggle or lack of experience in this new role.  Initially, they work much harder than before as a player/manager to get to the required numbers.  This works for this first year and then what happens?  The next year the targets are higher again, and they are doing even more individual work. Not much leading is underway to get to the target for which they have responsibility because they don’t have any time.  They are not leveraging the team to produce a team result. Heroically they are trying to do it all by themselves. By year three, they blow-up and can’t match the increase in targets. Then the machine concludes they are a dud as a leader. They are replaced with the next victim; no lessons have been learnt and the cycle kicks off again. It doesn’t have to be this way.  Get some new leader training and support for them. Then they will start to produce results from the whole team.  The initial struggle with the unfamiliar starts to sort itself out. Through the training they discover the leverage points around having access to people, to get to the numbers, as a team.  They are still doing some trial and error, but it is off a base of knowledge and ideas, rather than desperate guess work.  They are executing on what they have been trained to do and they are now fine tuning it for their own idiosyncratic reality.  There is a pivot point which must be cleared though.  This is to move from working in the business to working on the business.  A newly promoted leader, after three years of experience, has now worked out what to do and they are doing it well.  But this is where stagnation can set in.  They slip effortlessly into their Comfort Zone.  The machine is well oiled and working and they are just repeating the same steps over and over.  It would be good if business was left frozen at this point and not continually evolving or if their rivals were dormant and not innovating and pushing hard. Obviously that is not the case and there is no margin for cruising in modern commerce. If there is a culture of learning established in the organisation, then the new leader is constantly encouraged to educate themselves and look for kaizen style improvement as well as possible innovation leaps to grow the operation.  They are also pushing to get further trained as an experienced leader.  If they are smart enough, they cannot just be satisfied with what they were provided with as a new leader.  The leadership training content is quite different, because now they are operating at a more complex stage and need more complete solutions.  In Japan, very few leaders get this advanced leadership training because of the over-reliance on OJT – On The Job training.  In fact, in Japan, most leaders are not leaders at all because they are stuck as being simple managers.  They get the work done on time, on budget, at the required quality – all great and necessary.  However, they are not competent enough around bringing everyone together and persuading them on the direction for the business or developing the abilities of their staff, which are the additional tasks for the leader beyond running the machine well. Leadership is a journey, there is nothing particularly new and you would think we would have all worked this out pretty well by now.  In Japan, that is not the case and there is a big opportunity to improve the productivity of firms through further developing the ability of their leaders.  If your leaders are relying on trial and error, then you have a big problem which needs fixing and fixing right now.    

As leaders are we all perfect?  Are we perfect all the time?  Obviously, the answer is “no” to both counts, but that doesn’t mean we always face up to our own shortcomings.  An important part of growing and improving as a leader is to be honest about who we really are.  Let’s go through some common areas where leaders can improve. 1.     Uninspiring   This uninspiring tag covers a vast majority of leaders.  Ask yourself, “how many of my previous bosses would I describe as inspiring?”  The answer for most people is usually none or one. Now ask yourself, “if someone surveyed my team members, how many would say I was inspiring?”  This type of reality check is useful because it can help us become better in some key leadership areas.  What contributes to a leader being seen as uninspiring?  It usually relates to a lack of enthusiasm, someone going through the motions with no great passion. This is reflected in how they communicate.  The voice is dull, the energy low, the fire in the belly has long since smoldered out.  As a consequence, they lack direction for themselves and therefore cannot provide it for the team.  They are not leading an intentional life for themselves. Leaders are not robots and we go through our ups and downs in business.  An important part of what we do is to provide electricity for our people. That spark inside us ignites a spark in them.  If our spark has been eclipsed, then we need to reignite it. That means finding meaning in what we do.  It means going back to the basics of what we do as a leader and rediscover the fundamentals of our role and why we are here.  If we cannot manage that, we won’t be around for very long as the organisation soon realizes we are not providing any particular value to the firm.  Find some aspect of the work which provides enjoyment.  Start there and try to build on that scope to include more tasks and gradually rebuild your enthusiasm for being the leader. 2.     Over-Focused On Self It would be a hard task to find anyone who isn’t overly focused on themselves in this modern business world of sudden layoffs, deadly mergers and bankruptcies.  Leaders are not immune to these fears. Self-preservation gets more intense as you climb up the greasy pole and start costing the firm more dough.  Recently. a friend of mine here at a prestigious financial firm was asked to leave because his subordinate, who he developed, would take over as his bosses could save money this way.  So much for his long loyalty to the company and no wonder we become cynical. Over-focus in this context though means not being concerned about the people under you and just looking out for yourself.  Actually, we can do both.  Notwithstanding my friends recent unfortunate collision with boss greed, we can protect ourselves and develop our team.  They are not mutually exclusive objectives. Over-focus on us means not delegating tasks so that others can develop their career path. They need to impress an interview panel that they can step up and do the job because they have some valuable experience in relevant parts of it.  Delegation is not dumping one’s work on to others.  It is growing the people under you. We have to stop saying things like “it will be quicker if I do it myself”.  Instead, we have to devote some of our highly valuable time to developing others to have them learn the tasks.  3.     Not Accountable Perfhaps we are an avid resister of feedback.  We literally trash the 360-degree feedback because it is painful to read what others think about us, when they have the chance to freely express their views in a way which cannot be traced back to them individually.  Of course, we can all improve and even if the comments are “wrong” from our point of view, we accept that there is that perception of us.  We can work on improving that perception.  If we ignore it, then retribution isn’t far away.  Before you know it, your boss and the HR department are all over you demanding changes anyway.  So why not be the arbiter of our own adjustments and start work on fixing the perceptions though improved communication and deleting behaviours which others find irritating or unacceptable. Another aspect of lack of accountability is to cut yourself some slack, but be uber demanding of your team.  You take a two-hour lunch or head off to the gym during the workday, but hammer your people about their lack of results.  Remember staff are all card-carrying boss watchers and they see what is going on.  Having double standards will never fly because there is no consistency in that approach.  People under us like consistency and they dislike unpredictability.  Also, don’t apply your standards of today against someone younger and less experienced.  Compare them to what you were like at their age and stage. The contrast can be very revealing.  When we do this, it helps to adjust how we approach them regarding the quality of their work.  We don’t have ridiculous expectations or standards which we could never have achieved in their place.  None of these shortcomings are beyond repair.  We need to face the reality first and then work out a plan to improve on them.  If we don’t want to fix them, then someone above us will fix it by removing us.  That is avoidable if we choose to be someone who votes for leading an intentional life.  That angle makes such a difference in how we feel about what we are doing, such that improvements can come thick and fast.  

Which is more important to us as the leader – what we choose to do or who we choose to be?  Most of our careers on the way up will have been concentrated on doing, achieving, delivering results, making the numbers, getting projects delivered on time and on budget.  Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that.  When we get into a position of leadership there is always a lot to do.  Previously we were responsible for ourselves and now we are responsible for a bunch of other people.  It is always breathtaking to discover that the people you are leading are nothing like you. They have different mindsets, motivations, values, fears, habits, desires and ambitions.  The old boss idea that “if you want to get ahead, be like me”, is a joke in this modern business world.  The “doing” in business is so loud, we are often oblivious to how we are showing up.  Everyone of our staff are expert boss watchers.  They can notice the smallest variation in our demeanour from one day to another.  They are like those gazelles you see in nature documentaries, wandering around the African savannah, keeping a close eye on the nearby pride of lions.  Staff have learnt that self-preservation is improved by keeping a close eye on the mood of the boss, “maybe I shouldn’t raise that project today because the boss looks in a bad mood”. I was reminded of this recently. I got to the office early and when one of my team arrived, he asked me if I was okay.  Without knowing it my face was showing a lot of stress.  I didn’t realise I was showing it, but he noticed it immediately.  Here is a hint for bosses – keep an eye on what is on your face, because we can be radiating messages and we might not be aware we are doing so.  The ”do” part of our job has to line up with the “say” part as well.  Staff love consistency and predictability on the part of the boss.  They don’t want to work for duplicitous people.  Today they have lots of options and there is an army of hungry recruiters constantly on the lookout for poaching opportunities.  Companies often frame their Vision, Mission and Values statements and hang them on the wall as a dedication to what the firm stands for.  Middle management leaders cannot even remember these statements, so you have to wonder what is the value of doing this.  I know that they cannot remember them because we test it every chance we get.  As a training company we are often brought in to give the Middle Managers leadership training.  At the very start of the class I take the frame off the wall and turn it around, so that no one can see it.  The class usually has around 20 plus people and when I ask what is the Vision or the Mission or the Values there is often a lot of shoe gazing gong on as they avoid eye contact with me. The best they come up with is two or maybe three of the Values and they cannot recall the rest.  I can’t see how you can live it, if you cannot remember it. So as the boss, can you remember the Vision, Mission and Values?  Are you living them as a role model for the rest of the crew?  Are you congruent in your boss behaviour with what the firm says is the way we do things around here?  Companies like to say things like, “there are no mistakes, only learning opportunities”. I agree and that is a very noble idea.  The problem arises when the boss chews out a member of the staff for benefiting from this learning opportunity by screwing something up.  This is where the “do” and the “be” are not aligning. It is so easy for this to occur because the “do” part of our work is so deafening and so overpowering.  We get sucked up into the vortex of constant meetings, tsunami of emails and task requirements exceeding the time available to do them. Tempers can fray, patience can erode and we say things we regret later, because we know we were not walking the talk. Being a boss is an inside out process.  Who we are on the inside becomes obvious to everyone around us. They know if we are a fraud or if we are a true of heart.  This can be the Johari window quadrant of “known to everyone, but not known to us”.  Our “do” is not matching up with our “be”.  Being self-aware sounds good in theory, but in a busy world it can be hard to track and monitor.  Busy bosses have no time allocated for self-reflection, because they are overwhelmed by the workload.  This taking a moment to think about our “be” and whether it is matched by our “do” is a very useful exercise.  We are not perfect human beings, but we can improve if we decided that it is worth it.  If we want to keep our people from the ravages of the recruiter army, then it is worth it.

Leadership is about creating environments that influence others to achieve group goals. This works because people support a world they help create. There are five success areas for leaders to focus on that make all the difference. Rate your performance by giving yourself a mark on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) for each area. Self-direction This is a must for leaders. If you can’t organise yourself, your ability to have others follow you is doubtful. Effective self-directed leaders have a personal vision which they review each day to remind themselves that the compass is more critical than the clock. They write down this vision and they write down their goals. They do this because they know there is magic in committing generalities to specifics in written form. They have a broad range of goals around their main roles in life, so that the balance between business and non-business is never compromised. They have clearly defined values that guide their behaviour. This makes them predictable, congruent, consistent and reliable for those dealing with them. They understand the importance of self-direction and they are evangelistic about converting those they are responsible for into similar individuals. People skills Mainly because they lack self-awareness, are under-informed or uneducated, many people find these skills one of the most difficult areas to master. Leaders know that failure to form effective teams and partnerships at all levels, inside and outside the organisation, will have a critical negative impact on their personal influence capacity. Organisations that wish to prosper need their people to grow, and that requires a safe, open environment that encourages individual development. Effective leaders understand what turns people off and stop doing these things. In the same way, they study what works best and strive to interact with others accordingly. Many successful leaders have read Dale Carnegie’s classic text on developing an aptitude for human relations, and make it their bible for people skills. The primary reason leaders should develop people skills is to ensure they can build trust and respect between themselves and their subordinates. Process skills Such skills challenge a leader to ensure the system is not subjecting great people to poor systems and processes, ensuring that they will fail. We cannot see a process, but we can observe people using that process. It is, therefore, easier to blame the poor performer than the process, and leaders must be attuned to the difference. Leaders demonstrate the ability to plan, innovate, define clear performance objectives, delegate, utilise time effectively, analyse problems and make good decisions. As noted above, leaders know that people support a world they help create, so they enlist their people for reviewing and improving processes. Effective people skills ensure processes work optimally through users. Communication skills These make or break leaders. By demonstrating effective questioning and listening skills, leaders learn the most. They understand that, even during their first day on the job, associates can offer valuable insights and ideas for innovations. This is counterintuitive because leaders often fall into the habit of telling everyone what they need to do and how they need to do it. Leaders are usually the most experienced, smart, capable individuals in a group, and are willing to share their knowledge and insights. Learning how to ask questions instead of giving orders is an essential discipline for leaders. They also investigate the communication systems in the organisation to ensure they are right, and examine their processes to verify communication flows effectively throughout the organisation. Checking for understanding and being clear, transparent and concise are great strategies for leadership. Mass motivational speeches have been replaced in business by quality one-on-one questioning. Such questioning sessions spur the self-discovery process, and provide the best coaching opportunities. Accountability This success area is disseminated throughout the organisation by leaders who hold themselves and their team accountable. Leaders quickly and emphatically admit their own mistakes and lead by example. Following Mr. or Ms. Perfect is difficult. Leaders have the self-confidence to show their humanity, including their weaknesses, and have the communication skills to enlist their teams’ support. Leaders coach, guide, support, and train others to achieve mutually agreed goals and objectives, as well as provide direction and manage change. Leaders also create and monitor systems and processes of control and accountability within their organisation, so that people have the freedom to achieve results. And your mark is . . .? What mark did you give yourself out of 50? We all know we can do better on the basics. Take a moment out from your busy leadership role to gauge your performance in these five areas, then redirect yourself and move forward. Watch the clock but seize the compass!