Fads are a constant in business.  Consultants have a field day. They rush around providing companies with ideas on how to ride the new fashion wave.  They then have to milk it as hard as possible, because they know it will be soon supplanted by the next fad.  Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is right up there as the latest fad in Japan.  I am not saying that DEI isn’t legitimate or important.  What I am saying is that for many companies, this is a patina of legitimacy, a fig leaf, as they seek to show good citizenship rather than a heartfelt belief in the importance of DEI itself.  “If others are doing it, then we should be doing it too”, is more the motivation, in many cases in Japan. The benefits of DEI in the West are numerous.  These include faster problem-solving, better decision-making, increased innovation, employee engagement and better financial performance.  None of these outcomes have been accepted as relevant in Japan as yet.  The scope is also quite different. In the West, we are dealing with generational, gender, ethnic, cultural and religious differences in the melting pots of the world, in particular in the US.  In Japan only generational and gender differences are significant.  There are only 2.89 million foreigners living in Japan, who represent 2.3% of the total population, so that is a very small share and the consequent impact is negligible.  Japanese are so flexible.  They manage to celebrate their children’s 5th and 7th birthdays with a Shinto Ceremony, have a Christian style wedding ceremony at a chapel and be cremated as Buddhists, so their religious tolerance and flexibility is pretty high.  Muslims are 0.15% and Christians 1.5% of the population of Japan, so again both religions are basically insignificant.  If you think about it, the vast majority of workers in Japan never encounter a foreigner while working. They do encounter young people joining the workforce and they do encounter women working in larger numbers though.  The female employment rate is around 52%.  In fact, pre-Covid, the average percentage rate of 15 to 64 years old women in the workforce for the OECD was 65%, whereas in Japan it was 73%.  However, 32% of women workers were working 40 hours plus a week and 26% were working between 15-29 hours a week.  Seventy percent of male workers worked for 8 hours or more a day, while the same ratio for women was 40%, because often they are employed as part-time workers.   Men work ten hours a week more than women in Japan, the highest disparity in the Group Of Seven nations. Professor Isamu Yamamoto from Keio University did a study of listed companies from 2010 to 2015 and showed that a rise of 0.1% in the ratio of female managerial positions, resulted in an increase of 0.5% in return on assets and 13% in productivity improvement.  Additionally, he found that there were notable earnings improvements at companies in Japan where 15% or more managerial positions were held by women.  The study concluded, “Productivity improves possibly because the increased chances of promotion (for women) raise their motivation”.  However, only 8.6% of Japanese companies have women in managerial positions, despite the Japanese Government’s 30% target, while 45% have no female managers at all.  Only 8% of companies have a female president and roughly half of that number took over from their husband when he passed away. The opportunity is there for Japan to do much more in terms of diversity around embracing the ideas of the younger generation, but company hierarchies are constructed according to age and stage of service in the company. That is, the older you are and the longer you have been there, the more valued is your opinion.  Japanese youth are encouraged to heed to Victorian England’s child raising mantra of “seen but not heard”.  Organic change around doing more, to structurally embrace the views of the youth, are probably going to take a thousand years to see any major change in Japan. When we are approached by Japanese companies to do some work in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion area they are invariably asking us to train the women.  The problem with that idea is that women are not impacting the promotion stakes inside companies, as that is the bailiwick of male managers.  The men need the training too. There are few role models for women in the leadership area and few appropriate mentors.  Internally developed company training is often geared up for a man’s approach to leading, rather than something more universal and applicable for anyone. The numbers of participants in our public training classes are skewed with around 60% to 70% male, because companies are investing in the men, more than the women.  This almost ensures that the women will be overlooked for promotion opportunities compared to the men. The simple strategy though is to focus on numbers.  How many more women can we get into leadership positions, to make our firm look like a model citizen.  There may be an argument for quotas in the short term, because without them and with only a reliance on organic growth, basically not much has changed in the last few decades.  Ultimately, the environment for women to become leaders and for the young to be heard more is about the environment being created inside the company.  The latter issue may get solved quite simply, because of the shortage of supply will be forcing companies to do more to retain young talent.  Women on the other hand, need a big push from the top, if anything going to change, because the revolution emanating from the bottom will just never happen.

Shaun Tomson was a famous South African world champion surfer and the recent guest on Tim Reid’s podcast Small Business Big Marketing, of which I am a fan.  In the show, Shaun was talking about what he called his Code concept, based around 12 “I will” statements.  In fifteen minutes, we have to come up with twelve statements, each starting with the words “I will…”.  The idea is that we have to use our stream of consciousness to get down ideas about what we need to be doing.  In Shaun’s case he is getting people to think about things they need to do to improve their lives, but it can also be used for more specific business purposes.  I tried it for myself and thought this was a useful idea for strengthening the commitment of the team, to hit our goals and targets. I changed the naming from Code to Commitment, because I wanted a purely business oriented focus in this methodology.  Tim asked Shaun why the number twelve and there was not a particular reason for him to choose twelve, but I kept the same format.  I think twelve makes sense, because it isn’t a long laundry list of things that need to be done, which are so numerous, people just give up.  It also can’t be too few either, because we have many things to get done and we need some meat on the bone to make it worthwhile doing it at all.  By the way, I found the first few were relatively easy to get down, but twelve pushed me a little to go a bit deeper in my thinking. So you may have a revenue target to reach or some similar business goals and so try it and get your people to spend the 15 minutes to do the exercise.  When I think about it, I usually leave the execution component to the team, after we have announced their targets.  This 12 Commitments approach goes a bit more granular and starts addressing which concrete actions they are going to take to get there.  As I mentioned, the first commitments flow easily without too much thought, but the last half create a bit of tension to come up with things beyond the obvious.  The 15 minute time limit cuts down on the procrastination and perfectionism, which can so often becalm initiatives, as we over think them or make them so complex they never get done. The 15 minutes is enough time without being too much time. I did this exercise with the sales consultants and once everyone has their Commitments, it is important to publicly announce them in front of each other.  Get your people to stand up one at a time and read them out. There is a level of a super buddy system here, as we all become witnesses to each other’s commitments.  As the boss, it is also revealing to see what quality level of commitment people can come up with.  Do they have a clear focus on what they need to achieve? How well have they absorbed the culture of the organization? How clearly do they understand the hinge points in their work, which will make a difference to getting the outcomes we need?  In some cases, listening to these reports, we may flag we need to do some additional coaching with some people. In this regard, I also ask everyone to send me their commitments.  Listening to a bunch of people going through their commitments, one after another, becomes hard to remember all of the detail. I will make the time and go through these with them one by one, to see where I can coach them further and also increase their resolve to actually do what they have said they would do.  I also plan to publish each person’s commitments internally, so that the whole team can be a witness to what has been committed. I may even get them into some printed format and hand them back to the team to keep in front of them as they do their work.  Having physical reminders of intellectual aspirations is always a good combination. I don’t think in a business context, we can just go through this exercise and leave it there.  These twelve items make a good base for the weekly catchup meetings between the boss and the staff to see how they are progressing.  By keeping the interest alive, they feel some pressure to actually implement what they have said was important in their work.  This could just as easily be a temporary boss fad, a passing interest with no great importance.  We don’t want that. The Commitments can also be useful milestones for the formal reviews of staff performance.  They had their targets previously and now they have their action items to report on as well. Anything I can do to get my team more focused and committed to achieving the outcomes we have set for the business is very attractive to me.  Shaun’s comments in the interview mentioned that there are tens of thousands of people around the world who have gone through this exercise, achieving good results. That sounds pretty good to me and so let's see how far and fast we can drive this approach.

Every month, I check the leave balance for my staff and am always unhappy with the numbers.  The team can accrue up to 20 days a year for a maximum of two years, so technically they can have 40 days available, if they don’t take any leave at all.  Anything beyond that 40 days they lose.  In my company we provide an additional 4 days of company paid holidays, plus a CSR day, which they can use anyway they like.  There are 16 national holidays in Japan, so you would think the team would be able to use their leave without feeling they were losing too much of it, but that has not proven to be the case.  I found they still weren’t taking enough leave and thought maybe they were worried about sick leave and so were hoarding their annual leave to cover that possibility off.  I subsequently gave them an extra 5 days of sick leave, but it made absolutely no difference – they keep stowing away their leave and don’t use it enough. As an Aussie, this whole Japanese non-leave taking thing is mystifying.  I try to set a good example by taking my own leave and heading down to Australia for two weeks, to hit the beach during the southern summer.  It is still not inspiring others to take more elongated time off though. Some bosses may be thinking, “this is great, the Japanese just keep working and working and this is how we will build the revenues of the company”.  The problem with this idea is we are talking about quantity, rather than quality.  The Japanese office worker pace in my mind is rather slow.  They have built up a habit of doing 8 hours work in 10 or 11 hours, rather than the reverse.  Parkinson’s laws says the work expands to fill the time and that is Japan to a tee.  I try to head this off by not having any overtime, so that you have to work more intensively to get through your work, in normal hours.  If anyone wants to work overtime, they have to apply for it beforehand and get it approved.  In a previous company, I noticed that some Japanese staff had worked out the way to get paid more, was to work more hours, regardless of whether it was warranted or not.  That makes no sense to me, so I don’t allow that to happen. I want my team to work like demons, stop work completely and then have a life outside of work.  Dribbling along with the work, taking long hours to get through it and wasting their time seems ridiculous to my Aussie brain.  Finish work and then have drinks and dinner with friends, have a brilliant hobby, spend time with your family - these all sound like a better use of time than making Parkinson’s Law come true. The Japanese rhythm of long hours spent at work, preceded and followed by long commutes is draining.  Standing up in a crowded train carriage for hours means you are already tired when you get to work.  It is hard to be productive if this is repeated every day and you are perpetually tired.  I have noticed in many job interviews, that when I ask people why they quit this particular job in their resume, they will often say they got sick because they were working such punishing hours.  How can that be right? Creative ideas rarely emerge from tired humans.  If we want innovation, we need to create the right environment to be able to spark new ideas. That means allowing our people to work reasonable hours and to be able to take breaks from work completely, by going off on holiday.  It is so stimulating to travel and sight see and when we return we are more refreshed and energized than before we left, no matter how packed the holiday. Also, when we are worn out we can find ourselves becoming more irritable and short tempered.  This can lead to issues within the team, as disputes arise which may not occur if everyone was more rested.  Having politics inside the organization is like allowing a cancer to spread. We don’t want that, because it will suck up a huge amount of management time to sort it out and that disrupts the work being produced.  If we want our people to work well together get them to take holidays and take a break from their daily work.  They will be refreshed and calm and able to overlook any ill chosen words or sharp reactions from their colleagues. I keep encouraging my team to take their holidays and not lose any days in the year.  If someone does take a few weeks at a time, I celebrate them and praise them. I am still not as successful in this holiday taking as I would like, but recommending it sends a good message to my people. Gradually some are starting to listen and act upon it.  We are still a work in progress over here, but we are gradually moving in the right direction. Fresh, well rested teams will outperform exhausted rivals every day of the week.  It is so obvious, but not yet common practice in Japan and we have to improve that situation.

When we first start out in business we are ninja boss watchers, studying our leaders with a level of forensic detail which is remarkable.  How is their mood today? Should I bring up that request or pick another day, etc.? We study how they lead, both the good, the bad and the ugly.  We are rarely mentally putting ourselves in their place, taking their viewpoint but we are quick to discuss the boss’s failing with our colleagues.  Then one day it happens and we are made someone else’s boss. The usual reason that happens is we have demonstrated some strong capabilities in the job we have.  The best salesperson, architect, engineer, accountant type of thing.  Rarely are we able to be a mediocre performer who is great with people, excellent in communication and get the next big job. This is where we hit our first snag, when we realise the people we are leading are not like us.  They don’t necessarily share the expertise in the things we are good at.  They may have young kids, elderly parents, a brilliant hobby, a major passion and any number of things which rank above shareholder value for them.  We are young and motivated though, so we press forward, dragging the team with us. After a few years of this, we start to see the brass ring could be ours, so we set out to claim it.  By this time, we have worked out that we cannot get there by ourselves and we need the team to be performing.  We also spot rivals for the same promotion and they are doing the same thing – working through their teams.  We start to push harder to get the team up to ramming speed and we are relentless in our demands.  Everything is cantered around us and what we want and what the team wants, becomes an obtuse distraction. We get that job and now we are the leader of leaders and we make a new discovery – some of these people are unable to lead in a way which gets the results we want.  We most likely inherited this leadership group from our predecessor.  The previous leader may have been older than us and in a different season of their leadership life, so their leadership style has been quite different from ours.  Our leadership team prefer our predecessor and their leadership style to ours, because in their minds we are so demanding and in too much of a hurry. We are earning the big bucks and have weighty responsibilities now, so we feel the pressure for outcomes.  We push, push, push, forcing the square pegs into the round holes.  Then we hit the ceiling, where no amount of pushing is working anymore.  We start to panic, worrying how we can maintain our position if we are not able to deliver.  We start to seek information on what might work, because clearly what we are doing now isn’t working. We discover that there is a magic key for every person which unlocks their full potential and it is called personal self-interest and motivation.  Up until now that was also uppermost in our mind, but it only applied to ourselves and what we wanted.  Now we have to switch gears and start investigating what our direct reports want and finding ways to deliver, to tap into their drive for results.  We have to slow down now in order to go fast.  We have to stop rushing about and start considering where the energy and time are best applied. We learn there is a secret world of leadership, we were unaware of.  Now we piece together how other leaders, who look so relaxed, are getting their teams to produce the outcomes.  They seem unhurried and not particularly hassled.  They are spending a lot of time talking to their people and they never seem to be upbraiding anyone for a lack of performance.  They seem to know a lot about their team members and seem have a different style of interaction with each. As we become better with our people, we are given even higher ranked jobs and we are now dealing with leaders with large empires.  They know what they are doing and they are capable.  The leadership task has changed again and now we must set a course they can all get behind.  Our people and communication skills become focused on persuasion and we are more interested in gaining collaboration, than telling anyone what to do. That thrusting, impatient self seems a long way away.  Why didn’t we just jump straight to this latest leadership model?  Like everyone else at that early leadership stage, we were pig headed and too confident we could do it all by ourselves.  Every generation seems to have to discover the things known to previous generations, which were ignored or forgotten.  We could have shaved some wear and tear off though on the way though, if we had studied more about leadership and started the process much earlier.  We could have relied less on trial and error and instead benefited from the experience and insights of others.  It is never too late to learn. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is today.  

Bosses coaching employees is such a critical task, yet so few leaders get any training on how to be effective in this role.  In Japan, the OJT On The Job Training is supposed to provide the guidance needed.  That probably worked back in the 1960s when Japan was doubling the size of the GNP. Today though it is a poor cousin to what it used to be.  Back then, the bosses didn’t ever touch a keyboard.  They  weren’t carrying around the internet armed with supreme connectivity in their hand like today.  The time poor pressure we feel today was probably evident then too, but I think the speed of business has accelerated to an extent which makes comparisons between then and now meaningless. Today’s leaders are doing their own email, answering their own mobile phones and constantly migrating from one meeting room to another.  The one-on-one time needed for coaching has sailed out the window and been replaced with a thin version of OJT.  Time management is a challenge for everyone, including bosses.  I am always astonished when we are teaching leadership classes, to find out the vast majority of people in the class do not have a prioritised list of things to get done every day. If a leader is not prioritising their day then they are living the prioritised day created by someone else. To coach subordinates the first thing you need is time.  If you don’t have that most basic ingredient, then nothing will happen in any sustained, meaningful way.  Let’s assume the boss has at least managed to make time for their staff. What else do they need?  Sports coaches once upon a time would coach everyone in the same way.  Hollywood has captured that old narrative with the scenes of locker room oratory from the coach whipping the team up into a frenzy before they go out for the game.  Nobody is doing that anymore for a good reason – it is isn’t niche enough to cater for each individual. Sports coaches have worked out that they need to know the personality type of their star.  They understand how their athletes prefer to be communicated with and then match to that style.  Shouting incendiary phrases at introverts won’t get very far.  In the same way whispering conspiratorilly in dulcet tones won’t work with extroverts who want to feed off the energy of others.  This applies to the motivations of each staff member as well.  Of course, the firm will have their vision, mission and values as guiding lights for the staff.  The usual problem with that, in my experience, is no one can remember much of it.  Vision – usually nothing.  Mission – the same.  Of the five or so values, the team get around two or three.  What that means is there has been poor communication about the supposed glue of the organisation.  Just for fun, do a quick survey of your team and see how many remember any of this stuff and don’t forget to include yourself too!! The boss needs to know what are the personal vision, mission and values of their staff.  What do they want to do? Also have they changed it since you last checked, because people’s lives change. If you get married or have children or lose a parent, then a  lot of aspirations and goals get adjusted.  The boss needs to knew what the new plan is.  Now in my youth it would have been unthinkable for the boss to get that cozy with my aspirations.  Today, it is different. Staff want to know you are in their corner, helping them achieve their goals.  Therefore we need to have these types of intimate, confidential conversations today, to make sure we are in lock step with our team. The boss also has to be expert in the main field of endeavour.  If you are running a sales organisation and you are outed as someone who can’t sell yourself, then all credibility and hope is lost right there.  If you are the head of marketing and you don’t know much about the latest aspects of marketing, there won’t be much followship going on.  You get the idea.  The basic requirement is that you are competent in your field.  As the boss, we don’t necessarily have to get down in the mud and the blood of the machine, but we have to demonstrate we know how things are supposed to work around here. That is the minimum to be taken seriously when coaching others.  If you are obviously out of date or ignorant of the latest and greatest, then no one will take any direction from you.  You might be thinking, “duh”, that’s obvious.   Yes it is, but what have you been doing to keep yourself up to date?  What personal development have you been undertaking to be abreast of the new directions being forged in your sector of the industry? So the very basics for coaching are boss time, subtle yet persuasive communication skills, deep knowledge of the individuals in the team and what is important to them plus ample personal expertise.  How do you stack up?

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離.  Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals.  Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing.  Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us.  This transition matches what we go through as leaders.  When we start we are unsure of exactly what we are supposed to be doing but over time we mature as leaders and can raise our effectiveness t greater heights.  Well that applies if we have been properly trained on the way up, which probably makes it difficult for most Japanese leaders to make the cut.  On the Job Training (OJT) is great if your mentor leader provides an excellent role model on which to base your own leadership style.  This is very much a long shot at best in Japan.  Getting proper training however is a much better proposition to create the base for Shu-Ha-Ri progression. Leadership at the practical level rotates around some core skills, such as communication, coaching, personal time management and dealing with different types of people.  Usually we enter leadership through the path of personal capability and results achievement.  Senior leaders are never going to promote a dud or average performer into a leadership role, unless they are totally desperate for a warm body to fulfill a temporary role. Having abilities in a functional role is not much help though when it comes to leading others who may be totally wired differently and variously motivated to do the work.  If we get a base of leadership training we can work on the proper skills to be an effective leader. Knowing what to do and how to do it is a big advance on trying to work it out yourself.  If we understand the principles of communication, we can practice and hone those skills until we become excellent in mustering our powers of persuasion.  This opens up new vistas for achieving results, because now we are getting more and more of the team onboard and they are pulling together with improved teamwork and heading in the same direction. Coaching is a similar area of strong need and one of the most challenging tasks of the leader.  Trying to work out how to be an effective coach by yourself is asking for trouble and will waste massive amounts of energy and time yielding very minimal return.  Once we know what to do we can start turning our work environment into a massive laboratory to see what happens when we take certain actions. Naturally if you are a shambles because you are not well organised, you won’t have enough time for communication and coaching with the team members.  As we get more practice, we naturally get better and this is where the Ha segment of the journey allows us to try new things and to expand the scope of our perspective on what is possible. We can get into greater and greater depths of personalisation with our communication and coaching.  We can better tailor what we are doing to the needs of the team members, treating them as individuals and being able to respond accordingly.  Our innovation ability also increases as we have a stronger base to work off.  We start to see patterns, whereas before we just saw a confusing mess of variables, which we couldn’t get into any legitimate order.  As we improve our people can feel more trust and closer to us.  Coaching in particular requires an enormous amount of trust to be effective.  Maybe at the start of the boss-subordinate relationship the team members are not that keen to open the kimono to a boss, who they are not sure of. That consolidated pattern recognition combined with practical leadership training provides the right toolbox for us to be effective in a leadership role.  At the Ri stage we start to create our own unique leadership style, which is the product of many additions and deletions over time.  We also begin to create a portable system which can be applied in any work environment, with any crew.  We are no longer having to think what we should be doing in certain circumstances, because we now know what will be the best course of action or maybe we decide we should be taking no action whatsoever.  This ability to find a system which we can apply universally is a big advantage, because it means we can be given more and more complex assignments and we will be successful. Problems for our people come up and after a while, we realise it tends to be same types of problems.  We also find that problem people keep popping up, who all look basically the same.  The solutions needed are now second nature to us and so we can get straight into action without suffering any self-doubt.  We don’t have to expend a lot of nervous energy on the process.  We are that swan gliding across the lake surface now. Shu-Ha-Ri is a good concept for us to realise where we are in the process of maturing as a leader and therefore what actions we need to be taking at each stage.

As a training company, we are the canary in the coal mine about commercial trends and corporate shortfalls.  During a recent Sales Consultants Forum we were discussing client needs and the same theme kept coming up.  Companies are asking about leadership skills around better communication between Middle Managers and subordinates.  What is driving this, more than say sales training or presentation skills needs?  One answer can be Covid-19.  A lot of industries were hammered by Covid and companies had to reduce their team sizes.  With fewer staff fewer managers were needed.  These managers are being replaced now that Covid has been contained or at least the perception is there that it is being contained.  It would seem the Japanese Government would like to move forward and are doing whatever they can to achieve a change in the citizenry’s mentality about the pandemic.  The borders have been opened up and that nightly map of the case numbers in every prefecture has mysteriously disappeared from the NHK 7.00pm news broadcasts. Being hired as a new manager or continuing as a manager has been made more difficult by the diaspora to the suburbs, as workers have shunned the office for their own homes as the new workplace.  Every company is struggling with what to do next.  Do we keep everyone working at home or do we force them back into the office?  Do we go for a split shift where some work on certain days of the week and the rest work on the remaining days?  Do we have people in one day a week or two days a week or three days a week?  What do we do about onboarding new hires and that includes newly hired managers? Many clients tell us that sending everyone home was like the tide going out and all the defects of the ocean floor, the rocks and flotsam and jetsam were revealed.  Leaders who could not lead a dispersed workforce were exposed and outed as incompetent.  There is no doubt that leading a remote workforce is considerably more difficult than having everyone under your stern gaze in the office.  Are they really working at home?  Are they goofing off?  How can you tell? The issue of communication has already been flagged as a problem.  Trying to phone anyone at home seems to be very difficult.  You call, but they don’t pick up the phone.  You leave a message, but they don’t call you back. Why?  What are they doing?  You have to relay the same piece of information numerous times to different people, because you have limited interaction opportunities with everyone at the same time.  In the office, you could just grab people, and hold an impromptu meeting or just yell out to someone across the work floor about what you wanted. Add to this the poor time management skills of most bosses and the problems balloon in proportion.  A disorganised boss is going to have a lot of trouble keeping across what a remote team is up to.  Funnily enough, some people are like ninja at exploiting the bosses lack of ability to manage their own time and they find more escape routes than a sieve.  They don’t do what they are supposed to do and rely on the fact the boss cannot get sufficiently well organised to keep close track of them.  These days the boss has fewer arrows in the quiver too, given the population decline has meant there are more opportunities for people to jump ship and go somewhere else if you try and manage them too closely.  The whole discipline of work has been upended and the usually successful supervision techniques are now unworkable. Staff retention is the new gold standard of boss ability.  That means regardless of the many obstacles placed in front of bosses, they have to find ways to keep close communication conduits going with their staff.  This is inspite of how much the staff may try to avoid it or how complex the logistics become.  Bosses have to better organised around their time usage and are now required a higher degree of remote work micro-management than before.  This is a very tricky balance and not easy to get right, but that degree of touch with the staff has to be carefully calculated.  Too close a scrutiny becomes suffocating for some and they leave.  Too loose and the work isn’t getting done, results fade and the goofing off erodes the culture, discipline and loyalty to the cause. Boss retraining is definitely a rising topic for us, when talking to clients and we can see why.  The really scary thought is what about those companies who fulfill Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same old things but expecting a better result?  They keep on keeping on and won’t face the new reality. If companies don’t recognise things have morphed and they need to change how they manage people, then they will be spending a lot of money recruiting hard to come by replacements and losing a lot of corporate knowledge, as experienced people walk out the door to competitors.  There is always a lot of strife when replacing people, as you have to train the new hires and also take a hit on results and productivity, until they get up to speed.  Stasis is not an option anymore.

We work long, diligently and hard.  We are recognised for our devotion and the quality of our output and get promoted.  Instead of being solely responsible for our own results, we are now in charge of our colleagues and we are accountable for their results too.  If we stride around like the boss and are bossy, we are likely to hit some turbulence from the led.  If we are a cream puff, walking around on egg shells, we may be ignored and not taken seriously.  Who knew this leadership gig was so tricky? Imposter syndrome, self-doubt, fraudster misgivings are all crowding our mind as we try to navigate this new role.  We have to be confident without appearing too confident.  Given we are not confident at all, this is a hard needle to thread.  Here are four strategies for helping to build our confidence as a new leader. Self-Acceptance Perfectionism is a curse for the new leader, yet it is a natural goal, as we want to prove that the trust which has been placed in us, has not been misguided.  We get into comparison-itis where we see ourselves not measuring up to the abilities of experienced, senior leaders.  We feel a thousand beady eyes boring holes into us, as everyone observes how we go about this new role and we worry we are not matching their expectations.  We go straight to our weaknesses and skill gaps and we focus on those. What we have forgotten is that we got promoted because we have ability and that ability didn’t suddenly rise from the sea on Day One of our working career.  We have been building up our experience and skills over many years and we should expect that becoming a seasoned and capable leader will also take time.  We know how to produce results for ourselves and so we probably have a reasonable idea on how to help our team members reach their targets.  If we honestly believe that in the success of our team members lies our own success, we will have the right mindset.  When the team feel we are working to help them succeed their attitude will become positive and we don’t have to try and pretend we are someone we are not.  We can be ourselves, relax and accept that given some time we can be effective as the leader of the team and we can confident that we can get there. Self-Respect We all tend to live our lives like that Japanese art called bonseki where miniature landscapes are created out of sand and then the whole thing is thrown away.  We don’t take the time to appreciate our achievements, because we have cast those aside and are now on to the next big thing, always seeking the grasp the brass ring.  However, when we reflect on our successes in our lives to date, our perspective about who we are and what we are capable of changes. We start to see patterns about our work ethic, our people skills, our communication capabilities and a myriad other elements, which will become the critical building blocks to make sure we are a successful leader.  We realise we have these elements already within us and now we are just pointing them in a new direction.  We have a strong enough grounding in our work careers to establish a base on which we can build further.  That realisation is a long way from the self-doubt and paralysis we may have felt on being told we are going to have this new responsibility.  It is important we shift our mindset to the positive and the history of achievements we have accumulated so far. Take Risks One of the dangers of getting promoted is you can also get fired more easily.  Before you were in total charge of your results and you could devote your time and effort to hitting your targets.  Now you find you have actually very little control over the production of results by your team.  In Year One you can keep doing your work and be the biggest contributor to the team results.  You can probably keep this up just in Year Two.  By Year Three the targets will have moved up to a point where you alone cannot do enough reach them. When you start missing team targets, the big bosses conclude you were not up to snuff in this new role and they replace you with someone else and the cycle starts again. You realise too late you should have been spending your time helping the team to get better, to hit their targets, to produce the results themselves.  You have been doing the fishing for them, instead of teaching them how to catch fish. It is a risk to step up, but we have to reduce that risk by approaching the leadership role in such a way that we are working through the team to reach results. Self-Talk Self-doubt generates a certain self-talk which is negative and not helping.  We need to get control of our inner dialogue pretty smartly and really monitor the quality of the thoughts rattling around inside our brains.  A very good way to achieve this is to start watching,  listening to and reading content which helps us to feel more confident about ourselves.  Search out the self-help gurus, the motivators, the boosters and start absorbing their messages.  Toxicity loves a vacuum and if we don't fill our minds with the right content, then the rust of self-doubt will start to creep in.  We cannot allow that to happen, so from the very day we are told we are now a leader, we need to start assembling our protective walls for keep our self-talk and mindset positive. These four strategies will definitely make a difference in establishing the inner-confidence that you can become a successful leader and in time, a great leader.

“Japanese are two faced”, is a common complaint you will hear from foreigners in Japan.  The implication is you cannot trust someone who has two faces, so believing what you are told is a folly here and you need to really evaluate the messenger carefully.  It is totally true that Japanese are two faced, in fact they are world champions at it.  Living cheek by jowl for centuries in crowded cities breeds a lot of accommodations and a big one is with the truth.  In the West the truth is absolute, but in many parts of Asia the truth is more relative.  Hence the trust divide between East and West and that includes Japan.   We do it in the West too.  The “little white lie” is a bold faced lie, but we wrap it up in cotton wool and creates the illusion it isn’t so bad.  If your friend, who is obese, tells you she has been trying to lose weight and she has last a couple of grams and asks you how she looks now, what do you say – an absolute truth – “You are still grossly overweight and look like a heart attack waiting to happen” or do your say “you are making progress and are looking great”?  We know the answer and we are being two faced.  Why?  Because we know that is how we build harmony and protect people’s delicate feelings.   We do it in the workplace too.  The level of sycophancy will vary, but it is always there between subordinate and boss.  A career ending “absolute truth” statement to the boss is best avoided and something less fatal is substituted for what we are really thinking. We are being two-faced about it and are saying one thing to the boss, but then telling our workmates what a dill the leader is and how hopeless they are.  Japan has just taken this to another level of sophistication.   Harmony in all aspects of society is much valued here and it makes sense.  In the cities, the urban density is intense.  The morning train commute is super intense and so we all have to learn how to get on with one another by restraining ourselves in many ways and that includes how we communicate.  Being vague in speech is seen in a positive light in Japan.   In the countryside, because of the communal nature of many of the tasks such as rice planting and harvesting, neighbours had to support and get on with each other, so again harmony was put ahead of “absolute truths”.  Telling your neighbour he is an idiot, doesn’t work well when you need that same neighbour’s reciprocal labour at rice seedling planting time.   So culturally, two faces works like a charm here and everyone is happy to join the charades. because everything works more smoothly as a result.  Naturally, as the boss you are the target of a lot of two faces opportunities.  One is the natural harmony required in the workplace and the other is because you have power and authority over people’s work lives, so upsetting you isn’t terribly smart.    Getting honest feedback as the boss in Japan is pretty well impossible.  It is probably the same elsewhere as well, except the Japanese are brilliant at it and the difference is harder to spot.  You can start believing your own internal publicity here and imagine the team do see you as the Great One.  Very few people are prepared to disagree with you, so the assumption is that they are in agreement and are diligently following your lead.  This would be delusional.   As the leader, our expectation management is crucial.  If we want to take things at face value, then the two faces thing is going to annoy us and make us angry.  We need to apply some strong filters.  Any time we receive any whiff of praise from the troops, we have to immediately keep saying to ourselves “this is just grease smoothing the wheels of commerce at the corporate level”.  It is a bit of zen approach – not attaching yourself to anything they say.  We note it and just let it float by without any attachment or absorption.    When we realise that we are not getting any constructive ideas regarding issues, we have a potential “Yes Man” scenario playing out.  It is nice to get agreement and also dangerous in Japan, because the bearer of bad news won’t surface, until it is no longer avoidable.  Usually this is too late to rectify the problem, so a lot of effort goes into the train wreck clean up. What is not being said in Japan is also important.  If we aren’t getting a balanced stream of feedback on ideas, then we have to create the environment where the team feel they have permission to state their own views.   Japan’s love affair with risk avoidance means coming up with what is wrong with any proffered ideas and is playing to the local strengths.  We need to assign people to doing some due diligence on what could go wrong with this possible project and then get out of the way because the crew will do a sterling job decimating our ideas.  As the leader, we are not allowed any negative reactions to their findings – no body language pushback, no facial expression change, no blood pressure rises.    We have to stay cool, calm and collected and appreciate that we are getting access to their real face for once.

There is a lot of focus on conscious and unconscious biases at the moment given the  amount of attention being directed at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  In Japan’s case, for  the most part, this is a discussion  about gender and to some extent age.  The leader however faces other challenges, apart from addressing these topical subjects.  We are all witnessing major changes in the workforce driven by Covid.  Many companies have staff continually working from home or are executing a dual shift approach where half the crew take turns attending on specific days.  Leading a remote team is not how we leaders were trained, so there is a lot of gritting of teeth going on.   Leaders are smart enough not to be voicing their preferences for everyone back in the office, under the careful gaze of the supervisors.  The hesitancy is fairly simple – staff retention.  If you are forcing people to work in the office, they may just quit and go to your competitor, who has a more flexible leadership approach and doesn’t demand too much, in exchange for people staying put wherever they want to work.  The unconscious bias is that this is not a proper, logical or efficient arrangement and we should all get back to what the boss is used to.  This version of reality is based on inertia for the most part.  This is how is was done when we started working and so that is how is should be today.   There is a McGregor Theory X boss moment going on here.  Under this theory workers cannot be trusted and have to be carefully watched all of the time for slacking off and not doing the right thing and putting in the required effort.  The underlying culture is “if I cannot see them, then they will be cheating the organisation by not taking their work seriously”.  In Japan however, there is a pride in work and a sense of responsibility which doesn’t easily fit into McGregor’s model.    As an example, I remember a bleak, sleeting, winter’s day in the Yurakucho area, when I emerged from a subway entrance and here was forlorn, frozen young woman, diligently handing out tissue paper packs, while sheltering under an umbrella.  Without thinking about it, I knew she would stand out there in the cold and hand out all the packets, until her task was completed.  If that was a Western country, probably the packets would be in a dumpster and the shelter would be moved to a nice warm bar close by.   Given we all know about the loyalty and responsibility aspects of Japanese work culture, why are we letting our unconscious bias tell us that we should worry about people not taking their work seriously, simply because they are at home?  Theory Y bosses would believe that people inherently want to do a good job and want to enjoy pride in their work, so we don’t need some invasive checking going on all of the time.  I believe, if the boss trusts their team, they will reciprocate of their own volition.   The lack of trust stems back to the culture of the organisation and that in turn is a product of the leader’s imagination.  How we see the culture we want is a key to what we create.  If we make our values a central piece of how we lead, then inevitably we will come up with some wonderful guideposts.  I cannot imagine a leader proclaiming values such as: no trust, no integrity, no accountability, etc.  Values are always highly aspirational elements, reflecting the world we want to experience.    Engagement is another critical element of work.  All of the surveys I have ever seen for engagement scores in Japan tell you that the highly engaged proportion of the work population is very, very small.  I am a bit dubious about some of the questions in those surveys and how relevant they are to determining a Japanese team’s level of engagement. The survey asks “would you recommend your firm as a place to work to your family or friends?”.  I don’t think Japanese people want to have that degree of exposure to such heavy responsibility.  If their friend screws it up, they will feel responsible. If their friend hates the place, they will feel responsible.  That is not very attractive. Better to mark that question with a very low score. One of the leader’s jobs is creating an environment where people can become engaged with their work.  If we are doing our job, then our unconscious biases need to be suspended and replaced with the hard work of building that high trust environment.   Rather than worrying about the work location, we should be worried about have we built the right culture in the team? Do we have the right work human relations principles in place?  Have we forged the required mindset to win in the market?  Are we focused on our external competitors or on our internal rivals within the firm?  There are so many bigger issues than having everyone confirm our biases and conform with how we were brought up in business.    

When things are humming along beautifully, leading is a snap.  We can even indulge ourselves in some tangential activities because we have been able to remove our nose from the grindstone.  We join a committee in a Chamber of Commerce or a non-profit. We have a spring in our step and effuse confidence and certainty.  Our energy is electric and we infect everyone with our bonhomie.  When the plan has been set and then things don’t go accordingly, we feel we are under assault from waves of challenge after challenge.  We have to be brutal thespians wringing out the maximum leverage possible to mask our despair.  Our team take their direction from us and if we go into a hole of depression, then they will be leaping into that same hole, like lemmings following the leader into oblivion.   We ride the razor edge of concern about the lack of results and the need to maintain our optimism that this ship will right itself and not go down.  If we were emotionally stable all of the time, this may be doable, but we are creatures of emotion too.  We are not always able to be in full control of how we are feeling and how we are projecting those feelings.  When the cash isn’t arriving we are focused on cash flow control and our mentality becomes minimum rather than maximum.  We are focused down on specific numbers to the exclusion of other indicators.  The team can feel the change in us.   There is no doubt this is what we should be doing.  However, how we do it is the rub.  If we go hard on the team, because we are feeling desperate, is that going to be the way to get them self-motivated to get us all out of this hole we are in?  If we let our anger erupt over the results and start blaming people for their poor contribution, is that going to work?  I can guarantee you that won’t work.    I was privy to a series of volcanic eruptions by the President of a company when the numbers were not matching his expectations.  His temper went from zero to one hundred in two seconds, as he just verbally pummelled the poor saps sitting directly opposite him.  The seating was random, so they just happened to choose the worst seats in the room, but they didn't know that until it was too late.    Here is a hint.  If you are ever required to attend public meetings with a psycho masquerading as the President, always sit on the same side of the table as he is and as far away toward the end of the table as possible.  He actually has to physically lean forward and turn his head ninety degrees to see you, which he doesn't bother to do, because there are enough victims sitting directly in front of him.  Were we more motivated after these humiliations?  No.  But we were spending a lot of time bitching to each other about what a lunatic he was.   If we paint a picture of despair and impending doom, we will be driving people out of the organisation as they seek a safer harbour elsewhere.  Where is the line between disaster and hope?  Painting too black a picture can lead some people to just give up and try again somewhere else, because everything here looks doomed, after hearing in detail from you. If we are seeming too confident, will the team take the situation seriously and put in the required effort to stop us from going under?   This is such a tender balancing act and we have to be really on our communication game to pull this off.   Some people suggest full transparency when things get tough, so that everyone fully understands the seriousness of the situation. I am not sure that is a great idea.  As mentioned there will be a rush for the door in some cases, so the news needs to be carefully curated by the leader.   Not only the communication piece needs attention, but also our demeanour and body language demands to be constantly checked for tell signs of depression and desperation.  As posited earlier, this is where our thespian “fake it until you make it” capacity gets a run.  Our people are reading us for indications on the safety of their job and their futures.  How we carry ourselves, how confident we look and how positive we sound, are all key indicators of potential trouble.  This is a lot of pressure, but we have to play the role of the immovable leader, become the rock, the one who can be relied on upon to keep their head, when everyone around them is spinning out of control.

Being fair to everyone in the team is one of the most basic elements of leadership.  It builds leader trust, predictability and reliability.  But are we actually always being fair?  Sometimes our own team members try to draw us off the fairness straight and narrow path.  There are those who want to play politics.  No matter how large or small the organisation politics will raise its ugly head at some point.  Obviously the bigger the company the more opportunity for political infighting.  In my observation, those not kept sufficiently busy have the band width to politic inside the firm.  Busy people, working hard and super focused on results don’t go for that option, because they are razor intent on producing results.  I like those sort of people and I hate corporate politicians.    As the boss, we are often oblivious to the underground politics going on inside our companies.  We are like those busy people focused on results just mentioned, so we are working toward results and can miss what is going on around us.  Often staff will not bring it up because they don’t want to get involved in a bun fight inside the company and have bad relations with other staff.  They note the politicians activities, don’t join in, but also don’t do anything about eliminating their influence.    When we are busy we can miss some subtle hints.  Those observing the politician’s activities won’t speak up directly, but they will lay bread crumbs for us to find.  The trouble is Japanese language is already super vague, indirect and the world champion lexicon at obfuscation.  Trying to parse linguistic hints in this country is not so easy.  We need to get our radar in full proper working order and always be scanning for this type of trouble.    An off the cuff remark, a nuanced comment, a tangential reference may be a secret invitation to go deeper on what is really going on inside the team. We may miss the hint, if we are too busy and too consumed by what is in front of us.  So if you hear something that doesn't quite sound right, then down tools and give that person all of your attention and gently lead them along the path of discovery to help you understand what you need to know.   Often when we introduce changes, we are upsetting someone’s vested interests in the old regime.  They can often go underground and become quietly vocal, spreading toxic remarks about what a dill the boss is.  They are all smiles and hail fellow well met with us, but they are actually shadow ninja trying to undermine what we are doing.  We may have thought we had explained the WHY of the change and maybe we did, but they don’t care about our WHY, because they have their own interests driving them.  We have to be very careful how we seek feedback on the change acceptance.  Subtly asking how others in the firm are adjusting to the change will give some staff the option to raise what is really going on for you.  They may not be brave enough to come to you and tell you, but when you open the door to the conversation they will be willing to walk through the threshold and have that private discussion.   It sounds odd to say it, but fans can also be a problem with fairness.  They want to be close to you and they enjoy the time you give them.  They seek it.  The issue arises though with the neutral team members, who are supportive, but wouldn’t quite qualify as “fans”.  By openly wanting the time with us, fans are creating problems with favouritism and jealousy on the part of other members of the team.  With all the pressure on us, we can be easily susceptible to spending time with our fans, because we crave approval and acceptance. Sycophants are another problem. Sucking up the boss is a high level skill that has been mastered by some people in organisations.  From other team members points of view, our fans can look like sycophants and they are carefully observing how we treat them.    We are human beings and we have certain people who are close friends and others less so. It is the same within the company.  There will be some staff we like to spend time with more than others.  This is where it gets tricky.  We have to be very self-observant and self-aware about how we treat the team members.  Without realising it we may be spending our time with some more than others. That in itself can be seen as favouritism or the boss likes that person more than me. As much as is humanly possible we have to treat everyone the same.  I doubt we will ever get that prospect perfect, but we have to strive to get it right.  Remember the entire staff have advanced degrees in boss watching and they observe us constantly every day. 

Some company polices toward remote work are let a hundred flowers bloom, a thousand schools contend.  Others are saying get back in the office right now or leave.  This issue is certainly contentious and there seems to be a preference for Japanese leaders to have their staff under their direct gaze.  What is driving that desire?  Is it that the bosses can’t manage a remote workforce?  Is it that they don’t trust people to do their work under their own accountability?   Is it because they have seen a drop off in productivity?  Or is it because Japan doesn't like too much change and clings to the known, over the unknown?   There are certainly big bucks tied up in real estate costs, especially here in Tokyo.  I can easily imagine companies looking at that expense in their P&L and thinking we could really hack into that cost and use the money somewhere else more productively.  For the first time ever, my landlord didn’t increase my rent at lease agreement renewal time.  They must be really hurting to agree to no increase, because normally they are merciless.  I drive around the middle of Tokyo and I look at all of these new skyscrapers being completed and I ask myself, “where are the tenants going to come from?”.  I interpret all of this to mean there will continue to be a lot of pressure on landlords into the future and hopefully will assist me in my rent negotiations.   I recently completed my performance reviews with my staff and took the opportunity to ask them about remote work and what they wanted to do.  Nobody said they want to go back to working five days a week in the office and the preference range was from zero to three days a week.  Why would I need them for five days a week?  Salespeople were never required to be in the office every day prior to Covid.  I always told them I expected them to be in the buyer’s office not ours.  As Covid relents, we will probably have a combination of buyer face to face meetings and face to screen meetings as the medium for sales.   The training team should be training people, so they will either be doing that online, in the client’s quarters or in our training rooms.  Their schedules will enable them to work out for themselves where they need to be.  The marketing team can do everything they need to do remotely for the most part.  The one issue is with no face time with anyone in the organisation, it may not be the best idea for them from a teamwork point of view.  Marketing and sales need to work well together, so there will no doubt need to be some regular interaction in person.  Does that need to be five days a week?  I wouldn’t think that was the case.  The Admin team, out of everyone, probably should be in the office every day.  We need the face of the company to be there for visitors and for picking up deliveries.  Our training rooms are right next to the office, so they also need to keep an eye in them as well, making sure they are ship shape and ready to go for our clients.   What about me?  As the President do I need to be there every day?  I used to be there five days a week and now I am almost exclusively at home.  Do I need to lead the charge back into the office?  I think my wife would be happier, if I wasn’t hanging around at home crimping her style.  The interesting thing is like most people, I have changed my lifestyle over these last couple of years.  I don’t lead a nine to six life anymore.  The day has been fudged, where I will work early and work late, fitting in exercise where it is doable.  I think I am actually working much longer hours than before Covid and I think this is the experience of a lot of people.  I find I get into a routine and it is not that easy to break it.  I am sure no one is missing the morning commute to work on packed Tokyo trains.  Flex time may be one of the additions to make going back into the office a bit easier, so that the rush hour can be circumvented.  Why do we need to start at 9.00am?   Teamwork is always the concern for the leader.  Are we able to sustain good teamwork with very little in person activity?  Have we seen a drop off in teamwork over these last few years?  I would say no, but is that a guarantee that is how things will work out as we move beyond Covid?  What if my competitors are doing better with their teamwork and productivity, because they went back to the office?  If it is everyone back to the office five days a week, will staff depart to join competitors who don’t require it? Will flexible companies win over inflexible organisations? What happens when we all start adding in new people?    We had a very strong culture build before Covid and we kept it going by just moving it online.  Every day we do the Daily Dale and go through our Vision, Mission, Values etc., – in short we focus on the WHY.  It takes about fifteen minutes and we didn’t get everyone attending when we were all in the office before, so the online attendance is about the same.  Can this strong culture keep going or do we need to strengthen it further, by getting together more often?  We have been doing All Hands Meetings every month to provide an opportunity for the team to meet each other face to face again and it has been very successful.   My conclusion is I have no idea what we should do.  How about that for decisive leadership!  We are not quite out of Covid just yet, but we are getting very close.  When the numbers come right down, we will have a situation where it is safer to return to the office and that is when some determinations will need to be made. What I do know is that this is a sensitive issue, which must be carefully considered and flexibility is an absolute necessity. In the meantime, the hundred flowers are continuing to bloom.

I have talked before about the loneliness of the leader.  This is often felt most strongly when facing difficulties.  The entrepreneur, in particular, owns the company, has all of the responsibility on their shoulders and feels the weight of that burden.  I am reminded of the ship’s captains in the age of sail.  They bore the responsibility for the safe delivery of the cargo and passengers to the destination, dealing with bad weather and even worse pirates.  The modern firm captain has the responsibility for the livelihoods of their staff and families.  If we get it wrong we can bankrupt the company or see us taken over by an entity who fires everyone and strips the firm of the goodies.   We face many tribulations of late, especially a global pandemic, the scale of which we haven’t seen since the Spanish Flu in 1918.  I certainly wasn’t around then, so have zero experience or insight into how to deal with the disruptions.  In other words, no smart answers for the challenges being thrown at us.  The years of Covid have seen long established companies close in certain industries, especially those most effected by the ramifications of lockdowns, Government restrictions on trading, severe drop offs in client purchases and supply chain issues.   This has thrown up some M&A activity where the strong devour the weak.  You may be a survivor, but now you are faced with well funded, powerful competitors.  We can see this as a threat and can start losing sleep over erosion of our client base or market share.  We can also see it as a rallying cry to the troops to repel all boarders.  Often in big companies, the enemy is that Division over there, rather than an outside competitor. I have experienced this myself.  Ambitious people eye your patch and decide they should be running it instead of you.  Before you know it they start getting their elbows out trying to sweep the main deck like a pirate takeover.   This is highly destructive behaviour and in well run companies is squashed early, before any momentum is generated.  In smaller companies, the team can become gripped with fear about their futures, as a powerful rival starts to try and eat everyone’s lunch.  As the leader, there isn’t that much you can do about rival’s advertising blitzes or attempts at price destruction.     We usually will have limited financial reserves to go head to head with a rival who is flooding the market with advertising.  We don’t want to get into a price war either, as that is a race to the bottom and it seems they can always outlast us, when it comes to absorbing the pain.  We need to accentuate the value offering to differentiate what we are doing from the others.  This usually means a change in the product line-up or the way we package that line-up.  As with most things in Japan, adjusting to change of any sort, isn’t a strong suite of Japanese teams.   In order to marshal support for the changes, we need to employ the rival to help us.  There is a balance between making the most of the threat, without pushing people into a panic and we have to tread that line very scrupulously.  Tough times demands tough changes and we need to convince the team that the changes are needed and this is the way to defeat the rival.  The prospect of the competitor beating us in the market is against the grain for everyone in the team and we need to accentuate the pride they feel in what they are doing and in how they take care of the clients.  We always refer back to the WHY of what we are doing. This is an incredibly important component of the culture build in the team and in tough times, we have to make this WHY our North Star to guide us forward.  If we believe our WHY is stronger than the rival, we will take confidence in what we are doing and that confidence will be felt by the clients.  Fearful salespeople, in particular, can be smelt by the buyers as they sense the desperation and then they start to doubt the stability of your company.   As the leader, despite all of the pressure we feel and no matter how bad things look, we have to seize every tool available to us.  Accentuating the WHY within the team and setting up the rival to be defeated are both important means of getting support from the troops.  Spreading the concerns the leaders feels across the team is a tricky calculation.  Too much gloom and people give up, too little and there will not be enough sense of urgency and camaraderie.  Increasing the intensity gradually, rather than a Big Bang approach, would be a better idea.  If the leader goes too hard, too fast, then that can be destabilising, whereas a gradual ramping up of the concern factor is more easily digested by everyone, as they gird their loins for the fight.   The key thing is to see the rival as an aid to greater teamwork and commitment rather than a destructive force sweeping all before it.  Sometimes, we can feel overwhelmed by all of the personal doubts and fears we have and which we keep to ourselves.  In this sense, we can forget we have team members who are there to support and to fight shoulder to shoulder with us.  We don’t have to do it all by ourselves, but we must lead with the strong conviction of success. Our very essence, our ki, has to be communicating that positivity to everyone.

In Part One we looked at Dr. Emily Anhalt research with 100 leaders and 100 psychologists.  She identified seven factors which measure how “fit” we are in this sphere of mental health and we covered the first three: Learn your emotional triggers and biases, understand the emotions of others and find comfort in discomfort.  Today we will continue with the last four points.   Foster a safe space of connection “Psychological safety” as a term has popped up over the last couple of years.  We all need a space where we feel we can be ourselves, where we can relax and let our guard down.  This could be within the family and circle of close friends.  Here is the rub.  Often as leaders we are too busy working to really develop family relationships and deep friendships.    Divorce rates are at about 50% in the West. A lot of this is due to the time being devoted to the work being disproportionate to the time being devoted to those closest to us.  We are constantly sacrificing family and friends for work projects.  I put my hand up for this one.  I am in permanent imbalance trying to get the balance right.  We need friends, hobbies, interests outside the mainstream of our work tasks.  Working in Japan can also add a layer of complexity, because we are often away from our friends we grew up with and our colleagues we used to work with back at home.  We need to make the time and make the effort where we are right now to fix this, because in the long term, it is not good for us to be isolated.     Bounce forward from failure and setbacks Being positive is a good thing.  We can see failures not as failures, but as our opportunity to grown and learn.  Except we don’t do that.  Instead, we beat ourselves up and we keep playing the video repeat reel in our mind of the disaster or failure which we were responsible for. This impinges on the work in front of us, it occupies our thoughts and distracts us from what we need to be doing.  It can also rock our confidence to keep moving forward.   Our world of possibilities becomes smaller, we take less risks, we shrink in confidence and we don’t actually bounce back for forward.  One of the keys to recovery is to block out the worry aspect about what happened in the past.  As we have seen, we cannot remove the memory or the pain, that just keeps popping up, whether we like it or not.  What we can do is not allow ourselves to worry about it.    Being unhappy about something which happened in the past is one thing, actually worrying about it is another.  So when those unhappy memories pop up, just acknowledge that happened and move on without allowing it to trigger any feelings of depression or worry.  Note it but don’t worry about it. That was then, it is in the past, times have changed, this is a new world compared to then and I have moved on.   Express needs, feelings and feedback It might be a generalisation, but that doesn’t mean it isn't true, to say that for men expressing feelings and needs and seeking out feedback goes against the grain. I grew up in macho Australia, so the strong silent type was the ideal model for a man.  If you had needs, you sorted it out for yourself and took care of them, without relying on others.  Any feelings you had were to be kept out of sight and never shared.  If you did share, your rivals would despise you, your bosses wouldn’t trust you and your team wouldn’t follow you.  Feedback was always negative in those days, so no one was happy to receive any.   Business is different today and the hero boss is a relic from the past because technology and speed have made things much more complex.  I tell my 21 year old son to not be like Dad and instead ask people for support and help and don’t imagine you have to do it all by yourself, like I did.    Sharing feelings is a tricky one.  I think we have to be very careful who we share our feelings with and how we express them.  Find people you can trust and to whom you can open up to.  Expressing the fact you don’t see yourself as being perfect as a boss is a healthy idea.  We can still be the boss and recognise we are still a work in progress and our team will appreciate the honesty and vulnerability.    Feedback can be painful.   The issue is very few people are well trained in how to give feedback, so we are constantly being hammered by amateurs who have no idea what they are doing.  Keep that in mind next time your receive negative feedback.  Try to parse out what you can learn from it, discard the rest and ignore the invective.     Implement what you have learned into your daily life If this was only as easy as it sounds.  We are creatures of habit and we all love change.  The problem is we love change in others.  We want the organisation to change, the boss to change, the clients to change, the team to change, but we want to stay exactly as we are.    I have thousands of pages of notes I have accumulated over the years, but how much of what I learnt did I actually implement into my work and life?  Occasionally I will learn something or get a hint about a way of doing things and I will make the effort and the time to make it happen.  The rule should be find the Pareto Principle of the Pareto Principle and find the 4% of things which will give you the 64% of the results you are after.  We can’t do everything but just concentrating on the 4% will help us to go a long way to improving 64% of what we are doing.  If you have more bandwidth, then get busy with the 20% of actions, which will bring in 80% of your required results.   These seven ideas about improving our mental health provide a good framework for us to get busy with.  Let’s keep this list handy and every day, let’s look at implementing one on the list.  That would be a good use of our time wouldn’t it.

Dr. Emily Anhalt is an American psychologist who has created a gym for mental health, based on research she did with 100 leaders and 100 psychologists who were treating leaders.  She identified seven factors which measure how “fit” we are in this sphere of mental health.  Does any modern leader believe things are going to ease off and leading will become less stressful and more relaxed?  I certainly don’t.  The problem is many of us grew up in the era of harden up, “soldier on” with strife and troubles, suck it up, grit your teeth and bear it.  That era’s level of technology, speed of business, global matrix connectivity was far removed from the complexity we all face today.  We need to be as fit mentally, as we all strive to become physically.  Let’s take a look at the good Doctor’s suggestions.   Learn your emotional triggers and biases This is familiar territory for me because I teach a course called Disagree Agreeably and this is where we look for what we call “Hot Buttons” or triggers that get the temper rising, the blood pressure pulsing and the body heat to climb rapidly.  My wife assures me my temper is getting shorter as I get older.  She is probably correct and there are no shortages of things to irritate me, starting with Covid and all that it brings with it.    The ability to ignore these irritants isn’t easy to develop, but we can work on how we respond.  We recommend using a cushion between the offending declaration and our reaction.  It is a benign sentence which neither diminishes nor inflames the situation but which acts as a circuit breaker to stop us shooting our emotion laden mouth off, before we have a chance to engage our brain first.    It can be a simple as saying, “thank for raising this topic, it is an important one”.  For me, that takes about 4-5 seconds to say and that is enough time to overrule the impulse to launch forth with the first thing which pops into my head and instead to plumb a more considered response to whatever nonsense my interlocutor has been sprouting.   Understand the emotions of others I can’t recall the author of this saying, but it is a goody:  “Remember everyone in life is carrying a heavy load”.  While I was in hospital recovering from a near death experience with pneumonia, after spending six days in the Intensive Care Unit, I was reflecting on life.  I thought that I should be less judgmental and intolerant of others.  I was reminded of this “carrying a heavy load” idea.    We have all read about the lives of the rich, famous and prominent and there is no shortage of problems facing them, so money isn’t an insulation from trouble.  They may have different “heavy loads” but they are carrying them too.  So if we get annoyed with someone, stop for a moment and reflect that “everyone in life is carrying a heavy load” and we may be better able to adjust our high expectations for their behaviour.     Find comfort in discomfort Human beings are wired to avoid discomfort, which is why we all lead these amazing lives full of gadgets to make things easier for us.  Around the world, Karate dojo are having a hard time getting students, because there is a lot of discomfort in the training and the younger generation would rather sit on the sofa and play video games.    Difficult things are difficult and we have to face that reality and get on with it.  When I first started Karate training at 17, it was more confusing than uncomfortable, because I wasn’t coordinated enough or good enough to do difficult things.  As I progressed through the ranks, I could do more complex things. This is where the discomfort factor took off.  The point is it was a gradual process of adjustment. My ability to find comfort that I was getting faster, stronger, better was traded against the pain and discomfort involved in the process.  When we can understand that trade off, we can put up with the discomfort because there is a bigger goals in front of us.  The pace didn’t go from zero to a hundred though.  It moved in spurts and this is a hint for all of us about how to build up our comfort in discomfort mental muscle.   In Part Two we will continue and look at how to 5. Bounce forward from failure and setbacks, 6. express needs, feelings and feedback and 7. Implement what you have learned into your daily life.  

We are all exposed to leadership lessons throughout our lives, yet for most of the time we are unaware of them.  When we were children, we didn’t think about what it meant to be a leader. Adults were all seen as leaders and they seemed to be unassailable authority figures whom we had to obey. In sports, maybe we were selected as the captain of the team or maybe we weren’t, but either way we didn’t think too much about what it meant to be a successful leader. At University we might have taken on a leadership role in one of the varsity clubs, but we weren’t necessarily thinking about the intricacies of leadership.  We just went with what we had at that point.  The exception though were those students who had decided they wanted a life in politics and so they were very keen to exert their leadership muscles to pad out their resume for future requirements.   When we hit the workforce, we entered a hierarchical world of different pay levels and designated leadership positions.  As new entrants, we may have been given some basic training, but we certainly were not given leadership training, as that was thought to be too early in the piece.  After toiling long and hard, we start to accumulate successes and attract greater responsibilities.  At some point we will be given a supervisory role over a project or a small team and then perhaps responsibility for our section.  At this point we may not receive any leadership training, even though we are now being held responsible for leading the team.   We are expected to work it out for ourselves based on self-study and combing back through our lives for examples of people who were in leadership positions.  That would include family members, teachers, sports coaches, classmates, bosses, etc.  We probably absorbed these influences without thought and they have planted some assumptions into our mind about what a leader is and what a leader does.  We will have cobbled together a disparate, idiosyncratic form of leadership.  It won’t have a formal structure and it will be missing bits all over the place.   About this time, we will start to realise that actually there is a lot more to this leadership thing than we imagined.  Here is the big dividing line.  Some leaders will just keep going with their trial and error, organic approach to leadership.  They don’t seek a teacher to help them learn what they are missing or to uncover the best practices available for leaders. Often their firms are also unwilling to invest in them and they are just expected to work it out for themselves.   Other leaders will start looking for information on leading, reading books, watching videos, listening to podcasts etc.  The amazing thing about modern business today is that there is an army of people out there putting up immense amounts of information for free, on the basis of their content marketing approach.  I am a member of that content creator army too, punching out six podcasts a week on Apple Podcasts, publishing articles in Forbes and on Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  I have written books on business and selling in Japan.  I am currently writing one on leading in Japan.  My point is there is a tremendous amount of free stuff available for any aspirant leader to absorb.   Basically there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to be thrashing around trying to work it out by themselves.  Business is too complex today for that and everyone in a leadership position has to become a student of leadership.  Ideally, the company will organise training for you or they will give you the money to go source it for yourself.  I have been sent to Harvard, Stanford and Insead business schools for expensive executive courses and all were great experiences, for flying the plane at 30,000 feet.    What I found though is you also need practical, immediately implementable down to earth in the mud and the blood, leadership training as well.  How do you get innovation, communicate, plan, handle mistakes, delegate, make decisions, do performance reviews, coach and develop your people.  These are the nuts and bolts of leadership on a daily basis and we will have picked up parts of these from just observing what our bosses and other leaders do.  It is so much better though to start studying about how to lead and to take courses which focus on the nuts and bolts aspects of the job.    Practical leadership courses are good because these are low on theory and high on applicability to your daily reality.  I found the varsity case studies interesting, but often also difficult to apply into my daily reality.  Practical leadership courses will spend more time on providing broad structures and have you fill in the blanks, as you create your own case studies based on the reality you are facing.  Two people from the same firm, in the same industry will come up with entirely different content, because each is addressing their particular reality. The practical classes will also produce a lot of ideas and insights, sourced from your classmates, as you can draw on their experiences both good and bad.  

Covid driving us all to work from home has been good for the commuter.  For Tokyo, many people typically face three hours a day in lost commuting time, standing around in packed train carriages, waiting to get to their office or getting back home.  That three hours is now being spent sleeping, playing with the kids, enjoying hobbies or working.  One of the major dilemmas is what happens after Covid has gone or is contained?  Every public opinion survey you read, says that the troops like working from home and are in no hurry to pack that morning sardine can and truck down to the office.  What does that mean for leaders?   Will there be many days in a year when everyone is back in the office?  Will the office have been sized down to save rent money on the basis that people won’t require desks because they have their home desk instead. If there are only going to be a few days in the year for the whole team to gather, then what happens with their relationships with each other and with the boss?  Some issues are not really suited to a Zoom call with the boss.  Will the staff member just keep it to themselves and let the issue fester or will they want to meet the boss and talk about it?   This is a reactive approach and maybe it is time to think about having more meals together with the team members.  By setting this up as a regular cadence, the boss gets to spend one on one time with everyone in their direct reporting line, at least and maybe there are a few others selected for a chat as well.  When we were all in the office this probably had no great urgency about it but we have been fled to the suburbs for over a year and a half now, so something has to give.  This “temporary” situation is looking to become permanent. Usually the work troubles are about difficult clients or difficulties with colleagues.  These are always tender subject areas so the personal touch is needed and rather than a formal meeting why not have a chat over a lunch or a dinner?   The troubling thing is whenever these chance encounters pop up, you find out so much about what is going on and it is usually stuff which will never surface during any Zoom calls.  Your mind starts thinking, “I wonder what else I am not across, which I need to know about?”.  The well organised leader will be thinking, “Okay how can I systemise this process, so that I can take a more preventative approach to issues which will arise?”.  Birthdays may be a good way of doing it.  You make it the rule that you will take the person out to lunch on their birthday.  This is a nice recognition element of the team culture and it also throws up the chance for conversations to be had which might be critical to the business.   That won’t be enough though, because we work around 270 days a year and that level of frequency is low.  Realistically, choosing direct reports for a regular catch up over a meal is a better plan.  There might be other key people who are not direct reports and inviting them for a meal may make a lot of sense.  You have to eat lunch anyway and it doesn’t have to be fine dining every time, because the key element is garnering improved communication.  It is also lunch time, so the trains are less crowded. It doesn’t have to be near the office, so a mutually convenient location may present itself, which cuts down on the travel.   The lunch shouldn’t feel like an interrogation.  The leader has set the stage with a psychologically safe environment for the staff member to speak up if they wish. Even if nothing magical is shared, just spending time together helps to build the trust inside the organisation. I spent an hour sitting in silence in a small meeting room, waiting for the early twenties female staff member to share the problem she was having with her 50 plus aged boss.  In the end after an hour she just said, “I can’t tell you the problem” and that was that.  I still don’t know what the issue was, but maybe if we had gone out of the office and off to a restaurant, she may have felt more confident to open up.   We are not going to be racing back to the office by the look of it, so we need to start thinking though scenarios where we can make sure we are spending enough face to face live, not on Zoom, with our people.  We have to keep in mind that there is an army of desperately stressed recruiters out there trying to keep their jobs by making their quotas for placements.  They will be very happy to have lunch with our team members, if they can lift them out of our shop, clip the ticket on the way through for 40% of their first years’ salary in the new position.  With a declining population and a strong demand for people, the lunch idea with you, rather than the recruiter, seems quite smart.

Leadership encompasses many required skills and mind sets and it is always interesting to dissect the topic from fresh angles to shed some light on areas where we could be making a bigger effort.  Japan has hordes of managers, but no so many leaders.  The managers here are great at getting the operational side of things humming like a finely tuned engine.  They are brilliant on eliminating errors and avoiding defects.  Deadlines get met, things work well and the wheels of commerce turn as they were designed to do.  Leaders do all of these things, plus some important additions.  They build the people and they set the direction for the enterprise.   There are many levels of leadership and so many levels of strategy too.  The CEO nestled high on the Executive Floor works with the Division Heads and collaboratively they set the overall strategy for the organisation.  At each level below, the leaders should set their strategies to fit under the overall umbrella determined by the big bosses.  Except in Japan mostly they don’t.  The managers here don’t see their role as taking that bigger picture strategy and then creating a grass roots version of it, one which points back to the main goals and direction of the company.  The WHY of the strategy has usually gone missing too and the focus is on what and occasionally on the how.   How much more powerful it would be if the section heads involved their teams in breaking apart the overall strategy and then collectively coming up with their ideas on how they can construct a local strategy to deliver the outcomes within the frame of reference.  The real genius in most organisations lies with those at the coal face.  They are closest to the customers and they pick up the nuances, hints, and shifts which make up the flow of business on a daily basis.  The high floor C-Suite denizens are often decades away from that level of understanding of the market and their muscle memory is often out of date.  If the strategy at the execution point can take on the complexion of the nexus with the market realities, then this is a real advantage over rivals for the same customer base.   The culture reflects the reality.  If it is focused on doing that you are told, then a big chunk of creativity is sacrificed for orthodoxy and supposedly consistent, no defect efficiency.  Busy lower level bosses do not coach anyone.  They are simply too busy.  They are reduced to barking out of orders and micromanaging the results, to make sure there are no stains on their record.  In big companies, patrons gather supporters and extract loyalty as a tax for promotion and support.  The enemy often becomes that other division, whose head is your boss’s rival for the next level of promotion.  The energy of the culture us now turned inward on itself and like rampant white ants loose in the enterprise, starts to hollow out the organisation.   A better culture would be one where the creativity of the group is harnessed, ideas are sourced and people are thanked for their contribution.  Those closest to the action are consulted and their responses are seriously considered.  There is a very good flow of information from the top to the bottom and the WHY is very clear to everyone.  The enemy is outside the enterprise, in the form of commercial rivals duking it out in the market place, for the customer’s business.   The brand concept isn’t just reduced to the logo and tagline.  When the leadership creates the better culture, the individuals in the organisation are aware of their professional personal brand.  The values and principles around work add up to a way of approaching tasks with a laser focus on professionalism, reliability, creativity and integrity. Being able to put up ideas is a part of the brand.  Being heard is part of the brand.  This dynamic creates a different type of teamwork from the “all hands to the oars of the slave ship” culture of organisations run by managers, who have no idea of what leadership entails.  Beating the drum and lashing the oar bearers is a dead duck culture and will not create the right brand internally, one sufficiently strong enough to win in the marketplace.   The alignment of individual values with those of the organisation, doesn’t come about because a CEO email was broadcast far and wide within the enterprise.  The middle level leader’s job is to understand the value set of the team and work with them individually to arrive at some core values everyone can sign on for.  The slave ship is transformed into a volunteer corps of committed people, trying to win against external rivals.  They are proud of the brand of the company and what it stands for, because the rhetoric and actions match up.  They are polishing their professional brands, because they are committed to self-improvement and feel encouraged to do so.   By the way, is this how you can describe the culture in your organisation right now?  Do your people understand the strategy?  Have they created a local extension of it, based on their knowledge of the customers?  Are they aware of their personal, professional brands?  So, how is the cocktail mixing process going down at your shop?

All guns blazing the new leader hits the ground running.  They are the new broom, sweeping all the detritus away from the old regime’s reign of terror.  “Embrace me as your saviour”, they say.  Well dressed, even natty, their hair is nice, they look the money.  They are the type of front man the organisation needs and a pleasing contrast to the previous incumbent.  Good looking, articulate, “hail fellow well met” and you think this is looking good.  They take on a much higher profile in the media, because they can carry it off and they can sustain the credibility needed for the public profile they are building.  They say all the right things and they have the right rhetoric for the zeitgeist.  Things are looking good, until they are not.   Covid does terrible things to companies.  It removes portions of the workforce from the front line, so the work isn’t getting done.  It causes the markets to change and the revenues to drop and drop quickly.  The way the leader responds says a lot about who they really are.  At one level they are positive, upbeat, confident the good old days will return again.  At the same time, they are wielding the knife and firing people immediately to reduce the exposure to the wages bill, amongst reduced revenues.    Of course, they promise the same level of service will continue, even though there are a smaller number of survivors left to do the work.  This goes down like a rock with the remaining crew.  I remember when I worked for the Australian Government and the Minister in charge of the Department I worked for, announced that the budget was being cut substantially, but was assuring all the voters that services would continue as normal.  The staff in that department immediately judged this fellow had no credibility whatsoever and the motivation in the organisation went straight down.  It is the same in the private sector.  The team are not fools and they know that the machine is always running lean and any reduction in input power impacts the outputs immediately and protestations to the contrary, there is a big impact on the quality and speed of service delivery.   The revenue reduction produces a quandary for the leader.  They start to become legalistic, waving around contracts and rules like fig leaves for their departure from the trust they have built up since they arrived.  The rhetoric and the reality really start to diverge.  At first, they try and make out like there has been no changes, but people in the organisation are not idiots and they see the changes quite clearly.  The fact that they think no one will notice creates a different set of issues.  Now people are not only unhappy, they are feeling insulted as well, to think that they are seen as that dumb that they can be fooled by smoke and mirrors.   The integrity of the leader sinks rapidly.  They try to isolate people out and deal with them individually, trying to mask the damage they are doing.  It doesn’t work though, because people talk and they complain widely to anyone who will listen, exposing what is the actual reality.  As we know, bad news travels fast.  Now every announcement is greeted with scepticism and doubt.  The leader is still maintaining their public profile, mouthing aphorisms and making sage comments on the general state of business or mankind, but the words ring hollow within the organisation.   Trying to justify the unjustifiable is a road to ruin, from which there is no return.  All of the good work invested up until now is being swept out with the fishbones and vegetable peelings into the rubbish bin.  Once the credibility and trust are gone then only concern is left and an urgent desire for change at the top.  Other nefarious acts going on in the background are now being brought into the light. Scenes from the shadowy wasteland of destruction are shared internally and beyond that rumours, flights of imagination, fantasy and fears on steroids are added to the mix of fact and fiction, to create a world of confusion and dismay.   No amount of rhetoric or press releases or podcast guest appearances will cure this cancer in the organisation.  Even if the economy and market bounce back, the damage is done.  The real leader has been exposed for who they really are, the full consequences of their appointment have become apparent and efforts to undo them are underway.  It didn’t have to be this way.    The real issue is time frame.  Those with a very short point of reference will take actions of desperation and will burn, pillage and plunder to survive.  They are the people who will drown you, if your swim to them and try and rescue them, as they push your head under to keep themselves above water.  The other major victim is transparency.  Because their ego is involved, they try to make out as if they are in control, they are awesome and don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.  In a vacuum of information flow, rumour and supposition fill in the gaps and then they lose control of the narrative.  Honesty breeds a collegiate effort to weather the storm together and to make the sacrifices needed to survive.  Integrity can become even further burnished in the fire of destruction which Covid has wrought on the market and the organisation. Like a Phoenix, the leader can emerge stronger, smarter and attracting more support.  Their true humanity has been revealed, their humility has been shown and their integrity has been preserved, in fact, it has been increased.

Covid-19 cases are skyrocketing every day.  Just when you thought we might be getting somewhere, the latest BA5 variant is spreading like wildfire.  For many businesses this will make no difference, but for many industries like mine, we are watching those numbers like hawks, praying they go down.  Why?  Because our buyers are making decisions not to buy, because of the danger factor of getting the virus.  If buyers reduce or stop buying, the next thing you have to worry about are cash flow prblems.  Can you make the rent and the salary bill every month?  These types of problems are like amoebas – they just keep multiplying.   Any hint of trouble in the business breeds fear in the staff.  Are we going to be okay?  Is this company going down?  Should I be the first rat to jump ship?  If you are not open with the numbers, then you run the risk of supposition, rumours and imaginations in overdrive.  You don’t tell them how bad it is, but they know things are bad and they presume they are actually a lot worse than they really are.  If you are transparent with the numbers, they have a clear view of the problem, but they still worry it is a huge problem and perhaps insurmountable.   We read these statements such as “it is lonely at the top”.  As the leader, who can you talk to?  The only words coming out of our mouth with our teams have to positive and confident.  The first sign of a lack of confidence and you could trigger the collapse of the whole edifice.  No matter how much you are hurting, they are not the audience for your fundamental, deep concerns about the business.   What about friends in business?  Certainly, this can include clients.  In fact, my policy is to make every client a friend if possible.  That is not always the case, but in general that is the type of relationship I want.  People like to do business with people they like and that includes those doing the selling, as well as the buying.  You cannot really share your woes with the client no matter how good a friend they are.  They are still the client and they have their own businesses to take care of. The prospect of you the supplier falling over would trigger them to seek more stable supply from somewhere else, regardless of how much they may like you personally.   What about your partner.  When you get home and start sharing all the stresses you are under, what is the impact on the family?  The partner is going to start worrying about the collapse of the family fortunes, what will happen to the house, what about the retirement years provisions?  The leader has to be careful with this messaging as well. There is a tension there between wanting to unburden to release some stress and creating additional burdens for yourself on the home front.   What about friends?  Do you in fact have any close friends?  You may be working so hard in the business, you actually don’t have any close friends, because you never have the time to invest in the relationship.  Assuming you do have some friends you can trust with this confidential information, does it help?  Apart from sympathy, they cannot do much.  They have their own problems in life and their own stresses.  Any advice they have is basic and you would have thought about it already.  Or they have advice which isn’t helpful because they cannot know your business well enough to make any difference.   What about a coach?  This can be a good idea.  One of the issues is the same as with friends, the coach won’t know your business well enough to understand the ramifications of what is going on.  They can help at a high level perhaps.  I am always dubious about so called “life coaches” who have done nothing in their lives?  The same goes with a lot of business coaches, who have achieved nothing in business?  Can a business coach sitting outside of Japan understand Japan well enough to be of any help?  It is a bit like that joke about the consultant borrowing your watch so that they can tell you the time.  The coach who doesn’t know Japan has to be educated by you first about the Japan situation in business.   Finding a business coach who knows about Japan and has sufficiently high level commercial experience to see things from the Presidential Suite point of view is a rare beast.  Active Presidents get it and get it perfectly, except they are too busy running their own shop to worry about coaching someone else.  This also presents a potential problem of because they are here, you are possibly opening up a conduit to the market to release things you don’t want publicised in the market.  How much can you really share?   It doesn’t sound great does it?  In reality the choices are few.  As leaders we have to harden up and find a way to push through.  The key is to be able to manage our stress.  If we know how to do that, then the release we seek can be found.  This could be journaling, meditation or exercise. Drugs and alcohol are creating a fresh set of problems and we already have enough troubles without adding to the pile.   Writing things down for whatever reason, does seem to help.  We can do it in four stages.  What are the problems I am facing?  Which of these many problems is one with the highest priority?  What are some things I can do about it?  Which one of these many solutions is the best choice to get to work on immediately.  It sounds so simple.  That is the genius of this method – it is so simple, but it really works.

Over the last six months we have been getting a steady stream of enquiry for leadership training.  Covid induced working from home situations has revealed the gaps in the leadership abilities of people who are managers.  The two roles are actually different, but usually companies conflate them, to expect their managers to also be leading.  Did they give them any training to make this leap?  No. Yet they complain about their leaders are only managers and are not doing a good enough job.  There have also been cases where people have been elevated into supervisory roles or leadership roles from the ranks. Not only no training, there has been little or no OJT, the On the Job Training, which has been the core of all corporate training in Japan since the start of the post war period.  Onboarding and on the job training have been impacted by Covid because people are working from home.   Managers are focused on processes.  There are various interlocking processes within modern work which require one piece of work to do be done on time in order for the related segment of the task to start.  Managers are keeping an eye on deadlines, to make sure things are in tandem and working smoothly.  There are also costs to be monitored and managers are closely watching the budget expenditure to make sure projects and work do not blow up the budget allocations.  Quality of work too is an obvious one for managers to focus on.  Rework is expensive in time terms and often in money terms too.    For many managers this is enough to keep them super busy already, without having to add on top additional leadership responsibilities.  Japan is a no defect work culture, so managers are keen to be recognised as people who make sure there are no problems and no issues in their section.  That means a forensic investigation of the processes under their supervision.   Leadership is really about two additional tasks – developing people and setting the strategy.  In most cases the broader strategy will be set by the most senior leaders at the very top of the pyramid, but for each division and section, there is a need to interpret that strategy at the coal face level.  This is the leader’s job for those further down the food chain. How can they adapt the broader corporate strategy to the piece of the machinery of the organisation which they control.  How to get their people fully onboard with the broader strategy and then the micro strategy piece, whose implementation they control.   Often in organisations, there are framed versions of the Vision, Mission and Values protected behind glass and sitting there becoming dust catchers.  Nobody can remember them, let alone live them.  That is unless the leader makes them come alive.  Ricco de Blanc opened the Ritz Carlton Hotels in Osaka and Tokyo.  He passed away a few years ago, quite young, so a great loss.  I remember I attended a talk he gave for a Chamber of Commerce in Osaka, about the Ritz Carlton’s twelve Principles of Customer Service.  I was so impressed, that a few years later I had him come and give that talk to my colleagues at the Shinsei Retail Bank and convinced my boss to send to me to Washington DC to attend the Ritz’s training center.   When I returned I adapted those ideas to create a similar set of customer service principles for the retail banking business at Shinsei.  The secret sauce from Ritz Carlton was that they made these principles the center piece of their culture and everyday, in every location around the world, each shift would start the day by reviewing the same principle of that day.  In this way they made the ideas come alive and that is what we do every morning in our organisation.  We have what we call the Daily Dale and we go through the Vision, Mission, Values and the principle of that day, from the Dale Carnegie human relations and stress management principles.  We make these ideas come alive so that our team can remember them in order to be able to live them.   The other task of the leader is developing people.  This means making the time to coach people.  Busy managers and leaders are challenged in this regard.  Technology has not given us more time, but it has given us more work to get done.  One of the casualties is coaching of staff.  If we look at the diaries of those in leadership positions and you extract the giving of commands to subordinates, the amount of time spent in real coaching will be captured in nanoseconds.  The remote work environment just adds to the complexities such that there is very little actual coaching going on in Japan these days.  Well, that is certainly what our clients are complaining to us about at least.  Maybe your organisation is different, a veritable paragon of boss coaching of subordinates heaven, but somehow, I doubt it.   Boss communication skills are another challenge.  Finding out what motivates subordinates and then communicating with them along those lines is not easy.  It takes time to understand what their changing needs are and it requires excellent persuasion skills on the part of the boss to communicate that the organisation’s objectives and their objectives are in alignment.  Motivating us others is a misnomer, because we cannot motivate anyone but ourselves.  What we need to do though is build a culture and environment, where people are able to motivate themselves to do good work.   The leader has to manage the processes, set the strategy and build the people.  If that is only happening in your rival’s shop and not in yours then long term your organisation will lose.  The whole war for talent in Japan makes this people part even more important and urgent.  Expect to see staff deserting middle managers and only staying with middle level leaders.  There is a world of difference as we have seen between the two.

Things Leaders Should Be Doing   There are tons of things leaders should be doing, so it becomes a bit of a blizzard white out mentally, because we are overwhelmed by the volume.  It is a good thing to isolate out some key ideas and just remind ourselves of their importance.  Here we go.   Focus attention chiefly on results to be achieved rather than things to be done. Everything that is happening should lead to the desired results.  Sounds obvious except when we analyse our diary and look at what we are spending our time on, often we are shocked that so few items are actually directly propelling results.   Plan and organise effectively to achieve these desired results, then coordinate the efforts of everybody concerned with these results to do their best to achieve them. How good are our plans?  Do they need to be updated because the market has changed or circumstances have run over the top of us? Are we still organised properly to achieve the results we have set for ourselves?  Is the balance between individual responsibility and teamwork correct or are we off center?   See that major objectives are divided into bite-size pieces and properly communicated with time targets for achieving expected results. Objectives must have an established measurement and accountability system to prevent deviation from what is expected. Covid has thrown many of us under the bus and business as normal is no longer a reality. Order and calm pursuit of targets has been replaced with scrambling to survive.  How do we measure performance in this situation?   Establish effective performance standards (expectations) so all people will be geared toward attaining profitable action and will know what is expected of them and how their performance will be measured. Again, how do you set realistic performance standards during a pandemic, which constantly buffets your industry with wave upon wave of infections, like kamikaze pilots attacking a battle group?  The textbook answers have to be thrown out the window and we have to work it out by gut feel and raw grit, rather than philosophy.   Build a results-oriented attitude in the organisation so people will develop self-reliance and achieve their goals and confidence. Certainly working from home has shifted the visibility of people producing results and a lot of it now comes down to numbers on a spreadsheet.  Also, the opportunities for direct supervision and teamwork have been reduced in the remote world.  For some people this is not an issue but not everyone thrives in that garden.  What do we do about that?   Motivate people to peak achievement. Try yelling “be motivated, be motivated, be motivated” over and over again at your team members and rapidly discover you cannot motivate anyone except for yourself. The best we can do is provide the environment where individuals feel self-motivated to succeed.  The trick is to know what that means person by person and then delivering it for them one by one.   Be creative and help others develop their creative potential. Creativity can be learned but when and where are we taught how.  How many leaders make an effort to study how to be more creative?  If you have no clue, how on earth can you teach it to your people?  Also, take a cold hard look at the way your organisation functions and see if it is actually designed to stifle or kill innovation rather than encourage it.   Track all progress so that what is planned is achieved. How hard could this be right?  Except we are often lost in the weeds or we are being pulled hither and thither and coming back to round up results gets overtaken by constant urgencies.   Maintain coordination of the efforts of all personnel both within and outside your organisation so the interaction of these people will be focused on desired results. This was certainly easier when everyone was in the office.  I find that there is a lot more coordination work required now that people are separated from each other and me and are working from home.  A lot of time and energy gets expended now on making sure things are known to people who need to know them and that things are being done, when they need to be done.   Know and strive to reach your own and the organisation’s continuing purpose and build this into your job and the jobs of those with whom you work. Often, we pontificate from on high about the purpose of what we are doing and imagine everyone is on board, that everyone got the message and they all understand what needs to be done.  It is always a shock to discover not everyone got the message or understood the message properly.  We learn we need to keep communicating the same thing over and over again and we always need to check for understanding.   Exercise and display the kind of leadership skills that will cause people to rally around the plans and grasp with enthusiasm, the concept of teamwork to get things done. Are you ready to fire your top performer who is not a team player?  This is where the rubber meets the road of leadership.  If you say one thing about the divinity of teamwork but tolerate the outlaw, the corporate libertarian, who persistently does their own thing at scale, then everyone gets the message about how things really work around here.     So how did you go?  Are you giving yourself a perfect score on all of these levers of leadership?  I certainly couldn’t do that and it was a painful reminder of my failings and imperfections.  The point is self-awareness is the key starting point and often busy work effectively masks our view of what is vital and we get tied up in stuff.  Let’s get back to basics and remind ourselves we are not divine after all and we still have work to do on ourselves.

The P&L, the Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Projections, revenues, profit, the list goes on regarding where we leaders place our attention.  There is nothing like a pandemic to have you focused on the numbers in the business.  It is easy to get caught up in the dynamics of survival and forget some of the subtleties needed to lead an organisation.  These usually revolve around our people and how we treat them and how we think about them.  Like a juggler keeping 5 balls in mid-air rotation or the artist who can keep many, many plates spinning at the same time, we have to be agile and be capable of concentrating on more than one thing at a time.    Here are four things we need to be aware of while we struggle through the day to day.   It is essential to influence others to cooperate toward achieving desired results: the leader only has value in relation to an organisation and the people who constitute it.  Basically, we know this, but often in straited times, our force of will, determination, grit and guts drive us to push ourselves hard and push everyone else hard as well.  Cooperation becomes replaced with demands, orders, announcements from on high reflecting one single perspective – our own.  The servant leader rhetoric is flung straight out the window and the value of the people to the leader becomes the dominant consideration, rather than the other way around.   The leader’s total personality, including the attitudes toward life and particularly toward people, will determine success or failure as a leader. Being perfect would make this whole leader gig much easier.  In fact, we are a tangled web of fears, hopes, desires and value judgements.  Basically, as we progress through organisations as a leader, we start to smooth off some of the rough edges.  We learn to curb our sardonic wit, sharpish tongue, that devastating riposte and love of bitter, razor sharp irony.    When things are humming along it is easy to be pleasant, upbeat, positive, hail fellow well met.  We have that spring in our step, smiles appear easily and tolerance and patience reign.  What a great leader we are.  When things are going down the gurgler and we are looking into the face of oblivion, our dominant spirit of negativity permeates throughout the entire organisation.  Being calm amongst the carnage and chaos isn’t a natural play for most of us.  So as leaders we have to have that actor’s ability to appear in control when we are out of control underneath.    McGregor in his study of motivation said the Theory X type leader focused on the shortcomings, saw only the negatives of subordinates at every turn and became the super detective uncovering faults and failures.  His conclusion was that how we saw people influenced the culture of the organisation.  This means we have to be highly disciplined to make sure our biases are not running rampant and damaging the team’s esprit de corps.   The blending of the organisation’s goals and the career goals of the individuals in the organisation is of paramount importance. These goals are interrelated and must all grow and prosper in concert.  Is this the case though?  Isn’t the leader’s own goals usually of the most paramount interest for the leader?   We are all human and our frailties are many, so self-interest is a natural human dimension and we should stop trying to put lipstick on the pig here.  That doesn’t mean that we cannot also have a keen interest in furthering the careers of our subordinates.  Knowing what drives our people, one by one, takes a lot of time, but this is the leader’s mark of excellence – spending the time to know what each individuals’ goal are in the first place and then trying to bulldog the system to deliver for them.  It is rare that the organisations goals and the individual’s goals cannot be homogenised like farm fresh milk into a creamy confluence.  The devil is in the details though and a lot of brute force can be needed to get that whole coalescence thing to work properly.   A central responsibility of a leader is to develop people and help to make them successful, since only successful people achieve important results.  This sounds a bit trite doesn't it.  In fact, we are often failing our way to success.  The innovation process is full of risk and is a messy endeavour. Hanmen Kyoshi in Japanese means teacher by negative example and importantly this can include ourselves, as well as the failings of others.  We learn what doesn’t work by trying it and failing.  The important thing to keep in mind is to be as generous with the failings of our subordinates, as we are with own failings.  Holding them to account, but to a higher standard than we apply to ourselves, is a toxic cocktail and unfortunately a common one.    In our own case if “we never fail, but only learn”, then that philosophy has to be applied equally to the team members under our care.  This is relatively easy when the stakes are low.  It gets more exciting when some very serious numbers are involved and this is the test of our integrity, commitment, trust, credibility and reliability as a leader.   Kuki wo yomu is a favourite Japanese expression meaning to read the air in the room and understand what is really going on, which might be different from what things appear to be.  For leaders, sometimes we have to take a pause in the heat of battle and ponder if we can read our own air and understand what is really going on inside ourselves.  These four prompts are a good reminder to make sure we haven’t lost perspective on what it means to be a leader, especially when things get rough and tough.

In Part One we covered principles 1-7 and we continue looking at some fundamentals we all know but may have forgotten or may have neglected.   Truly respecting others is the bedrock of motivation. This idea of respecting staff by the boss makes sense except when we realise that 80% of the team, by definition, are either average or low performers. Maybe the boss is frustrated with some performance levels and maybe they are digging the hole deeper for themselves by applying the wrong motivation formula and not communicating to their 80% cohort that they are valued and respected too.   People work for money, but go the extra mile for recognition, praise and rewards. Frederick Herzberg’s research on motivation said that salary was only a “hygiene factor”. In other words, people expect to get paid fairly for their work, so money isn’t everything. Of course, major money does speak loudly to certain people, though most people are not getting paid the astronomic packages we see in the finance industry for example. Our research on the emotional drivers of engagement pointed out that staff feeling valued by their boss was a key catalyst for feeling engaged.  How would they know they are valued?  The boss is constantly communicating this to them through giving praise and recognition.  So are you doing this?   Be quick to admit mistakes and slow to criticise. Above all, be constructive.  What - the boss has to admit they aren’t perfect?  Ego, face, pride, image are all wrapped up together for bosses and how they project themselves.  Afterall, bosses by definition, are saying they are superior to their staff, otherwise one of them would be the boss instead.  So how do we square this with the boss admitting they have made a mistake?  Doesn’t this undermine their right to rule, their authority to claim the crown?  Bosses who are chronic mistake makers should be replaced so we are not talking in terms of extremes here.  Bosses who have enough self-confidence to admit when they are wrong or have made a mistake will be admired, rather than scorned.  Once you deny your boss divinity it makes it easier to accept your staff are not perfect either and to be more understanding of occasional mistakes.  Again, chronic mistake makers need to work in another job, because the current one is not the right fit for them.   Set goals that are clear, challenging and obtainable. Most of my career, I have been subject to goals which defied any scientific, logical or understandable rationale.  A wet finger being thrust into the breeze seemed to be the methodology of my bosses. Were these unrealistic goals motivating?  No.  How are the goals being set in your team?    Today, I have a spreadsheet which tracks each salesperson from the day they joined us and I can compare the sales being achieved person by person.  This allows me to see some averages and a guide for what my expectations should be for every year of experience selling our solutions.  It certainly beats guessing or wishing when setting goals.   Leaders never lose their focus. They keep their eyes on the big picture. Do they?  Markets, currencies, wars, meltdowns, pandemic nightmares are all able to distract us from the big picture.  Staff are rarely sharing any interest in the big picture, because they are micro-focused on themselves.  They want what they want today and to hell with tomorrow.  It takes a lot of good planning, preparation and guts to keep the focus on the light on the hill when the darkness clouds your vision.  The mantras are “work on your business, not just in your business” and don’t forget to spend sufficient time in Quadrant Two – Not Urgent/ Important in our time management.   Consistently high performance comes from a balance between work and leisure. “I will out work, out commit, out sacrifice everyone to win”, sounds admirable, until it isn’t.  Our ideas often come while running, walking, lifting weights, swimming, gardening etc., not at the desk while working.  Our health determines our sustained success.  My father started his own company aged 49, was surprised by his immediate financial success and then died of lung cancer at age 51.  He wasn’t around to reap the annual rewards and that is the same for those who say dumb things like “the winners finish with the most expensive toys”.  This business life is a marathon not a sprint in terms of remaining successful.   Gain strength from the positive and don’t be sapped by the negative. The movie reel in our minds keeps playing past failures, humiliations, mistakes, disasters, etc.  The media says “if it bleeds, it leads” so they have learnt to pump out as much negativity as possible to sell ad space.  Covid was a disaster for the training industry, so staying positive in the face of massive losses and upheaval hasn’t been a picnic for me.  There wasn’t a lot of “positive” to cling to quite frankly.  The mantra is TINA – There Is No Alternative, meaning you cannot quit, you have to keep going, to keep fighting until the last breath.  If your business has survived the pandemic, despite taking massive flesh wounds, then congratulations.  If it didn’t, then get back up on the horse and try again.  I love this Japanese saying, “Fall down seven times, get up eight”.   Tame your worries and energise your life. “Can I make payroll this month?”, “Will we run out of cash?”, “How much longer can we hang on for?”, these have been the realities for many of us beaten around the head by the pandemic, supply chain issues, market collapses and war in Europe. Here is a simple, but powerful four part formula for dealing with endless woes: What is the problem?  Why is it a problem?  What are some of the things I can do to alleviate this problem?  Which one is the best solution to this problem?  We move from paralysis and drowning in worry, to moving our mind into solution mode.  It works – try it.   Never underestimate the power of enthusiasm. There is no doubt it has power, it can move mountains, it will make the difference, but how do you become enthusiastic when everything and everyone around you is grim. Somehow, somewhere, I learnt that staying away from the kryptonite of negative people was key to remaining positive.  This gets a bit trickier when your spouse is a glass half full type of personality.  Nevertheless, we have to honour, protect, cherish and amplify our own enthusiasm when it is coursing through our veins.  Don’t let anyone rain on your parade and definitely avoid hanging around “downer” people.  Find the spark of whatever it is which makes you feel enthusiastic and try and expand that spark into the blue flame of hope for the future.   The things I have covered over Part One and Part Two are unremarkable, unsurprising, old, well known and smell of moth balls.  The only problem is we don’t do these things as our regular practices as leaders.  It is always good to be reminded of the obvious and to try and make it the everyday.  Take one a day like as business health supplement and swallow it completely then let it course through your system.  These 16 pills are probably good for whatever is ailing you in business, so why not give them a shot.      

We pick up ideas on leadership from multiple sources – books, training, articles, blogs, guidance from mentors and personal observation.  What we usually fail to do is compile them or collect them in one place.  This sporadic approach is also completed over a long time span, so we forget more than we retain.  Here are sixteen principles of leadership which we all know, but which we will benefit from by reminding us of what we have forgotten and by collecting them in one place.   The first step toward success is identifying our own leadership strengths. This is not what we do though is it?  We usually focus on what we are doing poorly.  That is looking into the past. By concentrating on our strengths, we can build on those and keep growing, rather than beating ourselves up about being less than perfect.   Communication is built on trusting relationships. But what builds trust in relationships?  Being fair with staff, vendors and clients is an integral part of this.  Recently we had a case where there was some international pricing available for our training, which was higher than what we charge locally.  We could have easily taken the additional money. In straitened Covid times that cash would have been welcome, but where is the trust if we do that?    Trust also means doing what you say, when you say it and how you say it, which sounds easy, but many things get in the way of executing on these undertakings.  Regardless, we need to keep our eye on our integrity and follow our truth north values   Motivation can never be forced. People have to want to do a good job.  Imagine one of those cartoon scenes where the boss is loudly screaming “be motivated, be motivated, be motivated”, such that the staff members hair is blowing back off their head.  We know that is ridiculous, but what do we do instead of telling people to be motivated?  Aligning the individual’s values and those of the enterprise is a key start.  Also understanding their individual motivations and making sure the company can help them achieve their goals is another one.  So here is the million dollar question – do you know the values and goals of each staff member and do you know these over time, because goals can certainly change?   There is nothing more effective and rewarding than showing a genuine interest in other people. The key word here is “genuine”.  This means no hidden agenda, instead a pure curiosity about individuals we meet in business and life.  Fake pleasantries to gain a tip and then obvious displeasure with the insufficient amount of the tip, is a classic example of the opposite of what we are talking about.  In Japan, we refer to the “eigyo smile”, the fake “sales smile” to win business in the B2B world.  People are fascinating and when you show a pure interest, you learn so much and they feel the genuine nature of your interaction.  As leaders, let’s be curious.   Step outside yourself to discover what’s important to someone else. Deadlines, targets, quotas, the daily email deluge, bills to be paid, endless meetings – the rough and tumble of business is relentless.  In the process we can be consumed by our world and forget that there are other worlds which are impacting the people around us.    As an example, I recently observed a company owner vigorously networking at an event and another guest make a snide comment about what they are doing.  Maybe that guest sailed through the pandemic unscathed.  The owner however had been clinging on by the fingernails, but there was no appreciation for that.  This is what happens when the focus is on ourselves.    We lack empathy for others and for leaders that is a disaster, in particular, in a market where staff can easily jump ship and get another job, if they don’t feel they are being looked after.  Empathy is not an occasional thing – you are either empathetic or you are not and as leaders we had better become empathetic if we want to succeed in modern business.   Nobody is more persuasive than a good listener. This sounds so counterintuitive doesn’t it.  Often we think being persuasive means having the gift of the gab, dominating the flow of the conversation, steering the direction of the content and driving forward hard, through force of will.  This usually presents itself as finishing others sentences for them or cutting them off, as we interject our genius contribution.   This is so prevalent, that when someone actually shuts up and lets us talk, we feel liberated, energised and valued. Dopamine is flooding through our system and we like that person.  We take a more positive view of who they are, what they have to say and what they want.  Introverts in particular are very open to this form of communication.  So to be listened to yourself as a leader, let the other person do all the talking.   Team players are the leaders of tomorrow. I saw a quote the other day which flagged the three Cs as being critical to success for leaders – creativity, critical thinking and collaboration.  This element of collaboration is relatively new.  When I was growing up in business, Jack Welch was the dominant role model.  His image was that of the dominant leader, driving results through force of will, pushing subordinates hard and casting overboard anyone who didn’t measure up.  It was a Darwinian struggle of zero sum outcomes.  Today, we have a different business world in front of us and the ability to tap into the collective intellect, energy and commitment of the whole team is seen as the winning formula.    I can see this weakness in myself.  I now tell my son, he shouldn't think he has to do it all on his own like I did. He should seek support, mentors and collaborators.  I wish I had been smarter about this, rather than treading the path of the hairy chested individual, trying to do it all on my own – I have been a notoriously slow learner!   In Part Two, we will continue with principles 8-16.      

Japan was decimated by the Pacific War and really struggled until they had the lucky break called the Korean War.  Suddenly the war required a lot of supplies and more importantly Japan was no longer seen as a pariah, but as a bulwark against communism. America began to pour money into the country to bolster its economic defences and keep it capitalist.  By 1960 things had improved to the point where Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda could make the doubling of the economy a realistic target.  The engine room of this turn around was the hard work of the Japanese people but it came at costs.  Fathers weren’t around because they were working all of the time and so the mothers had to take care of the kids in their absence.    Things have improved a lot since then.  Schools no longer operate on Saturdays and the same for most firms.  Fathers are more able to spend time with their children and more mothers are working too these days.  Karoshi – death from overwork is still a thing in Japan and “black companies” who exploit their staff, are being named and shamed.  The hollowing out of middle management has put additional pressure on leaders.  The introduction of technology, means that bosses are basically doing their own typing and administration, as well as running their teams. Often they are player/managers, which means they also have their own clients and personal sales to achieve.  The traditions of “total work” like “total war” continue for leaders.    Being busy is good and being too busy is not.  There are many facets to life like the facets of a cut diamond and as leaders, we are well to remember that fact.  The Wheel of Life is a good visual reminder of the need for better balance in our leader lives. It is basically a rotary shape with a score of zero at the center and the outer edge, has a score of ten. You score yourself against the eight key indicators to monitor how you are doing across the important segments of your life.   Obviously career is one of the indicators and in Japan that can often be not particularly under one’s control.  The idea is you work like a dog like everyone else and you will rise through the ranks and get the same bonuses as everyone else, until you get to a certain advanced age when certain people will keep going and your will go sideways.  The lifetime employment configuration is changing and for many people taking control of their career is an option today.  The point about the Wheel of Life exercise is to make sure this isn’t the only thing in your leader life, which for a lot of men can easily become the reality.  Unsurprisingly, divorce rates are rising in correlation to the financial independence of married woman.  “Working for the family” and losing the family, doesn't make any sense.   Finance is a tricky thing in Japan.  The vast majority of people keep their money in the bank in cash and do not invest it.  During the deflationary economy of the past decades that made sense, but as we enter more inflationary times, the wealth will be eroded unless it is invested. Japan doesn’t let you miss your tax filing, so at least that forces us to get our act together on that front.  The pension system will collapse at some point because there are just insufficient numbers of young people paying in to fund the oldies taking the money out as they retire.  When I was at the Shinsei Bank, I was always keen to encourage customers to invest in personal annuities to avoid that collapse, but there is still a big gap in understanding of “winter is coming”.  As leaders we cannot be too busy to manage our finances well and prepare for the future, but often we do just that, thinking we will get to that later.   Community is well developed in Japan as part of the rice growing culture mindset which continues into urban life still.  People voluntarily wearing face masks during Covid was never even an issue for anyone here, no matter how irritating and uncomfortable. Everyone was doing their bit for everyone else.  But leaders can often be isolated from their community because work is the only focus.  Communities need leaders and we should make ourselves available.  It helps others and it helps us to be more rounded in our lives and relationships.   Social life is often the first fatality of overtime.  Working from home has meant the boundary between work and non-work has collapsed and leaders are now working much longer hours, trying to cope with running dispersed organisations.  Catching up with friends has diminished because we stopped going out with Covid raging around us. However, even before that, bosses were often neglecting the chance to smell the flowers from the back of the galloping horse.  Bosses dragging younger and often reluctant staff out for dinner and drinks was a type of fake social life.  Having rich relationships is real wealth and leaders need to keep that idea in mind.   Family we have touched on already.  For male leaders in particular, what are we working for?  We say “family”, but we don’t spend as much time with our family as we need to.  We need to “work” on having a wonderful, fulfilling family life because it won’t happen by itself.   Personal Life pursuits are not selfish.  Leaders need hobbies, interests and pursuits outside of work.  Often we are trading time away from these interests, toward working longer hours.  I am a curious example.  I write and record my articles every Saturday, so in one sense, the workaholic in me is on full tilt.  On the other hand, I cannot play a musical instrument, draw or paint, so writing for me, is an artistic escape from the work world.  We leaders need something other than work to focus on or life is pretty bare.   Health is not something we should ever compromise, but we do.  We don’t do the exercise we should do, because we are “busy”.  We eat and drink too much and often consume content which we should avoid altogether or which we should consume in microscopic quantities.  I see obese people appear for a while at the gym, tethered to their personal trainers.  I immediately check my watch, because the clock is ticking and in a few weeks they will be gone.  Why?  They got way too big, just have too much meat on them and losing the weight needs a complete lifestyle change, which they are unwilling to make.    I have been there, gaining weight due to eating and drinking too much at work related dinners and functions. When I was working in Nagoya, I attended a work related geisha party function and later some kind soul gave me a commemorative photo from the evening.  I was sitting on the tatami and it was a profile shot.  When I gazed on that expansive girth I had accumulated, I had an epiphany – I was massively obese. I know well the continuous effort it takes to get the weight back down, but it is vital we leaders make that effort.   Spirituality is such a personal element, I am hesitant to say much about it.  The basic idea though is to reflect on who we are, why we are here and what we plan to do with our life.  As busy leaders though, are we doing any of that or is all spreadsheets, revenues and reporting?    Leaders have many roles and responsibilities and work is one of them not the only one.  The Wheel of Life exercise is always a good reminder that we are omnipresent creatures living in a multiverse.  As a friend of mine says, “Time is life”.  What are we leaders doing with it?          

Internal meetings are held for worthy purposes such as reporting, planning and innovating.  Not everyone views these meetings the same way though and this is where we can face problems when we run meetings in Japan.   Let’s examine 8 sets of typical meeting issues we will be familiar with:   Expressions of desire. The range here runs from one group, who express their desires as a wish, all the way to the other end of the scale, where actual demands are being made.  We may prefer that those who are wishing for outcomes were more assertive and just come out and ask for what they want.  On the other hand, we may feel confronted by aggressive team members who start making demands on us during the meeting.    Winning at all costs or cooperating. Hard driving people get things done, they brook no interference and apply their energy, guile to bulldoze their way through the barriers.  They have tunnel vision, only see their interests and are oblivious to their impact on those around them.  Those at the opposite end of the scale are sensitive to the others in the meeting and are busily kuki wo yomu – reading the air in the room, in order not to offend anyone.  The middle group stand up to the bulldozers and put forward their own views, willing to engage in open debate.   Stress under fire. Business is highly stressful in this modern age, as technology and speed of change keeps the challenges coming thick and fast.  Some of the team will be stressed, but will be aggressive and add to the stress of others in the meeting.  Another group will also be stressed, but hide it, so as the leader, we may not be picking up on it.  Others will acknowledge they are stressed, deal with it internally and keep moving forward.   Varying communication styles. Confrontational, direct communication can cross the red line and become inappropriate very quickly.  As the leader we would prefer an honest conversation on the issues, so that we can gauge the array of views on the subject.  Quieter team members can have good points to make, but they self-censor and prefer to either say nothing or are very indirect in what they say. They often get run over by the more aggressive individuals in the room.   Deflaters and elevators. To get to the number one position, strong individuals will jockey for position.  They elevate their power by depressing the power of others.  I remember being in meeting where one of the sales guys was telling one of the administration staff, that she was a cost center and he was a profit center, implying his value to the organisation was greater than hers.  There are others though, who are building others up and even some who do so at their own sacrifice.   Degrees of accountability. We want everyone be accountable and to hold everyone else to be accountable too.  Some dominant people though want to control everything and hold others to account, but grant themselves a free pass, because they are so awesome or hardworking or a major producer.    Confront or acquiesce. Being confrontational in business is a given for some people, yet for others, it is the last thing they would ever dream of doing.  They may even bend over backwards to avoid confrontation, because it is too much pressure for them to endure.  We would prefer people to be passionate, but considerate and to make their point, without trying to intimidate everyone else to get agreement.   Thrusting or hiding. Being direct is fine, as long as it is done in a polite and considerate, collegiate manner.  The problems arise when the communication of their position is done in a direct, even abrasive way, because they don’t care what others think. The other problem is when feelings are being hidden and valid concerns and views not being expressed, robbing the meeting of different perspectives.     For Western leaders all of these types of meeting issues would be very familiar and we grow up in business trying to find ways of dealing with them.  We accumulate a tool box to deal with them. We go to leadership courses which give us ideas on solutions. What happens though, when we start running meetings in Japan in the same way?   The Japanese approach to meetings is to use them as one stage in moving the business forward.  There is a lot of wisdom in this idea, because what happens before and after the meeting play important roles.  In the West, we tend to get in the meeting room and duke it out, until we make some decisions and then everyone gets back to their job.  In Japan, the meeting room itself is not the gladiatorial venue it is in the West and almost all of the issues considered so far, are subsumed by a different take on how to use meetings to get results.  So where is the toolbox for these occasions?   Nemawashi or groundwork files down the rough edges of disagreement before the meeting starts.  Loud people, quiet people - everyone is consulted prior to the meeting and the lobbying is started, so that the meeting itself is a rubber stamp on decisions already agreed to prior to the meeting proper.  Any disagreements are worked on privately, so that the meetings can be run with efficiency and decorum.   If we come to meetings with a purely Western view, we will be expecting these flagged eight issues in full flight, which all work perfectly well in our home environments, but we may not find what we are looking for.  If we use the nemawashi methodology, we can circumvent many of these problems. 

We have been toiling away long and hard, being accountable, going the extra mile, starting early and finishing late to get the numbers and hammering those KPIs.  Then we get promoted to become responsible for others as the team leader.  Usually, we get no formal leadership training for the new role and are left to work it out by ourselves.  How do we keep moving up the ladder of success?  There are a number of things we have to study, in order for this new role to become the catalyst we need to deliver our career aspirations.   Stop Doing and Start Leading This sounds easier than it is, because we are often player/managers and have our own clients or parts of the business we need to take care of.  The danger is we find getting productivity from others who are less smart, motivated, skillful and determined is so difficult, we concentrate on what we can control.  That means we keep doing our tasks, because we are very good at them and we wind up being a key result producer within the team.  The organisation however keeps raising the bar, the rest of the team are still dawdling along and we find a finite limit to how much we can produce individually.  The results start to miss the targets and we get fired.   Somewhere in this mix, we missed the bit about getting leverage from the team.  The orchestra conductor is often the preferred metaphor for what we should have been doing.  The conductor doesn’t play any of the instruments and just waves a baton around, while the rest of the team does all the work.  The conductor also spends a lot of time understanding the ability and potential of the musicians and works hard to make sure the teamwork is operating at the highest possible level.  This means lots of coaching, conflict management, containing of egos and discovering how to create an environment where each person can motivate themselves to be the best they can be.  The numbers tell the tale of leverage.  Even if we individually work sixteen hours a day and the team of ten people only work eight hours a day, they by comparison are doing eighty hours a day as a unit.   So what are we doing with our sixteen hours a day?  Are we helping the team of ten in this example maximise their ability and production or are we doing our email and running our own business in parallel?  Yes, we may still have some of our clients, but we need to make sure we keep that activity to a minimum, so that we can concentrate on training the team and lifting their capabilities.  Ideally, over time, we move all of our clients over to the team and we apply our efforts to invest in our team members.   People vs Process Compliance rules are there to keep the organisation safe and keep us from going to jail.  There is a tricky balance in place though.  If the rules are too tight, then experimentation isn’t given enough oxygen.  If supervision is weak and there is too loose an environment without proper controls, then the organisation can get bankrupted.  We have all seen some of the famous cases in the finance world where the adrenalin fuelled trader destroyed or seriously wounded the firm.  How do we balance stability and creativity?   There are many paths to the mountain top and we need to encourage our team to come up with them.  If we are constantly micro-managing, telling everyone what to do, the X factor of staff creativity is diminished or disengaged.  Our ego is often the problem,  “we are the boss, so all the good ideas have to come from us right, otherwise why are we the boss?”.    We might also start to worry, “if they have too many good ideas, the big bosses might replace me with one of them”.  What we don’t understand is that every organisation is crying out for leaders and if we can be recognised as a “leader creating machine”, we will get handed bigger jobs and more responsibility.  The other thing we don’t consider is if there is no one in the ranks to replace us, then we are staying right where we are now, because the big bosses like stability.     Become The Genius Coach On the way up, we were very good at what we did and were totally self-sufficient.  Now that we are the leader, we have an important job, which is to help our team members become better than they already are.  If everyone keeps doing the same things, in the same way, we will keep getting the same results.  Any differences in outcomes will be through the changes we make.  The problem is everyone loves change, but they personally don’t want to change.  They want the boss to change, the organisation to change, the market to change, but they want to stay exactly as they are.   This is not a fertile ground for coaching people to make changes and become better.  This is when we discover the importance of persuasion ability.  We didn’t need it before because we were only responsible for ourselves.  If we don’t work on our listening skills and persuasion skills nothing much will change.  This is not something we gain through osmosis.  We have to get busy and study how to become a better coach who can listen and persuade.   If we only work on these three aspects when we become a leader for the first time, this will make the difference between getting fired and getting on.  We must see that what we did to get promoted is not what we need to be doing now.  The quicker we understand and act on that the better.  The key word is to “study” what the new role requires in this Darwinian  “up or out” business world, if we want to survive and succeed.

When you mention the word “meetings” to people in business, their eyes often start to roll.  Why is that? Usually because they feel there are too many meetings and that the meetings they attend are not effective nor worth the time being spent.  Given meetings have been around forever, you have to wonder why we haven’t done a better job yet on arranging our meetings so that they are effective.  Not all meetings are created equally and I think this is where we get confused.  There are very simple information sharing meetings and then at the other end of the scale, we have heavy duty, world changing, strategic meetings which will determine the fate of the enterprise over the next decade or more.   The complexity of the meetings should reflect the scale of time required and the number of people needed to attend, but often it doesn’t.  Many times, we are allocating too much time and requiring too many people for meetings. These simple meetings could either be replaced with an email or could be severely truncated in terms of the time impost.  The bracket of one hour seems to have become the default period for meetings and as we know from Parkinson’s Law, the content will expand to fill the time.  Let’s go back to the very basics of meetings, what we need to be doing and let’s look at the different phases of the meeting.     Pre-Meeting Considerations   Clarify the purpose. This sounds simple enough, but often meetings are a hotchpotch of loosely defined purposes. We need to make sure we are clear about the prioritisation of items we are going to address.  This becomes important especially if we run out of time. Do we even need to have this meeting or can we replace it with a simple inform style email or video or audio?   Determine attendees, location and length. Japan loves to invite everyone to the meeting, but who is really, really required?  Can we let others with a minor interest share the minutes, so that they are kept up to date, but we don’t take up their valuable time.  As mentioned earlier, why does the meeting have to be one hour long?  Often we can save a lot of time by fixing a shorter schedule for the meeting, say 40 minutes in length.  When you do the calculation of shaving twenty minutes off each meeting being held during the day, the numbers are tremendous in terms of the time saving.  Do we need to be sitting down?  Could we meet standing up, because the physical discomfort inspires people to have shorter get togethers?     Reserve space, clarify the room setup, equipment needs, food and beverages etc. In large companies, there is a perennial Darwinian struggle for meeting room availability.  You see seriously unhappy people milling around outside, looking to foment a storming of the room if you don’t buzz off. Why not be well organised so that we can finish slightly early and be gracious with our colleagues.  Most rooms have all the equipment needed but do we have the expertise to use it?  Often the tech defeats us and we have no recourse to get help.  Usually the more high tech, the more the difficulties. So it is better we deal with the tech issues before the meeting so we don’t squander everyone’s patience and time.   Anticipate and plan for potential questions and resistance. Like any presentation the best way to deal with pushback is to deal with it during our presentation and not wait for the Q&A.  We select the likely objections to what we are suggesting and demolish them with solid, inarguable, damming evidence.     Prepare and distribute an agenda. This sounds obvious, but how many meetings have the agenda sent out before everyone gathers together, rather than it lying on the table when we arrive?  Get it to people early, so they can be thinking about the content, before they get into the room. It also precludes any excuses for not being on top of the topic.   As the meeting organiser, arrive early to check everything is ready. Sometimes the set up isn’t as we need it or the equipment isn’t working properly.  Better to get there early and deal with it all before others arrive.     During the Meeting   We should be disciplined and begin and end on time. That means we don’t wait for people who arrive late.  At a previous company, I was astonished to see people swanning in fifteen minutes late, coffee in hand, unashamedly looking around for a seat. Ignore these oafs and start on time. Don’t put up with it.  One school of thought is to prepare less chairs, knowing certain habitual offenders will arrive late.  They will work out they better get there on time, if they don’t want to stand throughout the meeting.  Speak to them separately about their tardiness and lack of professional commitment to the rest of the team’s valuable time.    If we cannot complete all the items, we simply make note of the details and move them to the next agenda, so that nothing falls between two stools.   We need a nominated person to keep the minutes, so that we all have a record of what was decided. This arm twisting should be done before the meeting, because no one wants to volunteer for more work.   Encourage everyone to participate. The same three most confident people can take over the discussion and a lot of good ideas from those more quiet or introverted people can be lost.  As the meeting leader, purposely draw out silent people to make their comment and contribute.  Also summarise what has been decided before moving on the next items, so everyone is clear on what is going on.   Set out the rules of engagement at the start of every meeting. Make it a rule that no one interrupts anyone when they are speaking.   Make it a meeting law, that we all consent to disagree agreeably. Meetings can become gladiatorial spectacles as ambitious people try to elbow their way to the top, using the opportunity to show they are only one in the room who has a clue, or so they think.   Make it clear who has to do what and by when, for post meeting action follow-up. If this step is missed, then there is insufficient utilization of the time allocated and all of the resources which have been used up.   Post-Meeting   Distribute the minutes quickly, so everyone is reminded of what was decided and who has which accountabilities.  The action items to be reported on at the next meeting have to be made inarguably clear, because some people are total ninjas at dodging responsibility.   Check the designated timelines for task completion and track whether they have been achieved.Legitimate delays can happen and we need to allow for that, by not establishing such tight deadlines that a whole swathe of knock-on effects will kick in uninvited.   Self-evaluate the meeting and have others give you their assessments.This rarely happens because we are all busy and we just quietly move on.  Like anything in business, some reflection on how it was done and the value of the time spent is a useful method of generating improvements.  Become known as the Master of Meetings.   Meetings will happen anyway, so we have a choice as to whether they will continue as a major waste of time or whether we will make them an engine for the growth of the organisation.

“It’s obvious, we need to be continually innovating”, we say to our team.  But is it obvious to them and do they believe it?  Also are they really interested or motivated to do anything about it? They may feel they are super busy already, with what they have on their plate.  Then, the boss turns up talking about better, higher, further, faster and the eyes start to glaze over.  “Here we go again”, they are thinking and recalling the last time this big innovation push petered out and went nowhere. Further, most people in Japan are not that keen on change, because with it comes risk.  We all get into our routines of work and we are comfortable and competent in the way we do things, so changing what we do now isn’t that attractive.  We are in our Comfort Zone and we like it right here thank you.   In order to sell the innovation idea to our team, there are some key stages we need to go through.  Now, counterintuitively, we have to remember that our innnovation design phase order is different to the presentation phase order which we will show to the team.  There are seven stages in the design phase.   Preparation We have to think about the target audience for our presentation on the need for further innovation.  How much knowledge, expertise and experience do they have?  Do they have any biases or prejudices, which may need to be addressed during the presentation?  Where will the resistance come from and on what basis?   Closing It sounds a bit strange, but we should begin our design process with how we are going to finish the presentation.  We need to be very clear about what final impression we want.  We need perfect clarity around what is our key message.  By starting with designing the close, we are forced to get a better picture of what we will need to cover in the presentation, in order to prove what we are suggesting is a good idea. We have to boil the ocean of possibilities down to the one key thing, which will be crucial to getting everyone on board.   Statement of Organisational Need For Innovation Having worked hard to refine our key message, we need to get it into one short paragraph that states the problem and the objective we have.  We are looking for clarity at this point.  This statement is just that, a statement and the detailed proof comes in the next phase, but we want this statement to be unambiguous and  capable of being comprehended within two seconds.   Example Of Need For Innovation Our storytelling skills are useful here for us to describe an example of the need, in a way which will get people motivated to fix it.  We go straight into the background, we paint a picture of the context.  In our story, we involve some key elements - people they know who were involved, the location where we first realised the need, the season it occurred and the underlying situation.  The story cannot be too long or our listeners will lose patience, so it has to be brief and compelling.  If we can paint the picture of the context well enough, there is a very strong possibility our listeners will leap ahead of us and come to the same conclusion we have come to.   We Offer Up Alternatives As Our Solution To The Problem We take a strategic approach at this point. We don’t come with a single solution to the problem.  We come armed with viable, workable alternatives. We list up three credible solutions with tons of evidence.  We then go through the pros and cons of each idea in depth.   Best Solution Announcement We purposely make the last one, Solution Three, advocating spending team time and resources on innovation, the preferred one, the one we think is best.  We do this because for most people, recency means they remember best what they heard last.  We explain why this is the best choice compared to the other viable solutions.   Opening Finally, we design the opening.  We leave this until the last, because the opening has a specific function.  In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism, we know that when people join the meeting, they will have a lot of competing thoughts in their minds.  We must make sure that our message gets through to them, despite all of the distraction.  This is where the opening comes in.  We might ask a question, which really makes people think.  We might make a startling or puzzling statement that grabs attention.  We might offer a quotation from an expert or some statistics which are very powerful.  It must be so strong that they forget whatever was on their mind and they give us their full attention.   Now that we have completed the design phase, we need to rearrange it all into the order we will deliver the talk to the team. The talk is broken into chapters and presented in this order: Opening, Statement of Organisational Need For innovation, Example of Need For Innovation, Our Alternative Solutions To The Problem, Our Best Solution Announcement, Close.    One critical thing, which often gets overlooked, is that we need to treat this like any other major presentation.  That means we have to rehearse it, before we give the actual talk.  Just thinking “it is only the team, so it doesn't have to be rehearsed” is very self-indulgent.  This is a key presentation we are giving, one where we are trying to move the team behind us and lead them into unchartered territory. We need to ensure we are as convincing and as effective with this talk, as we would be doing a huge deal with a major client.

“Yeah, I’m a good communicator”, we say to ourselves, but that proposition is rarely seasoned with some solid self-awareness.  We blandly make this type of statement because we see communication as a one direction process, where we are telling someone, something which is important to us.  Being perpetually time poor, we abbreviate complex ideas into “headlines” devoid of the sustaining background and context. Try gauging your actual communication abilities against these sixteen principles to see how you really stack up.   Understand your own and your listeners’ assumptions, viewpoints and attitudes and harmonise both.We tend to make comments without much reflection, either about why we think what we do or considering how the other person might receive the content. Build an open and creative culture where “a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand schools contend”.In modern business, bosses no longer are all knowing or have a monopoly on good ideas. Being open to subordinates ideas and thinking requires boss inner strength and confidence, which is why the idea is not popular with weak leaders. Listen first for what is not being said, as well as listening to how things are unfolding, before you proffer advice, information or insight.Being really heard by the boss is a fundamental requirement if staff are to be motivated to do their best. Communicate on the same wave length as your team members.Vocabulary and grammatical structures used can be blockers to good understanding amongst native speakers and become steel barriers to understanding for non-native speakers. Creative endeavours should use a broad net to involve our people and require throwing hierarchy, status and power out of the window. Massive boss listening and tremendous restraint before speaking unearths a rich tapestry of subordinate potential. Empathetic listening is at the highest level. It means we are listening with our eyes and sensing with our hearts, the how of what is being said and constantly searching for what is not being shared. The articulate are few and ramblers many, but as the boss we have to fairly divine and parse whatever is offered by our team members. Leader communication is never conducted in a vacuum.There is always a context at play and we have to be self-aware of what is going on inside of us during the act. How the leader communicates is within the framework of the culture of the organisation and the leader creates that culture.If that culture is built on trust for and confidence in the leader, then the team will receive it honestly. Trust in what the boss says is built up layer by layer, based on consistency of message, follow through, transparency and personal integrity. Boss communication is a combination of the energy they radiate, the actions they take and the sincerity of their intentions.All of these elements are being transmitted without any words being spoken, every second of the day, every day. Formal funnels of communication are never superior to the grapevine.Leaders know they cannot allow a vacuum of information to exist otherwise rumours, fake news and dissembling take over.The correct messages must be constantly and continuously communicated in order for them to replace the wrong messages. Feeling the feelings of subordinates is not easy, but it is deep communication and allows the boss to fully tune in to what is important for them. Anger, disappointment, rage, irritability are boss communication drivers we have to stop before they get started.These communication sparks are selfish, inwardly focused and often immediately regretted, however it is too late once they have been unleashed.Suspend your inner turmoil and “speak to others as they want to be spoken to” is a good rule. “There is only one way and that is my way” is an out of date boss concept.The leader seeks to understand the subordinate first where they are coming from and what is important to them.In that frame, the decisions the boss take are more likely to be the right ones.   So how did you go?  These types of lists can be confronting and also revealing.  When we do serious self-reflection about ourselves as communicators in leadership positions, we realise how much we take for granted on the part of the listener.  We haven’t told them the why but somehow we imagine that is magically taking place.  It isn’t and we cannot be satisfied with the situation or expect that the listener has to improve and do better.  The source of poor communication or wasted communication will be us and we are the ones who have to fix it.  These sixteen principles are painful reminders that we are not perfect as the leader and have a long way to go before we can say “yeah, I’m a good communicator”.

Our image of leaders is often of someone giving orders or pontificating about what is supposed to happen.  Our leader monologue is always one way traffic and we may be laying down golden advice in English or our imperfect Japanese, but is it being received, understood, digested, accepted or employed?  In this modern, stressful, super busy life, we give the team a rapid burst from our content firehose and then we move on, because there is a lot for us to do.  Subsequently, we discover what we wanted wasn’t done at all or was done incorrectly or was taken off on a tangent we never imagined possible.    This is more common than it should be and we must be cautious when we are engaging in linear communication with our teams.  The content is often published rules and regulations, policies and procedural guidelines.  We may have developed Standard Operation Procedures which outline how things are supposed to be done.  We send out our memos, emails, text messages using various broadcast media. The good thing is it is written down,  so for Japanese team members, it is easier to absorb than rapid fire conversation. These are some typical ways we launch our missives into the void and we are never sure if people actually read, noted or understood what we were saying.   We are the boss right, so they have to take careful note of what we say, especially when we take the time to get key messages in front of everyone.  We are busy people, so this type of activity by its nature will be reserved for the most important content.  Therefore, everyone should know that communication hierarchy and treat these contributions carefully and thoughtfully.  Except they don’t always do that, do they.  Why?   Like their bosses, they are drowning in information, are subject to a constant bombardment of emails, messages on Teams or Slack, etc., updates on social media or from any of the other burdensome abominable conduits piling on the workload and filling up every minute of the day.  And it was in English.   So yes, we have to be articulate, concise and clear in our communication but we also have to use questions to clarify understanding and operate at the highest levels of listening capability.  Asking clarifying questions is relatively easy, but are we actually good listeners?  We assume we are, simply because we are too busy to pay any attention to how we listen. Let’s explore the five levels of listening and see how we stack up.   Ignore. We might be thinking, “I never ignore the team member when they are speaking”.   Is that true though?  The person may say something which triggers a strong thought in our mind. We are now completely diverted from what they are saying, to what we are thinking.  In effect, we are no longer paying any attention to them, because we are consumed by our own thoughts.  Effectively, we are ignoring them.   Pretend. In this case, we are polite, considerate and very boss like.  We are nodding our head and looking like we are concentrating, but we may not be fully taking in what we are being told.  Again, our mind may be busily crafting what we are going to say in our clever response to their points.  Or we may have been given an indication from the team member about something that interests them and we are getting ready to give them the benefit of our genius ideas and brilliant experiences.  If we hear something that sounds like resistance to our idea, that gets an instant counter response.  We are now mentally consumed with getting our evidence ready, so that we can go into an argument with them.  We want to sort them out, get them to fly right and get them to agree with our “correct” opinion.   Selective. Bosses have a highly tuned ability to hear agreement with their opinion and may miss key information.  Our listening skills are directed only to hear a “yes” or a “no” response regarding our ideas and nothing else from subordinates.   There may be key information attached to that “yes” or “no”, but we are certainly not listening for that.  We are filtering what we hear, according to our interests and preferences.  Effectively, we are only partially listening to the person.  We are standing right there in front of them, but they do not have our full focus.  My wife assures me I am doing this at home too and she is probably right, so more work to be done here.   Attentive. In this case we are giving the team member our full attention.  We are not filtering for signs of agreement or resistance.  We are not cutting them off, finishing their sentences or redirecting them mid-sentence. We are patiently and politely waiting for them to finish what they want to say.  We then paraphrase back to them what we heard. We are not shortchanging them, thinking what we are going to say, because we are fully absorbed by what they are saying.   Empathetic. This is the highest form of listening, where we are listening with our eyes as well as our ears.  We are reading what is going on behind the words.  We are conscious of what is not being said and we are listening to the tone of how we are being told the information.  We are trying to meet the person “in the conversation going on in their mind”.   Churchillian long bursts of our brilliance may make us feel good, I certainly enjoy giving them, but as leaders we should be aiming for more interactive communication with our team.  We need to have them respond to what we have said to ensure we are on the same wavelength and that we have actually heard each other correctly.  If we discover there is a gap in understanding, then that reflection allows us to correct it on the spot.  “I never said that”, “That isn’t what I meant”, “No, it is the other way around”, are all exchanges we want to avoid having to engage in.  When we are each speaking in another language, the opportunities for misunderstanding are rife.  Both sides never have enough vocabulary to completely frame entire thoughts and communicate the subtleties of the language in its original form.  English is very confronting and direct and Japanese is often vague and circuitous. Checking for understanding becomes obligatory.   However, even the act of checking is no guarantee.  If I don’t completely understand what I am being told in Japanese, I may be smiling, nodding and looking like I get it, because it is tiresome and embarrassing to admit my linguistic skills are not perfect.  My Japanese team members do the same when we operate in English, so the linguistic bear traps are many.  We need to have our team members feed back to us what we think they understand, to see if it is a match.  Empathetic listening and habituated checking for understanding have to become our firm habits in Japan.

Out of all the things we do as leaders, one of the most difficult is dealing with poor or substandard performance.  Inside that broad spectrum there are crimes, sabotage, toxic people, idiocy and people on the wrong bus or on the right bus, but in the wrong seat.  The most common recognition points concerning poor performance are missing deadlines, poor quality of the work submitted, not making the sales quota and mistakes.  Mistakes tend to be public events and so the team are watching how you deal with them.  Your credibility with your people and their consequent loyalty to you can be clearly compromised if you get this wrong.   I joined the rest of the seniors in the firm for the weekly meeting in this quite tight meeting room with the new Group President.  With so many people crammed in there, it was a bit claustrophobic on a good day. He had a resume that was platinum, a prince among men, an elite double alumnus of one of the best varsities, highly intelligent and a boot strapped, self-made executive.  He arrived into the organisation and quickly had fired our boss, so he was “taking care” of us, until the new head was appointed.    In the first meeting, I happened to be seated opposite him, but ever so fortunately not directly in front of him.  I mention this because it became very important in subsequent weekly meetings.  He was not satisfied with our results and like one of those amazing super sports cars, he went from zero to 100, in seconds and exploded with rage, decalcifying the spines of those unfortunates who chose the cheap seats directly in front of him.    Observing this phenomena and preferring a better quality of work life, I purposely chose the same side of the table where he would sit and made sure I was well down toward the end of the table.  You actually have to lean around and contort your body to excoriate someone seated in my location, so I just calmly observed the weekly humiliation of those seated in the death zone.  What was our opinion of this corporate prince?  How were the trust levels?  What about the loyalty factor?  Trust me, they were all exceedingly bad.   I was astonished that someone with his pedigree, in his position, could get to the top, without the ability to control his emotions and anger. As a side note, he subsequently chose the completely wrong person for the job of head of our business and everyone in that room departed from the firm and the business was effectively destroyed.  Actually he destroyed the Group and eventually he was shown the door himself, so the radius on the circle of karma is shorter than we all think.  I occasionally run into hm and even now, many years later, alI I can think about were those brutal torture sessions   This boss “rage-athon” is clearly what not to do, so how should we handle mistakes so that we don’t blow up the whole enterprise?  There are multiple stages to handling mistakes and we will approach an important fork in the road, depending on how the person reacts to their mistake. Let’s investigate the stages.   Stage 1.  Research We have to ignore what we might be told by others about what happened and get the real facts.  “Oh, you can’t believe what Tanaka has done now”, is the character assassin’s technique for removing rivals or people they don’t like.  They try to mould our opinion about what has happened and poison the well. We simply must ignore this type of talk and take careful note of the motives of the messenger.  We shouldn’t have any views on the mistake, until we have gathered all the relevant detail.  If the mistake is a large one, we start the research with the question, “Is the person worth saving?” in the back of our minds.   Stage 2. Begin with Rapport Rapport is like a bank account of good relations and mutual trust built up over a long time.  We draw on this when we start the discussion.  We want to put them at ease and reduce their anxiety.  We give them some honest appreciation about other aspects of their work and we support it with evidence to make it credible. We should be referring to their positive behaviour we have observed.  The more specific we can make these remarks the better, because that indicates the comments are sincere, genuine and thought through.  We use Dale Carnegie’s Principle #22 “Begin with praise and honest appreciation”.   Stage 3. Reference The Mistake or Issue It is important we focus on the problem not the human being.  We have to depersonalize the problem.  We need to let them tell us what happened and then tell them what we know about it, to fill in any gaps or correct any misunderstandings.  In reality we are carefully listening to them, to see if they are taking responsibility for what happened or whether they are trying to avoid accountability.  Depending on their reaction, we will take a particular pre-determined course of action.  To create a more psychologically safe environment we can use Principle #24  “Talk about our own mistakes before criticising the other person”.   Stage 4A. Restore if they accept accountability We appreciate that they have taken responsibility for what happened and we work with them to fix the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again.  We know that they are feeling bad about what happened and this can diminish their motivation.  We are focusing on encouraging them to keep going and stay with the company.  We use Principle #26 “Let the other person save face”.   Stage 4B.  Restate the facts and seriousness of what they did.  They are not accepting responsibility.  They are blaming others and resisting our attempts to help them through this. We will be referencing internal compliance rules and company policy to make it clear that the mistake is not going to be tolerated.  We can use Principle # 28 “Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to” and appeal to their nobler side, to face up to their responsibility and not try and push it off on to others. We tell them, “I know you are a real professional and self-confident enough to take accountability for your work, so let’s work together to recover from this incident”.   Stage 5A. Reassure We know that failure is a bitter experience and motivation and commitment suffers.  They are down on confidence and will not be able to work to their full potential.  Our job is to reassure them they have a place here, they are valued and we support them.  They can come back from this and we will help them to do so.  We can employ Principle #29 “Use encouragement.  Make the fault seem easy to correct”.   Stage 5B. Reinforce When people resist taking responsibility we need to make it clear they need to be accountable and resisting is not acceptable behaviour.  Often companies have specific policies and actions for this purpose. We have to make it clear, that unless they take personal accountability, these next steps will be triggered.   Stage 6A.  Retain If we have been a skilled communicator throughout this process, the individual will feel they can recover from the mistake and their career is not in jeopardy.  They won’t quit the company and will in fact do their best to try harder to succeed.  We make some suggestions and use Principle #30, “Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest”.   Stage 6B. Replace If the person continues to deny responsibility, we may conclude they are not a good fit this work or team. If they have strengths and abilities, there may be another area within the firm which may be more suitable for them.  They may have reached the same conclusion and may welcome a fresh chance somewhere else in the firm.  If we have been coaching them, but they remain a problem, then we may need to release them from the organisation. In today’s job market they will have a good chance of finding a much better suited job for their future.  I know from my own personal experience, that if you are working in an organization which doesn’t suit you, every day is excruciating.  It is better to find a job where you enjoy the work and can make a contribution and we need to point out some basic truths to the person and let them see leaving as a positive step for all concerned.    We are not handling mistakes in a vacuum.  Everyone is watching how we handle them.  If we are vicious with one person, then the rapid assumption is we are going to be dishing it out to the observers as well, one day in the future. In this current zero sum game, war for talent, we don’t want to be losing people, because of our inability to properly deal with substandard performance.  These are the clear steps for how we can handle mistakes.  They are not particularly complex or hard, but they do require superior levels of listening and communication.  We all need to make sure we are up to the task.

Developing people should be a committed constant of leadership.  That is not always the case though.  Often the leader is actually still the manager and hasn’t made that important transition to be a master of leverage.  We can work 80 hours a week and blow ourselves up or we can have ten people working their 8 hours every day, achieving the same level of output in a single day.  The manager’s job is to make sure that those ten people are in the right positions, doing the right things and producing the right results.  In addition, the leaders’s job is to set the direction for the team, create the environment where the team can motivate themselves to flourish and assist in the personal growth of the team members.  This last consideration is often abdicated by managers and imagined that this is the responsibility of the HR Department. That would be a huge mistake in Japan.   HR managers are often on a rotation in Japan, where their previous job was heavy machinery export manager and their next job will be head of audit.  In other words, they are not HR professionals.  In big companies in Japan, HR can be the internal police department, making sure all the proper forms are filed out, that the leave records are correct and that the next years job rotations have been sorted out in advance, etc.  Leaders need to guide HR to set the direction for the development of the team.  This can involve external training and budgets are set for this and HR’s job is to go and source the provider.    The leader however has many options apart from this route to help develop their people.  Mentoring people is an obvious one.  Often we are mentoring people not under our direct accountability and it works well, because there is a high level of objectivity on both sides.  As their boss, we can be too close to the situation and an outside mentor may be better placed to be an objective observer and be able to speak more freely with the staff member than we can. This builds the trust and corrective feedback is sometimes more palatable coming from someone perceived as a neutral person, who is not assessing your performance. Is there a mentor system in place in your company and if it is, is it working and how would you measure the outcomes? This last point is the rub.  If we have a mentor scheme and no way of measuring its success, why are we doing it in the first place?   Job rotation within the firm is a given in Japan and over time everyone becomes a generalist within the orgaanisation. Lateral transfers, temporary duty assignments and acting assignments are also valuable alternatives.  The people stay on your budget line, but they are sent off to work with another division to gain experience and to assist in the coordination between departments.  Usually the people connections are the secret to getting things done across departments within the firm and this is a brilliant way to build those connections.   Cross training is a very good idea to reduce concentration risk.  If there is a key person for a task and that person becomes ill or leaves the firm then there is a massive hole, because everyone else has become so specialised in their own roles.  This is particularly pronounced in smaller companies.  Take a quick look at the team.  If so and so suddenly left, what would happen to the business?  If the answer is “it would be a disaster”, then it is time to get started on cross training people within the organisation.  Having key roles cross trained is a good insurance against future disruptions to the business.  Is this something which is part of the weave of your organisation, something built into the fabric of how you operate?  I would guess that these opportunities are not as widespread as they should be.  We only discover the value of cross training when a key person disappears and we have no one around with the required expertise to do the job and to do the job right now.    That happened to me by accident.  My head of administration quit the company.  She knew the systems, did the book keeping entry work and made sure all of the inside logistics of the business functioned very smoothly. Uh oh. Without any intelligence or pre-planning, it happened that a part-time person had been working under the administration head and knew most of the key functions of the role.  He was able to keep us going until we made a new hire.  It worked out, but that result had nothing to do with me and my “genius” leadership and had a big sprinkling of luck.  I realised this was a close call and an important issue which I needed to plan for in the future.   Special projects, task force and committee assignments are a good ground for growing skills.  There is a leadership and coordination aspect which allows team members to experience first hand, all the headaches associated with being the leader.  It is easy to whine about the boss, until you find yourself in that role and all of the concomitant pressure and responsibility hits you.  This is where you discover the areas where you lack the necessary skills to be given higher responsibilities and it gives you the focus to know what to work on, if you want to rise in the ranks.  Giving project management opportunities is reasonably common and your firm may be doing this already.  However, is it a series of stopgap measures or part of a strategic plan to fully develop your leadership bench strength?   Becoming the assistant to the leader or to senior people in the organisation is a huge learning opportunity.  At this level, you begin to see the organisation as a whole and are exposed to all the complexities of running a modern business enterprise.  It also gives deeper exposure to different leadership styles, as you see the good, the bad and the ugly of how senior leaders lead.  One of the problems for leaders is we all tend to get very busy and are focused on our own work and we forget that these tools exist and we should be making greater use of them.    At a lower level, someone being groomed to step into a middle management leadership position can take on the role of the understudy to the boss.  Instead of the boss quickly rotating out of the division and going somewhere else, the understudy has the chance to shadow the boss and be privy to how to run the section.  This takes a degree of coordination and planning and often both are lacking and the handover between leaders is minimal.  This well organised succession plan is something which is extremely logical.  We all salute the idea but few companies actually are well organised enough to pull it off.  How about your firm’s case?   When we review the various tools, we quickly realise there are a number of development opportunities available, which we are not making the most of and are missing some possibilities for our team members.  This is natural when you have your head down, are surging from one meeting to the next and generally are run off your feet.  Take a moment and reflect on whether some of these tool might be useful to employ in getting the maximum leadership leverage feasible, by developing your people to the highest levels possible.  These ideas may seem like more work at first but we quickly realise we can organise most of them without that much difficulty.   We may think these ideas are too obvious and nothing new.  That is too true but are we doing these things?  Knowing, agreeing and executing are not the same thing.  So what are you doing and are you doing enough with what you have?

The concept of motivating people is a misnomer really.  It is a short form of saying, as the leader, we build the right relationship, the right culture and create the right environment where our people can motivate themselves to be successful.  Yelling at someone to “be motivated, be motivated, be motivated” sounds and is ridiculous.  We know that but do we have a good alternative?  The degree to which we know our people is the key.  Well we think we know them, but often it is only at a very superficial level.  Bosses are busy very people, time is short and there is a lot to do.  Getting to know our people in depth is a big task, one which takes considerable time and requires a sustained effort.  This is why most leaders don’t bother.   When we take over the boss role we probably went around to everyone in the team and interviewed them about what they do, how they do it, how they like it and any issues they have which, we as the new face, may be able to solve for them.  This is probably the only time we interview them.  We catch up at performance review time, going over the Key Performance Indicators, but we don’t really dig into the entrails about how they are going and what they think about the firm.  Then we move on to our next role and we repeat the same process.  The end result is we work with people, but we never really know them to any great or meaningful extent.  It doesn’t have to be like this and we can get to know people in a way which will allow us to appeal to their nobler and highest motivations.   We use a methodology called not the “interview” but the “innerview”.  This is not a single encounter in the first thirty days of taking on the leader role for the team.  It is a piecemeal, gradual accumulation of understanding of our people.  It may be over coffee, a lunch, a casual conversation.  The word casual here is key.  Yes, there is intention.  We want to get to know our people so that we can provide what it is they want from the firm and the work, positioning ourselves as the leader who can deliver those things.  At the same time it cannot be an interrogation. It cannot be manipulative.  This is a fine line however. We need to get to know how they tick, in order to help them, without it becoming a cunning plan to use them for our own glorious, ever upward, brass ring grabbling, dastardly plot to climb to the top of the corporate ladder.   There are levels of depth in getting to know someone.  Factual questions are the simplest.  Where did you grow up, go to school, go to university, what did you study, what sports did you play, what are your hobbies, where have you travelled, who is in your family unit, where do you live, where else have you worked, etc.  Obviously we are not going to ask these like a barrage of rapid fire quiz show questions.  These types of context, background questions will get answered over time, through the natural flow of causal conversation.  We shouldn’t be forcing it, like we are holding a clipboard survey with boxes to be checked, as we unearth each answer.  In these answers there are connectors with our own story.  We may have lived in the same city or studied a similar subject or even have gone to the same university.   Causative questions are the next layer down.  These are the deeper “why” and “what” questions, as we uncover the motivations and aspirations of the individual.  Why do they like this hobby? Why did they choose this city to live in or this university or this field of study or work?  Why did they move from one company to another.  The latter questions we may have asked during the hiring process, but that was a while ago and we may not recall the detail or they may have been somewhat guarded in their answers at that point in joining the firm or maybe they were already in the team and we are the new arrival.   The deepest level of questioning is around the value-based questions. Knowing the values of the person helps us a lot as the leader, because we can see if there is alignment or not with our own values and with the values of the firm.  These are rather sensitive, personal questions, so there has to be a certain level of trust already established through the earlier questions before we can get to this stage.  Busting right in with such a deep values based question might alarm the team member and they may feel some manipulation is going on.   After listening to them tell us about their career so far, we might ask, “looking back on your career so far is there anything you would do differently?”, “Many people have benefitted from mentors in their work, has that been the case for you”, “ What has been something in your work you look back on with great pride”, “ Life doesn't go in a straight line so do you have any advice for people who may be going through a tough patch at the moment”.   This whole process has to have the correct kokorogamae, or true intention, about why we are doing it.  If we are working out how best we can use people, then we will only damage the relationships, because people are not stupid.  If on the other hand, we are seeking to establish common ground, common needs and common values to deepen our understanding and therefore work out how we can help them to move upward in their career path, then we are on the right track.  Time, place and occasion are three considerations for holding these types of conversations.  We shouldn’t feel we are on a schedule and be in a rush to get to know our people better through these innerview questions.  Authentic, casual, non-probing conversation is the key to learning how best to create the ideal work environment which will help our people to succeed.

Thrusting oneself into leadership positions usually relies on confidence, drive, capability and ambition.  All good stuff, but those are not necessarily the key reasons we follow someone.  Of course, if they lack confidence, then they are radio-active and won’t command any followship.  To take on the accountability of the leader, you need to have that inner drive and ambition to want to position yourself above others.  Finally, you have to have the goods. If you are not good at the business then you lack credibility, especially with smart, competent people.  However, these attributes are not enough.  The calibration by the team on whether they will follow you has a big values component.  We might initially be snowed by the confidence, drive, capability and ambition, but if we flag the values are not correct, then things fall apart rapidly.   We can admire leaders for what they have.  They could be physically attractive people, well dressed and bristling with the accoutrements of power.  The big house in a tony neighbourhood, luxury cars, the massively expensive watch, the latest tech gizmos, etc. They may have degrees and qualifications which all point to competence.  An American friend of mine introduced me to the “power wall”.  Being an Aussie, I had never heard of such a thing.  The wall was draped with degrees, awards and more importantly, carefully framed photographs of my friend posing with Presidents and assorted captains of industry.  It radiated credibility.   Also, there does seem to be a direct correlation between height and leadership and many leaders are tall people.  They have a physical presence which commands respect.  I once worked for the leader of a large international organisation, who was very tall and impressive, at least until he opened his mouth. I reflected later that he probably got that job based on altitude, rather than aptitude.   We can also be impressed by what leaders do.  They gain our respect because they are excellent artists, lawyers, architects, salespeople, scientists, engineers, academics, authors, doctors, etc.  They have mastered their craft and really know what they are doing.  They have the depths of experience, the ideas, the insights and the analytical ability to see what others cannot.  They solve problems, innovate and create new possibilities.  They are hard workers, relentlessly toiling away, sacrificing, persevering and toughing it out when things get ugly.  They outwork us and at a higher level of quality.  They are good at what they do and we acknowledge that.   Ultimately though we begin to peel back the layers and we are exposed to who they really are.  The leadership honeymoon is over and the daily grind wears down their facades.  Our terribly tall boss example before was a classic case.  He spruiked the buzz words, the acronyms of the insider, was a good storyteller and oozed authority.  It became obvious though that his value orientation was all about him and his glorious career rather than the people in the organisation.   This grabbing the brass ring, climbing the greasy pole stuff is very common with ambitious leaders, who use that drive to make up for their fundamental values deficit in key areas.  They are not binary – have values or no values.  They are often flawed people who have some good values, but also lack other important values. We have politicians in politics but we also have a good coverage of politicians in business too.  They are adept at sucking up to their bosses and climbing over the bodies of rivals to get the big job.  When you realise you are a pawn in their game of business and here to be sacrificed for their personal greater good, the sheen comes off very quickly.  They suddenly don’t seem so tall or well dressed or smart.   So as a leader, who are you really?  When we strip off all of the braid and epaulets, what is left?  What do you stand for?  Are you actually following the values you proclaim for yourself?  This is a common weakness, where leadership becomes “do as I say, not as I do”.  Walking the talk is all about trust and our followers are all ninja level boss watchers observing us with tremendous scrutiny.  They can determine our mood at a thousand paces.  We are constantly being scanned for contradictions between what we say and what we actually do in business.    Having a core set of correct values, which we follow religiously and defend rigorously is the starting point for gaining real followship.  If there is no trust, then cars, competencies and power walls all collapse as supports for our leader authority.  Can I trust you and really trust you at your most deep level, is the central question followers are constantly striving to get an answer to.  So how do you shape up?

Kokorogamae means to clarify your true intention. It is a compound word combining two characters – one for kokoro and the other for kamae, which becomes gamae when in the compound format.  Kokoro can be translated as our spirit and kamae as our stance.  If you have studied a Japanese traditional martial art, you will recognise kamae as the command to take your fighting stance.  Why is this idea of your true intention important for those of us in business?   We talk a lot about trust is business, but this is the outward manifestation of our inner thoughts, which in turn guides our actions.  Kokorogamae as a concept goes straight to the spark of the idea, the attitude, the approach, the true intention.  In traditional Japanese arts such as ikebana, the master will strip the stems of the leaves themselves, rather than leaving it to their assistants.  Similarly, in shodo, the master will grind the inkstone to produce the ink for the calligraphy to be written.  In martial arts, the master will sit quietly at the start of the training mediating to clear the mind of all the extraneous thoughts that hinder the teaching process.  In each case, the masters are seeking total clarity of their intention before they take action.   What about in business?  If we are leading our team, have we clarified our intention?  Is it to drive the team hard and use our staff as a springboard to the next rung on the ladder of our  ever upward, glorious career?  Or is it to build leader bench strength in the organisation, to mentor our team members and invest in their growth?  Are we honestly working hard to develop our people?   Are we working cooperatively, focused on beating the external competition, seeing the big picture to make sure the whole enterprise moves forward? Or are we assembling our troops to fight with other parts of the organisation to position us to grasp the brass ring ahead of our internal rivals. Are we focused on ourselves or the success of the enterprise?     What about your current boss?  Is it all about them or do you feel they really care about you?  If you had to identify their kokorogamae what would it be?  Now if you are the boss, truthfully ask yourself, “how would my team describe my kokorogamae?”.    Do we treat our business suppliers as pawns to be squeezed until we ring the last nickel out of them to our advantage or are they seen as partners?  What is our kokorogamae?  I am always astonished by the terms of payment of some the biggest companies on the planet.  They demand and get payment terms of 60 days, 90 days and in some cases 120 days for our services.  We are a peanut compared to them and their kokorogamae is they can do whatever they like because their might is right.  These same companies talk about the importance of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), compliance control and ethics in business, but to me their kokorogamae is clear – pressure the little guy, because they can.  In my experience, small companies always pay each other on thirty days terms, because we know that business is tough and cash is oxygen.  Their kokorogamae, their true intention is correct because they know if it isn’t, they will lose trust and disappear.   What about in sales?   The pressure to sell is on.  You are on a low base and a high commission or 100% commission and if you don’t sell, then you don’t eat.  Or you are being pushed by your sales manager to recommend certain products because the margin for the company is better, regardless of the impact on the client?  Get the money in the door or else.   So I ask the question, “is the kokorogamae or true intention to just get the sale?”.  That to me is totally wrong thinking.  The kokorogamae should be to get the re-order, not the single sale.   We should become partners with our clients and we should be thinking lifetime value of the buyer, not about some smash and grab antics.   A businessman I know here in Tokyo told me that he used to work for a US company where he had to keep going to new towns to sell their product.  It was cheap, but the quality was bad, so like a shark, he had to keep swimming and moving on to the next town to make sales. He couldn’t go back again to where he had been, because he would have faced a hostile reception.  That kokorogamae for me is basically an evil way of thinking and I don’t want to deal with people like that.  Significantly, back when he was selling his product, we didn’t have the power of social media like we do today.    That influence was brought home to me when I saw a post on LinkedIn about “has anyone seen Mr. X., he owes me money”.  I knew both people and was shocked to see this dirty laundry splashed all over social media.  I went on to do a search on Mr. X and I found a viper pit of unhappy business partners all complaining about his kokorogamae.  I checked with my people “are we dealing with Mr. X?”.  It turned out we were in very preliminary discussions. We immediately broke off those talks. I reflected to myself that you should have a correct kokorogamae anyway, but you really need to have a correct kokorogame in modern business.   What is your organisation’s and your own personal kokorogamae?  Are they aligned? Is your true intention the right one?  Once upon a time, you could burn staff and buyers in isolation. Today, bad news about bad people travels at warp speed on the internet.  Let’s make sure our true intention, our kokorogamae, is the right one, because we all want that secret ingredient for a long and successful business career. 

When we think about leadership what is the perspective we are taking?  There are many ways of thinking about this, but today let’s consider some different perspectives which create tension for us as leaders.  “Make sure everyone follows the rules and we will get ahead”, sounds like reasonable advice.  Compliance, regulatory rules, internal systems, standard operating procedures all push us in this “conform” direction.    “Break all the rules, innovate, practice shoshin – the beginner’s mind – and let’s start with a blank sheet of paper”, sounds like reasonable advice.  Freeing our people from group think, conformity, too many proscribing rules, pushes us in non-conformist directions.  How can we hold these two countervailing thoughts in our minds at the same time and lead others, all the while providing a clear direction?   Usually, we are promoted to leader because we followed the rules, did a brilliant job on our accountabilities and have proven we can be trusted.  We are told to take care of others now and don’t screw it up.  Our natural flair and improvisation worked well for us, but our team are not like us.  They like rules, certainty, clarity and they don’t like accountability.  The easiest thing in the world is to do nothing new.  Instead maintain this microcosm of the corporate machine we have been given to run, as it is and just ensure it keeps doing what it has always done.   This would be fine, except there are troublemakers afoot.  They work for our rivals and they are focused on their people’s creative potential, beyond the constraints of the maintenance of existing processes.  They inspire their people to step up. It is so unfair.  They want their people to keep what they have today and do even more to create a different and improved tomorrow. They cheat.  They empower their people by encouraging experimentation, risk taking and can you believe it, treating mistakes as educational opportunities for personal and organisation growth.  Ridiculous.   The other annoying thing they do is focus on leverage.  They believe that their job is to do everything they can to help their team be successful.  They are delegating important tasks.  This is particularly annoying because we tried delegation ourselves once and it didn’t work.  Somehow their people see the delegated tasks as an aid in their own career development rather than an imposition of the boss’s tasks.   Now why is it they have time to spend coaching their people?  We are way too busy over here for that type of activity.  We are concentrating on getting our own work done and expect the team to do their share, after all that is what they are getting paid for, isn’t it?  Being player/managers we have clients and we have our own work to get through.  As the leader, we also have to set the right example in order to bolster our own grasp of the mantle of leadership.  Our production is an constant example to others of what they should be doing.    Now, we are not against coaching our people to help them become more effective, but where is the time for that?  Every moment we are doing, we are not coaching and vice versa.  We are trapped in a loop.  We have to keep pushing in our own work to make sure the team delivers the overall numbers.  Sometimes this feels like the axeman who doesn’t take the time to sharpen his blade, because he is too busy chopping into tree trunks.  Each swing of the blade becomes less and less effective, but the chopping effort continues unabated.   So as leaders we have two delicate balances to manage simultaneously.  We have to work out how much leeway we give people to stray from the tried and true processes?  How much error are we prepared to endure in the pursuit of innovation?  How do we keep the wheels of industry turning properly, on time, on budget and at required quality, but still allowing for experimentation to occur?  Are we in danger of confusing our team members with a rash of mixed messaging?   Also how do we balance our time allocation priorities?  How do we make time for the team to develop them when we have our own heavy schedule driving us without relent.  Another daily struggle for balance and this encompassing our most valuable leader resource – our personal time.   Our focus on people versus process and leading versus doing, are competing perspectives and as leaders we have to find the right balance if we are to be successful.  Are we even aware of these different perspectives though?  If we are not, then the very basics of leadership are not being covered and we have a serious problem we need to work on.

Business is stressful.  It becomes very stressful when your industry is hit by a global pandemic.  Just when you start to believe we might be finally escaping the death roll of the virus, we get Omicron pop up and raise the ante completely.  Just to add to the stress levels we now look like we are entering a global economic meltdown, because of the impact of the war in the Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia.  Oil, gas and grains are rapidly rising in price as are the delivery mechanisms of the global supply chain. If you are in certain industries the pandemic has smashed you, however other sectors have been sailing along quite unaffected. A global recession however, is much more democratic and will share the pain with everyone.  As leaders we have to be the rock for our teams.  Everyone gets nervous about their job and in some cases about whether the company can survive a one-two punch of the pandemic followed by a global recession?   “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is an old mantra.  For leaders though their role is equivalent to the captain of a sailing ship.  Before the coal fired steam era, ships relied solely on the wind, tides and the skills of the captain to deliver everyone safely to their destination.  The team relies on the leader as captain to keep the company and staff safe.  The natural inclination is to start working 18 hours a day, frantically trying to keep everything going.  This is not sustainable and is not necessary.   If you work eighteen hours a day and you have ten staff, they will outwork you.  Their standard eight hours a day collectively adds up to 80 hours a day, compared to your eighteen.  Working long hours under stress is tiring and the first casualty is judgement.  Making key decisions when your brain is enveloped in a fog is not recommended.  This however can easily happen, if you keep working long hours and don’t rest.    Rest here means rest for the physical body as well as the mind.  Lying in bed or on the sofa with your brain on fire from worry about the future of the business, looks like you are resting, but it is actually not restful at all.  You don’t get up feeling refreshed but exhausted.  Being able to make good decisions, create a survival narrative and deliver it with conviction, requires energy and a fresh mind.  If the leader is just whipping themselves into a frenzy of hard work to fix the issues, then the ship will go down, because the captain will implode.   As leaders, we have to understand our own energy wells and when they need refilling.  Taking a day off is probably needed sometimes. Working eighteen hours a day is definitely not needed.  The leader’s time would be much better spent investing in the team to make sure that what they are doing during their eight hours a day, are the right things, done in the right way.  Not micromanaging but supporting and communicating.  We can get into a loop where we are focused on getting deals done or selling our clients and so we abandon the rest of the team to let them work it out on their own.  It is a natural inclination, but it misses accessing the power of leverage.   How many clients can we individually contact or see, compared to how many our team members can see are obviously totally different.  The leader’s job during a crisis or a struggle for survival, is to be the fountain of optimism and hope.  That sounds easy to say, but not so easy to do when you are staring into the abyss of corporate oblivion.  It is even less easy when you personally are feeling exhausted every day.  Case studies and academic theories don’t prepare you for the hand to hand fighting required to preserve cash, your only oxygen in business. We get ourselves into a death loop of stress, exhaustion and depression. The whole structure starts to unwind and begins to spiral downwards.  We need an intervention, a break from the chaos, a little time to remove the fog covering our brains.   Leaders need to protect themselves, because if they push themselves over the line, then the whole team is lost.  Stepping back from the fray may seem cowardly or weak, but getting a better, higher elevation of the battlefield, may be what is needed to find a way through the mud and blood of the strife.  Take a day off or even a couple of days off, to recoup the energy needed to keep the team going.  Come back refreshed to the problems and hopefully with some clearer thinking and better ideas.  This is not our first inclination, but we have to listen out biorhythms and judge when we need to rest.  “When the going gets tough, the tough step out, rest, clear their minds and then re-join the fray”.  We have to upgrade our thinking to match the modern business world and be careful about applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems. 

Giving feedback at any time about performance issues is always fraught. Providing constructive feedback is one of those areas which we often dread, only surpassed by the prospect of having to give negative feedback.  Ideally, we can avoid negative feedback altogether and turn it into a more positive version. Nevertheless, those on the receiving end of anything but adulation and lavish praise, are rarely in a positive mindset about receiving corrective feedback.  They are keen to justify what they did, sometimes deny it was their fault or try to wriggle out of it and shift the blame to someone else.  It is extremely rare for someone to put their hand up and take ownership for problems.  What can we do about giving feedback?   Here are nine ideas on giving better, positive feedback. Be certain the feedback is positive and constructive. Don’t boost your own ego or pull an authority powerplay of blatant status affirmation, by putting down others less knowledgeable or less skilled. Whenever someone is struggling with performance, recall what you were like at the same age and stage.  As we get older, we conveniently forget that we had to make a lot mistakes in order to learn the best way of doing things and we didn’t know everything (although we probably thought we did). Also, remember, everyone is watching you, so if you push the blame for a project failure on to the delegate of your delegation, they will not be motivated to receive delegated tasks in the future.  If you beat people up, metaphorically speaking, then others will feel fear that they might be next and this lowers the morale, loyalty and engagement rates.     Be open to input and feedback from the team member. There are many paths to the mountain top and we should accept we don’t have a monopoly on the approaches available to us. The obvious way of doing things is the sum of our own singular experience and knowledge.  It is always a good reminder for me to be tolerant of other ideas when one of my team approach the task from an angle I hadn’t thought about.  “Oh, so I am not God after all” is what I remind myself, when this happens.   We should be vigilant for major deviations and act on them immediately. If we ignore them, then explode with rage because of what happened, we are going to create bad relations with our staff and within the entire team.  This is usually our fault anyway.  How did it get to this point of deviation in the first place?  Why weren’t we making the time to be cognizant about the path being taken?   Speak calmly and don’t do all of the talking. Our first instinct is to tell them where they went wrong and to share our viewpoint on the problem.  We do this because we believe it is the most efficient way of doing things.  But is it effective? If we view the issue as something they can correct by coming up with the solution, they will be more encouraged to get to work on fixing it. No one likes being told what to do, but we all enjoy being asked our opinion on how to fix it.   Do not have any discussion about performance in public. Remember, everyone is watching how you handle problems.  While it may feed our white hot rage at that time, to let them know they are an idiot etc., but in the long run we are diminishing our ability to lead the team effectively.   Start the conversation with a sincere compliment to set a psychologically safe environment. If it isn’t sincere and real, it will trigger a negative response in the staff member because they see through it as ploy, which by the way, they interpret as an insult to their intelligence.  We get things off to a bad start in this way. After the positive feedback on some aspect of their work, we transition to feedback using the specific word “and”.  Never use “but”.  As soon as we hear a compliment followed by “but”, we start mentally bracing ourselves for what comes next.  It makes a world of difference to use “and” as the bridge.   We must separate the person from the issue. Their activity or behaviour may be a problem, but they as a human being, are not a problem.  We only talk about the behaviour and the problem, but not about them personally.    Only if appropriate, do we supply the next action step. If possible, it is better to have it come from their side, because the ownership factor is much higher that way.   We started with some praise and at the end it is a good idea to repeat it and finish on a friendly note. Some people hearing the feedback will suffer a confidence crisis and believe they are useless. We have to encourage the that they can do a professional job going forward and we are here to support them.   Before we give the feed back we should be clear about what we are looking at here.  The issue can be clouded and confusing regarding the real problem. We need to have some sense of what the issue is, before we start engaging with the staff member.  We need to do our homework first.    We can use the Four Problem Solving Questions to provide us with more clarity, before we go any further.   What is the actual problem? Why is this a problem? What are some alternative solutions for getting around this problem? Which of the alternatives is the best solution?   This helps us when we get into the conversation with the staff member. We can compare our understanding of the facts with theirs and also our contemplation of the solution, with what they come up with.  It makes for a much more positive and rich conversation.

How did it go last week delegating to your team members?   This week we will look at accountability.   Having delegated a task, we must make sure that the delegate maintains a strong sense of accountability for the results.  If we did a good job selling the delegation to the individual we have chosen for the task, then there shouldn’t be too much to worry about regarding them carrying out the project.  The issues arise when we think we were successful in persuading them why this task completion is in their best interests, but we weren’t as persuasive as we imagined.    Business moves quickly and perhaps when we spoke to them, there was some margin in their schedule, but now something else has popped up and they start allocating more time to that endeavour and let our delegated task slip and slide. They are reallocating their priorities and we have a mismatch between what we think is happening and what is really happening.  How do we make sure that isn’t the case?    Micro-managing people isn’t effective.  Nobody likes to being told in detail what to do, how to do it and when to do it.  Our professional sensibilities are insulted. We like to have independence to do the work in the way we think is the most effective and being corrected at every turn creates resentment.  Our objective is to have people take responsibility for the work and we want them to be positively motivated, rather than feeling put upon.   Laissez-faire management isn’t effective either.  When there are no guidelines and no overview, the inference can be that this project isn’t that important and that it becomes a free choice as to whether it gets done or not.  “The boss doesn’t seem to see this project as important, so I won’t either” becomes the dominant self talk.   We need to be in touch with the delegate and the process, to make sure everything is on track.  We have to be very clear in our language that they are accountable for the outcome and not just the process.  We need to determine just how much interventioin is right.  Naturally we may not get this quite correct at the beginning, but we can start with the right level of supervision we think will work and then vary it, if we find we are too heavy or too light.   Beside this intervention weighing dilemma, there are two traps we can fall into: Buying Back the Delegation Sometimes delegates will try to move the accountability back to the boss.  We have to resist this entirely and keep them focused on the work.  Some staff have worked out if they make some mistakes early in the process or if they delay proceedings, the boss will get frustrated and then take the whole project off their hands.  We shouldn’t fall into that trap.   Put everything in Limbo This is very dangerous.  We are not holding the delegate accountable and we are not taking accountability ourselves either.  Now nobody is accountable, so obviously the project either doesn’t get off the ground or it stalls. We have taken back part or all of the task and we don’t do anything on it either. We are super busy, we tell ourselves “I will get to this” but we never do.  The whole task completion process grinds to a shuddering halt and we are precisely nowhere in terms of progress.  What is the answer? RAME gives us the guideline on how much intervention is needed from our side.  RAME is the acronym for Reasonable Allowable Margin Of Error.  We set the control limits on how much freedom we will give the delegate to run the task as they want to.  If we feel there are minor deviations, which reflect a different way of working toward the same goal, we will ignore them. This however might be difficult to swallow.  With your “superior” level of experience and expertise you may have convinced yourself there is only the one true way of doing this task and all other versions are wrong. It is always educational to have your subordinates approach a task from a new angle and to then realise they have in fact found a better way to complete it than you could come up with.  We have to remind ourselves when this happens that “humility is a virtue in leaders!”. If we see major deviations where the project may be going off track, then we need to intervene to get things moving in the right direction again.  We are always encouraging the delegate to learn from the process. We know if they can self-correct, this builds their self confidence, which in turn, helps them with their self-direction and they can get to a stage of self-valuation.  Our ultimate aim here is to develop the abilities of our team and to assist them to move up the ranks, as they show they can operate at the boss’s level.  As long as we keep that in mind, we will have the right touch, will find the right words of persuasion and will be flexible about how the project is delieverd.

This week we will look at becoming a master of delegation.   Delegation is a mystery for many leaders.  They don’t know how to get it to work properly, so they ignore its power. This is a busy life and business is becoming more and more complex each year.  The leader needs to delegate for a couple of reasons.     The most important one is to help their subordinates become ready to step up into their own leadership positions.  The fear that a subordinate will replace you is a misplaced concern in my view.  Every organisation is looking for leaders and if you can show you are a dynamite leader production machine then the organisation will give you a bigger job to spread that magic further.  For our own capacity to move up the ranks we need a replacement.  If there is no one to succeed us, then we will be kept right where we are.   The other reason for delegation is to make sure we are only working on the most high level tasks that only we can do.  If someone else can do it, then we should give it to them and give them the experience of operating at the boss’s level.  That becomes very important in discussions with promotion panels, when the subordinate can point to the fact they have done work at that level and so can be given the responsibility to step up to the boss’s position.   The reason most boss’s don’t delegate or do it poorly is because they have never learnt a process for doing it.  This delegation idea has been around for a long time, so really there is no excuse for not having a proven process to make it work well.   Let’s go through the eight step delegation process.   Step 1. Identify the Need Think about where delegating tasks will bring the most value and create a picture in your mind of what success would look like.  How would this delegation benefit the business and benefit you, the boss?   Step 2.  Select the Person Don’t choose someone who doesn’t look busy.  Choose carefully who should become a delegate.  Delegation has a large element around developing the skills of that person, to position them to move up the ranks.  This is a strategic choice we are making here, that has to do with our subordinates career development – this is a serious opportunity to prepare someone for promotion.    Step 3. Plan The Delegation Decide the desired outcome.  What would success involve?  We need to be clear on what we are trying to achieve here, before we speak with anyone about it.    What is the current situation? Where does this delegation fit into the work situation considering both internal and external factors?  Where is the subordinate positioned relative to their peers in terms of being groomed to step up in the organisation.   Goals must be clearly defined.  Goals should be realistic, reasonable, challenging and attainable for the person doing the delegation.  If the project is complex, then the delegation may be broken up and involve multiple people doing bite-sized pieces, which requires good coordination of the efforts. Step 4. Hold a Delegation Meeting Once we have done all of this, then we are ready to start speaking to our subordinates about the task required. This is one of the key steps which a lot of leaders fail to do well.  It is critical to explain to the delegatee what is in this delegation for them.  They may see it as the boss just pushing their excess dull and boring work off on to them.  As mentioned earlier, to get promoted in organisations, interview panels want to know what you have done.  If you can point out you have been operating at the boss’s level on some projects, that is a plus in moving up the ranks.  When we put the delegation in these terms, the subordinate can see the benefits to them.    The results needed have to be clearly explained, as well as the task output quality and timelines. The delegate needs to have a clear picture of what success will look like.   Step 5. Create a Plan of Action The temptation is for the boss to tell the delegate what to do in gory detail.  We have to resist this temptation. This micro-management won’t create as much sense of ownership as having the delegate create the action plan.  We want them to own the project, so let them design how to do it.   Step 6. Review the Plan We don’t have to accept their ideas if we think they are unrealistic or ineffective. We need to have a discussion about what makes the most sense. We can collaborate on the solution. With the delegatee, go through the plan and amend where required and agree on the steps required.   Step 7. Implement the Plan Once the plan has been agreed, then it is time to get to work on making it a reality.  Let them get on with it.   Step 8. Follow Up This is another critical stage in the delegation process.  We don’t want to abandon the delegatee until the end and then find out they have taken the project in the wrong direction.  We shouldn’t be micro-managing them either, so there is a balance to be found.  We check in from time to time, for an update on progress and the methodology they are using.   Having a plan of action like this will make the whole delegation process proceed more smoothly and effectively.  Don’t use trial and error.  That just wastes valuable time.  Instead use this proven methodology and enjoy the benefits of delegating immediately.

This week we will look at getting the team members engaged.   Now this is a tricky subject in Japan because what is the native Japanese word for engagement?  We always have this dilemma when we try to translate “engagement” into Japanese.  In the end, we just leave it as “engagement” in the katakana script which reproduces the sound, but which in itself has no meaning, as opposed to kanji pictographs, which have actual meanings.    So, if there is no word for engagement in Japan, how on earth can you get people more engaged?  Also, how do you measure it?  Gallup have been running engagement surveys around the world on a regular basis for a long time and invariably Japan scores low by comparison with other countries.  Usually only around 7% of the working population are “highly engaged”.  This always triggers a reaction back at HQ for multi-national companies who run these global surveys.    I have sat in those regional heads’ meetings and seen the world’s scores paraded up on screen, with APAC the lowest region and Japan the lowest country in APAC. Local leaders like me are then chastened to find ways to lift the scores.  You try and explain Japan to them, but you may as well talk to a post, for all the good it does you.     Part of the reason for Japan’s low scores is linguistic and the other part is cultural.  I strongly recommend you check the translation of the survey questions.  Often the translation provided misses the nuance needed for a Japanese audience and therefore the scores are more harsh than they need to be. Questions like “would you recommend to your family of friends to join our company” which is usually one of the key questions around the level of engagement,  gets a very low score here.  Japanese people do not want to take on that sense of responsibility to their employer or to their family or friends.  What if their friend hates the company or the company hates their friend – they don’t want to get blamed by either side.   Also culture of perfectionism here makes it hard for Japanese to give themselves high scores.  Luxury brands talk about the Japan 30% factor.  This means that Japanese consumers are scoring 30% lower than elsewhere, when it comes to satisfaction rates with the service or product and these luxury companies take this into consideration.   Is there anything we can do then to improve the scores for engagement?  Our own research on the emotional drivers of engagement have found there are three key elements and an important emotional trigger to getting the team engaged with their work.    The Key Elements Satisfaction with the immediate manager This is very obvious and as we say people don’t quit companies, they leave bosses.  The manager’s job is to build strong relationships with the team.  The leader sets the culture of the organisation and is it “people centered” or not?  If people feel they are treated equally and fairly, they will stay engaged.   Belief in senior leadership Often the leaders think they have been doing a good job in their messaging.  They believe that everyone understands the vision and are all united behind it.  If the communication of the Why we are doing this or Where we are going isn’t done properly, then doubt arises as to whether the senior leaders are setting the right course or not.  If the messaging is clear, then everyone feels more confident the organisation will succeed and want to do their job well.   Pride in the organization Often we wonder who the real rivals are.  The Marketing Department and the Sales Department seem at war with each other and the IT department seems to be at war with everyone. We need to be focused outside and uniting together against our external competitors.  Weak leaders will disparage other leaders within the organisation to unite their own team around them and so lose sight of the true rival – the external competitor in the marketplace.  We need to be talking up our organisation and talking up our people, so that we can feel pride in where we work   The Emotional Trigger Feeling valued by the boss is powerful.  How do we know we are valued?  Because our boss communicates that to us very clearly, that we are valued, so we are in no doubt.  Once we feel that what we are doing has meaning and is appreciated, we are engaged to work hard.  This opens the door to feeling confident, inspired, enthusiastic and empowered in our work.   These three elements and this key trigger will make a big difference in increasing the levels of engagement in your organisation.  By the way, all of these aspects are 100% free, so there is no excuse for not working on them!  

Meetings, email, social media, reporting, coaching, planning, performance reviews, firefighting, supervising re-work, the list goes on regarding where our leader time gets taken up.  Our talent got us into this illustrious position as the leader but do we have enough talent to sustain staying in this job over time.  Can we move up to an even higher position and what additional talent development would that take?  Are we investing enough of our treasure in ourselves, beyond anything the organisation may be providing?   I have the most powerful hand held tools at my command 24 hours a day.  I have access to the fastest communication tools ever produced.  I can access any information I want at lightening speed.  Do I feel I have more time?   Am I keeping up with the demands of business in this modern world of global interconnectivity and the global 24 hour work cycle?  In simple terms “no”.  If feel constantly pressured to do more, faster with less.  I have a continual anxiety about FOMO – Fear of Missing Out.  I worry that I am not sufficiently on top of everything that is going on and keeping up with the constant change.  I worry that my competitors internal and external are doing a better job of it than I am.   As my organisation gets bigger I get pulled further and further away from the frontline and have to operate through others. I lose control and access to insights because I am not in those client meetings, I am not there in the meeting room and all I see are the numbers which fall out from the activity. It reminds me of those favourite samurai war movies.  The samurai warlord leader and his key people are sitting around a low table with the map of the area, all the while hidden behind a fabric wall, with guards set outside to protect them from sudden attack.  Messengers rush in and out constantly to tell them how the battle is unfolding.  They have delegated the fate of the battle to their field commanders and they are totally reliant on their efforts.  That is how I feel.   Given I am constantly time poor and reliant on others, where should I be spending my time?  The answer to that question is critical.  We do have time, don’t we, maybe not much but still it isn’t zero.  We can’t do everything, but we can do the most high value, most high priority items.  Great – but are we doing that and are we doing that every day?  If we aren’t, then we had better get busy with a system which makes sure that is how we are operating.   When I was at school, Pluto was a planet.  It is still up there presumably, but we don’t refer to it as a planet anymore – how could that happen?  In 2006, scientists excluded Pluto as a planet and re-designated it as dwarf plant.  This story is a metaphor for leaders needing to keep educating themselves and developing their talents. If we don’t, we might wind up like Pluto and re-designated as a dwarf leader and find ourselves replaced.  The pace of change is dynamic and what we knew a few years ago is now irrelevant because technology and society have moved forward.    I have attended Harvard, Stanford and Insead Business School’s Executive programmes.  Those experiences were excellent,  but that was around the turn of the century, over twenty years ago.  A lot of research has come to light since then.  There are whole new areas of business which didn’t even exist then.  Facebook was kicked off in 2004, the same year Google went public, Twitter was launched two years later and Instagram four years after that.  What are we doing to stay current, to stretch ourselves intellectually and to access the rich experience of others?  Ongoing professional education has to become a habit, not an option.  What we have seen with the pandemic is that if those delivering the content are skilled, we can tap into the best people on the planet online, no matter where we are located.  I have been making the most of this global business education cornucopia online. This is a breakthrough which was unthinkable even three years ago.  That means the excuse basket just go tossed straight out the window.  Let’s get busy learning, never stopping and constantly rebuilding our talent.   Treasure was spent by my companies to send me off to these expensive high end marque educational institutions.  How much have you allocated for your own growth as a leader in your company budget or from your personal account?  We are awash with free content thanks to content marketing having everyone put their stuff out there for free.  That means we can try before we buy and see if this organisation has the goods.    I was watching a sample course on LinkedIn Learning and the instructor talked about our impact as a presenter was 55% based on dress, 38% on voice tone and 7% on what we said.  That is fake news folks.  Dr. Albert Mehrabian, the author of the research found these numbers only come into play when that what was being said was not being matched by how it was said.  When the congruency was lacking, people became distracted by our appearance and how we sound and they were not paying full attention to what we were saying.  She didn’t know that, so I realised I don’t want to buy anything she is putting out there on offer.    We have a lot of choices and we can really get a lot of bang for our buck, in a way which simply wasn’t possible in the past.  We can get reviews from people who have tried the training and it is all out there in the public domain.  There is no barrier preventing us from spending ourtime and  treasure wisely, in order to bolster our professional development.  Let’s get busy doing that and become a modern leader, a well educated leader, a real talent.  

We have seen the Hollywood version of leaders who are master blaster motivators.  These charismatic leaders gather the team together and give a rousing call to arms to slay the problem. They persuade the team to go beyond their personal limitations and get the job done.  In real life, usually the leader isn’t necessarily charismatic, nor a spirited orator. If you are leading in Japan, there is a strong chance that there are two languages in play and you are more likely to be better in one than the other.  Despite my now 37 years in Japan, my vocabulary in Japanese cannot hold a candle to my vocabulary in my native English. That means I can be more subtle, powerful, convincing in English than I can in Japanese.  Native Japanese speakers have the same issue trying to persuade others in English.   The days of the rousing locker room call to action are pretty much done for in sports teams, often the model for business leadership. The modern sports leader is more likely a skilled expert in understanding human nature and are speaking to each player individually, rather than as a frothy mass all the time.  In business, we need to see each person as an individual and find out what motivates them and then help them get to where they want to be.   Leaders are more and more challenged by technology speeding everything up and stealing our time. My laptop, my mobile phone, my apps are amazing but somehow all of this incredible advance in tech hasn’t given me any sense of “oh good, now I have more than before”.  It is the exact opposite. I feel I am struggling even more every year to keep up with everything.  Busy bosses can miss important signals as a result, especially when it comes to dealing with our people as individuals rather than a half time locker room mass.   Sometimes we mistake the reason for non-performance as being a lack of motivation. We need to make sure we know what we are really facing.  Let’s look at five common issues and drill down for what we really need to be concentrating on, rather than keeping ourselves busy making puff speeches. Problem: I don’t know what to do? Solution: Educate the person so they gain the missing knowledge.  Often the onboarding process for staff is perfunctory and then they are left to their own devices and have to rely on OJT, On The Job Training.  If your boss is busy, this can be a thin gruel to survive on.  We need to do an audit to understand where the gaps are to retrain them properly this time.  The boss also has to make the time for them in a consistent manner which produces results.   Problem: I don’t know how to do it Solution: Train them so they can learn the steps enabling them to do it on their own unassisted.  We hire or promote people on the assumption they have the experience needed for the tasks.  Every organization has their systems and these can take some time to master.  At the start we need to invest the time required so that the staff member is across the key aspects of the job and they know the steps they need to follow.   Problem: I don’t believe I can Solution: Coach them to see that they can in fact do it.  Often we are hired for one thing but the organisation changes or mergers and we are now out of our depth.  Maybe the market changes and we are not succeeding, as well as we were before. Did I mention Covid?  Here is a prime example which has changed the game on so many industries and those who were succeeding before are now floundering. As a consequence their self belief and their self confidence starts to drop off.  We need to help them build their confidence that they can in fact get the results.   Problem: I don’t know why Solution:  We create the why by working with them to come up with a clear vision of why this task is important and needs to be done.  So often the WHY is clear to those in the executive suite but it never percolates past middle management down to those below.  We have to keep reminding everyone about why we do what we do and why it is so important.   Problem: I don’t want to Solution: We need to help then find the motivation within themselves to want to do it. We might think that everyone is motivated by money.  Herzberg’s research on motivation showed that money was a given, expected and what he called a “hygiene factor”. Another common assumption is that everyone wants to be the boss and get promoted.  This may not be the case at all and we are just pushing our thinking on to the team members.    We need to spend the time to talk with our team and find out what they really want.  We need to ask them what they find motivating about the work or the company.  The best advice is to assume nothing and ask a lot of questions, until you really know what is going on with the members of the team.  Once we know what they want, then our job is to see where we can arrange the work to deliver what they want.   As leaders, the best work we can do is create the culture and the work environment where the team members can motivate themselves to succeed.  If we see each person as an individual and deal with them one by one, we can produce the results we need.  The key is boss time.  If we don’t allocate it for this purpose what are we focusing on?  Our people do make the difference, so this is where we need to be concentrating.

One of the big differences in the job when you move up in the ranks into a leadership position is you are now responsible for others and their development.  That means we need to coach our team members by ourselves.  Yes, HR may be able to organise valuable training opportunities, but that still leaves our role to follow up on that training and also to do on the job coaching every day. To better understand how to coach others, let’s look at the Seven Step Coaching Process   Identify Opportunities There are five ways to identify opportunities for your staff to receiving coaching.   1. You identify an opportunity for another person. You notice a weakness in their current skill set or you notice they haven’t been trained for a certain part of the task or you give them a new task that they don’t have any experience with.   2. The person identifies an opportunity for themselves. The staff member finds they don’t know what they are doing or finds they can’t do the task well.  They may have little experience with a certain aspect of the job.  Or they may be ambitious and want to receive more training to help them elevate their career.   3. A customer, vendor or outsider identifies an opportunity. There is nothing like a customer complaint to highlight areas where you have missed training for the staff members.  One simple one that drives me crazy in Japan is people are not trained on how to answer the phone properly.  When you call, whoever answers just says “XYZ company” and don’t offer their name.  This can be embarrassing for the caller, because you say, “Can I speak to Suzuki please?” and then they say “This is Suzuki speaking”.  Uh oh, you didn’t remember their voice.  This make you feel bad, but why do I have to feel bad or embarrassed?  What if they just said, “This is XYZ company, Suzuki speaking”.  How hard is that to organise?  Not hard at all, just some simple training needed.   4. You identify new skills needed within your team. Business is constantly changing and one of the dangers for career advancement, is that what you were hired for and what the job requires today are different.  When I first started in office work we had a Telex machine.  You never see a Telex machine anymore because the technology has moved on.  This is a metaphor for our work skills.  We have to be constantly making efforts to keep up with the changes going on in business.  The boss’s job is to coach their people or get training for them to help them adjust to the changes.   5. A situation creates an opportunity. If we get some new technology, then we need to coach those who don’t know how to use it.  If the work content changes, we need to coach people on the new skills sets they need.  If someone is promoted they may need more coaching at the start of the new task because they are not 100% competent in every aspect. This situation has certainly arisen since we all started working at home because of the pandemic.  New people who joined after January 2020 may have had no one around to ask about anything they were puzzled by.  When our new Training Manager joined in April 2020, we were all working at home and I spoke to him every day for months, to try and help him with the onboarding process.   Picture the Desired Outcome What would success look like in the coaching of the individual?  How would we know if we were successfully coaching them?  What is our vision or what end goal is in our mind for this coaching activity?  It is critical that the goal be owned by both parties.   Establish the Right Attitudes How well we really know our people may determine how quickly we will know if we have the right people on the right bus and in the right seats.  We will also understand what motivates them.   Provide the Resources Of all the resources required, by far the most rare, precious and valuable is coach time.  We cannot expect people to perform and then deny them the required support.  This could include money, equipment, training information, and upper management support   Coaching our team members is actually job number one for the boss.  You get this wrong and trouble is bound to be close at hand.  We shouldn’t confuse time efficiency with being effective as the boss.  Investing the time and working on building our ability to leverage the talent available to us is the best way forward.

How did it go in the last episode working on Performance Alignment?  This week we look at one of the most difficult areas of leadership – assessing others’ work performance.  This whole process is important because it leads to promotions, bonuses, bigger responsibilities and also to people being deleted from the enterprise.  No wonder each side of the table finds this process stressful.   Employees become nervous in this situation and bosses can also feel very uncomfortable.  There is nothing worse than having to let people go who have been in your team, unless they are completely hopeless or evil. That is rarely the case.  We are usually having to fire people who are average or slightly below average, who the big bosses have nominated for the cut.    I used to hate those department head meetings, where the whole population of the organisation is plotted on a bell curve of performance.  By definition, a group of people will be in the bottom 10% and that will include your own team members at different times.  You try to defend them, but sometimes the edict is “x” number of people have to be fired and you are the one who has to tell them.  There is nothing more disheartening than to be the executioner, following an organisational process you feel is seriously flawed.     So how can we go about doing performance appraisals, where we are not the merchant of doom and deletion, but working with the survivors?  We can use RAVE as a formula.   R – Review the Performance Results Description There will always be a standard against which the person’s abilities and results can be judged. We are looking at their “should be”, what they are supposed to be achieving.  This is the performance achievement we want to see.  Often these are numbers, so the ideal outcomes are clear.  With other jobs however there is more of a qualitative component which thrusts us into the foggy world of subjective judgements.   A – Analyse The Monthly Projects Lists We are looking for the “As Is” performance currently being achieved.  How is the individual doing across their key elements of the business.  Where are they doing well and where are they falling short relative to the “Should Be” goals?  What are their issues around non-performance?  If we are not seeing the levels required, then we have to make some decisions.  Is the person in the right job?   This is a major decision point.  It may be they are not and we can try and create a better fit for them. Perhaps we have realised they cannot make it and have to leave the firm.  They are not necessarily a bad person, but their capacity is below what the organisation needs to succeed and they have to be replaced with someone who is more capable.   If we decide we should continue with them, we are interested in what changes need to be made to make the goals a reality.  How can we help them to be successful?  Where are their opportunities for improvement?  In which areas will their improved performance help move the business closer toward achieving the outcomes required? This requires good clarity around what needs to be delivered and preferably, outcomes which can be measured.  These could be results of activities, which lead to outcome results.     V-Vision What does future success look like for the individual?  We need to be very frank and clear about any gaps they need to close.  Where does time, energy and resources need to be committed to help them grow.  What will their individual growth look like?  What assistance do they need to get to the next level?  What do they need to be working on in order to move up inside the company?  Sometimes bosses fear helping their staff move up inside the company because they worry their own job will be lost and their subordinate will replace them.  It is possible, but if you are doing a great job becoming a leader producing machine, the organisation is more likely to give you more responsibility.  All organisations are looking for leaders and if you can create them, that will be seen as an indication that you need to be promoted.  Also, remember, you cannot move up if there is no one to take over the job from you, so we all need to educate our successors so that we can move up.   E-Encourage The Person So often the performance assessment meeting demotivates the staff member.  The leader’s communication style and approach are critical to ensure the person becomes even more engaged around achieving their next year’s targets.  The review itself is a look backward to what happened.  The process also has to set up the future as well and inspire the individual to do their best.  This is probably one of the biggest breakdowns between the level the boss needs to be operating at and the actual communication job they are doing. “Let’s work much harder on this part of the process” is extremely good advice for all of us.   We only do these appraisals a few times a year, so it is hard to become skilled, so we need to prepare extremely well to make up for the lack of repetition needed to make us better at it. RAVE gives us a simple formula to use when doing work appraisals and against which to prepare ourselves.