It is an irony that in the most technologically advanced era, the human dimension is so much more critical to success in business.  When I was first entering business, the boss knew every aspect of the company and knew it better than everyone else. Education was working on the basis of limited access to information, so a lot of memorization was required.  An entrepreneur was a rare bird in those days.  A mainframe computer was huge and housed in it’s own hermetically sealed environment. Only a select few had access to the machine itself or the computations it was possible of.  A telex machine, something the size of a washing machine today, sat in a corner of the floor spitting out large sheets of paper with perforated edges, as a means of semi-automatic communication.  All the eligible young women sat in the typing pool on their own floor, so any excuse which could be found to head down there was a major opportunity to be seized.   A lot has changed, but the importance of human to human relations, has only become more vital.  Sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement, power harassment etc., have become part and parcel of the dividing lines around what is acceptable boss behaviour.  Work and non-work have become blurred.  Once upon a time, a boss would never dream of discussing an employee’s private aspirations.  Today, the boss is expected to take an active interest in what the staff want, when they want it and how they want it.   All of this means that the communication skills of the bosses have become so much more vital.  One of the problems though is that the tried and true usual boss route to the top, has been to claim all of the successes as their own genius ideas and lay the blame for the failures at the feet of their “incompetent” staff.  Staff who were smarter than the boss were seen as competitors for the incumbent’s job, so getting rid of them early was favoured.  That won’t fly today.  The boss has to become an engine of staff development, populating the organisation with talent, so that the boss can move up and be given bigger jobs.   Matrixed organisations means you might be the President of the operation in Japan, but with hardly any people directly reporting to you and so much dotted line stuff going on, it looks like a pirate map to the buried treasure trove.  In this modern era, the power to control has been replaced by the power of persuasion and coordination.  Fine, but are the modern bosses preparing well enough for these realities, by really working on their communication and persuasion skills?   In the cut throat world of professional sports, the successful coaches make a lot of extra money be giving talks on how they have managed to be so successful.  A common thread is usually their ability to understand the individual motivations and aspirations of their team members and coach them accordingly, so that they achieve their individual and team goals.  How many bosses in business are proactively doing this?    Often the will may be there, but not the time to invest in their people.  The bosses do a “once over lightly” job on this front and are not really effective in building the trust with the team.  To really understand the direct reports needs requires a lot of time to be invested yet the reality of modern business conspires to make this very difficult.  I have had a mobile phone for many years, recalling the brick sized models that were then a rarity.  Today they are light weight, small, powerful and ubiquitous, but do I have more time as a result, to invest in getting to know my team better?  I would say I have become progressively busier each year in proportion to how much the phone has shrunk and the technology has improved.    “Our key assets go down the elevator every night”, is a clever reflection on the modern reality that our people are the key to our success.  People really do make a difference.  If we have the right people, on the right bus and in the right seats, we are well on our way to getting a one up on our competitors.  If we have great teamwork and have crushed all attempts at having politics in our organisation, we are really sprinting ahead of many firms.  If the boss is well organised and is spending quality one on one time, with the key people, then a big moat is being dug around the company.   Is any of this easy?  No.  That is why it has so much potential for clever bosses to steal a march on rivals and to outperform their targets.  Moving the focus from the tech to the people is a very good start.  A sustained effort here will pay huge dividends.  Will this be a year with these goals firmly in mind or another lost year?  If the people are the key, precisely when will your boss schedule reflect that fact?  This is the reality.  The time has either been allocated in the schedule or it hasn’t.  Forget about all the flowery words, the lofty rhetoric, the ardent commitments – are the slots in the diary or not?  This is the boss challenge this year – master the time allocation required, so that you can get the people focus right or else!    

We have all heard that old saw we “don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan” and we go back to our work, somehow imagining we have mastered the planning process. It is very insightful to however to watch a team when given a simple project.  Our instinct for action seems to overwhelm us and we leap straight into the details.  The nitty gritty of the execution is occupying all of the brain space. No planning is going on whatsoever. How can that be when we know we need to plan if we don’t want to fail?   One of the problems is that very few people are ever given any training on how to do the planning itself and we wind up copying what our bosses did.  This is especially the case in Japan, where following orders and reproducing what your seniors did is accepted behaviour.  If the bosses were master of the planning process, then this wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately that is far from the reality, so we need to make sure the team are cognisant on how to plan projects and work.   Project Planning can be broken down to an Eight Step Process which is simple to follow and very logical.   Step 1.  Desired Outcome What are the outcomes we want?  How does this fit into the organisation’s direction?  We need to be very clear at the start on what the final achievement will look like.  This sounds easy, but projects can have multiple desired outcomes.  We always have limited time and resources, so some hard thinking needs to be done at the start to make sure we are setting out in the right track. Importantly, we need the project team to be sold on the outcome.  We cannot assume they simply will just our follow orders like robots.  They have to be sold on the goal or they won’t have the commitment and motivation required to put in the sustained work needed.   Step 2. Current Situation Where are we today?  What is the current reality?  We need to see the situation both internally and externally?  This is a mini project in itself in order to really accurately understand the starting point.  We can’t just work off vague assumptions, we need concrete details and that means hard numbers and accurate measurements.   Step 3.  Goals We need to clearly define and set goals.  The goals must be realistic, reasonable, challenging and achievable.  We need a good allocation of related tasks to achieve the goals, taking into consideration the abilities of our team members.  There will be a number of goals, so there needs to be a hierarchy of aspirations. The bigger goals need to be broken down to daily units which lead to the achievement of long term outcomes.    Step 4. Action Steps Many times goal achievement fails because effective, workable programmes and plans of action to achieve the desired outcomes, were not well designed.  I remember joining an organisation, just as they found out the $5 million they had allocated for a new operating system was a complete waste.  It didn’t work and had to be scrapped. The execution piece wasn’t properly planned and action steps to get to the goal, in the end proved to be insufficient to the task. There must be clarity about what needs to happen across everyone involved. Key details will include: requirements, task allocation, coordination, possible external and internal barriers, sequencing of the project stages and overall supervision necessities.   Step 5.  Time Frames We must have clear timetables. Unit components must be completed on time and everyone needs to be clear about the deadlines which affect them. Accountability for deadlines needs  be enforced.   Step 6.  Resources We need to estimate the cost of the plan.  Because it is important that all managerial activities be cost effective, the plans must be comprehensive looking at costs for people, material, time and the opportunity costs.   Step 7.  Obstacles and Contingencies Nothing ever goes to plan is ancient wisdom.  We know that, so we need to plan for it. We should have factored in additional time at the start, so that we weren’t putting too much pressure on the project completion.  We need a series of Plan Bs built into the fabric of the plan.   Step 8.  Tracking and Measurement What gets measured gets done, so we need to concentrate on the essentials.  We need to know if the project is deviating off course.  We need warning beacons set in place to tell us if we are about to hit trouble before it hits.  Before we start, we analyse which factors might preclude achieving the desired results.   These eight steps give us the map to move the project forward.  Getting the map right and then following the map are the two key components to getting the results we need.  Sounds simple doesn’t it, but as we know from experience none of this is easy and we need constant vigilance and adjustments, as we bump up against challenging and changing realities.  

Doing more, faster, better with less is inescapable in modern commerce.  The demands just keep going up and the resources available always seem to be tightening.  We find ourselves in a vicious vice of contradictions without end.  And then we have this global pandemic, to just make it all that much more character building.  Have I depressed you enough?  How do we get out of this mess?  What can we do to improve on the situation?    Getting innovative ideas is critical for our businesses to survive, but how do we generate creative ideas?  No matter how genius the boss, there are limits to how many worthwhile ideas can be generated by one individual.  Also, the further you climb up the greasy pole within organisations, the further you get away from the coal face of what is really going on.  The most recent, most junior hire may have the best ideas. The organisation’s employee generation which best reflects the profile of the buyer or the buyer’s customers, may have the best insights.  The problem is we rarely ask either group.   My various bosses holding the whiteboard markers and standing there demanding ideas which were filleted upon arrival, is still burnt into my mind as the worst way to generate creative ideas.  There are better ways to get ideas and we have a Nine Step Innovation Process tool to do just that.   Step One: Visualisation What is our goal or objective? What does success look like?  What is our “Should Be” case?  We have to be clear what we are striving to achieve, because if that target isn’t clear, we have little chance of achieving it.   Step Two: Fact Finding We need to get the facts.  We look at the “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why” and “how” of situations.  We defer judgement about facts and concentrate on collecting them. Sometimes we realise we have faulty or poor data collection systems or worse we discover errors.  We need to work hard to establish the measurement systems needed to generate valuable data and to start looking for creative solutions to problems.   Step Three: Problem Or Opportunity Finding The way we state a problem influences whether we get useful or creative input.  Our objective is to defer judgment and become crystal clear about what the real problem is. This sounds easy, but ask five people what is the main problem and you may get eight opinions.  We need to do some preliminary investigation to understand what is holding us back or where we are wasting valuable resources.  Sprinting hard and fast in the wrong direction is not helpful.   Step Four: Idea Finding No judgmental thinking is permitted at this stage.  We are trying to collect as many ideas as possible and are after volume of ideas not quality of ideas at this point.  This is not how things are normally done, so we need to police this stage very carefully.  Often participants in the idea generation process will want to start evaluating ideas as they arrive.  We have to set some very clear rules.  One which is extremely important is to insist all the idea generation is done in silence.  This sounds easy, but I have always been surprised how fast the quick thinkers get bored with the process and want to talk with their colleagues.  We need to shut them down and let the deeper thinkers do their thing.   Step Five: Solution Finding This is where we use judicial thinking.  We are trying to identify the best ideas.  Up until this point, we may have been able to restrain the bolshie, super confident, assertive few, but now they can easily come into their own and dominate which ideas are taken up.  This can also be tricky, as juniors will defer to seniors and everyone will defer to rank.  We need to make sure that we have a system to choose the best ideas.  In Japan, this process usually means arriving at a consensus.  We have to make sure that isn’t just a easy consensus to reflect seniority and superior status.   Step Six: Acceptance Finding We will need to convince decision-makers for support for the ideas and that will mean time, money and personnel.  This is where we need to sell our ideas because if we want money or resources for the project, then we will be competing with other options.  Our communication and persuasion skills are critical in this step.   Step Seven: Implementation This is where we execute on the ideas.  We need to set the plan, considering who does what, by when, how much budget, which resources will we need etc.  Clarity around responsibilities is very important and everyone has to know what they are accountable for and by when.   Step Eight: Follow Up We don’t want to micro manage the execution of the plan but we also don’t want to neglect to check everything is on track.  You think the project team are zigging but you realise they are zagging instead – best to know that earlier rather than later.   Step Nine: Evaluation Did we get the results we planned for?  Was all of the effort worth it? What did we learn which we can apply to other projects?  The whole team should be involved in this stage to make sure the learnings are reinforced.   It is surprising how many companies have no common process for generating ideas and creativity.  One process, constantly repeated becomes very efficient and effective.  These nine steps are the structure needed to start to build your own internal system for idea creation.  Make this law and good habits will become solidified and consecrated into the organisation’s DNA.  

Listen to Dr. Greg Story’s interview with William Farmer, Managing Director of Dale Carnegie Australia on “Business: The Art of Winning Podcast!” In the interview, Dr. Story shares valuable insight on leading in Japan, surviving COVID-19 as a training company, building lifelong partnerships with clients, and developing one’s personal and professional brand.   Dr. Story shares his three guiding values as a leader. First is to have “kokorogamae” – meaning true intention. Having the “kokorogamae” to build lifetime partnerships, build a good reputation, and achieving success is an important starting point. Secondly, being reliable and accountable is key in a conservative, risk-averse business environment like Japan. Thirdly, building helpful relationships and seeking support through mentors and resources like podcasts is crucial in continuous growth and success.   In addition to being President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo and a Dale Carnegie Master Trainer, Dr. Story has written several Amazon #1 Bestsellers books: “Japan Sales Mastery”, “Japan Business Mastery” and “Japan Presentations Mastery” and most recently “Za Eigyo” on how to sell in Japan.   All of Dr. Story’s books and online content are true accounts of his experience doing business and leading in Japan which he hopes will help Japanese people and those working in Japan to improve their professional sales, presentation, and leadership skills.   Dr. Story advises other business professionals to design their personal and professional brand carefully and consistently. He explains that by doing so, “when people find you in business, they find the best you that you want to put forward, and they will ascertain whether they want to do business with you.”

The reality of business today is that we are navigating the constant tension between Time, Quality and Cost.  We don’t have the luxury of concentrating on only one element.  They are interrelated and as we move toward one, we move away from the other two.  There is no perfect synchronicity either, because business is in a constant flux.   For a leader though、 their use of time is a big factor in their success.  Getting things done is a complete function of where they choose to invest their time.  You would like to believe that technology is saving us time today.  Somehow, I don’t feel that at all.  In fact, I feel I am getting busier every year, because the technology allows me to do more and do it faster.  The constant hunger for improvements and success keeps driving the pressure of the clock.   In time management, we talk about the Tyranny Of The Urgent.  This is when we are being run off our feet, kept permanently busy with one urgent item after another.  There is a hierarchy of tasks and we need to understand where to locate the various tasks we have in front of us.  Not all tasks are equal and we have to prioritise the most important tasks over the others.  This sounds so reasonable, yet so many leaders do not have a good system for capturing priorities and then working on them in the right order.   There is a useful four box matrix for breaking up tasks.  In the top left box, we have tasks which are both important and urgent.  If we stay here, we will have health issues and over time lower productivity, as we suffer from burn out.  In the top right box, we have tasks which are important but not urgent.  This is a key quadrant for us and we need to invest time here if we want to be successful.  This is where we do our thinking and our planning, our reflection on what we are doing and why we are doing it.  The planning process is tightly linked to prioritisation.  If we make the time to stop rushing around we can look at the order tasks should be completed and which tasks are more important than others.  We don’t plan to fail, we just fail to plan and this quadrant is where we do the planning.   In the lower left box, we have tasks which are not important, but urgent.  We should be trying to keep these to an absolute minimum and if we can delegate some of them, all the better. In the bottom right box, we have tasks which are neither important nor urgent.  Rationally, we should never spend any time here, but we do.  We are scrolling through our social media feeds, checking out assorted random strangers‘ Instagram feeds, watching videos on Facebook, TikTok nonsense and basically goofing off.  We should try and eliminate these tasks completely.  Having a break is fine, but a 30 minute walk would be infinitely better for us than thirty minutes on fluff from Facebook.   There are many things which steal our time which have a low priority.  We must become more sensitive to them so that we can control them.  Are we starting each day with a prioritised list of tasks, which we have drawn up for that day?  When I am teaching leadership courses, I ask the participants who has a written down, prioritised list of tasks for each day and then work through them in that priortised order?  Sadly and surprisingly, very few hands go up. If you are not doing this everyday, then why not?  How can a leader get all the things they need to do completed?  We can’t do everything, but we can do the most important things at every stage of the day.  We must make decisions about what that will involve and then go ahead and do them.    Once we make those decisions, we need to make an appointment with ourselves and then block out that time and protect it, just as we would the time we have allocated for a client meeting.  We shouldn’t allow our cordoned off time for key tasks to be fungible and allow other things to break in and steal the time.  If we had a client meeting scheduled, we would vigorously defend the time and not allow other tasks to get in the way. Grouping similar tasks together is the most efficient way of getting a variety of things completed.  This batching of tasks works well because we cut down the time required to get up to speed on the next task, because it was similar to the last task.  We can stay in the flow for longer.   Keeping a close track of our time is always a very scary thing, because we realise how much valuable time we are wasting on low value items.  Adding up all of the working hours we have wasted during our careers is a terrifying prospect.  We cannot go back and claim them, but we can claim the hours ahead of us, so let’s make sure we do that efficiently and effectively.      

We have so many things pulling us in different directions at the same time, we can get a bit overwhelmed by all the work we have to do.  How can we get the right focus and make our effort better coordinated?  There is a simple method we can use which is very quick and simple.   Firstly, we need to take a brief moment and draw a focus map of what we need to be working on.  How do we draw a focus map?    In the center of a piece of paper put a small circle around the one or two words which make up the key area of focus.  Now add separate related words which come to mind that fit this category and then circle those words to make sub categories.  On the page, these circled words will be arranged around that original central circle like planets around the sun.    For example, we might think of key topics like Better Time Management, or Better Followup, or Better Planning, or Better Communicator, etc.  Taking one of these topics as the center circle, in a few minutes the list of related words will soon come forth.  This is because we have all of these thoughts inside our mind and we just need the chance to release them.  These related words become circles surrounding the center circle.   If we take a concrete case and make the key focus in the central circle “Better Time Management”, for example, some related sub category words to surround that idea might include words like: prioritisation, block time, procrastination, Quadrant Two focus, to do list, weekly goals, daily goals, etc.    In a short period of time we have developed sub categories for us to work on, in order to improve our time management.  By physically arranging these words around the central idea, we engage our mind through visual stimulation.   Having done that, we now apply a template to help us decide just what we are going to do about each of these sub categories. There are Six Steps. Choose the Area Of Focus, for example in this case, we might choose prioritisation: What has been my attitude in this area? Why is this important to me and my organisation? Specifically, what am I going to do about this differently? What results do I desire? How is this going to impact my Vision? A completed version might be like this: Which Area Of Focus: Time Management with the sub-category of Prioritisation What has been my attitude in this area? I know I should be better organised but I never get around to taking any action to improve the situation, because I don’t choose activities based on priorities Why is this important to me and my organisation? Well, if I am better organised I can get more work done and I can be focusing on the prioritised areas of highest value.  This will make me more productive and I can contribute more value to the organisation. Specifically, what am I going to do about this differently? I will start by buying an organiser with To Do Lists in it and a calendar to block out time for the highest value, highest priority items.  I will start each day by nominating what I need to get done and then prioritising that list and only working through the list in that priority order. What results do I desire? My best time will be spent working on the most high value tasks which produce the results with the greatest impact. How is this going to impact my Vision? I will be better able to achieve it because my efficiency and effectiveness will go up dramatically compared to what I am doing now. We could repeat the same process for the other words we thought of like: block time, procrastination, Quadrant Two focus, to do list, weekly goals, daily goals etc.  This is a simple system which is highly efficient and effective.  Whenever I need ideas, this is my go to tool and I go to it for a couple of very good reasons: it is very fast, goes very deep and produces excellent, practical, applicable ideas.  Try it for yourself.  

Over the last three episodes we have covered not criticizing people, giving appreciation, understanding wants, being interested in others, smiling and remembering people’s names.  Let’s explore the last three human relations skills we need to succeed.   Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. “Some people are boring when they talk about themselves and I tune out, because I only want to hear stuff that is of interest to me, like where are the results”. That doesn’t sound like a good approach to build an engaged team, does it?  Remember we need to develop a genuine interest in our people and then ask questions. Sometimes we may not know how to engage others to get to know them better. We can find out what are some key areas of importance to them using a memory linking technique - Nameplate, House, Family, Briefcase, Airplane, Tennis Racket, Ideas.   Nameplate obviously refers to their name.  Are we pronouncing it correctly.  I was leading a training session recently and an Indian gentlemen was relating how impressed he was, when his new boss pronounced his full name, very slowly, very distinctly, obviously making an effort to get the whole name correct.  He felt very valued by the effort, when everyone else had given up and just used his shorter and easier nickname.  House refers to where they are living, have lived and where they want to live in the future.  Family is about their family composition.  A lot of work relationships become very tight through the children attending the same school.  Briefcase is about the content of their work.  Talking to people about the detail of what they do five days a week and many hours a day is a smart idea.  This is where they are fully focused and if we can hear what they are doing, it helps us to better understand their personal situation.   Airplane symbolises travel.  Where have their visited.  Where do they want to travel.  What have been some of their travel experiences.  Are there places they recommend we should travel.  Have they been to any good onsen, hot water springs, we should consider?  Tennis racket is pointing toward hobbies. What do they like to do outside of work.  People have the most amazing hobbies and you can work alongside someone for many years and have no idea.  Why?  Because we never made the effort to get to know them better.  Ideas refers to interesting information they have come across.  How they view changes in the market and the economy.  Have they seen anything interesting in business over the last few years or seen what competitors have been doing? What are some of the industry trends which are nascent and may be foreshadowing new directions and changes?  Have they come across any good sources of useful information we could also take a look at.   Make finding out all about your people your mission and you are sure to find leading your people becomes easier.   8: Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. What if you don’t know about the other person’s interests? No problem.   Ask more questions – remember what we learned about being a good conversationalist – and go back to Principle Seven - being a good listener. We may not be told immediately by our staff what they are interested in, because they are still wondering if they can trust us.    We need to gain their trust to allow us to dig in, to find out how we can help them.  By asking questions we have the chance to know more about them and that allows us to highlight similarities and things we have in common.  This makes the trust building easier By applying Principles Seven – listening – and Eight – talking in terms of their interests, you will naturally make the other person feel heard, which makes them feel important:   Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely. We probably all want to feel what we do is important and that we are important to the organisation.  Often, we are working hard but get no recognition for it.  Bosses can be too focused on the outcomes and forget the process involves people making sure the results happen.  We are not machines. Everything we do is driven by our mindset and our commitment.  We want to be recognised for that.   Notice how words like “honesty”, ”sincerity”, and being “genuine” run through these  nine Human Relations Principles. Without these caveats, the principles are simply tools for manipulation. People see through manipulation, and it’s not a way to win followers or positively influence them or be successful as a leader.  How can you develop strong relationships with your team members by applying these principles and having a positive influence this week?  

In the last episode we covered the first three principles for strengthening relationships, focusing on avoiding criticism, expressing sincere appreciation and arousing in others an eager want.  We will explore how to advance the relationship building process with the next three human relations principles.   Become genuinely interested in other people. Society has entered a very narcissistic stage, where many people are highly focused on themselves. Additionally, we are all time poor and focused on what we need to do and have little mental bandwidth for what other people are thinking or need.  Efficiency is a difficult approach to apply to building good human relations.  It is very hard to build up trusting relationships with such a time poor, highly transactional approach. If we don’t build trust, then what sort of relationships do we have with the team members?    The way to build trust is to get to know people and get them to know us.  The more things we share in common, the easier it is to get on with each other.  This is not manipulation, trying to get to know others so that we can use them.  I am sure we have all met people like this. It doesn’t go anywhere. People are not stupid and they pick up on this immediately.  Being “nice” to take advantage of people only works once and in this highly interconnected world, where information travels at a blistering pace, word spreads very quickly.   So what we are talking about here is genuine interest.  Each one of us has areas of experience or interest which others would genuinely find interesting.  It is often amazing to learn things about colleagues you have worked with over many years, that you had no idea about.  It makes for a richer happier workplace.  Being able to see things from another person’s point of view requires you know what their point of view is and more importantly to understand why they think that way.  The way to do that is take a real interest, an honest interest, in other people and build the bonds between us, based on our shared interests.   Smile. As we smile, we start to develop a deeper relationship with the team member. We are more approachable, more friendly, less intimidating.  It sounds so simple – smile - how hard can that be?  Well take a good look at people’s faces at work.  Most are looking stressed, concerned, pressured and very, very serious.  Not too many smiles being shared around.  That is the way of the modern world.  We are supposed to be getting more time thanks to technology, but in fact, it is making us busier and more stressed as a result. We are all more and more focused on ourselves and we are losing touch with the art of pleasant interaction and good communality. In that process we are forgetting to offer a smile as the first thing when we meet others.  More often, we proffer a furrowed brow and a serious face.   So keep this in mind that every time you face a team member to speak, crack a big smile first before you say anything.  This changes the atmosphere completely.  They will feel better about you and much more likely to cooperate with you and be very pleased to see you.    Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. We might be dealing with a number of people in the organisation and we may not meet all of them each time.  However, if we meet them again or pass them on the way to the meeting room, we had better be able to remember their name.  We may meet a number of key people from other divisions in the office.  We have to be able to remember their names, even though we may only meet them periodically.    When we are dealing with clients, Japanese decision-making ensures that there will be many people involved in the decision and we cannot afford to miss anyone from that group, if we bump into them at their office or elsewhere.  When we go to networking events or industry gatherings, then we need to be able to remember the names of the people we meet.  We are representing our organisation. This is an important skill and most of us have that “I know the face, but can’t remember the name” problem.  If our competitor can remember people’s names well and we cannot, we are at a major disadvantage.   Our skills in interacting with others are a critical function in business.  We need to master this skill set.  In the next episode, we will cover the final three human relations principles we need to be successful in business.  

As leaders, naturally we all want to build a strong relationship with our team.  However, not all relationships with our team members work well.  The Pareto Principle says that 20% of our team produce 80% of the results.  That means we are paying for 80% of the people, who only produce 20% of the results.  That is bound to be an irritation for leaders, when they cast their eye across those members of their team who are not producing as much as others.  We might think they should change, so that they are doing a lot better and so make it easier for us to lead them.  Unfortunately, we can’t change others. We can only change how we think and behave.   If we see them as a problem, then the chances are high that we won’t have a positive relationship with them. We won’t spend much time with them and will obviously prefer to be around the high performing producers. This in turn de-motivates the 80% group and we set up a cycle of grief.  On the other hand, if we accept that there will always be a statistical 20% and 80% grouping, we can focus on getting the results we need by combining the entire power of the team.  We need to focus on how to get the 20% operating at an even higher level. We have to accept, that no matter how much they produce, there will always be an 80% cohort.   People have different strengths and our job is similar to that of the orchestra conductor.  We need to find ways to get the most from every person, in sync and in harmony with each other. Of course, we have the 20%, the star vocalists and the first violin, but we need everyone else working well or we won’t function properly as a team. We need to change the way we interact with everyone in the team, so we have a happy work environment, where everyone feels appreciated.  This means we need to change ourselves first and re-think our attitudes.   That’s the whole thinking behind Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People – getting change with people is not about manipulation.  It is not about us honing our persuasion skills conniving for them to change. It’s about changing ourselves first and by extension how we approach our team members.  If we approach the lower performing people in the same negative way, every time, we will always get the same negative counter reaction.  If we change the angle of our approach by just three positive degrees, then we will get a positive counter reaction.    The point is, we have to make that decision to change those three degrees on our side first, rather than expecting them to change themselves to suit how we like things.  There are some excellent, proven, time tested Human Relations Principles we can draw on to help us with this.  Let’s look at Dale Carnegie’s Principles numbered one through three. Don’t criticise, condemn, or complain. How many times have you criticised someone and had them admit they were wrong and tell you that you were completely right?  It almost never happens because people rush to defend themselves and want to justify whatever it is they are doing.  If we do criticise them knowing this, then all we are doing is setting ourselves up to fail to change them and even worse, create bad feelings between us and demotivate the rest of the team.   Give honest, sincere appreciation. This sounds so simple, except that we don’t do it.  It is not that we give fake or dishonest appreciation, because we don’t give any appreciation period.  We expect everyone to be doing what they should be doing, what they are being paid for, but we show no any appreciation of that. Then we wonder why it is hard to get people to cooperate with us?  The consequence is that everyone is starved of appreciation.    They are also quite sensitive to any attempts at flattery and will dismiss what we say as dishonest words, somehow trying to trick them into doing something they don’t want to do.  So, we have to identify something concrete and provable that they did and then praise that in specific detail.    For example, “Suzuki san, I appreciated the fact you got back to me on time with the information I requested, it really helped me meet the deadline. Thank you for your cooperation”.  The praise is specific and true and Suzuki san is more likely to accept the praise as being honest.  The key is to connect the praise with evidence.   Arouse in the other person an eager want. We all want lots of things. In fact, we spend almost 100% of our day focused on what we want.  The issue though is when we need the cooperation of others.  They are focusing on what they want too and are not particularly interested in our needs, wants or requirements.    We need to switch our communication to focus on things which are also important to them.  What does the team member want?  Do we know what that is and do we know it in detail?  In this way, they will feel there is something directly positive for them and they are more motivated to agree to our ideas and work harder to deliver the goal achievement.  How do you need to change your communication style and content, to get the type of cooperation you need, where the other person thinks this is in their interests too?  Listen to what comes out of your mouth and check if it is all about what you want and when you want it.     As leaders, we get the team and the results we deserve.  If we want to improve on what we have, then we have to start with changing ourselves, as painful, difficult and embarrassing as that may be.  Or we can just keep whining about the bad hand we have been dealt.  If it is the latter, don’t worry, you won’t be short of company, as there are plenty of leaders doing just that.  Probably not a crowd you will want to be part of though, because they are the 80% of leaders producing 20% of the results.  

There are many things which lead to successful leadership.  You might have hit a purple patch in the market and things are going swimmingly.  Five Star Hotels in Japan, prior to the pandemic were doing brilliantly with very high occupancy rates and the General Managers looked like rock stars. Covid hit and closed the border, locked everyone up at home and desperation was the order of the day for the hospitality and tourism industries.  Or you might have inherited a bunch of well trained stars, thanks to your immediate predecessor.  We all hope for good business conditions and a good crew.  Hope however isn’t much of a strategy.   When it is down to us, what do we need to do? For leaders there are some key areas where we need to concentrate our time, energy and strength.  There are Five Drivers of Leadership Success which help us to be effective leaders.  Let’s go through them. Self Direction Leaders are self directed, have a vision and set clear goals.  They are self sufficient.  They know what they are accountable for and keep pushing hard to produce results.  They are values led and create the required culture in the organisation which helps their team to be winners.  We need an ego to believe we know better than everyone else what we need to do. We may in fact not be infallible and prove to be wrong in our initiatives.  That is okay, as long as we are flexible enough to change our course and adapt quickly to the realities we uncover.   A rigid, inflexible, massive ego on the other hand means we will be urging everyone to sprint faster off the cliff, bringing the organisation down.  That “sufficient ego” line is a tricky little dude to calculate, but we must do it.   People Skills Today’s business environment is too complex for the “hero” leader to be successful.  Once upon a time the leader could do it all, but not today.  The ability to form the right team, get the right people on the right bus and in the right seats is critical.  The team need to know they are working in a psychologically safe environment and that their leader is there to help them develop in their careers.  Without great communication skills and correct values, then trust can’t be built. Without trust there is no team. Climbing over the bodies to grasp the brass ring for yourself doesn’t work anymore.  There is a lot of nonsense talked about the servant leader, but fundamentally, investigate what is in your heart?  Is it all about you or is it about your team.  If it is all about you and your glorious career, you will get the team engagement you deserve but won’t like.   Process Skills The machines and people must perform correctly.  However, if the system or process is poorly designed or poorly administered, it will cause people to fail.  Is the poor performer really a poor performer or have we gotten the job fit wrong for that person.  For example, expecting a big picture person to be super detailed focused is asking for trouble and vice versa.  We must never forget that people support a world they help to create.  We need to involve our people in improving the systems and processes.  I am a Driver Personality style, which means fast paced, quick decision making and not much tolerance for time wasting. However, when it comes to the analytics of the business, I move more across to the Analytical Personality style dimension.  I was hopeless at maths at school but as the leader this means seeking three decimal places and having an eye for detail.  We have to be great at analysing a certain set of numbers and we have to make sure the numbers are correct and current, in order to make the best use of them.   Communication Leaders must be great communicators, but that doesn't mean they should do all the talking.  The ability to listen at the highest levels is required – listening for what is not being said.  Being able to ask great questions is another leader capability which saves a lot of time and reduces friction.  The leader knows what they already know, but by involving other’s opinions and asking questions they can learn what they don’t know.  Being clear and concise in communication is a high level skill.  Making sure the message is filtering down correctly throughout the organisation is also a critical element of being a leader.   Accountability The buck stops with the leader and there are no excuses. Leaders also quickly and emphatically admit their own mistakes and lead by example.  Leaders need to coach, guide, support and train the team to achieve the agreed results.  The leader provides direction and manages change.  The leader has to know the systems for monitoring results are working correctly.  They need to know that the right controls are in place and that everyone understands why these are important.   If we work on mastering these Five Drivers then we will be successful as leaders.  Is this stuff easy? No, but no one cares. The organization expects us to master these drivers and for us to do our job properly.  End of story!

We are super busy people, hitting our targets, ploughing through the workload, coming in early, staying late, working weekends, constantly studying and investing in ourselves and then it happens.  We get promoted to be the leader, to be in charge of other people, usually our erstwhile colleagues.  Our brain though is still in production mode.  We not only have the results we were personally accountable for before, but now we are accountable for the entire team’s production as well.  We have to make that mental leap from being in total control of what were doing, to being in zero control over what others do.     We immediately gravitate toward the mechanical pieces of the job, because they are the easy bits.  Checking the numbers, the milestones, the sequencing, the reporting, the details, etc., are all doable for us.  We are not yet a leader though, because we have decided to become a manager.  What the organisation is in dire need of though, are leaders not managers.  Managers are a dime a dozen, but leaders, good leaders are like rare metals.  You have to excavate through a lot of managers, a lot of dross,  before you find the valuable folk who can make a difference in the organisation.  So are you dross or a rare and valuable metal?  Do you want to become a valued and recognised leader?   What is the difference between a leader and a manager?  A manager needs to make sure things get done on time, to the required quality, in the right order and following the allotted budget.  The systems need to be perfectly sequenced and the production volumes need to be secured.   The leader needs to do all of these things plus some additional vital elements.  The leader has to set the strategy for the enterprise, outline the vision, explain where we are going, create the culture and build the people.  This people bit is the hard part.   There is a balance required though, between the attention given to the people element and the process elements.  If the leader focuses too heavily on the processes, then the people feel they are just like robots in the systems and their human capabilities are not being developed.  This is often the micro-manager, who tells everyone in great detail what they should do and how they should do it.  This is McGregor’s Theory X Leader, who is always checking up, looking for faults, mistakes and errors.  Workers are not being engaged in thinking about their jobs.  They are not innovating, because the boss monopolises all the idea generation roles.   The opposite problem is when there are not enough controls in place.  This is when we start to get safety and compliance violations, because the boss is not paying careful enough attention to what the people are doing.  The boss is super busy with their own work.  It is a very free environment through neglect, not intention.  But it is a bit too free.  People are being developed and given greater responsibility, which is good. However, the controls have been neglected.  The checking up, the follow-up, the supervision is not happening sufficiently.  This is not a light issue.  This is an environment where the boss can go to jail, because they had accountability and didn’t control what was going on. Regulators become involved and penalties can be severe.   The task of the leader is to determine how much control is required to avoid safety and compliance violations, but at the same time allow enough freedom so that the people can develop, take accountability and grow in their work.  Ask yourself, “have I got the controls about right?”.   The other tension is between leading and doing.  Often we become the manager because we were the best at the required tasks.  It was all about us, us, us and what we were brilliant at.  When we are promoted to look after others, we make some shocking discoveries.  We realise the people we are responsible for are nothing like us.  They have different motivations, thinking, values and commitments to us.    The temptation is to keep doing our manager tasks and also keep doing our player tasks.  We don’t delegate to our team because the trust is not there.  We think, “I don’t want to be accountable for their mistakes, so I had better do it myself, that way I know it will be okay”.  So we double down on our own production.  That is fine, but after a couple of years the targets keep going up and we, as one individual, cannot possibly achieve them. We get fired because the team are not making their targets and we are the one person accountable for the team’s results.   Sit back and take another, cold hard look at what you are doing. How is your balance between what you need to be doing as the leader and what you should be delegating to the other members of the team?  We have to always be aware our job is to work in our business and also on our business – we should never forget that.        

I don’t know whether we tend to forget things because we are getting older or because as we get older, we get busier?  “Life is so busy and there seems to be more and more to keep track of, I’m having trouble keeping up.  I worry about forgetting something really important and letting my team down or causing problems at work”.  It is not difficult to feel this way, is it. My computer screen will flash up a message in the top right hand corner from someone.  It is too quick for me to see where it came from.  So I wonder was that an email in Outlook, a message in LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, Telegram?  Now I have to swim around and try and track where that message came from.  I feel I am growing old, just wasting my time trying to navigate all of these modern day avenues for my attention. No wonder we worry about forgetting things.  What can we do about this?  Memory Pegging!!!   We always have some important information or concepts to recall. How can we do a better job of remembering them? Brilliant inventions include the pen, pencil and keyboards.  We should write it down.  I am sure you have you heard this saying, “the faintest ink is superior to the best memory”.  What about those things we need to commit to memory though, where we are not able to consult memos or notes? What do we do when we have to recall them in a specific order? To do this, we use a simple but effective system, using peg numbers, peg words and peg pictures.  For the peg pictures we can make them easier to remember using ACME: Action – create some movement in the picture Color – make it colorful Me – where are you in the picture? Exaggeration – make it bigger, crazier and more memorable   For the peg numbers and peg words we can use connectors.  For example, we can say One-Run to ourselves and them mentally imagine something is sitting on the side of the horse’s saddle.  We can do this for other numbers, words and mind pictures. Let’s continue. Two-Zoo- Something is being thrown to us by the monkeys Three-Tree-Something is bending the tree right over so it nearly touches the ground Four-Door-Something is stopping the spinning revolving door from moving Five-Hive-Bees coming toward us from the hive all have something on their faces Six-Sick-Something is coming out of the end of the syringe Seven-Heaven-Something is tumbling down the stairs from heaven Eight-Gate-Something is draped over the top rail of the railway gate at the crossing Nine-Wine-Something is stamped on the side of the crate of wine   You might be thinking, “Wait a minute, I don’t think I can remember all of that detail. What if I have trouble thinking of good images, because I’m not good at visualizing things or I get confused as to which one goes where?”. The secret here is to say them out aloud. They rhyme so they’re easy to recall. The picture is always the same image, so we just need to insert the item or information – the “something” we want to remember into the picture. By repeating the sequence over and over, we start to solidify it with the images. Start with just a couple and, after having mastered those, add the next item.   Usually, we don’t have to recall nine items from memory, in order, but using this methodology we have that capacity.  Say we had to remember nine cities, in a particular order, for some reason.  That is not that easy after the first five.  So we can use the “peg number, peg word, something” system.  One-run-Sydney is written on the saddle of the horse, two-zoo, the monkeys are throwing name plates with Toronto on them, three-tree, the wanted poster has Sao Paulo on it, four-door-the name Johannesburg is stuck in the door, five-hive, the bees are all wearing face masks with Seattle written on them, six-sick, the name London is coming out of the syringe, seven-heaven, the word Mumbai is tumbling down the stairs, eight-gate, the gate has the word Vladivostok draped over it and nine-wine-the wine crate has the word Kagoshima written on it.   Try this method compared to trying to remember these cities in the right order from memory- Sydney, Toronto, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Seattle, London, Mumbai, Vladivostok,  Kagoshima.  What if I have to remember more than nine items?  Don’t worry, we have thirty of these little beauties. Let me know and I will send them to you, if you need that much specific memory capacity. The memory pegging system will help and once you get used to it, people around you will be amazed by your prodigious memory, regardless of your age.   

Starting something new means we start with a clean slate and can create the culture we want to predominate throughout our organisation.  However how many people get that opportunity?  We are talking about a miniscule collection of opportunities here and it is much more likely we will be inheriting an existing culture, created over time by our predecessors.  That statement in itself may be problematic, because did they actually have a view on the type of culture they wanted or did it just evolve over time or in spite of them.    If we are inheriting an existing workplace culture, that doesn’t mean we cannot change it for the better. However, we should keep in mind that “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and we may be tempted to import the dominant headquarter culture to Japan.  Good luck with that and let me know how it is working out for you.  Actually don’t bother – I know the answer already.   What Are The Right Questions, Rather Than Right Answers   Our starting point is the most difficult.  Japanese business isn’t focused exclusively on the right answers.  In the West, we spend all of our energy and time to come up with the right answers to the issue.  Japan, however, focuses on “what are the right questions?”.  That is very wise, when you think about it. So let’s start with “what are the right questions we need to ask to identify the type of culture we believe is best for the business in Japan?”.    One of those questions could be, “what is already working well?”.  This seems an easy enough enquiry.  Imagine though what it would look like, if things were in reverse?  A foreigner turns up to your company as the boss and they can’t read anything written in English and can only communicate in depth, in their language, with a few of the staff.  By the way, they want to create a new culture?  That foreigner would be you in Japan, so we should spend a lot of time educating ourselves about why things here are the way they are.   After having spent a lot of time and effort to understand the cultural, work style, linguistic, and values differences, another good question to ask would be how does it all connect together?  The existing culture in Japan may in fact be an accumulation of compromises, enabling everyone to work together in harmony.    My Way Or The Highway   In the West, the culture tends to be dictatorial with no compromises.  The boss says, “If you don’t like the way we do things around here, you can leave”.  And that is what often happens.  The new broom turns up and sweeps a bunch of people out the door.  That same scenario would be an extremely rare occurrence in Japan.  We need to begin by creating our map of the corporate terrain, to understand how the pieces all work together and why?  What are the personal obligations ensnaring the senior leaders, as they work with their colleagues.  Who owes who and what do they owe? In the West we have a more transactional culture, so these types of obligations aren’t as clearly defined.   Resistance to an idea will arise in Japan for no obvious reason, as far as the new boss can determine.  It is a rational, logical idea to institute the change, yet certain key people are against it. But it is hard to fathom precisely why they are opposed.  The silken tethers may be almost invisible, but we have to uncover them. We need to know what we are facing and then be able to put in a plan to overcome the opposition.  For example, you discover this was the previous Chairman’s preference and his subordinates are loath to insult his memory and change it.  Why?  They still feel obligated to him.  Would that happen in the West?  Probably not.   “Yes Boss” Doesn’t Mean “Yes”   The new boss, trying to drive culture change, holds meetings with the team, drives the agenda, observes that people are nodding in agreement and then gets back to work.  After some weeks, it becomes apparent that nothing is happening on that culture change project, which “we all agreed on”.  But did we agree?    Major decisions in Japan are made through nemawashi or ground work, where idea sponsors talk informally with the other decision makers, harmonising the idea to get agreement.  In the actual meeting the idea is rubber stamped.  “That isn’t how we do it at home.  We get into a meeting room, have a robust debate, agree and get on with it”, you say.  Jolly good . “Yes” in Japan, can mean “I am listening to the words coming out of your mouth, but I don’t necessarily agree with any of it and I am not going to do any of it either”.    This isn’t quite the culture change you had in mind.  You realise you have to change your cultural bias and start working the system.  This system, by the way, has been around for a very long time.  Ask yourself, “what do I know, that is so insightful that the whole country of Japan should drop their way of doing things and do it my way?”.    Counterintuitively, the culture here favours execution speed, once the decision is taken, because all the resistance has been removed.  So which is better -  slower decision-making and fast execution or fast decision-making and slower execution?   To change the workplace culture of organisations in Japan first requires a big breath to be taken and then gain a thorough understanding of the existing culture.  Once the boundaries are clearer, then the better questions can be asked about, “why do we need to keep doing it like this around here?”.

How To Remember People’s Names at Networking and Business Events   Are you good at remembering the names of people you meet?  Are you having that embarrassing situation where you know the face, but the name isn’t coming to you?  How about that even worse situation where you have to introduce the person you cannot remember, to someone else?  We usually need the help of others in some form to achieve our visions. This can be people we already know or new acquaintances, for example, at a networking or business event.   But do you sometimes have this problem?   I meet so many people, I can’t remember them when I meet them again, or I meet people and two minutes later I’ve forgotten their name already.   How do you feel when you meet someone again, who remembers your name, but you can’t remember their name?  It’s awkward, embarrassing, and destroys my personal brand.    What can we do about this problem?  We want to be memorable to the people we meet in business, so we need to make sure they clearly hear our name in the first place.  Make a bigger effort and help them remember your name by using the Pause, Part, Punch formula when meeting people.   Before you say your name – PAUSE E.g Hello, My name is…(pause)…..   When you say your first name insert a PART to separate first name from last name E.g. Hello, My Name is…(pause)..John …(part)…Smith   When you get to your last name hit it slightly harder than your first name to make it easy to remember – PUNCH it out.   Hello, My Name is…(pause)..John …(part)…SMITH (punch the last name hard) To make sure you remember their name, use LIRA:   Look & Listen-we concentrate on the person completely, observing them for recognition hints about how they look or sound   Impression-we stereotype them into an easy to remember category based on how they look, sound and speak.  For example, Mr. Tall Suzuki with the Heavy Glass Rims   Repetition-We look for opportunities to use their name in the conversation without it becoming extreme or strange. For example, “tell me Suzuki san, how have you found….” Especially toward the end of the conversation we want to cement the name before we part company. “Thank you Suzuki san for letting me learn more about your industry today and I look forward to catching up again”   Association-We try to link them to something else which is easy to remember.  Suzuki san with the heavy black glass rims is the Japanese version of Clark Kent, who turns into Superman.  Suzuki is the Japanese Superman in disguise.   We use PACE to create more memorable pictures:   Person-we create a mental picture of them like a movie poster with their name on it.   Action-we imagine them doing some action that is linked to their name.  If the name was Asakawa, we could picture a fast running stream   Colour-We look for a colour we can associate with the name.  Mr. Black, Mr. White.   Exaggeration- we create some fantastical scene in our mind which is way over the top.  Suzuki san with the black rimed glasses is a secret superman like Clark Kent and wears a red cape, flying around Otemachi between the buildings trailing a big sign that says SUZUKI.   Use BRAMMS for name association:   Business - can we link the name to the business they are in?  Tokoro san is in the real estate business   Rhyme - can we get the name to rhyme with something we can remember? Everyone with a perfectly straight back or senaka is named Tanaka   Appearance - Onaka san has a large belly   Meaning - Takai san is rather tall, Minami san works in the south of the city   Mind Picture - I can visualize Abe san as Abe Lincoln with the beard and a tall hat.   Similar Name - Kawai san is cute, kawaii   This sounds complicated and I can’t remember all the acronyms!   No problem! Don’t try to do everything at once. This week, pick one or two things to concentrate on and use those to recall the names – some things will work better than others for you, but experiment and find which works best.   At the next networking or business event, try it and give yourself a score on how many new people’s names you were able to remember.

Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan and master trainer in sales, presentations and leadership provides further insight into his extensive career in sales in Part Two of his interview with Andrew Hankinson.   “I love the fact that sales makes the wheels of commerce turn. Without sales, there’s no business…it’s such an important role” explains Dr. Story. Yet he points out many companies do not invest in their sales team. Realizing a need for training, in 1939 Dale Carnegie pioneered a series of public sales training courses with Percy Whiting. Dr. Story himself struggled starting as a salesperson at 16 years old selling Britannica encyclopedia door to door and reciting a 25-minute pitch. He claims: “it was only later when I got the training that I realized I could do this because before that I had no confidence.”   Dr. Story has released over 250 episodes of sales-focused podcasts titled The Japan Sales Series and has published two books, Japan Sales Mastery and Japan Business Mastery, in addition to 5 more podcast series. The Japan Sales Mastery breaks down the sales techniques taught in the Dale Carnegie sales training programs and how they can be used in the Japanese business culture. In Japan, Dr. Story claims, one needs to get permission to ask questions to understand client needs in order to persuasively sell a suitable product or service. In reality, he has seen many salespeople waste valuable client-facing time by creating a one-way presentation. The Japan Business Mastery provides an overview of the Japanese business landscape for senior-level leaders who are planning to work in Japan yet do not know about the unique business culture. Dr. Story’s new book, Japan Presentations Mastery will be coming out soon in 2022.   Networking is also a key event for salespeople, but Dr. Story has seen many people in Japan not maximizing on the business opportunities networking provides. He explains it is vital to talk to as many people in such events as one never knows who can turn into a potential client. When attending networking events with his team, Dr. Story is usually the one to walk up to other attendees, handing out his business card. Afterwards, he introduces his staff and encourage them to connect. As the President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo, Dr. Story also uses the opportunity to gain access to other executives which his staff do not have.   Dr. Story notes connecting with decision-makers and clients in the post-COVID world will become more and more complex. Doing cold calls, getting referrals, networking and even meeting existing clients will become more difficult in the virtual environment. Dr. Story asks, “the problem though, is how do you engage the buyer in that limited environment?” He suggests using small talk before going into the main topic in order to have a human connection, even through online meetings. He adds: “And that's why that trust is so critical. Your capacity to understand the client's needs being very precise, about expectations management, about follow-up, about keeping in touch. These things are critical. Japan in a sense it's very demanding, but if you know what is demanded, then you can supply that demand.”   When telling a story, Dr. Story advises to use the CIR formula – context, insight, and relevance. He says: “you start with the background and then pull out an insight from that and why that would help us as a relevancy…you can disagree with my conclusion, but you can't disagree with my context because my context will come from my experience. It's based on my reality…If I tell my story well, enough, you are leaping ahead of me. As you hear the background, as you hear the context, your brain is going well, we should do X. And when I get to the point where I say, we should do X…you already got there ahead of me.”   Dr. Story’s favourite Japanese word is zanshin残心 – zan means to “remain” and shin means “spirit” or “presence.” He further explains: “when you strike your opponent, you are 100% concentrated even after the blow. That alertness of spirit, that is zanshin…so that spirit of karate remained with me my whole life. The zanshin of karate training took a very shy young man who had nothing going for him…the spirit to fight and to challenge…it’s like a reverberation of your spirit that goes beyond the striking of the bell. So when I’m gone, I’m in another place, I hope I have left something on this planet that will be good and help people reverberate beyond my life.”

Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan, sits down with Andrew Hankinson, Senior Managing Director at ZWILLING J.A. HENCKELS Japan Ltd. and podcast host of Now and Zen to talk about his valuable insight in leading in Japan, with a focus on presentations in Part One. Part two will focus on sales.   Dr. Greg Story has been working in Japan for 36 years in various leadership roles. He has written two books, Japan Sales Mastery and Japan Business Mastery, hosts six different podcasts, and is a master trainer in soft skills development including sales, presentation, and leadership.   Dr. Story calls himself a perpetual student with a constant thirst for learning. As someone that struggled during his early years to get his career started, Dr. Story finds joy in helping people maximize their professional careers.   Dr. Story explains that public speaking skills are essential if you want to have influence on people – from leading projects, making financial decisions, or even deciding what to eat for lunch. Dr. Story admits, he himself had been fearful of public speaking and avoided it until his early thirties. But nobody is born a natural public speaker and the skill can be developed through training. The High Impact Presentation course delivered by Dale Carnegie Training takes two days for people to dramatically improve their presentation skills. Dr. Story explains that with two instructors and massive coaching in an incredibly safe, critique-free environment, this is made possible   Dr. Story claims nerves due to public speaking can also be controlled through techniques like deep breathing and burning off energy. He recommends having the first few minutes of the presentation well-organized with a strong beginning. He adds to never apologize and keep one’s composure and audiences will not notice any minor blunders. When facing a hostile audience during Q&A sessions, Dr. Story recommends paraphrasing the question before answering it. He also advises to take a few seconds before answering the question and make eye contact with individuals in the crowd for six seconds each. In this way, the focus is not on the individual asking the question but the entire audience.   Being clear, concise, and valued are some of the top qualities people want to achieve in the High Impact Presentation course. In order to have a clear key message in presentations, Dr. Story asks people “if we could write the punchline of your talk on a rice grain, what would we say?.” Once the main point is determined, he advises to work backwards to design the context, background, evidence, and opening of the speech. Dr. Story highlights the importance of having a strong opening and enthusiasm to get the audience engaged and excited.   Even when attending other people’s talks, Dr. Story recommends being prepared to talk and ask questions to the speaker to be ready to speak on the spot.   Next week we will continue to Part Two of Dr. Story’s interview in the Leadership Japan Series!

There is nothing like a good meltdown to throw up valuable lessons for the rest of us.  So, a big thank you Suga san, for helping us on our leadership journey.  His shock resignation finished off a year of disasters.  To be fair, he joins a long line of failed Japanese leaders.  Counterintuitively, the Liberal Democratic Party prefers to choose underperformers as their leaders. The backroom boys can more easily control what is really going on and the face to the nation is totally disposable, while the power brokers stay on, hidden in plain sight.  Nevertheless, he has made a sterling effort to bring about his own political demise.   Covid didn’t come wrapped in a roadmap out of the pandemic.  Every country has had to work it out as they go along and to be flexible to adapt to changing circumstances.  Japan is in trouble then immediately. Effective adaption techniques during disasters are yet to be evidenced in Japan.  The 1995 Kobe earthquake exposed a lot of leadership deficiencies in Japan.  In 2011, with the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown those same deficiencies were still in evidence.  In 2020, the pandemic reaches Japan and it is as if nothing has been learnt by Japanese leadership groups about dealing with VUCA events.   Is that a “get out of jail free” card for Suga?  Is it a systemic problem that no political leader could ever hope to overcome?  That may be the case for Japan, because we are showing consistent form over the last three major disasters hitting the country.  Yet Suga is a actor who has some degree of control over his actions and decisions.  In business, we seem to face something significant every ten years or so.  Given we have to confront the strong possibility that something major is going to happen on our watch, how well prepared are we for that eventuality?  How good are our organisations around adaption and flexibility?   Like Suga we all face limitations on our leadership bench strength.  He has to deal with fellow politicians and bureaucrats.  Some Ministers are enemies hoping he will stumble, so they can replace him.  Others are useless age and stage journeymen and it is their turn to become a Minister. We have to deal with the inherited leadership cohort, some of whom thought they should have gotten our leader job.   Depending on finances, we can recruit new people into the team and then expend a tremendous amount of energy to weld the whole thing together.  Coaching people to be flexible in Japan is a challenge.  The risk averse nature of the culture, particularly in companies, makes it very hard to convince people to do new things.  There is always a lot of deep rooted resistance.  The leader needs to be able to keep pushing, keep herding the cats, keep the whole imperfectly balanced apparatus moving forward.   One big element in all of this is our ability to communicate where we are going, what has to happen, who is going to do what and when we need it by.  The second big element in this is coaching our direct reports to become excellent at communicating all of this to their people.  Suga was not much good at either, from what we can understand.  If his public utterances are any indictor of his persuasion power, then the Suga ship of state was doomed from the outset.  We had better differentiate ourselves from Suga in this regard and make sure we are operating at the highest professional level possible as a communicator. Of course, being a smooth talker but being useless or lazy is no help.  I am sure we have worked with these types of people.  Having them report to us is a danger, because we can only uncover their facility for talking at the start and it takes us longer to determine if they can actually produce outcomes.    Our coaching role also extends to helping direct reports with their communication skills. One of the mistakes we make is to imagine they must have worked that out by now, by themselves, otherwise they wouldn’t be direct reports in the first place.  How optimistic we are at times!!  We are busy though.  We have delegated the task and we are busy working on our own stuff.   Don’t make hope your strategy. Attend their briefing sessions with their own next line of direct reports and in most cases you had better brace yourself for impact.  It is often shocking how bad they actually are, in communicating the key messages in a way that motivates and engages people.  Looking back, Suga himself was an obvious dud at both and now he is gone.   External events, internal events, rivals, direct reports, communication all get swept up into the mix.  Adaption, flexibility, communication expertise, persuasion power are expensive and require the investment of the most precious resource in any company – leader time.  Suga underinvested in these areas during his career and when the big job was his, he was left exposed, left high and dry.  Hanmen Kyoshi means the “teacher by negative example” in Japanese. Suga has been superlative in that regard.  What are we going to do about absorbing these lessons?  Are we working on our persuasion skills? Or like Suga are we going to be too late to the party?        

In one of my other podcasts, “The Presentations Japan Series”, l talked about “Virtual Chatbots Are The End Of Civilisation”.  What is the problem and what do we bosses have to do to stop this happening inside our companies?  XiaoIce’s virtual chatbot accounts for sixty percent of all global human-AI interactions.  There are already 660 million users and it is designed to hook us by providing the levels of human interaction we cannot get in real life.  Danit Gal, an expert in AI ethics at Cambridge University says, “Users ‘trick’ themselves into thinking their emotions are being reciprocated by systems that are incapable of feelings”.  This is sad.    Nippon is not immune. Pre-Covid, Japan already had legions of fans, mainly young men, waving light sticks at concerts given by the very generously proportioned, long legged, big eyed, super cute, singing idol, Hatsune Miku.  Unfortunately, she isn’t real, because she is a hologram, an illusion.  If some people are that desperate for human interaction, that they fall in love with virtual chatbots and holograms, what can bosses do inside their companies, to provide that sought after human interaction quotient.  We spend a lot of time working under the care and supervision of bosses.   This discussion is particularly pertinent in the time of Covid, where we have been flung to the winds and don’t congregate that much in the office anymore, if at all.  Our team began working from home in February 2020.  We are still there.  Personally I have found getting hold of people much harder than when we were all in the office.  Trying to catch people by phone is a constant irritant, because it is hard to get hold of them.  The speed of communication has slowed down, as you have to wait to make contact.  You call they are not picking up, you leave a message. They don’t see the message, so you send an email. They don’t see the email, so it takes that extra time to communicate.   For the boss, this means that the work which needs to get done, isn’t getting worked on. The sense of time pressure goes up, as output deadlines are elongated and results production is slowed down.  In this type of scenario, the already busy boss become much busier.  The danger is that bosses become so focused on what they need to get done, that they lose touch with their team.  When you are barely getting through all the work on your plate for that day, the additional bandwidth to check in on other people just isn’t there.  Now we might be thinking, “no problem, my direct reports are keeping up close contact with their team members”.   Is this too optimistic?  Probably.  They are under similar time pressures to their boss.  It can easily become a systemic problem across the whole organisation.  It isn’t something we can just pigeonhole as a “younger person’s problem”.  Humans are social animals and for the last 18 months we have become individual units, sitting at home in isolation from one another.  There are people, of all ages, in our teams who need that human interaction.  Do we really want to abandon them to the dubious charms and comforts of a virtual chatbot?  Aren’t we sacrificing our people care responsibilities, on the altar of being super busy?   We can’t do everything, but we can do the most important things.  The issue then becomes one of prioritisation.  Are we sufficiently prioritising our people?  We might be thinking “of course I am, what a load of rubbish”.  There is truth in schedules and diaries.  Just go back a week or two and take a good look at where you were spending your time?  I will guarantee that viewed with the cold, hard eye of pragmatism, none of us were spending enough time for our people.  Were we encouraging our direct reports to be checking in in their team?  Again, the proof is in the records of meetings and team meeting minutes.  The ugly truth is we were no doubt assuming they knew what to do.  The other part of that ugly truth is they were probably doing just what we were doing – concentrating on their own work, head down and going hard at it.   We cannot let virtual chatbots replace the human touch.  It won’t necessarily happen by itself, so we have to be proactive and make it happen.  Step one is block out the time in our schedules.  If it isn’t sharp elbowed in there, then it probably won’t happen.  Step two is “just do it”.

The following scenario will feel familiar to Japan old hands.  The foreign enterprise hires the retired President of a local company to run their operation.  After five years it begins to become obvious the enterprise is getting nowhere.  The aging President is retired out of the company and HQ dispatches one of their local leaders to Japan to turn things around.  The brief is to get the Japan business moving and produce results.  To a hammer everything looks like a nail and the foreign change agent Hammer has just landed at Haneda Airport.    Things don’t look right to the Hammer.  The way of working isn’t the same as back home.  There seems to be plenty of institutionalised inefficiencies.  After some perfunctory meetings with direct reports, the orders start to flow from the Hammer.  Weeks go by and then the Hammer notices things which should be happening are not happening.  Thinking back, there was no resistance to the Hammer’s directives at the Department Heads’ meeting.  Everyone got their marching orders and knew what they needed to get cracking on.  But they are not cracking on, in fact they are not doing what they should be doing.   When the Hammer starts questioning direct reports on why there is no sign of any progress, the excuses, complaints and assorted problems come tumbling out.  The Hammer starts thinking about replacing his direct reports with people who will be more compliant to his will.  All the while his boss back at HQ wants to know why, given the Hammer has been there three months, nothing has improved as yet?  “What are you doing over there?  We expect results”.  None of this makes sense.  He was a successful change agent back in the home territory, able to turn teams around and get the revenues flowing.  After all, that is why he was picked for this job in the first place, he had a track record as a “change agent”.   As the Hammer starts to eliminate people who won’t toe the line, an unexpected turn of events occurs.  His boss tells him the Board has received anonymous letters accusing him of destroying the company’s relationships with key clients and that he has been sexually harassing female staff.  “What the hell are you doing over there?”, he is asked.  This type of conversation is guaranteed to drain the blood from your face, weaken you at the knees and generate heart palpitations.  Welcome to Japan, Hammer.   Just to place this scenario in context, imagine if a Japanese leader was sent to your branch as your boss and could only really communicate with the few Japanese speakers there.  He can’t read or write in the local language. He has no knowledge of the business locally, doesn’t understand the customers and is constantly pushing hard for changes.  Within short order he starts sacking your colleagues, because they have the temerity to say some of these changes are a bad idea and resist them.  How would you react?  What would you be thinking?  What would be the water cooler discussions vibe?   Okay, back to the scenario. Good talent starts heading for the exits.  They can see the train wreck coming, so they decide to jump out and because they are good, they have options.  The mediocre and the hopeless have no options, so they stay.    The new policies upset clients and business starts to get lost. People who were shunted out or chose to leave had deep, longstanding relationships with clients and these cannot be replaced easily or quickly.  The global employee annual satisfaction survey results are a horror show.  Results are not coming.  HQ recalls the Hammer and sends out Hammer Mark 2 to start again.   This time around, let’s start with understanding how the busines is constructed here. Let’sncover all the spider webs of relationships both within the organisation and externally.  Use your relationship with HQ to get the resources or localisation requests met.  Look for some quick wins for the teams.  Before you even get on the plane for Nippon get some strong air cover at HQ to allow you to not make the mistakes of your recently departed predecessor.   Start seriously studying Japanese language, culture, history and business.  Talk to the old timers here who have seen your like before, on how to avoid another train wreck. Hasten slowly but do hasten with changes that will make things better here without blowing up the operation or yourself.  Conscript influencers from within the system to support the needed changes.  But most of all really listen.  Try to find out why things are being done the way they are, before slashing and burning processes and systems.   This scenario has been played out so many times and each generation discovers it anew for itself.  Foreign business leaders come and go, but the Japanese market is still here, big, powerful and rich.  So try and be the foreign leader who is a builder, rather than a wrecker.

Never surrender, no capitulation, “quitters don’t win and winners don’t quit”, “when you are going through hell, keep going”.  The leader is the organisation’s rock, it’s talisman, the one who overcomes all.  The mindset is hard headed, stubborn, able to persevere no matter what.  Confusingly, the leader also has to be flexible, supple, adaptable and adjustable.  These opposites remind me of the yin yang symbol, the essence of dualism.  How should we leaders operate in this dualistic ecosystem, where we are called upon to be hard headed and yet pliable at the same time?   When you think about it, leaders become leaders because most other people just can’t be bothered.  As Yogi Berra, the American philosopher once noted, “Leading is easy.  It’s getting people to follow you which is hard”.  That is the reason most people are followers – leading others is hard work, problematic and stressful.    As the boss, we sometimes have to fire people who underperform and unless you are a corporate psychopath, this is unpleasant, wearing and difficult.  As the leader we have to drive our people to accept our world view is correct.  Now we may believe it, but why is it true?  What is so special about us, that we have a much clearer vision than everyone else, on where we need to go and what needs to happen?  Are we secretly suffering from imposter syndrome, where we are second guessing our own decisions or are we like a mad pirate captain, aggressively shouting out orders that must be obeyed or else?   As the leader, we have to be accountable for the results. However, we can’t do everything by ourselves these days, so we are forced to work through our people.  These are people who are totally different from us.  They are marching to the beat of many and various drums.  They also have secret drums, whose beat they never share with the boss.  There are hidden agendas flying around everywhere in the workplace. The boss has to corral all of these somehow and get the team to work together and toil away in harmony.  No wonder most people say “no thank you” and opt to be followers.   On top of all of this, the boss is busy, busy, busy. Working through people is fine as an idea, but the boss has a truckload of work to get through each day, to make sure things are moving forward as planned.    In this modern age, the time available to coach people has become a minimalist activity.  Also, the time to delegate properly to direct reports isn’t there.  Delegation easily drops off the leader’s radar.  This lack of delegation ability just boomerangs back into the boss’s orbit the work which should be done by others.  As the boss, we should be working only on those high value items which only we can do and we should be delegating everything else.  Good in theory, but for a reality check, when I take a hard look at my daily work schedule and routine I wince.    How open are we really to the opinions of our team?  We see a lot of mouthing of platitudes by leaders about management by wandering around.  This can often just become issuing orders and directives from a new location, other than their spacious corner executive office.    The platitudes come thick and fast when the subject of “servant leader” pops up.  When I hear “I am a servant leader”, my ears prick up, I brace myself and the cynical Aussie in me emerges.  We all get the idea.  We have to work through people and we have to become enablers, allowing others to be the best they can be.  All laudable stuff.  But how does all of this fit into the messy world of the busy, driven, take no prisoners, get the job done, hard head executive?  Who actually is serving who in reality?   If we do want to tap into the full potential of our teams, we will need to change our priorities and mindset.  We definitely should make more time for our team members to coach and encourage them.  I can hear the shrieks of pain already from many leaders, myself included. How can we do this? Let’s start by remember it isn’t the whole day we are talking about here.  Good so far, but we are talking about paying the opportunity cost of coaching someone versus doing other high value, urgent tasks.  I realise I have to face the fact this is the cost I need to pay and reorganise myself.   Our mindset also needs to incorporate there are many paths to the mountain top and accept that maybe we don’t know everything.  This is particularly hard because we are often reluctant to give up control and concede someone else’s idea is better than ours.  We didn’t become the leader because we doubted ourselves.  Can we concede others may have better ideas than we have?  How do we adjust to that approach, that angle?   In my own case, going for greater self-awareness is a good starting point.  This is how to realise that I have been hardwired by my experiences and attitudes to see the world in a certain way.   Consequently, I tend to lead a certain way, believing this is the “correct and only” way.    Conceding I am not perfect would have to be close behind.  Intellectually I know this, but I also know I am the leader and everyone is depending on me to be right and every time. How to do I regulate the perfection drive to incorporate more flexibility?  I struggle with this one all the time.   Let’s do the job to the best of our abilities and let’s not see flexibility as a weakness.  I have to constantly remind myself that while most people don’t want the hassles of being the leader, they can still have ideas and views which are a plus.  I can select what I like and leave what I don’t like.  I have to keep telling myself, “Greg, it is not a zero sum game anymore”.    The yin yang idea of dualism requires a flexible mindset, which requires work.  Like all hard work there are rewards at the end that make it worthwhile and this is another case, so let’s switch up our thinking about what it means to be a leader.  I’m still a work in progress and I probably need this message more than anyone else.

Marcel Danne, an Executive Coach whom I have never met or talked to, recently put up an idea on social media about how managers have a different perspective to leaders.  He contrasted how a manager’s priority is “know, feel and sense” while the leaders priority is “sense, feel and know”.  This is esoteric stuff at first blush, but it is a useful insight.  I was thinking about myself when I was a manager.    For some inexplicable reason I thought I knew what to do.  I was fully confident in my own ability and my feeling was that I had the answers and the clarity to know what we should be doing.  I had the get up and go to execute on my plan, keeping my head down and relentlessly bulldozering forward. The effort was centralised in me as the person accountable for the results. If I want your opinion, “then I will give it to you”, type of thing.  I wonder if other leaders can recognise themselves anywhere here?   Why are we so confident about our ideas and opinions and so uninterested in what anyone else thinks?  The way forward seems crystal clear.  Part of the reason may be the limited perspective of the manager.  I thought I had all the answers because I diligently self-educated after varsity, read voraciously, consumed information, put in the hours, worked extremely hard and pushed myself over the edge.  The latter proved to be a very expensive life-learning on multiple dimensions, but that is another article.   There is also the ego driving the self-belief, but often devoid of any great self-awareness.  Somehow when we are managers, the world seems straightforward and we push the limits to try and move quickly up the ranks.  What we need to be doing seems plainly obvious and there is no second guessing, because we are in action not in reflection.   Japan is interesting in that here “the first priority is not having the correct answers”.  Now that statement sounded quite weird to manager me.  I thought the correct answer had to be the top priority, otherwise what on earth are we managers supposed to be doing?  The other part of that Japanese line of thinking is, “Having the right questions is the main priority”.  Hearing that other shoe drop stops you in your tracks.  On reflection, I don’t recall spending any manager time on defining the correct questions, but a lot of time pursuing the execution of the right answers.   The “sense” part of my toolbox was limited.  The crash through or crash philosophy doesn’t care too much about the delicate feelings of the rest of the crew on the good ship “Manager”.  It was a lot of “my way baby or the highway”, “we brook no fools here”, “zero time for excuses”, “get out of the kitchen if you can't take the heat”, “lunch is for losers”.  All intense stuff, because I was intense, outcome driven, get to the top, brutal with myself and so not so open to considering “feelings”.   Eventually I started to reorder the line-up to have feelings more up the front.  A bell didn’t ring, so that I knew a change had occurred.  It was gradual and probably had a lot to do with following and teaching of the human relations philosophies of Dale Carnegie.  I know this is a trope in the USA, where shamed and ejected public officials discover Jesus and they make a comeback claiming they are “reborn”.  In my case I hadn’t thought about it, until a secretary who had worked for me in my “intense” time, came back to work for me at Dale Carnegie Training.  She didn’t say anything to me directly, but I heard through the grapevine that she was astounded at how much I had changed since she had taken time out of the workforce to have children and how much I had improved as a leader.  It was a survey of one, but I understood what she meant.   I am still very competitive.  However, I can also see that I can’t do it all by myself.  I need people with me because business and technology are too complex today to keep mimicking the John Wayne, Hollywood style of rugged individualism.  I am certainly more sensitive to peoples’ feelings than before, although I don’t see me winning too many gold medal prizes for my abilities just yet.  Let’s just say, I am improving and still have some way to go.   How about you? Where are you on this line-up of senses, feelings and knowing?  I found Marcel’s construct was a fresh way of examining myself and reflecting on what has been accomplished and where there still needs more work.  I would like to say I am the poster boy for the revolution, but that isn’t quite the case as yet.  Leadership is certainly a journey of self-discovery.  That thought just never bubbled up when I was a manager, so I guess there is some progress and some hope for me yet.  How about you?    

I remember the mockery, the cynical sneering, the derision about leaders having “visions”. The implication was they had lost the plot and were lurching into psychobabble. Being a cynical Aussie, I was probably one of the smarty pants commentariat pronouncing the whole thing a ragged jest.  Why was that?  I wish I had taken notes, but my memory tells me the content of those early leader vision efforts were trite, humdrum platitudes and so easily able to double hat as viable cures for insomnia.  So much has changed and the vision, mission and values of the organisation have become staples of leadership culture building focus.  A lot of the results of these efforts are still dubious though and It would be a good thing if your staff knew what the vision, mission and values actually were.  Objectively, if you can’t recall them, then it is impossible to own them or live them.   Unfortunately, staff don’t know them in many cases.  How do I know this? One of the party tricks for trainers going into corporate environments, is to swiftly unhook the beautifully framed vision, mission and value statements from the wall, rotate them 180 degrees such that the content can’t be seen.  Those assembled for the training are then asked to tell us the content.  In my experience, no one ever gets the vision or mission at all.  Collectively a training class of thirty employees may get two or three of the values right.  Why is that?   Sitting thirty floors above the daily melee, the big bosses in their quiet, comfortable corner offices, imagine that they are leadership legends and have effectively united the entire organisation around a common direction, through this holy trinity of the vision, mission and values.  Deluded would be a kind description.   Usually, the vision and value statements are too long, so no one can remember them. This is apart from the fact that the President wrote it, sadly without the benefit of any copyrighting skills or faint familiarity with wordsmithing.  The senior executive addiction for adding things to the content, has the direct negative effect of diluting the key message.  The opposite problem can be reducing the content down to a few words, which invariably churns up platitudinous, vapid cliches.  It is difficult to get excited about the banal.   We are a small company, so many years ago, we were able to get the whole team working on developing the content with my primary purpose being to foster ownership of the result.  That only works though if the poets, balladeers and lyricists stay with the company and no new people join.  Obviously that never happens and so now we have people who had no part in the original composition project.  If we were a major employer with battalions of people, it would be impossible to generate any sense of ownership through everyone’s contribution of words and ideas.  What needs to be done to bring these aspirational framed words to life?   This is what we do. Every morning at 9.00am we hold the Daily Dale.  This is a play on words given the founder of our firm was the famous Dale Carnegie.  The first order of business is we take turns to go through the Vision, Mission, and Values.  I stole this idea from the Ritz Carlton Hotel Group.  They have their same set pieces for every shift, in every location, world wide.  At the Ritz, the staff take turns leading the daily gathering, so it is not dominated by “very important” executives.  This egalitarian touch works because now the ownership is driven down the ranks.  I attended a week of training with them in Washington and sure enough, when we attended the executive team daily gathering, one of the secretaries led the proceedings, rather than the President.   So in our case, even if someone joined last week, they go through this pseudo inculcation exercise of reprising the vision, mission and values every morning.  We also feature one of the 60 Dale Carnegie Human Relations and Stress Management Principles for that day and the person leading the meeting talks about what that particular principle means for them.  Again, this is an effort to foster ownership of the principles. They are the core of our training philosophy.    Recently by executive fiat, I added a Strategic Vision.  I am a bit of a slow learner, but I realised that our current vision, penned by the team, talks about who we are and what we do for the changing the world and not so much about where we are going.  With Covid ravaging people’s health, the economy and in particular our training business, I saw that we needed to regroup for the post pandemic world, hopefully about to emerge over the next six months.  I hope I haven’t jinxed it by saying that!   So here are some reflective musings for you. Can your team pass the test of recalling the Vision, Mission and Values, if we turn up on your doorstep, to run some training sessions?  Are you an honorary Aussie cynic about all of this vision business and not a convert as yet?  Do you have a positive inculcation mechanism to instill these ideas and build a distinctive company culture, where these concepts are carefully arranged at the centre?  Do you need to recalculate the culture you want to create post-pandemic?    Hopefully we are approaching a brave new post pandemic world. Are you preparing for it now or are you still locked in the death roll with the virus?  Now might be the time to look up from the affray and look toward the future.

People are very creative, although many would not describe themselves that way.  This is often the case because the environment they have experienced has been unfriendly toward innovation.  Had they been given the right opportunity to be creative, then a lot of excellent previously untapped ideas would have come forth.  In firms, we do have idea sessions and sometimes even specific brainstorming sessions, but it is rare that these actually produce anything other than a major hole in our calendar.  Or sometimes we have the opposite problem.  There are some really good ideas generated and then nothing is ever done with them. They duly join all the other great, but wasted “dead on arrival” ideas, in the communal graveyard for corporate innovation.  Even if the leaders have done a good job and created a culture favouring innovation, there are still many leagues to travel, before any of these idea ever see their application light of day.    Ideas start individually.  The stimulation for the idea can come from anywhere and firm’s motivated idea generators are often constantly accumulating knowledge and tapping into networks, seeking glimmers and sparks for ideas. The bigger the networks and the broader the spread of attention, the more likely inspiration will strike.  We all want more creativity in our companies, which is good. However, ask yourself, “what quality and quantity of networks are we assisting our team members to tap into, to spur new ideas?”.   Ideas need careful cultivation. Firstly, we need to have staff sufficiently engaged to care to make things better around here.  That statement may eliminate a large chunk of the population right there.  Consistent engagement survey numbers in Japan place the “highly engaged” category in the 5%-7% range, which means the rest of the crew may be lukewarm about making any efforts to generate great ideas.  If you are turning up for the monthly pay packet, genius idea generation excitement may not be on your horizon.   The engaged person coming up with the idea will still need to have a clear understanding of the purpose of their work and the company’s direction.  Are the bosses in your company doing a good enough job communicating the WHY.  If we suddenly called the youngest, most junior staff, would they know what was the firm’s purpose? There is no point in building a better mousetrap, if the company strategy has pivoted all the attention and investment to cat breeding, as the central business model.  These engaged staff must also feel encouraged to step outside their comfort zone and try something new.  Why would they feel like that?  What are the senior leadership team doing on a daily basis to inculcate that type of “take risks in innovation” culture in the organisation?   The way the leaders communicate about new ideas and particularly, how they treat others who have gone down the innovation road, is the clear proof would-be creators are watching like hawks. They have to be competent, smart people in the first place to come up with worthwhile ideas. There are also poseurs, dilettantes and wannabes invading the field of firm idea generation. They may be the Dunning-Kruger poster children in the team, who believe they are smarter and more capable than they actually are and whose ideas are worthless.  This is tricky, because the leaders have to accept that there will be both wheat and chaff involved in the idea generation effort.  If smart people see that even not so smart people are encouraged to come up with ideas, they are likely to become braver and more confident about pushing their own “genius” ideas forward.   The idea still needs journey sponsors.  Others inside the company have to be able to see the idea’s potential.  Often there will be some form of collaboration to redirect the idea, expand it, shrink it , wrangle it and tweak it in a way which makes it more applicable for the business to pursue.   Imagining you can swan up to senior management with your shiny idea, without having gone through some harmonisation process, down in the belly of the machine, is usually wishful thinking.  You need allies, promoters and mentors.   Idea champions must emerge to shepherd the idea up the decision-making chain.  This sounds easy, except that most bosses are massively time poor and have very short concentration spans for anything other than what they need to be working on.  Their lives are a hapless series of meetings from dawn till late at night, with rabid emailing crushed into the gaps. There is also the problem of idea pirates boarding ship and stealing the idea for their own career acceleration.  Many a subordinate has seen the boss showcase their idea, as if it were their own, as they ingratiate themselves with the senior executives. You remain invisible, but your boss is celebrated, rewarded and promoted.   Selling ideas to senior management can be a fraught exercise depending on the company’s situation.  If the company is losing money, there is little appetite for anything but firing people and slashing and burning their way out of trouble.  Ideas require investments of time, human resources and cash in most cases – all of which are generally in short supply at the best of times.  Having a great idea at the wrong time isn’t helpful.  Microsoft launched their Microsoft Tablet a decade ahead of Steve Job’s iPad and in 2004 they launched their Microsoft SPOT Watch, again many years ahead of Apple’s IWatch’s 2015 debut.  Both Microsoft products failed, but both proved great successes for Apple.  Timing, timing, timing.   Having an express lane created for good ideas make a lot of sense.  Getting smart ideas in front of the top people is key.  Being able to shepherd good ideas through the firm’s convoluted internal systems is a differentable advantage.  Skipping layers however is a political minefield in Silo Land, but if the express lane is there, then blocker megalomaniac middle management bosses can be cleared in a single bound, like a running back over a linebacker.  So do you have such an express lane for good, new ideas in your company?   The ideas are there, hidden away perhaps, but they are there.  The leader’s job is to usher them forth and up the decision making chain of command, until they become a reality.  The boss cohort’s inability to apply ideas is one of the great white collar crimes of leadership in the modern era.        

Innovation is not the monopoly of the R&D Department.  Everyone of our staff has highly tuned antennae which pick up valuable commercial intelligence about consumer trends, supplier data and client feedback.  Just because they are not wearing white lab coats, doesn’t mean their insights should be ignored.  Yet that is what we do in most companies.  Innovation is the application of creative ideas into practical products and services.  The germ of the idea is where the creativity component comes in and this is available to anyone.  The journey from creative idea to idea application treads a path which transcends the scope of one individual.  This is where the wheels fall off and most companies cannot capitalize on the latent creativity inside their firms.   Our recent global survey on creative ideas at work uncovered some disturbing findings.  Given the intense competition in the marketplace for companies, you would expect that leaders would be doing all they could to seize and shepherd creative ideas through to application.  Yet the survey showed that only 21% of leaders were really actively seeking ideas from anywhere and anyone in their organisations.  Only 23% of survey respondents answered that it is very easy to get support for good ideas in their firm.   That germ of an idea will start with one person, but will it start at all?  If you don’t care about the firm and you are not engaged, you don’t care if the mousetrap being built is better or not.  Our research on the emotional triggers for high engagement showed that leaders need to make their people feel valued, confident, empowered and connected.  These are all leader soft skills and depend on attitude orientation and communication skills to work.  However, the numbers do not look promising.  Only 27% of respondents said their manager makes them feel really valued, just 24% strongly agree they feel empowered and 62% said they don’t feel particularly confident in their skills and abilities at work.   Purpose is a key word in business today.  Are the leaders actively promoting an emotional connection to the team’s work?  Are the daily tasks being connected back to the company’s purpose by the leader?  You might be thinking, “no problem, I do that”.  However, if we recorded your conversations with your staff for a full day, how much time would have been spent connecting work with purpose?  By the way the boss waxing lyrical about “shareholder value” won’t cut it, as a defining purpose for the staff.  We need a higher purpose here to motivate people to get out of first gear.   Psychological safety is a phrase we didn’t anything about at work until recently.  Today, crusty old leaders like me, have to re-invent ourselves and become more skilled at creating, coaching and maintaining workplace psychological safety.  This is not that easy.  Many of us grew up in the “suck it up” ethos of fight or flight.  “If you can’t take it, then leave and we will replace you with someone tougher who can handle the pressure”.  Namby-pamby whiners complaining about their lack of psychological safety are an affront to everything we did in our careers, because we did tough it out and we did climb the greasy pole to the top.    So what?  That is not the current workplace. Times have changed and we have to change with them.  The War for Talent is unending and is actually becoming more intense.  We can’t throw people overboard today,  because replacing them will be a nightmare. We just cannot afford to ignore people with ideas, because we are running the show like a demented pirate captain.   If the environment is considered safe for idea generation then there is a higher willingness to take risks such as putting forward new and original ideas.        

Regardless of what level of leader we are, from neophyte to legend, there are four attributes which we need to master and keep remastering, because business never sleeps.  There are leaders who are busy, busy working in their business and then there are those who make the time to work on their business.  The biggest component of working on their business should be working on themselves.  This however tends to be neglected.  We graduate from varsity, learn on the job, maybe we can lob in an executive education week, at a flash, brand name business school, but the day to day consumes us.  Before you know it, the last serious work on yourself as a leader was many, many years ago.  Often all you have to show for the passage of time is a thinning hairline or more grey (or both), a more generous waistline and higher blood pressure.   Leadership as a discipline requires constant study.  We need people to work longer, so the generations in the workplace have increased up to five for the first time in history.  Younger people grow up digital natives, seem terrified of the phone in many cases and often lack sufficient interpersonal skills, because they spend all their time staring at screens.  In Japan’s case formal leadership education is rare because most firms don’t invest and default to the OJT (On The Job) training model. A few generations of this and the wheels fall off.  Covid forcing leaders to operate in a remote online environment, exposed the weaknesses in the leadership cohort education systems.  Many of our clients contacted us to get to work to fix the issues.   The areas of greatest weakness tend to be: (A) poor time management, especially not having a rock solid system for prioritising time usage and then having discipline to spend their time working on only the most important items, when they are at their freshest. (B) Delegation of tasks, so that the boss can work on the highest value items that only the boss can do.  Delegation tends to be a fertile training ground for subordinates, to prepare them to step up and take accountability at a higher level.  Bosses who hoard work, because they don’t know how to delegate properly are denying their staff the opportunity to grow.  (C) Coaching is one of those high value tasks which is always sanctified but little practiced.  Bosses confuse barking out orders like a mad pirate captain with coaching.  When we shadow bosses and at the end of the day show them how many actual minutes they spent coaching their staff, they are universally aghast at how little time they are investing in their people.   Selling is a boss job for both internal and external audiences.  Some bosses though, mistake spruiking for selling.  Sales is mainly listening to the answers to supremely well crafted questions. The remainder of the time is spent asking follow up questions and introducing solutions.  Bosses need to sell their vision and direction for the company to the team, stakeholders and the shareholders.  If the boss has come up through the sales track, then there is a hope that they can do this well.  If they are technical people, who have come to occupy the hot seat, this idea may be foreign, even repugnant to them.  Nevertheless, bosses not only have to be able to sell, they have to master all of the medium touchpoints which now populate our business universe.   Communication skills maketh the leader today.  Bosses have to be able to compose and deliver messages, all the while being paragons of clarity and conciseness.  This is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so the task to get our message across has become unbearably complex and difficult.  Staff are time poor, constantly minimising everything, swimming against the daily tsunami of emails and tramping from one meeting to the next.  They are often not devoting the right amount of time to digest the boss’s messages.   The related skill here is giving presentations.  In this modern era, a boss who cannot give a sterling presentation won’t be boss much longer or won’t rise above their current station.  There are best practices for delivering presentations and a boss who doesn’t know them is defective.  I was astounded to witness a gaggle of executives give two minute talks on why they should be elected by their peers to executive council positions.  These were captains of industry in charge of brand name firms with large numbers of people and significant revenues.  They were shockers.  How could that be?  They obviously hadn’t received any training on how to present and it embarrassingly it was obvious to all.   The modern boss has to be a multi-tasking wizard, waving magic wands across leadership, sales, communications and presentation skills.  This is not an opt in function or a nice to have.  We are speaking of necessities here, because if your rival has the full package and you don’t, they will win and you will lose.  We don’t want that do we!

We are often leadership practitioners, rather than genteel philosophers, pontificating on leadership issues.  Yet, we have probably developed a certain style of leadership nevertheless.  We just haven’t focused on it as a methodology, because we are too busy doing it.  We leave the books and articles to the academics, who study this stuff with intellectual rigour, complete vast research projects and then write about business from atop their ivory towers.  Or we leave it to other successful business people to have ghost writers assemble their mad ramblings into a coherent form and get it published.  Or we have that rare bird amongst businessmen, someone who can write their own tome on the subject.   If we think about the concept of kaizen, continuous improvement, it would make sense to apply this to ourselves, as leaders in our businesses.  We should take a moment and examine just what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it.  In this way, we can analyse where there are gaps, inadequacies and fluff.  Maybe we received our business education in the University of Life or maybe at varsity, but we cannot rest on what went before, because business keeps changing.   Sometimes you will read a book on leadership and think to yourself, “I could have written that”.  It is a bit like comparing your kids daubs at playschool with some modern art and see the results as basically the same.  The big difference is you didn’t try and product that piece of art and you didn’t write a book.   The process of getting your random thoughts into a clear and coherent story is the discipline of the writer.  We don’t have to publish a book on leadership.  If we search “leadership” on Google we get one billion eight hundred and seventy million results. On the US Amazon site it lists over sixty thousand books on leadership, so do we really need another book on the subject?  However that same discipline needed to write a book is useful to uncover why we do what we do and why we think what we think.   Start by breaking down what you do as a leader.  This will be a bit of a shock, because you will quickly realise that you spend a lot of time managing and doing work, but it is not actually leading.  That in itself is a good breakthrough to remind us that we need to work on the highest value items. One of those must be getting results through others and that means more time should be spent on leading the team.   We can take a look at strategy.  Is this just some fluff we pump out each year to keep HQ happy and we really haven’t spent any significant time educating ourselves on strategies for growing our company?  Have we noticed that a lot of what we do is down in the trenches and we are not spending any time standing on a sunny upland contemplating the bigger world and devising a strategy for the future direction of the business?   We might reflect on our communication.  Another shocker.  We notice that we are telling people what to do most of the time.  We are not engaging them to see what they think, to plumb their experience and garner their ideas.  We are shouting out orders like a pirate captain.  We also notice that we don’t communicate much about the big issues facing the business.  We don’t do many town halls or regular update emails to keep everyone abreast of what is going on.   If we attended a meeting of the regional heads for APAC or a get together with the top brass back at HQ, we keep it all to ourselves and forget to share the findings with the team.   How much time do we spend on motivating the team?  This is a trick question because we cannot motivate the team. We can only create the culture and environment where they motivate themselves.  If you don’t believe me, try shouting “be motivated” ten times to any staff member and watch the results.  Leaders get the culture they deserve, so what have you been doing on the culture build front as a leader.  Nothing much?   It is a simple exercise to break down the various aspects of leadership in your business and then examine just what you are doing as opposed to what you should be doing.  Yes, it is  a bit scary, but better to be scared by yourself than a rival or the market.  If it goes well, it might be time to reach for the search tool for that ghost writer or getting busy typing yourself.

Covid is raging again, but we can see the end, be it this year or next year. It will finally stop being our total focus.  So many lives, livelihoods and businesses have been destroyed by this pandemic.  Ali Bab is a nice little French Restaurant near my office in Akasaka that has been closed since January.  Will they be able to reopen?  Hopefully they and many other businesses will do so and we can all get back to some semblance of normality.    That means we will see an uptick in business activity as consumer demand is reignited.  In that mix we will see the re-booting of the “war for talent”.  Many bosses have been weighing the cost of losing staff against the gain in cash flow, through lowering one of the biggest expenses in business – people.  Some businesses may have to re-hire staff they laid off, if they can, or find replacements. All of this activity is likely to happen roughly around the same time, so there could be a hiring frenzy.  Recruiters will start calling your best people to offer them new employment opportunities somewhere else.  The two big questions are why would new people join you and why would your people stay?   There is a lot more information available about businesses today than ever before and prospective employees will likely search out news, gossip and background on your company.  Japanese people are serious about their work and they have not absorbed the Western ways of job hopping, that are so prevalent in our societies.  They don’t move around much, so if they are going to join you, they are likely to be thinking they will stay with you forever or at least for many, many years.  Coming on board is a major decision. Now as employers, what messages are we giving out to the world via our website, social media and word of mouth about our firm and what it is like to work there?   One of the key reasons we can keep our people is the internal culture we leaders have built.  They can get more money and better working conditions somewhere else perhaps, but not the culture.  Culture build is about authenticity, maintaining and living stated values and boss communication skills.  This is expensive.  Why?  Because to build the culture and to be consistent in maintaining it, takes up the most expensive and valuable resource in any company – boss time.  This is why most companies don’t make the necessary investment.  Leaders imagine that culture build is someone else’s responsibility, say in the HR department or over there in marketing and PR.  Big mistake.   The leader gets the culture they deserve.  If the time is not invested, then nothing magical is going to happen and there won’t be much going on in the way of differentiation.  As bosses, we think we have given the message clearly and it has been received.  The thing that is always amazing is how little of the message actually sinks in.  You tell the team something and then in short order, you find they don’t get it.  Here is the time factor again.  “Efficient” bosses will message once and just move on to their next meeting.    Culture building bosses know they have to bang that drum continuously for it to sink in.  I read somewhere that ad creatives get sick of their own ads a lot faster than those who are consuming them.  It can be the same with our messaging – we get sick of it before the troops do.  We have to get the key messages out again and again and in different formats, because people are wired differently in how they absorb information.   This communication discussion is not limited to just internal recipients.  How much effort and time is the leader allocating to getting the key messages out to the world, to prospective employees.  We often make the mistake of putting some colourless message on the website on the “President Greeting” page.  It reads like pap, sounds like pap and is pap.  Are we talking about the culture, the values, how we think about our people and are we doing it in an authentic voice?  The PR department may be thinking only about shareholders when writing the content, but with the talent war looming, it might be a good idea to compose some fresh messaging to appeal to new employees.   The internal culture has to be real and we have to be congruent.  It can’t be a corporate Potemkin village of sublime wonder, when the workplace reality is actually more reminiscent of a Gulag.  Internal and external realities have to match up.  This takes time – that word again!  Most leaders have been scrabbling around since February 2020 trying to fathom how to survive.  Now is the time to attract great new staff, who through no fault of their own have been tossed into the street.  It is also the time to build or refine an unassailable culture which no unprincipled, eagle eyed, silver tongued, dreamy looking recruiter can easily pry your best people from.  If you already have a great culture, then get to work letting everyone know about it. Get out there and shout it from the rooftops of social media, so all can hear your siren call of “this is a great place to work, because you will love the culture here”.

The faintest glimmer of hope is reflecting off a trillion hypodermic needle tips, as we vaccinate our way out of the Covid pandemic nightmare.  Very shortly, we will be back into it, but actually what will we be doing in this totally time shifted world.  We have lost nearly two years of our normal lives, as well as millions of loved ones, through this virus.  My colleague Matt Norman in Minnesota gave a presentation at our virtual Dale Carnegie Owner’s Meeting which focused on some of the challenges we will face going forward and I have adapted it for Japan.  Here are five trends we need to start thinking about.   Managing a split workforce Covid will be contained, but many in our workforce won’t be satisfied to be contained in the office anymore.  They want the freedoms of working from home to continue to some extent.  Regimented lives, genie like, have tasted freedom and won’t be so easily stuffed back in the 9 to 11 bottle.  How do we avoid a two class system evolving of those present and accounted for and those invisible men and women no longer in the boss’s line of sight?  How do we make sure information is flowing freely, quickly, accurately and equally throughout the organisation?   Selling virtually forever By definition, if buyers are working from home, then selling online will continue.  Listening to our clients, most Japanese salespeople have made a mess of it so far and so how long can this situation be tolerated?  A big proportion of selling will go back to face to face, but not all.  Are we just going to give up on the virtual sales component and leave that to our rivals to rule the field of business battle?  Why can’t salespeople do both and do both at a very high skill competency level?   Leading to foster agility and resilience Leaders in Japan were outed for their actual lack of competent leadership skills during the work from home phenomenon.  Covid really showed how inflexible the systems were and how unagile firms were in Japan.  Resilience and dealing with change are skills which can be learnt.  The irony has been that most organisation stopped their training during Covid and tried to tough it out.  Agility’s biggest enemies are inertia, red tape, politics, factional infighting, overly extended decision making processes and working in isolated silos.  The base solutions to these problems are building real trust and dramatically improving communication.  How do you do that when the team are scattered to the winds and are not that interested in going back to the old ways?   Leadership capability creation at all levels Japan doesn’t seem to function well in a crisis.  I believed in Japan Inc and the Japanese Government until the January 1995 Kobe earthquake.  Much was revealed then. Natural disasters are part and parcel of life here – earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, landslides, floods, etc.  Yet we didn’t seem to learn much and when the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown combo hit, again the leadership was lacking.  The 2020 Covid pandemic has been frustrating, especially seeing how poor the leadership has continued to be.  Inside companies we need a culture where our people are confident to step up and become accountable and lead.  This will never happen by itself.  We need leaders who can create that environment and when we do that, speed of action becomes a powerful competitive advantage.    Post Covid employee engagement Covid has raised a lot of questions about life, death, values, family.  Are leaders thinking to get everyone back to the salt mines and work them like dogs, seeing them catch the last train home night after night.  We have a severe population decline which is going to up the ante in business’s war for talent.  Inflexibility will come at a concrete cost, as your people flee to a better home somewhere else.  Why would they do that?  Because the leaders are not able to understand the new reality and cannot respond to the changes needed.  Leader communication skills, which were already tatty and quite poor before, will become own goal lethal in this new zero sum game.   While the pandemic pounds us with a continual barrage of issues, problems, inadequacies, contradictions and challenges, we tend to hunker down in our fox holes and hope for the best.  “Hope”, as they say in the classics, “is not a great strategy”.  What are the key issues we need to address as we begin to poke our noses above the parapet?  It is clear we need to be thinking differently, because we are not going back to what was.  So what are you thinking about the future world of work and what are doing about it today?      

The most fatal words ever spoken by a leader are , “it will be faster if I do it myself”.  No it won’t.  If you want to scare yourself, sit down and write down all the tasks that you face both regular and irregular.  That is one long, long list for leaders.  Are you really going to be able to get through all of these items and take care of filing your taxes on time, see the kids sports events, have a romantic dinner with your partner, lie on the couch and read a book, magazine or the newspapers?  In short, you won’t, because you will be working all of the time, putting off life to earn a living.  The treadmill you should be the on is the one down at the gym, not the one where you are working like a dog, because you are trying to do it all yourself.   Inherently, we know we should delegate, but we have had prior bad experiences with it and are now gun shy about using this important tool in our leader toolkit.  When I was growing up in Australia there was a common expression that “a good workman doesn’t blame his tools”.  Delegation gets a bad rap because it is a misused tool and the tool itself is fine.  What we are mistaking is dumping for delegating.  What does dumping look like?  My old boss at Jones Lang LaSalle literally dumped two huge file collations on my desk, with a “whump”, they were so thick.  He just said “take care of this” and walked away.  I had to take on the work in those files, but there was no guidance, no instructions, I just had to work it by myself.    Is there a simple and better way to make sure that as the leader we are only working on the most high level tasks that only we can do? Here is an eight step process to make delegation work for you.   Step One: Identify The Need Among the many tasks facing us, which ones will lend themselves to being delegated and what does a successful delegation outcome look like in our mind?   Step Two: Select The Person This may sound counterintuitive, but select the person on the basis of how this delegated task will help them achieve their goals.  Wait a minute?  Isn‘t the delegation about me achieving my leader goals of getting work off my leader desk?  Actually no.  We are focused on using delegation to build leader bench strength in the organisation not playing “pass the parcel” at work.  Think about the team and identify which strengths need attention and how this piece of work will build this person’s capabilities.   Step Three: Plan The Delegation Meeting We don’t plan to fail, but we fail to plan and this is one of the big missing pieces in the delegation puzzle.  Leaders will just willy-nilly grab the person and starting downloading what they want them to do, without thinking the conversation through in any meaningful way.  There are three sub-goals involved here. Desired outcome – what is the outcome to be accomplished and what does success look like? Think ahead to be able to explain what is in it for the person receiving the task. Current Situation – Clearly analyse where we are today both internally and externally. What factors may hinder or help this delegation? Goals – Define and set goals which are reasonable and yet challenging.   Step Four: Hold The Delegation Meeting There are four subset goals. Identify their vision or goals. We are trying to align the task with their own goals so we need to be clear what is in it for them. Identify specific results to be achieved. We need to make success clear and also talk about the strengths they have which will allow them to succeed in this task. Outline the rules and limitations. There are bound to be resource limitations around time, money and people.  These need to be made clear from the start. Review the performance standards. To what level of sophistication are they required to deliver results?   Step Five: Create A Plan Of Action We don’t create the plan – they do.  This is important to  give them authority and ownership of how this task gets done.   Step Six: Review Their Plan They create it but we must check it so that we are all on the same page and have a clear understanding of what happens next.   Step Seven: Implement the Plan If there are other people going to be impacted by the plan then the leader’s job is to clear the way and provide any needed air cover, while the task is under way.   Step Eight: Follow Up Without micro managing the task, the leader needs regular progress updates so that everything is going as expected and there are no surprises at the end.   None of these steps are diabolically difficult or complex.  Well then, why don’t all leaders follow them?  It could be because they haven’t thought about a process for delegation or they fear the time required for Steps Three and Four.   Stop procrastinating.  These two steps, Three and Four, are not that big a time steal, so suck it up and get going.  You will never have the time available which you need, unless you start seeing delegation as a tool to develop the talents of your subordinates and treat the whole process that way.  Delegation is just Latin for coaching!    

Shareholders put up their future security in the hope of increasing their returns and adding further to their security.  They take risk of losing some or all of their dough.  CEO remuneration is often tied to how well they increase value for shareholders by driving the share price up and paying out regular fat dividends.   Customers buy the product or service, so without them being enthusiastic, the scale of the revenues will fall and so will the share price and dividends.  Without engaged employees, the customer won’t be satisfied with the quality of the solution or the service provision.  If you don’t care about the company, then you are unlikely to care about the firm’s customers.  These interests are not always aligned, so where does the leader need to assign attention?   There is no business without a customer and the reason you have customers is because your staff make sure you have repeater customers, rather than single transactions.  CEO attention however is not always focused on the staff.  They can see the staff as a tool for arbitrage in order to get more revenues.  The “pay em low and charge em high” type of mantra.  The USA has confused the world with its up to 300 times ratio between the CEO remuneration and the lowest paid employee.  The fact that many failed leaders of big corporations get hundreds of millions of dollars when they are forced out is also astonishing.   I don’t see that as a sustainable model for Japan.  As leaders here we need to be focused on recruiting and retaining the best team members we can afford.  Recruiting them will only become more fraught in Japan and retaining them will be ever challenging.  The way to attract people is by having very deep pockets and paying tons of dough to the staff.  If that isn’t an option, then we need to build a culture where staff will trade money for the environment.  Getting paid a lot of money to work in a toxic environment isn’t sustainable and eventually people crack and look for a better environment to work in.   How can we engage our staff so that they don’t want to leave and while they are with us, they want to work hard for the enterprise and want to support each other in that process?  Gallup’s 2021 survey in the US found that 36% of staff were engaged, 50% were either indifferent or compliant and 14% were disengaged.  Japan is hard to judge with these Western surveys.  Japanese staff are conservative in their estimations because they are always thinking in absolute, rather than relative terms. Also, questions such as, ”would you recommend our company as a place to work for your friends or relatives?”, have a lot of cultural issues in Japan, that we don’t have in the West.    This is one of those key “engaged or disengaged” decider questions in these surveys.  Japanese staff don’t want to take the responsibility in either direction.  They don’t want their friends complaining to them about the company they have now joined.  They also don’t want to have the company complaining to them about their friend they have just introduced.  Better to give this question a low score. Overall Japanese surveys are always at the bottom globally but is that really an accurate reflection of the workforce?   What do staff want?  Here is what we found from our surveys looking at the emotional drivers of engagement.  Number One was they want the leaders to have a sincere interest in the employee’s well being. The key word  here is “sincere”.  This means taking a holistic view of the employee and not seeing them as an arbitrage opportunity or a tool to spoon up more revenues.  Another key phrase is “well being”.  In this modern age employees are taking responsibility for their kids, but also for their parents, as the latter age.  That means they need a supportive work environment that puts health and family health above company health.    Sounds sensible, but is that the case down at your shop?  As the leader, is that how you are talking and making decisions?  Is this an approach that is sustained right throughout the enterprise from top to bottom?  Are all the leaders walking the talk, starting with you?  There is much more required beyond mere words and slogans to make these approaches the daily reality.  Coaching and communication skills for leaders will rank at the top to encourage staff to believe what the company is saying.  How would you rank these two skill sets across your leadership bench?  If it isn’t where it needs to be, what are you doing about it?  Everything is related to everything else, so it needs a complete solution rather than a fragmented result.  How is that coming along?

We are all striving to survive these VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) fraught and frightening times.  Covid has taken huge numbers of vibrant people.  The loss to families has been immense and devastating.  Companies have lost collective corporate memories, a hoard of rich experiences and real wisdom.  The survivors carry on, never assured they will not succumb too at some point.  Vaccinations proffer the opportunity to secure herd immunity and defeat the spread of the virus.  What next for those survivor leaders and what do they need to be working on for a post-pandemic world?   Own The Future Well organized leaders lead intentional lives.  What does that mean?  They have goals and plans and they calibrate and recalibrate their progress.  They are brutally buffeted, but not thrown totally off course by unpredictable, violent direction changes.  The ancients believed that their fate was not at their determination.  Many of our staff are still with the ancients on that one and are not leading intentional lives.  Many leaders have seen Covid throw the commerce rulebook right out the window, but their True North is still there.  Now is the time to work on the team and rebuild their belief in the future of the firm.  We need to reintroduce the idea of leading intentional lives for everyone in our crew.   The company Vision, Mission and the Values may need a real refresh thanks to the pandemic.  Knowing where you are going, clarifying what you do and who you are makes sense in a senseless pandemic. Now is a good time to work together and re-create these behavior drivers and help the team to become more intentional about their future prospects.  Probably no one could recite the old versions from memory anyway, so this time let’s make that possible.  If you cannot remember them, you won’t be living them.  How can we get all the important things which need to be included into a format which we can recite from memory, simply and easily?  This is a good problem for the team to work on together and reinforce the sense of ownership.   Craft Culture Every leader gets the culture they deserve.  Covid has brutally exposed the leaders who had failed to build a robust culture in their team.  Things break down when you don’t have good teamwork.  When we work in isolation, we can depend on others much more than when we are all together in the office.  Small tears in the fabric of cooperation became gaping wounds very quickly. Now is the opportunity to tune up the existing culture or to create an even better one.  When the culture weaknesses have been exposed, it becomes painfully  plain what needs to be done.    Unfortunately, leaders who have failed to unite the team during the pandemic will be unable to do much. Frankly, their credibility has been trashed.  What is the organisation’s plan for them – continued neglect, retraining, the axe or do nothing? The stronger leaders will have seen their team culture strengthen under their leadership and become a formidable weapon in the market.  As workplaces come out of the pandemic, it will be time for some serious weapon wielding.   Collaborators Will Win The strong, silent John Wayne hero type leader is too expensive.  The opportunity costs of not achieving collaboration critical mass cannot be denied.  Leaders have had to coagulate disparate team members working at home in isolation from each other, into a powerful collaborative team.  This melding process isn’t easy even when everyone can see and talk with each other every day in the workplace.  The exodus to our homes just adds that deadly dimension of separation that increases the leader’s difficulty of keeping it all together and going smoothly.   The business world is too complex today for any of us as leaders to imagine we can do it on our own.  We need 1+1=5 outcomes.  There is a lot of coordination grunt effort required, which is one reason why many leaders cannot pull it off.  Those who have managed it, can migrate into a post-Covid world with a powerful collectivization of the team’s intellect, experience and insights achieved.   Critical Communication Skills The first casualty of leadership during Covid was communication.  The traditional leader casting a carefully trained eye over those beavering away at their desks, had suddenly lost all visibility of what was going on.  Leadership fault lines, previously masked, hidden and indulged were rapidly exposed.  Frantic times makes inept leaders frantic and their tempers snap. Not good. Feeling valued by the boss is the springboard to engagement in teams.  Capable leaders were able to communicate that to their team, despite their work location.  In fact, the isolation amps up the need for many team members to feel valued and if that is not being communicated, Netflix and Clubhouse are the press of a button away.   Like a convoy escort, the effective leader learnt how to keep everyone together and moving forward.  Motivating and encouraging people replaced scolding, cajoling and criticizing.  Explaining the location of True North over and over, constantly stressing the WHY and creating the right narrative all proved powerful.  This facility must be kept in perfect working order for the days ahead when people again can gather together in an office.   The samurai sword is beaten, heated for red hot tensile strength and plunged into cold water over and over again in order to harden the blade.  Covid is beating us mercilessly. Organizationally, we leaders have to harden up and help our team members to become more resilient, flexible, cooperative and accountable.  If we can't manage that and our rivals can, then we are in for a depressing, remorseless post Covid business gloom of missed business opportunities. 

If the client complains directly to your staff member about their poor service, should you go to bat for your team member?  Should you publicly apologise and deal with the errant staff member privately?  Should you make a public show of solidarity with the staff member and criticise the manner in which the complaint was made?  Should you aggressively argue the point with the client?  Should you just ignore it and get back to other pressing matters?    The answers to these real life situations will differ, depending on the culture of your society and your legal system.  America is a very litigious society and there seems to be a built in reflex to not admit guilt, accountability or responsibility.  The upshot of this positioning is to ignore what was said to your staff member and hope it goes away naturally, after the client has gotten their complaint off their chest.  Privately, the boss can then commiserate about the “nasty” client and bond with the staff member.   Loopholes are always in high demand in these tense situations.  The favourite one is to complain about how the client communicated the complaint.  If the client is really losing it and abusing the staff member, that is great for the boss.  Now their high horse can be mounted and a full attack on the unreasonableness of the client can be commenced.  It is a bit trickier when there is no name calling and no florid abuse of the staff members stupidity.  A clear outline of the staff member’s failings by the client is annoying, because it is hard to beat it back. An attack on the language can be made anyway and various deductions made about the “accusatory” nature of the remarks and appeals made for fair play.  If the labour market is tight, the boss may be prepared to lose a client in order to retain a key staff member.   How about Japan?  Arguing the point with the client is unthinkable.  The same applies to taking responsibility and accountability.  Japanese clients expect this and if it is not forthcoming, they will keep pushing until they get it.  No sweeping under the tatami is acceptable here in Japan.  The concept that the client has to be moderate in their communication of their complaint is a non-starter.  The client is allowed to be as obstreperous as they like and the guilty party has to accept it.   So as the boss, how do you deal with your staff member?  Do you hang them out to dry and bear the full force gale of invective from the client, as a good lesson in client service requirements?  Do you stand up for them and defend them against the client’s claims, while privately reading them the riot act?  Do you decide the staff member is someone you would rather retain than the client?    I have recently been in all three of these scenarios.    I have been the aggrieved client, observing the American style of “shift the blame back to the complaining client” model.  I stood by my team member’s claim against the service provider and went hard to support the argument that the service provision wasn’t good enough.  When the shape shifting kicked off, I went even harder to counter that nefarious attempt to slip out of the noose.  I have fired the client.  A very unpleasant client began belittling one of my salespeople, when speaking about her.  I did not accept that libellous affront and staunchly defended the staff member, without hesitation.  I then told my salesperson to fire that client and don’t deal with them ever again and to keep a note in our CRM, for when they get fired and pop up in another company.  Life is short and they are not the type of person we want to spend any time with, so we should get rid of them forever.  And we did.   I have screwed up.  I have had to go hat in hand and apologise to the client for my shortcomings.  I have had to sit there and be berated by the client, at length and in great detail, for the error.  I had to be not only accountable, but also sincerely remorseful and apologetic.  I had to determine to give the money back, without ever being asked to do so.   In principle, we should accept responsibility for our service or product provision and when it is inadequate we should accept the blame and do everything we can to fix it. No mealy mouth platitudes or counter offensives about “inappropriate language”.  We should be the one to bear the client’s wrath and deal with our staff members in private.  Is the client always right – no.  We should stand ready to fire the client too, if that is what the situation calls for.  None of this is easy, but we have to determine what we mean, when we say we are in the business of serving clients.  We have to set the example for everyone to follow and we have to be consistent.                

“October this year is when we can expect the turn around to kick off here in Japan”.  Being the sunny optimist from Australia, that land of vast horizons and sweeping plains, that sounded doable a few months ago.  Now we have a fourth wave, hospitable beds in Osaka are full and no room for new cases, as the numbers surge.  This is the fourth lockdown and this current iteration has been almost continuous this year since the start of January.  The vaccine roll out is slow and projections are grim.  The best case scenario is that we have three more lockdowns between now and March 2022.  The worst case scenario is that we have four lockdowns during that period.   So how do you plan anything in such a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world?  The basics don’t change however, so let’s revisit them.  We need to be clear about our purpose, our WHY. We do this through our Vision, Mission and Values.  This stuff is not outdated.  It is the glue we need to meld the team together and help each other get through this pandemic.  We may need to take a hard look at the content, because Covid-19 may be forcing a re-think and a re-write.  Having these statement hanging on a wall in an empty office, because everyone is working from home, makes them inert.  We need to inject them into our daily work.  In our case, we go through them with everyone, every day at 9.00am to start the day off together with a common understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it.   We need to re-adjust and refine our goals continuously, because the situation keeps changing.  These are likely to be refinements, than major changes by now, given we are nearly 18 months into this pandemic.  Any need for major interventions should have taken place already.  If that hasn’t happened as yet, then today is a good time to start.   Once we have adjusted our goals to reflect reality, we need a strategy to make them happen.  This is needed to help us better define what things we should be working on.  There are many things we could be working on, but which ones will have the most impact?  Once we have made our choices between multiple possibilities, we need to start specifying what the activities of the team should be and how we are going to measure them.   We also need to have a system for easy monitoring of the key result activities being undertaken and their outcomes.  We don’t want to bury ourselves in bureaucracy though, so the right level of touch is needed, to keep track of things directionally, rather than micromanaging everything and just annoying our people.   The tasks need some performance standards attached to them, so that our team members know if they are doing what is needed or not.  This is often left out by bosses, as they just concentrate on the outcomes and don’t look at the processes for achieving outcomes.  How will the staff know if they are doing what is needed and especially in a situation where they are working in isolation from everyone.  Bosses need to be laser beam focused on communication at this point.  It takes a lot of effort to contact individuals, but this is what is needed in a VUCA work situation.    Are the team members clear about what they have to do and why it is important?  Are they clear on how their performance is being measured and are those measures considered realistic by the team members?  Any perception that a goal is too much, leads directly to people just ignoring it.   We may be asking our people to cover off work they don’t normally do or engage in projects they have never done before, as we pivot as an organisation.  Have we been clear about how much freedom they have to decide how to do the job?  Have we mentally calibrated how much we will tolerate deviations from the expected performance?  Often, performance of new tasks sees an initial decline, because the skills haven’t been built yet.  If this decline continues, are we aware that is the case and are we ready for it?  Have we made clear to ourselves how much reasonable margin of error we will tolerate?  Are the team members aware of it?   Expecting perfect work in a time of trouble is focusing on the wrong thing. We want strong engagement with the why, solid commitment to the work to make sure we survive and the encouragement of as much creativity and flexibility as possible, in order to tap into opportunities which may present themselves.  None of this is easy, but we need to go back to the basics and work on our planning of our strategy.  Putting it off until things improve is missing the point.  The strategy is there to make sure things do improve.

Pandemics force change.  We keep thinking we have turned the corner in Japan, to be just shunted further down the road with another lockdown.  Being the eternal optimist from sunny Australia, I was running around telling my team we would see things get back to a better situation this October.  Now I read that A1 predictor modelling indicates we will peak in October.  That means things won’t get back to normal or closer to normal until early 2022.  That is a lot of cash flow needed between now and then.  Trying to bring the full intellectual power of the team to bear on a severe problem through brainstorming, has been a good way of finding ideas, to make sure you make it out the other side of this pandemic.   With more contagious virus variants now the majority of new cases, no wonder staff don’t want to huddle together and do brainstorming sessions.  Does that mean that we have to forego the idea generation power of the team to come up with ideas to solve the dilemmas facing us?  In some cases it probably makes zero difference, because what they were doing for brainstorming was broken and ineffective anyway.  The classic scenario of the boss wielding the whiteboard marker like a light sabre and slicing and dicing people on the spot, if their ideas didn’t match expectations, was ridiculous before and is still ridiculous.   The bolshie assertive few got all of their ideas up on the board and the deeper thinkers were left to just eat dust, as the whole process rattled forward at a clip.  The psychologically unsafe environment ensured the introverts were left out, as were the young, the female and the junior.  It doesn’t matter how you wrangle the brainstorming session if you do it this way.  In fact, not doing it would probably be much better for morale.   We are arranged at home now, together alone.  Can we tap into ideas anyway?  Absolutely and we can make the session valuable.  The methodology though is much clunkier than in person, much harder logistically and requires more time.  Welcome to online platforms everyone.   Here is how we can do it.  Pose the question to be answered and check for understanding, so that everyone is on the same page.  Have each person type their answers concisely in a document they can share later.  They can elaborate on what they want say when they share their ideas, so we don’t need sentences, just some key words as banners for the idea.  This is done independently, so there is no chatter while this is underway.  It might be 15 minutes of thinking time needed to really get people to go deep on their ideas.  We are going for volume at this point not for genius.   Next, we divide up into groups and head off to the breakout rooms.  Usually in person, we would go for groups of five or six, but in this online logistical nightmare, three people per group is better. In the room, each person shares their screen and goes through what they wrote down, explaining what they meant.  This is not a moment for debate or evaluation.  We just understand the point.  Remember, my crazy, whacky, impractical idea might trigger your brilliant insight.   Once we have explained our ideas, we look for similar ideas which can be placed in the same basket of idea categories.  We move ideas around through copy and paste until we have them grouped together under the category title.  We now have everyone from every group come back to the main room and each group shares their categories and ideas.  Again, no critique is allowed, as this is just for further stimulation of the next level of ideas.   Back into silent contemplation of further ideas.  This might be eight minutes or longer depending on the problem.  We need to give everyone enough thinking time, because some people are very deep thinkers.  Then we go back to the breakout rooms and add the ideas to the categories we came up with before and create any new categories as needed.  Again, we share the ideas without comment on the quality of the idea. Depending on time available, we can go back to the main room and share all the groups ideas again. If time permits, we do another round of five minutes of thinking time and whole the process repeated, as we head back to the breakout rooms.   Once we have gathered together all of the ideas, we stay in the breakout rooms and work on prioritising the ideas in each category.  The idea is to find the top 3, 5 or top 10 ideas from each category.  This is where the evaluation takes place as we choose between competing ideas for the best possible insights.   Everyone comes back to the main room and each group introduces their top ideas from each category.  Each group’s ideas are then added together on screen and further prioritisation takes place, until we come up with the best ideas for each category from the whole group.  This can take a lot of time and require a lot of discussion.  It may be held off to another session because online anything is tiring for too long.   The keys to success are individual contemplation in silence and sufficient time to think.  Also, no evaluation takes place until the very end, when hard choices between good ideas have to be made.  It is technically more complex than being in a room together, but it is a lot safer.  It requires more time, yet the quality of the output can be excellent.  Certainly better than the tender mercies of whiteboard pen wielding maniac bosses.

Winston Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going”.  We have all been going through hell, compliments of the pandemic.  If you are Chinese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Thai, Kiwi or Aussie you have popped out the other side, now living a normal life, albeit one with many more restrictions and closed borders.  Virus mutations, great power self-interest and the breakdown of trust in institutions, threatens to make the pandemic a semi-permanent fixture for the next few years at least.  For leaders, that means we will be facing a new order, where our subordinates no longer congregate in the workplace. Effectively they have become invisible. Consequently, the traditional method of driving performance has become much more difficult.    An acquaintance of mine is on Clubhouse many times during the working day.  I know this, because I keep getting notifications about meetings and his name is there as one of the organisers.  If I was his boss, would I feel I was getting my monies worth from his work contributions?  How do I know my team members are not skiving off doing something equivalent?  Do I have to enforce discipline by sitting them all down in the office, under my constant view, to make sure they are working and not goofing off?  Probably not.    Hybrid Work Styles Will Predominate   We have been working from home for over a year now and there is a logic to not wasting time in the cattle crushes that are Tokyo’s morning and evening rush hours.  Spending every day at home isn’t the answer either.  Japan is a particularly group oriented society, so my team definitely need time together.  The exodus will become a partial phenomenon.  We will spend two to three days a week working from home and the rest in the workplace.  Why?  There is value and efficiency in being alone, beavering away without interruption. There is also value in being interrupted.   The X factor, the serendipity, the accidents, the vague chemistry of interactions when we are together cannot be reproduced when we are in isolation. Chance conversations, unscheduled meetings, instant feedback, the buzz and energy of the workplace all have value and we don’t want to lose it.    Culture Rules OK   Culture is key to value creation and maintenance.  Culture is based on the agreed direction of the organisation, the commonly deduced precision of what we do and don’t do. Our core values drive our behaviour and our WHY.  We are constantly surveying companies about their challenges, looking to match our training solutions to their issues. What we have found is that companies without strong internal cultures have struggled during the pandemic.  These leaders were operating off old notions of authority power and hierarchy. They found it hard to coordinate activities and drive results, when working with a dispersed workforce.   It is time to fess up.  I have stolen from the Ritz Carlton Hotel group.  Many years ago, I attended a week of training with them on how they create such a strong internal culture, expressed across their dispersed properties around the world.  They had central principles about how to deliver customer service and these were repeated every day, in every shift, for every work group.  I pilfered that idea and previously applied it to Retail Banking and now to my corporate training Franchise.  It works.  It works because the behaviours and the WHY are re-created every day. Each person in the team takes the leadership by turn, expressing their own take on what the values and principles mean to them.  This personal identification with the direction of the firm is a critical piece of the puzzle.   Recreate Your Culture Daily   Great, but how does this work in real terms?  In the office and now online, we meet at 9.00am and we call it the “Daily Dale”.  Each day we consult the spreadsheet which nominates by rotation, the name of the person leading today. We begin with Good News, to get us in a positive frame of mind.  Next, we go through the Vision, Mission and Values.  We have our motto and our mantra as well and then we get to today’s Dale Carnegie Principle, taken from his thirty human relations and thirty stress management principles.  The leader of the session talks about what that principle means to them.  We share who we are visiting today and who is visiting us.  Then we go through our individual top priorities for the day and we end with a motivational quote.  It takes ten minutes and we have reaffirmed our WHY and created a sense of common purpose and commitment.  The Tech exists now, to simultaneously have some of the team in the room and some online.  Consequently, there is no reason why we can’t keep this “Daily Dale” going, following our move to a hybrid work situation.   As the boss, checking on people doing Clubhouse etc., during work hours is a mug’s game.  If the culture is made strong, then the commitment is there, regardless of where the people are physically located.  Leaders who clarify and drive a common understanding of the desired culture in the organization, will manage the permanent exodus well.  There are no maps for where we are going, but our culture is our compass.  Get this right and everything else will fall into line.  If we get it wrong then trouble and strife will consume our futures.  The answer is obvious, isn’t it.

The Clubhouse global audio conversation App is hot, hot, hot.  It is only available on Apple iOS so far, but the landgrab is on and massive hours are being invested in this bonseki style activity.  What is bonseki?  This is an original Japanese throw away art, where you create designs in the sand, on a tray and then toss it all out at the end.  That is your Clubhouse conversation, thrown out each day, with no distribution and no repurposing, as yet. Clubhouse might be the next great thing or it may be superseded by copycat platforms launched on Face Book, Twitter etc.  The concept though looks like it will become a permanent feature of our lives, in the same way podcasts have done.  Be careful though fellow leaders, we are now walking on the high wire with no safety net.  We have put our leader personal and professional brands at risk.   If you are asked to give a talk, you usually have time to think about it, prepare, gather visual aids and rehearse.  Despite that most leaders make a mess of the opportunity.  Impromptu talks are at the top of the scale of difficulty for speakers.  Even the most skilled are challenged by this format.  We often see it with expert panel discussions.  The leader does a fine job then falls apart once the questions start arriving and the conversation goes free style.  When they have full control, it all adds luster to their professional and personal brands.  Speaking off the cuff though, sees leaders descend into babbling, swimming through a sea of filler words like ums and ahs and meandering explanations of their point.   Welcome to Clubhouse.  This is unscripted, uncontrolled and ever moving.  If you have been a mediocre public speaker to date, chatting on Clubhouse, exposes your lack of skill to the whole world, rather than to just the confines of a meeting room venue. We are so judgmental today.  We listen to a leader and we extend that first impression to their entire organisation.  If they are terrific, we think everyone down there is smart and capable.  If they are a dud, then we assume the place is full of hopeless types.   When we get our chance to speak on Clubhouse are we conscious that our leader professional and personal brands are at risk?  Most people are working from home, feeling isolated, so for some this is a chance to talk to others and they go for it.  They are not tuned into how they are coming across or the impression they are creating.  At the opposite end of the scale are the thrusting, ever upward types, who are going to build an empire on Clubhouse. They want to have legions of fans come to their Rooms, so that they can sell them something.  They are blowhards seeking to dominate the conversation and show everyone how smart they are.   An alarm goes off in our heads when we hear these modern day snake oil salesfolk.  So how do we navigate between the wall flower who only listens, those making bumbling efforts to string two words together and those dodgy sales sharks who are cruising around the Clubhouse pond looking for victims?   Once you have found the subject matter that interests you and the right group, take two tools with you into the Clubhouse Rooms.  Have a timer set to three minutes to let you know when to shut up and allow others to talk.  This shows consideration and community and Room peers will respect you for that.  On a note pad have some key bullet points you want to speak to.  The conversation moves continuously and the points may change, but always have points ready rather than talking about the first thing that pops into your mind.  Go for considered contributions, rather than unfettered spontaneity.  Rehearse what you will say before you go live.  Even though the actual content may vary slightly the act of practicing will make you sound smooth and relaxed. We like smooth and relaxed   Start with a confident voice and make your points persuasively using voice modulation, pauses, word highlighting, storytelling and no hesitation fluency.  Be clear and concise.  Start by thanking the hosts for allowing you to speak and find areas to praise about the previous speakers. We prefer polite, cooperative people to self-centered self-promoters.  Remember this is your leader brand we are talking about here.  How do you want to be thought of?  Don’t let it unfold.  Decide how you will be perceived as a leader and plan for success rather defaulting to an unplanned mess.  The time invested will make such a difference and it is not hard.  Having some solid self-awareness is the starting point and everything else will move forward and go smoothly from there.

Recruiting and developing the perfect team is an illusion, a Fool’s Gold hot pursuit for leaders.  Even if you do manage to recruit great people, an increasingly difficult task in Japan where the population is in decline and the improvement of English skills is getting nowhere, they leave.  They start a family, get poached for more dough, get sick, need to take care of aging parents or a myriad of other reasonable reasons and you have to start again.  The reality is we are always going to be dealing with people in different stages of their career and ability build.  It is useful to know which solutions are appropriate for particular situations.   Japan loves the middle of the fence and sitting there is the most comfortable position.  In fact, in a mistake, defect free work culture like Japan that makes a lot of sense.  Building slack into your world means you never get strained to a point where you might make mistakes.  On the other hand, there is a lot of underperformance associated with being in the Comfort Zone, relative to what is possible.  In big companies, if promotion through the ranks is determined by age and stage, why would you care? Just sit tight, keep your head down, make no errors and you will rise, like cream, to the upper levels, although never to the very top.  That might be good enough for many people.   The flipside of this equation is you get bored.   This particularly seems to occur with engineers.  They often need something interesting to work on and if they don’t get it, they could be lured to greener, more interesting pastures.  For the rest of us, the Comfort Zone saps our will to do our best work.  What we do is enough, but not all we are capable of and the gentle hum of that equilibrium, where we face no stress, is like a lullaby, putting us into a state of stasis.   At the other end of the scale are those working in smaller companies, where they have to do everything, because there are not enough specialists.  Leaders place heavy burdens on them.  They have high expectations of people who are underpowered for high levels of performance.  This could be a gap in aptitude or insufficient experience and training.  The work is overwhelming and they are very stressed.  They run into the conundrum of needing to avoid errors, yet plough through the workload.  They are stuck in the Frozen Zone.  They are erring on the side of caution, because the no mistake culture is causing them to avoid risk and really going for it.    The Breakthrough Zone is where we want people to live.  They are performing at full expectations just within or slightly beyond their capability.  They permanently live in stretch goal land. They are able to challenge new tasks, because they know errors are seen as education and mistakes are tolerated in the messy world of innovation.    What is interesting is that our people could be in all three zones, depending on the tasks at hand.  The movement between zones is also a constant, as work changes, colleagues change and the company direction changes.  In the West, you get hired for a job, the senior leadership makes some decisions about the firm’s direction and next thing you find yourself out on the street.  In Japan, you are expected to make the transition.   Someone in the Breakthrough Zone can see their performance decline when given a new, challenging task.  Like any new task, there is a learning curve and the initial track of that curve is down.  After some period of adjustment their performance begins to track back up again and keeps going up.   As leaders, do we know where our people are across their various tasks?  Over time, can we identify the tell tale clues to understand where each person is right now relative to their tasks? Have we got too many people underperforming in the Comfort Zone for some tasks?  Have we given so many tasks to others that they are overwhelmed and stuck in the Frozen Zone?  How many would we identify as being in the Breakthrough Zone.  Can we see mistakes as education?  Are we prepared to accept errors during innovation?  Can we anticipate temporary performance decline when new tasks are allocated?  Are we giving people enough training and support? What is the culture we are creating?   We need to know these things if we are going to see the best performance from our crew.  Yep, we are busy like bees on speed, but we need to be watching carefully how people are doing, task by task.  Have you ever done that or thought that way?  If I asked you, could you plot your team in a matrix, zone by zone, across their tasks?  Perhaps, it is time to do just that and keep doing it.

Leaders are often poor listeners in the modern age.  To listen to our team members requires the allocation of precious time. Advances in technology, especially hand held devices, was trumpeted as unfurling access to more time for contemplative pursuits and work-life balance.  Is there anyone out there who feels they are now more ebullient, because of all the extra time the technology has thrown our way?  Probably not.  In fact, as the pace of life has sped up, we are more time poor than ever.    The mobile phone has become addictive and we are reaching for it almost every second of the day.  We carry it around, we keep it close and we are plugged in 24/7.  Leaders are probably the most time poor in society and so interactions with our team members becomes more and more transactional.  We want something from them in exchange for salary.  We want that report, that update, that meeting and then we rush to the next thing on our To Do list.  If we clocked how much time we spend we each day coaching our people, the results would be preposterously bad.   Developing our people is one of the key tasks of the leader.  How can you develop people if you have little clue as to what is happening in their life?  Japan is especially tricky, because staff don’t share much about their private lives with their colleagues or the boss.  For example, if someone is getting married, they keep it a secret until it is a done deal, so there is no possibility of the marriage plans falling over and them losing face.  This means as the boss, we need to make a bigger effort to engage our staff and understand what are the key things in their lives.  We need to see where we can help them advance their careers.  But time poor people struggle with this.   I know myself, I have never been busier.  When things are going well you are busy fulfilling client orders. When things are bad, you are busy trying to get client orders.  There is no rest. Everyone working from home has made the whole communication piece more challenging as a leader.  My time poor status has been elevated even more negatively by the pandemic and its impact on business.  As bosses, we imagine we are listening to our staff, because we are too optimistic about our time allocations and priorities.  In fact, we are giving orders, checking on details and coordinating efforts across the team.  This is not listening, because the direction tends to be one way.  “Aye, aye captain” as a response from our staff is not communication.  It is a passive response to our barrage of demands.   There are different levels of listening and if we are not careful we can get stuck down the bottom of the hierarchy, at pretend or selective listening.  With ideas, thoughts, decisions buzzing around inside our brains, like a lot of bees on speed, we can miss what is going on around us. People are telling us things, but we have not been able to break away from the thoughts occupying our minds.  Instead, we make sounds that appear to indicate we are listening, but actually we are in the pretend listening phase.  Or we may be filleting the white noise emanating from our staff member and seeking only the most highly relevant bits, ignoring the rest.  It as if instead of speed reading, we are speed listening, skimming through the conversation, picking out the plums and discarding the rest.   We want to move up the scale to attentive listening and empathetic listening.  I used to work with a younger colleague who would continue looking at his computer screen and keep typing, while you were talking to him.  After suffering from that bizarre and unnerving experience, I made a commitment.  Whenever people want to speak with me, I need to physically prop the keyboard up on my desk, turn my head to face them and look straight into their eyes, giving them my 100% attention.  I need to be fully present for what they want to say to me and do no filtering.  I need to relax and really listen to what they are  saying and also think about what they are not saying.   Empathetic listening is extremely difficult, if you don’t make the time to speak with the team members.  We need to know what is going on in their life. The only way to do that is to leap off the leader rat treadmill and spend time with them.  We need to take a leaf from the slow food movement.  We need an equivalent slow leadership movement, if we want to really hear our staff.  Slow down with people to understand their perspective, their emotions and their thinking.  We are listening with our hearts, eyes and ears to hear their needs.   They are not making as many Japanese as they used to, so we will all be locked in a struggle to the death to recruit and retain staff.  It is a zero sum game. If you cannot keep the right people and your competitor can, then they can put you out of business. The boss ability to listen at the empathetic level is going to reflect the type of culture and environment, where people feel they can do good work.  Get this wrong and no amount of tech will rescue you.

We know the name Achilles because of Brad Pitt and Hollywood or we may have read the Iliad.  He was a famous mythical Greek hero whose body was invulnerable, except for the back of his heel.  His mother plunged him into the river Styx to protect his body, but her fingertips covered the heel, leaving it vulnerable.  Research by Dr. Jack Zenger identified four common elements which comprise Achille’s heels for leaders. Blind spots are a problem for all of us.  We can’t see our foibles, issues and problems, but they are blindingly obvious to everyone else working for us.  Remember, subordinates are all expert “boss watchers”.  They examine us in the greatest detail every day, in every interaction. Let’s examine what Zenger found and see what we can learn as leaders.   Lacking Integrity Not too many leaders would be saying they lacked integrity about themselves but that may not be how they are seen by their subordinates.  The organization may be zigging but we decide to zag.  We don’t agree with the policy, so we decide to head off in another direction.  There may be promulgated values developed in the senior executive suites and we are not modelling the correct behaviour.  Maybe our big leader egos can’t admit mistakes or when we are wrong. We try to bend logic and justify our way out of the situation.  Maybe we say one thing and do the precise opposite of what we are preaching.  “Do what I say, not what I do” – does this sound familiar?   Not Accountable “Of course, I am accountable – what nonsense”, may be our first reaction.  We may be telling our boss that the poor results of our team are because we haven’t been issued with the sharpest tools in the toolbox.  It is all their fault and we are pristine and perfect.  The 360 survey results are a bloodbath, as our subordinates hoe into us for our various failings, but we dismiss the results.  “Piffle. Don’t they know what I am facing here.  The pressure, the stress.  No one appreciates how hard I am working. They have no idea what they are talking about”.  Perhaps our decisions are poor and instead of owning them, we push the blame off on to others, particularly other departments.  “If only IT did their job properly.  If only marketing were more professional.  If only sales was pulling their weight”, ad nauseum.   Over-Focused On Self It would be difficult to find leaders who don’t have this attribute to varying degrees.  You don’t see too many wilting violets whisked up into leadership positions.  Self-promotion is a fundamental aspect of getting ahead in business.  The issues arise when it goes to extremes.  Strong leaders can often believe they are in a zero sum game and another’s success lessens their own worth and promotion opportunities.  Not cooperating with rivals or even attempting to sabotage them can be some fallout from this attitude.  Subordinates too can be seen as future rivals who might replace the boss, so better to not delegate to, coach or  provide experience for capable people in order to keep them down.    Uninspiring It would be a rare bird of a leader who admitted they were uninspiring.  We easily believe we are a role model for others, that we have credibility and are someone others would want to emulate.  However, we might be a hopeless public speaker, barely able to string two words together without injecting a series of ums and ahs into proceedings. We might be morose, weighed down with the pressure of our position and responsibilities, permanently in a bad mood.  We might be so busy, we are incapable of directing others and wind up dumping work on them minus the WHY and the how bits of the equation.   There is a bitter pill for leaders to swallow to overcome their blind spots.  It is called “feedback” and it can often taste sour, jagged and unpleasant.  We cannot see ourselves as our staff see us, so gird your loins and ask for help to be a better leader.  This is never easy, but the alternative of blundering forward, repeating the same errors is not tenable. At some point the organization will have a reckoning with us and it might prove fatal to our careers.  Better to take our medicine early, under our own direction, than hoping for the best and eventually getting the chop.        

In today’s business world, leaders need to be “authentic” leaders. We have all come across this somewhere, endorsed by self-proclaimed gurus and prophets.  I often ponder what does that actually mean?  I am sure all of those Japanese leaders screaming abuse at their staff, when they make mistakes, are being authentic.  They are authentically terrible, dictatorial, abusive leaders.  Actually this worked like a charm for a very long time in postwar Japan.  You joined a company for life and there was only one route for those who changed jobs and that was down into a netherworld of strife, insecurity and lower salary.  In the goode olde days you had to dodge the flying ashtrays thrown at you by your authentically enraged boss, endure their publicly delivered abuse and keep going. Yamaichi Securities going down in 1997, made changing jobs mid-career respectable for the first time for those who became unemployed through no fault of their own.   Can a boss be passive at the other end of the scale? No.  Bosses have to lead the charge, set the direction, check on the milestones, monitor the performance and drive results.  They have to praise those who are doing a fantastic job or have a difficult conversation with those who are failing.  Where is the line between aggression and assertion though.  One boss’s idea of assertion is aggressive power harassment from an employee’s perspective.  In years past this didn’t matter much, because there were plenty of people to go around and it was “my way or the highway”.  Today, we are rapidly running out of young people. There is a temporary pause in hostilities in the talent war here in Japan, which will shortly resume, once Covid is brought under control.   Aggressive bosses are self centered, concerned about their career and how they look to their bosses.  Assertive bosses will stand up for their team and themselves vis-à-vis the big bosses and sharp elbowed thrusting rivals.  They have a 360 degree view of what is going on and how actions affect the whole organisation, rather than focused on the needs of one aggressive individual.   Aggressive bosses are often lashing out because they cannot control the stress and pressure they are under.  They play a toxic version of “pass the parcel” and take it out on their subordinates.  Assertive leaders know how to keep calm. They have techniques for handling the stress. They realise that their dark, erratic, satanic moods can destroy the motivation and equilibrium of the team.  They are the swan bosses paddling like crazy under the waterline but moving elegantly through the days no matter what is on.   Aggressive bosses believe their job is to tell errant staff “how it is” and be very blunt and direct in their speech.  Assertive bosses can be honest and direct with subordinates but the language they choose doesn’t become inappropriate or demotivating.  They know they need this person to recover and get back into the fray and try again, even though their self-confidence is shattered by their poor work output.  When your young staff are useless you can’t easily replace them, so your job becomes to help them become useful.   Aggressive bosses often have deep underlying poor self esteem, which is why they lash out and whip people verbally.  They need to establish their supreme dominance over the team and fear is their weapon of choice.  Assertive leaders have a confident self-image and good awareness of their strengths and weakness.  They are at home in their own skin and don’t feel the need to constantly prove themselves or beat up their staff.  Rather they are looking for ways to further develop their team.  They know they are stuck right where they are, until they can groom successors which will free them up for promotion to bigger jobs.  Every firm needs leaders. The person who is the leadership factory is going to be given more accountability within the organisation.   I think words like “authentic” need to have more nuanced meanings.  What we are really talking about is someone who is honest, transparent, confident, considerate and a builder of people, because they believe that is the best thing for everyone.  Being an “authentic “bully in this era in Japan, will be a career ender once the top leadership work out this person is a sieve, rapidly leaking talent out of the organisation to rival firms.

We have met them.  Thrusters, mad with power and hungry to control others.  Organisation insider politicians who spend all of their time sucking up to the powerful, while lobbying for themselves to be granted more and more status and authority.  The absolute nobody, who controls approval processes and who milks it for all it is worth.  The psychologically damaged and emotionally stunted intent on making our life hell, now that they have been promoted.  The mixture of leaders and power can be a powerful tonic and it can also be a toxic cocktail.  Let’s take a look at five power constructs for leaders.  Have you worked for any of these bosses? Which amongst these are you?   Authority power is the absolute refuge of scoundrels. They have nothing going for them individually, but they have three stripes on their sleeve and we have none, so they can control our lives.  They flaunt their position power and try to suppress everyone under them. They often hate their job and take it out on everyone they can bully.  There has to be hierarchy in organisations and there has to be compliance with policies. Leaders are there to make sure that happens but some take it way beyond the original intention.    Coercive power is nuclear brute force unleashed on anyone who questions the leader’s position, direction, policies, actions or who they decide they don’t want or don’t like. When the status title or the three stripes doesn’t impress subordinates, or when they feel threatened, then the scoundrel morphs into the demon.  This is often the leader parachuted into the organisation from outside, who starts looking around for people to disappear.  They want to build their own crew of cut throats who will follow and support them. They use all the power of the machine against you and there is very little recourse.  The infamous Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) is their favoured bludgeon of choice with which to eject you out of the organisation.   Expert Power describes those with capability, knowledge, experience, intellect and expertise. They are very smart and accordingly can command genuine respect.  We look up to them as a superior being in their field of speciality.  They are completely confident within themselves and so have no need to belittle others or flaunt their big brains.  They are magnets for attracting followers and fans.   Reward power is the ability to garner followers by buying them off. Transactional relationships abound.  “I do this for you, so you need to do this for me”.  “If you don’t do what I say, you will miss out”.  Flunkies, yes-men, sycophants, toadies and lickspittles flourish.  They use the power of awarding promotions to favour nasties like themselves.  As patrons they demand total loyalty and so they trail these minions with them ever upward through the hierarchy, in order to bolster their own positions.   Role model power is the knight on the white charger. They have charisma, integrity, vision and attract support from followers who wish they could be like them.  They have expertise like those with expert power and are respected because they can project their capacity beyond specialist knowledge.  They have tremendous EQ, human relations skills and are excellent communicators.   As leaders we are sometimes all of these types. We need authority to get things done, especially when our subordinates don’t agree with the policy or decision.  Not everyone is engaged with the direction the organisation is going and sometimes we have to coerce them to toe the line, whether they agree with the direction or not.  Hopefully we have real expertise in key areas, which justify the trust placed in us by the organization.  We need to reward good performance and encourage others to do more and make even bigger efforts.  We should be the role model for the team.  We are doing our best to grow our bench strength, so we are coaching others and investing in their career trajectories.   I am sure we have all seen megalomania gone mad in leaders.  Equally, we have also met leaders who are truly impressive.  How are you seen by your subordinates?  The Johari Window talks about our leadership blindspots.  We can’t see our own faults but they are visible to our staff.  What can you do to investigate your blindspots?  How open are you to painful feedback on your behaviour?  What about all of those grossly unfair statements you read in the 360 degree feedback document?  What are you going to do about them?  As the American philosopher Yogi Berra famously noted, “Leading is easy.  It is getting people to follow you which is the hard part”.

Engaging your team as a leader is a relatively new idea.  When I first started work in the early 70s, none of my bosses spent a nanosecond thinking about they could engage their staff as a leader.  What they were thinking about was catching mistakes, incompetence, error and willfull negligence, before these problems went nuclear.  That meant micro managing everyone.  “Management by walking around” meant checking up on people.  The construct was that the team were problematic and the boss needed to have forensic skills to stop problems escalating.  That was the age of the hero boss, who was the best at everything, knew more than everyone else and could do it all.  That won’t fly today because technology has made business so much more complex.   Back in 1971 Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon noted, “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention”.  This is where we bosses are today, with hand held devices which keep us permanently connected through the flood release valves of the internet.  We are time poor, handling trouble aplenty, struggling to keep up with market shifts and spending too much time on Clubhouse.  What this translates into is bosses are too busy to engage their staff properly.  Unlike the 70s when it wasn’t a “thing”, engagement is known today and expected.  We are doing a poor job by design today rather than through brutal ignorance.    There are three useful foundation tools we can apply to spark the process of engaging our staff. Engagement levels are closely calibrated with how well the direction, values and culture of the organisation synchronise with those of the individuals in the team.  Here is the tricky bit – how well informed is the busy, busy boss about the team members’ agreement with the firm’s direction, their value set and the culture they want for their workplaces?   This is where the “poverty of attention” kicks in and bosses don’t know much about their team, because they never ask. There is scant time for asking questions when you are busy raining orders down like missiles on the team.  We can create connections with our team members by asking factual questions about where they were raised, how many in their family, where they went to university, etc.  We may find commonalities of experience or gain insights into what has made this team member the person they are today.   We need to have this information as a base, but we need to go deeper to help us understand the way they think.  That means using causative questions.  These are enquiries such as, “why did you choose to study geography at university” or “why did you choose to join that company” or “why did you get involved with parachute jumping as a hobby?”.  You get the idea.  These questions reveal motives for decisions and inform about priorities.   The third tool is asking value-based questions.  Our values drive our decisions and carve out our behaviour.  For companies this is often where the wheels come off. The rhetoric about what the company stands for and the leadership behaviours don’t line up.  There is nothing like tough times to reveal the firm and the boss’s true colours.   These are not immediate questions we would ask, because they can feel intrusive.  Imagining you will engage someone by getting to know them better and leading off with a question such as “tell me about a turning point in your life” is not going to have the desired effect.  We need to be building the trust over time and once we have gotten to know them reasonably well, we can then ask deeper questions.  We can enquire, “thinking back to the way things have gone in your life, would you do things differently?” or “what have been the high points of your accomplishments so far?”, etc.    Things are in constant flux and a conversation held eighteen months ago may have been overtaken by a series of events in the meantime.  So we have to have to make chances to keep engaging with our team to keep up to date on where they are in their thinking, what are their current primary values and recent experiences.   Less time on Clubhouse and more chatting with the team will do a lot more for the engagement of your people and will help to drive toward achieving the organisations goals.

Smirks appear quite quickly when you mention “role model” and “leaders” in the same breath.  Most peoples’ experiences with leaders as role models have been that they encompass the “what not do as a leader” variety.  Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) or teacher by negative example, as we say in Japanese.  What are some of the things we should be focused in our quest to become a real role model for our teams?   We can break the role model aspect into four major areas: Self-Aware; Accountability; Others-Focused and Strategic.  Within these four categories there are eleven sub-categories on which we are going to focus today.  Do a mental audit on yourself and see how many boxes you can check acknowledging that you are doing a good job.   Self-Aware covers a number of sub-categories: “Self-Directed”. Leaders have to give others direction, so they must be independent types who don’t have to rely on others to know what to do.  They have to be “Self-Regulated” which is a fancy pants way of saying they need strong personal discipline.  The leader has to decide what needs to be done and then marshals everything needed to get the job done.  This effort has to be sustained over time and that is where the self-discipline aspect kicks in.   “Develop Self” talks about taking 100% responsibility for one’s own career.  Depending on others, or the company in general, to take care of your career is folly.  We need to represent value to an employer, because if we don’t, then we will be replaced by someone who does.  The tricky thing about business is they keep moving the goal posts.  What was required when you started and what is required today, may be quite different. Scarily different.  If you have been pursuing your own personal growth, then there is a safety factor involved to enable you to weather the storms.   “Confident” is a vague term really.  What actually defines being “confident”.  We can recognize it more easily than we can articulate it.  A leader who has confidence speaks in a certain way, with a certain finality.  Hesitation never arises and the body language backs up the words.   Accountability is another area with sub-categories: “Competent” describes our capability to understand the business and do the work.  Most people rise through the ranks, so they have done the jobs their staff are doing, so they know the content well.  Changing jobs and entering as a mid-career hire can make the competence piece a challenge.   “Honesty and Integrity” are both problem sub-categories.  Honesty is easier to gauge than integrity.  We can see if you are honest and can measure it.  However, while everyone says how important integrity is, defining it is a challenging task.  Saying and doing what you say, is a fundamental basis of demonstrating integrity, as is standing for higher ideals.  How do you behave when no one is watching?   Others-Focused is a big sub-category and so not all aspects can be covered here, but we will focus on some key areas:   “Inspiring” is in the eyes of the beholder, except as the boss you have to inspire everyone.  So we need to uncover what the range of views on the subject are amongst the troops, in order to get an idea of how we need to appeal to everyone’s needs.   “Develops Others” means going beyond the managerial functions of everything done on time, to spec and to budget.  It means putting time into coaching staff and giving them stretch tasks through delegation.  Most people stay functionally at the manager level and never quite level up sufficiently to become a true leader.   “Positively Influences Others” is an all weather skill for leaders. Our grumpy mood can bring down the motivation of the team.  Also speaking ill of other divisions or sections to knit your own team together, makes the team doubt the robustness of the organization.   “Effectively Communicates” sounds reasonable, except most new leaders are not very good at speaking in public.  They do not generate confidence in what they are saying by the unprofessional way they are saying it.  We need to get the training and master this attribute.   The last category we will cover here is Strategic.   We will deal with just one sub-category “Uses Authority Appropriately”.  We are talking about using our position power for good, rather than self-aggrandisement.  Bossing people around to boost our own fragile ego and having the need for power over others is totally sad.  We are given power to help our people do better and that is the only reason.   So how was your self audit?  We now have a framework to place around the term “role model” and we know where we have more work to do.  Always a good thing for a leader.

402: The New Leader Mindset Shift Needed We are recognised for our capabilities and potential and promoted into our first leadership role.  We have been given charge over our colleagues and now have additional responsibilities.  In many cases we don’t move into a pure “off the tools” leadership role. We are more likely to be a player/leader hybrid, because we have our own clients and also produce revenue outcomes.  One of the biggest difficulties is knowing how to balance the roles of “doer” and “urger”.  Jealousy, bruised egos, sabotage, mild insurrection can be found amongst our former colleagues as we are now their new boss.  There will be some who feel the organisation has made a massive error and they should have been the one promoted. Their enthusiasm for striving for the greater good has become diminished and results begin to suffer.  The more Machiavellian may be thinking how they can unseat the new boss, by lowering outcomes enough, so that it damages the new boss’s credibility, without getting themselves fired.  They are happy to spend long hours conspiring with others to calculate the nexus of those two points.  The danger here is we double down on our own production because we have more control over that and we actually don’t lead.  We are busy with dealing with all the accoutrements of power, exciting stuff like approving leave applications, tracking sick leave, filling out reports and general paperwork which is the bane of a leader’s life.   Leaders have four main jobs.  Set the strategy, create the culture, maintain the machine so it runs on time and on budget and we build our people.  When we were team members we were given guidance and direction by the boss, now we are the boss.  Are we sufficiently knowledgeable and talented enough to take the organisation in the right direction?  Are we relying on what we knew before we became the boss?  Are we studying, reading, listening to podcasts, watching TED talks and doing everything we can to better educate ourselves for the different demands of this leadership role?  If we are busy, busy, busy working on our new leader tasks or servicing our own clients, we may not be devoting the time needed to grow.  The leader needs to have a long term perspective, but our subordinates tend to have a short term view and invariably so do our superiors.  They expect results from us and in short order or they start wondering if they made the right choice about who should have stepped up and be the boss.  The boss has to challenge orthodoxy.  If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will get the same results.  How can we get better results?  That is what the boss needs to be working on.  We need to persuade others to follow us and to have influence.  Often none of those factors were part of the selection process though.  We got the job because we were the best salesperson, accountant, engineer, bookkeeper, architect, etc.  Actually, many new leaders don’t even like people and much prefer numbers. Many are poor public speakers have big brains and no friends.  Do the new leaders get any training to build on their skill sets and give them the tools to succeed?  Often they get nothing.  They keep focused on what they can control which are their own clients, don’t build the people and they wind up carrying the team.  That works as long as the outcome demands don’t go up.  As the ask increases, the gap starts to form between how much one person can do to hit the targets and the total team contribution.  Because we haven’t developed our people, they are not filling in the gap between where we are and where we need to be.  After three years of this, the new leader gets fired and the cycle begins again with a new person sitting in the boss’s chair. New leaders relying on their companies for their security to remain in their elevated position are pretty optimistic.  The tasks of the leader are different to those of the led, so either through personal study or company sponsored training, there must be the investment to grow their capabilities.  The mindset element is important, as that is the trigger for changing the required behaviors in order to grow in the new position.  So bosses, are you sufficiently investing in your newly promoted leaders.  So newly promoted leaders, are you taking responsibility for your own career and investing in yourself.  If the answer to either question is “no”, then whether you realise it or not, you have entered the dander zone.  Don’t go there.          

The exodus from the office started a year ago, when we decided the safest thing was for everyone to work from home.  We had moved to an office free seating arrangement a few years ago, so we all had mobile phones and laptops and in that sense, we were able to relocate at a moment’s notice.  Did we still expect to be working for home for the next two years?  No, but that is the reality.  Now that everyone has tasted the freedom of avoiding rush hour and the fact that technology allows work from anywhere, life will never go back to what it was.  The first thing we realised was that the systems set up for working in the office did not travel well.  Just to make it even more challenging we had hired four new key staff in January 2020.  The whole onboarding process had that raw edge to it.  I got very busy, very quickly, in a frantic treading water kind of way.   The training business has been classroom based, so boom! - suddenly no classroom.  Fortunately, eleven years ago in September 2010 Dale Carnegie in America ran its first LIVE On Line training session. Since then the HQ had built up an entire infrastructure and curriculum for remote delivery.  Amazingly, back in 2010, they were using Adobe Connect Pro because it offered breakout rooms, whiteboards, polling, and video.    Before HQ launched the LIVE On Line training they did an audit of what was missing from online training. The most obvious thing was that it was boring, basically a slide show with a squeaky voiced talking heads emanating from a tiny little box on screen.  By the way, does that sound familiar to you?  It should, because eleven years on, that is what is the main fare of online instruction today.  Back in 2010, Dale Carnegie HQ deemed that was not good enough and concentrated on how to deliver the training in the most interactive way possible to mimic what goes on in the classroom.   In early 2020, we could quickly certify instructors and producers to deliver that interactive experience LIVE On Line.  The well oiled and well established instructor system allowed us to certify seven trainers and eleven producers in just nine days, to be able to deliver at the expected quality of interactivity.    Now all we had to do was convince clients to buy it.  Existing clients were one thing, but new clients were an entirely other matter.  How to get hold of new clients, because cold calling went nowhere very fast? Networking was now a passive session, watching some expert panel blather away on Zoom.  We ran some free Stress Management sessions to help everyone out, who like us were feeling stressed to see their businesses hit a massive pothole on the Covid-19 highway.  This real time exposure to our interactivity persuaded clients to sign up for LIVE On Line training.  We have been raging against the pandemic and lockdowns ever since, battling it out to survive.    The most difficult leadership factor has been the coordination of all of this rapid change.  I found that today’s young people are high on social media skills, but don’t how to use a telephone.  They don’t check their messages, so the whole ship of state machinery slows down.  We were able to preserve the culture by moving our morning chorei, the “Daily Dale” to a Teams platform, held at the same time, in the same way, every day.  We go through the WHY, the Vision, Mission, Values, the Dale Carnegie Principle of the day, who we are visiting online and who is visiting us and our top three individual priorities, ending with a motivational quote for the day.  We have to be dressed for business and be on camera.  This enforces a certain daily discipline and business mindset.   I do not expect that when the bell rings and Covid -19 is over, we will just pack everything up and traipse back to the office.  We will have a hybrid arrangement of some people working from home and some in the office.  Our clients will no doubt do something similar.  Everything will become that little bit more nuanced and more difficult to execute on.  Were we agile?  Yes, we were, but are we agile enough for Phase Two of this brave new world of remote working and leading?   We have been in our individual foxholes for the last year, fighting it out to survive this massive business disruption.  I have been like a busy bee working in my business rather than working on my business. Now is the time for me to peak above the foxhole and plan for the post partially negotiated peace with the pandemic.  How do I extract value from this situation?  Where are the gaps that clients need help with?  What are our advantages vis-à-vis the competition?  What will the new tech bring to the party that didn’t exist before, which we can utilise to change our business model.  How do we reinvent what we are doing?   How about your business?  Did you breeze through Covid-19, has it been boom times or did you feel the icy chill of imminent disappearance from the scene, as the iceberg lurched out of the mist?  The workplace Rubicon has been crossed and we are not going back to the comfort of the known.  So how do we create our futures?

The WHO team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan came up empty.  A lot of fairy floss was wrapped around the report, but reading the outcomes there were no outcomes.  If we don’t want to face the reality of why this occurred in the first place, then there is no comfort that we can prevent Covid-20 arriving unannounced at some time in the future.  As leaders what are we going to be working on between pandemics?  The current one will hopefully quiet down over the course of 2021.  There are five pillars of leadership we can rely on to be prepared for the next round of viral mayhem or any other VUCA events.   Take responsibility for the future. We lead intentional lives and we help our team members to do the same.  Most people in first world countries are leading accidental lives, buffeted by whatever happens to them, unable to exercise any control of their fate.  You can understand it when poverty, lack of resources and no useful assistance are your third world reality, but not in our advanced economies.    Dispensing THE VISION from on high is not as good as co-creating it with the team.  Let’s get the direct reports working together and come up with the enterprise wide umbrella vision and then have every work group cascade that down to form their own, within the general direction of that umbrella vision.   So what is the state of play of your corporate vision – if I called your company right now, can the person picking up the phone recite it from memory?  If you can’t remember it you cannot live it.   Build a culture of trust The value set of the leader determines the culture of the firm.  If the leader is the alpha thrusting type, consumed by personal avarice, then dystopian political survival games will rule.  If the leader focuses on developing their people to their maximum potential, then trust and respect will reign throughout the team.    Are you building a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts or are you tearing each other apart?  Is it a safe environment for the meek and mild to speak up and offer their ideas?  Or do the super noisy minority dominate the airwaves and get all the attention?   Create a culture of collaboration Superman wore tights and a cape not a Brioni suit.  The leader as superman concept worked in a less complex business world.  Today, no one person can know everything, in real time and make all the key decisions.  The leader no longer must be male and that revolution is still creeping forward, a long way from reaching its destination.  According to ex-Prime Minister and ex-Tokyo Organising Committee Head Mori, women talk too much.  That statement says everything about the state of collaboration in Japan.   We want the best ideas.  Is your corporate culture an enabler or a blocker in that process?   Communicate effectively The leader articulates the narrative about the desired future state of the organisation.  From lowest to highest on the firm totem pole, there is a strong sense of “what I do matters around here and I am valued”, because that message has been communicated from top to bottom.   Feeling valued is the springboard to feeling engaged.  Are your leaders constantly banging the drum that their people are valued?     Demonstrate reliability Trust in business is wrapped up in reliability.  Reliability simply communicates that I always do what I say I will do and you can make plans and take risks on that basis.  Are your organisation’s leaders consistently reliable?    If I asked people at random, would they say they trusted the leadership, because they were reliable and were true to their word?     We are creatures of emotion with a thin veneer of logic lightly smeared over the top.  We are not perfect and mistakes with people are an ever present danger.  Do we understand what we need to be working on as leaders? Are we working on our businesses, rather than being a busy bee in our businesses?  The best antidote for the next pandemic is mastering these five pillars of leadership.  We need to get on to this now, because we probably have less time than we think, as propaganda tries to overtake and replace science.

In the movie “To Sir, With Love”, Sidney Poitier was brilliant in the role of a black teacher in a tough London East End high school.  He was trying to make a difference for these young outcasts to better prepare them for the life they would face after graduating from school.  A very uplifting story about what is possible when we encourage others to be their best.  So what has this got to do with business, you may be asking?  As leaders, we have four jobs.  Run the machinery of the operation so everything works well, provide the vision on where we are going, explain the WHY and build our people.  This “build our people” part is a communications exercise which most leaders fail to do well enough, myself included.   Many of us grew up in business in a era when your boss just expected you to get on with your job.  No encouragement was needed, because you were required to do a full day’s work for a full day’s pay.  Praise didn't exist and you found your own sources of encouragement.  Things are different today, but are we skilled enough in the best practice techniques of giving honest praise and encouragement?  This is where the acronym SER comes in. “S” is strength, “E” is for evidence and “R” for relevance.  It is a useful formula to remember when you want recognize the good work done by one of your team.   “Strengths” are interesting because most bosses are laser beam focused on identifying weaknesses and fixing them.  They are “error finders” as opposed to “good work finders”, when looking at how people carry out their tasks.  They are searching for defects, time delays, poor quality, unsatisfactory performance, cost overruns and basic idiocy.  If we switch our mindset and look for strengths, then we completely change how we see our people. That automatically changes how we communicate with them.  Now words strung together like “good job” are a complete waste of time.  Please - don’t even bother saying them. The person on the receiving end is fully aware they are doing many things in their work, but still have no clear idea which particular bit they are doing well.  We need to be highly specific about which aspect of their work we are recognizing.  This is how our words have impact.   “Evidence” is critical to demonstrate that the boss has been paying attention and has noticed good work is being performed.  By referring to specific actions, decisions, outputs etc., the staff member knows the words coming out of their boss’s mouth are real and not flattery, propaganda or an attempt to snow them into believing the boss is nicer than they really are.   Every piece of work is made up of separate tasks, so the idea is to select a particular task that was done well and single it out for praise.  You could say, “Greg, good work on the report”.  Or you could say, “Greg, thank you for your work on the proposal for the client.  That was one of the best I have seen.  You assembled the evidence very comprehensively and you argued the case very convincingly.  I am sure the client was impressed by the professional level of the work they received from you”. It is obvious which one we want to receive.  So, if it so obvious, why aren’t we communicating our feedback like this?   “Relevancy” is a key step that 99% of bosses who do manage to offer some praise and recognition completely fail to mention.  We have to recognize the work, offer our evidence to make the praise credible and then take it one important step further.  We need to link the good work being done to the bigger picture.  That can be for the firm’s future, but it is much more powerful if it is linked to WIIFM.  “What’s In It For Me” is a powerful driver of employee self-interest.  The secret is to select that piece of excellent work and then link it to how that is going to help that person succeed in their business and career.  For example, “ Greg, your ability to source key data and then back it up with clear, concise language is a real skill.  That is the type of skill our company values highly.  It also means that you can have impact in your current role. This is the caliber of person we want to make a future leader in our organization.  I know you are working hard and keep going with what you are doing, because you are differentiating yourself in a powerful and positive way.  This will be a big help to you in your career”.   If you are hearing that comment, you are going to be fired up to try even harder and push even further.  “Greg, good job” pales in comparison doesn’t it.  Even worse, when nothing has been said at all, because working hard is expected around here, there has clearly been a major lost opportunity to engage your team members.  What is required?  That most valuable of all resources – “boss time”.    We have to make the time to become “good finders” and then take the time to communicate it using the SER formula. If we can do that, then we will make a huge difference to the enthusiasm, loyalty, productivity and happiness of our team members. They will outperform the competition, because a happy motivated team will always beat a disinterested, disengaged competitor’s rabble.

Covid-19 popped up out of nowhere in January 2020 and we began following the news reports about this mysterious virus coming out of China.  We all remembered the SARS era and how Japan had sailed through that pretty well. We weren’t particularly worried and expected Japan would sail through this one too. However, around the middle of February our clients starting postponing scheduled in-house training.  This is when we realised Covid-19 was a serious issue.  We had public classes scheduled too and at our own volition, worrying about people’s safety, we decided to postpone them.  We also said to our team to work from home.  If they had to come to the office, they could do so, but try to come in late to avoid rush hour trains and go home early for the same reason.  On March 3rd we had a socially distanced, mask wearing Town Hall. This was the last mass gathering of the clan to date.  We were able to piggyback on our American colleagues ten years of experience delivering LIVE On Line training and we pivoted across to remote delivery of our content.   For the first time in my career, I was leading a remote team, with a single person in each location, some working from a desk, others from their kitchen table, couch or the kotatsu, the low table typical of many Japanese homes where you sit on the floor.  I went out and bought a whole swag of headsets for everyone.  Actually, when I got down to the electronics store, I realised I wasn’t the only one thinking like this, because the shelves were pretty much stripped bare.  I kicked myself for not being sharper and speedier about the new necessities.  Fortunately, we all had laptops, so we could work from anywhere.  We had previously considered moving our server to the cloud and it was then that I regretted we hadn’t taken that step at that time.   I wanted to keep the team together, so we transferred our morning chorei or morning meeting online.  We call it the “Daily Dale”. I made it the rule you have to dress for work, regardless of whether you are working from home or not.  You also have to come on camera.  I required this so we could keep an eye on everyone, in case some people are becoming isolated and depressed, being stuck at home all the time and are starting to withdraw.   In our normal routine, by turn, we each lead everyone through the “Daily Dale” covering the company Vision, Mission, Values etc. We do this every day to re-energise our WHY.  We kept this going so that every day just about everyone could reconnect with each other.  After a while, I realised we needed to reproduce the chit chat opportunities that you get when working together in an office. We started “Coffee Time With Dale” at 3.00pm every day, for those who wanted to catch up informally with their colleagues.   I had four new staff start in January, just in time for the business to plummet and the team to disperse.  They had very little time in the office with their colleagues, especially in those all important early days of starting with a new company.  They needed lots of help on how to do things and where things were located.  I found that leading a dispersed team was much more time consuming than normal.  I was the center of the wheel and I had spoke connections to my reports, but what was missing were the cross spokes connecting them together.  I found I had to spend time telling the others about aspects of a conversation and decisions I had reached with their team mates.  Of course, they wouldn’t answer their phones, so I needed to call multiple times and leave messages.  I also found that the millennials in my team were not good with the phone.  They don’t check their messages. The whole chain of command was bogging down.   Somehow, we have kept it all together so far.  My concern is this situation is likely to last until the end of the year and beyond with everyone working from home.  I had scheduled another full safety Town Hall for January 2021, just to get people together for some face time, after such a long time apart.  The Government then announced the lockdown, asking people to stay at home, so we cancelled the meeting.  Isolation fatigue is a real thing in Japanese society, which tends to operate extremely well in group formats.  The hairy chested Aussie individualistic culture I grew up in, may handle isolation and not seeing work mates much better than Japan does, because of the latter’s group orientation.   Many of my team are singles, cut off from family, friends and work colleagues.  I keep telling everyone to schedule days off, take some of your leave.  You can’t go anywhere, but at least you can sleep in, watch a movie, read a novel, anything which provides a break from the grinding routine of chasing revenues in a business depression.  Do they do it?  No.  Being at home doesn’t feel like a holiday. It is boring when that is all that is open to you. They are all strenuously hoarding leave days waiting for the Big Breakout Release, when we can all travel again.  Fine up to a point, I get it, but I am still worried about my team’s mental health, so I keep pushing this “take time off” idea anyway.  How long can this remote leadership go on?   I know what happened over the last year, but what is going to happen this year? How do I keep people enthusiastic, as the situation grinds us all down?  Do I need to ramp up my communication and reach down more often to those on the front line?  Do I need to schedule more regular Town Halls, get people together in a large socially distanced room for comradery and provide actual face time, as opposed to only screen face time?  Do I need to mandate days to be taken off, so people can sleep in or read their novel, or watch some movies?  Where are the cracks that are going to appear in this second year of our collective nightmare?  How do I keep people virus free by encouraging them to avoid contact with random people, because they may be carriers of the virus?  Do I need to increase my positivity much further to drive positivity in the team?  What am I missing, because my own world has become so diminished and small now?   One thing is certain – this isn’t going away for a long, long time regardless of what various carefully coiffed Cabinet Ministers may say.  Do we have what it takes to get to the other side and have an intact business with a healthy, happy team?  These are the big questions facing us all, as we lurch into Year Two of the pandemic.