Best laid plans of mice and men.  That was 2020 wasn’t it.  We all started that year with our plans, hopes, aspirations and strategies in place.  They all went down in flames and business became a game of catch as can, as we tried to grapple with an unfolding disaster.  In our company’s case, our financial year starts in September and we were up 25% on revenues compared to the same period the previous year.  I hired four more staff in January and had a record breaking year looming in sight.  It was a record breaking year all right, but in the opposite direction to what I expected. What about this year?  Are we any better positioned to plan for 2021?   Japan has seen a state of emergency declared and virus cases leaping higher and higher each day, like the flames of an uncontrollable bush fire wreaking havoc on everything in its path.  Japan, being Japan, won’t accept the vaccine test results like the rest of the world.  No, we have to replicate the tests here again because, well, we are Japanese and are different.  That effectively means there won’t be any real vaccine led recovery until the end of the year at the earliest.  How do you plan in these circumstances?   Long term planning is fine, but there are so many assumptions involved, on top of the normal lot, that you have to really question whether it even makes sense to bother.  Maybe we just suspend long term planning hostilities, until the smoke clears from the battlefield and we can see what is going on.  If we are not able to do any realistic planning for the long term at this particular point in time, then what should we be doing?   Now is the time for micro-planning.  Fine, but how far ahead is this micro-planning limit?  I would suggest a year to 18 months is realistic to do some interim planning before we can get back to longer term assumptions that actually make sense.  I would even break that down further to look at the initial planning phases broken into 6 month terms.  By mid-year we will have a better idea of the production and logistics associated with vaccine dissemination.  Vaccines give us the capacity to get to herd immunity as fast as possible, with the minimum number of deaths being recorded.  Then we can project forward in six month brackets, with more confidence that our plans can actually be realised.   Our micro-planning needs to be focused on cash flow, cost control and productivity.  This is a good time to go back to the WHY.  Leading people remotely requires a lot of devolution of responsibility and leaders need to delegate a lot more than usual.  We need to make sure our people are committed to being highly productive and that they remain focused. This has to be an inside out thing, where they are motivated to do it themselves, without requiring any external interventions. Every company has their Vision, Mission, and Values done these days, but often more observed in the abstract, than in the practicalities of everyday work.  They are nestled up inside some protective glass, hung auspiciously on a wall somewhere like a totem to a better world.  People glide past them in the office without paying any attention and now they aren’t even gliding past anymore, because they are working from home.   Get the team together online and go through these guides and decide if they sufficiently suitedcover the current situation?  We may need some interim updates to tide us over this period of business anarchy and disruption.  Maybe we need to re-write them or revise them temporarily.  Do they fit the moment? We have our peacetime versions and today we probably need some wartime versions too.  Sprouting bromides, homilies and apple pie declarations from another simpler time, comes across as distinctly hollow and makes people cynical.  Let’s start by reworking the guiding principles around what we do, why we do it and what are our values in this moment of meltdown.  We need everyone’s buy in, in order to pull through this nightmare.   Doing simulations on cash flow are mechanical exercises based on the fall out of the numbers.  Importantly, we can arrange the teams’ efforts around the fulcrums which will give us the biggest lift.  What are they and who needs to be working on what.  What are the things we have been doing well that have worked and where are the areas for further improvement over the next six months.  Where are skill set gaps which need to be plugged.  How do we recognise individual effort when the bankable results may still be distant.  It can be frustrating to be working hard and feeling you are getting nowhere. Do we have a detailed, specific plan for each person, for their role, which plots out where they should be focusing their  concentration in the months going forward.  Leading remotely can mean the personalisation of leadership becomes diminished.  We have to take that into consideration and allocate the time to micro-manage people in a good way.   We can only see the immediate other side of the parapet at this moment, but we have to work given where we are and with what we have.  Our genius grand plans and brilliant strategies can come later.  We have to make sure we are still around to be able to play in that world. So let's go micro now, so that in twelve to eighteen months time, we will be busy putting the final touches to the major strategic plan triumph.    

Most leaders are not properly trained for leadership.  This is especially the case in Japan.  Here you study under the mentorship of your busy, time poor, over worked boss.  Your access to formal leadership training is constrained by the firm’s buy in to the dubious virtues of On The Job Training or OJT.  I am sure that at one point in time the OJT worked like a charm but the used by date has well and truly passed on that methodology.  Busines is a lot more complex today, technology rampant and the younger generation are increasingly feral.   The core required skills of the leader form three inter connecting circles.  These comprise leading, selling and presenting.  Now for many leaders they only see the one circle of leading as relevant and see the other two as less important.  The point here is that these circles each connect so that there is an overlap between all three.  If you are a leader you are in the business of sales.  You may have come through the CFO or Chief Scientists or General Management track to get to this position of authority, but you still need sales skills.  The problem is you haven’t ever sold anything, so you have no experience, no skills and no training.  Worse yet you have no positive mentality about how important being able to sell is for you as the leader.   It is a little regarded, not sufficiently embraced truism, that we are all in sales.  We are all in the influence business, trying to have other people follow our choices, suggestions and ideas. Experts in sales know how to anaylse what their audience wants, how to ask key questions to lead to self-discovery and how to present solutions in the most appetising and appealing manner.  The leader decides the direction.  That is their job and job number two is to get everyone to accept that is the correct direction and to get others to head there.  We are selling conviction that we are correct.  We are selling trust that we can be relied upon to get the organisation to where it needs to be to succeed.   “Selling is not telling”, is an old idea in sales.  It is actually asking very well designed questions, listening carefully to the answers and then making a decision about what is best for the buyer.  The salesperson decides what is the best because they have the most knowledge of their solution line up.  The leader has to do just that.  Decide the direction on behalf of everyone based on their superior knowledge of what is the best solution for the organisation.   Communication skills are the critical factor between getting compliance and getting engagement.  The leader can extract obedience based on threats, hierarchy, force of personality and position power.  That is a long way from motivating the team to self motivate to crawl across a mile of broken glass to get the results for the firm.  Being able to frame questions in such a way to reveal to the listener, the team member, the realisation that their best interests are best served by doing what the leader has suggested, is the key communication skill the leader must have available to them.   This is where the leader presentation skills kick in.  How to understand the team, their fears, their desires and to be able to meet them in the thought processes populating their own minds.  The ability to package up complex offerings and make them clear and able to be consumed by all.    Words stir the hearts and minds of the team members, but does the leader have that ability?  That is why the presentation skills of the leader must be extremely high.  Garbled messages, unanimated delivery, uninspiring aspirations sabotage the leader’s efforts to lead.  So many leaders though got to the top and somehow evaded the responsibility to become excellent communicators.  They relied on their technical skills and hid from the chance to reach out and gather people to them through their speaking skills.  They wander around making dopey statements about excellent speakers being “all style and no substance” to justify their own ineptitude.   Leaders who lead without advanced sales skills and speaking skills are playing at leading.  They flaunt and enjoy their status, while relying on the creaky apparatus of the company organisational chart to hold them up.  They are fake leaders.  These leadership Lilliputians are mediocrity personified. They are in deep denial.  They have only one circle of the leadership puzzle and continue to deny they lack the other two vital components.  They all get found out eventually and are exposed for their failings, their careers shattered on the rocks of self-delusion, timidity and fear of the unknown.  You don’t have the necessary sales and presentation skills?  Well stop hiding from reality and go get them.  We need expertise at the highest levels in all three circles, if we are going to be a true leader. 

Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape.  We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk.  We have two types of people working for us.  There are those who receive a salary of some dimension, be they full time or part-time and then there are those who get paid for their services.  Some of these services are delivered regularly throughout the year.  Others are intermittent, on a needs basis.  Regardless, we need to take a good look at these every year to make sure they are still fit for purpose.   As a training company, we have some regular suppliers.  Our landlord charges us rent for the space we use and that lease pops up every two years.  Regardless of the economy, the office space vacancy rate, the consumer price index or any other intergalactic factors, the numbers always go up at renewal time.  It is no good finding ourselves at renewal time and thinking “maybe I should have investigated if there were more appropriately priced alternatives”.    Too late by that time, because it takes quite a while to find the size of space you need, in the location and configuration you require, at a number that makes sense.  Better to engage a real estate broker early to start telling you what the alternatives are so that when the time comes you can have some choices available.  That data is also a potential bargaining chip in the arm wrestle for the next two years of tenant penal servitude.   Another key player is your accountant.  If you outsource your accounting to a firm, they will receive the data from your people and then get into a P&L and Balance Sheet format that you can come to terms with.  It also enables someone externally to see what are the patterns of spending and spot any anomalies.  Japanese staff are very honest.  However, like staff in other countries, they can find themselves in the newspaper for embezzling vast sums from their employers, sustained over breathtaking amounts of time.   If you need an English speaking accountant, we are now fishing in a very small pond.  This tends to mean that we lock someone in to do the books and we just keep them forever.  We all seek an equilibrium comfort point.  We get the service, we are happy with it and we are generally too busy to investigate if we can better it.  Once a year, list up some accounting service delivery alternatives and have a conversation about what they offer.  Existing suppliers can become robotic in their delivery of their services and they have pruned their services down to the minimum necessary to maximise their return.   It might be a good time to see if you can maximise your return instead.   In our case, we need things designed and printed, because we distribute flyers to clients and training manuals to class participants.  I am using the same printing company now which I have used for over ten years.  I know there are other companies who are slightly cheaper, but I need high quality service, delivered at speed. Being able to get things designed very quickly is something I value highly and will pay more for that service.  If that service was diminished then there would be a reason to change.  The point here though is, I need to keep track of the size of the disparity between what I pay and what they deliver.  I can’t just go to sleep at the wheel and keep using the same folk because I am too busy to know the relative price, quality and scope of the service I am receiving.   Labor lawyers do well here in Japan.  The regulations are changing, there is government pressure to not have unpaid overtime and numerous arcane labor rules abound.  Our labor lawyer is a pretty good businessman and signed my firm up on a monthly retainer.  I took my COO’s advice on this retainer, though I had my doubts.   I reviewed that service need and that retainer and guess what?  After I cut it, there has been no difference in what we needed as a service.  Instead we are saving that money every month  now.    Maybe at one point there was a point.  My point though is, don’t let these things just drift along, without making a conscious decision to decide if the service is really what you still need or not.  End of the year clean up time is a good time to survey new potential providers and clean up unneeded service expenses too.    

Looking back, 2020 started quite well and then rapidly descended into a nightmare for most of us.  Very few industries boomed. The majority of us were fully concentrated on not going bust.  In 2021, we know we will have more of the same from the virus and the business disruptions which result.  It is a new year though, regardless of when your financial year kicks off, so there is some residual societal energy there to draw on, for a new start.  Our mindset, as always, is going to be important. Shall we allow things to play out, continue on as they have been or do we decide to seek to control our minds and strive for a different direction?   There are five mindset tools at our disposal.  Number one is thinking.  Sounds obvious enough.  “Of course I am going to be thinking in 2021”.  But what will you be thinking?  Has Covid-19 shrunk your world to the boundaries of your own abode, as you control your empire from super safe seclusion in your eyrie?  Fatigue sets in for individuals in the team, when being vigilant about not catching the virus and also the feeling of being worn down by the isolation aspects.  As the leader what are you thinking about to deal with this personal and professional fatigue on the part of the team?  Have you in fact even had time to think about it?  Vaccines in Japan, seem a long way off being distributed. Even then, it will take some time to reach herd immunity, so we are bound to be stuck with this situation for a good chunk of 2021.  Is this factored into your calculations?   Number two is opinions.  Nobody has experienced this pandemic before, so we struggle to identify facts and we are awash with opinions.  Who should we believe?  The WHO was slow to label Covid-19 a pandemic and quick to say masks were not useful.  They have lost credibility as a result of both calls.  How long will this virus disruption last is an opinion call, because science just doesn’t know yet, as there are too many variables involved.  As the leader, we have an opinion on this, but is that opinion also shared by our team members.  At the start, some recommendations were for 1.5 meter separations and other for 2 meters .  Now some scientists say 6 meters of separation is required.  Who do we believe and what should we do about it?  Have you canvassed the team for their thoughts, expectations, concerns and opinions on what happens from now?   Number three is beliefs.  Are we glass half full or half empty on the prospects of things getting back to some normality in 2021?  These beliefs impact the way we invest money, time and effort in 2021.  What do we believe is the way forward and how are we able to persuade our team to follow what we believe, if they believe something different?  Should we be Mr. or Ms. Sunshine, trying to boost team morale with our positivity?  Should we be pessimistic and instead prepare everyone for the worst possible outcome, so that it won’t come as a surprise to anyone?  As the leader what we say counts and people want to know what to do.  What do we tell them?   Number four is emotions.  Working from home is destabilising, as is not being able to travel, or there being little capacity to take holidays.  The New Year period becomes a source of infection transfer, so we feel pressure to stay at home and not see family.  Single staff, living alone, in particular can feel the pressure of isolation and a sense of loneliness.  As the leader, how do we deal with these types of emotions on the part of our staff?  Is this something you have been working on or have had no time for this as yet?   Number five is insights.  What have we learnt this year, which we can carry into 2021 and do a better job as a result?  Have we had the time to learn anything or have we been run off our feet constantly putting our fires?  The end of the year break is a great time to reflect and think about what needs to be done in 2021, that we hadn’t been able to anticipate in 2020.  Are we advocating a long break for everyone, encouraging our people to have a longer than normal holiday?  True, you can’t go anywhere, but just being able to get away from work for a couple of weeks will help everyone to recharge themselves.  Is there a plan?   I haven’t suggested any solutions for 2021 because everyone’s situation is so different.  In Japan, the asking of the right questions is considered superior to having the right answers.  If we can ask ourselves the right questions, then we will arrive at the right conclusions for 2021.  How is your question list looking?

I met the owner of a successful business recently.  He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction.  So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange.  It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful.  Why was that my expectation?  Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are like, so I expected a Japanese equivalent.  He was totally different to what I expected.   He had no personal power at all from what I could see.  One reason may be that we were speaking in Japanese. It is a subtle, circular language that masks and obfuscates like few others.  He had two senior staff members with him, his direct reports and they too were rather underwhelming.  It got me thinking about what does it take in Japan to become a successful leader?  Here were three of them in front of me and I wouldn’t have crossed the road to meet any of them.   Position rather than personal power counts for lot in Japan.  You meet a lot of people here with big titles and pretty much no personal firepower.  That is not to say there aren’t charismatic, powerful leaders here.  Mr. Nambu who founded the massive Persona organisation is a very charismatic person, who has tons of personal power.  He has nearly 20,000 employees spread across his 67 subsidiaries and 11 affiliates.  I know him personally and he is very good at dealing with people, both high and low.  He started the company while he was still at university, so he is a rare bird in Japan, to take a start-up to serious stardom and himself to billionaire status.   What is the difference between some of the successful Japanese I have met and the nobodies leading many firms.  When we teach leadership, we make a point of differentiating it from management.  Managers make sure the processes are running on time, cost and at the required quality.  Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction and build the people.  By this definition most Japanese leaders we meet in business would be classified as “managers”.  Japan is a country of detail, long term planning, caution and perseverance.  You can go a long way on the back of that line-up and many do.   My new acquaintance is a manager I would say.  I am guessing that he fell into the business he is in, rather than it being the product of strategic planning.  What a contrast with Jordan Wang.  Jordan is the Dale Carnegie franchisee in Sydney and took the business over two years ago from basically nothing growing it very quickly to a substantial size.  I was attending his talk to the Franchisee Association on how he runs his business.    His planning frameworks were very sophisticated.  Because they started with basically nothing, he said, he had to come up with a road map. He spent some serious time studying the various frameworks out there and then adjusted them to his reality.  Over the next two years he shaped and crafted those frameworks into a formidable machine, to help run his business.  One of the very experienced and successful American franchisees commented that “I am feeing less smart” after listening to Jordan.  I know exactly what he means, because I too was blown away by Jordan regarding his thinking, energy and that word – charisma.   In Japan, trust is a key requirement for retaining staff, gaining clients and remaining successful.  This is the same everywhere, but somehow Japan just brings a much great intensity to the word.  If you can gain trust with others, you can build a business here. Over time you can build it, if you happen to have chosen a niche or a sector that is growing and profitable.  Being high on trust and low on charisma is no impediment to success here in Japan.   So when you meet a Japanese leader and they are a fizzer in the charisma stakes, don’t necessarily write them off.  Look at their numbers, particularly staff numbers as an indicator of how much credence you should attach to them.  In my experience, few Japanese excel individually, but put them together in a group and they are most formidable.  To keep the group together, their leaders need to have been able to build the trust.  The other question you need to ask is have they been able to sustain this over decades?   If they have, then you may have a business partner in front of you, even if they seem grey, dull and boring.

The ad on social media said, “we are looking for sales A players”.  I know the guy who put out the ad and he had recently moved to a new company, a new entrant into Japan and they were aggressively going after market share here.  I was thinking I would love to be able to recruit A players for sales as well, but I can’t.  The simple reason is that A players in Japan are seriously expensive.  If you are a big company, with deep pockets in a highly profitable sector, then this is a no brainer.  Why would you bother with B or C players, if you can afford A players?  What do you do though, when you are running a small to medium sized company in a tough market, with thin margins and lots of competitors?   Being a leader, able to recruit the best talent, isn’t the same requirement as being at the sharp end of the stick, where you have to create something out of nothing on a daily basis.  We have to take D players and turn them into C players and take C players and turn them into B players. Maybe we can even create the odd A player, given enough time and consistency. In theory, this sounds all very plausible and straightforward.  Good so far, but how do you bring your talent alchemy to the forefront?   Leaders are pretty busy, so who develops these D, C and B people?  It stands to reason that the sales section heads or sales department heads are not sales A players either, so their sales role modelling is a limiting factor.  The leader has to be highly selective where they put their time and effort.  Pumping a lot of work into someone, to see them walk out the door is heartbreaking, mind numbing, costly and depressing stuff.    Adjusting expectations is a big factor in leadership.  Trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle takes time.  So we cannot expect new people to be producing results any time soon.  Having a really good record of salespeople results is a start.  Over time, you can build up averages, so that you can know what is a reasonable expectation, for a certain point in time.  I have a spreadsheet that tracks all the salespeople from ground zero.  This way I am comparing salesperson against salesperson, quarter by quarter.  I know what a first year average revenue result is and so forth, year by year.   Knowing this is a big help, because I don’t load up new people with too much pressure.  In fact, it gives me the ability to encourage them.  I can tell them that I am not expecting them to hit the moon straight out the gate. The first year is a giant learning curve and I want them to do their best and that will be fine.  By taking away the pressure, they can fit into the team, absorb the culture and begin their training.  A players are expensive, so bosses want results immediately, to justify the big bucks they are paying them.  Fair enough, but the rest of us need to tread a different path of patience and encouragement, to gradually mould the new people into performers.   The other thing we need to do is inject ourselves into the mix and work on developing talent.  We cannot leave it all to our direct reports.  Even though we are super busy, we need to have some regular personal interaction with the new team members and need to keep close tabs on how they are going.  We need to create the time to coach them.  We cannot be there all of the time, but we have to select precise interventions to help them keep moving forward.  Maybe we can do thirty minutes early mornings, a couple of times a week, to work with them as a group.    We also have to scale for their ability to absorb pressure.  Some are robust and others are more delicate flowers.  We need to adjust our time expectations for how long it will take to get everyone up to speed to handle the pressure to perform.  A players are already forged in the furnace of high performance, so they are application ready.  The balance of getting cash in the door every month to pay the bills and being patient with people, is a high wire act that leaders have to learnt to walk. It is easy to get this wrong and fall to your demise and see the business go backwards or even down.  There is no road map here either, because every case is different, every group of individuals is different.  You have to play the cards you can afford and not spend any time wishing to be dealt a better hand.   The country may be going to hell in a basket, but salespeople are in high demand. When hiring salespeople people, I am constantly astonished at the prices other companies will pay for a warm body.  Very challenged E players, with no experience, are getting offers that make you want to cry.  That is the market.  We are all going to be constantly faced with this struggle of how to develop people we can afford, in an already overheated hiring market, that will just get worse.  The demographics are not on the leader’s side here, as the lack of young people coming into sales drives up the price.  This will become the sales era of the C player, with intermittent light showers of B players.  Get ready for it folks.

Years ago I inverted the pyramid and promoted the best salespeople to become the branch leaders.  The existing branch leaders were shuffled around to new branches and they provided the grey hair and the credibility needed by the older rich clientele, but didn’t have responsibility for driving revenues anymore.  They were moved because if they had stayed in the same branch, they would have undermined the authority of these “upstarts” recently promoted.  The revenue generation responsibility was shifted from guys in their 50s to a 60/40 mix of younger guys and gals, taking the average age down to 35 years of age.  It was a revolution in Japanese retail banking.   Not all made the transition from selling to leading but most did.  This was the American Dream brought to Japan.  In this brave new world, a young woman could become a branch head at the age of 35.  That was previously unimaginable.  The impact on recruiting talented, bright kids out of the best universities was profound.  We were bringing on board young people who were incredible and they chose us over the bigger more powerful competition, because they saw a new future here in Japan for themselves that hadn’t existed before.   There were many reasons for instituting this revolutionary change, but one of them was the generational divide between the older male branch leaders and the younger people they were responsible for.  Like me, they had all grown up under the tough love school of boss supervision.  When this is how you were raised in business, it is extremely hard to break free of that and try something unfamiliar and different.  The intentions are always good and were to make the younger staff better.  The issue had become the style of communication to achieve that.  Straight talk, for many in my generation, means tons of critique, criticism and maybe even verbal abuse.  That is what we got from our bosses, so we are passing it on down the generations.   The younger people today though have a lot more options than we had.  They have compliance systems, staff surveys of bosses and a fundamental change in societal attitudes working in their favour.  The demographic decline in the numbers of young people means there is a strident war for talent going on, as companies try their best to find enough young people to hire.  The young are a finite resource in a sea of strong demand.  That changes the power equation substantially from when I was a kid. We were all assured we were quite disposable.  In the modern era, criticism has to be replaced with words of encouragement.    Bosses have to adjust their expectations.   This sounds simple, but it is confronting.  I remember once calling one of my younger staff and I left a message to call me back. There had been some internal staffing changes and I wanted to assure them that everything would be fine.  I also wanted to gauge how they were was feeling about the changes.  No call back, but later I did see a text message to my phone that said they were “not mentally ready to speak with me yet”.   I don’t know about you, but for someone brought up on tough love, that statement seemed so soft, indulgent, entitled, namby-pamby, no guts and divorced from reality.  I tell you I had fire and sparks coming out of my ears and eyes immediately I read their message.  I was furious. I could never imagine I would say such a thing to the President of the company, if I were a junior employee.  If the President left a phone message saying “call me back” then I would drop everything and make that call as soon as I got that message.  We lead a different generation today.   In their mind, there was no problem with brushing off the President, because they weren’t ready to have that conversation.   I eventually spoke with the staff member and accommodated some concerns they had and all was good and resolved - for them. I wasn’t resolved though.  Maybe I should have just left it, but I couldn’t. I had to address their phone message to me.  This person was talented and I didn't want to lose them, so I knew I was walking on a tightrope.  My tough love upbringing had their “immature, naïve, stupid, unacceptable” comments stuck firmly in my craw.  I told them quietly, calmly but firmly, that if they ever got another message from me to call me back, then they should do so pronto.  If they couldn’t manage that, then they should find another President to work for.    They could do that easily by the way, because they are in the zone of high talent demand.  Where do we draw the line today though?  I know the way I was raised in business wasn’t the most ideal and that I am a hangover from a bygone era, but I am still here and still leading. How much crap do we have to put up with from this younger generation?  I would guess a whole lot more, certainly more than we anticipate or want.  There is no finite answer, but clearly our method of communication is going to have to change.  It has to  become much more nuanced than anything we ever experienced from our bosses.    I will try to keep Principle #17 in my mind, “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”.  Also, Principle #8, “Talk in terms of the other person’s interests”.  And I will definitely follow Principle #1, “Don’t criticise, condemn or complain”.  If I can keep the fire and sparks within me from burning the whole thing down, then there may be hope for me yet.

Time is the enemy of good leadership.  It takes time to develop a team of individuals.  A common metaphor is the orchestra conductor.  Each instrument player has a specific role and it is the job of the leader to meld them together to work harmoniously and effectively.  The conductor takes a significant amount of time to get this working correctly.  That is their sole purpose.  They make the best of the talent in the team, get them working well together and develop the individual talents of those involved.  In business, we have to do all of these things and worry about the P&L, the Balance Sheet, the competition, quarterly earnings, changes in Government regulations, the media, shareholders, where the market is heading and the latest developments in technology.  We are kept pretty busy.   Consequently we are time poor from the moment our eyes open until we drift off to into slumber at night.  There is a tension between the time needed to work with our team members to work effectively together and the time we have available to do just that. So we cut corners.  We start to lead from a macro perspective.  We are prone to broadcast emails to the whole team, mass Town Halls where we download what is going on, Zoom calls to the whole team where we pontificate on how things should be.  It is terribly efficient but is it particularly effective?   We know from sports that all the modern coaches coach each individual based on who they are and what they are capable of doing.  The old style game half-time coach thunderous moments of inspired oratory are the thing of Hollywood movie celluloid relics of a past long passed.  Leaders need to focus on each person, one by one.   Some players are easy going, amazingly talented athletes who can perform the most unexpected feats of spontaneous physical dexterity, that a coach can never teach.  They are Amiables who like people and are understated.  They don’t speak in a loud voice, in fact they are laconic to the extreme.  Loud incandescent outbursts about the requirement for getting the numbers are lost on them.  We have people like that on our business teams.  They are the solid quiet performers, often the social glue inside the team, holding all the superstructure together.   The opposite stye are the Drivers.  They are highly numbers and outcome oriented.  They want the big bucks which comes with producing results.  They don’t need external motivation, because the fire burns deep inside them and it is permanently self-igniting.  They don’t need public acclaim or affirmation, because they march to the beat of their own drummer.  They don’t listen to any praise because they are sceptical and they don’t feel any need of it. They can handle extreme pressure from above to perform. They have no problem with straight talk about getting the numbers or getting out of Dodge. They need to be strongly corralled to play as a team member, because they are oriented as an individual player and believe they rise or fall on their own efforts.  They have severe outcome focus, rather than people focus, so often they can be limited in application as the leader. That doesn’t stop organisations putting them in charge though, because they produce results.   Analyticals are data freaks.  They only react to proof and evidence. They suspect any opinions which cannot be backed up with the statistics, expert testimonials, key numbers or facts.  They are very well organised and thorough in their approach to everything.  You have to persuade them with the data.  They are not stirred by emotional calls to action.  “Do it for the Gipper” doesn't do anything for them.  Whether in sport or in the office, they need to be convinced by proof of the right course of action and once on board, they then knuckle down and get right behind the effort.   The opposite style is the Expressive.  They are outgoing, like being with people and are very confident, often too confident.  They are usually the pranksters inside the team, making the jokes, geeing everyone up.  They are flamboyant and enjoy the accolades, public acclaim and attention.  Titles, prizes, trophies, incentives – bring them on they say. Inside the company they are the “hail fellow well met” crew, who work hard and play harder.  Pumping up their ego has no bounds.  The less fizzy, more sensible variety are often the most attractive leaders inside the organisation.   As leaders we need to know which style we are and what are our own strengths and weaknesses.  We need to know the same detail about our team members.  We should spend time with them individually.  Time constraints push us away from doing this, but we have to fight against the unrelenting drive to harmonised mediocrity.  There is no point in being a macro leader in a modern micro world.

I remember reading once about a President reflecting on the cost controls he had instituted inside his organisation.  The industry had emerged from a recession and even though the economy and the company had recovered, he had forgotten to ease the strict controls he had instituted to protect the company.  Covid-19 has forced many of us to institute strict controls in order to survive the business disruption caused by the virus.  When should we release some of those stringent controls?   This is a tricky subject at any time, but it becomes more pungent when you are coming out of a long tunnel.  As Winston Churchill once remarked ,“If you are going through hell, keep going”.  Very clever and witty, but when we have come out the other side of Covid-19 hell exactly at what point do we need to ease off the vice like pressure we have been applying to expenses and investment?   In any business there is always tension around a couple of staples.  Control and innovation can be in contradiction.  Compliance, regulations, controls are there to protect the business.  Systems have to work at scale, regardless of who is employed in the business.  There has to be consistency and production sequences need to work to make deadlines or to ensure the required quality.  When I worked in retail banking, there were so many regulations and audits, regarding what we were doing.  Every process had to be documented and followed according to the letter of the specified designation.   People didn’t get into trouble for varying from the procedures.  It was hiding the variation that proved to be career ending.  They were too scared to admit they had not followed the procedures and so tried to hide the fact away.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t work and at some point it all comes rolling out and rolls right over the top of the individual and they are summarily fired for hiding the offence.   On the other hand, we want people to be innovative.  We know the danger of groupthink and also of being left behind by more creative rivals.  Staff witnessing the career ending variances from the established tried and true methods, are not much induced to try new stuff. How do we get innovation, when we have the system tied down so tight there is no room for mistakes?   There has to be a different mentality around mistakes.  Japan is a mistake free zone.  There have been decades of bosses very publicly screaming abuse at staff for screwing up.  This curtailed people’s interest in doing anything new or better.  The boss has to now take the lead here.  The staff need to be told clearly what can’t be played around with for compliance or regulatory purposes, but also what is up for grabs.  Mistakes can be said to be tolerated but if the talk isn’t matched by the walk, the experiment in a “hundred flowers” blooming, dies on the spot.   Sounds easy, but just where is the line?  How big a mistake are you personally, as the boss, prepared to tolerate?  When Lee Iacocca called in one of his marketing executives at Chrysler following a major failure on a new model launch, that executive was expecting to be fired.  To his amazement Iacocca said, “Fire you!  We just spent million educating you”.  Can you be like that?   We set the temperature for innovation, by how much we celebrate the learnings from failures.  We might not be as big minded about losing millions like Lee baby was, but still there will be opportunities to demonstrate that we never fail, because we always learn.  We are going to come out of Covid-19 in 2021, so although we can’t set a specific date to loosen the controls, we still need to set a date to remind ourselves that we need to reevaluate where we are in the business cycle.  Now is also the time to look for innovations which can be implemented, once the cash flow has been stabilised. Plan now and pour in the investment when the time is right, rather than waiting for the cash to be there first and then start the planning.   We need systems and rules to protect the company and we need innovation to take the company forward.  It cannot be “either”, it has to be “and”.  Striking that balance has no road map and is difficult to get right, but if we can be directionally right and at the right scale, then we are going to be on the right track.

Working from home can easily become working apart. Japan is a group oriented society and now the group has been flung to the winds, while people are at home working in isolation.  Ronin were masterless samurai and for many Japanese white collar workers they can feel they have been tossed from the castle.  Japan is a curious mixture of discipline, conscientiousness and also escapism.  The staff’s job description is of vital interest to employees, because it defines the scope of responsibility.  Their main interest is to avoid all mistakes and problems and small targetism is definitely in vogue here.  Collective responsibility is preferred.  We are all responsible, so that no single individual is responsible.   What many companies have found during Covid-19 is how low is the productivity of certain individuals.  Unprotected by the group and having to stand on their own two feet, they stumble.  Innovation, out of scope responsibility, flexibility are not hallmarks of the office worker in Japan.  Plunging them into isolation doesn’t trigger any changes for the better.  They are in retreat now and hunkering down, trying to keep out of the limelight. Actually, we need them to step up to overcome a difficult business situation, but there is little appetite for that.   The responsibility for this mess is with the leaders.  When the ship is going down, we don’t take a vote on the course of action.  The leaders spring into action and start firing off orders and making sure the coordination is happening, whereever it needs to happen.  The energy involved with this effort is enormous and difficult to sustain across the many months of Covid-19.  Nevertheless, it has to be done and leaders have to step up to the plate and lead.   Micro management is not the greatest tactical weapon in the leader’s armoury, but in times of crisis like now, it has a strong contribution to make.  The key thing is to manage the culture.  A British “keep calm and carry on” idea is not the recipe needed for leaders.  Instead over communication and massive efforts in coordination are key.  This is when you find out that your leaders are poor communicators.  They have no idea how to engage the team and how to motivate others to want to succeed.    Regular meetings everyday must be held to make sure everyone knows what is going on and so that people feel included. A common schedule of the key activities needs to be created across all departments, because otherwise, coordination becomes a nightmare.  Even with a common schedule, there will still be struggles to keep it uniform and updated.  This means super vigilance on the leader’s part for divergence from what is supposed to be happening. The team never see that big picture to the same extent, so for them the coordination issue is basically a curious irrelevancy.  They are hunkering down to focus on their little bit in isolation, not trying to work as a “one company” unit. The leader must drive this hard to make sure it happens.   Telling people one thing once never works.  The drum beat on the key points has to be constant no matter how boring it is to keep relating them.  Checking up on things that are supposed to be happening is annoying.  People should be responsible to do their bit, but they are not, so make those phone calls and keep double checking.   The only way to get things to work is to make it happen.  In this teleworking environment, controls are loosened off and the leader can be cut adrift from what is really going on.  The antidote is concentrating on the 20% of things which represent the 80% of results.  We cannot do everything, but we can make sure the most important things get done. If we take the Pareto Principle even further we know that 4% of inputs produces 64% of outputs.  Watch that 4% like a hawk.    If leaders communicate much more than normal, assemble a One Truth document that tracks what is supposed to be happening and make sure the integrity of this document is maintained, they will be on the right track.  Additionally, identify the 4% which represents the 64% of results and keep everyone focused there.

Giving people orders is fine and fun, when you are the leader.  Not so great when you are on the receiving end though.  Collaboration and innovation are two seismic shifts in workstyle  that are fundamentally different from the way most leaders were educated.  Command and control were more the order of business back in the day.  Hierarchy was clear, bosses brooked no opposing ideas or opinions and everyone below knew their place.  Things have moved on, but have the bosses moved on with it?   Basically, the people you see in your daily purview are arraigned against a similar team in another steel and glass, high rise monstrosity somewhere across town.  The quality of their teamwork and their ideas determines who wins in today’s marketplace.  All the cogs have to intersect smoothly and the quality and speed of the output are the differentiators.  Are your salespeople better than the opposition, is the marketing department punching above its weight, are your mid level leaders really rocking it?  Clarity of purpose, inculcation into the cult of the WHY, dedication combined with smarts, make so much difference when competing with rival organisations.   The leaders are what make the difference.  They are hiring the people, training them and promoting them.  There are so many deeper aspects to this.  Is the culture profound or anaemic?  Is talent recognised, rewarded and embraced as a competitive advantage or are we checking the age and seniority of the straps on the slave galley oars?  What is the communication mode?  Is this monologue boss city or are we engaging with a firestorm of vibrant, powerful ideas from below.  Is the boss the chief know-it-all or the orchestra conductor, moulding the raw untrained troops into a stellar team?   Communication is at the center piece to all of this.  When the boss communication is focused on direct orders on the what and how all day long, we breed robots.  Why don’t we push ourselves much higher and go for motivational leadership, where words capture souls and move mountains.  The key to this pivot is to dump the olde style locker room halftime rousing call for maximum blood and guts in the second half.  Today’s sports coaches are geniuses of psychology.  They know their athletes’ temperaments, aspirations, fears and hot buttons at such an intimate level, that it is simply breathtaking.   Bosses have to be in the same mould.  Knowing each person thoroughly as an individual is the starting point.  On top of that is knowing what they are trying to achieve.  We become their cagy corner man in the ring, wiping away the blood and helping to focus their dizzy brains through the fog of the daily beatings going on in the marketplace.    When we tell someone what to do, all we do is trigger negativity.  Their cynical brains are burning with reasons why that is a bad idea. They feel the prime insult of being told what to do and consequently lack interest in executing a plan not of their own design, desire or creation.  The reason they are so sceptical is that the plan is unleashed in a finished format, with no context or background attached.   We need to get to the point tangentially with a short story.  By the way, we don’t say, “I am going to tell you a story from my glorious past”.  That would be amusing. I would love to see their reaction to that little doozy of an opener.  No, instead we go straight into a place in time, to a location they can identify, with people they probably will know and we spin a yarn, a true yarn, about what happened to us and what we learnt from it.  This whole narrative is short, under two minutes.  We certainly don’t flag our conclusion MBA executive summary style at the start.  No, we are more crafty than that.  We are like Iga Ninja, luring the listener into our web of charm. We expose the background that led us to an experience and viewpoint on a topic.  At the very end, we give them the order, the action we want them to take and then we finish off with the benefit to doing it that way.   Next comes the hard bit for olde style leaders like me.  We ask them if they can see a way of taking that idea or method further and bettering it.  The old ego can take a battering at this point, when they trot out their half baked and crappy ideas, with all the aplomb of tender, ignorant youth.  That is why we make an important intervention. We say, “Get together with others, you select them and then together think about what I have said and come back to me tomorrow with your best ideas”.  This momentum breaker is important, otherwise only first phase, shallow musings will spill out of their mouths. We have also forced them to collaborate with their peers, giving us a better chance to reap richer alternatives.   In the end, they either adopt your suggestion as the best alternative or they adapt and improve on it.  Either way, they have been given ownership of the next steps and so are more likely to execute it with commitment and enthusiasm, compared to following your lofty commands.  This is a different way of leading. It is the methodology needed to match the future of work we are all facing.

Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School and INSEAD Business School are all awesome institutions.  My previous employer shelled our serious cash to send me there for Executive education courses.  Classes of one hundred people from all around the world engaging in debate, idea and experience exchange.  One of my Indian classmates even wrote and performed a song at the final team dinner at Stanford, which was amazing and amazingly funny, as it captured many of the experiences of the two weeks we all shared together there.    When you get off the plane and head back to work, you realise that the plane wasn’t the only thing flying at 30,000 feet.  The content of the course was just like that.  We were permanently at a very macro level.  The day to day didn’t really get covered and the tactical pieces didn’t really feature much.  This isn’t a criticism because you need that big picture, but the things on your desk waiting for you are a million miles from where you have just been.   Fortunately, there are some leadership principles which can cover off the day to day needs.  Principle #22 is “begin with praise and honest appreciation”.  Such an obvious thing, how could this even be mentioned as a principle?  It may be obvious, but are you a master of this principle?  We talk about providing psychological safety for our teams.  Well that is great and just how do you do that, when you have pressure to produce results from above and are feeling the stress of the current business disruption?  It is too easy to begin with an interrogation about the current state of play, the numbers, the revenues, the cash flows. How about if you started every interaction off with finding something real to praise about the team members.  Not fakery but something real, that shows you are paying close attention to what they are doing well.   Mistakes happen.  Except in Japan.  In Japan mistakes are not allowed and the penalties to career advancement are large.  “Fail faster” might make you a legend in Silicon Valley but would see you cast out in Japan.  That is why the entire population here are all ninjas at concealing any errors, so that the boss never finds out.  How do we get innovation going if we can’t tolerate mistakes?  That is one big reason why there is so little white collar work innovation in Japan.    Principle #23 says “call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly”.  Rubbing in it some one’s face that they screwed up is a pretty dumb, but universally adopted, idea by bosses. Principle #26, “let the other person save face” isn’t an “oriental idea”.  It is a human idea and no one likes losing face in front of others and it doesn’t increase people’s engagement levels.  In fact, is has them thinking about leaving for greener pastures.  Principle #24 also helps, “talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person”.  We want our team members to feel empowered to take responsibility, to step up and try stuff.  That is how we create an innovation hub inside the organisation.  If you have a hotbed of ideas from your team and the competition is still canning people who make mistakes, then you will win.   Principle #25 is so powerful.  “Ask questions instead of giving direct orders”.  Bosses are staff super-visors, because we have super-vision.  Probably true once upon a time in the olde days, but no longer the case.  Business is too complex today, so we need to grow our people and to be able to rely on their ideas.  If I spend all my time telling you what I think, I haven’t learnt anything.  Bosses need to think of questions which will push the team’s thinking muscle hard and get people really engaged.  Instead of laying our your thoughts, chapter and verse and falling in love with the sound of your own voice, try asking questions instead. After asking the question, shut up and let your people answer without interruption. It may be killing you, but do it. Being asked for your opinion and ideas is empowering.  Maybe the boss has all the answers, great, but what if the staff have questions the boss hasn’t even thought about.  In Japanese business, asking the right question is more valued, that having the right answer.   All of these principles have things in common.  They are common sense, but not common practice.  They are super easy to understand, but devilish to execute consistently.  They are game changers in our relationship with our staff.  Having some leadership principles to live by just takes the action of thinking out of the equation.  These become the reflex actions we take because they have become a habit.  These are the types of habits we need to cultivate.        

The President of a company is a very powerful force.  They drive the direction, the strategy and the culture formation inside the enterprise.  In Western corporations, there are big salaries and big incentives tied to the leader’s performance, especially around profit achievement and share price gains for shareholders.  We project this idea on to Japanese companies and imagine they are basically built in the same way.  This idea seems fine, until you ever have to get a decision from a Japanese company.  This is when you enter the twilight zone of differences about how things are really done here.   Japan has some specific features which make the leadership terrain quite unique.  Mid-career hires are the norm in the West and the exception in Japan, as far as larger firms are concerned.  New graduates are malleable and the company leadership wants to install their group think, culture and conservative action methodologies in them.  Seniority is a respected Confucian attribute in Japan, which has little currency in the Darwinian, performance outcomes oriented West.  Age and stage make sense in Japan, when you spend your entire career with the one firm and are part of the fabric of that company, gradually being stitched in over decades.    The risk aversion predominance in Japanese business weighs against change and bolsters constancy.  We foreigners represent change.  To become a trusted partner with a Japanese firm means they have to make some internal changes to accommodate the new thing we bring to them or the old thing we are tweaking in a new way.  The question is, who inside the Japanese decision making hierarchy is going to take responsibility for the change.  In Western companies there is a big personal payoff to taking risks, but Japanese salaries and bonuses are not on the same planet as a country like America. So, the upside of taking a risk in Japan is far outweighed by the potential career damage if there is a failure.   We have all grown up with a British Raj model of decision making.  Convert the leaders and you get the whole company to snap into gear and get with your programme.  It doesn’t work like that here unless the President is the founder or the owner.  This is the “one man shacho” formula, the classic dictator President, who rules with an iron fist and drives everyone to do what ever they say.  Most big corporates though, have a structure where the President has P&L responsibility for the whole company, but the direct reports have P&L responsibility for their part of the business. The President can’t force them to make expenditure allocations impacting their turf without their agreement.  Hence the reputation of Japan as the country of glacial decision making.  I find this is a bit boring, because the Raj approach is much faster and easier for me.  No one in Japan could care less what I want.   I deal with a lot of Presidents, as I try my best “convert the Raj” techniques to get them to buy my training services.  Being the President of my firm, I can get access to the senior echelons of the client company and get a hearing.  This is where Western logic departs from Japanese best practice. The leaders I speak with won’t personally do anything themselves.  The company has internal compliance methodologies to reduce risk and protect the firm.  The work to investigate my idea will get sent right down to the very bottom of the pile.  That lower level designated officer or tanto will start pulling together information on our company, our offer, our pricing, the market, the competitors, resources required and the prospective ROI.   The tanto will then present that report to their superior, the next up the line, who if they approve it, will place their hanko or personal seal on the document.  This is a public acknowledgment that it has passed their stringent evaluation process and they are willing to take responsibility and place it before their superior.  The hanko marks on the document will also include any divisions or sections that will be impacted by the buying decision. This is an internal harmonisation and communication process to provide checks and balances.  In this way, there are no surprises and no issues, when it comes to coordinating the execution piece.    This process is repeated all the way up to the President’s direct reports who have P&L responsibility to fund the deal.  If it is a big enough decision, there may be a senior executive meeting required.  This is usually a formality to bless the decision, rather than make a decision. The plan executive sponsor will outline the idea at the meeting, there will be no questions and it is therefore agreed. Next item! The surprising thing is that the President isn’t the final decision maker.  And I had such a good meeting with that President too and I thought I had the Raj technique working on steroids!   Actually, the person I needed to meet was the tanto. I could either work with them directly or I could supply the information they required, for them to do their due diligence. When meeting with the President, I need to finish the meeting off, by asking to have my people get together with their tanto, to supply whatever information they need. Japan being such a polite culture, the President will happily make that introduction even if knowing that there is no chance of this deal going anywhere.  This is because it conveniently avoids anyone having to tell me a direct “no”.  If it has legs, then the tanto’s job is to navigate the decision through the system.   So in Japan, it is better to start at the bottom and work your way up, than try to go top down, as we are more familiar with in the West.  The tanto has to become a key messenger for us. If we can’t win over a relatively junior, seemingly unimportant staff member to our cause, then the decision outcome will be remain vague and lifeless.  Now we don’t want that do we.

Tokusan the scholar visited Ryutan the Zen Master to learn about Zen.  Tokusan was a very smart fellow and very confident in his knowledge and experience.  He was good at impressing others with his capabilities and many people looked to him for guidance and advice.  After about ten minutes of conversation, Ryutan invited Tokusan to enjoy some green tea.  As the Zen master poured the hot tea into the cup, the tea began to flood over the brim, but Ryutan kept pouring the tea.  Tokusan became agitated and said to stop pouring, because the cup was already full.  Ryutan then told Tokusan that he couldn't understand Zen until he emptied his own mental cup, to allow new ideas to enter.   This is a famous zen story in Japan and we leaders are Tokusan.  We can be convinced of our ideas and become stubborn and inflexible about departing from them.  We have risen through the ranks based on our abilities, experience and results.  We had to work things out for ourselves and our decisions were correct.  Over time we came to believe in ourselves and our decisions and we would plough ahead regardless of what others might have thought. We have always had to overcome resistance.  We are now in the leader danger zone.   There is tricky line between knowing what you are doing and actually being correct.  We became the boss because our previous ideas were proved correct and superior to what others were advocating. We have seen off the idiots, doubters, naysayers, critics and rivals.  We have climbed the greasy pole and they haven’t. Everyone should listen to us and believe what we say, because we are right and they are wrong.  Case closed.   This is the classic hero journey favoured by the independent, tough, driven, Type A, alpha mammals. For a very long time this worked just fine.  Business however has grown more enmeshed with technology changes.  More complex organisations have arisen and operate at hyper speed.  Also, a different animal has been entering our companies, coming in straight out of college. Are we actually able to deal with these unparalleled changes?   Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution put more importance of adaptability than strength or brains.  Are we maintaining our full cup and therefore not well placed to adapt?  Are we trying to do it all by ourselves?  Many bosses are unable to hire smart people, because they cost too much, relative to the size of the cash flow in the company.  Others won’t hire smart people, because they are scared of becoming a victim of future corporate internecine struggles, where they can be replaced with someone younger and cheaper. How exactly can we work through others?   Covid-19 has disrupted business globally and the future is uncertain.  How do leaders know what to do going forward?  How do you know if your strategy is the correct one or not?  Strong willed leaders see asking others for advice as a sign of timidity and weakness.  They have attached their personal inner resilience to always knowing the correct answer, to being right, to being smarter and more savvy than everyone else.   Complexity today exceeds the capability of one person leading the team to have all the answers.  A superman or superwoman is no longer required.  What happens though if you, as the leader, have low self awareness and can’t see that you need to empty your cup?  Exactly how do you empty your cup?  What should go inside the now empty cup?  Lack of self awareness is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.  Once that is accomplished then the emptying and refilling of the cup can start to happen.   We have to face ourselves and ask why do we think we are able to keep operating as we have always done, when the current situation is more difficult. There are no indications we are ever going back to how things used to be?  Emptying the cup requires humility, often in short supply with powerful leaders.  Running faster, pushing aside and overtaking the other lemmings to ultimately be sprinting off the cliff, is of no help.    This is the moment to stop and consider your own cup.  Is it full of your baloney, that you have convinced yourself is correct?  Have you surrounded yourself with “yes men” or the meek and compliant?  Have you bullied everyone into submission? Are there ways to tap into more ideas and solutions than you can possibly produce by yourself?  Are there people closer to the action on a daily basis, who will have greater and better insights than you can possibly have.  Your frontline experience is way out of date by now, as you have arisen through the ranks over these many years.   This is scary.  Your self belief is what has driven you thus far and questioning it unravels a lot of your personal construct about your right to lead others.  That is the old model of leadership, so let it go.  The used by date has expired on that one.  Empty your cup and your ego and find ways of learning more from others, including those who work for you and may even be quite junior.  Tokusan thought he knew everything until Ryutan started pouring that tea.  I am pouring your tea for you right now and challenging whether your cup is going to stay full or will you make the effort to empty it?

Key Competencies Needed To Lead Others (Part Two)   In Part One we looked at two broad categories of leadership competences around being Self-Aware and having Accountability.  In this next tranche, we will look at being Others-Focused and at being Strategic.    Others-Focused has many sub-points, but today we will investigate five key aspects   Inspiring   Through role modelling and communication skills, leaders can and should inspire followers.  The olde days of the boss having to know more than everyone else has gone.  The focus has shifted to developing followers, through personal interest and example.  Are you consciously, systematically doing this?   Develops Others   Once upon a time, certainly when I first started work,  there was no particular concept that it was the leader’s role to develop others.  Individuals had to step up and do it by themselves. This is fundamentally what all leaders had done in the past.  Today however, business is more complex and fast moving, so everyone needs help.  One of the issues is the struggle between selfishly focusing on your own glorious career and the role of others in boosting that cause and your own efforts to selflessly boost the careers of your direct reports.   Companies need leader producing machines. The talented rise faster and higher by demonstrating they are that very elevating machine. Those who can demonstrate they can produce leaders are given a bigger remit to do that at scale.  Can you do it and are you doing it?   Positively Influences Others   Rabid rivalry and internecine warfare between competing thrusters amongst the leadership team permeate the wrong messages to those below.  Disciples pin their hopes to the banner of the thruster they think will go higher and take them with them. Everyone is grasping the greasy pole, trying to climb over each other to the top.  Politicians and sycophants abound inside companies and are a vicious form of poison, because they are playing all ends against the middle to feather their own nest.  The leader sets the tone.  Not whining about others in the company, not playing petty internal power games and keeping firmly focused on beating the external rivals is the correct path.  Are you and all of your colleagues on it?   Effectively Communicates   Personal capabilities and mastery of one’s designated tasks are the usual path to promotion.  Being 100% responsible for oneself is different to being responsible for a team.  This is where leadership communication skills are soon shown to be frayed and tatty.  Speaking the lingua franca is frankly so what? Communicating key messages and inspiring and persuading others to your path are the required skills.  Few leaders do a great job because many are locked into the belief that all this communication stuff is fluff and hard skills are the only currency.  They are doomed to be low altitude flight path denizens, because companies are looking for people who can move the masses forward.  Is what you are doing every day moving them forward?   Providing Direction   This sounds so simple.  I mean how hard can this be?  What if it is the wrong direction though? What if we are all being urged to sprint faster off the cliff?  This is the VUCA world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Setting the correct direction isn’t the easiest thing for leaders these days.  We can’t know if the direction is correct until we start down the path.  The clue is to adjust when confronted by unpleasant hints about the actual truth. We need to keep adjusting to the market realities and not become too convinced of our own genius and superiority.  Has your leader ego convinced you that you are always correct?   Being strategic is one of those tropes of leadership, but what does it actually involve?  Let’s look at couple of issues.   Innovative   This competency sounds obvious and easy except that very few companies, let alone people, are actually innovative.  Think of all the companies you have worked for and nominate how many came up with any significant innovations?  We are better off developing the innovation muscle of the entire team, than relying on our own scampy offerings. If you are substantially personally gifted in the innovation department then hats off to you.  How many people like you then have you ever worked with?  The answer is clear.  The collective team, if harnessed properly to the task of coming up with innovative ideas, can do it together.  The sticking point is, do you know how to marshal your team to do that?   Solves Problems   The is another obvious competency, except that are you the one running yourself ragged solving everything? Have you delegated tasks sufficiently so that others can share the burden?  Leaders should be involved with big strategic issues, not with every small fry decision.  If you are in the problem weeds and getting down and dirty with minor issues, it is time to rethink how you have positioned yourself as a leader.    Uses Authority Appropriately   Does every decision have to run by you?  Are you in too many meetings?  Are you hooked on your own authority and feel the need to be on top of everything?  Developing staff means letting go and giving them some things to try and possibly fail with.  “There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities” is a good mental intervention, for when your staff screw things up.  Delegating your own power is a tough one for driven leaders.  However, if you want to rise, you have to breed successors like rabbits, so that there are plenty of people to take over so that you can rise up the ranks.

Leading is super easy.  You are given the title, the authority, the budget, the power and then you just tell people what they need to do.  How hard can that be?  As we know, leading is a snap, but getting others to follow you is the tricky bit. Our awesome power will certainly bludgeon compliance. Sadly, the troops turn off their commitment and engagement switch whenever they come into contact with kryptonite bosses.  We get promoted because we personally did a rather good job on our individual tasks.  That is a false flag though when it comes to being able to communicate, coach, set the direction and inspire others.  Few great athletes become great coaches. It is a totally different skill set.    There are four broad areas we will focus on to help us become successful leaders: Being Self-Aware, Accountable, Others-Focused and Strategic.  The possibilities are endless, but these four areas will serve us well to elevate our thinking about what is required to be a great leader.   Under the umbrella of Self-Awareness we have four focus areas. Self-Directed There is a mental and physical requirement for leadership, driven by a strong desire to be successful. We explore inside ourselves to understand what we need to do and why we need to do it.  Someone who can only function on the basis of the advice of others is a follower not a leader.  Of course, taking advice is good, but leaders have their own sense of True North and keep moving forward, charting their own course   Self-Regulated Being a self-regulator requires supreme discipline.  Knowing what not to do is as important as making action step choices.  Shiny objects abound, multiplying like amoeba, but time, money and resources are limited.  Be it business focus or our temper, we need to rein them both in and assert control.   Develops Self Constant application of self-improvement sounds obvious, but many leaders are cruising.  The more diligent may be doing a good job working in the business, but they are too busy to be working on the business. Is that you? Technology, society, company culture and organisational development overtake some leaders and ultimately they are ejected from the firm.  Where is the locus of self-development to be found?  Good question and there are multiple options. Good choices will have a lasting impact on our longevity as leaders.   Confident “We don’t know what we don’t know” is a big problem.  Before you become a leader there is that misplaced confidence that you know what to do in the role. As you rise through the ranks, you keep making new discoveries.  The more you learn, the less you find you really know.  Imposter syndrome is a big factor here after we step up into new responsibilities.  Constant self-development is the cure for this, as we grow into the job.   Accountability covers four sub-topics.   Competent This is often mistaken for technical knowledge or business content cover.  That capability within your old job is what thrust you into a leadership role.   What about your competency as the leader?  What do you really know about leading?  How persuasive are you?  How well do you understand the aspirations of the team?  Can you coach others who are just not like you?   Can you set the correct course in a raging sea? This requires study and doesn’t happen by osmosis.   Honest and Having Integrity Are you honest?  Would your people agree?  Seeing people as cogs in the machine elevating your brilliant career, jousting with rivals for the next job using the team resources for that purpose and being all about me, me, me is often the leader reality.  Think about some of your bosses up to this point. The crust on top of this reality is a false veneer disguising what is really going on.  Subterranean self-interest is often voiced over with pious pronouncements.  Being honest is about sincerely wanting to develop the team members and integrity is what you do or think when no one is observing you.    Manages Progress Towards Goals Obvious.  Yet are the goals clear to your team? Is there an intelligent plan? Are people engaged and bought in? Are you the pirate captain simply bellowing out orders and threatening the crew with the plank?   Makes Effective Decisions When do you know a decision was effective?  Certainly never at the time of making it.  In that moment, we are working on hope rather than certainty.  Are the team convinced of the wisdom of the decision?  Was there any input opportunity for them?  Does our power of personality or position power just crush access to the diversity of opinions available?  When it isn’t working, are we trapped by pride, ego and arrogance to keep running faster off the cliff?   In Part Two, we will investigate being Others Focused and Strategy for Leaders.

Japan has some set pieces around leadership.  The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen.  This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t.  They can be observed every day, all day long.  What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss.  Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, what is happening with that report?”.  Now the team are at home, away from the constant surveillance of the boss.  The boss has little idea how they spend their days and our clients tell us many Middle Managers  are struggling to supervise the diaspora.   In many cases, the day would start with the chorei, the morning huddle, getting the team together to go through what is on for that day.  These meetups can continue even when everyone is at home. We have just moved it online. Everyone needs to be on camera at 9.00am, dressed for business, rather than in a T-shirt.  If you don’t come on camera that is a red flag.  There may be some depression issues bubbling away in the background, as the isolation starts to get to people. They begin to withdraw.    One of my team didn’t come on camera for three days in a row, saying there was an issue with the laptop webcam.  Was there an issue?  How would I know that was the case, sitting in my study, at my home?  I immediately started organising another laptop to be sent out. I need to see everyone’s face every day, to check how they are doing.  In the end, it was a technical issue around the privacy settings in Teams.  The point though is, I didn’t really know what was going on.  I have to be continuously keeping an eye out for the emergence of any stress or depression in my team.   At the chorei we go through good news reports, the vision, mission, values, the Dale Carnegie Principle for that day, who we are visiting virtually or otherwise and who is visiting us, each person’s top three priorities for the day and a motivational quote.  The whole thing takes about ten minutes.  I usually spend another ten minutes talking about things like taking care of your health, standing up regularly because we tend to sit for too long, issues around coordination which have arisen, the latest news in our business, the cash flow situation and recognising good work.  We also have Coffee Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day for anyone who wants to just shoOt the breeze and catch up with colleagues, they don’t physically meet anymore.   The meeting cadence with direct reports continues online but it is easy for this to fade or drift.  People’s new work from home schedules seem to make it harder to connect.  Back in February, when we started working from home it had a temporary feel about it.  On reflection, I didn’t immediately embed some processes I should have.  It is now many months since our migration to working from home and we will many more months like this. These direct report meetings are a discipline I found I have to really enforce, because many of my staff seem to possess ninja level skills at avoiding talking with boss. I want stuff from them, I want it yesterday and I am very demanding. Talking with me is probably a pain, so some are quite creative in escaping the supervision.    The biggest issue has been coordination across the whole business, as we all descend into our little pockets of responsibility and start losing sight of the big picture.  I have to spend a lot more time now making sure that key information is being shared and that I am also sharing key information, rather than hogging it to myself.  This is a time consuming activity, but we have dropped the ball a couple of times because it wasn’t done properly.  Before you know it, timelines start to drift, activities drop out of completion sequence and confusion is not far behind.   This is when you discover just how detail challenged some people in the team actually are.  In the office it got covered off somehow.  Being subterranean, it wasn’t noticeable. In isolation from each other however, wrong data inputs have a horrendous impact.  They spark a lot of effort to clean up the mess created. It draws people away from what they should be doing, dragging them into the morass of re-work.   We tried to get around these coordination and communication issues by creating one truth. There is a live document in Teams that everyone can access and all changes are noted there.  As a training company, we have training events scheduled LIVE On Line or in the Super Safe Classroom, so we can see which ones are being executed, which are postponed, who is involved, etc.  A limited number of people are allowed to feed into this document to enforce accountability and control.  You may need a similar live document that tells everyone what is going on, which is being updated continuously as things change. GIGO (garbage in garbage out) is an issue for any document, so the details have to be monitored carefully.   To overcome the isolation, one on one meetings are being held more frequently than when we were in the office.  However, I find it is even harder than normal to get hold of people because they are often holding online meetings or are on the phone.  In the office, I could just walk over to their desk and signal to them to see me after they finished their call or grab them when they came back from their meeting.  I just have to invest the time now to make the communication channels work properly.   I find our younger people are not phone savvy.  They don’t check their phones for incoming calls they have missed. This wastes a lot of time trying to get hold of people, so I have to be pretty bolshie with them, about checking their phones for missed messages and to check their voice mail regularly.  It is a real pain, but sending emails or text messages as well seems to be the way to get their attention.   People are now working from home and are liberated from the daily grind of commuting in Tokyo which is good.  They are not necessarily pouring this extra time into their work though. As the boss, I have had to become a much more “supervising” leader than before, which I actually hate.  There are many more moving pieces now due to Covid-19, so whether I like it or not, I have become more interventionist to make sure it all hangs together.  How about you?  Has this been your experience too?

Clients sometimes ask us to help their Japanese executives have more “presence”.  This is rather a vague concept with a broad range of applications. There is a relevant Japanese concept called zanshin ( 残心 ).  A rather difficult term to translate into English, but when you see it, you will recognise it.  In Karate we do the predetermined, specified forms called kata (型).  When someone is performing one of these kata, there are different points of emphasis and after the physical action is completed, there is a residual energy and intensity of commitment that continues.  It is the same in the kumite (組手) or free fighting.  After a powerful punch or kick is completed, the karateka keeps driving their energy, intensity and focus into their opponent.  In business, we call this intensity “executive presence” but usually without the concomitant violence.   When the executive makes a comment, there is an energy that remains after they have stopped speaking and the audience feels that intensity.  We also call this having gravitas.  Emilio Bortin was the CEO of the Santander Bank, which was a shareholder in the Shinsei Bank, when I was an executive there.  He was visiting Japan to check on his investment and we were assembled to give him a presentation on what was happening with the Retail Bank.    He was a broad shouldered but not so tall man, but when he entered the meeting room, he was like a Spanish Bull entering the arena, looking for a matador to emasculate.  He completely filled that large room with his presence.  It was absolutely palpable.  He hadn’t even said a word, yet you felt his energy, intensity, determination, passion, strength and confidence.  He was radiating zanshin - “presence” big time.   “When I am a billionaire like Emilio baby, I will have presence too”, you might be thinking.  So, did he get presence when he became a billionaire or did he become a billionaire, because he had presence?  We know it was the latter.  Right, very good, but how do we aspirant billionaire punters get executive presence?   The energy being pumped out is a big factor.  Low energy, low intensity people have zero zanshin and so zero presence.  Softly spoken people can have presence too I guess, but frankly, you just don’t meet too many of those.  There is a vast difference though between being raucous and loud and having presence.  Being loud is basically just annoying.    To have presence, your vocal strength and your body language must both be engaged at a higher than normal level.  In casual conversation we speak at a certain level of intensity, usually fairly mild.  When we are in a meeting or presenting, we need to ramp that up by at least 20%.  When I am teaching participants in our classes to increase their vocal strength and speak more loudly, they struggle.  I say to them “double that energy” and they raise by 1%. They resist because they feel like they are screaming.  However, when they see themselves on video, it just seems confident and credible, not loud.  This is one element of having presence.   Pauses, ma (間), are another critical element.  This space between the phrases or sentences, allows the audience to actually distill what you are saying.  When you rush the words together, each thought overwhelms the previous thought. Each successive idea canibalises its predecessor and so not much content is consumed in the end.  Our messages, in effect,  are competing with each other.  We speak at a good pace, so that the energy button has been pushed, but we need to break the content down to smaller brackets, which people can more easily digest.  We are not rushing, so it shows control and no pressure being felt.  This emanates confidence.    We hit key words for additional emphasis, rather than allotting equal importance to each word. This focuses the audience attention on what we want them to focus on, rather than trying to ask them to swallow the whole talk, in one gulp.  This communicates “I am confident”.  This level of control requires us to be very concise.  Too many words and the message becomes less clear, drowning in surplus words.  We need to trim the fluffy bits right back.   Our eye contact is a powerful engagement tool.  Spraying the eye contact around the room is fake eye contact and meaningless.  We focus 100% of our attention on one person, look them in the eyes for 6 seconds and then repeat the same formula with each person, one by one.  They feel they are the only person in the room and we are speaking directly to them. Previous American President Bill Clinton was famous for his ability to engage strangers in crowds, when he was mixing with the masses.  He focused his eye contact completely on that person in front of him and engaged them at the highest level.   Standing up straight or sitting up straight is super easy, but few can do it.  They kick out one hip when standing or sway around all over the place, while they are talking.  It distracts from their message and dissipates their strength and intensity.  When they are seated, they are sprawled out in their chair, looking way too casual to be taken seriously.  They don’t use gestures and just talk, talk, talk.  Talking way too much means they are always taking the long way round to get to the point.  Little chance for zanshin in this case.   Absolutely exude your belief, confidence and power from inside. Drive it into your audience.  Use your voice and eyes for powering up your messages.  Be concise, so you are distilling and focusing only on the key messages.  Break the rhythm with pauses and engage people with your power eye contact.  Strong posture says a lot about who you are. People believe body language, so ramp it up.  This is how to have zanshin, which is the key to having executive presence.

In business we live in the world of shallow statements of opinion.  Imagine there is a topic for discussion amongst the leadership team.  People will let fly with their thoughts and this becomes the basis for decision making, based on people’s statements on the matter.  Usually everyone is pretty busy, so the drill is to listen to what was said and then make the choice from amongst the various alternatives and move on.  There is a problem with this.  We are trapped in Phase One thinking if we continue in this way.  Phase One thinking is that first reaction level of contemplation on what you have just heard.  Instantly, you pour out your immediate thoughts on the issue.  The problem with this is, although it is quick and saves time, there is pretty light contemplation going on here. The famous Greek philosopher Socrates lived from 470-399 BC and was famous for his questioning techniques.  He used this method to help others dig deeper into their thinking.  We have to take inspiration from him and develop our own questioning techniques.  If we do, we will get to a deeper realm of understanding of the issues.  This is the platform we need to make the best decisions. I notice this issue in our training classes.  When we ask someone for their opinion on something, they will give us an immediate Phase One answer.  Because Dale Carnegie was a devotee of the Socratic method of asking questions, our teaching methods rely on us digging in a bit deeper.  We are trained to never take what someone says at the Phase One Level, but to always push further.  This applies to leadership and to sales.  In both disciplines, the students in the classes are encouraged to go further and question more deeply.   In sales, for example, imagine we were talking to a customer.  They tell us they need the widget in green.  We train our students to ask why they want it in green, as opposed to accepting the green option at face value.  This gets us to a Phase Two much deeper answer.  That is good information, but it isn’t enough.  We need the client to go to Phase Three thinking and we do that through further questions. If they said they wanted green, because of XYZ reason, we don’t stop there.  In Phase Three we ask, “what would be the impact on your business if your were able to get XYZ?”.  We have now elevated the discussion to the achievement of their strategic goals.  We have taken them to a much richer source of information to help them clarify what they are doing.  In sales, we have started to position ourselves as the customer’s trusted advisor. In leadership it is the same thing.  Members of the executive team will give their opinions on an aspect of the business.   Normally we collect all of these various opinions and then we make a decision based on that discussion.  Often, we are influenced by the force of personality behind the opinion. This is only Phase One thinking though.  If we ask them to explain why they think that, we have now driven deeper down to Phase Two.  Once we hear everyone’s Phase Two level of thinking, we could make a decision at this point.  We shouldn’t stop there however, instead we should keep going.  Push them to go to Phase Three and tap into their ideas on how XYZ would strategically impact the business.  This is a tremendously simple process.  It does take slightly longer than just tapping Phase One thinking outcomes, but the harvest is so much richer.  We have all had the experience of having had a discussion with someone, often an argument and a couple of hours later, we are having a conversation with ourselves.  We are telling ourselves genius things such as, “I should have said this” and “I should have said that” etc.  This is because in the interval, our thinking has moved way beyond the simple Phase One responses we were applying in the conversation.  We have moved to Phase Two and Phase Three thinking, but we have missed the boat. Instead of having to wait a couple of hours to get a richer response in meetings, as the leader, we have to get our Socrates mojo working and go for Phase Two and Phase Three responses right there and then.  We have to guide our people to start thinking more strategically about the business. You will be surprised by the improved quality of thinking that you trigger.  This means the leadership group discussion and the decisions made will also be much better.  Let’s all decamp to the Phase Three world and live there from now on.

Leadership is stressful during normal times.  Dramatically different situations being enforced to deal with Covid-19, such as working from home, just adds to the stress. The current business revenues may be under water.  You may now owe the Japanese government a sizeable chunk of cash just to keep the firm alive.  The strain may be apparent or it may be quietly building up like a cartoon pressure cooker about to explode.  Folk law says, as we get older our tempers get shorter.  So if that is true for older leaders, now exposed to more than usual stress, this might be a dangerous cocktail being shaken, rather than stirred.  My wife assures me that as I have gotten older, my temper has quickened.  Personally, I can’t notice it, but like most things, she is probably right.  Is it because we are getting closer to falling off the perch, that we have less patience with everything, in our flickering twilight years on this planet?  I am sure there is many a psychologist thesis written on this subject, but I will rely on my wife’s anthropological insights, from her study of the aging, captive Aussie male. With the team being at home or part of the team being at home, the simple coordination of things has become a lot more complex.  Also, learning the new tech tools to coordinate things, has added a layer of opaqueness to getting things done.  I find that I have to spend a lot more time keeping myself up to speed on what is going on and in keeping my team appraised of the latest developments. Actually, I find this quite annoying and feel like I am having to waste my valuable time. I belong to Tokyo Rotary and the Rotary symbol is a cog wheel, with the spokes radiating out for the center to the rim.  This was a coordination tool invented by Paul Harris in Chicago 115 years ago.  In those days, each profession had a guild where only people from the same profession mingled.  Harris saw the need to have an organisation to allow people in business to mingle with others, from quite disparate industries. With working from home now the norm, the leader tends to become the center of the wheel spokes, but there is no connecting rim anymore or a weaker rim connection is in place.  Everyone reports into the boss and the boss deals with people in a linear fashion.  The connecting rim is missing, but it is critical to keeping everyone informed of events.  Of course in this environment, things will start to drift.  Messages are not getting through.  In this new world, individuals are now free to freelance, making their own decisions and taking the organisation off course. As the boss, none of this is telegraphed to you.  It is subterranean and just creeps up on you.  Blissful ignorance reigns until it doesn’t. You discover that what you thought was occurring, actually isn’t.  In fact, it is not even close to what it should be.  Does steam start pouring out of your ears like a Disney cartoon character?  The next phone call from the boss will be a doozy for sure, as retribution is sought and the guilty punished.  For people in my age bracket, how’s that short temper going at this point? People not doing what they are supposed to be doing, is another ear steamer.  Your instructions were clear.  Or so you thought.  The result is not what was expected.  The individual in question now gets questioned, actually probably gets more like an interrogation.  No one emerges happier at the end of this conversation, than at the beginning.  The result is often a lot of heat generated and not much light. Another explosive is the mistake made.  Errors are never great in business, but in this free range, work from home world, the chances of errors occurring goes up. Normal office interactions allow for a lot more communication and consultation.  In Japan, spinach has been the usual answer – horenso (ほうれん草). This is a play on words, as horenso means spinach, as well as reporting (報連相).  Each element of the compound word means reporting, contacting and seeking guidance from the boss.  Horenso can easily dry up though when operating online and people start making incorrect decisions.  As stressful as it is for the boss, it is probably more stressful for the team.  They are stuck at home, often with small children, who haven’t quite mastered the concept of Mum or Dad are here working, rather than being available to them whenever they want.  The team don't have as much communication with their colleagues as before, so isolation can become an issue.  This is stressful. Problems will arise.  How we respond to them is the key.  If you find your ear steam machine is at full throttle, then time to reflect.  Try using a cushion.  Some interval between when we hear some news we don’t like or discover some issue we didn't even know was an issue and our response.  It might just be to take a walk around the house or around the block, to calm down.  It might be to schedule the response for much later, rather than immediately picking up the phone and going after the guilty party.  It might be keeping calm, asking questions rather than speaking and not trying to complete the business at hand in that meeting.  Get the facts, the nitty gritty detail and then take some time to digest what you will do about it and arrange a follow up meeting for later. We know all of this, but we forget in the heat of the moment. None of this is new, but it isn’t going away any time soon either.  We have to allow for our short tempers, explosive rage and frustration, as a fact that will be there.  Having a breaker to the short temper circuit will help everyone, especially me!  Remember, in life, everyone is carrying a heavy load, so let’s be more long term oriented, tolerant, patient and forgiving.

Kokorogamae is one of those Japanese concepts which are a bit tricky to translate.  Kokoro by itself as a word has a wide variety of meanings – mind, spirit, mentality, idea, thought, heart, feeling, sincerity, intention, will, true meaning, etc.  It is a radical in the Japanese kanji ideographic script and so appears in a large number of compound words.  Kamae comes from the verb kamaeru meaning take a posture, assume an attitude, be ready for, etc.  In Japanese, when the two words are combined, there is a phonetic shift of the “k” in kamae to a “g” sound. I first heard these two Japanese words in my karate dojo back in 1971, but never as a compound word.  Every class we were given the command “kamae”, meaning to take our fighting stance. For anyone doing Japanese martial arts, this is a very familiar word. The Kokorogamae concept is closely linked to Japanese ideas around perfectionism and mindset.  You cannot produce a perfect output, if your mind is not properly aligned with the action.  A great calligraphy master will establish their Kokorogame before they wield the brush, the ikebana master will do the same before they place the flowers, as will the master of tea ceremony before they begin to whisk the tea.  They perfect their mindset, to produce the perfect output. In my first book Japan Sales Mastery, I wrote about Kokorogamae in the context of sales.  What was your true intention as a salesperson.  Was it to secure a big commission, bonus or promotion for yourself or was it to help the client to succeed in their business?  The mindset is totally different and the output can be a single sale or a lifetime partnership with the client.  If you are a salesperson, which is your intention? Leaders also have their Kokorogame.  Hanging on many walls, protected behind glass, tastefully framed, clearly written is the Kokorogame of the organisation.  In English, we call it the Vision, Mission, Values of the firm.  Someone or a group of people, thought about where do we want to take the organisation in a perfect world, in other words what is the Vision going forward?  What we do that is the Mission?  Why we do that are the Values.  This is the Kokorogamae at the macro level. The culture of the organisation is there to police the individual adherence to the corporate Kokorogamae.  The leader’s key role is to bring clarity to the Why of what we are all doing.  But where does that concept of the Why spring from?  Simon Sinik has more or less, become the owner of the Why since his YouTube video went viral.  The Kokorogamae concept starts up one step before what Simon is talking about.  He concentrates on concentrating on the importance of establishing the Why, but how do you determine the Why of the Why? Where does that come from? This is where Kokorogamae is useful.  It makes us reflect on what we believe and why we believe it.  As the leader, is my true intention to build up the people in my team and help them become the absolute best that they can be?  Or, are they there to serve me, to propel my rise through the corporate ranks, with them arrayed like worker bee slaves to me, the Queen bee.  Just as in sales, these goals are not mutually exclusive.  A famous sales trainer Zig Ziglar said, “you can have everything you want, if you just help other people get what they want”.  Your Kokorogamae can create your own success wrapped up inside the success of your client.  As a leader, you can rise through the ranks on the back of the results created by a highly engaged team, who feel you have their back and are focused on their success. The key point is where is the focus of your thoughts about the people in the business?  How do you really see them, when we strip away all the psychobabble?  To get better clarity on that, we can use the handy Japanese concept of tatemae and honne, meaning the superficial reality and the actual reality.  Are you leading based on a tatemae version of what you are supposed to say and do or is the real you, the honne, the one your people see everyday?  What is your true intention?  What is your Kokorogamae as a leader regarding your team members and the organisation? 

In any organisation we are going to have our A, B and C players.  Hopefully no D players but if you do, then commiserations.  The Pareto Principle tells us that 20% of our team will produce 80% of the results.  Quite straightforward.  Why don’t we just fire the 80% and keeping adding to the 20%.  Well mathematically it doesn't work and also practically it is problematic.  If you have very deep pockets and you can hire the best, then go for it. The rest of us are just hellbent on making payroll.  We do our best to hire well, but after the probation period has ended, certain things become apparent. As Warren Buffet famously observed, once the tide goes out you can see who was skinny dipping.  In a properly functioning labour market, the poorer performers, could be terminated and replaced.  This is where Japan makes the whole premise more interesting. Covid-19 has crushed the hospitality and tourism industries, so there are a lot of people available on the market for that type of work.  Some other industries have had to let people go, so the unemployment rate has crept up slightly.  It is still not a market overflowing with talent ready to make a move or looking for a job.  People tend to stay where they are and particularly so at the moment.  Japan does not like volatility and people’s native conservatism comes to the fore to resist all change.  The upshot is that hiring people has become more difficult and is likely to stay that way, as the demographic decline kicks in. As leaders, we know that there is no point spending a lot of time trying to turn C players into A players.  All the research says put your energy into the A players, because they have so much more potential and capability to perform.  By definition there are fewer of these people in the team, so technically we should be able to use our available time to work more with them.  What do we actually do though?  Our emotions drive us to invest in the C players, trying to turn them into Bs.  We hired them, didn’t we.  Basically, we have discovered they won’t become As, in the vast majority of cases, but B levels seem achievable. We get irritated by the Cs poor performance.  We want to be that rising tide leader who can lift all boats.  However, are we deluding ourselves?  Are we unable to admit we screwed up the hiring process?  Is Covid-19 the opportunity to circumvent the bias in the Japanese legal system in favour of workers?  Is this a good time to cut people loose, who are C level and lower?  It is astonishing for Westerners, raised in the harsh Darwinian climate of foreign capitalist organisations, that being incompetent doesn’t qualify as a reason to get fired in Japan. Is this the time to fire them and blame it on Covid-19?  It will release some cashflow every month with them gone and reduce the amount of management time that they suck up.  The issue becomes what happens after Covid-19 declines and things get back to something resembling normalcy?  If we think ahead and we have to consider replacing these staff in the future, there will be costs to that.  The current people may not be producing much. Their replacements will also be getting paid about the same amount and for the first period of employment, won’t be producing much either.  It varies from firm to firm, but we can expect from 12 to 18 months of very little as the new folk in sales, for example, learn the business and start to create clients.  Other vocations may be quicker to skill up, but there is still that gap in performance that equals what the previous incumbents were doing.  There is also the groupism of Japan, which doesn’t welcome tossing people overboard like jetsam.  “But for the grace of God, there go I” is the dominant fear within the ranks of the survivors. Getting people is hard, getting good people is expensive.  Trying to keep your lower performers may not be possible, if bankruptcy is looming. In that event, many of the team are going to be tossed out regardless, just to reduce fixed costs.  Assuming that is not the case and you think you can hang on until the coast is clear, then keeping everyone together may be the better solution.  Maybe you have to adjust some salaries down or increase the at risk component of the salespeople’s packages to make it work.  Unlike your competitors who sacked their people, you will have a highly experienced, trained, knowledgeable and full strength team to lead into battle in the marketplace.  Your competitors will be down on numbers. They will also face a long period of adjustment, to recruit, train and equip these newcomers to go into battle against you.  Their survivor’s engagement levels will be low and their cynicism high.  Your team, on the other hand,  will be fired up and appreciative.  So, if you can afford to keep the team in place, this will be a powerful launching pad for you in the post Covid-19 universe.  Presuming any of us actually ever get to those sunny uplands.

Leaders are now leading invisible people.  Their staff are no longer in sight or at best are only visible in person a couple of days a week.  What are their people doing at home?  How are they spending their time, how motivated are they, how engaged?  Being in the office brings a certain level of discipline with it.  You can see if people are goofing off.  In an open office environment, you can hear the phone conversations with clients to gauge what is going on.  When people are at home though, there is no way to be sure the team are using their time effectively. Time is life.  Time management is life management.  The key tool to controlling time is the schedule, daily, weekly, monthly and annually. The temptation is to just imagine that time management is only about work time management.  We are holistic beings, multifaceted, with multiple responsibilities.  We play different roles in our lives and the work role is only one of those.  Concentrating all of our time on work throws our lives out of balance. The schedule is the key tool, so what goes into that schedule determines the life we lead.  We have parents or children or siblings or partners or friends.  Devoting all of our tine to work means that these key personal relationships are starved of the time needed to be allocated to them, in order for us to have a more rounded life.  If we are late for lodging our personal taxes, unfocused about our finances because we are too busy working, then we will suffer both now and in the future.  Getting our financial lives in order needs time and that time is in our schedule.  We either allocate the time for that purpose or it gets allocated for something else. Our health is the same.  If we just work all of the time and don’t schedule time for exercise or relaxation, then we will encounter health issues.   It is like running the machines 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  The production numbers are initially impressive until the whole enterprise has shut down to spend time repairing the broken machines. We start by nominating the key roles we play in life.  Work is certainly one of them, but not the only thing.  After we establish the roles we play, we can now attach some goals for each of those roles.  This becomes important, because the schedule prioritisation process will be run off the achievement of these goals.  When we consider the competing goals, we have to make a choice about which goals have a higher priority than others and then time is allocated for the attainment of each of those goals.  It sounds so simple and it is.  The surprising thing is that you realise you are a multifaceted person and not just someone who works all the time.  You need to allocate time to call your mother, to see the kids sports fixture, to go to the dentist, to check your bank accounts, to go for a run, etc. As the leader, this is the concept of time usage we need to be teaching to our team members.  If you are running in the wrong direction, going faster doesn’t help.  If you rapidly climb the ladder and find it is on the wrong wall, that doesn’t help.  What do we want to have, do and be?  We need to think about these aspects first, then set the direction, the goals to support that effort and the scheduling, based on priorities, to make it all a reality.  Teaching people how to get more done each day at work is fine, but the modern leader needs to see their people in holistic terms.  If they become sick or experience family breakups or financial instability because they only concentrated on time allocation for work, then they will not be able to fully contribute to the organisation.  What’s more they will be very unhappy and unmotivated and that doesn’t produce the culture that breeds the quality of professionalism we need.  The machine will break and require extended downtime.  Having a key person in the business experience illness, which takes them out of the picture, can be devastating to the firm.  We want our clients served by happy, engaged, healthy, satisfied and motivated staff.  The leader’s job is to educate the team about proper holistic time management.  If we do that, we will have a much more successful and sustained business.  We all spend a lot of our time working, so making that a happy, fulfilling experience rests on getting all these aspects of people’s lives to be in alignment.  For that, they need time and we teach them how to allocate that time in their schedules.  Are you doing it?

Leaders who are remote from staff have long been identified as a problem.  They don’t delegate, preferring to do it all themselves. This subtly tells everyone, “I don’t trust you”.  They keep the drip, drip, drip of information from above firmly to themselves, as a means of maintaining their position power.  They are poor communicators and don’t know how to inspire the people who work for them.  They have poor people skills and are generally regarded as duds, as far as the troops are concerned.  They dislike mistakes and will publicly flay the perpetrators, effectively driving passivity and fear into the team. Now, all of this was taking place in the office, where heads can easily be counted. People can simply be engaged by calling their name out and telling them to come and see you.  Judgements can be made on who is working hard and who isn’t, by observing body language and activity.  Meetings can be called quickly and coordination is relatively straight forward.  Life gets a lot more complex when we start toiling from home and we are all now “remote” workers. How do we keep close to staff, when we are working away from each other?  Holding team meetings every day is a must.  We want as many people as possible to attend and we want all cameras on.  I noticed one of my staff wasn’t turning her camera on.  When quizzed on this, she said the camera wasn’t working.  With today’s technology, that is highly unlikely.  Either the privacy settings are not allowing the camera for that particular platform and they need to be adjusted or there is a deeper issue.  As the leader, we need to be on top of these things to see whether we need to just check a box inside the software or whether we have someone having mental health problems as a result of the isolation. Every day at 3.00pm is Coffee Time With Dale and this is designed for those who just want to catch up socially.  We would usually do this in the office when we chat and sometimes it is about work and most often it isn’t.  This is one of those social activities which are the glue to hold the team together and we don’t want that to unravel.  In addition we want to be calling people individually, just to see how they are doing.  They may have managers they report to, but the boss needs to make those calls as well, to just check in with the team.  Listening skills should be in top gear when you call, rather than allowing your “telling” penchant free rein. Saying thank you to individuals is important.  We know they are labouring under strenuous conditions and having to do unfamiliar things, because they are isolated and working from home.  Tell them you appreciate them for what they are doing and how important the contribution they are making is to the whole organisation.  It is very easy to feel you are pointless and what you are doing is even more pointless, when you feel you are on your own. Being transparent about what is going on is also critical.  We all read the news and know what is happening to the economy.  We learn about major brands folding, workers being laid off in droves and various other unnerving events.  The leader has to provide hope for the future and a clear assessment of where we are today.  What is the situation with the company financially?  What are the prospects ahead of us?  How much longer do we have to suffer?  Not every deep secret need to be revealed because there are compliance and regulatory rules about that type of thing, but as much as possible, the team needs to hear from the boss on what is going on for real.  Don’t dress it up and trot out a Pollyanna version of reality.  Better to be clear, truthful and realistic.  The team want to know where they need to put their efforts, what role they have to play, what will make a difference from them for the company.  Being consistent with one’s own values and the firm’s values is critical.  This is definitely not the time for “do as I say, not as I do”.  We have to lead from the front and model the type of commitment and behaviour we need from the team.  When things get tough, it becomes clear what is real and what is agitprop from the Marketing and PR department.  Live the values and communicate, communicate and communicate.  In fact, look for ways to overcommunicate given we are in this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Today’s Japanese phrase is kakkoii (格好いい)

Leaders do dumb things and sometimes they have to do difficult things.  The line between which is which can sometimes be a bit hard to plumb.  I clearly remember the senior bosses coming back from a boozy weekend offsite, embraced with the idea that we, the great unwashed salespeople, would identify the top guns working for our rivals, so that the firm could recruit them.  What could possibly be wrong with this idea, in an industry that rapidly hires in market upswings and ruthlessly cuts staff in the downturns? Shareholder value in the US is another serious thing.  Quarterly earnings reports are weighty matters, which drives leader behaviours in directions you just have to shake your head at.  Capitalism gone mad in many cases.  Fortunately, for most of the world, this lunacy has been restrained to some degree.  Downturns turn out badly for employees.  Lofty rhetoric is tossed aside and “thoughts and prayers” becomes the common lament, as they toss you out on your ear.  The survivors are taking all of this in very granularly.  They know, “but for the grace of God, there go I” – out the door.  The lulls between the downturns and firings, saps the general despair toward the hypocrisy, as everyone gradually gets back to business.  Deep down though, there is always that distrust of leaders. Now, here you are, a thrusting leader in the making or at the helm already, fervently devouring Harvard Business Review articles on how to engage your people.  We teach an excellent programme called Step Up To Leadership and one of the modules deals with the issue that you, the new leader, should not imagine that what drives you drives your team members.  They have different aspirations and goals and you cannot overlay your world view on to them and expect everyone to be happy, happy.  This gap between actual motivators and the boss dispensed version is rife throughout the hierarchy of the organisation. In a global survey we conducted across 15 countries, we found there were some particular areas where team member expectations were mismatched with boss outputs.  When we surveyed the top leadership, 86% sternly pronounced that respecting people’s opinions was important to inspiring people to do their best work.  When we surveyed those being bossed around, we found a 28% gap in their observation of what the boss was actually doing.  Think about your own case.  In a busy world, especially now that we are locked away from each other at home or only half of the team are turning up on any given day, how good a job do you do seeking opinions?  You may be a legend of handing out orders to solves issues, a firefighter without peer, but how good are your listening skills? Big bosses in 85% of cases said giving sincere appreciation was motivating for the troops.  The troops however identified a 36% performance gap in this arena.  “Good job” is crap, as far as giving appreciation goes.  “Well done” is another meaningless piece of drivel, often shovelled out by supervisors, imagining they are successfully recognising their people.  By the way, is this you?  Here is a four step process, that should be the default for all bosses.  Firstly, thank them, “Yamazaki san, I really appreciate your hard work”.  Next, tell them exactly which part of their work was done well, “Your report was excellent, the analysis clear and succinctly explained, I could get the key points immediately”.  Now, explain the value of what they are doing, “You saved me a lot of time and that means that I can work on the other high level things we need to get done around here.  This will help us to move forward faster than our competitors”.  Now, encourage them to keep it up, “Please keep making this type of contribution to the firm, it makes a big difference and we really appreciate you”. The biggest gap in the self delusion department was over admitting when you are wrong.  Among the bosses, 81% thought this was important to motivate the people.  The people however said in 41% of cases that didn’t happen sufficiently.  Age and stage, position power  and technical expertise are all boss standbys to get other people to follow their orders.  These are also big inhibitors to admit we err, get it wrong, screw it up and create havoc.  Good in theory, this admitting you were wrong stuff, but a lot harder to do in practice.  What is the gap down at your shop, looking at your specific propensity to admit being wrong?  “What’s that? You have never been wrong in your life”, you say.  Well bully for you and good luck with getting engagement from your team.  The Age of Distraction has been married with the Era of Cynicism.  Being more self-aware as bosses is a requirement, no longer a “nice to have”.  Let’s be honest with ourselves and see how well we are doing in giving effective praise and admitting when we are wrong. That is a start toward getting higher levels of commitment and motivation. Today’s handy Japanese word is Onegai (お願い) which means please

Many decades ago, I remember a visiting Korean business delegation coming to my home town of Brisbane.  At the end of the day, in thanking us for being their hosts, the leaders noted it was very valuable visit and said “we didn’t know what we didn’t know about Australia”.  I had never heard that phrasing before and thought that was pretty cool and that these Korean chaps were pretty switched on. Nowadays, I realise how dangerous that “we don’t know, what we don’t know” business is in commerce and especially in leadership.  Shocking statistics emerged from a recent research piece we did on engagement in companies across 15 countries.  Respondents who had answered that they were “very satisfied” with their immediate supervisor, I would have expected were also among the most highly engaged staff in those companies we surveyed.  If my staff said they were “very satisfied” with me as their leader, I would be pretty chipper and upbeat about what a legend of leadership I was. Unfortunately, when we correlated that group’s answers with other questions, we found that 13% who said they were “very satisfied” were actually actively disengaged.  This means that we don’t know, what we don’t know about our staff’s commitment and big time.  The survey was one of those tricky ones, where you have choose between two attractive answers, to really flush out what you think.  When asked to choose between these statements about “which supervisor behaviour is more likely to inspire and motivate you to give your best at work”, they had to select from a leader who A, “is satisfied as long as I display competence in my defined role” and B, “a leader who encourages me and makes me believe in my ability to improve”.  Interestingly, 84% of respondents chose B.  As the leader, we might have been thinking that as long as we let them get on with their doing their job well, they will be highly engaged.  With people working from home, we can tend to leave people to get on with it and expect they will act professionally and pump out the work.  This survey tells us we have to be better in communicating our belief in them and create an environment where they can grow and demonstrate we are committed to their growth.  Loads of apple pie and motherhood statements in there, but the critical question is “fine, but are you doing it?”. The next question was either A, “recognises improvement only with tangible rewards” or B, “praises me for any performance improvement I make”.  The respondents voted for B to the tune of 83%.  Are we as leaders thinking that bonuses, pay rises, perks, etc., are the key to gaining higher commitment and therefore better performance?  The result would suggest that our communication skills are going to be very important.  Often we will praise people at the end of a project or at the completion of a process.  In fact, we should be handing out praise all the way through the completion of the project and not just at the end.  It also means we are looking for opportunities to praise rather than just correct.  When we don’t see our people anymore, because they are working from home, we need to be more vigilant about recognising their work and giving them praise. A third interesting response was to this choice, A, “makes sure I know how to do the work in advance” or B, “points out my mistakes in a tactful/indirect way”. In 78% of cases they went for B.  This is always a difficult area when it comes to dealing with mistakes.  The traditional Japanese leader technique is just to scream abuse at the culprit, in front of everyone, so that the rest of the team get the idea that we don’t tolerate mistakes around here.  The response shows that we need to be very judicious about how we handle errors.  A holier than thou attitude certainly won’t cut it.  Nor will “I never make mistakes”.  We need to begin by admitting that though we are the leader, we are also fallible and we can empathise with them, when there has been a mistake.  Actually, it is a handy reminder to consider how much you knew at their age and stage. Don’t forget that you are the product of all the mistakes you have accumulated thus far and all of the subsequent lessons you have learnt as a result.  So the results are in and we cannot be satisfied with not knowing what we don’t know.  We had better get busy spending time talking more with our team, handing out more praise and dealing with mistakes in a more effective way. Today’s handy Japanese phrase is perfect or kanpeki (完璧)

In Part Two we have looked at getting engagement, having transparency and the impact of tech.   One issue can be the lack of means to measure whether what the big bosses are saying is actually happening or not.  The Culture Champions do measure and track progress, so that they can correct issues.  These can be staff anonymous postings on speciality externally hosted third party sites, that allow the team to freely talk about problems with no fear of attribution.  Staff satisfaction and engagement surveys also work.  In the old days, these used to be every couple of years, but in some cases companies are doing light versions every quarter.  When Covid-19 settles down, we are all returning to back to the War for Talent.  Recruit and retain will again become major concerns of the organisation’s leaders. An attractive culture is a strong enabler in being successful in this regard.  How will you fare in this talent grab scrap?   The research we did was interesting, because even though the Culture Champions and the rest, both said that culture is a priority, 95% of the Culture Champions compared to 75% of the rest, recognised it had a strong impact on engagement.  Mystifyingly, only 72% of the rest, compared to 91% of the Culture Champions connected the importance of employee engagement to achieving strong financial performance.  In fact, regarding the connection of culture to delivering financial performance, only 62% of the rest thought it had a strong impact, compared to 89% of the Culture Champions.  How about at your firm?  Are your leaders making a connection between the company culture and engagement and between engagement and financial performance?   The Culture Champions, when considering why they had a strong corporate culture, attributed it to creating a strong customer focus (52%), developing and maintaining trust in the leadership (46%), providing corporate training (46%) and providing a clear strategy and goals (44%).  If we compared the priorities of your own organisation, how important would these elements be and to what extent do you think you can create a strong corporate culture without them? Are you taking action to improve your company’s culture?  In the example of the Culture Champions, they reported in the survey that 86% had taken recent, specific measures to improve it whereas only 63% of the rest had done so.  As dale Carnegie said, “knowledge is not power until it is applied”.  After absorbing the results of this global survey are you going to apply the results to build your own company’s culture?   There were four clear steps for the C-Suite leaders to work on, as a result of the research findings. Ensure there is a broad understanding of the financial impact of culture amongst the senior leaders. Clarify whether the leadership team truly believes in the value of an engaging culture. Check to what regard the leadership team has a firm grip on the current state of the organisation’s culture. Explore how the current culture aligns with the challenges of Covid-19 and are there any changes to be made?   For the HR professionals, there is a lot of work to do.  Are your current initiatives reinforcing or eroding the corporate culture you are trying to create?  What are you doing to strengthen the culture you want and eliminate the aspects you don’t want?  Have you developed any culture metrics?  Do you hold the leaders accountable for the culture of the organisation?  Are your own HR colleagues fully bought into these ideas?  Are your training and HR policies strengthening the culture?    These are weighty matters and I repeat this insight, “As much as half of the difference in operating profit between organisations can be attributed to effective cultures”.  That gets my attention, I can tell you.  It is obvious we should all join the ranks of the Culture Champions on the sunny uplands and let our competitors get stuck down there, fighting it out with each other in the mud and the blood.

How To Join The Culture Champion Workplaces – Part Two In Part One, we have looked at how to identify the culture in the organisation and if it is a keeper, the numerous obstacles to maintaining that culture.  In this instalment we look at what the best in class companies are doing about building an unbeatable culture. Our proprietary research showed that for all companies the main challenge to both creating and maintaining positive culture was the pressure to produce results. This makes sense, because all of those high-falutin words coming out of the C-Suite, tend to evaporate by the time they loft down to the engine room and the down and dirty world of revenue production tends to take over everyone’s concentration.  Saying you believe something is easy, but losing money to show you believe it, now that takes a lot more courage.  In the good times, your CEO airily says cool stuff like, “Our staff are our most valuable resource”, “Our most important assets go down the elevator every evening”.  This is very hip.  However, when Covid-19 pops up on the radar, senior management immediately furlough many of those loyal, hardworking staff, because they are worried about damaging shareholder value and keeping their own job.  What happened at your company?  Were people instantly thrown overboard, to protect owner wealth or did you burn cash to keep the herd intact?  When this type of dilemma arises, you find out the true value system of your leaders and the integrity of your culture. The second highest challenge was workplace transparency.  Here the gap between the best performing Culture Champion workplaces and the rest was quite large. The champions registered 44% as a challenge, compared to only 27% for the rest.  The top performing Culture Champions recognised this was an issue, that needed to be dealt with.  Aspiring to a positive and great culture means being a lot more open with the staff.  This is inclusive rather than exclusive thinking in action. Employees feel both trusted and valued, when they are told what is going on.  Would you say the leaders in your company are open and transparent? This doesn't have to be a reactive process. There is an opportunity for the top leadership to be proactive about being transparent.  They can be open, honest and willing to communicate both the good and bad news, as they explain their actions.  Is this what happens in your organisation?  Or is the good news trotted out and celebrated widely, while the bad news is quietly taken out the back and garrotted?  Is the leadership walking the talk? The other push for transparency comes from the front line. Today, employees have a lot of access to information.  The CEO gives a presentation at a Town Hall or via video broadcast and this goes out directly to the troops, with no filter.  Matrix organisations also provide opportunities to access information from colleagues scattered around the firm and from a variety of managers, beyond your immediate supervisor.  The old days of the Middle Managers monopolising information, to maintain their position power, has been undone to a great extent.  At your firm, are the Middle Managers conduits of what is going on, happily sharing the news from the upper echelons or are they like squirrels, busily hoarding the news, to maintain their power over everyone? The advance of tech has also challenged the transparency of companies and the alignment of what they say with what they actually do.  The Marketing Department and the Investor Relations Department, put out a beautiful version on what is happening within the firm.  However, online forums will have insider information coming from current or former employees, which cannot be controlled by the company’s propaganda machine.  If you want to know what is going on in your company, a quick search on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook will also be revealing.  Strong employee culture expectation are very much about “don’t tell me what you did for me yesterday, tell me about what you are doing for me today”. In the next instalment, we will look at how to measure culture, what the C-suite and the HR professsionals can do, to build a Champion Culture.

How To Join The Culture Champion Workplaces – Part One Harvard Emeritus Professor James Heskett’s comparative study of the impact culture has on corporate financial performance was shocking.  He found that “as much as half of the difference in operating profit between organisations can be attributed to effective culture”.  Half, wow.  Now that is a big impact point, especially when we are talking operating profit rather than just gross revenues.  What is going on here? Corporate culture is like a glue that holds everything together.  It impacts the formation of the strategy, how decisions are taken and followed, clarity around the WHY, respect for those at the top and how customers are thought about and therefore how they are treated.  Edgar Schein’s famous study of organisational culture identified how to uncover your existing culture.  If you have a great culture, a so so culture or an underperforming culture, how would you know that in detail and where should you look.  He found there were three levels of observable culture.  Artifacts describe the layout, the furniture used, the dress code etc.   Espoused Values are those rules around behaviour, and how the team represents the organisation to each other and to those outside.  This will easily be found in the Vision, Mission and Value Statements gathering dust on the wall.  The degree to which the team’s behaviours match the aspirations captured on glass protected, beautifully framed, parchment paper says everything about the culture and the people.  Shared Basic Assumptions was his third indicator.  These are the deeply embedded, taken for granted, this is how we roll around here, approaches on the part of the team.  Toxic cultures are easy to spot.  Widespread distrust, no accountability, depressing negativity, lack of a clear strategy, finger pointing, blame shifting, infighting and greasy pole climbing internal corporate politicians running amok.  What about the rest of corporate humanity?  What then is a good culture, apart from being the opposite of this tawdry lot of refuse dwelling, disease infested rats in the system? Actually there is no one size fits all solution in play here.  It depends on a number of factors to do with the environment in which the firm operates.  Following on from Charles Darwin’s ideas about adaption to survive as a species, there may be adaptions of culture in organisations which enable them to thrive in the environment in which they find themselves.  It might mean being highly competitive internally or highly collaborative, incredibly creative or enforcing razor sharp discipline, etc. Even if you have plumbed a culture that really works for you, it is devilishly hard to maintain it.  Past success promotes self propelling inertia.  Covid 19 has shaken everything up and requires changes, but the organisation is stuck in ways which are familiar and which worked just fine in the past.  They just can’t make the needed changes.  This is especially tricky here in the Japan, the risk aversion epicenter of the Universe. Mergers and acquisitions rarely work and the most common reason is the disparate cultures can’t blend well enough together. The bigger player flexes their muscles and enforces their culture.  The junior partner either collapses, as the best people depart or they descend into an internal guerrilla war against the invaders.  Diverse Societal Cultures revolves round different ways of thinking , conflicting value systems, and expectations.  The greenhorn gaijin CEO arriving in Japan, pre-briefed and recently instructed to shake things up and get these folks to fly straight, like everyone back home, is unknowingly on a kamikaze mission of self-destruction and folly. Leadership changes are such a huge factor in culture change.  Never throw your strategy plans away, because every five years the CEO will change and that work you did previously, that has been shelved, will now be in demand.  If it was consolidation, centralisation and discipline before, it is now “let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” local innovation and the blitzkrieg of decentralisation.   Covid -19 has overturned the workplace. The rabbit hutch kitchen table is now the battlefield HQ, as the scattered troops go about their business, in blissful isolation from central command.   This culture extravaganza is a big topic. In Part Two, we will continue to talk about the impact on culture of new tech, corporate transparency, communication changes and the chain of command.  We will also go deep on what the corporate culture champions are doing, so that we know what we should be doing too.  We did some proprietary international research on the most successful corporate cultures and all will be revealed in the next instalment.

Sales Leadership For The Online World   Covid-19 hit business in Japan like a brick thown through a shop window.  All of a sudden everything was a mess and there were glass shards, dangerously sprinkled around everywhere.  We were all tiptoeing around trying to find a safe way through this catastrophe. Companies were upended and people were vanquished to their rabbit hutch homes to conduct business from there.  Commerce ground to a halt, as we went into lockdown.  Toilet paper, rice, pasta and Zoom licenses were selling well, but for most of us, things came to crashing halt.   In this scramble to adjust to the new situation, sales leaders were struggling to handle the new working conditions, themselves now sharing a small space at home with the spouse and kids.  Most Japanese bosses were not familiar with the new technology, so there was a period where a lot of energy had to be invested to learn how to connect using the new medium with the team.   The first thing we all found was that communication was much harder.  We discovered that coordination of things in the office was a breeze – a simple, efficient, painless process.  Being remote from everyone, suddenly made coordinating things much more complex and time inefficient.  The scramble to re-ignite revenue streams also meant we started short circuiting our communication.  “When we will that deal get paid”, “What’s happening with this client”, “What are you doing about your sales funnel, it looks light and low?”.  We became demanders and order giving bosses, instead of leaders.   Language is so much more important in the remote world.  We have to embrace that timeless wisdom from sales guru Brian Tracy when he said, “Remember, everyone you meet in life is carrying a heavy load”.  The exodus to the home office, which for many meant the kitchen table, has been stressful.  Our team are all carrying many varieties of heavy loads.  They can’t concentrate at home, because their family are making a lot of noise.  They are having trouble contacting existing clients, because they are also under stress and are at home too.  They can’t attend networking events anymore to find new clients.  Cold calling hasn't gotten any easier in lockdown.   Engaging our sales staff to keep going hard despite the difficulties has three elements and one huge trigger.  Their relationship with you, the boss, is number one.  Are you speaking to them from an empathetic standpoint or are you just shouting out urgent commands from the bridge, like a pirate captain under enemy fire.  What about their belief in the way senior management are handling this economic disruption?  They will have worries.  Are we going to run out of cash and go under?  Will people start getting fired?  Will I be furloughed home for months with no pay?    What has been the communication flow from on high and from you, about the strategy for dealing with this crisis, the financial stability of the firm and the company’s prospects for the future?  Do they still feel pride in the company?  Have the internal levels of sectional infighting, blame shifting, finger pointing and political manoeuvring reached radioactive levels?  As the boss have you grouped the team together to fight against the external threat of Covid-19 and united everyone to crush your weakened competitors?   The biggie in gaining team engagement is that people have a sense that you care about them and they are valued.  This feeling valued component encourages their confidence and empowers them.  This is where boss communication skills are so critical.  When we contact our people, are we spending some time to connect with them on a personal level, empathise with how they are feeling and telling them that we value them in this company.  Or are we straight into interrogating them about their numbers?   Before Covid-19, none of us were having a happy time recruiting sales staff, especially those with good English.  The danger now is that through errors in leadership, we start seeing our good people leave and join our competitors.  We need to keep the team together, united and ready to fight against the many disruptors of our businesses.  We want the sales team to remerge from catastrophe stronger, more united and motivated to win.  The buck stops with the sales leader.

Back To The Future At The Workplace   Let’s presume you have all of the safety protocols in place for providing a safe working environment.  How do we co-exist with Covid-19, while gathering together back at the workplace?   Human interaction is definitely something that many people long for after months of working from home.  Yes, there were the online catch ups, maybe even virtual lunches, coffee breaks and happy hours, but it has not quite been the same.  It doesn’t mean everyone has to rush back to the workplace though.  There may be some people who are better off continuing to work from home, so organisational flexibility is the key.  In fact we must now question the logic of some of our workflows.  This deadly virus may have also been deadly for workplace inertia.  Pre-Covid-19,we just did things a particular way, because that is how it has always been done around here.   Sharing our lock down lives is a good way of bonding the returning team together.  With appropriate social distancing, get together in workgroups and share with each other how each of us found it.  What was good, what was difficult, what was different?  This sharing might have to be done in relatively small groups, for better safety considerations, but certainly make the time to do it.   We can also spend some designated time together thinking about were there particular things we found while working from home, that could be introduced into a new style of working together.  Hataraki Kaikaku or the workstyle reform is now well and truly upon us, rather than just being some speculative musing.    Things we had previously thought to introduce, but delayed, actually happened at lightening speed.  Things we thought impossible, became commonplace.  Maybe we don’t need to commute at the same time, every day, anymore.  Maybe, we don’t need as much paper flitting from desk to desk.  Perhaps our electronic approval systems need a permanent upgrade.  Do we still need a hanko seal for documents?  We have some clients who ask us to send them the physical copy of the hanko imbedded electronic invoice.  We walk over to the photocopier, print it out and then send it  by post - quite crazy!   The virus won’t cease to be an issue until a vaccine is found, so coexistence is the best we can plan for at this moment.  Well then, what should we be planning for?   Rather than fighting the battles of the past, brainstorm these issues, engaging the team in order to move forward as a unit.  Dale Carnegie said , “people support a world they help to create”.  Getting people involved in the “design in” stage, makes the execution piece much quicker and easier. The client’s world has changed too, so how can we position ourselves to best serve clients in their new world of work?   While everyone was sitting at home in isolation, the boss was forced to become a micro-manager, constantly checking on projects and shepherding overall coordination. The normal channels of good communication broke down and bigger efforts were required to do relatively simple things. Because of this, during team separation, individuals had to be delegated more authority to make decisions.    Now the boss has to be very careful about simply transporting this micromanaging “temporary” fix back into the re-imagined workplace.  A lot of things have changed.  Individuals who have stepped up and taken the lead, need to be recognised and encouraged, by giving them more responsibilities.  The boss can’t keep doing micro-management.  The leader needs to get back working on those tasks, that only the boss can do.  These are the most high level tasks, that bring the most value, as opposed to the detritus that normally consumes the daily schedule.   Charles Darwin didn’t talk about the survival of the strongest.  He talked about the superiority of those species which could best adapt to change,  “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”.  Covid-19 is a change that will be with us for a long time. We must find ways to adapt ourselves and our workplaces to this new world of work.                    

The Great “Safe” Return To The Workplace In Japan Congratulations on escaping the Covid-19 virus by staying safe and working from home.  We all want to see our businesses succeed and we all want to stay healthy.  If it is time now to go back to the workplace, understand that there will be members of the team, who are concerned about their continued safety.  As the boss, you have a responsibility to ensure a safe working environment for the team. Here are some things for everyone to think about. We all have to learn how to co-exist with Covid-19, so why try and replicate the old work style?   Avoiding crowded transport and elevators are smart ideas. Try working from home in the morning, go in a bit later to the office to avoid the crowds and do the same thing by leaving earlier than normal.  When you get back home continue working.  Yes, it may mean continuing to work after 5.00pm or 6.00pm,  but this is the trade off, for coexisting with the virus. You will get the same amount of work done in a day spread out over more extended hours. We all need to be more flexible about developing a new work rhythm. Why not check your own temperature at home before you leave, to be certain you are no risk to colleagues at the office.  This takes about two minutes, so it is manageable, even for busy people. Avoid all surfaces when you are outside like stair or escalator handrails, subways straps and posts, elevator and vending machine buttons, etc.  Wearing gloves outside makes a lot of sense, in addition to a face mask and maybe a face shield where appropriate. Directly touching others through handshakes, fist bumps, hands on the shoulder, pats on the back, high fives etc., are obviously now out, so bowing will be a much better alternative. We need to rethink how we work in the office.   Does everyone really have to be there every day? Why not have teams permanently rotate.  On certain days, some staff will go to the office while the others work from home.  The so-called A Team and B Team interchange.  Maybe Fridays is the day for everyone to work from home? Hold stand up meetings at the office to make them shorter and allow proper social distancing rules to apply.  Do we actually need to meet together in person.  Could we be in the office at our desks and still meet online? Certainly have coffee breaks together to catch up on what has been happening in our lives, but always use social distancing.  Everyone can have their own cup, so there is no need to share any crockery any more. Masks and face shields are good ideas when we are gathered together and by making it a common rule, no one feels weird or out of place.  Clear plexiglass barriers between seats makes sense.  If reintroducing individual cubicles and offices makes more sense than open plan arrangements, then we are all going back to the future! Reduce the amount of paper which needs to be circulated by hand.  What about “handing over meishi”?  Is this now a thing of the past?  Can we connect electronically?  Anyone remember “Bump”, a discontinued app which electronically exchanged our business contact details on the spot at a networking event?  There are several apps such as iCheck, Camcard, PiQy, Eight, and Shoot which may get a new lease of life now.  Anyway, let’s make greater use of electronic document sharing and do all of our approvals on-line. Enforce best practice hygiene standards.   We are continuously reminded to avoid touching our faces, eyes, noses and mouths, because this is how we get absorb the virus.  Easy to proclaim, but not so easy to do. Regularly washing our hands with soap throughout the day, for twenty seconds, including the areas under the fingernails, between the fingers and up to the wrist are best practice.  Soap breaks apart the container that holds the virus and then the virus is then washed away.  Use a paper towel to dry your hands and turn the water faucet off with that paper towel as well.  Also we should use hand sanitiser. With your colleagues, allocate teams throughout the day to regularly clean door knobs and surfaces like coffee pots, elevator buttons, tabletops, photocopiers, mobile phones, whiteboards and marker pens. Bringing your own bento reduces your exposure to outsiders at lunch time.  You can still eat lunch with your colleagues and at a safe distance. Let’s all keep well and stay safe.

Seize The Moment With Your Leader Storytelling   Covid-19 has changed the world from a personal health risk point of view and has also trashed industries, careers and livelihoods.  This is not the time for leaders to be simple observers of the meltdown, but to be collectors of stories from the devastation and the rising phoenixes.  These stories can be for those “rallying the troops” moments or for public consumption in the wider world, as you detail your organisation’s saga. This crisis has a lot of dramatic tension bound within it, which lends itself to great storytelling material. So let’s make the effort to carefully collar what is going on around us.   Typical business storytelling will have the hero’s journey and the trials, tribulations and triumphs therein.  If this isn’t a time of trials and tribulations and hopefully, triumphant organisational survival, then I don’t know what is.  It is easy in theory, but harder in practice.  We can be swept up in the maelstrom of each day’s specific challenges and not be awake to the legendary dramas being played out around us and to us.  We must embrace these stories, because they will be the source of powerful memories and emotional connections for many people in the audience.   In the Covid-19 catastrophe, the heroes come under tremendous stress and strain. The opposition, obstacles, threats and their own personal frailties are all exposed.  The heroes set about ensuring survival of the business. They gradually turn the problem around, as rivals beside them succumb and go into ignominious, commercial oblivion.  We need to be keeping track of these exploits for future storytelling reference.  The daily newspaper is full of stories every morning, but it ends up ferrying the fish bones and potato peelings to the trash can.  We need a more permanent snare of what has taken place, day by day.   Within the team, there are those who have stepped up and carried the banner aloft under tremendous pressure.  We can’t let those efforts go unrecorded and just be allowed to join the forgotten fishbones and carrot peelings.  We need to be creating the narrative arc of the journey, as the heroes learn and innovate as they push forward.  They take blind alleys and make choices that don’t work out, but these tough times add to the credibility of the story in the retelling.  The higher the walls in front of the team, the greater kudos for managing to scramble over the top and keep moving.  The bigger the failures, the larger and more valuable the lessons in the recounting.   Audience emotional resonance with the heroes is relatively easy, because this virus enemy is instantaneously threatening the whole planet.  Everyone will remember what they were doing, how they were feeling, the losses suffered, the drama, the dangers and the close calls.  Those listening to your story will quickly identify with the struggle and the people involved, becoming engaged in a way that is usually very hard to achieve.    Cause and effect is how we define what we know to be true in the world.  This thing happened and set off this reaction, which led to this outcome, involving these people.  The leader’s job is to refine our understanding of what has been happening and why we are getting the outcomes we have been seeing.  This needs intellectual, analytical work.  Written records, observations, snippets of dialogue, blogs, podcasts, video records all become the historic archive needed by the leader.   It sounds easy enough to do, except when you are in the middle of the disaster, it is hard to distance yourself from the business carnage going On around you.  Nevertheless, the lessons being learnt need capture, the stories involved need to be told, the examples must be assembled and the raw emotion of today conveyed. Covid-19 is throwing up the material for a billion blogs and thousands of scholarly tomes on leadership.    We are in the moment. We are the wartime correspondents, capturing what it is really like in the front line and understanding how people feel about being so close to the end of their business world.  We must emerge from the turmoil with insights, which we can convey thereafter in stories.  People thrive on and learn through storytelling and here we all are, leaders during Covid-19, placed at the centrepiece of the unfolding story.    So, as leaders we need to add yet another ball to our juggling act.  We need to be a character in the play and also be the playwright, capturing the details of the drama, as it envelops us.    Maintain high vigilance for elements of the hero’s journey both good and bad.  We will come out of this dazed and dusty but also armed with pertinent and poignant stories to use in guiding the team. We need to be able to tell the story of how to survive a once in a lifetime business Armageddon.  Write it all down now for later use.  It will be a treasuretrove of hard earned lessons, wisdom and practical insight that most others will have thrown out with the fishbones and gobo peelings.           

Social Intelligence For Leaders In Covid-19   We admire people with very high IQs, as badges of intellectual prowess.  Members of Mensa International are an elite group established in 1946, for people who scored in the ninety-eight percentile or higher in the standardised IQ test.  We respect technical experts be they lawyers, medicos, engineers, architects, etc.  The thing we desire most is that we be treated well by our boss, Mensa reject or otherwise.  Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman was a bestseller and we would all prefer that our employers be people who voraciously devoured the gospel according to Goleman, chapter and verse.   The obvious things for leaders are often subsumed by society’s devotion to brainpower.  Having social intelligence means being able to get on well with all sorts of other people.  It means being the boss the team would crawl across a mile of broken glass for.  How do we up the ante on our social intelligence?   We need to invest time in relationships.  Too obvious you cry.  Really?  Busy bosses can be consumed by email, meetings, reporting to the upper echelon and trying to juggle their family responsibilities.  In this melee of desired outcomes, the time for the team gets siphoned off and consumed by other competing requirements.  If you want a reality check, then just grab your diary and look at how much time you are spending with the individuals in your team.  Zoom, WebEx, Teams, etc., based broadcasts to the whole team are absolutely counted as the bare minimum, but do not rate a high score of investing in relationships with individual members of the team.   We need to be having one on one online meetings or appropriately socially distant conversations with members of the team and showing our genuine interest in their well being.  Imagining people are goofing off at home and calling them, to call them out on it, is ridiculous in this environment.  Social intelligence means assuming everyone is hurting and carrying a heavy load, as they try to jam the square peg into the round hole offered up by Covid-19.     We have transplanted people into their home environments and tried to fool everyone into believing this is now a viable working pod.  Kids spiralling out of control while cooped up at home, no proper place to work in the rabbit hutch, that is the urban existence for most Japanese members of staff and this group oriented tribe is now imprisoned in imposed isolation.  A boss with a supremely high IQ isn’t much help in this situation.  We need our boss to feel genuine care about us.     One of the ways to do this as the boss is to truly listen.  Most of us breeze through life powered by the twin carburettors of the “ignore” and “selective” listening skill categories.  “I don’t ignore my people”, you wail in the background.  Really?  When they are speaking and your brain suddenly populates a strong thought about something you need to say or a burning comment you must make, invariably you are now single tasking rather than multitasking and have lost the concentration on what your team member was saying.  In effect you have ignored them to concentrate on yourself and your soon to be sallied forth brilliant intervention. Selective listening is slightly more human relations hygienic, but again we are searching for what we want to hear, rather than hearing our people in the entirety of what they want to say.   Respecting people’s opinions is another one of those motherhood statements we all solemnly overlook, because it is in plain sight and not even hiding.  Busy bosses though are now working harder and longer than before.  The Covid-19 work day is much harder, as we struggle to coordinate things amongst our team.  We are baffled by the balance needed between delegation and anarchy.    We have to give people free rein in order to get things done, but they are adventurous and take things in directions we would never have imagined, let along anticipated. We can quickly find ourselves extinguishing the spark of originality and creativity, because they varied from what we expected.  We tell them they are wrong, their idea is bad and we reject their opinion on how to get to the mountain top.  We forget there may be better ways of doing things, but we jump on them when they freestyle.   Social intelligence trumps IQ intelligence every time when you are the boss.  Your people want to know how much you care about them, much more than how much you know.  Get on the case now and start talking to your people from a social intelligence frame.  This is the magic formula for leading during Covid-19.    

The Leader Must Be The Flagbearer Of Hope   Daily reports of doom and gloom descend on all of us through the media.  Unemployment, enterprise obliteration, crashing growth rates, plague and pestilence run rampant.  The short term looks bad, but the long term looks worse.  Unlock in haste and repent at leisure or stay locked in and gamble with elimination. I was participating in a German Chamber webinar where the speaker flagged his company’s current research which said 39% of Japanese worried they would lose their job and the same number feared their firm would collapse.  Every continent has trouble and every continent is enmeshed in global supply chain configurations, that line up the national economic dominos for big scale, long lasting recessions.  Optimists like me are running on fumes right now.   As a leader, I have to be a fully paid up, active member of Optimists International.  I have to give my team hope of a way through and a future – together.  US firms are fast to furlough and fire, compared to Japanese organisations.  The American Dream of shareholder value says cut costs, cut people and keep the profitability up.  In America, loyalty seems transactional.  Japan reveres longevity.  Television news programmes showing long established small restaurant owners bidding their loyal customers a final farewell, before they disappear for good, are scenes which tug on Japanese heartstrings.   Ninety-nine percent of firms in Japan are Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs).  Some of these medium companies are quite big by western standards, but the vast majority do not employ legions of workers and up until February, they had trouble hiring staff.  The social contract between boss and worker in Japan’s SMEs is “I will do everything possible to protect your employ”.  Japan in my experience expects that people will be placed before profits.  In SMEs there is a paternalistic assumption, that the boss thinks of the workers as family.    Big companies often flourish flowery rhetoric such as “our assets go down the elevator every night”, except of course, when they are firing them, to retain shareholder value.  For SMEs, their people are the key assets in the business and they are hard to replace.  As the boss, I have to keep my team employed, no matter what, and I have to keep them after the virus war is over or a coexistence armistice has been arrived at.  This retain aspect is not a given.  In the current situation, people are obviously clinging to their jobs, because their choices are few and ugly.   After the devastation has been halted, what then?  Will the staff decide to stay with the firm and together rebuild out of the bad times?  Or will they conclude that, with their skills, they should move to a bigger firm which is better resourced and more stable and reliable in tough times?  Bosses being transparent has risks.  Telling the team the real situation builds a strong sense of teamwork and commitment to survival.  It might also be secretly building exit strategies by the best and most talented people, who conclude they prefer predictability over flexibility.   This is where the boss has to become a fluent communicator of hope for the future.  We tend to get focused on the day to day, “we have to keep going”, aspects of the leader’s role and we take our eye off the future.  We are stressed. We are working harder than before, under considerably more pressure and with a lot less control.  Even before it looks like there is a future, we need to be talking about it.  That doesn’t mean Pollyannaish piffle based on a wish and a prayer.  There has to be objective truth in there somewhere or we just stoke the fires of scepticism and doubt.   Yes, we have to watch the day to day reality of getting money in the door, but at the first glimpse of tunnel light, we need to ramp up the “hope for the future” anthem.  We need to marshal everyone’s thinking to getting on the front foot.  We need to talk about we the survivors, will survey a reduced competitive plain in front of us.  We have to focus our attention on capturing our clients at that critical moment, when they mentally switch from the “do nothing” ideology to “it is time to take some action”.   We have to expound on how we have become stronger, better positioned for this coming year.  Mention must be made of the growth in the team’s capabilities, the new skills which have been added since February.  Our every opportunity must be given over to presenting a future together, where we will not only get back to where we were, but we will now go even further, because of this experience.  Focus on the here and now, has to become focus on hopes for the future. 

Embracing Change In This Covid-19 Crisis   The concept of co-existence with the virus puts a different spin on the “new normal”.  Yes, the lockdowns are coming off, but what will we need to be doing from now going forward?  We may be moving to a murky world that is not quite office and not quite home.  We will be keeping aspects of both, but not having the totality of either.   Here are sixteen ways to master on-going coexistence with the virus.   Every morning, get your brain into 100% productivity by getting into your work battle dress as per usual.You may be going to the office or you may be working at home, or you may be doing a bit of both, with a late flex-time dash to downtown. Anyway, you are not on holiday, so no jammies, shorts or T-shirts.   Start everyday with a group huddle at 9.00am. Whether some are in the office and others are at home, cameras must be switched on to set the professional tone for the work day.  It is important that everyone can see each other to feel connected.  It also alerts you to anyone not being there, especially those living alone and possibly having some health issues.  We need to make sure everyone in the herd is okay, every day.  In our case, we have continued with our set Daily Dale morning routine and have just taken in online.   Chit chat is part of the social glue to keep people connected and now many are at home, away from the group and possibly feeling isolated. Set a daily coffee break time to allow people to talk informally, just as they would in the normal office setting.We have Coffee Break Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day, for those who want to join and just catch up with colleagues.   This is a mark of the professional organisation. Have everyone set their laptops such that the camera is at eye height, rather than shooting a video broadcast of the inner passages of people’s noses, which is what happens when you simply sit your laptop on your desk.   When meeting on-line, look like a reliable, credible businessperson and sit forward and upright when speaking, rather than lounging back in your chair or sprawled on your sofa.You will look and feel much more professional.   Create an extra 12.5 hours a week for personal development.Wake up at the same time as before, work until the same time as before and use the two hours commute time and thirty minutes from your lunch break, to work on your personal development and not just on your job.  Also, spend the time researching your industry and the market.  Avoid the media and social media, as most of it is pulling us down into negative mentalities by its love affair with bad tidings.   Invest 15 minutes a day as a group, to extrapolate that 2.5 hours a day of personal reading, by establishing formal study group sessions with your colleagues. By rotation every day, each can provide a synopsis of the key points from what you have been reading, watching or listening to.Share good information around.   Use the technology available to brainstorm ideas with colleagues and also clients on how to deal with industry and market specific issues.There are whiteboard functions where you can brainstorm in real time, share and discuss.   When you are presenting don’t allow the tech to hijack the center stage of the presentation – you must be the main focus, not the screen, just as we would do in a live meeting venue situation.Hit the ‘B” key on your laptop to black out the screen, so you are not competing with the slide deck for everyone’s attention.  Hit “W” and the chastened slide deck will miraculously reappear, after you have shown it whose boss.   Use breakout rooms to practice role plays in triads.One plays the role of the client and another the coach, to both give good/better feedback to the person doing the role play.   Access high quality online training to make sure the workforce are moving forward rather than slipping backwards in their professional skills and competencies.Some locatedin the office and some at home makes on-line training a must, in this future twixt and tween world.   When on-line, use polls to create some humour and also to build self-awareness with colleagues and clients.   Try and break the tech, by pushing it to the its limits, so that you can get the absolute most out of it. Don’t be timid with the tech, push the hell out of it to see what is possible. We broke WebEx when we did breakout rooms with 150 people and we learnt a lot from that experience.   Bring value to your clients by offering product training, insights from your reading on the industry and the market.Send them links to the best podcasts, blogs, articles etc., you have found using your extra 12.5 hours of study per week.   Use the cost cutting you have done to re-examine whether some of these savings can’t be maintained after the lockdown is over and we go back to some recollection of normality.You may find there were things which actually didn’t add any great value, which you never got around to turning off.   Because of the Covid-19 business disruptions, many talented people are losing their jobs or their faith in their companies and are now available, so this is a good time to look for hiring new people.In the same way, there may be people you have been carrying for a long time and this may be the time to move them out and replace them with more talented staff.                    

Bad Bosses In Covid-19   Douglas McGregor coined the descriptors Theory X and Theory Y bosses back in the 1960s.  Basically, Theory X bosses doubted people working for them and felt their worst elements had to be watched carefully.  Theory Y bosses saw the potential in their team and wanted to develop them further.  It was not quite black and white, one was 100% good the other was 100% bad.  It was more a question of where to sit on the scale in view of the team and circumstances you faced.  Theory X bosses did have to deal with people who were not motivated and couldn’t be trusted.  The problem became that they started from a negative position, rather than a neutral one.  Another researcher into human motivation, Abraham Maslow, presciently warned us, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.   Here we are today, with a lot of our staff out of sight, locked away at home.  How do bosses know what they are doing?  Have some bosses moved more to the Theory X side of the equation, expecting the worst behaviour from their people? Is this what you feel from your boss – suspicion, distrust, doubt?  A Theory Y boss would trust the team to pull together during these hard economic times and work harder for the common good of the survival of the whole enterprise.   Theory X bosses are more likely to enter into the sordid world of power harassment with their attitudes and language when times get tough.  They are likely to be more harsh in their words, adding innuendo and veiled threats if the team doesn’t keep production up.  Fear is relied upon as the hammer and people are not left in doubt that they are disposable.   There is also the issue of firing people to save money or improve shareholder returns.  In America, companies were very fast to furlough people, which is American English for sending you home without any salary, until things improve.  Bad times brings out the worst in bosses and these are bad times indeed.  In Japan, this sets up the tension between the solidarity of the group and the enterprise’s survival.  There is a major difference between last resort and first impulse to fire people.  There is a massive mental wall between “cut deep and early” and “we leave nobody behind”.   Once upon a time in Japan, when staff were plentiful and the resumes were many, being choosy was normal.  Times changed with demographic downturns.  Until February, we had a labour shortage across most industries, especially around hiring young people.  Now the unemployment rate is rocketing, the number of jobs open relative to those seeking work is dropping. Small and medium companies, in particular areas like hospitality, retail and the service sector are going out of business.  When people shortages reigned, bad bosses were lovey dovey, but now the faux smiling faces have been replaced with the original scowling issues.   The mark of a person’s character and true belief system is revealed in these Covid-19 times.  Japan has done an amazing job of observing governmental requests to stay home.  In Australia, we fine you over a thousand dollars for lockdown rule non-compliance, to keep our wild colonial boys and girls in line.  Horses for courses.  What about the boss in Japan?  Are the worst boss aspects emerging and being given free license because of the times?   This virus will not last forever.  Business will gradually reopen as it has in China, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand as they have flattened the curve of outbreaks.  Looking back at the boss’s language, behaviour, demeanour and outlook during the crisis, what will staff conclude about where they want to work?  The demographic trend will last a lot longer than the virus and the realities of finding and keeping good people won’t switch course.   Keeping the team together, until the last yen and tear has been expended, makes sense in Japan.  Bosses need to show their commitment to their people.  The staff will show their commitment to the organisation with accepting salary cuts and furloughs if needed, and they will return.  “Cut deep and early”, “protecting shareholder value”,  “pragmatic choices” may work in other countries, but not in Japan.   Start wielding Maslow’s hammer in your hand in haste and repent at leisure. When the dust clears, your people will know who you really are.    

Many leaders get to the top because they are very smart, technically skilled people, with broad experience and high levels of competence in their area of speciality.  In Japan, they often become the leader because they have been with the company for a certain number of years or have reached a certain age and stage. Scary thought that, isn’t it.  In our collective Covid-19 world, whether you are legend of your area speciality or just of a certain chronological age, the leadership skills we need today are going to be different from the “previous normal”.  Here are eight ninja skills to help us shine as capable leaders in lockdown.   Arouse in the other person an eager want Leaders want stuff and their bosses want stuff too.  That often means we are telling people what we want, how we want it and when we want it.  Reflect on this last week for you – does that summarise your monologue of late?  Leaders with better communication skills express desired outcomes in ways which resonate with the highest self interests of their team members. The team consequently  become willing disciples to carry out the required tasks, rather than galley slaves being whipped to ramming speed.   Become genuinely interested in other people The boss/staff divide usually means we don’t get into the detail of people’s personal lives.  But in this Covid-19 situation, we need to appreciate the staff member’s home work environment more and the limitations therein.  That is best done in a caring non manipulative manner that communicates “I am genuinely concerned about you and how you are doing”.   Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves Bosses have a lot they want done and can be spending all their on-line time telling people what the boss wants and consequently what they need to do.  Covid-19 is not a boss “free pass” to nag or micromanage the team.  Have you become a nag without knowing it?  Find out how people are doing and what their issues are, by letting them talk and then listen carefully.   Talk in terms of the other person’s interests This is similar to number one.  If we recorded your conversations and created a transcript, what would we find there?  A long list of things you want done and now?  Our teams are always much more interested in their own interests and so we need to frame what needs to be done in a way which resonates with their desired outcomes.  Are you doing this?   Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never say “you’re wrong” In times of crisis, it is easy to slip into the uncompromising General Patton style of leadership,  “Do what I say”.  This military model works well in combat, but we are a scrappy people’s militia, conscripted to stay home to fight the virus.  We want to be heard, so don’t start bossing us around sunshine, by pulling rank and thinking your every decision is perfect.   Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view Diversity is trumpeted by companies as a good thing, except when something like Covod-19 hits and we want lockstep for the duration of the lockdown.   The team’s home situations can have tremendous diversity, so we cannot be forcing square pegs into round holes.  Different views have to be understood and why.  Are you doing that? Or are you continuing to crash through?     Begin with praise and honest appreciation We forget that our people are operating under stringent conditions at home, trying to wrestle their domestic situation into some format that allows them to work in a location never designed for it.  We might make the mistake of thinking that is what they are getting paid for or that this is their job.  That would be a very tone deaf leader for today’s work reality, I would say.  We need to appreciate that they are operating in ways never encountered before.  We should be praising people, instead of barking out commands.  Sounds simple right. Well, how much praise have you given your people this last week?   Ask questions instead of giving direct orders Barking out orders like a pirate captain is easy.  The issue is nobody likes that.  We are much better to suspend the command deluge and replace it with seeking opinion, experience, advice on aspects of the current situation and how to best deal with it.  Yes, you may have an idea or two on what to do, but one of the team may have a better idea.  By the way buddy, how many Covid-19s have you been through before?  None.  That is right, so ask people’s opinions, because you have no monopoly on knowledge or insight in this situation.   Dale Carnegie’s human relations principles really hit the mark in these trying times.  Your leader ninja soft skills must come to the fore now, to galvanise the team behind you.   Actions Steps Arouse in the other person an eager want Become genuinely interested in other people Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves Talk in terms of the other person’s interests Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never say “you’re wrong” Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view Begin with praise and honest appreciation Ask questions instead of giving direct orders

Stressed Leaders Must Lead Their People Through This Stress   Watching your business implode is stressful.  Losing access to good staff through furloughs, firing loyal people through brutal necessity, bum rushing suppliers by not paying them, seeing your clients cancel orders, smelling burning cash reserves are all hurtful and hit hard.  You didn’t sign up for this meltdown, but it is upon you anyway.  You are under immense stress and so are your people.  How are you dealing with your team in this environment?   I was watching a video of an American sales guru talking about how to lead your team in lockdown.  He had already fired one third of his own team and had some harsh advice on how to inspire the survivors of the first wave of cuts.  Those working from home had to be ridden hard to make sure they performed.  If people couldn’t match their number targets, they needed to be fired immediately.  Whenever there has been a recession, companies fire people and those remaining fear they are next, every working day until the axe falls or things recover.  All of that fine rhetoric about “our people are our most valuable resource” is shown to be the hot air it always was.  This is what people remember and it impacts their levels of engagement with the firm, when things finally get back to normality.   So where do we strike the balance between having to get the work out and being empathetic to our team members?  In these various on-line meetings that I attend, to try and get ideas on how to survive this Covid-19 disruption to my business, I occasionally get a glimpse into the speaker’s abode.  Often, these expat leaders are living in apartments, where the living room is bigger than the entire apartment of their employees’ families.  Their staff are at home trying to work, surrounded by the kids going crazy from being cooped up all day and night. Knowing that would you adjust your expectations on how much productivity you can expect?   As the leader, are you giving any guidance to your team on how to deal with their stress?  Are you doing anything to work on how to deal with you own stress?  We have been running a series of free stress management LIVE On Line sessions in both English and Japanese.  Our sessions are not your bog standard lecture with slide deck and talking head affair.    These are highly interactive sessions, where people go to virtual rooms to discuss with others about the issues under consideration.  They are called upon to share the discussion outcomes and to engage with the instructors.  The post-session survey comments often mention that the attendees were really happy to speak to someone and share.  Living by themselves, they can go many hours without speaking to anyone and the loneliness is a factor for them. They note they are happy to hear, they are not the only one under pressure and they get ideas from their instructors and each other, on ways to deal with their stress.   We poll them during the LIVE On Line session on which of the 10 Dale Carnegie stress management principles covered, really resonate with them.  I won’t cover all of them now but a lot of people focus on principles like “keep busy”, “cooperate with the inevitable”, “count your blessings not your troubles”.  These come from the book “How To Stop Worrying and Start Living”. They are all very simple ideas, but actually highly effective.    Going from being busy in the office, to suddenly being on your on at home can make your routine disappear and leave you feeling lost  The work flow is now different and things don’t work as smoothly, so you are left with downtime which you are unused to having.  It makes you feel lost, nervous and guilty.  You have to find things which will keep you busy and make the day fly by.  Also, stop working 16 hours a day like before and work a normal 8 hour day instead. That will help productivity by getting the work done in 8 hours, because you are working in a more concentrated fashion.  The boss needs to help everyone develop work routines for remote work to replace what they had before.   Cooperating with the inevitable means focusing on what you can control instead, of stressing yourself and worrying about things you cannot control.  Covid-19 is out of your span of influence, with the exception of staying at home and reducing the contagion effects.  So ignore the hourly updates in the media and focus instead on things which make you feel stronger and better.  Bosses can direct the team to spend time studying about their industry, watching videos, reading books etc., which will educate them further in their profession.  Knowing how many cases of Covid-19 occur each day really energises the media, but ultimately means nothing to anyone.   Stress is not 100% negative and life is not 100% negative either.  There are some positives, we just have to look for them and then count them, to get the balance back to some form of equilibrium.  When having a morning huddle on-line at 9.00am make sure it gets started with people sharing some good news. Staff may need some encouragement to find some good news, but once the ball gets rolling, they will find there are aspects of positivity out there.  It works, it does lift the team’s spirits and outlook.   Live in day tight compartments is another favourite.  This means to block out yesterday’s worries and to also not worry about what is coming tomorrow.  We need to concentrate on today, one day at a time.  It doesn’t mean we don’t plan for tomorrow. We just don’t let tomorrow’s worries impede us from focussing on what we need to do today. This is a mental trick we play on ourselves to get more productive work done in less time.   Adjusting expectations of ourselves and our team members in these Covid-19 times is the first step the leader must take.  Looking at the mental health of the team and understanding their personal work at home circumstances assist in that regard.  Using proven stress management principles saves a lot of time trying to work it out yourself.  Embrace Principle 17 from Dale Carnegie’s thirty human relations Principles: “try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”.  Doing that will be noticed by the team and their full engagement will follow.

Leading From The Covid-19 War Frontline   In wartime, there are leaders back at HQ, pouring over maps, receiving intelligence, creating strategies and making decisions about where to position their troops.  On the frontline, there are on the ground commanders, assessing the situation and then following or adjusting HQ orders, based on what they see in front of them. At the sharp point of battle, leaders are with their troops, as they all move into close mortal combat with the enemy.  Where are you in this battle with Covid-19 and the business terrors it has unleashed?   We are in lockdown, so for many of us our troops have been dispersed to the winds.  Contact is done remotely over video conferencing or phone hook-ups.  The chain of command has become much more fraught, than when we were all happily congregated in the office.  In this situation, communication and coordination can become more challenging in the fog of war against the virus enemy.  Delegation becomes a necessity and with it the challenges that come with the communication protocols needed to make sure it is working properly.   What are the communication protocols you currently have in place?  We have a compulsory 9.00am huddle on WebEx every morning, everyone dressed in battle gear for doing business, rather than in their pyjamas.  WebEx is the platform we use to deliver LIVE On Line training, so we want to live in that environment as much as possible, so that we are all masters of our tool.  We must turn on our cameras, so that we can see each other.  If someone’s camera is broken then we don’t wait for Covid-19 to end. We get you an external camera right now, because the cohort must stay in close visual contact with each other.  The Covid-19 virus’s ugly cousin is screaming isolation. People can begin to feel they are abandoned in this fight and we have to fight on that mental health front too.   Leadership in many areas has been delegated. We take turns to lead the morning meeting, with a roster established for each working day of the year.  We are purposely pushing the accountability for leadership down the hierarchy.  We want to involve everyone in the ownership of the mission to get through this crisis.  We must make sure we stay close together and leave no one behind.   We start each day’s huddle with asking for good news.  We are determined to stay positive, because positivity is a strong antidote to stress. We always review our WHY- our Vision, Mission and Values. Covid-19 makes this purpose focus even more important than before.  We also review one principle each day from Dale Carnegie’s thirty Human Relations principles and thirty Stress Management principles.   Each person speaks during the huddle, as they share their top three priorities for the day.  We want everyone to hear and see all of the team members each day, so that we can bind together as a team.  We finish with an inspirational quote to lift our thinking, as we start the day’s toil.    As the leader, I will also give an inspirational talk to wrap up the meeting.  Five days a week you might be thinking is a bit too taxing for coming up with an inspirational speech as the leader.  Well, why can’t you do it?  You are the leader and this is part of your role, to find the words to lift the team, to gather the people to you.  It is the only time in the day, to have everyone together at the same time, so it is a critical chance which cannot be squandered.  Churchill is remembered for sending the English language into battle during the Blitz, in the Second World War.  We have the same duty – to find the words.   Individual meetings will be held during the day, with different people depending on projects being worked on.  The leader needs to get involved with some of these and to roll up their sleeves.  Making pronouncements from HQ doesn’t have the same influence as getting into battle with your team and leading from the front.  Yes, it is very time consuming, frustrating and laborious.  However, seeing their leader in the front lines gives the team belief and gathers trust, credibility and respect.  We must show up for the team.   Every day at 3.00pm we can meet on WebEx to have a virtual coffee break and just chat.  We want to connect people together, so that the feeling of being isolated can be reduced.  Not everyone can make it every day, but the link to WebEx is there and the time is designated.  I try to make as many coffee breaks as I can.   Where are you?  Are you tucked up nicely back at HQ with your officer corps, directing the battle from afar or are you down in the mud and the blood leading your troops?      

Lockdown Leadership and Coordination   Technically Japan hasn’t gone into lockdown, as other countries have, but in typical Japanese fashion, it is effectively the same thing.  By requiring “honourable everyone” to cooperate with the Government’s “request”, they have achieved the same outcome as a lawful direction.  My fellow Aussies have had to be given fines for not cooperating with lawful requirements, making us toe the line, because we are wild colonial boys and girls.  Not here in Japan though and so now we have many more people working from home.    Leading from home is a challenge.  The first things that pop up are the difficulties of coordinating things that were so much easier in the office.  In this isolation environment there is a greater degree of separation between the team members and with the boss.  Everything seems to slow down and drift even more than normal.  Actually, in the best of times, despite your heroic leadership efforts, nothing moves at a rapid pace in white collar work in Japan anyway.    By the way, if you want to see if the Japanese can work really fast, then visit factories.   I remember touring a car plant assembly line and the pace of work production on display was really impressive.  In the Japanese office however, it is usually a lot more leisurely.  I always feel Japan is full of Parkinson Law poster children.  The same amount of work getting done per day is calmly spread over thirteen hours rather than seven.   So now add in the unsupervised work from home equation and things can easily grind to a very low production ebb.  There are additional factors in play though.  Technology issues arise when trying to replicate what you do at the office while working from home.  My team all have company mobile phones and laptops, but very few had printers at home. Not everyone has really fast broadband either, so live video conferences can become very clunky and unstable.  I also bought them all headsets to try to reduce the work noise intrusion into their homes,   Another part of this productivity issue is because the family abode is a pretty confined affair in Japan.  Most people live in small apartments or small homes.  I have a humble study at home, which by Japanese standards, is quite a luxury.  One of my American colleagues, from big sky Dakota, asked me if I was attending the video conference call from my closet.  How do I explain Japan to her?  I just said “yes, I am”.  For my Japanese staff, throw the kids who can’t go to school into the working from home mix and chaos is the order of the day.  Trying to get any work done in this environment is a nightmare.   Working in teams means we rely on our colleagues to get their part of the work completed, conforming to certain milestones and cut off dates.  This new lockdown environment may make a lot of previously planned work schedules wishful thinking today.  Bosses need to reconsider what makes sense in terms of outputs in this environment and to do this in a discriminatory fashion.    Discriminate toward expecting more from those who have personal circumstances that avail them space, peace and quiet when working from home.  Recalibrate what you would expect from other team members who are working in home hell at the moment.  Allowances have to be made, but it requires the boss to have that degree of knowledge of the team. If you don’t have it, then just ask.   The coordination element gets interesting because people start to second guess what you may want or may decide that they prefer to do things in a different way to what you thought was happening.  How would you know this is happening when you are in glorious isolation?  You can’t possibly prepare for all possibilities, across all dimensions of work and be able to head these diversions off at the pass.  You certainly can’t do it at scale with a large workforce.   Delegation is now absolutely required, however it can’t be the usual low level of delegation, which is really abandonment and neglect, dressed up in fancy clothes. It has to be delegation with a much higher degree of reporting, almost breaking the rules on micromanagement.  People will do stuff you can’t imagine and when you discover these things by happenstance, you start to realise the scale of the systemic problem.    Bosses need to be checking in a lot more on work being done.  Certainly maintain the regular cadence of meetings, but then add to that cadence, to over communicate.  More short catch up meetings will tell you earlier when trouble is on the way or when wild tangents are now loose in the system.  The energy and time needed to coordinate simple things, goes up dramatically in this lockdown, isolation environment.  You need to allow for that.   You may find yourself having to work longer to better coordinate things and so be careful of sitting all day.  In the office you get up to go make a coffee or get some water or go out for lunch.  Home is smaller and you move a lot less.  Before you know it, you are gaining weight, losing muscle density and spending many more long hours staring at your computer screen.  Everyone else’s inadequacies and time challenges, now get bumped up to you, as you try to cope with your team’s new, even more inefficient way of working.    As we found out, Covid-19’s disruptions were not over by Easter.  This will last a lot longer than we prefer, so dig in for trench warfare. Reassess how you are working and make your adjustments now.  

The Nuts And Bolts Of Running Virtual Meetings   Running meetings used to pretty straightforward.  We would all assemble in the meeting room, go through the agenda and then get back to work.  Now people are sitting alone, operating at all different levels of adjustment to working in isolation. They are in all different family situations too, some of which can make concentrating on remote meetings very taxing.    As the host of the meeting or as the leader of the meeting, you have a role to play.  Start by making sure to welcome people by their name as they join the call. It can be simple, “welcome Sachiko, thanks for joining the meeting”.  Using people’s names gives them a feeling of inclusion and comfort.  Some people will join the meeting by phone and the name won’t necessarily pop up on the attendees list screen.  If so, just ask who is joining by phone today, so you can connect the code for participation, with the name of the person on the call.   The worst combination is having some people on a speaker phone or on video, while others are in the meeting room.  For those joining remotely, the audio is always a problem. The video is never satisfactory either, because it is hard to gauge reactions of the people in the room just by looking at them on your screen.  The people gathered in the room ignore the audio delay issue and speak over the top of others.  Even worse, they crack jokes in the room, that those on line cannot really hear or appreciate.  When everyone is laughing and you couldn’t hear what was being said, your feeling of being an outsider is magnified. Add in the language issues across English and Japanese and you have a formula for pain aplenty.  It will be better to have everyone on-line together, even if some are in the same office location.  Make it a level playing field for all and save those stupid insider jokes, for when we all gather together again.   Noise on-line usually comes from people who are unmuted.  This makes the communication difficulty factor rise and so do people’s tempers. Rustling papers, side conversations, dogs barking, etc., we all know how annoying this can be.  The host needs to be aware of needing everyone to mute and to remind those who forget or are unaware they are not muted.  Be polite and sympathetic, but stop proceedings and call on them to mute themselves.  If they had any social awareness, they would be already be muted, so we are dealing with the unaware, rather than the uncaring.   People join the meetings at different times and are often late because they may have had technical issues connecting to the call.  Audio is often the culprit. and we have to log in numerous times until the tech God smiles in our favour and let’s us join. Finally, we can hear what is going on, rather than trying to lip read the proceedings.  We have to get going at the appointed time and not wait for people to join.  We must also educate people to join the call 15 minutes early, to be able to provide a buffer so that people can log in.    Meetings need an agenda and usually some records are being kept either in writing or by recording the meeting.  Preferably the agenda items to be discussed will have been distributed already, so people can bring their ideas to the meeting. If it is a regular meeting, the leader needs to remind everyone of the point of the meeting, to get alignment on expectations from the meeting.   The meeting opening is just like any other presentation in that it competes with a lot of noise going on in the head of the attendees.  They are 100% fully occupied with things in their own world when they join the meeting and the leader needs to break through all of that clutter and get everyone focused.  A strong opening is required that gets people to stop what they were doing and pay attention to what is being said.  Distracting multitasking is a plague in its own right, during on-line meetings. Don’t leave things to random good luck - instead plan the opening well.   Hiding during meetings is also function of disengagement.  It happens in real life as people sit there and don’t contribute, so it happens in the on-line world as well.  The leader’s job is to get everyone engaged and paying attention.  Because of the audio connection issues and varying internet stability, it is a good idea to be concise, avoid long monologues and check for understanding regularly.   If there is a slide show involved on-line, then the same standard presentation rules apply – keep the ratio to one idea per slide.  Go zen like minimalist in slide design terms and work on the assumption that if the viewer cannot get the key point within two seconds, then the slide needs to be reworked and simplified.  Often taking individual pieces of the content and breaking them off on to a separate slide will work wonders for increasing clarity.   Tech products like Webex and Zoom allow many more features than in the past.  Breakout rooms, whiteboards, polls, chat boxes are some of the ways people can communicate on-line.  If we were in a physical room, we might break into small groups to discuss a subject and now this is also possible when working remotely.   The systems also allow us to call on people for their input, just as we would in a typical meeting room.  In Japan, it is a good idea to let people know this could happen and that just sitting there listening isn’t an option.  It is always good to flag what is going to happen, so that everyone has some mental breathing room to prepare to participate. For example,  “In a moment, I am going to invite some feedback”.   When people want to contribute, they need to introduce who is speaking. For example, when about to make a point say, “Greg here” or “Greg from Tokyo here”. Sometimes it is difficult to know who is speaking and often the people in the meeting may not know each other, so they can’t identify all of the other participants by voice.   Regular meetings need to be held and they need to complete their function - to inform, coordinate and plan.  Keep the cadence of the meetings you held before, because the temptation is to drop them because things are now different.  The driving reasons for holding meetings at all, have not changed and so the continuity is important.          

Leading Your Japanese Team In Lockdown   Your team are sitting at home, unable to go outside and so as the leader what are your priorities?  Crunching out work, pushing people to perform, driving results?  Are you concerned about your people’s mental health?  They are used to working together in a group for 16 hours a day and now they are at home, either on their own or jammed together with the family, in their small home.  What are your expectations and what is the tone of your communication?   This has never happened before, so the road map doesn’t exist for us as leaders. Where do we start and how do we cope? Let’s start with the identification of the possible and the impossible.  If you were able to go through this exercise in the office, while everyone was still together great, but if you didn’t, then you need to do it now.  The technology exists to group people together on video calls.  A massive town hall of everyone might even be possible, but probably division by division, section by section will be much more effective.   The first thing we need to realise is that we need to spend just about all of our leader day in communication with the team.  This is our new job.  Checking in on people to hear how they are going, to know they are healthy both physically and mentally is key.  That is very time consuming and so classical management of task completion has to be shunted down the priority list.    What do we talk about?  We should spend most of our time listening, rather than telling.  The 80-20 rule is a good one here, they speak for 80% of the time and the 20% is for us to talk. Ask how we can help them, what are their concerns, do they have enough resources, how do they feel they are dealing with this isolation?  How is it going at home trying to work with the family who are stuck at home too, especially if there are young children going stir crazy?  Do they have noise cancelling headphones, a suitable place to work from, enough tech support to work remotely?  How are they approaching their work, what type of routines they have developed, are they able to truncate the work day, so there is a clear distinction between work time and non-work time?   With regard to how to work remotely, this is where gathering team members together virtually, either as a whole, depending on numbers, or section by section, is valuable.  Rather than being the font of all wisdom concerning a situation with which you have zero experience, get the team to come up with ideas and to some conclusions together.  We are looking at the joint sourcing of ideas, experiences and insights, as well as getting them to own the conclusions.   The technology, in some cases, can allow people to split up into groups to brainstorm in breakout rooms and then report back to the main group, just as we would if we were all face to face.  If that is not the case, then have everyone make a comment in order to share their ideas.  Regardless, don’t ask people to come up with something genius on the spot, you are unlikely to see lighting strike on that front.  Instead, give them all some thinking time in silence, so they can gather their thoughts and then ask them to share their ideas.  By the way, in Japan, don’t ask “well what is your idea”.  Instead ask something more tangential and less confrontational like, “So what did you write down?”.   As with any brainstorming session, when we get to the reporting component, don’t judge, fillet or criticise the ideas as they emerge.  If the technology exists on-line for you, have someone designated to get these ideas up on the virtual whiteboard, so everyone can see them or if not, then get them on to a slide that can be shared with everyone or just have someone scribe them so there is a record.  In this initial stage, we are looking for quantity of ideas, not quality.  That individual’s crazy, impractical, stupid contribution can be the spark to a genius ideas from someone else.  It would never have emerged however, without the original dud idea being there in the first place.  Unleash the crazies at initial idea generation time!   Once we have been through this process, we can either discuss which ideas we want to go forward with or we can take the ideas to a smaller working group, to decide where to put the resources and to define the activities required.  The point is to involve everyone, so that they feel they own the outcome.  None of us like being told what to do, but we will happily execute our own plan or a plan into which we have contributed.  As Dale Carnegie said, “People support a world they help to create”.   The ideas can be directed to very practical issues, such as how shall we all arrange our days, when will we start, when will we finish.  Shall we start and end each day with a video conference, so we can see each other and not feel so isolated?  How will that video meetings be run?  Will there be a standard written down agenda with items to be covered or will some just be a social chat opportunity to keep in touch?  What is the cadence of the meetings? What work will be done by which teams and inside those teams, who will be responsible for which tasks.  What will be the Key Activity Indicators, milestones and deadlines for that work?   What are the opportunities for the business relative to the competitors?  We want to help lift everyone’s thinking from a scarcity mentality, to an opportunity mentality. How can we get on the front foot and be better organised than our rivals.  How can we gain clients, or maintain existing clients and stop them being stolen by our rivals?  What are realistic revenue targets in this situation?   We need to break the business apart and rebuild it in a new format, one which works in lockdown mode where everyone is working remotely.  The key is to do it together and expect this will take some time, be laborious and difficult, because we are doing it at a distance.  We need to factor that in to our expectations of how much we can expect to get done, in the same amount of time as if we were doing it all together in a meeting room.  We need to change our thinking at the most fundamental level.   Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.   The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e  

Covid-19 Financial Crisis Leadership   The Covid-19 virus is nomadic, persistently wandering around the countries of the world infecting people and proving deadly for those over 70 and or with an existing health condition.  Health professionals provide advice on how to limit the spread of the virus and washing your hands, cancelling events, restricting travel, working from home and social distancing have proven to be good advice.  For those businesses impacted by these preventative measures however, the restriction of activities to reduce virus contagion means constricting their ability to make revenues and therefore make payroll.  For small and medium sized business, it can seem like a race to the bottom, between which one will get you first, the virus contagion or bankruptcy.    As the business leader, you can feel you are staring down the barrel of oblivion.  You are worried.  Your team are worried.  They look to you for a way out of this and for some comfort that you know what you are doing.  Do you actually know what you are doing or are you just trashing around desperate and uncertain of survival?  The first priority is to face reality and stop kidding yourself.  “It will disappear in the summer, because the virus doesn’t spread as fast once we get to 40% humidity” is not a plan.  I pray for all of us that idea is true, but what if this virus doesn’t follow the same projections as other similar viruses or it just keeps extending, as it rolls out through different populations?   You are the leader, so you must seek clarity around what you are facing, in order to know what to do. Start by writing down the worst business fear you have.  Call it out, don’t try to hide from reality.  Having done that, gather the team, share your worst case scenario and work together to take action to minimise the damage.  Transparency is critical, regular communication both oral and written must be maintained and keep it real. The team will rally to your call to arms, because they all know TINA - There Is No Alternative.  By sharing the scenario that is worrying you the most, you can align the power of the whole group and give them ownership of devising and executing on the right solution.   Be proactive as the leader and you in particular, must be super positive.  Things are never 100% negative in business and you have to be the beacon of light on the hill for your team to give them hope.  Look at your resources, things like cash on hand, accessing available government grants or soft loans, asking for debt repayment moratoriums from your bank or applying to receive a line of credit, negotiating invoice payments to be extended to sixty, ninety or one hundred and twenty days plus.   Smaller companies have almost no margins to help much, because they are grappling with their own death throes.  Larger players have better capacity to help and so ask early and often for assistance.   Plan for three phases, not just what is in front of you today.  Think about things in terms of the immediate, mid term and post-crisis.  Get everyone also living in the future, focused on life after Covid-19 and not just the current confusion of the moment, as key information changes, government policies lurch and markets gyrate.    I remember reading Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search For Meaning” where he noted that those who survived the Nazi concentration camps, tended to be those who maintained a future orientation, as they grappled with the day to day atrocities. We have to give our team hope for a brighter future.  We assemble our immediate action plan, which moves into the second phase as we execute the plan and then the final phase is where we land after the crisis has passed.   When your revenue stream dries up or is reduced to a dribble, it sounds counter-intuitive to be focused on your customers, when you are unsure you will even be in business in a few weeks to be able to service anyone.  This is another aspect of future orientation to keep us all going through the immediate threats to our existence.  Talk to your customers to see where you can help them, because if they don’t survive, your survival is guaranteed to be gone.  Maybe they can’t pay you or engage you today, but this Covid-19 won’t last forever and how do you want to be thought of when the viral cloud finally dissipates?   Is there an area of your business you can pivot to, in order to keep going?  Maybe the income streams aren’t as large, but some income is a lot better than none.  In every crisis there is also an opportunity.  This is part of the positive messaging the team needs to hear. When the share market peels thirty percent off the value of solid companies, there is a buying opportunity.  When people realise they can work from home, there is an opportunity to service that need.  When there is too much reliance on China, there is an opportunity to diversify supply chains, tourist and investment inputs, as well as export markets.    Change itself is agnostic, but our reaction to change is the key.  Forging a strong, proactive, positive, do or die mentality is a must for the leader in a crisis.  Communicating your powerful belief in the future for the company, moulded in the harsh crucible of truth and realism, amplifies the team’s sense of hope. Involve, plan, execute, review, execute, review and keep executing is the way forward.  Winston Churchill’s speech to Harrow, his alma mater, in 1941 should be our guiding light and we need to convey this message to our people “never give in, never, never, never, never….”.       Free LIVE On Line Stress Management Sessions On a separate note, we are running public LIVE On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered LIVE On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.   The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e                

Two Waves Theory And Covid-19 Leadership   As an Aussie, I enjoy going surfing in Australia.  Blue skies, golden beaches, clean oceans and good surf make the whole experience very enjoyable.  What is less enjoyable is when you catch a wave, get severely dumped, find yourself pressed to the bottom under the weight of the wave and have to struggle to claw your way to air.  You break the surface to grab some air and at that moment, you are smashed by an even bigger wave.  That is where we are as leaders right now.  The First Wave is the virus disruption to business, particularly hammering small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).  The Second Wave is a global recession that takes everyone down.   Naturally in Japan, we initially thought the virus was a Chinese problem, like SARS. Then we discovered that big influx of Chinese tourist money brought with it carriers of the virus.  We also had political leadership who after Cabinet debate, concluded that the 1000 people who had been locked in their cabins on the Diamond Princess were okay to go home.  Every other country who evacuated their nationals off the cruise liner, placed their evacuees into a further two weeks of quarantine isolation.  Not Japan.  The virus started popping up in unexplained locales and PM Abe closed the schools down, sparking a panic rush to buy toilet paper, long life food products, hand cleaning gels, etc.   The business consequences of the fear of the virus kicked in with cancelations of events, people avoiding going out and many working from home.  Restaurants saw major declines of clientele, tourists both domestic and foreign stopped traveling, Hotels faced horrendous vacancy rates, etc., etc.  Suddenly cash flow concerns seized everyone’s attention, more than the health aspects of the virus and SMEs began to entertain probable bankruptcy.   As company owners and leaders we have moved all the cash to the centre of the office and set it on fire.  We now play a waiting game of which will extinguish first, the virus or the cash?  We have all put plans in place to wait it out.  We stopped all unnecessary spending.  This has been a “pass the parcel” exercise, where our lack of spending hits those down the food chain, who in turn stop spending, affecting those further down their food chain, who stop spending and so on, ad nauseam.  This is Wave One.   Once we start locking down whole countries, as we have seen with Italy, Spain, France and New Zealand (at the time of this writing), we can anticipate nearly all commerce comes to a dead stop.  Trade is hindered and each country lurches into recession, as their domestic economies cower in the fetal position, hoping somehow things will get better soon. Now the big corporations have moved all their cash into the centre of the CFO’s office and have the lighter at the ready. This global recession is the Second Wave.    As leaders, have we bridged this full blooded global recession likelihood with our teams?  They may be sitting in isolation at home, already feeling uncertainty and even loneliness.   Have we set up regular Town Halls, with everyone accessing it on-line, to talk about where we are with the cash burning situation?  Are we focusing only on the virus induced business disruption in Japan or are we now talking about a potential global recession.  Or are we afraid to talk about either of these highly flammable subjects ?   It is difficult because we have to strike a delicate balance between causing panic and being transparent.  Looking at our global political leaders, not too many countries have found that balance as yet.  My view is that we need to be transparent.  If the team knows they may face salary cuts, as the corporate cash burns low, they are mentally ready for it.  If they are alerted to a macro economic problem, associated with a probable global recession which will elongate the required survival struggle period, then they are ready for it.  They also know that this isn’t a one company, one industry, one country issue.  Even if they wanted to retreat to another company, it is the equivalent of choosing a different deck chair on the Titanic.   We must be transparent, but also must have a plan which is shared with everyone, on how we are going to make it out of this morass.  The plan may be as simple as preserving cash until things pick up or switching focus to a part of the business where there is still some ability to get revenues.    The leader also has to radiate hope, confidence, certainty, calm, bravery, commitment, fighting spirit, consistency and guts.  Winston Churchill sent language to battle to keep the spirit of the British people alive in the most dark days of the last world war.  We don't have to be as good as Churchill, but we should be trying as hard as possible. He communicated with his tribe and we have to make sure we have committed ourselves to doing the same.  Regular on-line Town Halls for isolated staff working at home has to be a given. If you think you are doing okay in terms of communication, then double that, because you will undoubtedly need to do better.   Free LIVE On Line Stress Management Sessions On a separate note, we are running public LIVE On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered LIVE On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.   The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e      

Covid-1929: Are You A Wartime Or A Peacetime Leader?   “Hey Greg, you misspelt the name of the virus, you dummy - it’s Covid-19”.  Well, did I now?  Actually the 1929 reference is more accurate.  Wall Street crashed and the chain reaction pushed the whole world into a miserable recession, that destroyed lives and businesses.  In my view, that is what we are looking at here and the question is, as a leader, are you ready for the commercial carnage?    Launching a start-up, maintaining market share and seeking rapid growth escalation are all different requirements and not all leaders can do all three with equal flair. China’s retreat from markets has thrown a lot of business plans straight out the window.  Now the virus contagion goes global. We are entering an economic war zone and are your leadership skills ready for the challenge?    As a leader, focusing solely on the health aspects is to join the media led sensationalist panic.  If you have an existing health condition or are over 70 years of age, then you have a very high mortality risk from the virus.  For everyone else, the biggest risk is that your company goes down and you are out of a job.  Are you the leader able to make sure that doesn’t happen?   In 1929 the stock market tanked and everyone, including the Government, started scrambling to preserve cash and stop spending.  This just drove a stake through the heart of the capitalist system, as people’s panic stopped the wheels of commerce.  This will begin to seem very familiar to everyone very shortly.   Japan is the first major capitalist country, apart from Hong Kong, to really suffer from the virus.  The pain starts for small medium sized (SME) businesses.  Here, these SMEs account for 99 percent of all enterprises, 70 percent of employment, 50 percent of the value added manufacturing sector and 60% of the nonmanufacturing sector.  According to Government statistics 70% of companies in Japan don’t make a profit, so many will be SMEs and be in that situation.   The virus is curtailing commercial activities.  Abe closes the schools and people focus on what to do with the kids at home.  The other issue that doesn’t get enough attention is what happens to all those businesses who have revenues tied up in supplying schools with lunches and other services?  Events get cancelled and that means everyone who had revenue potential in that event, gets zero income or maybe even loses money.  Tourists, both domestic and international, are stopping their activities in Japan, so the entire industry takes a huge hit.  This affects thousands of businesses directly and also those who were looking at supplying goods of services to that industry.  Hokkaido gets locked down to avoid the virus, but what about avoiding the corresponding loss of cash flow?   This is how we recreate a 1929 scenario.  I would guess that right now, almost all SME enterprise leaders in Japan, are focused on preserving cash.  This is the oxygen of business and without it you don’t last long.  The way to do that is stop investing, stop spending and stop paying other people for the bills they have already sent you. This chain reaction leads to an economic meltdown and it won’t be contained in Japan alone.  Like the virus, it will envelop the entire world, as it creates the same domino effect on all businesses.   You are the leader.   What are you going to do during this mass slaughter of fellow SMEs, to make sure you don’t go down for the count?  The war time leader doesn’t try and tart up the reality for the team. They tell them straight where the firm is positioned now, regarding cash reserves and are totally transparent about the stages the business will go through.  Stage One is stop all unnecessary spending. Stage Two is stop paying other people, including the Government.  Stage Three is cutting salaries, starting with the President, who leads from the front and goes down to zero, while the others take a progressive haircut of firstly 10%, then 20%, 30%, 40% etc.  Stage Four is to throw in the towel and declare bankruptcy.   During these four stages on the way to the Apocalypse, the leader must be constantly communicating where we are right now and that we can survive this.  The team will not be conveniently gathered in the office anymore, because they will be scattered to the winds at home.  Are they actually working at home?  That is a question, because with the downturn there may be less for them to do.    Suddenly they have time on their hands and can brood about how bad things are and how fragile this company they have trusted with their livelihood is.  Constant media bombardment with bad news wears people’s spirit down. Watch for signs of depression and stress in the team and get them help if these appear.  The leader must be a beacon of raw hope and optimism and more importantly must keep communicating that to the team.   The leader needs to keep them all busy too.  Meetings that were face to face, can still be had by video conferencing, as the tech is very accessible and inexpensive today.  Scheduled meetings should continue to offer some normality, routine and opportunities for good internal communication.  Don’t stop holding them because everyone is at home, hold them anyway, but now do it remotely.  Offer remotely delivered training for your clients or for your own team – it could be product knowledge, technical hard skills or soft skills training.   Create projects and get them involved.  It might be focusing the sales team to take the opportunity of decision makers being at home and contact them there, sans the usual bevy of brilliantly talented gate keepers, who frustrate our efforts to reach the boss.  It might be developing marketing campaigns that align with the current situation.  For example, drop the usual key search words for pay per click leads and go after different terms and phrases.  It might be to clean up systems and projects that have been kept in abeyance, because previously there wasn’t the time available.  Plenty of time available now if there is no work going.   Be positive and radiate belief that we can come out of this long dark tunnel.  Brainstorm what can be done in the new environment, start executing on that plan, constantly communicate, be totally transparent and provide massive hope of a better day coming.  Be a war time general for your team.   Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.   The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e                  

Stress Is Mounting In Japan And What You Can Do About it   PM Abe’s sudden announcement closing every school in the country from Elementary level on and up created immediate panic buying of toilet paper, face masks and people stocking up on rice and other long lasting food products.  This has pushed anxiety levels much higher. Hokkaido is in lockdown and the Covid-19 virus keeps popping up in unanticipated locations.  If you are unhealthy and or over 70 years of age, then you definitely don’t want to catch this virus, because the mortality rate for that grouping is relatively high.   For everyone else, the health concern while real it isn’t the most concerning issue.  Business disruption impacts the livelihoods of many, many more people. The majority of companies in this country are small medium sized enterprises (SMEs), seventy percent of which don’t make a profit.  Yes, they arrange their accounts to run everything they can through the books to avoid paying tax, but how much cash in reserve do they have?  The stressful elements are will I get the virus and will my sole source of salary, my company, go under, when the cash runs out?   In 1929, the crash of the New York stock market triggered panic with a wave of spending cuts to preserve cash, which led to less spending, which led to layoffs, which led to even less spending, which led to even more layoffs, until the world was brought to its knees.  This is exactly what every leader of an SME in Japan is doing right now.  They are nervous, anxious, worried. Yes they are washing their hands and wearing a mask against the virus, but more damagingly, they are stopping all spending to preserve cash. This axing of spending has an instant   impact and immediately sends out ripple effects, turning into a tsunami rapidly spreading through the economy.  This builds into a major recession, on top of the minor one we have already from US-China trade friction and the increase in the consumption tax.      In your company, you expected that invoice payment, but it didn’t turn up in the bank account.  This keeps expanding and is happening at pace. All the employees are really worried about their salaries and their jobs, if the company goes bankrupt.  Everyone feels the danger and the uninvited stress which comes with that.  Two incomes was a safety net and forty six percent of married couples both work, but who looks after the kids at home, now the schools are closed?  What happens next, how long will this last, will my family be okay, will I lose my job?  These are very stressful times for all of us, me included.   What can we do about any of this?  When we are stressed there are so many serious concerns competing with each other, we can be blinded to the key issues.  We are anxious and battling through a fog of stress induced confusion most of the time.  A blocker is needed to stop this mental rollercoaster.  We have to cut through our many concerns and work out clearly just what is the key problem.  Unless we can identify the key problem, we have little hope in fixing anything, as we just go round and round, worrying ourselves into depression.  This finding the key factor isn’t as easy as it sounds, because there are so many factors at play.  Which one is the key one?   The solution is to take one clear action - start writing down all of the concerns floating around in your mind.  Somehow the act of writing helps us to refine what we are thinking.  We need to get these problems out first and then get them into priority order.  Is this easy - no!  But it forces a higher level of thinking about what we are facing.    Are there any constants, threads, themes, similarities or specifics at play?  Having sorted that prioritization out, we now have to dig a bit deeper and look at what are the causes behind these problems.  We can identify the symptoms, but what are the root causes of the troubles we are suffering?  This again needs some analysis and often we are not operating with a lot of numbers we can rely on, to pick out the threads of the root causes. We often have to go on instinct and this is an imperfect science.    Having ascertained what is causing the problem, well what can we do about it?  Go beyond the headlines in the media and Government announcements and isolate out how you take individual actions for your family and your business. We start digging deep for solutions, for ideas, for innovations which will provide us with a way forward.  This is a brainstorming process and the object should be to throw up as many ideas as possible.  We do this on the basis that even a crazy, impractical idea might be the trigger for a really great idea.  The excellent idea may not have emerged with out the stimulus of the crazy idea in the first place.   Having drawn out a broad range of possibilities we now need to whittle these down to the best ideas.  We start evaluating the consequences of taking possible actions on these ideas.  We will distill the best solution in this way and now we have created a roadmap for ourselves.  Through action comes clarity and the solutions flow forth.  We need to get the battle plan into priority order for the execution piece.  We are trained in business to execute and once we get a plan together, we can start to move forward and get out of the hole we have been lodged in for some time.   Dale Carnegie wrote a whole book on this subject, called “How To Stop Worrying And Start Living”.  He was thinking that we needed to find a way through the worry stage and get out of that hole we have dug for ourselves.  If we don’t do this we will see our stress continue to mount up.  Anxiety will paralyze us unless we make sure it doesn’t.   Once we find that way forward, we get on the front foot and we can exercise more control over our attitude and our circumstances.  This means we can start living in a full and complete way, because we have thrown off the yolk of stress and we are now tapping into our full potential.   Today we know the connection between stress and illness and we can’t take it lightly.  The virus won’t last forever but the likelihood of our lives becoming less stressful in the future is slim.  We are better off finding ways to deal with it for both today and the future.        

Vijay Deol summary   Vijay Deol originally came to Japan to teach English in rural Kyoto before starting at en world, a global recruiting company where he now serves as Regional Director. During his first 8 years, Mr. Deol worked his way up to Sales Director ast enworld before becoming President of a British multinational recruitment firm. As the sole employee in Japan, Mr. Deol grew the firm to about 30 staff by the time he left in 2017, to make return to en world. He currently leads en world Japan, Australia and Singapore, managing approximately 350 employees.   Mr. Deol constantly puts en world’s vision of nyuushago shuukatsu, Enabling Success, to practice in order to effectively lead a large and diverse team. He emphasizes the importance of hiring the right talent, continuous improvement and active listening. For example, Mr. Deol admits his own mistakes in company meetings to encourage his staff to be more creative without fearing failure. To understand and address the different demands and expectations of his staff, Mr. Deol holds one-on-one sessions, live engagement surveys and provides opportunities for career development. They have successfully launched LinkedIn Learning for their staff to take free online course. Mr. Deol stays updated on trends in the industry by looking at investor relations reports from competitors to use as a benchmark for en world. He also points out the importance of understanding the various priorities his staff have in order to offer suitable incentive and maintain engagement. For his younger, millennial and generation Z staff, Mr. Deol explains, “I think, [their] highest priorities are, [the] opportunity to learn, develop, and work in an independent and flexible way.” This, in turn, leads to greater motivation, satisfaction and retention for the company.