Nikhil Gutpe   The standard dress code is much more formal in Japan than many other countries, even including other Asian countries. Casual Friday, for example, is not a thing here in Japan. I have had to make sure in meetings, as the boss, that I do not state my opinion first, because then there will just be silence and no one will be willing to speak up. While in other countries, you are free to question the boss, and even say to a certain extent that I do not agree with this, in Japan, it would be a disaster. One thing that is excellent about Japan is the network of expats. You just need to ask the questions. You hear a big noise about how different Japan is, about how tough it is, but once you get here, and you ask questions of expats, and you experience things with an open mind as to why and how they are occurring, you can pick up simple things and start connecting the dots. You have not come here to be comfortable. You have come here for the challenge, so throw yourself into it and learn and have fun. Remember you have come to Japan, Japan is not going to change for you, so you need to work out how to go with the flow of what cannot be changed in Japan but influence what you can influence in the patch of Japan that you are being entrusted with. Nodding and smiling and saying yes does not necessarily mean they agree with you. You need to ask questions in such a way as to the answer might be negative, because if the answer can be given in the affirmative, then they will do so whether or not they actually are saying yes in the way Westerners understand it. Japanese have an extraordinary poker face and body language that is hard to read. So asking questions where the answer might be negative is vital if you are to find out if they are actually in agreeance and things will happen, or they are just saying that they hear what you are saying. I want my employees to make mistakes, because that way you will learn. If you make the same mistake again, you are foolish. If you make the same mistake a third time, then please find a new job. Making mistakes is not frowned upon at all under my leadership, but the same mistake three times is not acceptable because it means you have not learned from it, and I cannot have someone on my team that cannot learn. Silos are also something you need to watch out for in Japan, such as silos of individual work space, silos of job descriptions, because they have a drive for perfection and they are very used to not really knowing what other people are doing. The concept of helping each other with their jobs is not very common in Japan so it has been one of the challenges I have faced in Japan in getting my team to do multiple jobs and help each other with those tasks. To drive improvement, I ask the team to point out what went wrong. They need to develop that awareness of when things are going well or going poorly, as well as if I tell them what went wrong, there is a chance they will not accept it and then our solution implementation is going to negatively impacted. I work hard to build a one on one bond with my employees so trust is shown and more easily reciprocated. We also have no clocking in, clocking out machines, no walls, glass everywhere. It is a very specific and intentional approach towards creating trust. Trust does not come with telling someone that you trust them. Trust comes from actions and behavior and how you create the environment. One thing I tell my team a lot is to keep your ego out of it. It is not about me being right or you being right or anyone being right. It is about the best solution for that problem in alignment with the company strategic priorities. When a solution presented by a staff member shows a lack of alignment with the company strategic priorities, then I know I have a bigger problem, which is that they do not understand the strategic vision and this is a real issue. So I make sure that we constantly reaffirm the company strategic priorities in our meetings, our overarching value is `good for you, good for the company` It is easy to digress and get distracted in life, in business. So you need to keep re-focussing on the priorities and a good way to do that is via constant reaffirmation of the overarching values and mission. Businesses in Japan are always facing the dual issue of delivering 100% at the cost that the consumers want. It’s a constant battle for all companies. This is one of the `Japan only` issues. In other countries, 90% delivery is fine. The other part of leadership is the expat`s families. If they are not comfortable, if they are not enjoying the place, then the leader will not last long. It takes effort and the right mindset. It takes learning Japanese, even just a little bit, because extra effort in understanding Japan`s culture is very much respected overall by the Japanese.  

Seiichiro Asakawa   As a leader, I learned to not compete on things I did not have expertise in. I had a financial background, not a technical background, so there was no use trying to convince technically strong employees on that front – I had to use financial data as facts in order to convince my employees to accept that things needed to change in order to grow on the global scale that I wanted. While I accept there are differences in practices between cultures, I think the basics of people are the same. People are motivated to learn, to grow, to advance. Young people particularly, regardless of culture, are willing to challenge themselves and are not afraid to try and even fail. We invested heavily in the company computer systems so that all staff can, at the touch of a button, contact any other member of our overseas team. So, apart from being conscious of time differences, there is no excuse for a lack of communication. We communicate, even at the Japanese headquarters, mainly in English and what I encourage the most is everyone just having a go, it can be horrible English with just a bunch of words together but there will always be someone in the meeting who can translate so it is vital that people gets a chance and just tries. Bit by bit, they will realise no one`s English in the company is perfect and that just trying to communicate is the key. We never fire people for making a mistake, even if it is a big one because they tried, so they are not penalized and in fact we set up challenge systems within the company to recognize employees globally who met the challenge, made the contribution and tried. We also bring managers to Japan and take Japanese managers to our other offices in India and China and Europe etc, so as many people as possible, can see first-hand how our business operates in different cultures. It is expensive to do this, but I see it as an investment in my people, in team building and in my company. I think while money is important to people, they have bills to pay after all, but recognition in so far as being trusted to take on certain roles and responsibilities is a bigger motivating factor in my company. When I took over the company, and instigated the global expansion, I had to be very precise and transparent about my messages. I would send the messages in English and Japanese to the employees about where we were and where we wanted to go. I would outline the broad plan and then ask different groups into meetings to plan, plan, plan – down to the detailed plans. This was how I built ownership from the employees into the global plan, and changed the company culture from a One-King culture, top-down strong leadership style that my father used, to a style that was more suited to me and what I had learnt in the US I think a problem in Japan is we ask people to choose a specialization at far too early an age. For example, once you go down a science path, you do not learn management or business skills, so we end up with highly skilled workers but only in their particular field, and that puts us at a competitive disadvantage because in many other Western countries, even if you major in science, you still get a liberal arts education, which basically teaches you the leadership and communication skills you need anyway. In Japan, a well-mannered conversation is based on listening, to fully understand and make an in-depth comment. Feedback is only considered appropriate at work, feedback to people at your own level is considered aggressive. You need to be very careful giving feedback to Japanese people, listen carefully to what they are trying to do and the reasons they are doing that. Personal relationships are key in Japan. Japanese have hospitality in their DNA, so show some interest in the culture and people will be more likely to engage with you. It helps build trust.

Paul Hardisty Once you walk the talk over a given period of time as a leader, you gain trust, and then people will follow you, instead of just doing what you say. Then you start getting buy-in and ideas and you can work cross-functionally. On engagement surveys, if you are giving a very low score, then you should not be coming into the office. If you are not going to be part of the solution, then you should reconsider your career and job. Engagement scores however tend to coincide with big decisions, e.g. head count freezes has a negative impact on scores, but bonus time has a positive impact. It is also not helpful to compare countries against other countries. It is about trends and patterns and feedback. You are always going to get people who score low, but it is when you see big swings that you know there is an issue. I used to think that my job was to find a local leader to replace me once I moved on, but I have realized we are an international company and rotation is a better solution, so succession plans are not just country-based, they are global. While it may not be a fantastic analogy, chopping the tree down from the top takes a long time. If you wedge things in the tree all the way up, the tree will fall the way you want it to fall. The unwillingness to change in Japan is strong. We have long had an innovations/idea box and you can put your name on it or not, but we would offer prizes and that encouraged people to put their names on it. But then we received feedback that the idea then became the responsibility of the person who suggested it, and yet often it was not even about their own division. So we created a business development department that reported directly to the CEO, and they can then tackle any strategic ideas that need to be implemented cross-functionally. It was a great tool to get ideas out of heads and onto paper and then to receive quick feedback on that idea by a specialist department who was responsible for it. Employee meetings are held quarterly and they are mandatory to the extent I myself would walk the floor to see who was not in attendance. There would be various presentations but it was designed as a forum for communicating what needed to be communicated. I used to have a pizza lunch every 3 weeks with the newcomers where they would have to answer 5 questions and I would have to answer the same 5 questions honestly. It helped build trust and exposure. My door was always open. I would meet with anyone and everyone. Sharing personal stuff really helps brighten engagement. I do it because it is just me and how I am but especially in Japan, I realized it was seen as a really big deal. My view is you do not need to be a rock or some kind of impenetrable individual. You are a human, you have a family, you have a dog, you have issues, so its okay to relate to people and have them relate to you. You should not stop a weekend activity you have been enjoying for decades just because you are the CEO or whatever. I think it is important to be careful what you wish for because changing things that are inherent to a culture, even if they sometimes cause frustration, would fundamentally change the country. Manage the business with the environment you have. Use it to your advantage. Do not be brainwashed by some of the things you have been told about Japan either by foreigners who are new to the country or who have been there a long time. There are as many challenges in Japan as they are in any other countries. Focus on the good and where there are growth opportunities. Yes, it can be a flat market in general but pick your battles and look for areas you can innovate in. You need to think and you need to ask for help. Consultants can often give you insights into the market from a bigger picture and help you develop those plans, as well as point out where you can hit to grow your business, grow your career and grow your family. So be open-minded, draw your own conclusions and enjoy the ride.  

The 2020 Leader   Are you a perfect leader?  If you are, bully for you.  For the rest of us we continue on the journey.  As the great American philosopher Yogi Berra once noted, leading is easy, the getting people to follow you bit, is the snag.  Leaders do make such a huge difference. This sounds like the great man ideology in history, where specific individuals are credited with making the difference, rather than socio-economic factors and the contribution of others, who didn’t get their names into the official histories.   Business is different though.   The same industry, the same market, the same firm, the same staff, the same technology, the same capital, the same competitors but the outcomes can be so different depending on who is leading the firm.  We see this phenomenon all the time in various turnarounds.  A new leader is sent in and things begin to improve.  They bring in their own trusted people to execute their decisions.  They break many eggs in order to make the new corporate omelette.  They drive through their vision, mission and values for the business.  They are relentless about using these to drive structural changes to impact individual thinking.  They align systems around these messages to make them come alive for the team.   Then they leave for another post and their replacement begins to unravel all the good that was done and drive the firm down.  Within surprisingly short order, the firm is headed south and the office politicians, hangers on, sycophants and assorted ne’er-do-wells take over under the new regime and the whole company goes to hell in a basket.  We have probably all seen this either up close or from afar. It is real.   As the leader how do we take the organisation forward?  What is our job?  It sounds like a stupid question to be asking a leader, but it isn’t.  We tend to get drowned in a lot of stuff and find we are living permanently in Quadrant One – Urgent and Important.  This means constantly fighting fires, living in the moment, becoming a crisis solving junkie.  We are nomads, moving constantly from meeting to meeting, sprinkling pixie dust around wherever we go.  We lose sight of our real role because we are too busy working in our business, instead of on our business.   We have three jobs as leader and we should never lose sight of them.  We set the direction for the firm, we get the right people on the right bus and in the right seats and we grow those peoples’ abilities.  Sounds simple, but we screw this up.  We think because we have the vision, mission values installed on various walls throughout the firm such that everyone knows where we are going.  If you ask people to repeat the content from memory, I will guarantee that process will be character building, as you discover they will get two of the five values and nothing else.  If you cannot remember it I don’t how you can live it?   The leader may get sick of saying these things over and over, but that is the job.  Maintain a relentless drumbeat on these things, so that the team will get it and keep on getting it.   Have the individual work teams brainstorm how to get these lofty words into daily rituals, so that we are all living them.  When they do it they will own it.  When they own it, these items will become the basis for decisions and actions being taken.  Unless we can manufacture the ownership then these lofty words will be lofty and irrelevant.   When there are 1.6 jobs for everyone looking for a job in Japan, the choice of the right people becomes a challenge.  A guy I know here has taken over the running of an American firm and he is out there in the social media telling everyone he is looking for A Players for his business and they should be contacting him.  Sounds reasonable except we are all looking for A Players, they are in short supply and now becoming very expensive.  We are all involved in a bidding war for talent and these young candidates have no compunction about accepting our offer, arranging to start on a certain day and then dumping us for a prettier face, joining another crew instead.  This is Japan!  Who could imagine such a thing would become so standard.   So recruit and retain become key leader skills in 2020.  Today, we need to inject ourselves into the recruit process and not leave this entirely to others.  We need to work on retaining good people by giving them opportunities to grow and that means work assignments, projects, coaching, training and mentoring.  Yes, I know you are already busy.  But look at what is keeping you busy and ask yourself how that content aligns with the priorities that are confronting us all as leaders today?  Time to realign our thinking, time usage and priorities to match the demands this new year is ushering in.    

341: Want To Be A Great Leader - Then Be Yourself Masa Namiki   While you can be ready for a position from a capability or mindset perspective, it does not necessarily mean you are ready from an actually `doing the job` perspective. One of the biggest struggles is that I did not have a viable local leader reference point when I was not sure, because my managers were regional leaders but their advice inevitably did work in Japan because they were drawing from their own experiences in different countries, with different people and different cultures. I also was not resourceful enough back then to have an outside of company network to draw upon. The key in leadership for me has been understanding that I do not have to be some big CEO type, I need to be authentic to who I am, building personal connections and showing vulnerability helps me lead by being able to connect with staff as a real person. Change is also not effective if it is leader-driven because once the leader shifts their attention elsewhere, the change shows up as the temporary illusion that it was. I have found that I have to get the staff taking ownership of the process. Things like give them more responsibility, empower them more, show them how they can benefit from the direction I want to go in so they feel that by driving the change, they personally will benefit from it as well as the company.   To encourage innovation and risk taking in a traditionally risk-adverse culture, I try to publicly acknowledge the risk first and stand behind the risk-takers so they feel more empowered to continue. We also try to make sure we capture when people are taking risks so we can talk about it in their evaluation. With engagement surveys in Japan, we need to explain what the scores mean to try and avoid that Japanese unspoken conservatism loyalty score of 3/5, so that people feel empowered to rank as they really want to. Having confidence in your intuition as a leader and being open about is very helpful. You can say `I understand that logically but it isn`t sitting right, so let`s discuss further`. It is helpful not only to avoid making decisions that you felt in your gut was not the right decision at the time anyway, but also to show your staff that you are a person who does not have all the answers and that is okay. Do not assume you know why something is happening. Connect personally with people. Be respectful of Japan.    

2020 Will Be Different   Let’s make IWWCW our motto for 2020.  Quite a mouthful as far as acronyms go, but the meaning is sensible, yet challenging.  In What Way Can We is a perfect foil for inspiring those who resist peaking out from deep inside their comfort zone.  By the way, we have now captured a big proportion of the Japan archipelago right there.  Problems arise but we should never be defeated by them. This country however is the risk aversion capital of the universe.  This is important - don’t be put off by other people’s limitations.  They may see no way forward because their thinking is too negative.  We need IWWCW thinking to overcome all of that negativity roiling around us.   We should use IWWCW thinking to focus on your own problems and conquer them.   The new calendar year is always a time for reflection and goal setting.  We get a few days off and can put some distance between ourselves and the everyday bustle and minutiae of the business.  This affords an opportunity to think more strategically about where we want to be over the next few years and how to get there.    After all of the bonenkai and big dinners, we look at our waist line and think we should strike a blow for freedom and do something about removing that fatty liver build up.  We also know this is not our first rodeo and we have done and said all this before.    We have notes scattered amongst bits of paper or maybe even collected diligently in one place.  If you want a good laugh, go back and look at what you said you would do in the business or personally, a few years ago.  But this year it will be different.  Well, the Einstein take on insanity was repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  We were crazy kids in the past, but now we have seen the light.  So far so good.  Where do we start though?  IWWCW?   Start small.  Sounds a bit defeatist doesn’t it.  “No, I can do that big project!”.  Well going by track record so far, why would that idea be true?  Let’s try a different approach this year, aim lower to start off with and then build up the tempo.  We avoid the rush of blood to the head and steer clear of the initial “spurt mentality”.  We think more long term for a change.   We know that to change our results, we need to change what we are currently doing.  We also know we are creatures of habit and the current crop of habits is delivering what we are currently getting.  Ergo, we need to create some fresh habits.  New habits will generate new behaviour and that in turn will create better ways of working and living.  Employ IWWCW thinking.   For some people this gradual approach goes against their nature.  They want to crash through or crash.  Great.  How has that “crash through” bit been working out so far?  This is the obese crowd, crowding the gym in January but who evaporate by March.  This is the mad boss making massive changes all at once in the first quarter and seeing them fritter away by the third quarter.  Behaviour change is tough and needs a sustained programme to achieve results.   The new thinking is don’t plan for massive changes back at the office for the new year.  Go for the 4/64 dance card.  This is the next level of the Pareto Principle.  Pareto said that 20% of our efforts produce 80% of our results.  If we push the Pareto Principle even harder, then 4% of our efforts yields 64% of our results.  Let’s consider what that 4% might consist of?  Also compared to achieving nothing in particular, getting 64% seems pretty good.   IWWCW is good thinking but don’t try and eat the elephant in one gulp.  Find a 4% bite size piece that gets a 64% return in the business.  What might that be?  Is it some change to the systems being used now?  Is it shaving off some item that reduces scale by 4% but delivers a 64% cost saving? Is it a pin point investment in training the people to sharpen up their productivity?  Is it allocating 4% more of your time to supervise the very key functions of the team?   For your personal development, aim for reading five pages a day at first.  Find a category area that will stimulate your mind and give you fresh ideas on how to drive the business forward.  Take a good look.  There are many books sitting on your bookshelves as yet unread.  Pick up a four percenter and start with that one.  As you find yourself achieving some daily reading consistency, crank it up to ten pages a day.  At that rate you will finish a reasonably sized book in a month.  Twelve a year is probably a lot better than what you did over the last decade!  If you tried to read the book quickly, you may have been too ambitious and find, just like before, that book that got started, didn’t get completed.   If you are going after your health improvement again this year, declaring war on your waistline, be strategic.  What would be the 4% intake reduction of alcohol and food, or specific choice of content, that will get your weight down by 64%.  After having made selection number one, add selection number two, for the items which will be next four percenters.    If you are taking up walking or running, start modestly.  Maybe don’t head off too far at first, but look for a nice, close big hill to make you work intensively, over a short period of time.  As powering up the hill gets easier, extend the distance you can cover.  Keep track of the time taken to see if you can improve the work rate.   If you are down at the gym or pool, which are the four percenter exercises which will give you the best results.  Pick a few and then look at increasing the number of sets and reps.  As you improve, add in more exercises - the next group of four percenters.  Keep a written record that you can refer to, so you can see your progress and track it easily.   We know all of this stuff, by the way, but we just don’t do it.  This year will be different because we are going after the 4/64 sweetspot.  We are seeking to change our behavior, rather than trying to get short term results.  Water on rock is our mantra - we will wear the problems down over time.  IWWCW is our change up in our thinking about all of the problems which will spring up.     Action Steps Start small and scale up. Look for the four percenters and start there. Don’t try and crash or crash through Measure and track progress Use IWWCW thinking to solve problems      

Reflecting On Your Leadership Journey   We all tend to live in the moment as leaders.  We swing from meeting to meeting like a great ape moving across the jungle canopy.  We descend to indulge in some mindless email time and then we are off again, up into the meeting morass.  We are constantly pushing, always vigilant for trouble and permanently insecure about making our KPIs.    We struggle through the year to get the results, month by month.  We collapse in a heap at the end and see if we made it or not.  Even if we did, the relief is short lived because now we have to chase this next year’s numbers.  We have to rally the troops, exhausted and beaten by the last year’s efforts, to poke their heads above the parapet and go over the top into battle again.   The time for reflection on our leadership journey is slight to nothing.  I have been interviewing CEOs here for a project called “Japan’s Top Business Interviews” and there is a significant similarity between the leaders so far. They have all grown as leaders and they have been on a journey of discovery as leaders about what works here in Japan and what doesn’t.  No one said they were brilliant straight out of the gate and were a leader legend from the get go.  All of them mentioned the mistakes they had learnt from and the slow progress they had made.   This makes sense, but what are we doing to maximize our leader learnings?  Are we scheduling time for reflection about how we are doing as a leader?  Probably not because we are all too busy working in our businesses, instead of working on our businesses.  And that means working on ourselves as well.  Instead of trying to imagine what we did over the course of a busy year, wouldn’t it be better if we consulted our notes we had made along the way.  What notes you ask?   Probably there are no notes, but why don’t we change that.  How much time would it take at the end of each month to write down some reflections on what happened to you as a leader.  Not much, so why don’t we start from now.  Make this monthly record the resource from which to evaluate your leader performance over the whole year.   Imagine your were a third party looking at you.  What you would you say went well and what would you do to improve that leader’s performance for the next month.  At the end of the year you look at all the monthly records and then try to identify trends and patterns.  There may be some consistent inadequacies or areas where sufficient attention was not paid, that need to be worked on in the new year.   Did you spend too much time in meetings?  Could the meetings have been run more professionally, so that valuable time could be shaved off each meeting length, adding up to  substantial time savings over time.  Were there things missed like coaching your team members.  Or did you fail to spend enough one on one time with certain people.  Did you allocate enough time in Quadrant Two – Not Urgent But Important?  That means was there enough importance attached to planning rather than simply doing?  Did you delegate enough of the tasks so that you could allow yourself to concentrate on those higher levels tasks, that only you can do?   What was missing that either wasn’t done at all, because you just missed it or was done poorly, because there wasn’t the attention devoted to it?  What were the things that had been planned, which just never got off the ground, because you were to stretched on other tasks?  What were you procrastinating on and is that task an annual exercise and what can you do next time to get it done?   The point is the time we spend analyzing our time usage monthly, building up to an annual view is very revealing. Okay, it is often actually pretty depressing when you add it all up, but we have another year in front of us to get it right this time.  If we don't go through this exercise, then how can we make meaningful progress?

Leading An Intentional Leader Life In 2020   Leaders are made not born.  Yes there are some bossy types and charismatic types who bubble to the top and assume the mantle of leader, as their rightful place.  For the rest of us, we have to learn about leadership in the angry fire of the real world of work, where the stakes are high, the competition fierce and the mood unforgiving.  In Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull’s 1969 book “The Peter Principle” we all rise in the hierarchy to our to our level of incompetence.  In other words, we get promoted to a point where the job requirements outstrip our capabilities.  Well that makes sense, but we don’t have to be relegated to supremely low level though in the process.  We can push ourselves to the highest height possible if we do a few things along the way.  Here are some ideas for 2020 on becoming a more skilful leader.   Understand the difference between being a leader and a manager.A manager makes sure all of the processes are working correctly.  Things get done on time, on budget, without error and with maximum efficiency.  The leader does all of that, plus they invoke passion around the WHY, set the direction for the team and build the people.  We can be very busy with the process and forget about building the people.    If we have no one to do our job, then we have nowhere to move to up IN the hierarchy.  The big bosses will keep us where we are because they can’t replace us.  Don’t worry about creating people who can take your job.  We want that because if you become known as a builder of champions, then the organisation will give you more scope to build other champions, at a higher level in the organisation.   Don’t forget to work on your job as well as in your job.If you have ever cut down a big tree or cut up fallen branches with an axe, you notice it doesn’t take much for the axe blade to become dull and for the cutting to become more a bludgeoning, rather than cutting exercise.  It is the same with our way of working.  Being constantly busy in the business is just cutting and slowly seeping into bludgeoning.  We need to sharpen the axe to keep the blade keen and we need to spend time in Quadrant Two of time management – “Not Urgent But Important”.  That means time for studying about leading, spending thinking time about the business, planning and strategizing.  In 2020, schedule appointments with yourself and protect the integrity of those slots, in the same way you would protect that time if it was for a client.   Delegate your work to your subordinates. This is a double whammy exercise because it builds capability in your future leader bench and gives you Quadrant Two time. When people are being considered for promotion, those higher in the food chain want to know they will have a safe pairs of hands at the wheel.  They are looking for people with experience at that level, except how do you get that required experience, if you are busily working away at the level below?  The answer is delegation.  By delegating tasks to your successor group, they can speak about their experiences of doing their bosses job, when they are being interviewed for the post.  When you sell it like this, your subordinates will welcome the chance, instead of being sullen and resentful about having to do the boss’s job.   Keep harping on about the WHY, long after you are sick of hearing about it.We tell people why we are doing what we are doing and that is that, or so we think.  People just don’t get it, believe it, follow it, absorb it, integrate it or develop upon it from just one hearing.  As the leader you need to build a culture where the WHY is front and center of the decisions being taken, the strategies being formed and the execution piece of how we do the business.  You will get sick of hearing about it, but keep making reference to it.  You need to drive it into people’s work habits and the fabric of their thinking about their tasks.  One telling won’t cut it.   The new year is a fresh chance for some fresh thinking.  Break free of the mental bonds we have enveloped ourselves in over the last few years.  Let’s spend some time determining just what we want and how we are going to get there.  Bring your “A” Game to 2020 and life as a leader will get a lot better.          

When Things Go Wrong Everyone Dives for Cover In Japan   Japan is a no mistake culture.  This breeds timidity, resistance to change, lower levels of innovation, avoiding accountability and an aversion to responsibility.  Fine, but what happens when mistakes actually occur?  As the boss, you face a conspiracy amongst the team to keep anything damaging, embarrassing or lethal from you.  If you discover one mistake, then you can probably guess that you never even heard about the other forty nine.  The biggest nightmare for the boss is to uncover an issue when it is too late to fix it.  As the boss, you have money and authority available to make things happen and resuscitate a catastrophe.  Usually that becomes too little too late, because the crew hid it until it ballooned out of control.   I remember an incident which occurred with a client.  It was a very small piece of business, but there was some dissatisfaction.  The account manager was requested to bring the problem to my attention by the client’s staff member.  My account manager at the time, told them that I didn’t speak Japanese, so there was no point contacting me directly.  This was a blatant lie and untrue but the account manager had no problem swinging that one in order to hide his mistake.    It only came to light serendipitously, otherwise I still would be no wiser.  I had to waste an entire day, travel down to Kansai and to apologise to the client.  I assured the client manager that if he ever did that to me again, I would fire him on the spot.  I explained that making mistakes is not ideal but that is how we learn and improve.  Hiding mistakes though is an entirely different matter and totally unacceptable.  I have the money and power to bail him out and I will do that immediately, but can only do that if I know about it.   Given that everyone is trained to hide problems, how should we proceed to understand the full scope of the issue.  The staff will only reveal the absolute minimum amount of detail to the boss and try and smother the rest from sight.  The boss needs tO apply this six step formula to get on top of the issue.   Define what is the problem As I mentioned, you don’t automatically get offered up the full picture of what is going on, so you have to really concentrate on dragging it out of people, who are super reluctant to inform you of what is the real situation. Next, look at what was the cause of the problem This is where people really go into overtime to bamboozle the boss.  Key information is hidden, timelines are blurred, responsibility is definitely the first casualty of trouble.  Forensic skills and great patience are needed here.  Detective style tactics like individual discussions with those involved are needed so the collusion capacity to hide stuff can be kept to a minimum. What are the possible solutions This is where we get on to the front foot and start moving things forward.  Not everyone is willing to come with us though.  I have noticed that those who have created the issue tend to disengage completely and give up.  They have no appetite to be helpful finding solutions.  This is a problem because often they are also the person with the best information and most knowledge of what is involved.  So these people need to be assured a mistake is not fatal and must be convinced to help in the recovery process.   What is the best solution Now we need to get even more brains involved.  Those in the immediate vicinity of the train wreck may not have enough distance to weight  up innovative alternatives.  Get other departments or staff involved.  At Dale Carnegie we have this really effective brainstorming methodology which eliminates bias based on age, gender, seniority, rank and aggression.   Who will be responsible for implementing the solution By giving the people who created the problem the chance to restore themselves, through leading the solution component we have a useful way of moving forward.  It shows trust and that we accept mistakes happen but do necessarily lead to elimination.   What is the timetable for implementation We may have our own views on when we want this done and as the boss that is usually yesterday.  It is best to get the people working on it to nominate the completion timetable.  Of course in Japan, they will sandbag the schedule to build themselves as much protection as possible.  Unless there is a specific need to get things done by a certain time, it is not a bad idea to go with their schedule.  They have set it and now they own it.   Japan throws up many challenges for the leader.  I speak, read and write Japanese, so my access to information is very high, compared to someone sent here on a three year assignment.  Despite that advantage though I know that there are many problems happening in the background, which I will never be allowed to discover.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be vigilant and constantly checking on things.  Japan is a very honest country.  You can drop your wallet and someone will hand it in to the police and you get it back with nothing missing.  Don’t imagine though that this type of honesty extends to owning up to mistakes in the workplace.  That is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Six Staff Members To Be Careful Of In Japan   In most cases, as leaders we inherit the staff employed by our predecessors.  It is a rare chance to employ everyone yourself right from the start.  That means there have been varying degrees of thinking about who constitutes excellent staff.  Even if everyone preceding us had clear visions and great skills in selecting staff, times change and things happen in organisations which can disaffect staff.  Also, we are all consummate actors in the job interview, thrusting forth an image of ourselves most likely to win the affections of the interviewing panels.  The reality can be bitterly disappointing.   Organisations do their best, but sometimes get it wrong and some of these mistakes are now your responsibility.   You arrive bright eyed and bushy tailed ready for your new assignment and to meet your new team.  Here is the handy dandy guide to identifying trouble early.   Doom and Gloomers This is a hard sub-group to identify in Japan, because everyone here is so conservative about trying new things, given there is risk attached to uncharted waters.  The Government publishes their tankan survey of business attitudes to the direction the economy is going and invariably it is mostly pessimistic.  Even if things are going reasonably well, there is the fear it will end, so the scores are never effervescent.  We also know from government statistics that ten percent of the workplace population are suffering from depression.  No wonder we will have negative, depressed, frustrated  people in the team.   Fudomyoo types Fudomyoo is Buddhist diety in Japan who symbolises immovability, resistance, implacability.  These staff resist change entirely, either openly or in secret.  They may agree with your ideas to your face, but secretly are undermining everything you are trying to do.   Salaryman types The Japanese salaryman is the salaried worker, who just does the bare minimum to get paid and doesn’t contribute much.  They are hanging around watching the section head or the division head, to see how early they can leave, once the bosses depart.  This group represents a big proportion of the workforce who are stuck in jobs they don’t like, but cannot easily make a change, because society frowns on job hoppers.   Gossipers Japan is a hard country in which to keep a secret.  In big cities, there is always someone around watching what you are doing or where you are going.  In small neighbourhoods, everyone is watching everyone else.  In ancient times, the government divided populations up into groups of 100 FAMILIES and if a crime or misdemeanour occurred, then everyone would be punished, the severity getting stronger the closer the relative.  This meant there was tremendous pressure for everyone to conform.  It also has mean that A secret in Japan is hard thing to keep and people love exchanging secret information.  True or not, doesn’t seem to matter that much, the forbidden fruit of the secret I S massively appealing anyway.  So there are plenty of gossips, who enjoy dealing in the trade of secrets, more than getting any work done.   Victims These are the people who tell you they are carrying the entire team, because the others are so useless.  Because it is so unfair, they say they deserve special recognition or being cut some slack for their sterling contribution.   Informers This group are expert at attaching the blame for problems on others.  They quickly deny their own responsibility and are genius at guilt shifting.  They are quick to tell you who is not pulling their weight, in the hope of ingratiating themselves with the boss.   Forewarned is forearmed, so take a careful scrutiny of who is in the team.  You would be very unlucky to have representatives from all six groups in your team, but you can bet you will have at least one or two.  Knowing where they are coming from will assist with the best lines of communication and handling of their issues.

Luke Verwey has been running Nielsen Japan for a little over a year and I wanted to ask him about his experiences.  He has worked in a number of countries in South East Asia and has the capacity to compare and contrast with his experiences here. His three tips for new leaders, based on his new leader experiences are:   1.  Listen.  Feedback from within the team comes, but in subtle ways here, so it is easy to miss it.  Miss it twice and it stops coming, to your detriment.   2.  Be careful of sweeping statement about "Japan" and how things work here.  The culture of a team and the sub-cultures within teams, can vary tremendously.  Don't imagine they are all the same.   3.  Learning.  Learning about the culture and language helps immensely to understand how things work in Japan.  Get out of Tokyo and travel around Japan to gain deeper perspectives.  

330: Harry Hill- From Zero to $700 Million Today we have an interview with Harry Hill the ex-CEO of Shop Japan.  He went from being an English teacher in Gifu, to the founder of firms that grew into a $700 million business.  He has his own leadership mantra, using the acronym VICES.   V - Vision I - Integrity  C - Competency E - Efficiency S - Sustained Success   He also mentioned that although VICES can sound a bit negative, as an acronym, but it also reminds him that power can be a vice, pride can be a vice, inflated self-importance can be a vice and that you are always just a step away from crashing failure and oblivion in business. When I asked Harry for three pieces of advice for new leaders in Japan he nominated these points: 1. Trust and Check 2. Listen rather than want to be heard 3.  Identify who are the biggest obstacles and immediately and publically remove them  

The Leader Imposter Syndrome   In any field the people at the top can be plagued with self-doubt.  It is especially prominent in the artistic world where creativity is so important.  Am I creative enough, original enough, talented enough?  It happens in sports too.  The top players worry if they are past it, can they get out of this performance slump?  Will they be replaced by cheaper, younger teammates?  So it is no surprise that this crops up in business too.    The leader has a couple of key jobs.  One is setting the direction and vision forward.  What if they get this wrong, if the troops don’t support it, or if it proves to be their folly?  They have to run the processes.  This is not too taxing, because most companies processes have been well refined. All it takes is to be well organised, to make sure everything that is happening is at the quality, speed and cost level required.  The other tricky component is building the people.  How hard can that be? It sounds simple enough but is it?   The boss has to make the decisions and often with imperfect information.  We rely on others for the insights, as often they are closer to the issue than we are.  If we have a lot of people around us, just like us, we may lack for diversity of view or opinion, and we can get into groupthink.  Are we getting the correct information, can we trust it and can we get it in a timely manner?    I was in a staff meeting and we were looking at a column of numbers.  I am not much of a numbers guy, but I felt there was something about a particular number which looked odd.  The rest of the team swore black and blue the number was correct.  I am rather stubborn, so I continued to challenge it.  And it proved to be incorrect.  Fine, bully for me the boss, but were there other occasions where I was making decisions and the number was incorrect, but nobody picked it up, including me?  Do I really know what I am doing, setting the course for the company?  Am I making the right resource allocations?  Am I taking the actions, at the right times?  Do the team still believe in me?   Before we were the leader, we were snuggly ensconced in our comfort zone, doing our role very well.  We knew how to do it and how to produce results.  We had a lot of experience and expertise in our area and were competent.  Now we have to lead others, who depressingly, are nothing like us.  Some of them think they should have gotten our job and are doubtful about our abilities to perform in this role.  The senior executives are all putting pressure on us to get results and now.  Dealing with people is a pain and one of the less attractive aspects of the work.  Am I really a people person enough to be able to generate loyalty in others.  Am I a good enough communicator to inspire others to become the best they can be?   Am I a fraud?   It is very easy to talk ourselves out of our potential and abilities, when all we do is focus on our inadequacies, failings, foibles and fears.  There was a book published back in 1969 called “The Peter Principle” by Dr. Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull , which stated that people rise in a hierarchy to their level of incompetence.  The corollary is that senior posts are occupied by people who are incompetent to carry out their duties and will be removed once this fact becomes known.  We begin to think that is our situation and are worried we are imposters awaiting execution upon discovery.   For these reasons we need to be constantly working on ourselves.  We need to be constantly reading, listening to books and podcasts, going to conferences, joining study groups, attending events, doing courses, studying success models and mixing with the super successful.  If we are not pushing ourselves hard to learn, we will be run over by the endless drive of progress.    We also need to be involving our people in decision-making.  The idea, in this century, that the boss is the font of all wisdom is laughable.  The internet has put that concept to the sword.  That means we must become skilful in delegation.  Becoming a great coach of others is how we rise in organisations.  Personal skills will only take us so far.  A builder of champions is a valuable resource in every organisation and all organisations are screaming out for competent leaders.  If we are busy working on ourselves and working on our business rather than just working in our business, we can keep one step ahead of falling victim to the leader imposter syndrome.        

The Five Drivers Of A Positive Workplace   As the leader you set the culture and tone of the form.  In Japan, up until a few years ago, you could get away with whatever you liked as the leader.  You could create a hellhole to work in and everyone caught up in the vortex had to put up with it.  There was shame attached to changing companies and mid-career hires were given the cold shoulder by the HR hiring teams.  The end of the Bubble economy in the late eighties, the IT industry meltdown at the turn of the century, the Lehman Shock in 2008 and the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in 2011 shaken things up here over the last forty years.  In particular, basic demographics of a declining population have moved the locus of power to the employment candidate away from the hiring firm.  Having a positive workplace becomes even more important to attracting and retaining good staff.   As leaders we need to work on our skills in five areas.   Self-Confidence This world of rapid change is throwing up new risks, daunting challenges and fierce competition.  Change is no longer just constant, it is moving at hyper speed. How do we keep up and how do we gain the confidence to have the audacity to lead others in such a complex construct?  The first step is to take charge of our attitude and determine that we will take the steps needed to make ourselves more confident.  This will mean emerging from our comfort zone and putting ourselves into tough situations where there is no road map and no guarantee of success.  Only by doing that ourselves can we have the ability to lead others to do the same thing.  “Do as I say, not as I do” won’t cut it anymore.  Despite how we may personally feel at any one time, we have to be the beacon, the guide, the strong stream of positive light in the organisation, pollinating everyone with our rampant optimism.   People Skills Leaders often become leaders because of their high IQ, despite their desperate EQ skills.  In today’s business world, people skills are an essential ingredient for gaining influence and persuasion with others.  Every person needs a defined approach and the leader must know just what that is.  The Golden Rule is severely flawed.  We shouldn’t treat people the way we want to be treated.  This is a mistake, because it assumes that everyone is like us.  We need to treat people the way they want to be treated and we must spend time with them, to know exactly what that actually is.  Busy leaders however can miss this because they are not spending the time and so are not able to function at a high EQ level with their teams or teach it to their subordinates in middle management.   Communication Shouting out commands is the quick and dirty way of leadership.  Very time efficient, and maybe even rewarding to the leader themselves, but ultimately not very effective.  We need to be asking questions rather than telling people what, and sometimes even how, to do it.  The megaphone has to be replaced by the earphone.  We have to amplify our listening skills.  Individually, we cannot possibly have all the answers today, as the world is moving so quickly and business is so much more complex.  We need to be able to tap into all of the ideas of our team and that requires changing our skill set from commanding to becoming a sponge.   Leadership Leadership is about creating the environment that allows our people to motivate themselves to succeed.  We have to set the vision, manage the processes and build the people. We can inspire them through our advanced communication and persuasion power, but ultimately they have to do it.  Our job is to help them do that.  Leaders used to be locked away on the executive floor where quiet reigned, the carpets were plush and the secretaries fulsome.  Today they are often working in open spaces with no set desk, just like everyone else.   This requires a lot of flexibility and openness to being available to the team, rather than being closeted away.  We have to lead from the front today and role model what we want to see in others.  Our daily work visibility has never been higher in business.   Worry and Stress Gloomy, depressed bosses kill enthusiasm.  The ability to face trouble with a constructive attitude will determine how successful we are in building the team spirit.  Tension, stress, worry - all kill our productivity, so we need good methodologies in place to deal with them.  Dale Carnegie’s book “How To Stop Worrying And Start Living” is a treasure trove of the means to reduce stress and get ourselves back into peak productivity.  Read it and you will become fully capable of reducing your stress and being much happier.  If you want a happy team, then you need to be happy yourself.     The world of work challenges us as leaders to constantly re-evaluate what we are doing.  There is no pause button, as it all happens in real time and at a fast clip.   The competition for talent is real and people are more mobile in japan these days and they will leave to find a happier work environment.  Develop these skills and this will be yours and you will have a greater choice of which talented people you want to hire.  The alternative is be like everyone else and be on the wrong end a beating, as you hustle and bustle about trying to hire and retain staff.  It is a zero sum game of winners and losers, so don’t play that game.

Leader First Impression Success     In our presentation training classes we ask the participants, “how long does it take for you to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time?”.  How about you? How long do you take to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time? People in our classes would say 30 seconds, others would say up to a couple of minutes.  Today, the answers are down to three to five seconds!  What does that mean for us in leadership?  People judge everyone who works in our company on the impression they form about us.    If we are impressive, then they think the rest of the troops are impressive too. It goes the other way of course.  If they meet someone from our firm who is a dill, then they think we are all dills down there.  Now as the leader we set the tone, the standards, the expected behavioral norms for our operation and this includes everyone’s personal presentation. Based on this new three second norm, we all have such a small window to make that good first impression. Are we prepared? Are you and the team really planning your first impressions or are you all leaving it to random chance?   This is not a discussion on whether we all have to be in expensive suits or whether we can go smart casual at work.  There are slobs aplenty in suits in Japan.  Just take a good look around on the subway any morning.  Crumpled suits, scuffed shoes, ancient food stains on ties. There are also people in casual attire who are very well appointed.   Let’s look at some areas where we can build an excellent first impression.   Dress:   Here is an important caveat.  In this instance, I am focused on men, because I don’t have the expert knowledge, confidence or guts to talk about dress for ladies.  I am also pulling my points from my observation of what I see here in Tokyo.   There was some famous research done on how we form impressions by Professor Albert Mehrabian.  He found that under certain conditions, we make assumptions about your professionalism, reliability and trustworthiness based on how you look.  What does that mean then in business?   As the boss are you happy with the following list of sins as it applies to the male members of your team? Shoes are scuffed and not polished like a mirror; dirty food stains on ties that haven’t been dry cleaned; hair is unruly and messy; clothes don’t fit well anymore because they have put on some weight; worn pants belt which should be replaced; belt colour doesn’t match the shoe colour; tie knot is loose and not tight against the collar.  These are not difficult things to fix, however, the lack of self-awareness in people who look like this is fairly vast.   As the boss, if we want to ensure everyone produces a good first impression, we need to pull them into line.   Initial Contact: We should all pay attention to our first greetings in Japan.  A bow is expected of course, but how about a smile just before the bow.  Yes, we can have a serious expression on our face and do the bow, but being easy to do business with is an advantage in this competitive market.  So let’s train everyone to smile more when they meet people for the first time.  You would think this is hardly revolutionary or even worth a mention, but next time you meet someone, check their facial expression before they bow and I will bet it doesn’t look friendly.  By the way, you can be a serious businessperson and also smile.  They are not mutually exclusive!   Also, make initial eye contact when you first meet people, but do it for no longer than six seconds.  Japan is not keen on making eye contact, so everyone is busily looking at people’s throats, chins or foreheads instead.  Engaging people for that initial six seconds isn’t outside of cultural boundaries here, so we can apply it to build a stronger connection with people we meet.  Longer than six seconds however and we will have a problem, so let’s make that length the maximum.   Voice Tone: Here are some things to avoid: mumbling, lifeless voice quality, voice too soft or voice too loud.  We convey a lot through our tone of voice, so we have to make sure that when we meet someone for the first time, the tone is clear and friendly. As a best practice, we should try to immediately use the name of the person we have just met using a friendly tone.  This helps us to remember their name and also makes the initial contact feel more personal.   Insightful Remark:  When meeting new people it is always a good approach to get them talking as soon as possible about their business.  This helps us to know if there is some useful information we have which we can impart to them and make ourselves valuable to them in some way. If you are visiting their office and there is something eye catching in their environment, don’t just say it is eye catching.  They work there and they already know that.  Ask to what degree this feature has had a positive impact on their business or their staff or their customers etc.  This will lead to an interesting business discussion about their firm and that is a great way to get to know their current situation.   Obvious things are not always obvious to the people who work for you.  The boss has to be the arbiter of the good first impression and school the team on its importance.  That means we have to lead from the front in the way we present ourselves and we have to speak to people who don’t get it.  Have a strategy for building first impressions and don’t leave this to random.  Allow your competitors that privilege.    

The Mental Game Of Coaching In Businesss   Today there is a lot of discussion about conscious and unconscious bias in the workplace, especially when directed towards women.  This is a significant issue. What a lot of people don’t realise though, is that this also extends into the coaching area as well.  The heart of the problem is how we see our people.  In the 1960s, Douglas McGregor was researching the sources of motivation in teams and he came up with an interesting insight called Theory X and Theory Y leaders.    Theory X leaders see their people as being basically stupid, lazy, unreliable and disloyal.  They have to be managed very closely and watched all the time.  This means anticipating trouble, catching errors, looking for mistakes and watching their behavior carefully.  They require very close supervision.  We need to tell them what to do and how to do it in great detail, because left to themselves, they will make a big mess of it.  We expect they will fail, so a lot of leader time is taken scanning the horizon for trouble, observing them closely for poor performance and berating them when they make mistakes.   This bias in how we see our people spills over into how we coach them.  For a start we probably avoid coaching them at all, because we think it is pointless.  Time is short, so we minimize our time spent with them. When we do spend time with them we are firing out orders, rather than letting them say much.  We do most of the talking, we don’t try to source their input and we feel we have to guide them in everything, because they are so useless. They feel this too and they tend to respond by fitting in with the way we treat them.   In the case of Theory Y leaders, they see the potential in their people.  They believe that basically the vast majority of people are smart, honest, decent, hardworking, loyal individuals, doing their best for the organisation and their families. They have good abilities, are committed and want to work hard. They can be trusted to run projects delegated to them.  They can take ownership and can be held accountable for results.   When it comes to coaching these team members, we apply a different approach to Theory X leaders. We get them talking during the coaching session.   We encourage them to come up with ideas.  We use good listening skills, because we know that we all “own the world we help create”, so to get ownership, we want them to determine how the project should be run.  We expect they will have ideas and that they are coachable.   Now there are four competency levels applying to our team members (and ourselves by the way).  The unconscious incompetent is the person who doesn’t realise they lack skills.  They think they are better than they actually are in reality. The conscious incompetent understands they need to become better because they are not at the level they need to be and they know it.  The conscious competent knows their own ability quite clearly.  The unconscious competent is someone who has great, as yet, unrealised potential.  They have abilities but something is hiding it from their view.  Depending on whether we are a Theory X or Theory Y leader we will approach each of these situations quite differently.  Theory X leaders are looking to fire people, while Theory Y leaders are looking to build people.  If you are thinking I don’t care about the people, because I am here to get results then you are looking at trouble brewing.  In today’s market for staff, retaining people is going to be the critical leadership skill.  The way to do that is through the combination of training and coaching.  Those who don’t get it will eventually work it out, when they have staff turnover issues, find they can’t replace people so easily and the fees for doing so are very high.  This will be pure pain.   For the leader taking a positive view of their team, the unconscious incompetent needs coaching and training.  They lack self awareness and exposure to training with others shows them where they have gaps.  The conscious incompetent actually demands training and coaching because they know they are accountable for their results and they see their lack of skills as a career progression blocker.  They are usually open to advice and are hungry to move forward.    The conscious competent wants recognition for their contribution and abilities.  Funnily enough, as leaders we think they don’t need anything, because they are already very good.  We tend to leave them alone and work on the people who are struggling or not performing.  With the people who are good, we need to tell them are good and encourage them to aim even higher because we can see they have the potential.  They recognise their potential too and are open to having resources made available to help them, to go further in their careers.  If we don’t invest time in them, they are capable and will be likely to leave, seeking faster progression somewhere else.  They need to be coached to get to the highest level possible and retained in the organisation. s The unconscious competent is like finding a gold nugget.  Here they are working away under the radar, only doing a fraction of what they are capable of.  They are not expensive and relative to their potential productivity are a bargain. We see the spark inside them and through and coaching start to help them see what they could become.  They are often holding themselves back through lack of confidence.  We need to help them gain that confidence by giving them progressively more and more responsibility to show where they can shine.  Through training an coaching they can unlock their hidden abilities and become a strong contributor in the organisation.   So as a coach, how do you see your people?  Theory Y leaders build organisations.  They see their people in different stages of development and adjust their approach to suit rather than bundling many of them into the “hopeless” category and giving up on them.  Take another look at your own unconscious biases towards your people. Check to make sure you are not creating a leadership nightmare for yourself, by the way you see your people in the team.  Are you a theory X or theory Y leader?  Have you segmented your people into the four competency levels and adjusted your coaching to suit?

Today we interview Mt. Yasuaki Mori, previous CEO of Infineon Technologies.  Mori san was President there for 17 years and grew the business from $150 milion to a cat's whisker off the $1 billion mark.  A fascinating account of a long career running a major company in Japan.  Born in Canada to Japanese parents, he grew up and was educated in Switzerland and later did college in the USA.  He spent 20 years working for the legendary AMD, spanning many continents in the process. He talks about being parachuted into the company from outside and dealing with the issues that come with that.  Infineon had a mixture of German Executives and Japanese staff.  Listen to how he walked that tightrope of vastly different expections - it is a fascinating story.  He also talks about the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown disaster and the impact that had on the people in the business. This is a masterclass on how to be successful in business in Japan from a man who has done the hard yards and as he says, made all the mistakes in the process of learning how to make it all work.  

Why Coaching Is So Important Today   We all accept that high performance athletes need high level coaches.  What about in the work place?  Are we providing our staff with the necessary high level coaching so that they can be their most productive possible.  We often look at the staff’s deficiencies but remain blind to our own failings as coaches. Where do we start? What do we need to do? Do we need to coach everyone?   Well, what sort of staff need coaching?  We can apply a triage to the team to decide what is needed where.  In a Level One case, if they are still learning their job, then they need skill development coaching.  In Level Two, if they are experienced, but have hit a plateau in their performance, they need to learn how to motivate themselves, through receiving additional coaching.  At Level Three, if they are already a high performer, coaching can groom them for future leadership positions. Sounds tremendously logical but there is a problem though.   Let’s look at the best case, the Level Three staff.  While a supremely talented or technically adept staff member is an asset to the organization, if they are not highly engaged, then their full potential is not going to be realized.  It hasn’t happened by itself, so they need coaching to become more highly engaged.  Looking at your team, are you satisfied with their engagement levels?  Try this quick “Levels of Staff Engagement Quiz”.  Write their names down the left side of a piece of paper, then next to each name, score them from Very Low (VL), Low (L), Medium (M), High (H) to Very High (VH) levels of engagement.  Looking at the results, how did you score them? Are there some who are not scoring as highly as you need?   If so, how do we encourage our team to be highly engaged? This is where our coaching ability comes in.  Let’s explore further the connection between coaching and engagement. We know there are three drivers of employee engagement: satisfaction with immediate manager, belief in senior leadership and pride in the organization   The relationship with the immediate manager is obviously of critical importance.  There are also some emotional trigger points in that relationship with the immediate boss, which set off a chain reaction to boost engagement levels.  Our research found that when staff feel valued through receiving coaching, it sets off a chain reaction. They feel more inspired, enthusiastic and empowered.  These are the prerequisites for feeling engaged.   The most important trigger to create high levels of engagement was to feel valued by the boss.  The act of coaching concretely demonstrates that the boss values the staff member.  The boss makes the time for them and works with them to boost their career. Time is the most valuable resource of a busy, busy boss and giving that to their team is the public endorsement of their importance.   There have been many studies done on millennials and they show that today’s younger generation are impatient for personal development.  Coaching is an important tool for developing staff capabilities and it is also important in retaining staff.  The younger generation are in decreasing supply in Japan, so managers who can retain their staff will be highly valued by senior management. On the other hand, if staff are leaving, it is costly from a number of angles: lost time, recruiting costs, opportunity cost of training new staff and dislocation in the team.  We recently had to find two new staff.  One left to become a full time carer for her aged mother-in-law and the other went from full time trainer to contract status. The recruiter costs and time spent on this have been gob smacking.  Some staff departures you cannot help.  However, if we all want to keep our younger staff in particular, then we need to start coaching them properly.  The grass should not look greener on the other side of the fence.   You are already too busy with your own work and you may be thinking what is the ROI for me in investing in coaching the staff? Here are some powerful reasons to get busy coaching your team.   More capable staff produce better results and you can meet your team KPIs Senior management are always looking for talented individuals who can develop other talent, so you will get promoted Coaching takes you deep into knowing the individual’s motivation and you will be better able to align their vision for themselves with the company’s vision, which will make them more happy and productive Through successful delegation, capable staff free up the boss’s time to enable work on the most high value tasks, that only the boss can do Without trust, you will never be a true leader. Coaching builds that needed trust   Immediately take action.  Apply the triage by first identifying which staff are in Level One, Level Two and Level Three divisions of your team?  Do the “Levels of Staff Engagement Quiz”.  We know that “feeling valued” is a key trigger for getting high levels of engagement. Ask yourself, are you sufficiently demonstrating you value your team members through your coaching?  How much time to do you spend coaching the team each week?  Yelling out commands and giving orders doesn’t count as coaching time when you are calculating the nanoseconds you spend on this each week at the moment.   We can all do a better job of coaching our teams.  We just have to change our mentality, our time allocation and find the time to do it.  Not doing is not an option today.  Those who haven’t worked this out will soon and it will be a painful process. Let’s see ourselves as high level coaches for high performing teams.    

What Sort Of Coach Are You?   Many Japanese executives have grown up in the “tough love” school of OJT – On The Job Training. They were scolded severely by their bosses and given a very hard time.  Their bosses did this in the belief that this is how to get people to perform correctly.  It might have worked in a different era, but not today.  Young people won’t put up with that type of treatment and they don’t have to put up with it.  The next generation are the first “free agent” employees in Japanese history. There are already 1.6 job offers open for those seeking work.  In the case of youth, they are in serious, serious short supply.  This situation is not going to change or improve.  This means that anyone imagining that “tough love” is how to coach and develop people is in for a rude shock, as young people will simply quit and walk out the door to the competitor.   What sort of coach do we need to become?  We have to be an excellent listener.  How hard can that be?  Not very hard you might be thinking, except we are all becoming poorer listeners in this advanced high tech age.  We are all super busy, so we are rushing around doing many things and we are short circuiting every interaction to fit it all in.  What this means is we are so busy thinking about what we need to do, we are not really listening to the staff members.  We don’t ignore them because that is too confrontational and unprofessional.  What we do though is to pretend to listen.  We look like we are concentrating on what they are saying, but in fact we are tuning them out, because our own thoughts are too dominant.   You may not be guilty of this sin as a listener, but are you a selective listener instead?  This is very common with salespeople, who are listening for verbal cues from the buyer so they can make a comment or offer a suggestion.  They are not really fully concentrating on what the buyer is saying and are only focusing on the pieces that excite them about a possible sale.   Coaches can become guilty of the same thing.  They are listening to part of what they are being told and are racing ahead with their own thoughts anticipating where the conversation will go.  This is a guaranteed method to miss key cues and signals from the staff member.  A better form of listening is attentive listening.  This means shutting out all the distractions and giving your 100% full concentration to what they are saying.  You are “in the zone” so to speak.  This is immediately felt by your listener, who appreciates the fact you are giving them your full and undivided attention.   The highest form of listening is empathetic listening.  It sounds a bit esoteric, but it is listening for what is being said and what is not being said.  It means studying the words that are being chosen and what is not being revealed fully. It is gauging the body language to check this against the words coming out of the staff member’s mouth.  It means really feeling whatever the staff member is feeling and relating to them at that level. This and attentive listening are so powerful today, because everyone else is doing such a poor job of listening.  We will immediately stand out if we operate in this way.   Often the issue is the staff member won’t open up to us with their issues.  There may be some trust requirement not quite built yet, sufficient to tell us their thoughts.  They may be guarded.  It is very difficult to deliver effective coaching if you don’t know the full scale of the problem facing them.  We need to be asking them open questions.  An open question is one to which you can’t answer with just a “yes” or “no”.  You need to state your opinion.  We can also ask hypothetical questions to get them dealing with scenarios they may not have considered as yet.  This is particularly useful when dealing with projects and anticipating problems which may arise once the project is underway.  We can ask exploratory questions to dig a bit deeper into the background, the current situation and why they think what they do.  We might ask them some comparable questions,  “If this happens, is it better to do A or what about B?”.  This gets people engaged and talking.  Sometimes a closed question, where the answer is a yes or no is handy to get clarity around a subject.   Bosses tend to be very interested in what they have to say.  But when we are coaching we have to suspend that desire and get the staff member to do 80% of the talking.  That means asking questions, getting more information and in particular listening in a way that builds trust.  If I feel you are only giving me fake listening, then I won’t open up to you and share what is really going on.  The honesty of the listening invites honesty in reply.  Here are some considerations: which level of listening are you applying – pretend, selective, attentive or empathetic? Also, do you feel you have earned sufficient trust from your staff, where they can tell you honestly what are their issues?  To coach the team is no easy matter because most of us confuse coaching with giving orders.  Take a moment and reflect on how you have been as a coach for your team?

How To Identify When You Need Help As A Leader   Asking others for help can be difficult.  The psychology of driven, perfectionist people though is to prefer doing everything themselves.  Others never seem to match up to their expectations and standards.  Founders, entrepreneurs, strong willed individuals are often guilty of this “I will do it myself” mentality.  I am one of them.  For various reasons to do with different backgrounds and experiences, we are seized with the need for independence and self-reliance.  This works fine up to a point.  The modern age though has seen business become so much more complex.  Specialisation, niche dominance, technology, the need for light speed are all driving us toward realising we cannot do it all by ourselves.  How do we audit ourselves so we know we have to turn off that independent streak spigot and unleash that “get help” flexibility?   Here are 7 indicators that we need to rethink our approach and tackle issues from a different mind set.   When we need more experience We know what we know, but we don’t know everything.  Our lack of experience can be a blocker to further growth and we are limiting ourselves unnecessarily.  We need to hire the specialists with that required experience, rather than trying to recalibrate ourselves to master every new aspect of business. There are only so many hours in the day, so we are better off to get the experience in quickly through others, than try and work it out ourselves through trial and error.   When we need a different skill set Leonardo Da Vinci was a polymath, the essence of the renaissance man who could do it all.  We are not him.  What we need to master today is so much broader and more complex, we cannot hope to mimic Leonardo.  Audit the business for the key skill sets needed today and also for those which will be needed in the future.  As organisations grow, some people get left behind.  They were capable and fine at a certain size, but struggle with the bigger scale and new accountability.  We need to skill up those who can handle it and bring in new people to fill the gaps. All the while, keeping an eye for potential gaps which will emerge over the horizon.   When we need a different perspective Making decisions, based on what we know and the information available to us is a leader strength.  The problem though is, are we locked into a narrow view of what is possible?  We have probably all seen that training tool where, depending on how you look at the drawing, it is either a beautiful young woman or an old crone.  Same drawing, but different insights into what we are actually looking at.  The leader who is an order giver, a commander, a teller, will miss the opportunity to get different insights from within the team.  We have to recall that scene during the triumphant parade through the streets of Rome, Caesar had a bloke next to him in the chariot whispering in his ear “you are not a God”.  We need to understand we are not a God either and get inputs from others.   When we need creativity and innovation Sometimes the less people know, the more insight they have.  The codification of the work, the history of the people in the firm, the inherent groupthink all work against creative ideas emerging internally.  We need these in order to thrash the competition in the marketplace.  We get very, very focused on ourselves and lack outside perspectives.  Bringing in people from outside is handy, because they challenge the norms, ideas, sacred cows and the established hierarchy.  I always ask our new people to report to me after their first month on what we are doing that is working and what we need to do better. Unlike the rest of us, they see things we all take for granted and which we don’t question anymore.   When we need additional people power Japan is very good at this.  They throw a lot more people at tasks and projects than we do in the West.  They are more fixated with ensuring no mistakes, so they do that by applying the weight of many people.  We are fixated on reducing costs, being lean and we will put up with mistakes.  There is also the danger that as we grow, we start to outstrip the capability of the existing team to cope with the work.  We have to be observant to make sure the machine can run efficiently and that we have enough people in place.   When we need additional resources The key resources are usually people, cash and time.  We can get into a poverty mind set after a recession.  We have wound everything down so tight, to protect the cash flow, that we are hurting the business now that things have recovered. We need to plan for additional resources to sustain the growth.  As we grow in scale, we get busier, so access to the boss becomes a rare commodity.  As leaders, we lose touch with the engine room, because we are locked up in the wheelhouse.  We need to bring in resources that free us up so we can work on the business and not just in the business.   When we need a values check We start the business with high hopes and grand aspirations. The Vision, Mission Value statement is crafted so carefully.  It goes up on the wall behind the protective glass and then gathers dust. We need to keep these ideas alive over time and with the influx of new people.  There is probably only one person left in my office who took part in the original effort to create these guidelines for the business.  To deal with this, we go through Vision, Mission, Values every single morning at the start of the day, so that we don’t forget them and to get us all on the same page.   We can’t do it all by ourselves, but we can do the maximum amount possible, if we get others to help us.  To do that takes a mind shift about how to run the firm and what is needed.  The trick is building awareness, rather than repeating routine.  Take an audit of what you are doing and make some decisions about where help will add to the business.

Problem Solving In Business For Leaders   Leaders are problem solving experts.  They have the authority, money and time to apply their skills to fixing things that are broken in the business.  In fact, they spend a lot of their time eyes peering toward the horizon, trying to identify future trouble.  They are detail oriented around systems because they have learnt if the systems break down and they don’t know about it, things get ugly very quickly.  They also know that their staff are card carrying Keep The Boss In The Dark experts too.  Japan is great like that.  Most of the things that go wrong, you as the boss, never get to hear about.  That is because people bury the problem from your purview, never fess up that something has fallen off the rails.  You usually only find this stuff out by chance.   Well if your team fail to keep it hidden from the boss and you do discover a problem, what is the best way of dealing with it.  Here are four handy steps.   Clarify what exactly is the problem? There tends to be a lot of noise around problems.  Different people are concentrating on different elements of the issue.  Often staff are very good and highly satisfied with applying a nice band aid to the problem and then busily moving on.  This is fine, except we need to clearly grasp what is the actual issue. What is the core problem we are looking at?  Is this a one off or a systemic problem?  Is this part of a sequential chain or an outlier?   What are the causes of the problem? Sometimes this is not quite as clear as we would wish.  There may be an attempt to mask responsibility for something that was altered or underdone, that triggered the event.  Don’t forget everyone is a bona fide expert at hiding stuff from the boss, especially if it involves their own error.  We need some forensic skills here to really dig down into the entrails of what happened.  What was supposed to happen, what was the variance, when did it happen, how often does it happen, who are involved in the process.   What are the possible solutions? Finding out someone has screwed things up may lend itself to a first response boss explosion.  This is natural because “the buck stops here” is addressed to the boss, who ultimately has to take responsibility for how well the operation runs.  If there is a major compliance violation, then this looks especially bad on your boss record. it means you were not overseeing the work sufficiently well enough.  This can make bosses nervous and explosive, especially if a lot of the mud lands on the boss.   We have to suspend our desire to lash out and flog the guilty party.  Actually, we want their help on how to fix this. Through the distinct process of elevation in the ranks, the boss gets further and further away from the everyday detail of what is going on.  This means we need the expertise of those who know how things work in detail.  We need to seek their ideas on what to do.  We need to have them come up with the various alternatives to solve the issue.   What is the best solution This is where the boss has to make the judgment call.  The power of money and authority is attached to the boss position and the selection amongst competing options needs a decision.  This is all fine and dandy but the troops have to execute on this decision.   Are they ready, willing and able to do that? They may not buy into the solution and just give it token acceptance.  This is where the boss needs to track that what has been decided actually gets done.  If the new system is a pain from the point of view of the staff, they may not actually do it or do it completely.  Best to check up on progress or lack thereof.   They may or may not be willing to devote the energy needed to make the fix work. They may have no enthusiasm to do it the way the boss wants and instead prefer to do it another way that suits them more.  The boss’s authority is being brooked here, but the staff can be quite bold in Japan. They know it is not something that will get you fired in this country, so they feel they can vary the solution and get away with it, especially if the boss doesn’t find out about it.   Are they able to do it? If they don’t have the resources and that usually means time amongst all the other things they have to do, then the execution of the solution gets waylaid.  The fix often requires more resources than were available before and all the boss could do was shoot out orders, unable to provide additional help.  That doesn’t generate much joy in those left to pick up the pieces.  The command may have been given, but it doesn’t mean everyone is saluting it.  Best that the boss check up on what is actually getting done.   Action Steps   Clarify what exactly is the problem? Check on what are the causes of the problem? Look at what are the possible solutions? Decide what is the best solution Make sure the troops are ready, willing and able to implement the solution      

Leading Virtual Teams   We have seen some major changes within Japanese corporates as they move overseas. In the old days, the Japanese headquarters would dispatch a generalist company man, as an expat to be posted for five years in a foreign clime.  They would be forgotten for five years until they came back to work in Japan.  Typically, to be sent to some totally unrelated business area than where they had been gaining valuable skills. This was the established logic of moving people around throughout the company, over many years, to make sure they understood how the whole thing operated.   With the predictions quite clear about the limitations to the market in Japan for good and services, many large companies have begun buying offshore companies in their industries, so that they can continue to make profits, even as the home market declines.  In the new model, staff situated in Japan will be running virtual teams located around the globe.  Foreign business heads will have Japanese staff here in Japan reporting to them. All of this is being done remotely, with few opportunities to meet.   Although the technology today for videoconferencing is pretty good, it is not perfect.  When we go wide angle, to be able to see everyone sitting around the meeting room table, you can’t gauge people’s reactions because they are too far away from the camera. Add to this the sound quality, which is rarely good.  Language barriers and cultural barriers, become intensified in this environment as well. Insider jokes in a foreign language are impenetrable to everyone else.  People talking over the top of each other, makes it hard to hear what is going on.  How do you successfully lead in this environment?   There are five C’s to concentrate on.    Connection   This doesn’t just mean the physical connection of upgrading the technology. It means connecting the people together and with the leader.  We are all leading separate lives, operating in different cultures, so we need to build some bonds between us.  Start the meetings with some good news – one piece personal and one piece work related. When operating virtually, the leader must make this compulsory.  “I don’t have any” is not an acceptable answer.  We need the team members to build bonds by sharing details of their lives with each other.   Confidence   When we play team sports, we depend on our team mates to do their job properly.  We need to have confidence that they will be where they need to be, when they need to be, so that we can cover our own responsibilities.  It is the same in business.  Where this breaks down in a virtual environment are when the expectations and work norms differ.  Timeliness for an email reply, being on time with a report, accuracy of the numbers, etc., all differ according to which country you are located in.  The leader has to set the standards for the group. The norms must be stated and defended.   Communication   In a virtual leadership environment “over communication” must be the norm.  More calls to team members than usual.  More regular group meetings than usual. There should also be a number of meetings together each year, in person, to build the bonds deeper and further.  Meeting notes must be taken and distributed so that language barriers are reduced. English is the standard international language and most non-native speakers are trained to read English better than to speak it.   Collaboration   Joint projects involving different locations are going to be the best way for people to learn how to work together.  We have enough silo problems in our own countries already.  To get around this silo issue on steroids,  joint work, involving different international members ensures that people get used to working together and the trust gets heightened. The boss has to be the sheriff making sure everyone does what they are supposed to be doing.  Without that overview, things will slip and slide for sure.   Commitment   Getting verbal commitment is easy.  No one is going to tell the boss to buzz off and expect to keep their job.  The real commitment is when the boss is not aware of what is going on and the team members are getting on with it.  The way to build the commitment is through shared vision, mission and values.  The virtual environment has to be self-policing as much as possible.  If we are all signed on for achieving the vision and we clearly realise what is our mission, then the values will glue us together. The leader’s job is to keep pushing on these elements.  They have to become part of the daily framework of cooperating together.   Operating across borders, in a virtual environment, won’t be easy or straight forward. However, if the leader concentrates on making these five factors work for them, then the whole operation will succeed.   Action Steps Connections must be built amongst the people Confidence in each other must be established Communication that is clear Collaboration that is reliable Commitment that gets the job done

The Secret World Of Conflict When Leading In Japan   Japan doesn’t like conflict.  As the foreign boss you will be super busy and may be missing some areas of conflict operating within the team.  You can’t deal with it, if you don’t know about it, so the difficulty scale can get high here quite quickly.  You are also often tied up in meetings or visiting clients, so things may be boiling over and you don’t hear about it.  As is the case with any part of the world the boss is always the last to be told about bad news.   Conflict can be situational.  Something was supposed to happen or didn’t happen and someone is now unhappy with someone else.  Words are exchanged and now we have a tense situation between people in the team. It might be a communication trigger point that leads to the conflict.  Attempted humour is often the offender in this case. An amusing remark isn’t amusing at all to the person on the receiving end and they take offense.  It might be a miscommunication.  We meant one thing, but they take it in an entirely different direction and now we have a problem.  It can be expectations.  We think something should be done in a certain way and when it isn’t, we take issue with the perpetrator.  Or we expected something to happen, it didn’t and now we voice our unhappiness.   The Johari window provides a useful snapshot of where we are with conflict. There are conflicts which are known to us and known to others.  These can be worked on because everything is out in the open.  The case could be where there is a conflict that we see, but nobody else has picked up on it yet.  This is also relatively straightforward, as we can work on solving  the conflict because it is known to us.   The other two quadrants in the Johari window are where it gets tricky. Conflicts unknown are time bombs which could explode without warning.  It may be because we have designed things in such a way that inevitably, conflict must arise.  We might have a commission bonus structure that will ultimately generate conflicts between team members.  It might be that we are under resourcing one area of the work and eventually the chickens will come home to roost when things blow up.  We might be putting unrealistic time completion expectations on certain work which will causes stresses between all the interconnecting pieces of the business.  Things don’t get done in time and people become unhappy with each other as a result.   The worst is when the conflict is known to others but not to us.  This is very common in Japan, where everyone else knows what is going except for the boss.  As bosses we need people who will tell us what is going on.  A good practice is to assume you don’t always know what is happening between members of the team.  Just because you don’t know about it, doesn’t mean it is isn’t occurring.  We have to regularly check in with our sources to see if something is bubbling away under the surface that we need to address, before it grows into epic proportions.   When we are preparing to deal with the conflict, we can use the same Johari Window framework.  We need to look for what is known to everyone, what is out in the open, what is common knowledge.  For example, the project is not progressing smoothly and there is a lack of coordination, resulting in deadlines being missed.   Now we have to think about what do we know about the situation, that one of the individuals involved may not know.  For example, we may know about a particular personal situation in the background for Yuki the project leader, which is making her rather short tempered.    Similarly, we might may know something about Taro, one of the project team, that Yuki does not know.  He may be very perfectionist and keeps everything to himself, so he is not sharing with others in the team enough.  We may have realised that Taro, being a very technically focused engineer is oblivious to the fact that the way he is speaking to Yuki, is what is irritating her.   As the boss, we may be unaware that Yuki and Taro, have some work history in the past and there is some underlying bitterness between them.  This last type of information is important, but is often hidden to us.  Before we try to get involved and solve the conflict issue, we have to dig deep to find out as much as we can about the relationship between the two people.  We need to know what we are in fact dealing with here, before we try to do anything.    This Johari Window framework is a useful tool to examine conflict within the team and especially useful to remind us that there are factors not known to us or others, which we have to find.  Also, the other annoying one is “known to others but not to us”.  We need one of the team to be our guide on these matters, to get someone to fill the boss in on what is really going on.  Before we start taking any action, a quick construction of the framework will give us a guide as to where we need to direct our efforts to solve the conflict.  

Managing Or Leading - Which One Are You Doing??   Last week I was teaching a leadership programme for new leaders and this key question of what is the difference between leading and managing came up quite a bit.  They are not the same thing.  Also, most of those so called “leaders” are only managing and not doing much leading. In Japan, we promote people into leadership roles running sections and don’t give them any training.  They continue with this pattern throughout their career, rising, ever rising, but never doing much leading on the way up.   Managers are the Swiss watch mechanics.  All the little interlocking wheels must be properly aligned, integrated, running in a well oiled fashion, not suffering from breakdowns or disruptions. The point is efficiency of process, in both design and execution.  It does require adroitness to create work arounds, when things lurch out of control or to apply first aid solutions to an open wound in the system.  A mastery of logistics and detail makes the job much easier. This would drive me crazy by the way. A leader wants more than that.   A leader must be a capable Swiss watch mechanic but also a high performance coach. Behind all of the star athletes and a good many of the top performers in business are their coaches.  The elevation of tasks above managing are all about the soft skills.  It doesn’t matter if you are the most talented software engineer if you are a dork and nobody wants to be around you, let alone led by you.  Having tremendous current knowledge of the latest accounting standards changes is great but the people working for you don’t care all that much.  They are more interested in, “what are you going to do for me?”.   Being a tyrant used to work a charm once upon a time.  Instilling fear into people to get them to do your bidding, made leading pretty easy.  Barking out orders like a pirate captain was good fun too.  Yelling abuse at staff who made errors was thought to be morale boosting by showing others why they should be more careful.  Life was so much easier.    I was listening to the global head of Abobe, Shantanu Narayan speak here in Tokyo last week.  He made the point that all of his IP or Intellectual Property goes home every night and he hopes they decide to come back the next day and continue at Adobe. This is the reality, good people can be highly mobile and if the leader isn’t chiming in with them, they leave. In Japan, this dictum has now been extended all the way down to the highly mediocre.  Even the very average staff are still needed, because the shortage of workers means it is very hard to replace them.  Someone doing an okay job is better than the disruption of them leaving and facing the long, laborious and expensive process of identifying their replacement.   The retain component of the leader’s job in Japan is broken up into a couple of incendiaries.  Salary will blow you up because people even more desperate than you will outbid you for staff.  We had interviewed a candidate a number of times, things were looking good.  On Thursday evening he was very “excited” to have the meeting the next day when the job offer would be made.  Friday morning he told the recruiter that he taken another job.  He didn’t even bother to hear my offer.  We had been out bid by another company.  He was good, but I wouldn’t describe him as brilliant or exceptional or any other descriptor you would actually prefer to the hang around the neck of a prospective employee.    Another incendiary is our communication capability.  Busy bosses start to not communicate much with anyone, apart from during the slay of continuous meetings they are trailing through each day.  This type of communication is very agenda driven, concise, business like and bereft of the human touch.  “Where are we with the project”, “what are the numbers showing”, “are we on track to finish well”, “what is the run rate” etc.    Not much milk of human kindness in that lot.  And that is the problem.  We become very transactional, in a world where people have choices about the type of culture they want to work in.  The work culture is created by the boss and how they speak with the team.  How much do you know about what is going on in the lives of your people?  Probably not much.   The third incendiary is our coaching chops.  We didn’t get any on the way up because in our day, that was how it was. You had to work it out for yourself and it was a dog fight to the top.  Today the high performance coaching aspect of the boss has become more important. Organisations realise a lot of value is trapped inside their people and can’t get it out because their middle managers are so lame.  Innovation is usually best found at the coal face, by those closest to the action, rather than from the grey haired captains strolling around the bridge on the executive floor.  Middle managers who are handing out orders like people possessed, won’t be asking any questions or brooking anyone else’s contribution or ideas.    Leaders are taking care of business and taking care of their people.  They recognise that new communication and coaching patterns are needed.  They look for creating cultures where innovation can thrive.  If they are too busy for all of that “fluffy stuff” and their rivals are focused on it, then bad times are ahead.  It doesn't come in a collapse, but like rust it just keeps coming, until you either change it or find the organisation can’t keep up anymore.

Build Your Successor’s Storytelling Skills   We enjoy movies, dramas, novels, plays because they all excel at telling stories. They are not executed as simple chronologies – this happened, then this happened after that and then after, this happened.  They have what is a called an arc in writing.  It takes us on a journey that engages our emotions.  The majority of business presentation journeys are as engaging as road kill.  That is to say, mainly on the depressing side or at best, just plain boring.  “But business is boring”, you say.  “Greg, we are all about the numbers over here baby. We don’t have time for fluffy stuff like bedtime stories.  We live in the real world dude, get it”.  Well that is not true.   Leaders have two jobs.  One is to manage processes.  We make sure the system is working on time, on budget, on point for quality and on plan. This is the execution piece and without it, things turn ugly real fast.  Try missing a salary payment sometime in your company and see Pandora’s Box spring open and trouble emerge.  We have to make sure the team are doing their jobs well and that things don’t fall between the cracks.  Changes which we don’t know about are the most fearful.  One of your staff goes “freelance” on the system and makes some changes.  You have a minor heart attack when you find out.  So we must be on top of things, vigilant, checking and double checking constantly.  All good stuff.   That is not the totality of the leader’s role though.  The other bit, more often than not, the missing bit, is the leader part where we build the people.  We absolutely won’t move up in our careers if there are no suitable candidates to take hold of the sacred flame from us and carry on the good work.  We need to develop people’s technical skills but we also need to work on the soft skills.  We need to demonstrate to them how to motivate the team or more accurately create the environment where they can motivate themselves.  This is where our persuasion power comes into play and storytelling is a powerful communication tool for that task.  The weapon of choice for talented leaders is always close at hand, fully primed, yearning to be taken up and wielded with gusto.   Millions of company walls are currently being graced by beautifully framed, glass protected Vision, Mission and Value statements.  They are all lifeless, dead, dust gatherers.  The leader has to free the parchment from it’s captivity and bring it alive for their teams.  It might be recounting the hero’s journey of the founder.  The years of struggle, failures, setbacks, betrayal.  Or it might be your own personal journey.  What we are doing is inviting the team to see the written words behind glass, from a specific context rather than in the abstract. When we tell everyone the background, the conclusion reached and express it in a story it makes more sense – we get it.    Better than just getting it, we remember it.  That is the beauty of storytelling.  We can package up huge amounts of information and relay it in a format that people can remember.  That is why there is a 99% non-retrieval rate applying to our memory of business presentations we have heard.  The speaker, topic and their recommendations are quickly and unceremoniously forgotten.    Vision is important because it provides a much needed glue to engage everyone and keep them on the same path.  The story behind the vision is the key.   We have to tell that story.  Why do we have this vision?  Why does it say what it says?  This is where telling the story brings clarity of purpose and direction to a all, in a format, that is the most easily absorbed.    The chances of your people being able to recall and repeat the words written in the vision statement are probably so close to zero it is frightening.  But give them the story behind the thinking, the production of the statement, the way it was crafted, the individuals involved and they will remember that story forever.   This is the skill we need to be teaching to our successors.  Being a whiz on the macros in a spread sheet or having supreme technical knowledge are all admirable qualities, but leaders need to able to blast their team off into the stratosphere.  We have to show them how telling stories is the powerful rocket to get sufficient elevation to reach the highest heights. We do this by the way we engage our team with stories and examples.  We make this the modus operandi of our workplace to gain the full effect of our persuasion powers.  Great.  Are you doing it?   Action Steps Dust off the Vision Statement and bring it alive through storytelling Role model the power of storytelling to your subordinates The best way to learn anything well is to teach it, so teach it to your nominated successor

Don’t Take Bad Advice From The Buyer   Clients worry about their bottom line, cash flow, brand reputation and their own career.  They often move around between countries and companies.  We are still here though.  When the client requests something that ultimately impacts our brand in a negative way, we are the one who has to face the subsequent and consequent ramifications.  The lure of the fee payment is powerful but sometimes we should walk away from the money.  We are in haste to get the dough, to make the target, but we reap the whirlwind down the track and then repent at leisure.   My client was new to us and this was the first solution we had delivered for them.  In the prior discussions about their needs, we had identified what was required for developing their sales team.  The client had quite a split between the newbies recently hired and more experienced salespeople. Naturally, I proposed we split the groups out, because they had quite divergent requirements.  The slow pace suitable for training a new person in sales, will drive a more experienced hand nuts.  If it is pitched too high, then the new person is lost, can’t keep up, feels frustrated and won’t be happy.   Now, the client understood this “split them up” logic completely but still insisted we lump them all in together.  The money to be spent was therefore for only one group rather than two, so a substantial saving on expenditures of course.  The most expensive training in the world though, is the training that doesn’t work or work well enough.  There is the opportunity cost of everyone’s time, which will be lost when calculating the entire cost factor. It might make cash control sense to lump all into the one class, but the results will be bad I warned, but to no avail.     This was weakness on my part.  I should have pulled up stumps and walked at that point and not agreed to go with the combined class.  I was trying to give the client what he wanted, even if it was the wrong thing. The cost of one class of newbies and the cost of one class of experienced people is actually the same cost.  We should have chosen one or the other, rather than combining the two together.   Sure enough the post training surveys results came back emblazoned with red.  We take the numerical scores and then create colour coded graphs, to make the score results easier to read and understand.  Getting lots of dark blue is excellent, lighter blue means pretty good, yellow means neutral and the worst result throws up red.  We never get red.  Well, until this occasion. Sure enough, there was lots of red, as the more experienced people expressed their frustration with having to be held back by the slower pace of the newer crowd.  They may be tremendous role models in the sales role plays, but they don’t see any particular value to themselves in helping the new people.  Their industry is a dog eat dog, bloodthirsty scramble for fees. Despite all the high blown rhetoric about teamwork and brand, it is basically every man for himself.   When I presented the graphs dripping in gore, the client wasn’t the least bit phased.  He said this is what he expected.  He was prepared to wear the poor results because this was his design, his creation, his train wreck.  Now for me, these results were unacceptable.  Yes, we got paid our pittance, we got the cash.  But, our brand was being trashed by the miscued design. In fact I couldn’t stand it.  This was not us, we never get these results and yet here they were.   So I offered and he accepted that we run, it all again for the senior people only this time.  And here is the snapper - at my cost not his.  Me paying made it an easy decision for him to commit his people to do it again.  Why did I offer to repeat the same training for free?  Obviously I was worried about the damage to the brand, to have so many people have a negative impression of out training. Did it work? In the short term yes, but actually no.  No, if you judge it over the long term.  The next survey was all blue, so the senior people got a lot out of the training.  Now the President with whom I was dealing, shortly thereafter pulled up sticks and has added back to the UK.  That red graph explosion was six years ago.  We had a couple of  attempts to do some training with them, talking with his immediate successor. However, as in many similar cases, the new guy wanted to do things his own way, so no possibility of more business with them.   One of my team had a meeting with them again and there was a complete new hierarchy over there.  A lot of people had moved on, and so most of the people were new.  However, what do we hear from these new people.  The corporate memory, despite all of the time which had passed, was “Oh your training got a very bad score”, so we don’t want to use you.  The bit about their President designed it that way and caused the graphs to drip red, had conveniently been forgotten.  The free second round to make up for the first catastrophe was lost in the sands of time.  The stain remained after the blood had been mopped off the floor.   In retrospect, this was my fault.  I should have refused the assignment, in the construct they demanded.  I knew it was going to be bad. It was, and after the fact, I tried to restore the life flicker of the brand but this was everything the wrong way around.  I should have protected the brand in the first place, rather than trying to play nurse in the intensive care ward, where the brand was on life support.    This is fresh in my mind for two reasons.  One reason is my staff member reported to me that we linger long in the hall of shame over at that client’s shop.  The other is because I just had a high stakes meeting with a huge multinational client, presenting our response to their RFP.  In the course of the discussion, I realised that what they want us to do, is not really in our sweet spot.  So this time around I am going to be a bit smarter and limit what we will do, based on what is best for the client and best for our brand.  If they decide to go with another vendor, so be it. We live to fight another day, our brand intact!  

Leading Projects Across Multiple Offices   What a nightmare this is, dealing with different times zones, work styles, understandings, offers, commitments and varying degrees of time consciousness. Big projects bring big headaches with them, especially when the client wants something done in a hurry, across multiple markets.  In a global world of business these types of challenges are only going to increase.  The hard bits are when you have to rely on others for vital information.   The client has a formula which suits their situation.  If you are dealing with procurement officers they want to get it all down to a one size fits all spread sheet.  The fact that you are being asked to fit the square peg in the round hole is of no interest to them.  They want to gauge comparisons of cost across all the potential suppliers participating in the beauty parade.  This has the effect of warping some of the information from certain markets.    Even in the same organisation, not everyone offers exactly the same thing across all markets.  These regional or market variations become a nightmare when you are trying to frog march them into the designated spread sheet cells.  Nevertheless, you have to do it, because there are no other options and the client isn’t helpful around catering to your organisational differences.   Actually, like in politics, they say that the people from your own political party are usually the bigger problem, than the opposition parties.  Getting cooperation across countries gets tricky, because the buy in to the project can differ quite a bit.  Maybe the size of their part of the deal isn’t that major.  They see this as a mild annoyance, rather than an opportunity to build a relationship with the client.  Usually we are fairly scanty in our explanation of what they need to do.  We are super busy, with a hard stop timeline looming, so we forget to give them the big picture and we just ask for pricing etc.    We are usually communicating across time zones, so there is always that loss of time as a result.  We have to wait twelve hours for a reply or sometimes much longer.  The key person is away on holidays and purposely incommunicado. Their subordinates don’t make a move without authorisation from the big boss, so you are easily stymied and lose time as a result.  As the deadline gets closer panic starts to reign supreme, because you have to make the client deadline to stay in the race for consideration for the prize.  Late entries leave a bad impression with the buyers, especially if your competitors are obviously much better organised and coordinated.   There is also the matter of getting the right information.  You attach updates of the slide deck that will be used, in the presentation to the buyer, so that everyone can see what they are required to do. Now you think that this makes it quite obvious for them, until you start getting piecemeal information back, that doesn’t provide the data you need.  Some people don’t even open the slide deck and read it.  With such a tight deadline, how can that be you ask?   What do we need to do instead?  Firstly be highly proactive and use phone, email and social media messaging to make contact with the key players and get them to agree to participate.  We also want them to designate who will be the counterparty in their organisation for you to work with.  Often the big boss is just too busy to help with the level of detail you want.  All you need from them is their agreement to participate and then often it is better to start interacting with someone else in the team, someone closer to the action.    Start with explaining the WHY in some detail, so that everyone has better context on what this is about and the level of importance to be attached to it.  Here is a critical point – be very detailed and specific in telling them what they have to do.  Checklists are great for this.  Just babbling away in an email can sometimes mean they forget to provide certain key data, giving your only three pieces out of the four you need.  When you look back as to why that happened , it is often the case that you were not demanding and specific enough, about telling them what they had to do.   Check in regularly to get a progress report.  The worst thing is when you imagine something is happening and in fact it isn’t.  This is when you run out of time completely and you have to move heaven and earth to get it done.  The wear and tear on everyone is tremendous.   Expect mistakes and miscommunication.  When we are dealing with representatives from various countries, the common language may be English, but the levels of English can differ considerably.  This is why you have to spell it out, so that there is as little room for misinterpretation as possible.  Asking for feedback may be blocked, because they don’t feel fully capable of explaining what they think in English. Sometimes you have to just harvest what data you need and use your own common sense to bring things to fruition. Better to make the deadline and ask for forgiveness later than miss the client deadline.   Begin by anticipating this will be a nightmare and start from that basis. Expect non-completion of tasks, insufficient data supply, mistakes, no answers to your emails and ridiculously tight deadlines set by the client to selfishly suit their situation.  Now you are ready to rumble!   Remember, if you would like any questions you have, answered live by me, then just put in the email header “I am based in…and am interested in joining your live Leadership Q&A” and send that email to me at [email protected]. I am planning to do a  Zoom meeting with everyone and we will record it for those who can’t make it.  Tell me your location because I may do a couple of versions, to best suit your time zone.    

Killing Rumours And Misconceptions   Staffing is a subject that gets a lot of attention from those within and without the organisation.  Those outside see staff movements as a bellwether of how the company is travelling. High turnover indicates disruption and uncertainty about the future.  Rapid high turnover indicates real trouble within the ranks.  When executives arrive in Japan, they often discover a lot of deadwood and they get about cleaning them out.  They are wholly focused on internal issues.  The outside perspective hasn’t been a consideration in their minds. They have forgotten about their competitors and how they will try to use this information to damage the firm. They think they can operate in a vacuum.   Japan being such a risk averse culture, unscrupulous rivals have a field day playing up your instability and therefore heightened risk as a business partner.  I remember running ads for sales staff when I was in Osaka.  I merrily ran the ads looking to expand the sales team.  Now I knew that, but interestingly our rivals took that as a sign of weakness not strength.   Japan loves secrets and rumours.  With everyone living on top of each other for centuries, keeping secrets is almost impossible and salacious talk and spreading rumours are up there with dining out and shopping as national sports. It was made to look as if we were in chaos and there was high turnover in the ranks.  Our customers began to ask probing questions about our stability. No doubt they were doing this after they had been briefed by our competitors on what a mess we were and how we were not a suitable supplier anymore.   That negative fallout from the ads never occurred to me in a million years because I was upbeat, focused on the positive, the expansion, the growth. After that near death experience with our customers, I made sure that every ad thereafter had the explanation that we were hiring because we were expanding.  What was the additional costs of including those few vital words in the ads – nothing.  It was only my ignorance and single focus that allowed our rivals to seek a way in.   The same issues can arise from within.  Whenever there is an organisational change, do people start high fiving each other, celebrating the new structure as a way to steal a march on the competitors?  No, they are concerned about losing their jobs, or having someone invade their turf, lose face, or being dragged kicking and screaming out of their comfort zone.   This is a great breeding ground for rumours.  The formal explanation of what and why this is happening never seems to outpace the rumours.  The top executives are all on board with the changes, because they thought of them, but for everyone else, this is new.  In the vacuum, the rumour mill kicks into high gear.  The impact is that everyone forgets about the customer, the competitors and concerns themselves with their own best interests and imagining all the bad things that are about to unfold.   We have to make sure that every person  is spoken to directly and so quash the rumours and misinformation before THEY can gain momentum.  Yes, this takes time.  But the focus on the customer and the competitor is where we want people concentrating, rather than on what is going on inside the firm.  They need to get back to work and the sooner their fears and concerns can be addressed, the faster they can do that.   When people quit, the assumption is there is something wrong in the company.  Key people departing is especially unnerving for a lot of people, who immediately jump to all sorts of misconceptions about what this means for their own security or the stability of the enterprise.   Sending out a blanket email heaping praise on the departing is guaranteed to set up the vacuum, allowing it to weave its magic spell of impending doom for the survivors.   We need to tell each person, one by one, what is really going on and assure them that everything will be okay.  We will find a great replacement, we can carry on in the departing person’s absence, it is not the end of the world.  This is time consuming, but it is the best way to ensure that the official version is the only version floating around.   Action Steps   When you have turnover whether it is positive or negative, be aware of external perceptions about the change – that perception will always be a negative one, so prepare to counter it Whenever a vacuum in information appears, it will be filled with rumours and misinformation, so you have to grab hold of the narrative and control it Internally, make sure every single person is spoken to directly and don’t imagine for one second that a blanket email will do the trick –it won’t  

How To Fix Burnout   Previously we looked at preventing burnout but what happens if we missed that tide and the ship didn’t sail?  Burnout can be a gradual build up of tensions, stress and issues that affect our physical and mental health.  There isn’t a buzzer that sounds to tell us we have hit burnout and the whole lead up phase is a bit vague.  Is this burnout or am I just a bit tired after a big week, month or year?  Many of us were brought up in cultures where you suck it up, soldier own and don’t grumble.  The grumbling usually starts in intensive care, as the medicos rush to save our life, because we have pushed it too hard.  Few people in Japan die from excessive hard work.  They normally kill themselves instead because they are so stressed about their situation and so tired from the ridiculous hours they are working, that they want it all to end.  No one pushed the emergency break to get off the careening, runaway train.    Burnout is beyond stress.  When stressed we still care.  With burnout, we are too exhausted to care anymore.  Our self talk starts to sound like this: “Every day at work is a bad day, I hate going down there”, “My manager has given me unachievable goals, so why try”, “No one appreciates anything I do around here, so why should I care”, “I don’t have enough extra energy to care about my work anymore”, “Everyone always wants too much from me and nobody helps me with my stuff”, “The majority of my day is spent doing meaningless tasks”.   Overload drives the feelings of burnout, so we need to reduce the overload.  That means we don’t keep adding tasks.  We need to create some margin in our day so that every minute is not accounted for.  This is an anathema to workaholics, but we have to change our thinking and build in some margin for ourselves.  We are not a machine.  Dale Carnegie said, “rest before you get tried” and it is good advice.   We also have to slow down to go fast.  Rushing around often leads to mistakes.  This is one of my constant struggles.  I move fast, eat fasts, talk fast, think fast and get myself into trouble as a consequence. I turned up at the meeting the other day, at the appointed time, but a day late!  I had been in such a rush when doing my diary note that I had missed the correct date.  Fortunately the client was forgiving and understanding.  Fast is good but too fast is not good.   When we are too rushed we can neglect the small things that build solid human relations. Building trust cannot be fast forwarded like a movie on a DVD.  Being too busy for your friends ensures you won’t have any friends.  Being too busy for your kids means you will be distant from your kids when they get older and you need them.    Technology is supposed to help us save time, but in fact we have unleashed a monster, that allows us to work seven days a week, for very long hours each day. We carry our phones everywhere with us, we sleep beside them, we check our email when we awake.  We are slaves to the machine.  Checking your messages constantly when you are trying to get some serious work done is like pulling up the plants you have just planted, to see how the roots are progressing.  Move away from the computer or leave the phone away from you to concentrate on the task. Only deal with each message once – act on it, if it can be done in 1 minute, file it, delete it or forward it to someone else for action. Don’t keep going back to it.   Schedule email reading time for specific parts of the day and for the rest of the time ignore it.  If it is that urgent, they will phone you.  Once you get into this habit try and space the reading times further apart, as you realise 99.9% of your email is not urgent and 95% of it is pretty much irrelevant.  I hate those services that ping you phone when the latest notification arrives.  I turn them all off.     Don’t be afraid to turn on the Out Of Office message to give you some air cover to escape from everyone else’s expectations of how you should work. Remember you are the one facing burnout issues and you have to protect yourself.  Forget about their priorities for you.   Take holidays.  Japan is a crazy country where people don’t take their leave.  I have to meet with my admin team every month to check how many leave days each person has, because they are storing up their leave, but never using it.  When I see people with masses of days I need to talk to them about using it. Refreshed people are happier and work a better clip than tired people bogged down in the rut of life they have designed for themselves.  This includes us the bosses too, by the way.   Action Steps   Monitor our self talk for the danger signals of burnout Build some margin into your day so it is not packed from woe to go Go slow to go fast sometimes, not everything needs to be done in a manic rush Decide who is the boss – you or the tech  

Networking When Doing Business In Japan   There are two varieties of networks here for me - the Japanese speaking and the English speaking. With regards to the Japanese speaking groups, there are a few things which are a bit different.  Japanese people are raised not to talk to strangers and guess what, they carry this idea over to networking events as well.  In a typical Japanese event, it goes like this: if I know you and I meet someone else I know, I will introduce you to each other.  I won't walk up to a complete stranger and start introducing myself.     This is how it is done here, but it is pretty limited in terms of how many people you can get to meet. In our case, with my team, we bowl straight up to strangers at networking events and introduce ourselves. If you are going to create a contact point with someone new, you have to make it happen.  You have to be polite and reasonable, but you also have to break through the barriers.   As a foreigner, the social rules are not as strict for me, as compared to my Japanese team members. Often I am the battering ram, to walk up to groups standing around in a semi-closed circle and break in. I then introduce my staff member to everyone and away we go. I just keep repeating this all evening and we get to meet a lot of new people and some potential clients.   At English speaking events there are two varieties again, those who are Japanese and those who are foreigners.  The Japanese always get there early and they will go straight to the tables and sit down, uninterested or unable to meet anyone.  I don't let that little detail stop me.  I walk straight up to them and introduce myself, "May, I meet you? My name is Greg Story" as I extend my business card to them.  They are usually a bit taken aback, because they thought they were safe from having to meet anyone new or speak in English, but after starting the conversation they warm up.   If you go to networking in pairs or groups, my rule is don't sit on the same table.  How are you going to meet anyone if you sit together.  This happened the other day.  I was at a networking event and two representatives from a foreign embassy, who are involved in furthering commercial relations with Japan, were all poised to sit down together.  I was in that business for twelve years for Australia, so I suggested that was plan was not possibly the best use of their opportunity and that they should “work the room”.  I don’t think they quite managed that bit, but they at least sat separately and met many more people   My Dale Carnegie Training Japan rule is we divide the room up. I will take this half, you take the other half and we will get back together at the end and exchange notes on who we met at the event.  This sounds simplistic, but so many times I meet people sitting together who are from the same company.  Why would you do that?  I also start with the people sitting down at other tables and leave my own table until last. I walk around meeting everyone at the other tables and then finally at my own table, because I will have a chance to engage with them over lunch.    The organisers sometimes provide a list of who has signed up to attend the event and this is very handy. If they haven't done that, it is always a good practice to get there early and check the name badges.  This allows you to put a face to the name of those people you have already met and to identify some people you may want to meet. It is also a good practice to ask the organisers to introduce you to people you want to get to know or at least point out who is who, so that you can go and introduce yourself.   I position myself right near the door, so I can meet people as they come in. I recommend you always have a couple of key questions which will help you to know if this is a potential client.  If they are not a potential client, then move on because time is tight and time is money. I see some people getting trapped and they manage to spend all the time speaking with just the one person.  I do this parting very politely and say, "thank you, I am going to meet a few more people today" and move on.  I am there to find clients and this is not a social activity for me whose main purpose is to chat with new people over lunch. I do that too, but that is not why I am there.  I want to build my contact base and find buyers.  That is the point of networking.  To know and to be known.   In our ancient Western fairytales, the wicked witch turned the beautiful princess into a frog and she can only be released from the spell, if the frog is kissed by the handsome prince. That is all the potential client networking guidance you will ever need right there.  You have to kiss a lot of frogs, before you find the beautiful princess. You don’t know which of these people at the networking event is going to be the next client for you, so start kissing as many frogs as possible, from start to finish, if you want to build your business in Japan.

Don’t Hit Burnout Baby   Leaders encountering this title preventing burnout might be thinking “I am tough, self-reliant, hairy chested and resilient. I don’t need to worry about it”. This means your business is probably sailing along smoothly and everything is hunky-dory.  What happens when the economy starts dropping precariously or key people bail out and join the competition.  Or when rivals within the organisation start making things difficult for you internally or the new “bad penny” boss turns up and upends your neat little world? One day you are a hero and the next day zero is in the offing. Also, what about the members of your team who are not like you?  Those who are more vulnerable to becoming stressed or who are sacrificing their health for the business, through a strong sense of duty and loyalty?  We know the impact of psychosomatic illnesses today, so sucking it up and carrying on isn’t the answer for everyone.  On the sea or in the air, the captain of the vessel is responsible for the lives of everyone on board.  That duty of care extends to the leader.  We are responsible for the health and well being of all of our crew.   Workplace burnout isn’t the same as workplace stress.  Unrelenting stress may lead to burnout, but it isn’t the same as too much stress.  When we are stressed, it is often because we are too concerned, taking total responsibility for the business.  When we are burned out, by comparison, we don’t see any hope in the future, we can’t hold out for an improvement to the situation.  We feel empty, devoid of motivation and have given up caring. Feeling detached, disengaged, demotivated is the door to deep depression.   Okay, you say, “that is not me”.  That is not you today perhaps.  What about other people in your organisation?  Studies show that ten percent of the Japanese workforce is suffering from depression.  This is real and are you fully aware of how your employees are coping with the demands of the business?  The Government has introduced laws to reduce overtime work.  There are some people who miss the point and want to game the system, so that they can work longer than the limits.  Japan is a crazy country in some ways!  I can’t see this new limit ever being an issue in my own home country of Australia.   The most effective way of heading off job burnout is to quit what you are dong and switch to doing something less stressful.  Hardly an option for most of us though.  The better option is to monitor our stress as it rises and take precautionary measures to prevent it escalating into burn out.  Here are four things to consider.   Clarify job expectations Update your job duties and responsibilities.  We all tend to accumulate extra duties over time, a bit like how ships accumulate barnacles on their hulls as they plough through the seas. These need to be cleaned off for smooth sailing.  Lazy, disengaged people don’t accumulate these job barnacles, so we are talking about the hardest working members of the team here, including you.     Request a change If your workplace is large enough, you might be able to move to a different location, office or department.  Even a change of scenery can help to generate a new you.  “Oh no, I couldn't do that. I need to get to the top, I have responsibilities”.  Great, dying from a brain aneurysm or becoming totally disengaged through burnout are worse things, so let’s get some better perspective going here.   Ask for different responsibilities If you have been doing the same things for a long period of time, refresh your mind by asking to try something new.  Maybe a different sales territory, lead a new team, run a different project, or play a different role in the organisation.   Take time off For workaholics, this is the big one.  Which is better – get the rat off the treadmill and take a complete break or break down?  Take a vacation or a temporary leave of absence.  As the boss, you might be indispensible but if you got hit by the proverbial bus, the workplace would still open at the usual time and the work would get done regardless.  Somehow everyone would manage without you, so why not take a break from the front line to regroup.   You may or may not be on your way to burnout, but maybe one day the stress will start to pile up or you will begin to detect it in your crew.  Better to take action early in both cases, rather than trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  

Dealing With Superstars In Your Business   We are all looking to develop talent within the ranks.  We invest time and treasure to boost skills and experience.  We succeed. We produce outstanding individuals who can really take the business forward.  Whether it is a large enterprise or a small-medium sized firm, the superstar looms large.  We might think that a superstar’s influence gets dispersed inside a large company, because they have so many staff.  The problem is that the numbers of superstars are relatively few and their presence inside certain divisions or sections makes them crucial to that part of the business.  If it is a smaller business then the talent concentration become intense.   Superstars usually come with super egos.  They may have had tiny egos at the start, but over time we have promoted them and boosted them to become the superstar they are today.  What happens when they start to go rogue?  Their self belief becomes vast and they want to strike out on their own.  They have been cosseted inside the warm bosom of the company, but they come to believe they are bigger than the firm.  How do you lock them in early with golden handcuffs, so that they won’t stray? Obviously shares in the firm, large bonuses, future equity are attractive.  At what point do you do that?   There is no simple formula for the timing, because every situation is so volatile. Caution is a wise precept, so probably better to give them baubles in small doses.  Try to get them on the drip feed of more goodies coming, if they behave and play nice.  Too late is too late.  I was talking with a very experienced small business owner who had almost been a father to his superstar.  He was planning to hand over equity in the business at no cost.  Before he could do that, his superstar up and quit and launched his own competitive business in the exact same space.  He waited that fraction too long.  There was no pulling it back either once the horse had bolted.   What about when the rogue component is about straying from the culture of the organisation.  John McEnroe changed tennis by browbeating umpires.  They were all walking around on eggshells, because he was a superstar who made good money for the promoters of the games.  Sponsors ponied up big dough, tennis became a gladiator sport perfect for TV engrossed couch potatoes to enjoy the bloodletting.  Why didn’t the first umpires facing his tirades kick him out, before he became the enfant terrible of tennis?  This diminished logic is what plays out inside companies. The superstar brings in the big bucks, so the bad behaviour is tolerated, exceptions are made, excuses abound.   We spend a lot of leadership effort on alignment around a shared vision, clarifying the mission and embedding the values into the culture.  Superstars get a free pass on all of this.  However what is the message we are sending to the rest of the organisation?  We either believe in our values or we don’t.  People who don’t live the values are a cancer inside the organisation that will just grow in size.  We need to cut them out, but we don’t.   There are weak accomplices inside the machine whose greed is larger than their brains.  They fight for weakening the culture to keep the superstar.  Often they have powerful veto power, which prevents the removal of the cancer causing superstar.  Now we are locked in guerrilla warfare inside the organisation, one side for counting the money today and the other for looking to the negative long term impact on the firm.   Inside smaller firms, the loss of the superstar is immediate and devastating. Putting up with their antics is also devastating but that is more of a long term play.  Get them out and don’t hesitate.  Twenty paces in the town square and no blindfold.  Shoot them right between the eyes and rebuild the business.  Being held hostage to the superstar is folly.    The rest of the team need to be brought into the reasons why the superstar is being moved out.  Talk to each one individually.  This is no time for a town  hall announcement. Listen to their concerns and fears.  Provide them with hope that this is not the end of the world, as we know it.  Come back to the values we all agreed upon.  Draw a line in the sand and make it clear no matter who you are, if you don’t want to uphold the shared values of the team, then there is no place for you here. It is going to happen eventually anyway.  You already know that in your heart of hearts. My advice - go hard and go early.

How You Can Get Change Engagement In Japan   We know there are many challenges to getting the team to embrace changes. Resistance, poor buy in, fear of the unknown, the breakdown of cooperation, vague priorities etc. are common problems.  Change engagement won’t be achieved by email announcements or mass town halls.  These usually spark cynicism, criticism, scepticism and outright hostility.  We need a better approach.   Begin by placing your feet firmly in the moccasins of your team members who are about to undergo the change.  Think back to workplace changes you have experienced in the past.   What was your initial reaction at that time?  What were the outcomes as a result of the changes? What went well and what didn’t go so well?  Reflecting on your own history, positive or negative, is useful when trying to enlist others into the brave new world of change which coming down the pike.   How do we do it? We should not get tied up in the logistics of change – reporting lines, Division restructures etc.  Instead we should start with the people and drive hard on explaining the WHY of the changes.  There might be some external issues driving the change.  The company may be the acquirer or the acquired in an M&A. It might be internal through some developments in technology, scientific breakthroughs, rapid growth, personnel changes or sudden losses.  Steve Jobs being sacked at Apple is a case study in change for the organisation.    Having communicated the WHY, we need to do a thorough analysis of the risks and opportunities associated with the proposed changes.  What positives will the change bring forth?  We need to calculate the costs involved to prepare the required budgets. Having nominated the risks which will arise, we need to also come up with the means to reduce those risks. One factor which is often overlooked when considering costs and risks is the opportunity cost of doing northing. Doing nothing and taking no action is not free, it is not neutral.  There are gains given up when we freeze the changes.   Having decided that the advantages outweigh the risks and costs we move forward with the planning.  Most organisational changes fail because they were rushed and insufficient planning was done beforehand.  We are not robots.  Change impacts us as people and we have to factor that in.  Some will be more impacted than others so what is the plan for them?  New systems will replace the old.  How can we make sure the new system is fully functional and works.  A company I joined had just spent 5 million dollars on a new internal operating system.  It did not work.  Why? The initial planning was poor and mismanaged.  Systems need to integrate the changes into the organisation and this needs the fine detail worked out beforehand.  “Measure twice, cut once” is a good philosophy.  Once the plan is underway, the milestones need to be set and prepared for adjustment if needed.   The implementation may be gradual or abrupt, depending on the situation. Generally, given Japan’s risk aversion the preference will be for gradual change.  The tricky part is that this is not how the foreign HQ leaders see it.  They want speed and Japan wants slowly, slowly.  Regardless, individual responses will need to be carefully defined.  The timetable for the launch and the follow up has to be declared and publicised.  All the way through, the team have to be regularly reminded of why this is good for the organisation, rather than just getting caught up in the execution.   Our planning may have been perfect or flawed and the only way to know is to monitor the progress of the changes.  We need tools to measure progress. Are the expected outcomes actually coming to fruition? Are there any unforeseen problems which have emerged?  How are the people most affected reacting?  Were the cost estimates accurate or do we need to allocate further funding?  Have we been doing a good enough job of keeping everyone informed of the evolution of the change?   When we are making good progress then we need to imbed the changes.  This doesn’t mean we declare “victory accomplished”.  We need to keep watching for how the process is unfolding and check that the changes are staying in place and yielding the results we anticipated.  If things are not going to plan, then we need a new plan.  What has failed or faltered?  Who do we need to get further involved to fix the issues?  Are we communicating the issues to everyone, so that more people are involved in the rescue?  Are we bringing enough resources to the fight to make sure we win?   Change by design and change by accident are different universes.  We must ensure it is by our best, most well thought out design. We have to keep calculating how to bring the people with us on the change journey.  If we follow the ideas we have discussed then the change will be as successful as is humanely possible.  It is hard to argue for more than that.    

Anticipating Trouble Before Activating Change Engagement   Change is glacial in Japan.  Everyone complains about everything but no one wants to change anything if it impacts them.  We call this the NIMBY Protocol.  Not In My Back Yard sums up this philosophy toward change.  This company should change what it is doing, my boss should change, my colleagues should change, but I want to stay exactly the same. It would be good if everyone got behind the changes with full enthusiasm and cooperation.  However, that is rarely the case.  Caroline Schoeder’s advice is salutary, especially for Japan.  “Some people change when they see he light, others when they feel the heat”.    “Forewarned is forearmed” is ancient wisdom, so if we are contemplating change, what are some of the roadblocks we can anticipate?  If we know what is coming down the pike, we will be better able to me deal with it. In this week’s episode we will look at the blocker issues and next week we will look at how to make change engagement work.   Here are five aspects of trouble we should prepare for, anytime we get religion, go crazy and decide want to start a change process.     Can’t break down resistance Change represents an assault on the established order.  People who have accrued perks and power suddenly anticipate all of this hard earned advantage being stripped away from them.  They might have built a little empire inside the organisation and this is about to come crashing down.  There are always winners and losers in change.  Because it is an alteration to the established order, by definition, the losers will always outnumber the winners.  Resistance to change in Japan can be open but more often than not it is hidden.  Telling the boss or the system they are wrong is dangerous.  Saying you are not going to follow orders is a bold statement not too many staff want to be make in Japan or anywhere.  So resistance moves underground and can be hard to ferret out. Failing to gain buy in Many organisations are regularly introducing changes and staff can suffer from “change fatigue”.  The “here we go again” skepticism is especially prominent in staff who work for multinational companies in Japan. The ability of the organisation to drive change can also be in question.  The “seen it all before” philosophy of doubt can sponsor a “wait and see” attitude.  Often the changes are incremental and each step relies on the previous step to move the whole process along.  When there is a stall because people have not bought into the change, it can derail the whole effort.  Just telling people to accept change won’t provide enough muscle to get it done.  We need to get the team to embrace change, support it and champion it.  That is a lot easier said than done.     Cannot minimise anxiety Humans tend to fear loss more strongly than they get excited about gain.  The change envisaged is to usher in a new era of improved performance for the organization. Not everyone sees it that way.  Our survival instinct kicks into gear and we start identifying the risks, the downside, the negative.  Because we fear losing what we already have, in exchange for something we don’t yet have, we can become anxious about the change.  Anxious people don’t become champions of change.  They join the subterranean resistance to try and derail change, divert it or slow it down. Failing to gain cooperation Change in organisations can trigger the “everyman for himself “attitude as people hunker down to protect their personal guarded interests.  One of the first casualties of change is internal cooperation. The silo effect between divisions in organisations is always prominent anyway.  It can be blown up into large proportions by change.  There is constant jockeying for positions, titles and influence by ambitious politicians inside firms. Protecting turf and gaining turf become their focus.  There is little thought of what the impact all this might have on the change process and its capacity to succeed.  “Not my monkeys, not my circus” being the prevailing ideology.   Cannot establish correct priorities People are told the existing, well established priorities are now out. Up to this point it has probably taken an enormous commitment and effort to educate everyone on what the priorities are and to get people functioning accordingly.  Change means by definition we have to start again and rebuild the priority alignment internally around the changes.  How well are we able to explain the new priorities? The Executive Suite may get it, because they are driving the change, but what about the people down at the bottom of the totem pole. In normal times it is hard enough to get middle management to communicate the why sufficiently well, to get everyone behind the cause.  Understanding the why makes following the priorities much easier, but are middle managers doing a good enough job in communicating the why of the new changes?  Just telling people to change as an order only gets the minimum of compliance.   Change is diabolically hard in Japan.  Resisters are like guerilla bands roaming the hallways trying to subverted the changes. Nothing is what it seems, so it is hard to get a read on how people are embracing the change.  When making changes look for these five hurdles as they emerge and take action to smash them when they arise.  If you don’t, you will have a two tiered organisation.  The top thinks the changes are being taken up and the bottom are resisting, slowing things down and often sabotaging the project.  

What Do You Do When Key People Quit?   I once had the perfect team in business.  I had spent years hiring well and really putting a lot into training everyone.  I thought, “finally, I have the perfect team”.  That wondrous situation probably lasted about six months before one of them quit.  A client poached them from us.  Why? Because we had done such a stupendously excellent job in training and developing them, that they were considered highly, highly  valuable by other companies.  What does this tell us?  We will never create the perfect team and even if we do, it won’t last, so get used to instability.   Whether it is a division within a large company or within a small company, there will always be key people.  Sometimes they are in highly specialised roles, which take years of investment in their training and qualifications to get them there.  They are truly unique talents, who are almost impossible to replace.  So what do we do?  We start treating them like princesses.  We are very keen to ensure they stay with us, so we pander to their ego, keep giving them more money and cut them a lot of slack we don’t extend to others.  As they realise they are so rare and valuable, their ego kicks into gear and they become entirely entitled and expectant.  You can’t afford to replace them so you just suck it up.   Usually, we come up with brilliant counter moves once they have quit.  We start to work out work-arounds, we inject new processes into the system to cope, we start spending money to compensate for the loss.  In retrospect, we would have been better to do all this before they quit.  We were busy though, we had hived off that bit of the responsibility to them, so we could concentrate on other tasks.  Everything was working, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” reigned supreme as the dominant ideology.   There were warning signs which we neglected to note on the way through. We ignored them because we didn’t want to confront the possibility of disaster.  We were very busy, you know. So in future what should we do?  Once we feel we are tip-toeing around on egg shells with particular individuals who are deemed to valuable to lose, the alarm siren should sound in our heads. We should start thinking “uh oh, all of our eggs are congregating in the one basket here and the consequent risk factor is major”.  We need to start working on reducing our exposure to a meltdown of epic proportions.   The backup plan needs to get attention.  We need to develop another capable individual who can slip into position if the need arises.  Funnily enough, often the superstar doesn’t want that.  They only want one sun in the sky, so they use their position to block the development of a replacement.  They can’t find anyone who would be good to hire.   They are too busy to look.  They are too busy to train them.  None of the potential candidates are right for the job.  At the time, you yield to their superior knowledge or their qualifications and accept that what they are telling you is true.  You are respectful of the superstar’s  position, you never imagine there is a second agenda in play, and you are busy. Your superiors or your partners are constantly telling you that we need the superstar, so tread lightly, be careful, keep them engaged, don’t screw up. Your options suddenly look constricted. And you are busy.   Ignore all that superstar smokescreen and do your own search for a candidate, because that is exactly what you will have to do anyway when the superstar quits. You may as well spend the time now, because pain today will be relief of pain tomorrow.   Bite the bullet.  Don't become a hostage to the superstar.  Always work on devising a cunning plan in case you need to replace them.  It means time out of your already super busy schedule, and it probably requires unbudgeted monies, but get it organised and do it.  We cannot expect to realise the perfect team and keep them intact forever.  Someone will poach them from us or they will want to do their own thing because they are a genius.  It is only a matter of when.  We also know that experts can be hired in and budding experts can be developed over time.  As soon as you hear the sound of egg shells cracking, get into action.    

Why Japanese Staff Refuse Leadership Positions   It is an irony. In the West ambitious people have the elbows out to bundle you out of their way.  They are scheming and plotting to get the next promotion.  They exaggerate their qualifications, experience, talent and capability at every turn, if they think it will serve to see them step up over the bodies of their rivals.  They fake it now hoping they can make it later.  They suck up to those above and criticize those below.  Their peers are seen as the enemy who must be vanquished if they are to prevail.  In the Game Of Thrones and in the Game of Promotion “you win the game or you die” is the prevailing philosophy.  In Japan, when staff are recognized for their good work and given the chance to move up often they refuse.  They say things like, “it is too early”, “I am not ready yet”, “maybe in two years time”. This drives Western leaders here nuts.   Why are these Japanese staff so bashful and unmotivated?  The speed of promotion is fast in Western companies.  Age isn’t thought as important as capability.  Seniority however is a big deal in Japan.  Younger staff are reluctant to make a suggestion in meetings, if those around them are older or higher in rank.  The possibility of having to manage staff who are older when promoted than them sends shivers down their spines.  Culturally, this is extremely awkward.  It is awkward in the West too, but we are all locked in a Darwinian struggle to get to the top, so everyone just has to suck it up and get on with it.  If you don’t like it, there is the door, goodbye and good luck.   “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” is traditional wisdom in Japan, so everyone is very adept from childhood at not sticking out.  You get along, by going on. Getting a promotion over your peers is bound to cause aggravation with those passed over.  Spite, backbiting, nasty comments, vicious rumors are all part and parcel of the employ landscape.  Getting a higher salary and higher status doesn’t fix this issue.    Japan has solved this problem by promoting everyone together based on when they joined the firm.  Your patron promotes you and you become a loyal follower.  They are there to protect you as you climb the ranks.  Only in the top layers are the wheat sifted from the chaff and age and seniority dimensions break down.    In Western firms, it is meritocracy based, so synchronicity is irrelevant.  Nobody cares who entered the company when or how old anyone is. The firm wants the outputs and therefore they want the best people in charge of producing those results.  In Japan your Western boss is not reliable. Your patron who promoted you is just as likely to leave town and head off to sunny shores elsewhere to their next assignment and your have no air cover internally anymore.   There is also the nasty issue of accountability and responsibility.  If you are promoted you have to be judged by your results.  In Japan, because of group decision making no one steals the glory, as it is shared around.  Likewise, when things go pear shaped and scapegoats are sought, they can’t be found because everyone was a party to the decision, so no one is individually responsible.  “We are all responsible, so no one is responsible”.  What a perfect system!  There is zero protection in a Western firm.  If you fail, you are expected to fall on your sword and disappear.  In the West, the mobility of the job market is such that you can dust off the beating and live again to fight another day.  Japan has not been like that because of its postwar lifetime employment system.  Getting removed is a serious blow to one’s career prospects, so caution at all time is the watch word.   Better to forego that promotion until all the risks have been contained.  The support groups internally need to be lit up, the consensus arrived at and the opposition reconciled. None of this fits into the firm’s calendar of leadership development though.  The big bosses back at HQ ask why you can’t produce new Japanese leaders, why are the high potentials so unmotivated?  What is wrong with your leadership of Japan?   So what can you do? If they have been identified as a high potential, then give them additional training that marks them out from their peers.  Bolster their credibility by giving them additional skills.  Have them assume an additional “assistant” role to the boss, so they can be drawn into doing the actual work, before they are handed the entire responsibility.  Include them in meetings now, which normally they would only attend once they are in that new role.  Give them a project where they have to lead their peers.  If the peers are being snarky then sort them out quick smart.  This is the same for staff who may be older. They have to get the message, we are going to promote Tanaka and if you don’t like it, then vote with your feet and leave.   Coaching them specifically for their new role is important.  When decisions have to be made, ask them for their opinion and input.  Get them used to taking responsibility at that level for bigger budgets, more people and higher risks.  Have them attend key meetings representing the team, especially if these are being held overseas.  Have them deliver the reports, do the presentations, take a more prominent role.  Have lunch with them and their spouse and outline what the company has in mind for them.    The support of the spouse is important and having lunch together with both of them is not something we would ever dream of doing in the West.  Well Japan is different and we know that we want the spouse supporting the step up in position too.  Whenever we are offering a job to people, the candidates always say they have to talk it over with their spouse.  Changing jobs or taking on a new job is a big deal in risk averse Japan. Promotions are seen as risky, so let’s cut off that line of retreat and get the whole family behind the programme.   Expecting everyone to be like us, want what we want, react the way we do is a formula for leadership disaster in Japan.  Knowing that in itself is a big insight and so the positioning of a promotion needs to take a different route.  This means starting much earlier in the process than in the West.  It means stifling any negative comment and opposition by rivals and critics early.  You have to sell the idea here and get the spouse behind it too.  Japan should operate differently, you say.  Good luck with that and let us know how that is working out for you.        

Value Led Leadership   When we think of the value of the leader, we are drawn to things like insight, vision, experience, technical knowledge, expertise.  The Yogi Berra quote on leadership however points to a fatal truism in being in charge of others, “Leading is easy.  Getting people to follow you is the hard part”.  Being individually talented and polished in the production of outcomes isn’t enough.  Our personal skill level as a doer is no automatic qualification for leading.     The real value proposition of the leader is in how they make their team members feel valued.  Here is where we locate the real value equation in leadership.  Getting everyone behind the leader’s vision requires that they be engaged.  Think about your own case and various places you have worked and bosses you have worked for. If you were not engaged, then you didn’t care about direction, vision, innovation etc.  Unengaged staff simply turn up to get paid, but don’t do much beyond that.  Now imagine your crew up against the opposition, who are at peak commitment levels. You don’t have to be gifted or a genius to determine who is going to win in the market.   We might get smatterings of commitment and engagement across the team, but is it in sufficiently concentrated form enough, to bolster the difference between winning and losing?  If our rival’s whole team is firing and we are only partially engaged, then the customer will feel it. The competitor’s service levels will show it, their follow up will live it and the gap between us and them will be palpable and painful.   Great Greg.  How do we get people engaged then?  There is a trigger we must make sure is being pulled.  That take off point to engagement comes from the degree to which the individual team members feel they are valued by the company.     “Of course they are valued”, you might be saying.  Good, but are you telling them that? Are you communicating that?  Busy leaders get sucked into the vortex of shooting out orders like a rocket barrage.  We are so time efficient, we can get orders flying out to the troops in the quickest time possible so that we can concentrate on ploughing through the work.  Today, we short form everything.  We reduce the amount of communication to a minimum, we go very, very zen.   Actually we want to go barouche. We want to be much more florid in our recognition of our people.  We want to tell them what they are doing that we value.  We need to be super specific and zero in on key things they do, which add value to the enterprise.  We tell them how these activities make a difference in the company.  And we make sure to encourage them to keep doing these important things.  We assure them they are not just a tiny cog in the company’s wheel.  We explain they are a powerful engine, driving the business through their contribution.  Now this cannot become simple flattery.  It has to reflect the actual work they are producing and relate the value of that, back to the vision of the business.    The key though is that we have keenly observed what they are doing.  We tie their contribution into the vision of the firm and the results we all seek.  We must draw out their role in the achievement of outcomes.  We always end by encouraging them to keep doing such good work.     The communication piece here is vital.  We have to firstly find the time though.  This sounds easy except being time poor, and inclined to “zen everything”, we don’t allocate the time needed for them.  By making the time to observe, to capture, to communicate what we have seen is what it takes. However, often we miss that chance, because we have our head down and we are busy with our own work.  Inspiring the team, getting them engaged is also our work and sadly, sometimes we simply forget that bit.   Telling staff once only that they are valued is absolutely not enough.  It requires regular effort, reflection and articulation.  It means praising them on the way through to reach the target, not just once they get there.  We need to encourage them to get there, to keep trying, no matter how hard the going may prove to be.     So value led leadership isn’t about relying solely on our personal attributes.   It hinges on our capacity to draw out and recognise the value that team members bring to their work.  It has to be timely and we have to express it in a way that is motivating, credible and long lasting.  

The Leader Player Conundrum   When we are promoted into leadership positions or when we are running a small business, there is no luxury option of just being a leader, focused solely on working through others.  We have to both lead and produce.  As a first time leader, this can be extremely dangerous.  Often our career trajectory is shot down because we blow ourselves up.  We fail as both a producer and a leader and then we get shown the door.  Usually, we are promoted and left to our own devices to work it out, because there is no training on how to be a leader.   As the player, we are comfortable and as the leader we are feeling out of our depth.  Naturally we gravitate to where we feel the most comfortable and capable.  We were chosen as a leader because we were the best at our functional responsibilities.  The best accountant or IT specialist, the top sales person etc.  We distinguished ourselves through our ability to produce results.     The trick here though is all we had to worry about were our own numbers. These were targets which were reasonable and achievable by one person, if sufficiently motivated to go get them. When we become leader the number is now much bigger.  It is the combined production of the whole team and we have much less control over the achievement of the goals than what we had before.   The team are average producers by definition.  If they were above average, they would be the leader instead of us.  So we don’t inherit a team of star players.  We have to make star team out of a bunch of disparate individuals.  They differ in terms of knowledge, intellect, motivation and levels of engagement.  We rapidly discover that what floated our boat to get ahead, is of little to no interest to them.  “Just do what I did” as a rallying call to the troops, falls on deaf ears.   In the first year, we keep the player component going, carrying the team. The problem is the targets go up and in the second year despite our personal heroic efforts, the targets are missed.  Now we are on a watch list by the big bosses.  We have become even more desperate.  We now start working harder and harder to get the numbers up, but the rest of the team keep turning in mediocre performances.  We have had no time to coach them, inspire them or lead them, because we have been too busy doing.  The target numbers go up again and after continued unsatisfactory results, we are replaced at the end of year three.  The cycle starts over again with a new face walking in the door.   When we are running our own business, it is our baby and we are fully committed to make it work.  We are busy doing everything.  Because it is a small business, we cannot afford big salaries for top performers, so we have to hire B and C players.  Because we are the boss, we can get access to the big bosses over at the client’s firm, so we naturally want to parlay that Into business. We don’t delegate that to anyone else.  We are also supremely busy, so we have very little time to pour into developing the team members.  We are constantly fully occupied with doing our own work and checking that others are doing theirs.   In both cases, if we swing too far either way, then bad things happen.  We wonder where is the right balance between our own input into results and getting the team to create their results. When In doubt we gravitate to what we can control directly and leave everyone to their own devices.  We can only work so many hours a day and there is a limit to how much we can produce.  This means that however valiant our contribution, the business just never makes it.  We either get fired as the leader and replaced when we work for someone else or if it is our company, it just doesn’t seem to grow.   What should we be doing instead?  We have to focus on what is the role of the leader?  Managers manage processes.  Leaders manage processes and build people.  This is easy in theory, but not so riveting when there is a lot of pressure on us to produce results.  Building people takes time.  They don’t produce much at first or they get to a plateau and don’t keep growing.  If we want to break out of this deadly cycle, we have to invest In the future. That means delegating tasks to our subordinates and spending time coaching them.  Both of these activities take us away from what we feel we should be doing, which is precisely more doing.  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing but expecting a different result.   Delegating is usually frowned upon because it doesn’t work and we conclude “it would be faster if I do it myself”.  That is true the first time, but if we keep doing it ourselves then we will never free up the time to work on only the things that we can do.  We need to invest the time to sell the delegation to our staff, and then keep coaching them through the execution.     When we spend time to coach our staff we give them the capacity to replace the results we normally have to produce.  This starts to tip the scales in favour of more leading and less doing.  It doesn’t come immediately, but if we don’t start, it will never come.  Here is a hint - don’t start with the worst producer, when you start coaching.  This is the natural temptation.  Even if they double their results, it is usually not all that significant compared to what the top producer is pumping out.  The scale growth opportunity is with the people producing the bigger numbers.  Spend time getting them to get even bigger results and the numbers flow.     Work your way down from the highest to the lowest producers and actually in reality, you will probably never get to them.  Better to start at the top end though, if you want to influence production.  None of this is easy or quick and headaches abound.  Just when you think you are getting somewhere, your top people quit and go to the competitor because they can pay more money.  You feel like you are in a game of snakes and ladders and after grafting your way up the ladder, you slip on the snake cast down toward the bottom again.  This is business life!   Time allocation is where we make progress.  Start allocating more time to develop others and pass the work off to them to free yourself up to do more coaching, more thinking, more strategising, more innovation. If we can do that then good things start to happen.            

Virtual Leader Best Practices   Developing people who you can walk up to and speak with face to face is hard enough for most leaders, let along doing this when they are in another country and in a difficult time zone. Fortunately these days the technology is pretty good when it comes to virtual meetings, where we can see each other as well as talk.  We can share our screens and show various data as well, which makes the whole experience much richer.  This is fine for one on one, but what about when there are multiple team members scattered to the winds?  How do we create a team feeling, when all we ever do is see each others photos, in thumbnail size on a screen?  There are five things we can focus on to become a better virtual leader.   The leader’s job is to create a connection between the team members.  They can be remotely located but they don’t have to be remote from each other.  For example, sharing information is a good way to connect with each other and to establish some feeling of unity and solidarity.  When holding these virtual meetings have each person share two pieces of good news, one business and one personal.  This helps to establish some bonds amongst the team where they can celebrate together positive news.   Building confidence comes from success.  Hearing about successes in the network builds a sense of we can do better, let’s catch up with that office, if they can do it then we can do it.  Sharing information about what is happening across the whole organisation is important.  Often mid-level leaders are like big sponges.  They soak up all the information from the senior executives but they are scanty when it comes to sharing that information with their own troops. By keeping the whole virtual team up to date, they can be more confident about how the organisation is progressing and see things beyond the limitations of their  current horizons.   Communication is a given but often the quality of that communication is poor.  Regular virtual meetings with compulsory attendance can be required to make the whole thing work.  If some people are missing from the meeting, then they need to get the minutes and to be brought up to speed.  We need to communicate even more when we don’t see each other face to face.  Being busy though everyone today is a minimalist when comes to communicating.  We have too many meetings and too many emails to get through and so we are always looking for shortcuts.  Virtual though lends itself to more leisurely ways, in order to slow down in order to speed up.  We have to give it more time than normal, so the meetings may be a bit more frequent and a bit longer than usual.   Collaboration sounds good in theory, when you are sitting on different continents.  Actually making that work across tough time zones is less straightforward.  This is where more supervision of projects and joint work is needed.  Normally, the leader tries not to micro-manage the team, but in the virtual world there is a greater need for more involvement and following up to make sure what is supposed to be happening is in fact happening. Getting updates and reports on what the collaborating parties are doing is a must.  Out of sight and out of mind is an old saw and so true.  With virtual, we are definitely out of sight, but we have to remind everyone of the goals, milestones, agreements and schedules to make sure they don’t drift off track.   Commitment is more than words.  It is easy at the meeting to agree to produce certain work, but the day to day realities interfere and the work is not done or is delayed.  When others are waiting for our input before they can move forward, we have set up a possible delay mechanism without knowing it.  This is why we need virtual partners to commit and then to be held to those commitments.   The leaders job is to hold toes to the fire and force stuff to get completed.  This means monitoring progress, getting updates and reports, to see if everyone is playing their role in the team.    Virtual demands a different approach.  We have to become more heavy handed than usual as the leader and force more transparency between the team members.  The distance of location and time zone cannot be counted on as  excuses for failing to get the work done.  Knowing early if things are going adrift means being a bigger sticky beak than normal, but it has to be done.  The key is to keep reminding people why you are doing it this way and to ask for their continued cooperation. When people understand the challenges of virtual leadership, then they are more willing to take accountability for their roles.  Don’t forget to praise people when they do their job and be as specific as possible to make the comments meaningful. Praise and vigilance are two key tools to be employed regularly by the virtual leader.

As The Leader, Never Assume In Japan   Leaders are busy people. Processes become established and we assume they are working properly.  You are sent in to run the Japan operation and or you join a new company here and you are faced with major tasks, like raising the revenues  or reducing costs or expanding market share or all three.  These tend to be the big chunks of work which command all of your attention.  Because these are usually not start-up operations, there are existing methods for the functions of the business.  Over time, you start to play around with how the business is run, introducing innovations or making changes.  Time moves on and you assume that these changes are part and parcel of the standard operation procedure for the business.  In Japan, assume nothing.   When we take over and concentrate on the key KPIs we have been given, we don’t have a lot of time to dig down too deeply on the operations component.  This is a mistake, because there are bound to be inefficiencies, anti-client structures, brand damagers and worse tucked away in there.   It can be simple things like expecting customers to fill out eleven fields on your website to get some lead generation magnet.  Maybe it is a free report or an industry survey, or a piece of research.  Maybe it is really crazy and the customer has to keep filling out these fields every time, if they want more than one thing off the website. That drives people nuts and you have to ask why that is the way it is.  Often, you find out that fairly clueless people decided that they needed all the information from the first, rather than having a strategy to attain it over time.  Or maybe that is how it was with everyone at first, but cleverer people worked out that was blocker and dropped the requirements down to an email address to get better traction with getting leads.  Your firm however has persisted with the old model.   It might be how easy or hard you are to do business with.  I met the President of a large corporation here.  We did some presentation coaching work for a big event he had coming up. A thought occurred to me a little after we had finished and I wanted to share it with him, to make sure his presentation was a total success.  I rang the general number, asking if I could speak to the President, using his name. I was told he was unavailable. Okay, so could I leave a message. No.  Okay, could I talk with his secretary, because obviously the person I am talking to who picks up the phone is an idiot, happily destroying the brand. No, the secretary is unavailable as well.  Dead end right there.   This particular President joined this major corporation over a year ago and he doesn’t speak Japanese, so I would be 100% sure he had no idea how callers trying to reach him were being treated. He would be assuming that everyone in the company is busily working hard to make the wheels of commerce turn as quickly as possible. Just to make sure it wasn’t a language problem I was facing, I asked my own executive assistant to call them and she got the very same treatment.   So call your own company. Do it during the day but also do it before 9.00am or at lunch time or after 6.00pm, when the usual person isn’t there to answer the phone.  This is when you discover that the brand is being hammered by people who have no idea about brand.  They are unhelpful and unfriendly in tone.  When you ask for the person you want, they say that they are not at their desk and then go stony silent.  They don’t say helpful things like, “please allow me to take a message and I will make sure they ring you back”.  They don’t pick up the phone and give their own name, they just say the company name and that is it.  None of this is helpful.  You probably have temporary staff working for your organisation and no one bothers to train them either and they are often the person manning the phones when everyone else is out.  The person with the least skin in the game is now the owner of the brand image.   Japan is interesting, because when I discuss this with Japanese business people here, they can’t see the issue of not saying your name.  They try and justify it. “Why would you volunteer that information to everyone”, they say?.  They don’t understand that this is saying, I will take accountability and responsibility for the business of this phone call and give the caller a point of reference to help them.  They say a fish is the last thing to discover water and this is a similar problem in Japan. This is a country of group think, in so many facets.   The other thing to look for is when people start changing your innovations.  You think you have brought an improvement to the system and that this is now the way we operate around here.  It is always enlightening to discover you are the only person operating under that assumption.  They change it, don’t tell you and you usually only find out by accident.  They usually change it, because they can’t be bothered doing it the way you want.  They see it as bothersome and don’t get the why of the change or the value of the change.   A good rule of thumb in Japan, is dig deep on how things are done from the operations point of view. If you make changes or introduce innovations, keep checking that people down at the bottom of the totem pole have not scuttled your ideas.        

Power Harassment And Being the Boss In Japan   “Pawahara” the Japanese adoption of the English term “power harassment” has only appeared in the last few years in this country.  In 2006, there were 22,153 complaints lodged with the Japanese labor Bureau and in 2016 it has jumped to 70,917 cases.  In a 2016 government survey, 33% of respondents said they had experienced power harassment in the past three years.  The Japanese government is drafting a bill to go to the Diet to ban power harassment in the workplace, but the bill does not include any penalties. What does this mean for bosses trying to get results from their teams?   Power harassment is defined by the Government as being an act that causes physical or emotional pain, or demoralizing the workplace by exploiting one’s position.  In 2012 the Labor Ministry listed six examples of power harassment: physical attacks, verbal abuse, deliberate isolation from other employees, making excessive demands, making too few demands and infringing on the privacy of others.   Like many things in Japan, once something is established as a new concept, then the interpretation by staff of the boundaries of power harassment becomes very broad.  Holding people accountable, expecting them to take responsibility for results are all part and parcel of being the boss.  The issue becomes more potent when the staff don’t match expectations.  Not doing your job is not considered to be reasonable grounds to fire someone in Japan. Courts are weighing in on the side of the staff against the employer, so there are some strong limitations on the power of the employer.  Chastising staff for non-performance is being interpreted as power harassment by staff, because it suits them to do so.  Taking personal responsibility for anything is avoided like the plague in Japan at the best of times.   So how can bosses navigate this tricky path between no control over outcomes and being taken to the Labour Bureau for power harassment?  The missing component in Japan in companies is a clear understanding and sign on for the WHY of what we are doing.  Staff are recruited out of university and are given a steady diet of WHAT and HOW and almost no WHY.  This continues on through the years as the work efforts are focused on the tactical execution piece.   We need to break through this continuum and refocus the team on the WHY behind the reason we exist. Western businesses went through a big push on forming a vision for the enterprise which never really captured too many imaginations here in Japan.  The Vision, Mission, Value statements are all safely ensconced behind framed glass and hung on the wall but almost no one can quote any of it from memory.  If you can’t remember it, then how can you live it?   The other piece that is missing is the buy-in to realise the goals.  This means switching from telling people what to do, to asking them what they think we should do to hit the target.  In tandem with this switch is the concept of delegating responsibility to staff to achieve the results.  Japanese people resist any accountability at all because that is the sure fire way to avoid failing.  Delegation needs to be sold to the delegatee as a concrete opportunity for them to gain experience that will help them move up through the ranks.  Normally it is just demanded and feels like an unfair burden given to them, on top of all the other things they are super busy with already. We need them to see doing these boss tasks is going to be a positive when the company looks for successors to replace the boss as they themselves move up into a higher level position.  In Japanese companies promotion is still mainly based on age and stage, so these companies are denied engaging their teams through Vision and delegation.   The other missing ingredient is boss coaching of staff.  Bosses are basically too busy today to coach staff, so it is more honoured in principle, than actually acted upon in reality.  If  the boss having reinforced the WHY, is having the staff member come up with the HOW, and then coaching them on how to improve on that, then we are getting accountability and the full scope of what needs to be done.  This is the perfect combination.  If the staff deviate from the correct direction, then the boss can help them, but this is done without trying to micromanage the work.    If the staff fail to deliver a task that is part of their work, then the way the boss handles that discussion is important.  As we see yelling at people isn’t going to fly anymore.  The boss needs to focus on fixing the issue and having the errant staff member come up with the fix.  No yelling required and the work gap is plugged.   It is the same concept as delegation, in that we get the staff member to take ownership and accountability for the task, but we help them to complete it correctly this time.  We check, but we don’t micromanage.   Japanese staff will be quick to blur the lines between their being called to account for their work and power harassment.  The weaker they are the quicker they will be to blur the lines.  Going back to the WHY, getting them to uncover and own the how and then providing coaching, will go a long way to avoid being faced with a “please explain” power harassment claim notice from the Labor Bureau.

You Have To Chastise People, Right?   I was meeting with the HR team from a client company.  In fact, this was the first meeting with the HR team, because previously we had been directly dealing with the sales line managers.  They were looking for a leadership programme for people being moved up into leadership positions for the first time.  They had requested the manuals, so I brought them with me and we were going through them.  The HR head stopped on a page where it referred to giving praise to staff.  “Doesn’t the boss have to give out corrections and chastise staff for poor performance, rather than giving praise”, she asked? She said she had a attended training from a competitor – a very large Japanese domestic training company and that is what they were teaching in their programs – how to give strong leadership to staff.   I have to say I was overjoyed when I heard that piece of market intelligence.  It means this behemoth rival of ours is a dinosaur and so far behind it is breathtaking.  I explained to her what happens when you directly criticise people.  They either puff up their chests like a barnyard rooster and fight or they slink off with their tail between their legs, like a beaten dog, giving up entirely.  Maybe in the good old days of a high unemployment rates and young graduates hitting the workforce like machines, you could get away with this type of leadership.    We have 1.6 jobs for everyone looking, unemployment is at all time lows and the numbers of young people in the 15-34 age bracket has halved over the last twenty years. We are running out of demographic margin to find enough people for our companies.  In addition to that, we have to be really clever about the retain part, because it is going to take ages and cost a bomb to replace people who up and leave.  So idiot managers yelling at people isn’t going to work anymore.   Those who make mistakes or are underperforming generally know this and either try to justify their position or just see a collapse in confidence.  Given we can’t just fire people willy-nilly, we need to be in the restore people business.  If we criticize, they throw up defensive positions and these people don’t take accountability or responsibility.   We need to see the person as a whole – they do some things well and other things not so well.  It is typical for the boss however to become a fault finder, rather than a good finder.  The boss is always in fix mode, so when something is broken they fix it and their biggest fear is something is broken, but they don’t know about it.  They are constantly scanning for bad performance.   We should see what the person is doing well and recognize that.  Praise the things they are competent it.  For the things they are not doing well, we can refer to these indirectly.  Why not directly?  Why not tell it like it is baby and get it all out on the table?  If we want the person to accept responsibility and fix it, we need their cooperation.  So praise first, then we might call attention to their mistakes indirectly.  We might ask them how they think we could fix this issue.  For example, maybe they are not meeting their sales targets.  Telling them they are not selling enough is not new information for them, they already know what.  We can ask though, “The team will miss their target for this quarter.  What can you do to help the team make the target?”.  They have missed their target, they know it and now they are being invited to talk about what they can do in their area of responsibility, to get the numbers back up.  It is the same message as, “hey stupid, you missed your target, what are you going to do about it?”, but without the resistance which arises to looking at alternatives and solutions.  We get on the forward momentum train and look to what can be done.  We want them to own the solution, because they are more likely to execute on those ideas.   We might talk about our own mistakes before we draw attention to them.  This provides an entirely different context to the discussion. The boss has admitted that they are not perfect and that they understand that things go wrong, but intimate it is possible to recover from mistakes.  We let them save face and we tell them we are sure they can fix the problem. We are giving them support in that we believe they can recover from this and we will help them.  For those people who collapse into depression and lose their self belief, this is important to rebuild them and send them back out there in the firing line to make it work the next time.   Yelling at people may make the boss feel good, but it is not helping the business.  We cannot operate as if demographic exigencies don’t exist. We need to keep people and make them productive and that requires a different skill set as a leader.  The EQ or Emotional Quotient is certainly the key. Bosses who lack this understanding will pay a weighty price of lack of staff. In fact they will be losing staff continuously and the business will see competitors thriving as they wither in the vine.

Change Agent Leaders Are Highly Vulnerable In Japan   The Japan business has been around for many years, but it never seems to live up to the expectations the firm had for the initiative.  They employed an aging Japanese CEO thinking, ”well a Japanese person is the obvious one to lead the business in Japan”.  It seemed logical at the time and the individual chosen had many years experience working in the industry.  Gradually the penny drops that this very expensive CEO is not much of a leader and isn’t up to the task to take on the market and win in Japan. This is where you come in.  You are selected for the Tokyo assignment. You are honored to be selected and off you go, bringing the family to this new and exciting country.   You don’t speak the language, so you have trouble being able to directly discuss issues with the staff. Your assistant doubles as your interpreter and off you go to change the world.  Headquarters keeps reminding you they expect you to get the business to start performing, after many years of it going absolutely nowhere.  You don’t know what to change at first, so you take some time to understand the lie of the land, the people, the clients, the market, competitors, etc.   Gradually it dawns on you that the sales team are not doing a good enough job.  They only like seeing the same clients and make no great efforts to go and source new clients.  You also start to realise that your leader group are not much good at leading.  They have made it to these positions through dint of age and stage and haven’t had any real training on being a leader.  You start to suggest some things you think will spark more sales, but you immediately run into heavy resistance.  You are told you don’t understand Japan and things can’t change very easily here and we should keep doing what we have always done. You also notice that people are guarded with you and won’t open up.   As you get to know Japan better and speak with more experienced fellow expats running businesses here, you start to doubt what you are being told and doubt the people telling you.  You start to think that the only way to change the business and get it out of the rut it has fallen into, is to change the people.  Meanwhile headquarters are saying rude things like, “you have been there for nine months and there has been no change in results”.  They want to know when you are going to get things moving in Japan.  You try to explain that Japan is “different”, but they have no idea what you are talking about and these pleas fall on deaf ears.    The global engagement survey results come out and APAC is the worst performing region in the entire world and Japan is the worst performing country in APAC.  Headquarters want to know why you are not getting the team properly engaged in their work and how you are going to lift these engagement score numbers. They expect to see a big improvement by the time of the next survey (or else!).   You feel the pressure and realise you have to make major changes or you will be sacked.  The kids have settled into their new school and you don’t want to uproot the family and head back home in failure.  So you try to fire some of the people who are non-performers, blockers, deadwood.  Immediately you are told by the local HR that you can’t fire people in Japan and that they will have to stay.  You dig in a bit deeper and realise you can fire people, but the cost of paying them out is considerable.  You bite the bullet on the money and fire them and bring in new blood, hoping to spruce up the team. The new people are a disappointment too and seem to have decided they would rather fit in with the existing team, than join the revolution. You couldn’t afford to hire A players so you had to go with B and C players. The new people quickly realise that you will leave after a few years, but they will have to continue to work with their new colleagues. They decide to assimilate with the existing culture and not join your revolution.   You suddenly get an angry call from your boss back at headquarters.  He wants to know “what are you doing over there in Japan.  The Board has received a series of handwritten, unsigned letters from members of staff, complaining about you.  They are being told you are lazy, incompetent, don’t understand Japan, are ruining the brand and destroying relationships with clients.  And you are sexually harassing the staff”.  Your boss has been designated with the task of dealing with this by the Board and they are taking the accusations very seriously. Especially the sexual harassment claims. You are astonished and protest your innocence to no great avail.   Your breath is literally taken away by these accusations.  Your body is trembling. Who would write such a bunch of blatant lies about you?  You start thinking through the members of the team and try to figure out who are these assassins.  Everyone shows you respect, they don’t openly display any hostility toward you.  It is so puzzling.  You ask for copies of the letters and have some handwriting experts help you to identify the perpetrators of this massive injustice.  Unhelpfully, no clear conclusions can be reached, so you are still in the dark about who is moving against you from within.   Your boss, feeling the pressure from the Board, is mainly worried about his own backside.  He wants to know what you are going to do to fix the mess you have created.  You try to explain Japan and how it works to him, but you realise he is just not listening. To you, it feels like they all seem to think Japan should operate like back at home.  You have no support locally and no air cover back at headquarters. Your rivals back there are having a field day with your troubles and are taking advantage to push themselves forward as future leaders, instead of you.  Your wife expects you to fix it too, because the kids have made friends at school, she has formed a nice support group for herself and she doesn’t want any disruption to the family unit.   The latest engagement survey has been delivered and the results are even worse than the previous one. Again the pressure from headquarters becomes intense.  Your mind is in a fog.  If you try to incorporate the changes you know need to be made, various local staff will be threatened and will knife you in the back.  They have strong vested interests in seeing things stay just as they were. Further, they have no compunction and no moral restraints on doing anything in order to get rid of you, to stop the process of change.  They know they can outlast you.  All they have to do is freeze the results by doing nothing different, keep up the pressure and wait. The letters keep turning up and your boss is on the phone again, but now with a cold, non-supportive attitude and clearly no tolerance for more of the same.   You have been in Japan for a couple of years now and you know better how things work.  You now know that most of what your people have been telling you is not true.  They say changes can’t be made, but what they really mean is, they don’t want to make the changes.  Well except one and that is changing you as the local President.   Finally, your boss calls you and tells you your assignment is terminated and you have to return to headquarters.  You wife is very unhappy, because you have to pull the kids out of school. She asks you how you will find a place for the kids in a decent school back home, at this stage of the year.  You are utterly defeated by your team, who are silently smirking and triumphant. The door slams hard behind you. In a few weeks your replacement turns up and round two gets under way.  Your assistant quits because her protector has been removed and she can’t deal with the team on her own. The score is “locals” one to “expats” zero.   The moral of the story is if you want to be a change agent in Japan be very, very careful.    First of all, understand there are absolutely no rules here.  This is a vicious, brutal street fight with only one winner and the odds are stacked against you from day one.  Before you even accept the assignment, get guarantees written in blood by the hierarchy at headquarters, that you will get air cover once you start making changes and begin to upset the deeply entrenched vested interests in Japan.    Tell them that they can expect unsigned handwritten letters accusing you of anything and everything, in order to discredit you.  Instead of being alarmed, they should see this as an indicator of progress.  It means you are making substantive changes for the good of the business. They should ignore them entirely and count them as a cost of change.  They have to understand this is a rear guard action by a bunch of loser hold outs, who do not have the firm’s best interests at heart and will stop at nothing to maintain their cushy positions.   Have the leadership accept that this change process will not succeed in just one or two years.  This is major cancer surgery and will have to be sustained over time, if the business is to be saved.  Get them to agree to a fund for staffing payouts in Japan, as you start to cut the deadwood and replace them.  Also get monies put aside to work with head hunters, to source higher quality A player leaders who will support what you are doing.  You need your own loyal crew in there to help you drive the change and switch the odds in your favour.  You want people who are equally committed to change, to do the heavy lifting with you.  Ask that no engagement surveys be conducted in Japan for five years, because that is how long it will take to see the results of the changes.   Once you get these agreements in place, then take the assignment.  If they don’t go for it, then decline to go to Japan.  You will only face massive stress, sleepless nights, family disruption and it will leave a nasty stain on your, until now, excellent unblemished work record.  Let some other ambitious executive go and try.  Wish them luck.  They will need it.

How To Kill Off Organisational Silos   Every organisation suffers from the Not Invented Here syndrome.  This is where collaboration is dismisseD in favour of independence, even when it is a cost to the business.  Sections or divisions within the body of the organisation do not cooperate and form a united front to win in the market, because of rivalry, stupidity, egos, history, politics etc.  The cost of all of this hairy chested independence is high.    Gaining collaboration from other parts of the organisation is the mark of the superior leader.  The good news is that we don’t have to work this out for ourselves.  There is a nine step method we can follow to make sure 1 + 1 = 5 rather than 2.   Goal Defintion What is the issue exactly? What is the central goal we wish to achieve through this collaboration?  How will this increase the competitiveness of our team against the rival companies’ team?  We need to define what success lookS like at the start.   Building A Case Opinions are cheap and everybody has one.  We need to come armed to the teeth with facts and data to be persuasive.  We need to gather all the relevant facts about the current situation, so that we can clearly articulate the starting point and also elaborate what the finish line will look like.   Define The Issue Clearly We know where we are now, having gathered the data.  We know where we need to be, to win in the market.  Why aren’t we there already?  What is lacking or missing or insufficient?  How will this work?  Who needs to do what for all the moving pieces to line up for success?   Request Help Strong individuals are often driven to do things independently because they want to claim all the glory at the end.  Too many “I Did It My way” sessions at the karaoke for these types.  The greater good, the bigger picture, has to be the focus. Winning as a total team rather than as individuals, requires humility enough to ask others for help.  When asking, the request needs to be very detailed and specific, so that the assisting party knows what resources will be required and how much time burden will be involved.   The Art Of The Possible The initiating group has to be able to accept other thoughts and means of achieving the end, rather than being locked into what they think should happen.  The “how” part needs to draw on ideas from all parties and be reformulated so that the sense of ownership is as widespread as possible.   Collaboration In Action Brainstorming together as a reality is now taken to the entire group, so that everyone has input. If the correct method is being used, then fast thinkers, slower thinkers, deeper thinkers will all be tapped for their ideas.  The ideas initially generated won’t be judged at the generation stage, as that will be left to later in the brainstorming.   Implementation Ideas are cheap. Action is what creates value and now the ideas created have to be acted upon.  As we don’t know what will work and won’t work, we are constantly testing progress to make sure we are on the right track.  We don’t want to commit too many resources, too early to discover our plan cannot work.  We keep pushing forward through the milestones to make sure this is the right thing to continue doing.   Follow-Up We need to keep everyone on board, so we need regular check-ins on progress to make sure the time and resource commitment is being honoured.  We don’t allow people to drift and drop out, because we are carefully monitoring the milestones we have set.  Accountability Is a big part of success and this is where the leader needs to apply maximum scrutiny and pressure.   Evaluation How were the results? Did we achieve what we intended to achieve.  What things emerged that we had not counted on?  Did we make the targets we had set for ourselves?  Did our activities throw up new opportunities we hadn’t thought about or did it close off possibilities which were once considered valuable?  Did we adopt an attitude of there is no failure only learning?   Getting different groups to cooperate is always a struggle.  The bigger struggle is to try and do it without a solid mechanism to make sure it works.  We usually try and build the plane in the air, rather than having a solid blueprint before we touch any materials or tools.  This nine step process is the blueprint. When followed it will absolutely guarantee we will do a better job, than if we were left to our own devices, to work it by ourselves.