Japan’s Galapagos Syndrome Still Alive And Well   The description of Japan, as similar to the remote islands of Galapagos off the South American coastline is often quite apt. The fauna and flora of the Galapagos Islands are unique and have become so, through their splendid isolation from the outside world. When the ruling Tokugawa family declared death for anyone coming into Japan or leaving Japan, with the exception of the Dutch down on tiny little Dejima Island in Kyushu, the country went into isolation from the rest of the world. Many things in Japan still continue in isolation despite the country opening up to the world, thanks to the arrival of American gunboats in the 1850s.   In 1992 I was posted in Nagoya, for four years, launching up a totally new operation there. I found it tough. We were trying to get Australian products and services into the Chubu region market, but the mental resistance was quite strong. Initially l thought it was because we were foreigners. I discovered that even those Japanese who were posted there from outside felt the same sense of isolation.   The people who staffed the companies in Nagoya graduated from schools and Universities in Nagoya or its surrounds. They spoke the local dialect, Nagoya ben and supported a range of parochial activities that differentiated them from “outsiders”. Being from Queensland in Australia, I knew all about parochialism. The Japanese staff I met in Nagoya coming from “outside” that region couldn’t wait to get out, because they complained they never felt accepted by the locals. This is the Galapagos syndrome in action.   Now the four years I spent in Osaka from 1996 were quite different. Yes or No was quite quickly forthcoming which was great – you received a decision. In Nagoya it was usually No. Osaka was more open but they also felt a jealousy with that upstart Tokyo. Osaka had been the commercial capital of Japan for centuries until the Tokugawa family decided that they would make the sleep fishing village of Tokyo their national headquarters. The locals mainly all went to school and university in the region, spoke the local dialect Osaka ben and supported a range of parochial activities that differentiated them from “outsiders”.   Back in Tokyo for the third time in 2001, I felt freed from all of that narrow minded regional parochialism. Sadly the narrow mindedness continues even here. I find this often in business. For example, when you go to a networking event, no one seems much interested in networking. The company representatives stand around talking to people they already know. If one of them knows someone else there, then an introduction is made, but no one is actively walking around handing over their business cards or meishi to strangers. Not done old chap, what.   Even at international events held in English hosted by the various foreign Chambers of Commerce, the more cosmopolitan Japanese representatives seem reluctant to network and meet new people. Surprisingly, if they arrive early, they go straight to a table and sit down – a sort of seated wallflower. When I approach them and ask to meet them, their faces drain of blood and they go quite pale at the thought of having to speak to a foreigner in English. I see the spread of relief in their faces when I switch to Japanese. Puzzling though, that the company would send someone to an international event, who is scared of having to speak to foreigners.   Who is educating these company staff about how to get out of their own mini-Galapagos? Their bosses are either doing the same thing themselves or they are ignorant of what a poor job their people are doing. I met someone at a recent networking function and followed up the next day, asking to be introduced to their HR person, so I could introduce Dale Carnegie Training to their company.   The HR person replied to them, they already have training contacts and so no need to meet me. It is quite normal that they may have some current suppliers but what struck me was the reluctance to expand their world. Here was someone in their comfort zone, settled in snugly in their mini-Galapagos.   Yes, they may have an existing supplier, but why is there no interest to know what else is out there. I can guarantee that the other supplier is not 106 years in operation globally or 55 years in Japan; that they have offices in 100 countries around the world; that they supply training to 90% of the Fortune 500 countries. No, they are not doing any of that!   Now I am obviously very proud of what we do, but that is not my point. What struck me as strange is why is this HR person doing such a poor job for their company? If they were half awake, they would want to expand the range of options and look for the best quality training they can find, to give their company a competitive edge in their market. Ultimately, it may not be with us, but at least they should be better led to get their thinking out of Galapagos and into the real world. This is a major recruiting, training and leadership issue.   In Japan, HR are often the internal police, making sure all the regulations and procedures are being followed. What we call strategic HR barely exists here. The idea that HR can impact the company’s results is a thought rarely held in their minds. They are relentless box checkers – placing a check mark when activities are completed, rather than analyzing which are the best activities.   This is a leadership decision to have people like this running such a vital function. Take another close look at who you are employing in the HR function. You may be shocked to find out they are dummies, not doing the firm much good at all. Japan in general and companies in particular, cannot afford to be mini-Galapagos Islands in this matrixed, inter-connected, 24/7 global construct called modern business. Time for a change.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Japan Must Globalise But Where Are The Global Leaders?   The consumer demographics for Japan are crystal clear. The domestic market is shrinking and will continue to do so into the future. The population is aging, so there are opportunities serving that market today but it is a shrinking market over the long term. Once this baby boomer generation passes then the revenue problems will really hit hard. Basically japan is not a growth market in most sectors. Japanese corporations recognise this and are expanding their operations overseas. Part of this process is the globalisation of these companies, as they realize their staff have to become more global in outlook and capability for the organisation to survive.   Junsuke Usami, a partner at L.E.K Consulting wrote an interesting article on this issue, which was published in the Diamond Harvard Business Review. To have capable Japanese leaders who can run a global business is a reflection of Japan’s difficulty in producing strong leaders in the first place.   He noted four syndromes that prevent Japanese companies from developing strong business leaders. I am going to add my take to explain the four problem areas he has nominated.   Cannot do early promotion for high potentials Everyone enters the company on April 1st and moves forward on the basis of age and stage, not talent. Seniors rank over juniors and it cannot be the other way around in a seniority based system. No matter how capable the junior staff may be they will not be selected to lead folk older than them. In the old system of lifetime employment, staff knew they would get a chance at one point in the future. That is not felt to be an iron clad guarantee anymore, so the talented are more skeptical than in previous generations. As the young sign up for a free agent era of employment, where there are prepared to walk out the door if they think the grass is greener on the other side, this loss of talent to competitors will be painful. If you have no system to fast track the next generation of global leaders within the company then progress will be glacial, in a world that is moving so quickly it makes your head spin.   Cannot give high potentials stretched challenges to accelerate their growth Before the economic bubble burst in the late 1980s, Japanese companies had so many levels within their promotion systems. You progressed in tiny increments. This made sure the rate of progress was slow. Access to challenging work was limited. The plus side was that you get coaching on the way up from your boss, so the OJT or On The Job Training system, more or less worked. The collapse of the economy saw many layers cut and everything compressed. The bosses today have to do their own email typing, are terribly time poor because their job scope got much larger and are basically out of the successor coaching business. The jumps are now much larger, the number of positions much fewer, so the difficulty of moving up has become much greater. Bosses are not delegating because they think, “it will be faster if I do it myself”. They are also risk averse to delegate to a subordinate, in case the delegatee makes a mess of it and blows up the boss.   Cannot take risk This is part and parcel of growing up in Japan. Risk aversion is built into the DNA. People know if they make a mistake it could be career ending. They are so scared of a mistake, they prefer to do nothing and make no decisions, even though both avenues are against the interest of the company. In large companies HR is feared because this is where the collection of all the records of any mistakes made are kept and these are brought out when it is time to consider which of two candidates to choose for the promotion. We are all the product of our mistakes and that is how we learn. By denying people the right to make a mistake, we are holding them back. This has an impact on the range of experiences available to leaders as they rise through the ranks.   Develop only “company professionals” not “management professionals” Traditionally there have been very few mid-career hires in Japan, so the bonds of those who have joined the company straight out of university are strong. Everyone has shared experiences in the company and groupthink becomes entrenched. Relationships within the company become the way of moving upward rather than through ability. Internal patrons become important and are a substitute for personal capability.   These four syndromes identified by Mr. Usami guarantee that companies won’t create strong leaders. The gap between where companies are in the leadership journey and where they need to be just grows every year. If they were able to stay entirely domestic in their focus then it would work, as it has its own circular logic.   The brave new world outside of Japan can’t accept this construct and this gap is agitating against producing the global leaders the companies need to progress in the 21st century. The talent is there, it is just unable to be properly developed. It is all a bit depressing really and you have to worry about the country’s future if they can’t fix this issue of not being able to produce strong leaders, who can deal with the global challenges facing Japan. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.      

Questions As Incoming Missiles   The new President, a super star with a brilliant resume, started attending our Division’s weekly meetings. We were between divisions heads, because he had just fired the old one, so he took it upon himself to see what was going on. We were all pretty excited to be in the presence of corporate royalty. The first meeting, though in a room a bit small for all the people crowded in, seemed to be going okay as people reported the results. But then things went a bit crazy. When he didn’t like what he heard, he would explode with rage, going from zero to 100 in a nanosecond. His fury was so intense and his questions were brutal and lethal. If you were on the receiving end, your spine simply decalcified on the spot. Every week the meeting was like this.   Here is something I noticed. Never sit in front of an enraged President. Whoever sits in front is going to get both barrels between the eyes. It happened every week, time after time. Get there early and always sit at the absolute end of the long table, on the same side as the President. It is very hard to see you there, so you can escape his wrath and get a good view of the decimation taking place amongst your colleagues!   In business, we are sometimes confronted by a doozy of a question. It could be from the Board Chairperson, an unhappy client, a town hall meeting for the staff, the union delegation, cranky shareholders, an overly ambitious peer during a presentation to the big bosses or a member of the audience attending one of our speeches. Usually we don’t handle it very well, because we rush to defang the question by answering it immediately. We speak, drawing on the first thing that pops into our mind, rather than going to our third or fourth more considered response.   When questions are thinly disguised incoming missiles, everyone around us takes cover, in case any of the debris lands on them. A lot of gazing at shoes starts to happen and we feel we are out there on our own. Counter-intuitively, when we handle one of these very hot ones, everyone is really impressed and our stocks rise substantially. So knowing how to deal with danger can be a rather large positive. Great, so how do we deal with trouble?   This requires discipline, concentration and courage. Do not allow your face to show the shock of the assault. Put up the best poker face you can manage as you listen to the tirade. That also applies to your body. I was under attack in a public situation and I caught myself moving my head slowly from side to side, as a sign of my negativity to what was being proffered. I wasn’t even aware at the start that I was even doing that, so we have to be careful to rein ourselves in physically.   Also never nod up and down as you listen to the question under any circumstances. It is a habit we have created to acknowledge that we are listening to you, but it can get us into trouble. If it is being filmed, the clever editor will run your apparent agreement with either the negative comment of one of the participants or from the host of the show. It looks like you are agreeing with them.   Repeat the question, but do it in a way that kills the power of the weapon. In a public occasion, people often cannot hear the question, so it is legitimate to repeat it for the audience. When we repeat it though, we emasculate it. For example, imagine it is a town hall meeting and the question rockets in that, “Isn’t it true that 15% of the staff are going to be fired in this financial year?”. We don’t repeat , “The question was are we going to fire 15% of the staff before year end?”. Instead we neutralise the fire of the words and say, “The question was about staffing levels”.   Just by going through this process alone, we are buying ourselves valuable thinking time. We can add extra thinking time when we include a cushion statement. This cushion is nice, fluffy and soft and is placed between the hard, sharp edges of the question and our answer. In the example above I might say, “Getting the correct balance between work volumes and staff to do the work is important”. In the cushion, we are looking for a statement which will not ignite more opposition or raise temperatures in the room. We want something bland and neutral. This statement gives us more scope to formulate our answer to the question. Remember, we are looking for the answer as close as possible to the one you get hours later, when you have thought further about it and realize, “I should have said this or that”. Too late by then, but if we can buy a bit of time we will do much better with our immediate answer.   When answering the questions we can deny it, admit it, reverse the proposition or explain it. If it is factually incorrect, misinformation or a misinterpretation we need to deny it, in order to quash rumors and incorrect musings.   If it is true, then own up to any misunderstandings, mistakes, or errors. There is nothing so pathetic as someone who is clearly wrong, trying to wriggle out of it with mealy mouthed excuses. Harden up and be accountable.   If it is a negative, there may be some silver lining in the clouds. We need to look for that and bring it forth in an attempt to create some better balance of the interpretation of what has happened.   We can also simply explain what is going on. We can clarify misunderstandings, give background information which led to the decision in dispute and provide other relevant details.   No matter which of these we choose, we need to be very careful when delivering it. When presenting we always spend six seconds using our eye contact to engage with each person in our audience. When starting the answer, look straight into the eyes of the person who raised the question. No matter how scary they seem, look straight at them. After that ignore them completely and only talk to the others in the room. Look at each person for six seconds and then move on to the next person. Keep repeating this.   Often people are trying to upstage us, embarrass us, make themselves look smarter than we are or any other number of stupendously stupid motivations. Don’t give them any additional attention. By ignoring them completely, we take away the limelight and their power.   If it is an incoming missile, they are not for converting to your point of view, so don’t even bother.   To get the balance back on track, after giving your brief answer to their missile question, tack on a piece of good news about what the organisation is doing. We need to re-arrange the audience’s perspectives. They are focused on what is wrong through the question, so we also need to get them considering what is working well.   When we use these techniques, we look sensational because everyone else in the room is cringing, trying to become the smallest possible target and worried they might be next for a tongue lashing. We hold our head up high, defuse the missile and look so professional. If your boss is unhinged like our erstwhile President at the beginning of this story, then getting your seating arrangements properly sorted is your only hope!   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Effective Team Building Is Not A Snap   You are sitting there at your desk beavering away as usual when you get the phone call. Suddenly you are called upstairs by your boss to their office. You are informed there is a new project needed and that “we want you to head up a new team to get it done. There is a lot counting on this and time is of the upmost urgency”.   This is good and bad. You are already very busy with a bunch of other work not yet completed and this project sounds very high risk. If the project doesn’t get done well and on time, you know your head is on the block. On the other hand it is a chance to shine and show the big bosses you are more than ready to join their elite company.   The only problem is you cannot do the whole project by yourself. Fortunately, you have been given permission to pull together the team you need to get the job done. In a perfect world, like you see in the movies, you would be selecting the all star team of high achievers and the most motivated dudes and dudesses on the planet. Not going to happen.   You will have trouble getting anyone initially because no one is available and the talented few are totally locked in to other projects. You will get the team you can get, not necessarily the team you want.   This will be a new team and therein resides a raft of complexities right away. You are highly motivated because it is a make or break chance for you. For the team members it is an additional burden in their work lives they feel they don’t really need. We have to disengage them from their existing work to make space for the new project. No one is happy about doing that by the way because they know their current tasks aren’t going to be magically completed by someone else, while they are working on this project for you.   You might have been given the authority to create the team but the members hearts and minds are not something that can be won over by fiat. How can you get them enthused and motivated about the project? It sounds like a cliché but you need to establish the WHY we are doing this project through the Vision for the team.   This cannot be an email you send out alerting everyone to the new team Vision. We need buy in. “People own the world they help to create” tells us they need to be the ones who create the Vision. We need to use our communication skills to explain the veracity and urgency of the WHY of the project. Having done that we need the team members to create the Vision. This will be the guiding light for going forward.   The team collectively completes the project. That means each person has to be motivated to work hard on the project. They have to defend milestones, to adhere to quality standards, to be accountable and to get on with each other and with you.   The getting on with you is not a given. You have to earn their respect, commitment and effort. You can threaten them with diabolical outcomes if they don’t toe the line and try and put the fear of God into them, so that they get with the programme. Stupid idea – don’t do that. You will only ever get partial buy in at best. At worst, they may even sabotage the project to see you ejected out of the organization once it fails. Instead use human relations skills to create the environment where they will motivate themselves to do an excellent job.   Here are some basics in human relations skills that will help you to create a team of believers, rather than resisters.   Become genuinely interested in other people The key word here is genuine. People can spot fake interest from far away. By talking with them about themselves we can understand what motivates them. Everyone is different so no “one size fits all” type of approach will work. You need to understand what excites them individually , what is important to them and find a way that this project will deliver that for them.   Smile Sound so simple. Except that busy people, time pressed types, stressed individuals forget to smile. This could easily be you or become you. When you engage with your team you have to remember to start every interaction with a smile. People will gravitate to people they like and there is nothing more powerful than a smile to build a strong bond between people. Forget that fake smile business, this has to be genuine. You will be surprised how little you actually smile at work. We are all so serious at the office, we just train our facial muscles to scowl and show worry, more than we train them to radiate goodness and light.   Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. We are usually poor listeners, especially bosses. We are in the habit of making announcements, firing out orders, issuing directives, scolding poor performance, and telling others what to do. We are always perpetually super busy, so time is money and short form communication using headlines becomes the norm.   ‘The trigger to our engagement of staff is creating the strong feeling of being valued. There is nothing more powerful that listening to your team members for creating motivation. When we really listen to them, they feel they are valued, that what they do is appreciated, that they make a difference around here. Telling them what to do just doesn’t stimulate that level of emotional commitment to any great extent. We listen to learn what motivates them, to hear what concerns them, to build empathy with them. This is powerful.   Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. Our team members have one constant thought - what is in it for me? If we keep their perspective at the forefront of our minds when we are talking to our team members, our communication skills and persuasion skills will be excellent. Forget about what you want. What do they want and how can this project bring it to them? If we talk about the wonderfulness of the project in its own right that might make us the boss feel good. The team members are much more interested in how this project is going to be wonderful in helping them get their goals met.   Leading isn’t about being the most gifted technician, the one best with numbers, the grey beard with the most experience, the hardest of the hard skillers. It is about getting the team to function well together because their commitment is sky high. The reason it is sky high is because you are an outstanding team leader who knows how to use these human relations principles and use them in a genuine not manipulative way. People are not stupid. They can tell if you are genuinely interested in helping them meet their goals or not.   Be genuinely interested in your team and your projects will be successful. You will be given more and more responsibility. The leader who can have people willingly follow is the leader that every company wants. Become that leader. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

My Japanese Managers Are Duds      The foreign firm sets up in Japan and they hire an experienced senior Japanese President. Things roll along, although with Japan operating like another planet. VIPs visit. Meetings are held, plans are made. The results never seem to come to fruition, despite the passing of time. “Japan is different” is trotted out each time to explain. Finally headquarters snaps, fires the extremely well paid Japanese President and send in their own guy or gal to turn things around. The newbie arrives into a heavy fog engulfed landscape, where nothing seems quite right. Three years fly by, the fog is lifting a little, but no real progress has been made. The newbie is transferred out and another one is dispatched to Nippon.   Now in the process of trying to reattach Japan to the mothership, for the first time, headquarters has better information about what is going on in Japan. It doesn’t seem to be helping much though. The new President surveys the team and finds major gaps, especially with the managers. The first observation is that they don’t seem to be any good any managing. They seem to be weak on communication, coaching and motivating skills. This is a bit hard to tell though because of the language barrier.   Over time the President finds an interpreter inside the company who can help with the language challenge. Without knowing it, the new boss has now anointed this handy person with a lot of power to influence. If they are a relatively junior person, which is often the case, then they start to be whisked outside their expertise areas pretty quickly. The boss starts asking their opinion about issues that are way outside their experience level.   The firm is being divided up between those that are ready to support the changes the boss wants to introduce and the group who want to maintain the status quo. From a Japanese perspective, having some “green” expatriate turn up into the country who doesn’t know the culture, language, business practices, clients, competitors or how things are done around here is a scary proposition. The potential damage they could do has to be minimized.   The best way to do that is keep them in the dark, uninformed about what is really going on and to secretly resist all dubious changes. Waiting them out seems like a splendid option. To the new boss’s astonishment, things they want implemented are not. Changes they need made are not. In fact, it seems so hard to get anything done in this country.   When the new boss tries to work through the managers it doesn’t seem to work. They don’t seem to have a strong sense of personal accountability for the results. They seem bereft of any ideas or innovations. They can’t seem to lead anyone to get anything done. They appear to be company bureaucrats who seem wedded to the old way of doing things. Tasks allocated are not completed or are completed at a glacial pace.   Things start to get desperate because now headquarters are breathing down the new boss’s throat about where are the improved results. Desperate times require desperate measures and maybe a good round of firings may focus the attention of the survivors. This is when the new boss discovers things are not so straightforward. Getting rid of managers for incompetence doesn’t constitute a justification for firing them in Japan. The HR function seems to be in the business of protecting people rather than helping to rationalize them.   The opposite tack doesn’t seem to be yielding any value either. Offering people bigger bonuses or commissions to stimulate the greed button in order to punch out more results isn’t getting any traction. “Why aren’t they motivated by money like everyone else?”, the boss sighs.   It rarely happens, but if the new boss took a careful look at the salaries and bonuses of the managers, they would see that they are well paid and having had a big remuneration lunch, they are not interested in any desert. They would also realise that these managers know they can’t be fired easily, so threats fail to move them. They can see that they have been managers for many years but what they cannot see is that they were promoted on the basis of their age and seniority not their capacity. Just to compound the issue, they were never given any training on how to lead. All they have to go on is the example from their own bosses, who were also promoted on the basis of age and stage, rather than ability. A vicious circle of incompetence has been firmly welded into the body of the organization.   Doubts form. Maybe that handy interpreter is in league with the old guard, feeding information both ways, to control how much gets done. A double agent so to speak. The boss’s sense of isolation and powerlessness grows daily. This is not fun and worse, it is derailing a brilliant career. Time to slip the noose and get out. The new President arrives and round and round the merry-go-round we go again. Welcome to Japan! Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Me, Me, Me Leaders   Getting to the very top of a company is a zero sum game where you either make it or you don’t. There are winners, losers and wannabees. For the highly ambitious, the efforts start early. Often from childhood they have self-selected themselves to become the leader. To earn their spot at the top they have to show they can shine, as they make their way up through the ranks. They shine all right. In fact they shine all the light on themselves to make sure they eventually get the top seat. They are selfish, self centered, self-promoting and out of date.   The world of work has moved. Sheer will, dominance of others, baring of teeth and the pointed display of claws isn’t as important as it once was. In the modern firm, we need to see teams working well together, both internally at the section level and at the broader level of a total company-wide team effort. This requires an aspirant for the big job to have a greater degree of big picture vision and strong sense of holistic responsibility for the entire fleet, rather than your own little row boat.   This is not how we have been developed in the past though and so old habits are hard to break. The Golden Rule of Bosses in the past was simple. Anything that went well was “all my own work”. Anything that crashed and burned was “the fault of others”. Claiming credit for everything, attaching your name to successful projects (when you actually hardly contributed anything) and widespread sucking up to the top echelon was de rigeur.   It is a tricky separation between supreme self-belief and narcissism. Many bosses cross that line and become all about how great, smart and special they are. This is the well trodden philosophy of “pick me, pick me” for the top job road to success. Huge confidence and huge ego often come as a package. It can be a nasty pairing, obnoxious and pathetically shallow.   In our companies we need leaders who others want to follow, who can engage the team and get everyone playing to their full strength. Think about it. If you are not engaged, you don’t care about innovation and making things run better around here. You become disengaged, which in reality, is encouraging a form of self-centered selfishness. Leaders who are all about themselves kill motivation, commitment and engagement. As an aspirant leader though you may think you have to be constantly self-promoting yourself forward. Now where do you suppose you learnt that model of behavior from? Probably your ever upward, elbows at the ready, take all the credit, scrambling boss.   If we want engaged, creative staff we have to give them leaders who are prepared to recognize others for their good work. Hogging the limelight and monopolising successes doesn’t breed any respect from those below. They are not stupid. What they see is that they are considered expendable, that their efforts are being taken for granted and their successes are being looted by their boss. When this is the case, we are not likely to leap out of bed on a chilly morning and rush down there, to work like a demon for the cause. The boss gains staff engagement to the degree they make their team members feel valued. To make them feel valued means putting the spotlight on the team and what they have accomplished. It means being someone focused on the success of others and believing that in their success, lies our own success.   These days, boss’s can’t bully their team members. If they do the power harassment charges will be flying around fast. They therefore can’t use fear as a tool to the extent it worked in the past. There is an old saying that you get further by giving people honey rather than vinegar and it is even more true today. Playing to the strengths of individuals makes more sense than tearing strips off people who struggle with aspects of their work. Our motivation to get better at tasks is critical. When we fail and then have the boss rub our noses in that failure, we can easily feel weak and as if we can’t do the job. The boss’s role is to create the opportunity for staff self-improvement and for them to grow their internal motivation, rather than grow the scope of the boss’s personal aggrandizement of other’s results.   Recognising our people is a big part of this transformation needed for the “me to we” boss. We need to understand that the top executives are all looking for leaders who can produce staff motivation. Yes, motivation is an internal game, but the boss creates the ecosystem for it to flourish in others. The big bosses need to hear about the terrific efforts of your subordinates to fully appreciate you as a leader. Hogging all the glory for yourself is counter-productive. At the best, it means they can’t promote you. They can’t move you because there is no one under you, talented enough to take over. This is your own fault by the way. At its worst, you just identify yourself as a selfish, limelight hogging boor, who is destined for nothing much in particular.   Ambition for yourself is fine, but ambition to become as helpful as possible to the team and produce the next generation of leaders is finer. “Me” moved to “we” as the focus, works much better. Staff developing skills and maintaining courage in the face of fire are directly related back to the attitude of the boss. Exceptional people will shine regardless of what any boss does to them, simply because they are exceptional. They have many choices, are totally mobile and will go where the best opportunities are to be found. It is the other 99% who need our help to become as great as they can possibly become.   Talking up a storm about ourselves (and how awesome we are) or are we talking about our staff in glowing terms. Simple choice really. Which one of these bosses are you now and which one will you be in a year’s time? Is it going to be twenty years of leadership experience or one year of leadership experience twenty times? Time for the focus to be properly adjusted to where it needs to be and that is off the boss and on to the team members. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Japan's Big Challenge   The demographic challenge for Japan is looming on the horizon.  The decrease in the numbers of young people is permanent. What companies will face is a shift in power from the company side to the employee side.  The young entrants into Japanese companies will start to realise they are in super demand.  This will end lifetime employment as we currently know it.  If you meet someone from a Western country who has spent their entire working life with the same company you are always surprised.  This is because we move between companies and this is unremarkable.  Japan will become like this in the future. The issue in Japan will be the two Rs - Recruit and Retain.  How to be an attractive employer who young people want to work for will be the test.  Today with social media there is a tonne of information about companies which allow the young prospects to check us out.  They will particularly be looking for is information on how their supervisors will treat then. Once they get inside the company, they have different expectations to their parents about what they want from work and what they want from bosses. The bosses however may be behind the times here in Japan and not really understanding what they need to do to retain the young. Companies in Japan have not fully realised the ramifications of these changes.  They need to work this out now or the damage will be substantial.  Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.  

Stop Making Yourself Invaluable   It is rather counterintuitive to suggest we leaders become less invaluable isn’t it. When you are climbing over the bodies on the corporate climb to grasp the top positions, you have to show you stand out. You have to show you are “the one”, better than the rest, the most talented candidate for the big job. To get the big job you have to keep repeating this self promotion process at every level, as you climb higher and higher. If it is your own business, you have so much knowledge and passion for the business, you automaticly become the one person holding all the complexity together. This is the Great Man or Woman theory of leadership, a bit like the same phenomenon in understanding history.   The story of kings and queens got a bit of a hiding in the modern histories, as scholars began searching for other factors to explain what has occurred in the past. In leadership terms, the era of the single powerful individual has yielded to a much more complex structure, better reflecting modern business. You just cannot know everything today and be the best at everything anymore, because the required specialist talents are no longer located in one person.   The modern leader has to become the orchestra conductor, rather than the virtuoso violinist. The demands from those being led have also made leadership change a necessity. Staff suffering from cancer and other illnesses need special handling. Aging and often ill parents of staff are a modern phenomenon, because in the past they passed much younger. As we get older ourselves we need to take care of our parents, so this challenges the idea of sacrificing all for the enterprise. Women play a much more prominent role in business than ever before. In modern Western societies the base population is decreasing, the cost of living is increasing and the need to for women to work has changed society’s thinking about how families are to be ordered.   The younger generation entering the workplace have different ideas about what constitutes success and the old model of self sacrifice, sucking up to bosses and seeking the top job at all costs. The leader cannot say they have more skill or knowledge than their staff anymore. When we remove personal narrow band expertise from the mix, we are left with status power. Being the boss gives us authority, but it doesn’t give us followers. We have to earn that follower trust and deference in a way that wasn’t required before.   The ability to have the orchestra play well together, in harmony, happily, each person wanting to do their absolute best is the leadership challenge. How do we get people to that stage? Obviously hard skills are always going to be important but actually are becoming a less important component of the leadership mix. We can employ people with much more specialized hard skills which are more current than our own. We have seen leadership requirements move from a hard skills base to a soft skills base over the last 30 years.   Communication, team building, motivation, recognition, coaching, delegation have supplanted pure technical skills as the formula for getting that orchestra of experts and specialists to play together in a winning way. Part of achieving this state is to let go. To not be the most knowledgeable person in the team, the most technical, the most expert is the key today. We need people with those attributes but we no longer have to be The One. We need to go from being leaders who in the past were forensic fault finders, honing in on weaknesses and mistakes of our staff to becoming good finders. Recognising people’s strengths and coaching them to bolster those abilities is what is needed now. This is extremely hard when you have been brought up under an entirely different value system.   Delegation of your authority and expertise to someone else, knowing full well you could do it better, is another hard nut to crack for the modern leader. The staff member will have certain skills but the objective of the delegation is to lift them up to attain higher level, more impact skills. In the old model, smart subordinates were a danger, because the big bosses might ship you out and move them into your job. So you had to hide stuff to keep control.   The opposite is the case today, because the machine needs more and better leaders and will promote bosses who are machine like at pumping out excellent new leaders. To help prepare these new leaders for the next level we need to give them more responsibility earlier. This means delegating higher level tasks and managing the transition, so that the project doesn’t blow up in our face, but also doesn’t have us micro managing the subordinates into submission.   So what are we seeing in Japan? Bosses are not delegating, coaching, or encouraging. They are maintaining their position through personal expertise, controlling and fault finding. Promotion is still based around age and when they entered the company, so do nothing is a perfect formula for not making mistakes. Success comes from keeping your head down and slowly moving up the rungs of the machine.   The revolution hasn’t quite made it to Japan just yet, but it will arrive. The shortage of younger workers will force the changes though. They are not signing on for what their parent’s generation went for. Trying to force them to bend to the boss’s will, simply because the boss has the position power, will fail. They will vote with their feet and go elsewhere in search of greener pastures.   They will find them too, because the labor shortages will show early adopter companies how to become more successful by becoming an attractive place to work. In typical fashion, once this path is proven, everyone will pile on in and copy the formula. Women are going to be needed in the workforce and they need more flexibility from the system, to raise kids while working and take care of aging parents. This will force companies run almost exclusively by men to change their thinking, rules and systems to survive. It will also force leaders to change. Choose: change or die. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.  

Dealing With Companies’ “Senior Problem” In Japan   A senior problem in the past meant having a “senior moment”, where you forgot something and this lapse hinted at oncoming dementia. Today in Japan it has an entirely different meaning and refers to the demographic problems Japan is facing. Japan is aging rapidly and there is a lot of discussion about the impact that will have on the welfare, health and pension systems. What is not being discussed much as yet is what to do with all of these “young” oldies?   They are reaching 60, which is retirement age, yet they will have many decades of life ahead of them. They are healthy, active, relatively digital, have large networks and considerable experience. They all know the Government pension system will breakdown under the weight of their cohort’s numbers impacting on the cost of the system. They are not confident about having enough money to last their lifespan, so they want to keep working.   Japan’s working population of those aged 15-64 will decline from 65.77 million in 2013 to 37.95 million by 2060, that represents a 42% drop. The ratio of job offers to job seekers in November 2017 hit 1.56, the highest since 1974. Here we have the issue, there are not enough younger workers available to match the corporate demand. Yet at the same time, the population itself is getting older. Bringing in foreigners to make up the difference isn’t an option as yet. The Abe Cabinet has made it clear their stance is they will never adopt an immigration policy to make up for the labor shortage.   At the lower skill levels, the so called trainee system is a disguised immigration activity bringing in cheap workers from Asia to do factory level work. They can be easily repatriated however, so the system has considerable flexibility, even as it is being attacked for the exploitation of some trainee workers taking place.   The Labor Standards Inspection Office in 2016 found 70.6% of workplaces hiring foreign trainees were violating Japan’s labor laws. The Government make tweek the system to iron out some of the worst aspects, but it will always be a temporary approach. These trainees will have to go home at some point. I doubt they will ever be allowed to settle here permanently. Japan values it social harmony very highly and having to tolerate a bunch of foreigners with different languages, ethics, morals, social values and ideas isn’t attractive at all.   What about at the higher end of the skill set scale? This is the issue facing companies. How to keep employed those who would normally be retiring. The current system is that your salary drops to half once you get to 60 and still keep working. That is a simple fixed costs adjustment strategy on the part of companies that will work for the moment. That thinking may change though once the bite of not enough skilled staff is felt more powerfully.   Japan is planning to get around the immigration option with technology. Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, on-line services, automation are the preferred way forward. We see it starting now with places like the retail banks. Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ Bank has seen the number of visitors to its branches drop by 40% over the last ten years and so 6000 positions or 15% of the workforce are being eliminated over the next 5 years. In my own case, I probably get to a bank branch once every two years at the absolute maximum. Overall the number of retail customers using the bank’s services via mobile devices or PCs has increased more than 40% over the last five years. We have moved our service consumption on-line.   Those older workers with skill sets the companies want to keep are being required to move into new fields. Bankers, for example, who were used to commanding teams and being the big boss of their sections are being asked to go on to commission sales arrangements, where they are paid according to their productivity. They are still young at 60 and can work for another 10-15 years if they can make the leap across to a different role.   This is the issue for the leaders in companies. How to migrate these older workers internally, retaining their networks and experience, but having them become more productive in terms of personal output. They need them to vacate their current leadership roles to make way for the younger generation coming through, but they don’t want to lose them at the same time.   They will need training in modern sales for these new commercial roles they are being asked to play. They will need support also to make the adjustment to go from being the boss – a big shot – to just being one of the troops. That, in a formal hierarchical society like Japan will be a hard transition. This means they need some work on shifting their mindsets as well. That type of training is the most difficult given their age and stage but it can be done. I know that is possible because we have been doing it for our clients. Those tasked with leading this group will also have to display really excellent people skills. The leader will need some retraining on how to lead their sempai or seniors, a very uncommon requirement in Japan, where age is so closely tied to power and authority.   The new constellations in the workforce will be challenging everyone. It will become a zero sum game of those who get it and those who don’t. Recruit and retain are the bywords of current and future business success in Japan. If you haven’t put together your strategy on how to motivate your seniors to want to play a more personally productive role in the company, now would be a really good time to start. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

The Foreign Leader In Japan   We know leaders who are friction magnets. They upset those working with them on a regular basis. They are quick to point out their opinion and their view. Their rights are paramount and we are soon informed of them. They are highly driven, powerful, even intense individuals. They are upwardly mobile and have sharp elbows. Basically they are a pain in most countries, but they are a disaster in Japan.   Crash or crash through sounds cool, but it is not a great formula for getting change embedded in the organization. Often Japan can drive everyone nuts because it is so hard to introduce change here. This is not just the frustration of Western leaders sent to Japan on assignment. Japanese leaders are also frustrated that they cannot get the changes they want implemented fast enough.   The forceful expatriate leader in Japan soon discovers that their will is not everyone’s command. At some point they find that force of status won’t work here. Japanese employees have a social contract with the company, such that just firing some of the troops for insubordination isn’t so easy.   Japanese business people value their relationships and so the command to damage those because of the whim of the newly arrived boss is met with stiff resistance. The staff know that in three years or so, this new foreign boss will be winging their way to another assignment, but they will all still be here to pick up the pieces.   The idea of waiting out the new guy or gal is well established. A rear guard action is inaugurated to slow down the change, hide as many facets which no one wants to change as possible and to control how much the new boss finds out. What looked like “we crashed through” actually turns out to be just a “crash”.   There are better ways to do things here, but they involve diplomacy and tact on the part of the leader. Temper tantrums are a part of some Western leader’s management tool kit. Exploding in anger and venting rage at things that they thought were being done, but actually aren’t being done, is part of the package. Venting here doesn’t change things much. People are people everywhere and nobody enjoys being forced to do things against their will. The local staff see themselves as the business experts in Japan. The new boss is seen as so ignorant of how things work here, that they are a danger to the business.   Losing one’s temper is seen as childish and demonstrating a lack of control. A serious business person stays in control and uses their communication ability to persuade others to follow them. They are very tactful when listening to ideas they think are stupid and useless. They control their body language so the other person cannot gauge their animosity to the proposal. Japanese language is a big help here because it is so circuitous and indirect, it is genius at disguising what is really being thought. English and most western languages are much more clear and direct.   Rather than telling everyone what they need to do, to fly straight, which is the usual Western boss proclivity, it is a good idea to ask people’s opinions. Asking for them to volunteer their thoughts is not going to get very far though. Japanese people are hesitant to volunteer that information for fear of getting it wrong. It is probably easier to ask why what you think should be done is going to be difficult. That is a great word “difficult”. In the Japanese context it means “impossible”. The critique ability of Japanese business people is pretty well honed and so they will find the thousand reasons why this suggestion of yours is a bad idea.   The more taxing part is getting everyone to think how to get it done anyway. This is where listening skills and encouragement are major assets for the leader. There needs to be some persistence applied here. The typical first blush replies will be half hearted, superficial answers about how to make it work, with no real belief that any of this effort is even worth it. This is where the boss needs to be dogged, but in a polite, non-aggressive way. Ask them to work on it further. This process needs to keep repeating itself until the project team actually start taking it seriously. This won’t happen in a hurry which is a problem. The Western boss is always in a hurry.   Moving the needle here is a time heavy activity. The consensus building process and the involvement of many stakeholders slows the process down. On the flip side it really speeds things up once the decision is agreed upon. That is a key word “agreed”.   Hearts and minds have to be won over and trust is the key to that process. This obviously isn’t going to happen for quite some period of time. The HQ expectation of a major turnaround in Japan’s results is based on pure fantasy and no understanding of Japan at all. The new boss is caught in the vice of pressure from above and resistance from below.   Just when they start to sort it out and look like they may be making progress, HQ requires their vice-regal presence in the next country and off they go. Their legacy here in Japan is zero, their real impact on the business is still a work in progress that will never be brought to fruition.   Welcome to Japan. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

How To Guide Your Team In Japan Through Change   Up until these last few years being capable and loyal was enough in Japan. Technology has changed the business landscape completely. Post the 1990 bubble burst, the previous many layers of management in Japanese corporations have been substantially compressed. Globalisation is forcing change within Japan and no one is immune from this trend. Team members in Japan have to deal with change and will have to face even greater changes in the future. As their boss, what are some things you can do to help them manage the transition into the new era?   Mentoring the team is going to be critical. To do that you have to become much better organised than you are now. We are all time poor already, constantly swimming against a floodtide of email and social media posts. The inflight passenger safety information videos always talk about in the case of emergency, grab your oxygen mask for yourself first, then help those around you. This is the same. The boss has to be able to allocate sufficient time to the team to help them through what will begin to look more and more like an emergency for Japan. If the boss can’t do that because of poor time management, we will be needing a new boss who can do so in short order.   Here are some ideas around useful conversations you can have with the team members. Talk about change expectations. With flatter organizations and a demographic wave of boomers coming through together, there may not be the same availability of top positions as in the past. There will also be a push to keep everyone working hard into their 70s. Life expectancy will climb past 100 in Japan, so 75, for example, will seem young.   At age 60, companies are putting “retired” workers on annual contracts, at half the salary they enjoyed previously. People are going to run out of money before they run out of life, so they will have to keep working. The individual’s contribution to their own medical bills will see an increase as the government runs out of the ability to fund the current scheme. Those with money will get no help, because that funding will be allocated to those at the bottom of the income tree. Learning how to manage investments to prepare for a long life, will become more pressing.   Building relationships and networks has always been important in Japan. For the young entering the workforce, they will need to think more broadly about these aspects. The lifetime employment mantra, decades at the same employer construct will go. Just like in the West, the young will move around companies more than in the past. They will need to create bigger networks that their parents who stayed at the one employer. They will be fewer in number than in the past, so developing strong relationships with key people will become more important to get things done. A lot of routine work will be done by AI and robots. There will be a need to develop expertise, but there will be a bigger need to let others know about that expertise. Getting training will become so much more important to stay ahead of the automation canibilisation curve.   The idea of starting at the top and working up from there just won’t happen. Those amongst the young who become company nomads, wandering off in some new direction every two years, will not build the skill sets or the relationships they will need to be successful in the future. Patience will be the deal breaker. Those without it will go nowhere in their careers. The concept of going broad in experience terms will be the first iteration of the new era of youth worker mobility. The long game though is going to be gaining automation proof expertise and this will only come with depth of exposure and wads of experience.   The collision of the demographic crunch and Japan’s immigration allergy will just keep pouring more oil on the fire of female participation in the workforce. This means the male/female power structure has to change. The boss is a lady will be much more prevalent than it is today, so young men of Japan, get used to the idea! Global matrix organizations will see the spread of foreign bosses leading Japanese teams but doing so remotely from distant climes. English will finally need to be understood and mastered in Japan, like everywhere else in the world. There will be technology to help with translation, but the human to human interaction needs direct fluency and no machine is going to replace that.   It is a brave new world for Japan, both for those aging and those entering the workforce. The boss will need to be a mentor to both groups as they are all entering unfamiliar territory. Those who are successful doing so, will not experience any particular issues with recruit and retain strategies, because they will be employers in demand. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

How To Get Change In Japan   Japan doesn’t have a monopoly on resisting change. Having said that, it will probably rank fairly high in terms of business environments where it is hard to introduce change. There is a very dogged, well established risk averse culture here which works against change. The Tokugawa family froze change in Japan for 400 years and this allowed them to keep control. It is hard to come up with a local opposite example where massive change was a real winner. Kaizen is more acceptable because it is small increments of change spread out over long periods of time.   To engender change in Japan we have to work through the team members. They have fairly consistent attitudes toward change. Fear of change is a strong driver to resist it. Will the change be a positive or a negative for us? The glass is always half empty in Japan, so the prospect of change being a positive is not a widespread idea. The communication piece around the change becomes very important to negating the negative impression change represents. Involving the team in absorbing the change and directing the change is critical to getting engagement anywhere, but is particularly important here.   The Comfort Zone in Japan is an important location. Making mistakes is definitely frowned upon. Doing new things has a higher likelihood of generating mistakes so better to not get involved in anything risky like that. Growing professionally by taking on risky assignments isn’t greeted with any enthusiasm in japan. In fact everyone wants to have the most narrow band of duties in their job description as possible, to limit the chances of mistakes arising.   Change means letting go of old thinking and procedures. It requires a measure of mental flexibility to make that shift. Rules and procedures are risk buffers in Japan and protect people from errors. Asking teams to change - that is not attractive to those being required to change.   Change can introduce some imbalance and motivation can be the first casualty. Change unleashes stress. We are all trained to avoid stress as much as possible. Japan has a constant stress of high density living, social obligations and tricky hierarchical relations already without bringing in any new changes.   To overcome all of these difficulties we need simple structures that will involve the team, so they they can become captains of their fate rather than galley slaves. The Why of the change is crucial. Unless this is well documented, communicated and explained nothing will happen. Setting the direction is fine but let’s have the team own the execution piece. We need to next analyse where we are now in relation to the change we want to see implemented.   Having done that we need to do a proper job of planning the detail of how this will roll out. The first initiatives are begun and we constantly monitor the progress, expecting to make adjustments. We need to keep a close watch on the direction to ensure we are not moving off on a tangent. When we turn over the implementation to the team, they may develop their own ideas about what is required, which will change the direction of the project and move it away from the goal. This is why with delegation we have strike a balance between freedom to execute but with the need to monitor progress without allowing it to morph into micro-management.   Checking milestones is key to keeping things on track. Accountability may be in place, but that doesn’t necessitate that the requisite commitment is also there. We need to keep a close watch out for drift or non-compliance. This can be a form of passive or silent resistance and we have to nip that in the bud early.   This process is simple but complex at the same time and it requires that one key resource which is in most short supply – boss time. We need to open up our diaries and schedule in the monitoring to check to make sure what we think is happening is actually occurring.   Creating ownership of the execution, paired with boss checking it is being done and is traveling in the right direction, is critical in creating change in Japan.   Unless the leader time purse is opened up, it will not get done under its own steam.   Constant encouragement and auditing of progress have to run in parallel, like a railroad track. If we can be excellent time managers ourselves, we can pull it off. If you want change in Japan be very, very well organized individually or a million winds will blow you off course. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

The Leader Is The Mood Maker   When you are on the executive floor, the carpet is thick, the mood is quiet and the décor is sumptuous. It is a world removed from the scramble going on floors below. Maybe you are in your own President’s office, shielded from the fray outside the door. The further you place yourself away from the troops the harder it is to influence the mood of the team. Of course, you have direct reports overseeing the work and they too should be mood makers in their own right. There is something very powerful though when the boss is also the mood maker.   I visited President Nambu of Pasona a number of years ago, I was super impressed. To get to see him I had to walk past a large open plan workspace, in the center of which was a raised platform, which housed all the senior executives at their desks. I had to then walk on through the shokudo or cafeteria to get to Nambu san’s office. I was curious so I asked him about all these snakes and ladders to get to see him. He said he wanted the executives to be in an open plan environment and visible. He wanted people to see him too as he entered and exited his office, again to be visible. When you run such a huge company as he does, it is easy to become disconnected from the troops. He took physical steps to overcome that possibility.   We can’t be a mood maker in the machine if we hide ourselves away. Even if we are physically removed from the troops for whatever reason, we need to make an effort to be seen. Tom Peters and Bob Waterman chronicled the MBWA (Management By Wandering Around) philosophy in their book In Search Of Excellence. They were advocating that the leader leave their office and wander around to where the troops are and engage with them in their workspace. Find out what they are doing, how the team mood is and look for places to have influence.   In Japan, we have the chorei or morning get together. The Ritz Carlton has taken that idea to a great height. I spent a week on their course in Washington DC studying their management methods. They have a highly dispersed workforce scattered around the globe. So how do they wed the whole thing together so that the customer service philosophy is the same, no matter where you stay with them anywhere in the world? They have their principles of service and everyday, everywhere, at every shift they review the code. They make the code the mood maker.   They have a template to run the meeting and everyone takes their turn as the leader. The day I joined the morning meeting of the executive leadership team, the CEO was there and yet one of the lower ranked crew was taking the lead to run us all through the rituals. This was done everyday, so again the core philosophy was being driven by the top and was being supported with the high visibility of the CEO participating everyday he was in town.   I adopted this for the Shinsei Retail Bank when I was there and I came up with our banking version of core customer principles. We all took part including all the leaders. We did it in every branch location, exactly the same way, every morning. This was the leadership group leading the charge and everyone was aware of it.   In Dale Carnegie Training Japan we have the 30 Dale Carnegie human relations and 30 stress management principles as the core. The morning meeting is done everyday as long as two people are in the office – that is the rule. It is run by a different leader by turn, but always with me participating. We have an open plan arrangement so I can tap the mood of the team all day long. I also use the morning “Daily Dale” ritual to rev up the troops. I don’t pontificate everyday, because it loses its power but I try to do it quite regularly. No matter how I feel that day at work, I have to project energy, passion, commitment to the team. I have to infect them with your enthusiasm for the work. I have to keep reminding everyone of the WHY. I don’t believe we can ever over communicate the WHY to the team.   So get with the troops and infect them with your passion and commitment to the cause. If it is not a cause yet, then make it one. We have to be the key mood maker no matter what our particular mood may be on any given day. We must always be little Mr. or Ms Sunshine! Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.      

Whose Really In Charge?   Japan is going through one round of revelations after another in different industries, where the proper compliance procedures were not followed. In some cases they have not been followed for decades. Which begs the question of who is actually in charge? The senior executives are given reports and rely on those below to feed them the correct information. To make it more interesting the company decides to reduce expenses and raise targets. This is when the creative accounting can really start to ramp up. The shareholders are happy, the Board is happy and so we continue with the winning formula. The only problem is that corners are being cut and procedures are being subverted, in order to meet the “reduce costs, increase revenue” mantra.   Then the whole mess is sprayed across the front page of the newspapers, evening newscasters lead with your firm’s lies and the magazines live off the debris for months. The fake news phenomenon has pointed up the fact that the media is a business. They are more concerned with making money than telling the truth. This whole apparatus is assembled against you and they are relentless, because the hew and cry keeps the cash registers ringing. They want to milk this baby for all it is worth. The shareholders and the Board are no longer happy as the share price plummets and the value of the company shrinks. What was the point then of “reduce costs, increase revenue” targets?   In Australia, after you have done something exceedingly stupid, usually fuelled with alcohol, we amusingly reflect, “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. It is a bit like this in Japan at the moment. There will be pain all around and things will get sorted out, until the next incident. The bigger issue is as leaders how can we trust that the system is working? We assume a lot and we hope a lot. Is that enough?   The complex modern organization structure ensures no one person can keep up with all that is happening all of the time. Therefore we have to delegate tasks and responsibilities down the line. Usually there are checks and balances built into the system to make sure that what should be happening actually is happening.   Japan presents a bit of a bigger challenge because the consequences of failure are so strong here, people are fully prepared to lie to avoid the pain of their failure being exposed. What should be happening isn't and everyone is in on it. Hiding things, withholding information and keeping the boss in the dark are the black arts of corporate life in Japan. Everyone seems to be a ninja at this stuff, so what do you do? As we see daily in the media, even the big guys can’t get it right.   When Nissan’s vehicle inspection compliance sins were revealed, President Hiroto Saikawa pondered why the bad practices hadn’t come to light earlier? He answered his own question, when he also noted that no internal whistleblowers spoke up, because they believed that “the issue would not be resolved even if they reported it”.   You have been appointed the boss or it is your own business, but it runs independently of you in many key areas. It has to. Once you reach a certain scale you personally must lose control or it cannot continue to scale. How do you know what your salespeople are telling your clients? You can’t know. What about the back office people, when they really screw it up? You will always be the last to know, if you in fact find out about it at all.   What can we do? Talk to lots of your customers. Talk to your suppliers. Check that the systems you think are in place, actually are being carried out. Check that the team haven’t dropped some of the systems without ever telling you. You can bet they did that because those systems were “mendokusai” or troublesome. It is always exciting to discover, usually by accident, that the system has been re-routed and what you wanted to happen or thought was happening no longer does! Do regular system and quality audits. Don’t just focus on the accounting numbers in the P&L and the Balance Sheet. Look at your work flows, customer handling flows, follow up systems, etc.   Yes, it is more work and you are already time pressed. I am sure the senior executives at some of these big companies caught up in these compliance violations are being kept pretty busy fighting fires and trying to minimize the damage to the brand. Where would you rather spend your time – in prevention or in rescue? Check early, check often.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.        

Staff On-Board or Over Board?   Recruit and retain must be the mantra for all of us in Japan. If you have been following me, you will know I have been talking about the coming demographic crunch of not enough young people to go around, for the last two years. A number of years ago we had 40% plus of the new recruits fleeing their companies, after getting trained. They were heading off to greener pastures, which they no doubt discovered were not all that green after all. The current number is in the low 30 percentile area and the bad news is it will start to rise again.   We have all seen the news broadcasts of truckloads of the young all wearing exactly the same outfits, sitting diligently in their rows at the major firms recruiting intake in April, at the start of the new financial year. This will continue of course, but the mid-career hiring of the young will become the new black for HR people in Japan.   As the young discover they are in demand and are being scouted, they will start leaving the firms that have already invested in them, in much bigger numbers. The recruiters will be spending much of their time poaching them, even though the fees are not large, because the volume will get them interested. They will be recycling them every couple of years, because that will become the trend in the free agent era of work in Japan. Get them early and keep moving them around, clipping the fee ticket every two to three years. So the “retain” component of company strategy is critical. Well when should we start the retain strategy and who do we apply it to?   Some ancient grey beards believe that losing thirty percent plus of your young is a good thing, because it filters out the losers and troublemakers. It is a type of “generational cleansing” exercise in their minds. That may have been the case in the past perhaps, but today the replacements are not there in numbers anymore.   The retain part of a companies activities must begin from the moment they agree to come on board. Buyer’s remorse is a well known concept in the world of sales, as we come to doubt our own judgment, when we make a big purchase decision. Changing jobs is a major decision too and the prospective candidate can have doubts after agreeing to come onboard. We have to keep in touch with them and keep reassuring them that they have made the best decision.   We can also anticipate that the ferocity of the incumbent employer’s counterattack will go up many more notches, as they realize replacing people is a lot harder than offering them more money to stay. Hint to employers – give your people more money, so they won’t leave, rather than offering it after they tell you they are leaving. The time and productivity lost from the departed, the internal friction their leaving creates and the burden of finding and then on-boarding their replacement are all expensive items.   So the mid-career hire finally arrives. That is right singular, not plural, because they will not come in droves, but instead one at a time. In larger firms, the HR function are there to on-board them and arrange the paperwork, training etc. Is what they are currently doing up to scratch? Probably they have been doing the same thing for many years, so the process is mostly on auto-pilot. But what is the quality of what they are doing? Has anyone done a recent audit of how the new folk are being brought into the warm bosom of the company? Has anyone asked those recently onboarded how they felt about the process? If we are aware we are already in the war for retaining talent, we should take a long, cold hard look at what we are doing getting them on-board.   For smaller firms, there may be no process for mid-career hires, beyond the most rudimentary. We make sure they will get paid, insured, given a desk, phone etc. This is not enough. Small company bosses are very busy and may not be allocating much time for the new recruits. This is an expensive, pseudo time saving energy allocation. The boss has to be more involved than in the past. We have to go back and carefully look at getting the boss more involved, plus the other seniors in the firm. We have the future in our charge now, so we have to start treating them like what they are – gold!   A full daily programme of briefings, self-study, mentoring, training has to be planned well in advance of their arrival. They need to know there is a plan – that says a lot to them about the quality of who they have joined. The good news is once you have created a template, this can be applied to the future mid-career hires as well. No template? Then life gets random, ad hoc and in short order it also gets hard.   Spend the time designing it well and get the needed briefing appointments into the calendars of busy people. We have to create a sense of “I have joined a well organised and welcoming new home for me, the new recruit”. If we start well then the chance of keeping them will also improve substantially. First impressions do count, so we had better design the one we want.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Karoshi Is BS. Overwork Rarely Kills You   So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork. This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice. This is fake news. The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke. In Japan, that cause of death from overwork rarely happens. The vast majority of cases of karoshi death are related to suicide by the employee. This is a reaction to mental and physical exhaustion and the associated stress that piles up, until it is overwhelming. So the real source of death from karaoshi is stress, not physically working too hard. Just where is that stress coming from?   It is coming from two sources: the individual’s inability to deal with the stress of long hours, long commutes, and no time for recovery driving them to depression and ending their own precious lives. The other source is management incompetence to allow that amount of stress to be experienced by their staff in the first place. It is compounded by power harassment of those who struggle to keep up with the output requirements.   In my view, management irresponsibility is the prime killer. If there were no cases of exceptional stress buildup, then the staff wouldn’t need remedial actions at all. The long hours worked, long hours of public transport commutation and high amounts of pressure from bosses are the real problems. The hundreds of extra hours of overtime worked are being logged for no justifiable reason.   In many cases, such as Dentsu, the company tried to hide the extent of the hours being worked.   Management was party to the process, all the while knowing it was wrong. They were also aware of previous cases where people cracked under the strain of too little sleep and permanent tiredness and took their own life. They knew this was a possibility, but did nothing to alter the work flows.   This is criminal and that is what the courts found. Dentsu was fined 500,000 yen by the judicial system. However, was justice served? This young woman was 24 years old when she jumped off the roof of the Dentsu dormitory, to kill herself and end her stress and depression. Many would consider a fine of 500,000 yen insignificant.   The management were unable to control the work flow. If there was so much work on, why didn’t they bring in either more full time staff or part-time or contract workers to help? This is what bosses are paid to do – get through the work and apply the required resources to do that. The system didn’t see it that way. Presumably, they expected the staff to put in the ridiculous hours to save the company the money needed for salaries for new staff.   We can talk about there being a culture of long hours in Japan and it is true. Dentsu was picked out in the 1970s by Time Magazine as a company of fearless samurai salarymen, toiling ridiculous hours for their bosses, so this is not a new development. These long hours weren’t needed then and are not needed now.   It is being driven by a pathetic white collar culture of low productivity. The work expands to fit the time in Japan as per Parkinson’s Law and so working hours elongate to suit. If bosses were capable, they would be seeking improvements in productivity to get through the work in less time. Is Japan not capable of being highly productive?   The kaizen and kamban production systems in manufacturing are well known in the West as methods of achieving maximum efficiency by blue collar workers. The irony is that one hundred meters away, staff in corporate offices are working at super low levels of efficiency for the same company – the contrast is large. How can the same senior managers entertain these two contradictory ideas in their minds, at the same time?   No problem for them because they have compartmentalised the situations. This is how we do it around here and so we will keep it going just as it is. The factory system is different to an office, so there is no commonality. That is simply lazy thinking. Efficiency in process, in workload distribution, in systems sequencing, in checking methods, in approvals are all areas that can be applied to office work as well.   What is being kept alive by mediocre company leaders in the way of standard Japanese corporate practices? Here is a list of leadership crimes for which no one is ever reprimanded. No clear daily prioritised individual goals, poor time management, meetings too numerous and too long. Painfully slow decision-making required to get everyone on board. Disengaged staff turning up to get paid and not motivated to be bothered to innovate. Poor communication, no real coaching, demotivating performance evaluations, mistaken mistake handling methods and zero effectiveness delegation skills on the part of undereducated leaders, promoted on the basis of longevity and age hierarchy, rather than ability.   There are no excuses for this legacy system to continue in the 21st century and we have to change it from the inside out. Government estimates are that roughly 10% of the working population is suffering from depression. It is time to change things in Japan. We should see no more cases of karoshi here – there are simply no justifications for continued company mismanagement of their staff. We need to better educate the leaders on how to lead, to teach the managers how to manage and to encourage the staff to push back on illegal requests from senior management to work crazy hours. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.        

Team, I’ve Got Your Back   We don’t run perfect organisations stocked with perfect people, led by perfect bosses. There are always going to be failings, inadequacies, mistakes, shortcomings and downright stupidity in play. If we manage to keep all of these within the castle walls, then that is one level of complexity. It is when we share these challenges with clients that we raise the temperature quite a few notches. How do you handle cases where your people have really upset a client? The service or product was delivered, but the client’s representative is really unhappy with one of your team.   Often, being the boss, you are the last to find out what is going on. Japan, in particular, is excellent at hiding bad news from bosses. “The less the boss knows about the source of the trouble the better” is the mantra here. Japan is a zero mistake tolerance culture and so everyone has learnt to be circumspect about sharing the bad news around.   The irony though is the boss is the one person with the capacity of power and money to fix a lot of issues. It gets easier to fix issues when you know about them early, rather than trying to sort things out later when the proportion of the problem has grown larger.   I found this when I was working in retail banking here. Compliance violations occur and have to be dealt with. Usually, they are not fatal errors and the person committing them can recover, learn from the mistake and keep going.   The bias toward hiding mistakes though creates problems in the work environment. That minor compliance violation has to be hidden, the perpetrator believes and this is when the problems really begin to kick in. The hiding part is the bigger issue.   The problem is like a balloon that keeps inflating and inflating. You stick it away in your desk draw hoping no one will notice. Discouragingly, the problem gets bigger and bigger until it breaks out of the bounds of secrecy. It now looms large across the landscape at an immense threatening size. The genie once out of the bottle can’t be stuffed back in again.   At the bank, people were getting fired for what were minor compliance violations because they tried to hide it. This was unnecessary, but that didn't change the effort to keep problems away from the boss. Why is that?   The usual boss reaction to the trouble in Japan is yelling abuse. This somewhat hampers the effort to have more transparency. HR recording a black mark in their secret book of employee misdemenours and crimes doesn’t help much either. So we are pretty much guaranteeing that when things go bad, the boss will only hear about it at the worst possible moment. This is usually when the window for a helpful intervention has been slammed shut.   There are always going to be two sides to the story and the boss’s job is to find out both. Sometimes the client’s representative can take personal dislike to our guy or gal, or they can become emotional because they are under stress within their own organization. In Japan they can be feverent about doing a perfect job. If perfection is your standard then there are bound be shortfalls in delivery at some point.   How do we sort this mess out without destroying the relationship with the client and killing the motivation of our own team member. Our team member can genuinely be trying to help the client, but may not have enough capability to do that to their satisfaction. These gaps are what test the loyalty of the team. If the boss hammers their staff member for causing the problem, the rest of the team carefully watches and works out that telling the boss bad news is a losing proposition. They will become experts at hiding trouble until it is too big to hide anymore. This is not an ideal outcome. So we have to back our people, apologise to the client, sort out monies involved with a partial or full refund if they are genuinely not satisfied.   The boss’s job is to switch the brunt of client anger away from their subordinate to themselves, as the senior representative of the organisation, and also become the one to find a solution which satisfies the buyer. In Japan, that means bringing expensive gifts for the client, lots of deep bowing in apology and listening sincerely to tirades from grumpy clients.   If there is going to be any on-going business, it can also mean switching that team member out of that project and bringing in a new person to be the contact point. The air needs to be cleaned up and that means reassigning those previously assigned to the project.   This has to be communicated in a way so that the staff member understands we support them and we trust them. We are now in the modern business era in Japan of recruit and retain. Hanging on to people, even when there have been issues, becomes a much more delicate calculation than in the past. We have to be comfortable with much more complexity than earlier. Simply firing people if the client complains, berating people publically for mistakes, ranting to the whole team about not making mistakes are tools that have seen their used by date pass by. We need to be more sophisticated and nuanced than that today.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

How To Snuggle Up To Employees   We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Drive type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested.   The snag in all of this though is employees don’t want that. They want the boss to be more interested in them, their career and their family. The feeling of being valued by the boss has been found to be an important trigger to create strong engagement in staff. Driver bosses rarely pull that trigger. They believe you need to “harden up baby”, do it yourself “like I did”. They wonder why we need to mollycoddle this lot.   In fact they don’t know how to snuggle up to staff and get to know them, because they never experienced that from their own bosses and they are not built that way. They grew up independent and self-reliant. They are driven to achieve and have a take no prisoners approach to business. They are survival of the fittest advocates. Consequently, they are not much for small talk. They are permanently time pressed, so everything has to be driving toward an outcome or it is a waste of their valuable time.   How do you snuggle up to employees anyway? Bosses need to engage with their staff by using the “innerview” to deepen their understanding of who the person is who works for them, what are their motivations and interests. The skeptics may be thinking “brilliant”. Now they can interrogate their staff, find and start pressing their hot buttons, to get more production out of them having found some keys to staff motivation. This is not what we are talking about. Staff can spot this very quickly. They won’t be interested in being manipulated by their bosses for higher productivity gains.   The effort is to get to know the team better, so that as the boss you can help them to succeed in their work by aligning their goals, interests and motivations with those of the organization. The classic win/win.   Getting to know staff starts with asking basic factual questions. Where did they grow up, where did they go to school, what did they major in. Where have they worked in the past, what are their hobbies, how many in their family etc.   To go deeper we need to ask causative questions. The “why” of their choices. Why did they pick that field of study, why that school, why this company, why that hobby, etc.   Then we get to values-based questions. Getting to know how they tick. If you had your life over again would you do things differently and if so , what would you do? What were some turning points in your life? What have been some of the work and non-work related things you have done that have made you feel proud? If you were giving advice to a person entering the workforce what would that be?   These questions have to be asked in a relaxed manner, not spewed out like machine gun fire. This is getting to know someone better in order to better be able to appreciate them as a person. It is not a drill in shaking them down for private information, which can be used later to exploit them.   Conversations like this, done correctly, invite massive mutual understanding. The end result is better communication and shared values. A uniting of mutual interests toward achieving goals together. So all of you driver bosses out there, this is how to get cuddly with the team. First sort out your objective and make sure it is reflecting the real interests of the staff.   Drop that manipulation thing. Then make the time available to have a deep one on one conversation with another human being who also exists on this planet just like you. Believe me, good things will flow from this.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Vulnerable Leaders   The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them.   When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them. Organisations seem to be stacked with politicians who are excellent at ingratiating themselves with the higher ups and climbing over the bodies of their rivals to get to the top. Their political nous seems to be in inverse proportion to their lack of real leadership ability.   Given we have much flatter organisations today and the correspondent pressure to do more faster and better with less, the pressure on leaders is at an all time high. The super leader is bullet proof, never makes a mistake and sums up the situation perfectly. They are also a pain to work for. Followers don’t deal well with perfection. This is mainly because it is fake, because no one is perfect. It is a leader charade, a marketing effort, a clever attempt to maintain their position power.   We never feel close to people like that, because there is no way in for us to be close to them. They are always separated from us by their self important self-image. We cannot identify with them because while they project they are perfect, we are only too aware of our own failings. We don’t like perfect people because they make us feel inadequate and uncomfortable. They seem nothing like us, so there is felt to be very little in common.   The irony is that as leaders, the less perfect we try to project ourselves, the more effective we will be in winning over followers. Yes, absolutely, we have to be competent, but we don’t have to be perfect. We have the have the goods but we don’t have to be pain. By admitting our foibles and failings, we provide a way in for our followers to identify with us. When your basic premise is “I am perfect”, then you have to invest a lot of energy in backing that claim up and maintaining the perfectly assembled facade.   On the other hand, you can say I am imperfect, but I still bring plenty of value to my followers and the organisation. You are confident enough to say you are not Mr. or Ms. Perfect. People lacking in confidence often try to appear something they are not, because they are not confident to show others their weaknesses. I was exactly like that for a very long time.   When I was younger, I thought I had to be the best, brightest, smartest, toughest, quickest and the hardest worker. I thought all of this was necessary, because I didn’t know how to be vulnerable. I was raised in a typical Aussie macho environment in Brisbane, where men had a clearly defined role and weakness wasn’t any part of it. How about your case?   As you move through your career you meet leaders who don’t make any claims about how great they are and their teams love them. They don’t strut around trying to prove they are the best and they just get on with helping others succeed. They are comfortable within their own skin and having nothing to prove to anyone. They get the job done like a duck on water. Above the surface it looks like they are just gliding along, without any effort being made, while the legs are working away under the waterline.   The current Mayor of Yokohama Fumiko Hayashi was relating a story about her time as a manager in BMW. She was unafraid to appear less than perfect, to encourage the men working for her to help her achieve the firm’s goals. She later became president of BMW, Tokyo Nissan Auto sales and the Daiei supermarket chain - all bastions of male management.   She was able to project her vulnerability and yet succeed in a male dominated Japan business world. I don’t think this had anything to do with the fact she was a woman. I can think of another example right now of another extremely successful Japanese woman, who just projects ice in the veins, vicious, steely, killer toughness. The out-machoing the men in the room way to the top. This domination approach is one way of doing it and I have worked for plenty of men like that. I never liked them, respected them or was motivated by them. I thought they were jerks. Hayashi san however was able to be vulnerable and get others to help her and this is the lesson we can all learn.   By being able to be vulnerable, we establish a relationship with our team where they feel comfortable. They still respect our ability, experience, dedication, hard work and our focus on helping them to succeed. None of that goes away just because we don’t go around projecting we are superman or superwoman.   So let’s be confident and vulnerable at the same time. If we do that, gathering followers will become easier and leading will become more enjoyable and successful.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Six Nightmare Listeners - Are One Of Them?   We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run into. By the way, do any of these stereotypes sound a bit too familiar to you?   The “preoccupieds” are those breathless types, racing around, multi-tasking on steroids, permanently distracted. They don’t make much eye contact because their eyes are constantly scanning for things other than you in front of them. When we meet this reaction we need to grab their brain. We can say, “Is this a good time to talk?” or “I need your undivided attention for just a moment”. Once we do get their attention, we have to get to the point, because their attention span is fleeting.   The “out-to-lunchers” have the lights on (their eyes are open) but no one is at home. They are thinking about everything else but what you are saying to them. It is a good practice to check in with them to make sure they have absorbed the key points you are sharing. You can ask them a very pointed question about one element to determine if they actually heard you. Closed questions are good because an answer has to be yes or no, they can’t fudge it or fake it easily.   The “interrupters” are ending your sentences for you, jumping all over you while you are speaking, they are fixated with their contribution and not much interested in yours. You cannot stop them so don’t resist. Let them blurt out whatever it is they cannot contain and then interject, “As I was saying…” And pick up where you were, as if they had not spoken at all.   The “whatevers” are giving off that jaded, bored impression that what you are saying is of little interest or consequence. To grab their attention you have to lift your energy and spice up the content, make it more dramatic. Also, ask them specific questions that will draw them into the topic. Use open questions where they have to use actual sentences rather than monosyllabic responses.   The “combatives” are people with a strong sense of their rights and they are very interested in demanding they be heard and defending those rights. They are quick to call out perceived affronts to their dignity and will readily argue the point. Look for points of agreement and concentrate talking about those or ask to agree to disagree.   The “analysts” are logical thinking, very detailed orientated and are always in fix-it mode. They love handing out advice regardless of whether it was requested or not. You can go for idea generation from them by saying “I just need to bring you up to speed, so you know what is happening. I’m not looking for advice”   By contrast what would a good listener look like? The “engagers” are empathetic listeners who really concentrate on what you are saying. They employ eyes, ears, hearts and minds to absorb your messages. They understand that they already know what they know and can learn a lot more from finding out what you know as well. They let you talk. They make you feel good, because they are obviously following along with you and taking an interest.   When they are your boss, they let you talk and give you the opportunity to self discover solutions and ideas. “We own the world we help to create” and bosses who listen and give their people the opportunity to speak, to suggest, to innovate are going to have a highly engaged team. That is the team that is going to win against the vast majority of teams who just show up to get paid. So the ROI (Return On Investment) from listening can be huge. Are you listening?   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

My Boss Doesn’t Listen To Me   If you reading this title and thinking this has nothing to do with my leadership, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants on our training. They complain that the boss doesn’t talk to them enough because they are too busy, don’t have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers into a few. The other has been the democratization of information access. Bosses have been struggling to keep up.   When we had more layers in our company structures, leaders matured like a fine wine. They rose up the ladder in small increments, over an extended period of time and were groomed for responsibility. There were assistants aplenty to do mundane, time consuming tasks. The striping out of the layers, for the sake of cost cutting and “efficiencies”, has thrown this world off its axis.   The fewer layers means the jumps are larger, the responsibilities greater and no assistants. Boss busyness has resulted in less subordinate coaching and delegation getting done. Explanations have been replaced with directives – “do this, do that”. Bosses don’t delegate much anymore, because they are time poor. They don’t have the bandwidth to explain, so they say to themselves, “it will be quicker if I do it myself”. Does this scenario sound familiar at all?   The internet has made information instantly available and free. Boss monopolisation of information is not as easy or replicable as in the past. The amount of information emerging everyday has become a massive flood tide against which resistance is useless. Bosses cannot be in command of its entirety, so they have to rely on others much more than before. They need their subordinate’s help, but the sting in the tail is that they are not doing enough about accessing that help.   Subordinates have good information, get ideas, are closer to the market, collect the most up to date experience and produce insights. Harassed time poor bosses have no time to seek out these ideas and bring these insights out into the open. They don’t create the time required to coach. They do delegation, but in a way guaranteed to fail, because they won’t invest the time to sell the delegation.   The consequence is that subordinates hesitate to engage with their boss, because they see how distracted and frantic they are already. When they do talk to the boss, it is all formulistic around reporting on progress on the various projects being worked on. Bosses don’t bother to enquire about the other key things going on in their subordinates lives. They fail to seek ideas and innovations because they are already preoccupied with their own work. They hover between distracted and selective listening. On a slow day, they might stray into the zone of attentive listening, but that would be a rarity in a year long period.   In fact, bosses tend to excel at pretending to be listening, because they are brilliant at multi-tasking. They are mentally fixated on something else, while they are talking to their subordinates on a completely different topic. Does this ring a bell? They are listening for key items which will be of interest to them and they are tossing out everything else. The subordinate doesn’t feel they are actually being listened to at all. They don’t feel it is attentive listening, let alone empathetic listening. They draw the conclusion that their actual perceived worth and value to the boss is pretty low. They get discouraged and soon just stop inputting ideas into the system.   If you have not been hit up with an idea from one of your subordinates in the last month, take a moment and reflect on exactly when was the last time that happened? The chances are it has been a long time between drinks. The reason is probably that you are not really engaging with the team and making sure they feel they are being listened to. They need to know that their ideas have value, that you are recognising their contribution. They want to see their ideas being put into application. Are you doing this? Are you really listening? Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Leadership Blind Spots   Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep adding more and more certainty to what they say is important, correct, valuable and needed to produce the best return on investment.   With an army of sycophants in the workforce, the leader can begin to believe their own press. There is also the generational imperative of “this is correct because this was my experience”, even when the world has well and truly moved on beyond that experience. If you came back from World War Two as an officer, you saw a certain type of leadership being employed and the chances are that was why there were so many “command and control” leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. The Woodstock generation questioned what had been accepted logic and wanted a different boss-employee relationship, where those below had more input into the direction of the company. Technology breakthroughs made hard skill warriors the gurus of leadership. Steve Jobs abusing and belittling his engineers was accepted, because he was so smart.   Technology has however democratized the workplace. The boss is no longer the only one with access to key information. Being smart and abusive isn’t acceptable anymore. The boss-employee relationship has changed. It is going to keep changing too, especially here in Japan where there are 1.5 jobs for every person working.   Recruiting and retaining people becomes a key boss skill. The degree of engagement of the team makes a big difference in maintaining existing customer loyalty and the needed brand building to attract new customers. Social media will kill any organisation providing sub-standard service, because the damage travels far, wide and fast. The role of the boss has changed, but have the bosses kept up?   Recent Dale Carnegie research on leaders found four blind spots, which were hindering leaders from fully engaging their teams. None of these were hard skill deficiencies. All four focused on people skills.   Leaders must give their employees sincere praise and appreciation We just aren’t doing it enough. With the stripping out of layers in organisations, leaders are doing much bigger jobs with fewer team members. Time is short and coaching has been replaced by barking out commands. Work must get done fast because there is so much more coming behind it. We are all hurtling along at a rapid clip. The boss can forget that the team are people, emotional beings, not revenue producing machines. Interestingly, 76% of the research respondents said they would work harder if they received praise and appreciation from their boss. Take a reality check on yourself. How often to do you recognise your people and give them sincere praise?   Leaders do well to admit when they are wrong The scramble up the greasy pole requires enormous self-belief and image building. Mistakes hinder rapid career climbs and have to be avoided. Often this is done by shifting the blame down to underlings. The credit for work well done, of course, flows up to the genius boss who hogs all the limelight. The team are not stupid. They see the selfishness and respond by being only partially engaged in their work. In 81% of the cases, the research found that bosses who can admit they made mistakes are more inspirational to their team members.   Effective leaders truly listen, respect and value their employees’ opinions Who knows the most? Often the boss assumes that is them, because they have been anointed “boss”. They have more experience, better insights and a greater awareness of where the big picture is taking the firm. So why listen to subordinate’s mediocre and half baked ideas? Engaging people means helping them feel they are being listened to by their boss. Sadly, 51% of the survey respondents said their boss doesn’t really listen to them. Ask yourself, am I really focusing 100% of my attention on what my team are telling me or am I mentally multi-tasking and thinking about other things at the same time?   Employees want leaders they can trust to be honest with themselves and others There are two elements to this – external and internal reliability. External reliability is the boss does what the boss says they will do. They “walk the talk”. In the survey, 70% said their boss couldn’t be depended upon to be honest and trustworthy when dealing with others. That is a pretty shocking result. The internal reliability focused on being consistent with your own core beliefs. Again, 70% said their boss fails in this regard – another shocker!   Obviously, bosses are not employing their full self-awareness about how they are being perceived. You can argue people have it wrong, but perception is reality. We need to pay more attention to each of these leadership blind spots if we want to engage our team members. Only engaged team members can deliver the highest levels of service to clients and that must be our aim. To achieve that, we have to take a cold hard look at ourselves and lift our game.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Leadership Success Formula For Japan   In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks received and others are not. This extends into the world of work where the bell curve is used to decide who are the star players, who are in the middle and who at the bottom are going to be fired.   The modern world of work though demands different things from what we have had in the past. The sheer volume of information available is mind boggling. When I was at University, your world of knowledge was what was on the shelves of the stacks in the University library or other libraries in town. There was a physical card index system to help you find information, although browsing book spines was the fastest method of locating relevant tomes. Today, we have the entire holding of libraries digitized and available for discovery through advanced search tools. We have search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and YouTube to help us find what we need to know.   There are powerful publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram which floodlight information to us, using crowd sourcing of knowledge. We have email connecting us globally 24/7, we have video recordings, live streaming of events, podcasts etc., all drowning us in information. My 16 year old son’s generation will have to learn how to swim in the floodtide of data, how to analyse, synthesise, select only what is relevant, reliable and credible. Voice commands will replace keyboards and AI will speed up the process of access.   Even the single, most powerful, savant cannot withstand this data flood, cannot keep up with the publishing platforms, cannot do it all alone. Teamwork, the distribution of labour based on finite specialties, crowd sourcing of information and ideas becomes a must. Most leaders were not raised in this maelstrom of confusion and over reaching and struggle just to keep up. We were more or less able to have a superior grasp of subjects, better information than our followers, expert authority and greater specialisation to justify us being the boss. Today, we cannot know it all or do it all by ourselves.   In any boss/follower situation, as you climb the ranks you get further and further away from the coalface and have to live the market reality absorbed by osmosis from your people. The flood of information makes that imperative even more pressing. The problem is are you and the other leaders in your organisation, any good at coalescing the team’s total power? Are those at the top able to develop people further to make them highly valuable experts supporting the growth of the enterprise?   In Japan, the middle management echelon has been crushed by technology, too much data and the democratisation of data challenging their position power. Further, the speed of modern business is being propelled forward in asteroid catching slingshot mode, by instant communications and the widespread flattening of layers in organisations. In Japan, the gradual rise through the ranks, where you were coached by your bosses up the corporate rungs, until you got into a leadership position has been collapsed into only a few rungs today. Your erstwhile bosses had the time to develop their people. Today, be you expat or local, you as the boss in Japan, don’t have any time.   You keep adding spinning plates to be kept in motion, as you flit from meeting to meeting, interspersed by deluge email, relentless social media and phone calls on your mobile at any hour of the day. Your “coaching time” has been compressed into barking orders and giving direction to the team. You have no time for doing much brainstorming, because you just have no time. Anyway, the brainstorming method you are using is almost 100% ineffective anyway, so it probably makes no difference. You may as well do a few more emails instead.   Actually, it does make a difference though, compared to what needs to be done. The bosses can’t do it all by themselves anymore. They don’t have all the key data and insights. They are perilously time poor, distracted, stressed and busy, busy, busy. They need to have the support of the team to get all the work done and they need the team to be engaged to care about getting it all done.   People quality is an issue and only going to get worse as demographic decline means anyone with a pulse will be hired. People who just turn up to work in Japan, waiting for their turn to rise up through the ranks, based on when they entered the company, who are scared of their own shadow and can’t take risks are pretty much useless. These people by the way, are the majority of the workforce.   So the boss needs to be able to engage the team. This means being a great communicator, who flags the WHY all the time and makes the smallest task or simplest job seem relevant in the big scheme of things. Leaders have to be able to motivate the team through involving them in decision-making, through getting their ideas out using effective brainstorming methods, through excellent coaching of talent to help them rise.   Delegation is a powerful coaching tool hardly used for that purpose in Japan. It is corrupted by “seagull management” - the “fire orders, dump and flee” technique of the harassed boss in Japan. Because of this, it always underdelivers and underperforms. Excellent time management is a must, if bosses are to have the margin to develop their people. That activity requires good people skills and needs time, it can’t be short circuited or compressed. We have to know what is the motivator for each of our people, so we know how to align the tasks and the work to be a best fit to help them advance in their careers.   The days of the hero boss are dead in Japan. The new boss is sitting atop the amalgam of the talents of the team, orchestrating the teamwork, supporting the innovations, and inspiring greatness through the actual words being spoken into the ear of each single team member. Be honest, tellme, is this what you and the other leaders are doing down at your shop?   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.        

Japan Street Fight Leadership   Change is hard to create anywhere in the world. Getting things to change in Japan also has its own set of challenges. The typical expat leader, sent to Japan, notices some things that need changing. Usually the Japan part of the organisation is not really part of the organisation. It is sitting off to the side, like a distant moon orbiting the HQ back home.   There are major differences around what is viewed as professional work. The things that are valued in Japan, like working loyally (i.e. long hours) even with low productivity, keeping quiet, not upsetting the applecart, not contributing in meetings, getting deep into the factional constructs of the organisation, are not seen as positive.   Inefficiencies seem to beg for correction. Innovation seems to be a foreign concept in both senses of the word. Doing what we have always done, in the same way as we have always done it, has eliminated most of the opportunities for making mistakes, so why change anything? Doing things in a new way is inherently risky, because there is no reliable road map.   We are going to have come out of our comfort zone to do that and we might make a mistake – not appealing whatsoever to the Japanese staff.   Meritocracy is a given to the new expat leader and so personnel changes are a prime interest. People are where they are for many reasons and merit is not always the reason. Longevity, who entered the company first, who is your patron, always have a big determinant on whose who in the zoo in Japan.     Talented people are supposed to keep in line and do what they are told. Showing too many smarts seems they are getting uppity before their betters and the hocho, that is the razor sharp Japanese knives, rapidly come out. The “nail” sticking out is about the get a good whack from everyone who can hit it hard.   Nevertheless, ignorance is bliss, so our expat hero or heroine plunges in and starts shaking things up. Entrenched interests, who have created this current system to suit themselves, now feel threatened. They are not stoics. They make a very keen calculation. Can we outlast this clown, who is so rude, so ignorant about how to properly lead in Japan, so annoying and so dangerous to our vested interests. If the answer is “yes”, then a guerrilla war commences, where those most threatened band together to slow down progress, obfuscate the vital issues, hide key information, isolate out the new leaders pets to weaken them and look for petards on which to hoist the expat.   If the answer is “no”, then it is a bare knuckle street fight. There are no rules. Classic weapons are looking for points of failure with new innovations to blow them up on purpose. Anyone close to the boss becomes a target internally and all sorts of societal pressure is brought to bear, to “turn them” into a spy for the “good guys” against this lunatic from outside. They are reminded that our hero won’t be here forever and the rest of us will be. “We will get you. You are going to be toast when the boss heads to the airport for departure to the next foreign assignment. You aren’t going anywhere sunshine, remember that”.   Out of nowhere and nothing, headquarters starts to get anonymous communication about various crimes and misdemeanors that are pure fiction. Sexual harassment is a favourite, because they know Western companies are really sensitive to these types of allegations. Power harassment which was a preferred, traditional boss leadership technique, has now made it into the upper ranks of crimes, as this has become something flagged in Japanese society.   Unsuitability for leadership in Japan. Ignorance of the market, clients, business practices, damage to the reputation of the firm locally are all trotted out to paint a dismal picture. The staff engagement survey for Japan is always the lowest score in the world and this shows what a miserable job our expat hero is doing. It is always the lowest in the world, but HQ isn’t usually that smart or well informed enough to know that.   HQ is demanding Japan’s results improve, but are not happy to see any pushback when changes are introduced. The expat boss has to keep everything as it is, the exact same structure but produce greater results and they have to keep everyone happy about achieving that. The boss is on a hiding to nothing here. Welcome to Japan!   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

How to Glue Your Team Together   Teams are composed of people. That requires many skills but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival’s bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars; category experts; long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing. Usually communication skills and people skills were not prominent in their rise to this position of trust.   What does it take to be successful as a team leader? Here are nine different adhesives to help glue the team together.   Don’t criticize, condemn or complain When we criticize people for mistakes or poor performance they stop listening to us and use all of their brainpower to marshal their defense or assemble their excuses, about why it isn’t their fault. We have created a barrier with them and they are in denial. The direct approach may make us feel better but it leads nowhere useful.   Give honest and sincere appreciation Snowing staff with false praise, fake appreciation doesn’t work. People have well tuned gauges for flattery. When they detect it they do two things: they ignore it and they don’t ever fully trust the perpetrator. They are saying to themselves, “Do you think I am that dumb?”.   Instead we need to become “good finders”. Look for what people are doing well and recognise it. When we give appreciation, be very specific about what they did well, this makes it real. Look for strengths to develop, rather than trying to pull people down because they are not perfect.   Arouse in the other person an eager want As leaders we want a lot of things to happen. Our targets, accountabilities and directives from above drive us. It can very quickly become all about “me” and what “I” want. Others are not that excited about what we want compared to what they want for themselves. If we can coalesce what we want with what others want we will do a lot better in terms of getting cooperation and achieving our desired outcomes. This is a communication skill we absolutely need to master.   Become genuinely interested in other people We are all firmly attached to ourselves. We are the center of our universe and we want all things that are good to flow to us. As the leader though, you have to flip that self-absorption and get focused on your people. You can work 100 plus hours a week, but your team of 10, only working a 40 hour week can out work you with four times the input of hours. So working 100 hours yourself is dumb and getting your team fired up and working at peak performance is smart. Why would they do that? Because they feel there is something attractive in it for them. They feel that way because the leader has been an excellent communicator to explain the connection between hitting their own goals and hitting the firm’s goals. They are committed because they trust the leader.   When Dale Carnegie did it’s global study on the emotional drivers of engagement, they found that “feeling valued” by the immediate supervisor was the trigger to having people become highly engaged. You have to know what your team values, in order to help them understand they are highly valued. Your values are only interesting to you. Their values, for them, are the key. Once you are really genuinely interested in your team, you will naturally understand what they value Then you can arrange for good things to happen for them, based on what they want, not what you want.   Smile We think we smile but we do it more rarely than we imagine. We are swimming through a flood tide of emails, meetings and reporting every week. We are under pressure to produce the goods. Our internal rivals are nipping at our heals, our external competitors are making life hell. It becomes hard to smile. What our team sees is a serious face, maybe an explosive face when the pressure gets too much. Our mood everyday is the barometer of how the team feels. If we are stressed out we transfer that stress to everyone and take their mood straight down. We have to be up, regardless of the pressure, the irritations, the stress Remember to smile and pass this over to your team, to keep their mood positive   Remember names Presumably you can remember your team’s names. However, in a big organisation that may not be that easy.   In Japan in larger operations, it is interesting that often colleagues can’t remember their workmate’s personal name, only their family name. You need to send an email and you ask, “what is so and so’s personal name?”. The answer is often, “I don’t know”.   Do you know the names of those staff in the teams of your direct reports? In a small team, do you know the name of their spouse, partner, kids, pooch, pussy, etc.? being able to recall the family member’s names is a big plus, because it shows a level of attention and interest and people appreciate that. When you meet someone at a networking event and they greet you by name and you have no clue who they are, that is always a moment for reflection on your ability to recall names.   Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves We want to be heard, to have our input appreciated, valued. We want recognition for our ideas and contribution. A big part of making us feel this way, is the way the other person interacts with us. If they are really leaning in and listening carefully to what we are saying we feel valued. If they are doing fake listening, we can sense it. If they are just listening so they can butt in and make their point, we feel that is insulting. So, the leader needs to stop whatever they are doing, look the person in the eye and really open the ears up and listen. Don’t second guess what they are going to say, don’t finish their sentences for them, don’t jump in over the top and interject your thoughts.   Get them talking. We know what we know, but when we let the other person speak we know what we know and we will come to learn what they know as well. People love to talk about themselves, their accomplishments, their hobbies, their troubles, their family. Let them. They will feel valued because most people couldn’t be bothered listening because they want to do all the talking themselves, about themselves!   Talk in terms of the other person’s interests We feel close and comfortable with people who are like us. So, when speaking with the team, get into furious agreement by creating context around their interests, so they are aligned with the organization’s interests. Look for the win-win in everything, articulate it and keep reinforcing it.   Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely This sounds easy, except that we are often tied up in what makes us feel important. Fake praise is spotted quickly and both we and the fake praise are instantly disregarded. Always be looking to find ways to tie the team member’s contribution into the big picture. The rat on the treadmill can feel that what they are doing is rather low value, unappreciated and perhaps even pointless. This is where the leader comes in. They need to connect the dots and explain that this person’s role is important, that they are appreciated and that what they do matters.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

The Four Stages Of Building A Team     When do we create teams? Usually we inherit teams from other people, stocked with their selections and built around their preferences and prejudices, not ours. Sometimes we might get to start something new and we get to choose who joins. Does that mean that “team building” only applies when we start a new team? If that were the case, then most of us would never experience building a team in our careers. This idea is too narrow. In reality, we are building our teams every day, regardless of whether we suddenly became their leader or whether we brought them in or we started from scratch.   Teams are fluid. People come and go, so there is never an end point of team building. “Yeah, it’s built” would be fatal last words, because before you have even drained the champagne flute in celebration, your best performer is heading off to bigger and better things with your competitor.   So we are constantly adding to the team, even if we kicked it off ourselves. New people arrive with their own work culture, cobbled together like a coat of many colours from from their previous employment. The team has to coalesce again and again and we are the orchestra conductor, getting all the specialists to “play nice” together and in harmony. It helps to remind ourselves that there are four stages of team building.   Uncertainty If we have newly arrived into a team as the boss or whenever new members are injected into the existing team, we are in stage one of team building. In Japan, this is a tricky stage. If we are new, the team is uncertain of us. They have been moulded by our predecessor, have worked each other out. Here we are, all shiny and new with our “whacky” ideas , idiosyncrasies, foibles, penchants and talents. If we later bring in someone new, now the whole team has to regroup again. What will this person be like, are they going to be cooperative, nice, trustworthy? What will happen to my role – is it safe, will it change?   Anxiety If we know there is this uncertainty stage then we can prepare for it. Often though, the “new broom” arrives, puffed up with their own massive self-belief, hubris, ambition and zeal.   They scare the team because they blow up everyone’s comfort zone. Things start to change rapidly and few are up for the roller coaster ride about to commence.   People’s roles start to change as the new boss reorganizes things. Performance standards are invariably raised, because the new leader is here to show their metal. Life becomes more fraught for some and they look for ways to protect themselves. If things become too intense or too dire in Japan in foreign multi-nationals, then senior executives or headquarters start to receive anonymous communication, telling what a jerk this new boss is and pointing out in florid detail how they are destroying the business.   In smaller Japanese operations and in Western organisations there is a possibility some people are going to be moved out. “Am I next?”, is a permanent question in the minds of the survivors. New people are being absorbed into the team, but this takes time and creates a sense of instability in the team. Are these new folk going to be “teacher’s pet” because the new boss hired them or are they going to become part of the existing team? Are they with “us” or “them”?   Clarity The card carrying “boss watchers” in the team, that is to say, the whole team, start to work the new boss out. The intelligence, skill set, experience, capability, emotional quotient, etc., are very carefully calibrated. The navigation required for the new boss is gradually discovered and people adjust to the new style or they just leave if they don’t like it. People don’t leave companies – they leave bosses.   The new arrivals get a similar ruler run over them, to measure how well they will fit in. If they don’t fit in, then the herd groups together and tries to isolate them out. So, if they stay, then they have been successfully acclimatised to the dominant culture of the work group. This is often the opposite of what the boss desired to happen. They expected the new people would be sprinkling their latest version pixy dust on the “old” team members and creating change.   Consistency Presuming the new boss doesn’t blow the whole thing up and go down in flames, then things start to settle down. People get used to the new work requirements, their new colleagues, new boss, new targets and get back to focusing on their work. The team might even improve their performance and enjoy the recognition which comes with success. If the boss is any good, then the team now have a greater sense of shared responsibility toward achieving the targets and to supporting each other.   Just when all this harmony and light comes together, the boss gets sent somewhere else to a new role and a new shiny boss arrives. Here we go again.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Building Your Team   Teams are fluid. People move or leave and new people join. Targets go up every year. The compliance and regulatory requirements become more stringent, the market pivots and bites you, currency fluctuations take you from hero to zero in short order. Head office is always annoying. There are so many aspects of business which line up against having a strong sense of team. We can’t be complacent if we have built a strong team and we have to get to work, if we are in the process of team building.   Sports teams are always high profile and successful sports coaches are lauded for their ability to produce results, especially when they are always dealing with tremendous fluctuations in the make up of the team. Vince Lombardi is one of those much heralded coaches and he noted: “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity”.   Sterling stuff, but how do you do that? Vince had access to some of the most highly paid and motivated team members on the planet, but what about the rest of us? We often haven’t chosen the team. We have inherited someone else’s criteria and selection model. People come to us from different companies or different sections and so how do we address the issue of establishing a common purpose?   We need to make sure each individual has a clear sense of the reason the team exists, their individual role and the importance of their role to the team effort. If you suddenly asked your team members about the reason the team exists, you might be dumbfounded to receive so many disparate answers. We assume everyone knows and that we all in sync, but we should check. And we should do it regularly, as the team composition changes over time and new people may not know.   Establishing an agreed set of team values is an important glue to hold the whole team together. Whenever we do this exercise for ourselves or for clients, we always get a huge range of values being nominated. This is helpful but not particularly helpful. We need to do it in two parts, starting with our personal values and then do the team values. Ideally, each individual’s values will also be part of the team values so that the ownership factor is sky high.   A team vision is the next stage and this is where many people start to weep. They are heartily sick of the word vision. So many vision consultants, articles, videos and podcasts covering this one little word. It bogs down and eventually all the fluff associated with the word, collapses under its one weight. Regardless, you still need a team vision, so get over it.   Jack Welch pointed out, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion”. A vision is a future picture of what could be and what should be, regardless of what is today. The vision is stated in the present tense, as if we were already at the final state of development and success that we are aiming for. The visualisation is positive and optimistic and the words both powerful and specific. We need a vision to define where we want to be, in order to work out how we will get there.   Our mission is the other building block.   It describes what we do and by definition, what we don’t do. Clarity around objectives and goals means counting out some shiny objects that are not core requirements for the team. The vision tends to last long, as do the core values, whereas we have to keep revisiting the mission. This is because things change and we may need to change tack and go in a different direction. In which case our mission has also flexed and we need to restate it. We do this so that everyone in the team has clarity around what we are doing and how we are doing it.   Successful teams have achieved great clarity throughout the entire organization about what the team is trying to do. This is not an accident, but the product of good leadership work to establish a base and then good ongoing work, to keep the ideas alive and relevant.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Common Sense Baby Is Not Common   As the leader we have to work on the presumption that people know what they are doing. It is impossible to micro manage every single person, every moment of the day. By the way, who would want to do that anyway? The issues arise when things deviate from the track we think they are on or expect that they are on. We find that a process has been finessed, but we don’t like the change. We find that some elements have been dropped completely, but we only find this out by accident or substantially after the fact. We are not happy in either case.   Why does this happen? Training can cover the basics, but there is always a wide margin of discretion in carrying out jobs. We need to allow this or the team become asphyxiated by the confines of the narrowly defined tasks we have set for them. We all own the world we help to create, so we need to allow people to be creative, if we want them to take ownership of their jobs. It is when things start to stray that we run into trouble. There is a margin allowed for doing things differently, but when the red line gets crossed, we get cross.   Another seed of discomfort is when systems are changed, but you don’t know that. There might be a really great reason or a very bad reason for this to happen, but the scary part is not knowing the change has been made in the first place. Do we have to know about every single thing our staff are changing? Obviously no, so where is the line in the sand to be drawn here?   This is tricky and there are no genius answers really. We need to remind our team that they are free to innovate, to be creative, to look for every kaizen opportunity. We also need to have them tell us if they make a significant change. Okay, so how do we define “significant”? This is a very grey area and this still won’t capture everything we need to know about, but it is better than having no clue at all as to what is going on.   Our workplace is usually divided into specialty functions like sales, marketing, operations etc. Cross functional innovation is good, if both groups know about it and contribute. Problems start to arise when the changes are made in isolation and in secret. Not secret in the sense that anyone is trying to fool others, but secret in the sense that affected groups are not told what is going to happen. It just happens and you find out later – usually at the worst possible time.   The changes can also reflect an uninformed view of how things work in reality. Not having in depth detail on the sales function, for example, can result in the operations team making some decisions which negatively impact the sale effort. IT may make changes that are completely rational from a geeky IT point of view, but which create results for other parts of the business which are not helpful. Undoing things always takes time and money and results in lost productivity.   What can we do about these challenges? Having functional heads keep an eye for any negative changes, is a delegation task that must be done. The leader cannot get across that degree of detail. Educating the whole team about how the whole fits together is a good practice. We assume everyone gets it, but that is wishfull thinking. In team meetings, it is important that all sections report changes that will impact other parts of the business. Formalise this into the meeting agenda so that it never gets missed.   When things do go off the rails, educate those involved about the big picture, so that it won’t happen again. No one is trying to destroy the business, so intentions are honourable, but the communication piece can be missing. Encourage staff to think about the ramifications of changes they may want to make and have them inform those likely to be affected before the changes are made. Surprisingly, even in small offices, this simple activity fails to happen because everyone is so time harassed doing multiple tasks at light speed.   Japan has it horenso ( 報連相) mantra to fall back on when in doubt. Ho for hokoku or report, ren for renraku or contact and so for sodan or consult. This is a useful construct to reduce problems before they occur, especially for junior staff – report/contact/consult.   Finally, don’t blow your top! Being the last to know about bad news is the lot of the boss. That is bad enough, but finding out randomly about bad news, that only you understand is bad news, is really, really irritating. The instant boss reaction to this type of thing is usually explosive.   We have to remember the importance of encouraging everyone to innovate. The corresponding increase in risk of failure goes hand in glove with that effort. We have to remember to be using our communication and people skills, so that we don’t kill team motivation. Bite your tongue when things are revealed and start thinking of a positive way of encouraging everyone involved, as you correct the situation. If we can do this, we will be building the culture of creativity we want and over time we will diminish the outbursts of common sense collapse.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

The Olympics’ Generation   We are on the cusp of a change amongst youth in Japan. Those already entered into the workforce have memories of the Lehman Shock and the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdown and the impact this had on the job market. They are looking for security of employ and family life, because of the fragility of both were exposed to them in September 2008 and again in March 2011. They saw the dire straights of those who slipped into the part-time employee hell of low wages, no prospects and everything tough, tough, tough.   In 2016, only 6.9% of those in the 25-34 age group switched jobs. The September 2016 survey by the Japan Institute For Labor Policy and Training also found nearly 90% supported lifetime employment. This figure was only 65% in 2004. Of those in their 20s, 55% wanted to work for the same company right through. That same number was only 34% in 2004.   There is a generation coming behind them though who will be different again. They were born around the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, have little recollection of the Lehman debacle in 2008 and except for those with close links to the Tohoku region, vaguely recall the ordeal of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdowns.   They are going to graduate after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. They are going to see the part-time jobs market filled with Asian, mainly Chinese, students working their allowed 38 hours a week (more hours than the work week in France). They are going to see driverless electric cars, Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs, the ubiquity of voice commands, bumptious robots and the Internet of Things controlling their lives. Their demographic curve is in rapid decline, their numbers are dropping every year and will be half today’s figures by 2060. They are going to be in big demand. The current unemployment rate of 2.8% will sink even further. They will be free agents looking at multiple job offers and openings available to them.   They will be the last juku or cram school generation. University entrance requirements will collapse. Except for the absolute elite institutions, a pulse and cash will be the only entry requirements. Tokyo is going to cap the numbers of students on campus, but the rest of the country will have no limits. Many universities will be hungry for fees and desperate to attract students. The Millennial’s successor generation, who some are calling Generation Z and for Japan, I am calling the “Olympics’ Generation”, will have an entirely different perspective on education. “Exam hell” will mainly disappear as a cultural construct for the 90%-95% who don’t aim for the elite universities.   Mid-career hires are still an anathema for many local Japanese firms, but that is going to have to change. They simply will not be able to find staff. What to do with women is confusing for them, as their structures are built on the old post-war model of husband works and the wife raises the kids. That will have to disappear quite soon.   This whole concept will have to change and they are going to have to learn to be more flexible about hours worked and leave. When the kids get sick, the husband is still unlikely to be dropping tools and heading off to the school to pick up junior. The working wife will need to do that and woe be tide to any firm who doesn’t cooperate, because others will and she will move on.   Today, some domestic firms still look askance at employees having a profile on LinkedIn. This site started as a pseudo-job board, but it has become another source of useful information available for free. This will all add up to assisting greater job mobility.   Recruiters will be poaching people right, left and center to satisfy firms desperate to find young workers. The wooing to move will be constant. We have seen an aberration of Economics 101 where labour supply shortages have not yet resulted in wages growth. That cannot last much longer. Certainly this Olympics’ Generation will enjoy the financial benefits of powerful labour demand.   The key word for this Olympics’ Generation will be “mendokusai” （めんどくさい）or “bothersome” and anything duly defined will be resisted. Companies are going to struggle with leading this generation. The current Millennials may become their immediate bosses, but the cultural divide between them will be vast.   Middle managers in Japan will be faced with the greatest challenges of any generation of Japanese leaders. Unless they are properly trained for this onslaught, it is going to be a nightmare. Their situation will simply outstrip the leadership answers usually tapped from OJT (On The Job Training). There is no roadmap for this eventuality, because this is all a brave new world of leadership.   Is anyone in Japan thinking about this? I would say based on my discussions so far, the answer is “no”.   You heard it hear first folks: “Winter is coming”.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Customer Service     All interfaces with the customer are designed by people.  It can be on-line conversations with robots or in store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ.  The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation.  That culture is the accountability of senior management.  The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer.  The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills.   This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different.  Senior leaders, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be customer focused.  They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction.   They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service.  Love your staff and they will love your customers. Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second. His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first. Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determines our performance.   Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right?  Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders.  It is not a function of rank or longevity in the organisation.  Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team.  We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer. Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it.   To get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills.  We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills.  We could be doing things really well up at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it.   If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation, we have be sincere.  If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way.  People can spot fake from a mile away.  If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate.   We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc. We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers.  They may however want different things.  We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want.  This is not manipulation.   This is well developed people and communication skills. The trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want.  As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want.   To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others.  This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer.  When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break.  If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer.   There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile.  It could be the very top executives who are too serious to smile at their staff.  They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand.  They just don't see the miscalculation and self-delusion involved here.     Bosses are often poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer.  What if that is not the case?  If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea.  When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer.  We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us.  In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them.   One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, promotions, commissions) and concentrate on what the client wants (solve my problem).  When they are talking to the client, the conversation is all about what the sales person is hoping for.  We have to learn to change that dialogue and talk in terms of the key interests of the buyer.     I was giving a keynote speech at an event hosted by one of our major clients, for their most important customers.  Another speaker spent the entire time just talking about his own company!  I really wondered what was the take away for the audience? Actually, I don't wonder, I know. It was a big fat zero.  We can get caught up in ourselves and forget that everything we talk about with the buyer, has to be firmly focused on the client’s interests.  The way we do that is by listening to their answers, to the brilliant questions we have designed for that purpose.   When a customer encounters one of our touch points, we want them to like and trust us. Doing this on-line is a challenge but good navigation, intuitive processes and clear explanations all assist in this regard. In the face-to-face world, we need to start in a friendly way. The culture of this basic idea however springs from within the company and is guided by the outlook of the leaders.   If the top management are a dour bunch, always serious, rarely smiling, stiff and “businesslike” rather than friendly with their teams, then we have to wonder why the front line staff would not be influenced by this outlook? If we want our people to smile and begin in a friendly way with customers, then the leadership group needs to demonstrate that attitude themselves and show this in their own staff interactions.   Another challenge for bosses is to shut up. Often, because they are older, more experienced and time poor, they get into the “everything abbreviated” habit of firing out orders. They do all the talking. The same problem with salespeople, they talk too much. The key to satisfying both staff and customers is to let them do the bulk of the talking. This requires a strategy and considerable discipline, but it is worth it because it creates a different type of culture in the organisation and this flows out to the customer interactions.   It is an obvious thing in sales to get customers to have a sense of ownership. We might describe the product or service and the situation after they have bought it. We regale them with the problem solutions we are bringing and the success platform we are going to create. We have a goal in mind – find the best solution for the client and get them to have ownership of this idea. We want them coming up with our preferred solution. We design the questions we will ask, with this in mind. It is our idea, but they reach the same idea on their own and in the process come to have ownership of that idea.   The same thing is needed with our staff. We can tell them how to do their jobs in great detail, but it would be better if we could have them come up with them own conclusion. Preferably one that matches what we have decided is in the best interests of the company. Again, question design here is crucial and if we do this correctly, the client arrives at their own conclusion and it matches the one we had previously reached. This way there is no sense of hard push sales or badgering of the buyer. They got there by themselves and so their sense of ownership is very high   We cannot be persuasive unless we can honestly see things from the point of view of the buyer. The aim in persuasion is to join the conversation going on in the head of the customer. This gets us on the same wavelength and our conversation will be in sync, because we are speaking about the things that are of greatest interest to them.   Trying to stop seeing everything from only our own viewpoint and to see if from the client’s viewpoint, sounds tremendously simple, but it requires a strong effort. We need to do this logically as well as emotionally. We have to be understanding at the empathetic level, which means really understanding the driving ideas and desires of the buyer.   Nevertheless we need to enable this discipline to apply if we want to be successful in convincing others of what we think will serve them best.   If we want our staff to appreciate the business we can receive from the buyer, we need to build that attitude internally of praising staff and giving them honest appreciation. This is often missed in firms, where everything is rather cut and dried. Buying is an emotional activity which we justify with logic. We want our designers of the interface with the customer to have a sense of appreciation for the buyer. We want staff who are facing customers to do the same. If we are not giving our own staff praise and appreciation, we are not building a floor to ceiling culture that will work best when interacting with customers. It has to run on automatic, because we cannot be everywhere at the same time. We have to trust our people to deliver great customer service.   The ability to ask questions instead of making statements is an important skill. It is easier to drive this skill throughout the organization, if this is part of the culture. Bosses shooting out orders is a “tell” culture. If they automatically asked questions instead of giving orders, they would be building the right mentality for customer service. Our objective is to find out what the customer wants. To do that we need to be asking them questions. This is a mental frame around which the customer interaction needs to be built.   When we ask questions, we can come up with solutions that the customer themselves realise are the best outcomes for them. If we are more concentrated on what is best for us, then the customer can feel that too. So we want to understand their needs, suggest solutions that we know will make them happy to follow our lead.   Inside the organisation this is how the team should be managed. They should be doing what they are supposed to be doing, happily. Their bosses have communicated in a way that the staff member comes naturally to the same conclusion, as being the best way forward. When we achieve this common level of understanding then everything moves forward very smoothly.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

The Fog of Busyness       Focus is under constant attack.  The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor.  Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable.  That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics.  The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team.  The vision of the future is the guiding light on the hill toward which the troops are pointed.  The relevancy of that vision is constantly being challenged by the market and by clients.   The leader can no longer easily keep up with all of the demands on their time.  Social media has become a major source of information and we are all drinking from the firehouse.  Meetings are numerous and suck up time at a prodigious rate.  Email comes gushing forth in relentless fashion and inboxes become archives.  "I will get to that email" is a plaintive cry from the oppressed masses.  If we are traveling across time zones, then sleep patterns are shattered and we enter a zombie like twilight zone but still have to function anyway. When we get finally back home we are still trying to assimilate with our usual everyday challenges, but in a jet lag induced vegetative state.   We are not delegating enough.  We know we should do more of it but we don't.  We are holding on to too much control and this is ramping up our workload.  In tougher times we had to jump in and keep things afloat.  After the refloat though, we haven't eased off on the controls and are still doing too much ourselves.  Where is the time to work on those things that only we can do?     Projects are bright shiny objects that fascinate our minds.  We already have a big bag of them to carry around, but we keep stuffing more into the same bag. Our intellect and our imagination make us constantly hungry to do more and more interesting things and we do.  The hours of the day don't grow to match our hunger, so things start well and then drift.  We pull back the edge of the carpet and there they all are - projects started but never finished.  Stacked up there out of sight and out of mind because they have been replaced by a newer sexier beau.   We never get to any perfect harmony with our team.  The ones we want to keep move on to greener fields, the ones we want to move on, we wind up keeping by default.  The turnover means time and expertise is lost and we are in a state of constant starting again.  This kills progress.  The current candidate friendly market in Japan means that we are in a permanent recruit and retain mode.  We have to put a higher value on continuity, than in the past, because the lag between losing people and hiring new staff gets longer. Hiring gets harder and more expensive.   None of this looks like it is going to improve any time soon.  The ability to deal with this level of complexity becomes more important.  The agile yet focused will win in this game.  A good leverage point is heightened self-awareness.  Knowing what is important and then giving that time is a differentiator. We need to have a “true north” in mind, against which to align ourselves, or we will find ourselves adrift in a sea of confusion.   The fog of busyness needs a clear counterpoint.  We need to reestablish who we are, what we want and where we are going.  This sounds simple. But if I ask you right now, can you pull out your written down game plan for your future? Can you articulate the steps needed to keep moving forward? Have you clearly nominated what success actually looks like.   “I want 10 million dollars”, is too vague. What do you want it for, how are you going to use it, how does this translate into your personal happiness or satisfaction?   The manic pace of the everyday can distract us and we forget about working on our personal alignment. Ironically, we need to slow down in order to speed up and get more done. We need to re-establish the point of what we are doing.   We need to re-set the starting point and to fix a clear image of the finish line in our minds. We can then swim hard against the pull of busyness with a firm plan in place. The alternative is often being drawn along in the froth and fury of the storm tide.   So stop what we are doing. Intervene in our busyness. Re-connect with who we really are. Reaffirm our direction. Define true north. Make a new plan and follow it.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

End Your Fear Of Failure For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway. The odd part was that this was a deep seated fear within me, that I wasn't really all that conscious of. It was sort of sitting there in the background. My father had been a big smoker (died of lung cancer at 51), big drinker (every night) and a big gambler (every Saturday at the track). If you grew up in a gambler's household, then you know what never having any money is all about. The weekly pay packet received on Friday evening is taken down to the racetrack and blown on Saturday morning. I never gamble, I never smoke and I drink very, very moderately. Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) it is called in Japanese – my Dad was my teacher by negative example. So as a gambler's son, you start below the waterline and have to work hard to make something of yourself and eventually you do. The strange part is that the fear of poverty, the fear of failing never leaves you. Somewhere in the back of your mind is the idea that success is not allowed for you. So you drive yourself hard, constantly dissatisfied with your progress. It is never big enough, never good enough, never fast enough, never safe enough. I could never answer the question of how much was enough, so I just tried to maximize it every time, in every way, in every situation. This put enormous stress and pressure on myself. Then one day, something happens or someone says something, that makes you rock back on your heels and think hard about it. That is what happened to me. I was describing my fears of the cardboard box and my listener questioned that thesis. He said, "Greg, you have a Ph.D., you have a big job with lot's of responsibility, you have money, you have assets and investments, you have drive and energy, so why are you operating on a false premise of failure. Why can't you drive forward based on a different idea? What about the concept that you can live out of your potential, rather than your fear of failure?". Wow. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was stopped in my tracks by that comment. That thought of living out of my potential had never occupied my mind, not for even one nanosecond. Getting good information and doing something about it are not the same thing. I was gripped by what he said and started to ask myself whether that was actually feasible. After so many decades of living out of fear of failure, could I just switch gears completely? Well it turns out that I could. From that moment in 2000, I forgot about a cardboard box bound future. I made the switch by starting to concentrate on what I had going for me and looked for ways to make more of that. I made a list of all the things I thought were my strengths and I added that list to my goal setting routine, for daily review. I concentrated on the positive, not the negative. It sounds simple to say that, but this is not simple, when your whole lifetime narrative has been one of a failed future prospect. I changed my perspective about myself. I started by questioning my basic assumption - why I thought I would eventually fail? What was the evidence for that assumption? Was I still caught up in my father’s paradigm of self perpetuating poverty, as part of the gambler’s curse. He was a hard worker. He started work at 13 out in the bush on a sheep station in the west of Queensland. He tried many things, but he could never get ahead because of the gambling. When I analysed it, what had any of his life challenges to do with me? I said to myself, “Hey, I don’t gamble – ever”. My real narrative should be different to my Dad’s and it should be about who I am, not who my father was. When I put it like this is sounds so obvious but it took me a long time to work that out. I was trapped in a mindset of possible total failure looming in the future. For other fellow "fear of failure" travellers out there, hear me now - we can change gears. We can live everyday with drive and hard work based on a new premise. There is such a thing as working toward our potential, rather than trying to escape from our fear of failure. We can change our view of who we are and where we are going. We can objectively analyse about our current and future prospects. We can prepare for the future without worrying about it. We can take steps to head off any possible calamities and take action now, rather than just spinning around in worry circles. Don't be like me though and spend lost decades working this out. Don't rely on getting lucky through the most random chance of a single comment. Hear me now and hit the reset button. Decide you want to say goodbye to your cardboard box premonition and move to a better future based on the reality of your current strengths, experience and accomplishments. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Twelve Steps To A Win-Win Conflict Resolution (Part 2)   Conflict is with us everywhere, everyday.   That is the nature of the human condition. We have different desires and thinking. Some conflicts can be very low level and minor and we continue to cruise through the day. In other cases however, it becomes a lot more problematic.   In any organization, when the machine is fighting against itself, progress becomes suspended. Instead of concentrating on beating the other guy, we have suddenly become locked into an internal battle against ourselves. In large firms these can be driven by strong personalities thrusting themselves forward to get to the top. They bring their divisions with them into the fight and a lot of energy and time is wasted dropping large rocks on our own feet!   We need to see the bigger picture here and look for how we can marshal our strength, access the diversity in our ranks and maximize the creative possibilities rather than concentrating on the battling within our own ranks.   In Part One we looked at areas we could work on to have a better chance of resolving conflicts. We looked at our attitude, finding neutral ground, clarifying what is the issue, being properly prepared, being self-aware and emphasizing commonalities rather than differences.   We continue that process and look at steps number 7 to 12.     Deal with facts, not emotions In sports we say “play the ball, not the man” and in business we look at problems not personalities. This sounds fair enough, but it is not easy to do. We may find we are attacking the person, their ideas and opinions rather than looking at solving the problem. We need to switch over to outcome focus and logic. This will take the personalities component out of the equation and help us to get to an agreed solution faster.   Be honest Politicking, game playing, one upping are all well known in business, but stay away from these pursuits. Focus on the reason everyone is working hard in the company. Remind yourself what we are we trying to achieve relative to our competitors. We need to come back to the basics of the vision, mission and values.   Present alternatives and provide evidence Compromise is the assembly of other ways of solving an issue. Things that make sense and are workable are very hard to argue against.   Concessions in non-core areas should be made to build trust and the cooperation muscle. Look at options in terms of the other side’s interests. When promoting your own ideas, make sure these are backed up with strong evidence, so that they are easy to agree with and hard to argue against.   Be an expert communicator Communication skills are essential to finding resolution to points of difference and can be done in a way that the relationship is maintained. Really listen to the other side. We often think we are listening but actually inside our brain, we are formulating what we will say next and so are not really taking in the other side’s points. Feeding back that we have understood them is a good habit to develop.   End on a good note Win-win means feeling like we all did well. Shake on it, agree the next action steps and milestones. Nominate who is responsible for what and how progress and success will be measured. Also decide how further disputes which may arise during the execution phase will be handled.   Enjoy the process Companies benefit from having a range of views and diverse experiences when it comes to solving problems. The process of resolving disputes educates us on how to see things differently and to entertain other ways of doing things. We can often build stronger relationship s having gone through this type of dispute resolution because we have come to know and understand each other much better than we would have otherwise.   Resolving conflicts is not easy but most people pour their energy into winning the conflict rather than trying to find the win-win. The latter is the better option every time if you want to win in the market. Fighting amongst ourselves makes no sense and we can do better than that. These 12 steps will get us pointed in the right direction.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.     About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcast “THE Leadership Japan Series”, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.  

Twelve Steps To A Win-Win Conflict Resolution Part One     “Remember that other people may be totally wrong, but they don’t think so”. This quote from Dale Carnegie sums up the problem. All those other people we have trouble with, had better fly straight. All they need is a better understanding of why they are wrong and we are right. By force of will, strenuous, sustained argument and politicking we will win the day. Or will we?   Actually, getting a clear win in internal conflict situations is rarely the result. Battles are won but wars are lost. Energy that should be directed at the competitors is instead turned loose on our own team, to no good outcome. We need to be able to deal with internal conflicts in a way that resolves the issues in a positive way. Not so easy!   People tend to gravitate toward extremes. They either fold and don’t stand up for what they feel is right or they try and bulldoze everyone else and make them bend to their will. If we want progress, we need a better way forward, achieved thorough compromise and collaboration.   Here are 12 Win-Win steps we can take to turn things around.   Have a positive attitude Our attitude is a big factor. If we shift our thinking to how this conflict situation can be converted into a learning and growth opportunity we will have more success. Easy to say, but not so easy to do!   Meet on mutual ground Find a neutral location to remove all the residue of the past from your front of mind. Find a mutually agreeable time, when you won’t have interruptions. Don’t try and deal with complex conflicts over the phone or by email warfare – do it face to face.   Clearly define and agree on the issue We might be arguing at cross purposes, so let’s clarify precisely what the real issue is and concentrate on that. If it has many facets and is complex, let’s break it up into component parts. Attach priorities and start with the most pressing core issues.   Do your homework Think about the issue from the other side’s perspective, as well as from your own. Some things are must haves and some are nice to haves – be clear about which is which. Also, at the very start define your BATNA or Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement – basically your walk away position.   Take an honest inventory of yourself You know yourself. You know your own “hot buttons” that need to be reined in. Are your feelings leading the charge or is your brain determining how this should progress.   Look for shared interests Conflict pulls you from the extremes and compromise meets in the middle. To get agreement we need to emphasise where we are similar, have shared interests and objectives. Move the discussion to the future, rather than raking over the coals of the past disputes, crimes and misdemeanors.   In Part Two, we will cover the six remaining steps.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

International Japanese Staff Armageddon   Japan seems to be going in opposing directions at the same time, when it comes to the supply of internationalised staff suitable for foreign companies. The statistics show a peak in 2004 of 83,000 Japanese students venturing off-shore. This dropped to a low of 57,500 in 2011 and since that point has climbed back above 60,000. Just to put that in context, Korea has over 73,00 students studying overseas but has half the population of Japan. Today, with many international companies looking to hire English speaking, internationalised Japanese staff, the supply situation is looking grim. Some Japanese domestic companies are becoming strong competitors because they need more international Japanese as well. These firms are branching out overseas because they fear the decline in the Japanese consumer population will stunt their future growth. Once upon a time, this meant shipping Japanese expats off overseas to be forgotten for five years, before sending the next one. The shortage of staff in Japan makes this proposition harder these days, because they are needed here as the boomer generation retires. Also with the increasing integration of overseas enterprise purchases into the Japanese mother ship, the internationalisation of the local headquarters staff is also becoming more important. So we have less Japanese youth going overseas and an increasing demand at home for those with good English and international experience. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) has been attempting to address this shortage. In 2013, the Japan Revitalization Strategy announced a government target of doubling the number of students studying abroad to 120,000 by 2020. There have been new programmes introduced such as the “Reinventing Japan” project (2011), the “Tobitate!” (Leap for Tomorrow!) study abroad campaign (2013), and the TeamUp campaign (2015). Doubling the overseas Japanese student population to 120,000 by 2020 sounds like an education bureaucrat’s wild fantasy, but at least there is an effort being made to address the shortage. I won’t be holding my breath in anticipation that these programmes will be producing the numbers needed in the immediate future. Why aren’t this generation heading overseas to study? A British Council 2014 study found four key reasons: 1. Don’t have the language skills (51%), 2. Too expensive (41%), 3. Unsafe (32%) and 4. Courses abroad are too difficult (12%). There has been a lot of discussion also about the inward looking nature of this generation. The Lehman Shock put loyal staff out on the street and shook up their kid’s assumptions about following the same lifetime employment path of their fathers. Consequently, like Millennials elsewhere, they seem very focused on themselves. They don’t have much patience for things which are mendokusai or troublesome That includes studying English and dealing with pesky foreigners. The 3/11 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor core meltdown refocused everyone on family, staying close (kizuna) and personal safety. Going overseas doesn’t really fit into that picture. Having said that though, the British Council study concluded that the interest in studying abroad is still strong. The interest may be there, but their actions are not matching the needs of business here. The risk aversion of the Japanese mentality also operates against going overseas. Their perfectionist qualities also make the mastery of English seem like the impossible dream. Getting a job when you get back is an issue because of the inflexible nature of Japanese company hiring practices. Being older than your sempai (seniors) who entered the company before you, is confusing for the company hierarchical culture. Fitting in is also harder because now because they no longer think the same as everyone else. They have dared to be different and this is not a formula for career success in Japan. There are a couple of things we can do. Larger companies can look at providing scholarships, with golden handcuff clauses, to assist the motivated who want to study overseas, but may be financially restrained from doing so. Related to that is the issue of keeping internationalised youth in the company after hiring them. This is where company culture becomes a winner.   Conditions of employ can be a lot more flexible than in competitor Japanese companies. With a declining youth population, (the number of those aged zero to thirty-four, halves over the next 40 years) employers will have to become a lot more flexible anyway, if they want to retain staff. These graduates often want to work in an international environment. However, they find themselves surrounded by local Japanese colleagues and they can’t get to use that English they worked so hard to improve. Create opportunities for them to use their English by making English the language of the office. Monday and Wednesday can be designated Japanese day and Tuesday and Thursday English day. Friday is your free choice. Getting middle managers properly trained to lead the young is going to be a key to retention and even more so with those international youth returned from study overseas. Coaching and communication skills are going to be at a premium, because in the coming free agent world of work, the young will walk without hesitation. Recruiters will be ringing their cash registers hard as they pick up fees for luring your young away by painting a glowing picture of the greener grass at your rival’s firm. Your managers have to preclude that possibility by knowing how to provide the young a style of leadership they themselves never experienced. Tough love leading is out, because otherwise all that will be left will be tough times, as staff shortages hit companies hard. Our hiring Armageddon winter is coming. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.        

How To Resolve Internal Conflicts   Business is more fast paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained.   Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely irritated. Twenty years ago we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations!   Imagine our forebears who when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super snail mail ping pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity. Not today. We want it and we want it now and look out anyone who gets in our way. We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace.   We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention. Process Conflict – is this what we are dealing with? How much control do we have in this particular case we are facing? We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner. They may not be aware this is causing problems for others. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and come up with a joint action plan to fix it.   Role Conflicts easily arise in flat organisations. What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue? We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead to do so. This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is. We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. This may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!).     Interpersonal Conflicts are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actions, behavours, words and the reported versions from others around us.   We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Are people telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason?   There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are but we don’t want to do them. However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself.   This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the issues. Before you do that though, forget about what you want for the moment and put yourself in their shoes. Reflect on how you would see the issue from their perspective. This will make it easier to have that one-on-one conversation.   Direction Conflicts arise when the path forward is unclear. Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone of what needs to happen or at the same time. Check that you are in fact clear yourself on the organisation’s current direction or vision. Bring up the discrepancy between you and the other party in respectful terms, in a neutral way. This is not about establishing blame (although we often like doing that!), but about getting joint clarity about what is the aim and how it should be delivered together.   External Conflicts are tough because by definition, you lack power or control. Ask yourself whether you have a dog in this fight or not? Choose your battles carefully and concentrate on what you can do to improve things, rather than wasting energy whining about what you cannot control. As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control stop and re-set your mind around how the situation can be improved. Ask yourself, “in what way can we continue to move the organisation forward?”. In the words of the hardest working man in show business Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”!   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.     About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, THE Sales Japan Series and THE Presentations Japan Series, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

A Soft Skills Revolution Required   The Spa magazine in Japan released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. Apart from not enough money, in a time of massive corporate profits, the other issues are all about leadership soft skills. Dale Carnegie Training did a global study of engagement. The results for Japan were consistent with the global trends. Japan’s scores were also consistent with every survey I have ever seen on the subject of engagement in this country. The percentages of those who are not engaged are always gob smacking.   Why would staff feel underappreciated? The reason is obvious. No one in a leadership position has shown them any sign that they are important, that what they are doing is important and that they have a future in the organisation. Part of the reason is cultural. Japanese prefer understatement and subtlety not passionate plights of appreciation. A boss coming back from a training course suddenly telling staff how great they are and how much they are appreciated would be viewed with distinct suspicion that something odorous was about to descend and this was some smoke screen before all hell breaks loose.   This says a a lot about entrenched ideas about leadership and expectations about leadership in Japan. The bar is so low here that any deviation toward something approaching more normal western management styles is viewed in a negative light. That means we have some work to do.   That global study said the gateway drug to gaining higher levels of engagement was to have staff feel they are valued by their managers. Often, work can become routine and parts of it can be tedious. The lower down the totem pole you descend the harder it is for those at the bottom to recognize that what they are doing has any great relevance for the organization. This is where the boss has to re-connect them to the machine. They need to see how what they do is important and where it fits into the overall picture. The essence of the job itself has to be established as having relevance, for them to feel they have relevance.   Their work may or may not be perfect but very few people in life try to do a bad days work. They may not be geniuses but they are usually doing the best they can. If we want higher skills we need to train them. If we want greater productivity we need to help them become motivated. How can that happen? Well telling people “be motivated’ won’t do it. This is an inside out, not outside in process.   The boss’s job is to have such good levels of communication that the individual aspirations of the team members are known and the work can be related to how this will help them achieve their aims.   For the boss to be able to do that with any credibility takes training in communication skills and understanding people. Barking orders at plebs is not the type of communication skill set about to unleash hitherto latent high enthusiasm levels for work.   Even bosses finding the time to actually speak about these things with their team are difficult. Flatter organisational structures has pushed a lot of work onto the boss’s plate. If the boss can manage time properly (know any?) and if they can delegate effectively (know any?), then this flat structure ordained busyness will be counterbalanced to some extent. So boss effectiveness in managing themselves, sets up the organisation to help them manage others in a more professional way.   Japan needs to address these failures of leadership in the soft skills area and tap into the full strength of the working population. They are not making as many Japanese as they used to, so we have to make sure we allow all of our staff the chance to shine. In this regard, bosses have a bigger responsibilty than ever before to get this right.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business. +

Where Is My Praise?   The Spa magazine in Japan released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and under evaluated and a lost sense of purpose. Feeling unappreciated and under evaluated are both boss failings. This is the direct result of decades of neglect of the soft skills of leadership.   The feeling of being valued by the boss and the organisation is the trigger to producing high levels of engagement for your work. Japan is renown for always scoring poorly on international comparative engagement surveys. The global study on engagement by Dale Carnegie showed that feeling valued was the key factor. The results for Japan were the same.   Good to know that we have the answer at hand to improve levels of engagement. By the way, disengaged or hardly engaged staff are not going to add any additional extras to their work or be motivated to come up with a better way of doing things. Innovation requires some sense of caring about the organization. So work productivity and innovation both need higher levels of engagement to help us get anywhere.   Fine, but so what? How do we get leaders who were raised in a different world of work – the bishibishi (relentlessly super strict) school of leading to now switch to becoming more warm and fuzzy? Telling them to do so is an interesting intervention by senior management that will go precisely nowhere. This requires re-education on what we need from our leaders. The most widespread system of education in corporate Japan is OJT (On The Job Training). How does your bishibishi boss change mindset alone? They can’t. That is why training is required to better inform bosses about how to gain willing cooperation from subordinates, instead of just pulling rank on them to drive their obedience.   How to deal with mistakes is a key to the future in a society that hasn’t worked out that mistakes are the glide path to success. Japan is a mistake free zone and this is a big disincentive to experiment, to try the new. Locating oneself in the middle of your comfort zone makes the best sense, if you want to avoid all change efforts. If you want innovation, progress then change must be embraced. That also means including risk. The risk of error.   If the internal evaluation process is used to re-live all the failings and insufficiencies of the staff, then don’t expect your shop to become a hotbed of innovation anytime soon. Leaders need to be helping staff lead intentional lives. Goals, strategies to achieve the goals, milestones, targets all come as part of the package. This is different from being Mr. or Ms. Perfect and holding the team to standards you yourself can never possibly achieve.   Encouraging people to come out of their comfort zones and try new things requires a lot of communication skills. It requires feedback, but not critique. Telling people they are wrong may make the boss feel superior and good, but it kills staff motivation and interest in doing things any differently. Good/better feedback is a better strategy. Tell them what they are doing that is going well and praise them for that. Tell them what they could do to make things go even better. The point is communicated but in a much better way and will be received in a more positive frame.   Because of the old fashioned style of management in vogue here, Japanese bosses are actually untrained in how to give praise. “Good Job” is not praise. That is a very vague reflection on a piece of work. Tasks have many facets and just which part of that project did they do well? We need bosses to be specific about which bit was done well and how. We then explain how that task fits into the big picture of the organization and encourage them to keep doing that task well.   The boss in japan has to do better. The soft skills area is where the greatest productivity gains will come from because hard skills education in Japan is already maximized. This is the next frontier of leadership and if Japan can unlock the full potential of its worker population, we are in for an exciting future.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Japan Still Scared Of It’s Own Shadow   The world’s third largest economy and one of the most sophisticated and advanced countries is a notorious underperformer on the international stage. I was reminded of this by Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. She was a guest speaker at a foreign Chamber event drawing a capacity crowd. She is whip smart, charismatic and knows how to charm the crowd. She speaks Arabic fluently and her English is simply excellent. Yet, she chose to address the assembled Chamber members in Japanese not in English. What an opportunity missed to show Tokyo and Japan’s internationalism.   Having been a diplomat, I know how these events are totally scripted beforehand, so nothing can possibly go wrong. The event featured a series of questions from the Director of the Chamber to Koike. These questions were all vetted prior to the event, so Koike had complete knowledge of what she was going to be asked. They were all softball questions anyway, which made them easy to handle. The foreign Chamber is never going to get aggressive with the Governor of Tokyo, so Koike was amongst firm friends.   Yet she switched to Japanese after making some flawless off the cuff comments in English at the beginning. This included cracking a joke about channel three of the headsets were receiving the translation in Arabic. That was witty and said to everyone she was a very confident person in dealing with foreign languages. At the end she switched back to perfect English again, more witticisms followed and then she elegantly glided out the door. Why didn’t she do the whole piece in English? She obviously had the ability.   Yes, it was on the record and there were members of the Japanese media there recording her comments, so by speaking in Japanese, she could play to the broader populace of Tokyo. “Here is our Governor effortlessly dealing with foreigners”, type of thing. You may have noticed that the the Governor of Tokyo does not want for media attention.   Here was an opportunity to work on the non-Japanese media. To work on the Japan fans and boosters in the room. Projecting Tokyo as a truly international city was always a stretch under her long reigning predecessor Shintaro Ishihara, because he was so parochial in his views. Koike is a breath of fresh air in that regard and could have played an effective role of evangelist for Tokyo, speaking directly to the foreign community. She distributed some very high quality books on Tokyo to the audience, which were first rate exemplars of the sophistication of the capital.   She could have worked the room and converted everyone to fandom, but she chose to retreat into Japanese. She could have chosen to make her main remarks in English and then answer the questions at the end in Japanese or rely on the simultaneous translators. I know from my own public speaking experience in Japanese, that the questions at the end can be difficult to follow at times. However, she had simple options to get around that issue, which she chose not to exercise. Why?   We see again and again Japan scared to step out. Soft power should be a tremendous advantage for Japan, but it consistently decides not to take it up. Koike’s luncheon event is another example. The conservative bureaucrats in the Governor’s office were no doubt laser focused on eliminating all risk. Speaking in English is risky, so let’s not do that. What about the upside? I guess that this was a non-contest between balancing some degree of risk and achieving a very much more positive result.   As we know in Japan, mistakes are not allowed and the best way to avoid a mistake is to do nothing different or new.   Isn’t it time we started to work on this construct? In our companies we need to embrace change, to allow failure as a learning process, to have our BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) which take us out of our Comfort Zone. Leaders like Koike would be fantastic role models for the country, if they chose to play that role. They choose not too and so Japanese continues to fly under the radar. When will Japan be ready to become a player on the world stage in international business or global relations? Don’t hold your breath in anticipation of anything changing soon, when the best and the brightest decline the challenge.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Tatemae, Honne and the Gaijin Boss   Japanese people are famous for having learnt over many centuries how to get along with others.  High density living in the modern era and village communal agricultural activities in the past, have both seeded probably the best example of how to have a complex, but low friction society.  Arguments, fights, road rage do occur but compared to anywhere else with such a large population pressure cooker, Japan doesn't even rate as a contender for worst practice.  The concepts of tatemae or proffered reality and honne or actual reality, are a big part of creating that harmonious environment.     Of course, as foreigners we initially struggle with this separation of the real world and the imagined world.  It can seem that Japanese people can be two faced - saying one thing but doing another.  Being the bearer of bad news rarely becomes an issue in Japan, because no one ever delivers it.  No shooting the messenger here because people have learnt to be extremely circumspect about how much they tell others and how they tell it.  The language is an excellent tool for this, because it is so excellent for vagary.   Western society does the same thing, but we tend to notice it more here.  At home, if your father-in-law has been on a "see-food-diet" (see food and eat it) but asks if you think he has lost weight, you are likely to plunge right into a tatemae answer that will tell him what he wants to hear. No unvarnished truth that he is obese and there is no difference from the last time you saw him, which would be the honne.  So we do it in our cultures as well, but Japan has institutionalized it.   Being indirect, vague, circuitous are all admirable traits for Japanese communicators. Rude, unrepentant, bombastic Westerners, card carrying members of the "tell it like it is" society, have trouble with what they see as duplicitous behavior.  What do you do when people won't tell you the truth?  How can you lead an organization when you don't know what is going on and when bad news only eeks its way out, when all efforts to hide it have failed?  How can people be held accountable when you can't count on them to adhere to the internal rules around transparency.   It gets worse of course when you are the boss.  Any boss, in almost any culture, will be getting served up some form of tatemae, simply because they are the boss.  People want to tell you what want to hear, as a means of sucking up to you for some possible advantage or to avoid your wrath if it all goes the wrong way.  There are plenty of killed messengers in the Western world and we have all learnt that that role is one to avoid whenever possible.  Japan just takes the mastery level up a couple of notches.     As the boss, how do we get to the bottom of what is going on, if we can't rely on those who work for us to speak up.  We have a few options available to us.  Find a confidant, who is plugged into what is really going on who can tell you the truth.  Be careful of the "gaijin handler". This is the English speaking Japanese staff member who uses their English communication facility to get close to power and to be a double agent.  They may look like they are on your side, but actually they know you won't be around forever and they have to build powerful patrons from within to get that all important leg up to the top.  They are there to feed you what others want you to know, make sure you don’t find out too much and keep an eye on you. It is hard to spot the difference between a confidant and a “handler”, but just be careful and keep your eyes open.    A better method is to be a great boss Be the boss people can trust and will not feel fear, whenever they have to talk truth to power.  You might imagine that is you already.  Wasn't it you who erupted when the target achievement was poor or the deadline was missed or someone did something dumb?  Everyone is watching the boss like a hawk.  How does the boss react to bad news?  What happens when the pressure is really on, does that bon vivant boss become a monster?  Keeping calm, no matter what, takes courage, patience and practice.   Building a personal relationship of trust with staff means making time available for them. The boss who can't manage their time or can't delegate is just a leaf being blown around by the wind of busyness.  They can't coach, can't create real relationships because they don't have the time.  So make the time and get busy working on time management and delegation skills.  Work on communication skills.     We found in our research that high engagement levels are not an accident of fate.  They are created through the boss taking specific actions to build a relationship with the staff that translates into having more honne conversations and less tatemae substitutes.   When that trust is there, then you will find out what is really happening.  The way to build those high engagement levels is to make staff feel valued.  Those educated in the “expendable staff” tradition will struggle with this one.  “Staff are there to produce numbers and it is my way or the highway around here, because I have responsibility for the numbers, thank you very much”.   Instead, make the time to talk with the staff. Find out what motivates them, become their assistant to make what they want happen.  Back them, praise them, support them and good things start to happen.  Making people feel valued is a science but it can be very wearing.  Start with your true intention - what is it? Snow the punters or actually establish a real relationship based on trust?  Get this right at the outset and you will be in a much better and more credible position.    Okay, you may never find out all that is going on, just because you are the boss and this is Japan and you can't read the air.  However, you will get a much better clue and will be infinitely better informed that your contemporaries at other gaishikei multi-national companies.   When you arrive in Japan you are dispatched to a lake.  A heavy fog has descended on the lake and you are swimming around looking for a direction. You can hear noises and make out indiscriminate shapes, but not such more.  After a couple of years the fog beings to lift ever so slightly and now you can see the shore and a bit of an island maybe.  As things finally start to clear, you are sent home or on to you next post.  The way to get out of the fog earlier is to understand how Japan works.  The locals are not about to change it anytime soon and certainly not to suit “transient you”.     Create staff  members who feel empowered by you.  Make them feel valued in a sincere way.  Make time to communicate and build the relationships.   The fog will lift and tatemae and honne will just be cultural steps to succeeding in Japan, rather than roadblocks imperiling your meteoric rise to the top.  Accept the boss is always the boss and that getting full disclosure will never happen, no matter what.   Action Steps Understand we have our own versions of tatemae and hone Be careful of the gaijin handler Keep calm and never show your emotions, especially anger, in front of the team Work on building trust in you make the time available to build good relationships with your staff, regardless of how busy you find yourself Accept that, as the boss, you will never find out what is really going on in Japan anyway. That is the honne!   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

“Sontaku”: The Secret Sauce For Leaders in Japan     Sontaku is a Japanese word which means to surmise or conjecture about someone else’s feelings or desires. It is often associated with another Japanese word omotenashi or superb levels of hospitality, for which Japan is rightly famous. Sontaku means supplying an omotenashi style high level service before the customer has realised they actually need that service – anticipating the customer, based on the host’s conjecture about what they might need.   Steve Jobs at Apple did that with the iPhone. We didn't realize we needed it when we were all happy with Nokia, Blackberry, etc., but now we can’t go back. Wayne Gretzky, the legendary ice hockey star made the same point, when he said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is now”. Gary Vaynerchuk from Vaynermedia is famous for understanding where our “digital attention” is heading before we understand it ourselves. All of these aspects have a sontaku or conjecture element to them.   What about leaders in Japan? There are many business challenges facing us here: currency movements, government regulations, North Korea threatening our security, looming trade disputes with Trump, oil price fluctuations, China’s military control of the sea lanes to Japan, weak consumer spending, potential collapse of the welfare system in Japan due to the aging population, Government debt levels, the fragility of the tourist boom, etc.   Another biggie is staffing. Delivery companies can’t keep up with on-line retail purchase orders, soba restaurants can’t get young people to spend the many years required to learn the craft, speaking Chinese will help when we go to the convenience stores, because not enough Japanese want to work there. We know that farmers are aging but there are not enough successors in the pipeline. The construction industry is going to lose 1.28 million workers between now and 2025. In 2015 thirty percent of construction workers were over the age of 55. It is a physical job, that doesn’t age well. Overall the youth population up to the age of 35 is going to more than halve between now and 2060. Where are the new hires going to come from?   The dual aging and decline in the population is currently being addressed in two ways. One is moving businesses offshore or buying businesses in foreign climes, where there is a growing buyer base. The other is automation. We will replace people with robots and machinery of some sort to make up for the shortfall in workers. Driverless vehicles makes sense when you can’t hire enough drivers. Robot attachments to our limbs is a reality now, to help the aged go up stairs. The same idea applies to give workers the power needed to lift heavy items in factories and on building sites.   Leaders will not be automated any time soon because of all the soft skills needed. Are we going to be facing a major “sontaku deficit” though because our leaders in organisations are not anticipating what their workers will want? Basic economics tells us that a reducing supply of labour coupled with a rising demand, makes everything much more competitive.   Our global research, confirmed for Japan as well, was that the sense of feeling valued by your boss and the organization was absolutely critical for being highly engaged at work. Great, but how would you know that you are valued? It all comes down to the skill of the boss and how the boss communicates and interacts with you. This is where sontaku comes in. The boss anticipates your needs in your career and work before you realise it yourself. The leader is having the right type of career conversations, the correct discussions about what drives each staff’s individual motivations, the ability to do delegation correctly so it is seen as a career enhancer and not a punishment.   Are your leaders skating to where the puck is going to be or are they racing into the 20th century in leadership terms. Are they still working off the old playbook of worker low mobility, high loyalty, total sacrifice and obedience? If your leaders are the product of OJT (On The Job Training) alone, then get ready for disruption. Their mediocre bosses as their role models and their own best efforts to repeat that low standard in their own leadership, will take your organisation nowhere in this new world of work. The current crop of leaders expect the sontaku to be applied to them, not the other way around. Brace for impact everyone, in this relentless war for talent we are about to crash!   We are entering the new day of ruthless competition to recruit and retain staff. Leader’s soft skills of getting willing cooperation, encouraging real innovation, fostering creativity, being excellent persuaders and having supreme people skills are the new reality. Technical knowledge isn’t disappearing anytime soon in terms of importance, but hard skills alone won’t be enough. If that is all you are providing to your teams, then watch your staff jump ship to your rivals who have skilled up their leaders in how to apply sontaku to their staff, as a recruit and retain strategy.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.     About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, THE Sales Japan Series and THE Presentations Japan Series, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.  

Leaders Need To Skate To Where The Puck Will Be     Wayne Gretzky is famous for this ice hockey quote about anticipating where and when the critical actions have to be taken, rather than just following what is already happening. This metaphor applies even more in business, because the complexities are much higher, the team is usually a lot bigger and the ramifications much larger. In reality though, we often find ourselves following, rather than leading.   We are frequently looking at numbers which are historical indicators, not forward guides to what is coming. The ebb and flow of the day also sucks up all of our time. We are dealing with people issues and these are inspired by something that has already happened and can’t easily be undone or was missed and didn’t happen. Again, we are all historians, poking over the bones of the event to try and create a narrative to explain what has happened, so that we won’t see a repeat of a failure.   The puck location idea here is to get ahead of that daily grind and look forward. We know we should do this, but the amount of actual forward planning we do is often limited to working up the annual plan. Daily changes make that plan irrelevant pretty quickly. As the famous philosopher Iron Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. We are getting punched in the mouth everyday and are usually bogged down in reaction, rather than spending any high value time in anticipation. Ask yourself this question, “How much time do I spend on a daily basis predicting, rather than reacting?”.   Some numbers can be made available that allow us to track trends and give some insight into where the numbers may finally fall out. The run rate on revenues can tell us whether we are on track to reach an annual goal. The monthly accumulative revenues are one indicator, but run rate can show we are in trouble. It tells us we have to take some action now, to influence the final numbers, rather than crawling to the finish line exhausted and find we have come up short.   Companies who are adding people and growing rapidly are often consumed by absorbing the new people, but give no thought to the future culture construct of the organisation. When I was working at the Shinsei Retail Bank we were rapidly hiring mid-career staff to sell our financial products to the very wealthy.   At one point, the new hires became the majority. That instantly meant we had lost control of the culture of the organisation, because there was now no single dominant culture. We had to scramble to create a “One Shinsei” culture, but we hadn’t spent anytime predicting that would happen. Consequently we now had to go into catch up mode.   The vision, mission and values of the organisation are the glue. Rapid expansion can unglue the compact between the team and the leadership. Skating to where the puck is means anticipating the outcome of the changes we are currently executing. This sounds simple, but most of our days are spent belting crocodiles with the oar and trying to keep things afloat.   Somewhere in our day we need to be tracking the future. It could be revenues, supply capacity, clients who have missed a payment or whatever. These are rather mechanical. The tricky part if tracking what is happening with the people. For example, the predictive work needed to understand how we can retain our people isn’t being done yet. In a declining population demographic that is suicide. We see companies around us unable to source enough staff, but we never anticipate that is going to be us, in the very near future.   For those anticipating growth, that means thinking now about how many new leaders will be needed and who they might be. Next, how can we prepare them to succeed? Often we put them straight into the leader job with no training. They fail, so we have to replace them. We repeat this process forever. Giving training early is much better than coming up with the solution too late. Once they have burnt their bridges with their team, it is very had to roll that back.   Where is your puck going to be and are you ready?   Action Steps   Review what metrics are available to help us with our predictive needs If we are adding people anticipate the possible impact on the organisation’s culture Calculate how many new leaders will be needed, identify the candidates and give the final selection the training they need, before we give them the responsibilities of being the leader Allocate time for predicting, rather than just spending everyday reacting     Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.     About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, THE Sales Japan Series and THE Presentations Japan Series, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people:    

Productivity Not Immigration   During the “bubble years” of surging economic growth, Japan could not keep up with the supply of workers for the 3K jobs – kitsui, kitanai, kiken or difficult, dirty, dangerous undertakings. The 1985 Plaza Accord released a genie out of the bottle in the form of a very strong yen, which made everything, everywhere seems dirt cheap. Japanese people traveled abroad as tourists in mass numbers for the first time. They often created havoc in international destinations, because they were so gauche – a bit like we are experiencing now with mass Chinese tourism. Companies bought up foreign companies and real estate at a rapid clip. French champagne and beluga caviar was being downed at a an alarming pace.   Finding Japanese workers became difficult, so the Japanese government turned to immigration. We had a very special immigration however. Countries with oil like Iran were allowed to send their citizens to Japan without requiring visas and suddenly we had an influx of Iranians, a bit like we have now with Nigerians. Brazilians of Japanese decent were encouraged to come and work in Japan. They rarely spoke Japanese being third and fourth generation, but they did have Japanese blood coursing through their veins. Somehow Japanese bureaucrats decided that would compensate for the fact that culturally they were 100% South Americans.   With the collapse of the bubble economy many of these Brazilians went home as their jobs here in Japan dried up. We are again facing a shortage of workers in the 3K industries because of the declining population. We are scheduled to lose 780,000 people every year. This has an impact on consumer spending because we have less people around to buy goods and services. Uncertainty over the future has played to Japanese risk aversion and native conservatism. People are not spending, preferring to leave their money in the bank at microscopic interest rates. In a deflationary economy at least you are not losing money. We are seeing Chinese and other foreigners working at convenience stores. Students can work up to 38 hours a week, which surpasses the work week in France.   The Japanese government is creating immigrant workers without calling it immigration. They do this no doubt because they can easily ship them all off home again whenever they feel the need. These ghost immigrants are like hydroponics – they can get nutrients here but they can’t put down any roots.   Is immigration needed when we have such low white collar productivity and low wages? Do we need to bring in mass immigration to maintain or expand the population levels? Wage growth has not occurred yet, despite companies hoarding massive cash surpluses under their futons. Also, somehow the laws of supply and demand have not kicked in yet. There is a shortage of staff for child care facilities but wages are not attractive enough to staff them. Nurses are in short demand but salaries are not moving up yet. Delivery workers are in short supply but where is the wage increase to fill the vacancies more easily?   Japan is looking to robots to help cover the staff shortages. This plays to Japan’s love of robots and their technological might. What would be more impactful would be to free up the latent capacity of white collar workers. They have very low productivity because of the culture of work here. Spending long hours as a tatemae or superficial show of devotion and loyalty is not helping. The amount and quality of work being produced is more important.   There is a slow rhythm of work in Japan. In the big cities like Tokyo, people are tired in the morning because of the late nights and long commutes. Working long hours is tiring and as Parkinson noted “work expands to fit the time”. Just hanging around the office to show your devotion is nice, but not all that helpful. This is the exact opposite of a productive work culture focused on outcomes.   The other issue is very low engagement numbers. Every engagement survey seems to show Japan as the global outlier in terms of engagement. Yes there are cultural reasons around Japanese conservatism when it comes to answering these survey questions. However nobody seems to think that directionally, the low scores are wrong.   Low engagement affects work pace and also creativity. Tired people are rarely innovative. Finding better ways of working has a lot of potential but it needs desire. Doing new things isn’t rewarded in japan because in the new there is risk. Failure isn’t tolerated and there are no second careers here for failures. You have to slink off into the sunset and disappear. Middle managers are experts at not rocking the boat and they don’t see any gain from being innovative and rallying their troops around that banner. Better to get ahead by doing the same old, same old.   Better leadership, delegation, time management, engagement, outcome orientation and more tolerance for failure in pursuit of innovation would go a long way to lifting Japan’s productivity. This would easily compensate for the declining supply of workers due to the demographic reality Japan is facing. Immigration is not the first response needed when there is so much excess latent capacity not being maximized here.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author   In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, “THE Sales Japan Series”. “THE Presentation Japan Series”, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.  

How To Resolve Internal Conflicts   Business is more fast paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained.   Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely irritated. Twenty years ago we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations!   Imagine our forebears who when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super snail mail ping pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity. Not today. We want it and we want it now and look out anyone who gets in our way. We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace.   We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention. Process Conflict – is this what we are dealing with? How much control do we have in this particular case we are facing? We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner. They may not be aware this is causing problems for others. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and come up with a joint action plan to fix it.   Role Conflicts easily arise in flat organisations. What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue? We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead to do so. This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is. We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. This may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!).     Interpersonal Conflicts are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actions, behavours, words and the reported versions from others around us.   We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Are people telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason?   There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are but we don’t want to do them. However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself.   This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the issues. Before you do that though, forget about what you want for the moment and put yourself in their shoes. Reflect on how you would see the issue from their perspective. This will make it easier to have that one-on-one conversation.   Direction Conflicts arise when the path forward is unclear. Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone of what needs to happen or at the same time. Check that you are in fact clear yourself on the organisation’s current direction or vision. Bring up the discrepancy between you and the other party in respectful terms, in a neutral way. This is not about establishing blame (although we often like doing that!), but about getting joint clarity about what is the aim and how it should be delivered together.   External Conflicts are tough because by definition, you lack power or control. Ask yourself whether you have a dog in this fight or not? Choose your battles carefully and concentrate on what you can do to improve things, rather than wasting energy whining about what you cannot control. As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control stop and re-set your mind around how the situation can be improved. Ask yourself, “in what way can we continue to move the organisation forward?”. In the words of the hardest working man in show business Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”!   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.     About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, THE Sales Japan Series and THE Presentations Japan Series, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Fear and Loathing In Japan   The Spa magazine in Japan released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. The Lehman Shock in 2008 opened to door to job losses in larger companies, something which only had been possible in smaller forms in the past. The sense of lifetime employment as a given was removed and a brand new world of work emerged.   Feeling unappreciated is a construct of leadership. The Japanese system of hierarchy in companies has followed the lessons proffered during the military service experienced by those who participated in World War Two. Brutalisation was widespread and everyone was expendable. Postwar leaders in the West were also the graduates of battle as well. Things changed in the late 1960s however and modern economies moved away from the old military models of leadership, to seek best practice based on research.   Japan has not even started on that path yet. The post war years were a frenetic effort to rebuild a devastated economy and to catch up with the rest of the world. When I first came into contact with Japanese businesspeople, I remember their joy as Japan knocked off one Western economy after another, to climb to the rankings to number two in the world.   The bubble economy saw Japan go completely crazy and lose all sense of proportion, as the Plaza Accord Agreement sent the yen into the stratosphere of supreme value and everything, everywhere was a bargain. I was back in Australia during that time and wondered why those lovely Japanese people I had met pre-bubble, were now replaced by these rude, arrogant, overbearing types?   During all of this transition there was no driver to change the management systems in companies away from the war-time model, because things had worked out pretty well. It wasn’t broken, so no fixing required and anyway nobody likes change because of all the risk attached to it, so steady as she goes. Here we are decades later and life has certainly changed, but the leadership mentality has not caught up yet.   Bosses were schooled in the Tough Love Academy of Leadership. Communication, coaching, feedback, encouragement – all the key soft skills were never in that curriculum. You probably can’t beat Japan when it comes to hard skill education. Their perfectionism, combined with a relentless curiousity for small incremental kaizen style improvements is a wonder to behold. Soft skills not so much.   Japan always bottoms the charts whenever firms do engagement surveys. Japan is the global leader in the bottom rung of microscopic scores for percentages of highly engaged staff. Yes, there are cultural issues with these surveys, given Japanese humility, conservatism and circumspection. But just ask any Japanese firm if they think the low scores are fiction and everyone agrees that directionally, they are correct.   So we need some solid work here for Japan to catch up and join the rest of the advanced world of work. The HR function in Japan, apart from its policeman role in having the rules followed, is there to move you around the organization so that you can become a jack of all trades an a master of none. One The Job Training (OJT) is the main methodology of leadership instruction.   Just passing on what each boss experienced to the next generation, without any structure, excellence, best practice capture, design, doesn’t sound too smart does it. Yet that is exactly the problem, not enough thinking has gone into what Japan needs from it’s leaders going forward. Soft skills and hard skills are both called for, but you need a mindset change to appreciate that they are both important. The Spa survey shows that the areas of greatest demand are for soft skills solutions. Have a good look around your own operation and see just how much time your leadership group are spending on encouraging, coaching, recognising and praising. My guess would be not a lot, because they simply don’t think these areas of attention are so important. What a lost opportunity. It is time to turn that around and get this country going.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.     About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcast “THE Leadership Japan Series”, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.                    

Big Brother Japan Inc Style   “What anchors their behavior is the salaryman’s desire to protect himself – no one wants to put their position at risk by telling the truth”. This little gem of an insight was made by a retired nuclear engineer who worked for Toshiba. He was referring to the various scandals that had taken place there and explaining why illegal decisions made by senior management like cooking the books went unchecked internally.   Corporate Japan in some ways, could be a modern model for George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”. Big Brother is the leadership who define that truths are lies and lies are truths. That anyone against the system must be eliminated because 100% loyalty is the minimum. There are facts and then there are “alternative facts”. We do the thinking around here, your job is to carry out our genius ideas.   This is not surprising because kids are inculcated into accepting authority, doing not questioning, following authority figures even if they are only one year older. Sempai (seniors) sensei (teachers) are respected as part of Japan’s Confucian construct. Group responsibility lessens the burden and gives air cover to individuals that they have learnt is essential if you want to void the stain of failure on your record.   Errors are kept track of and come into play later in your career when the bosses consider who gets the promotion and who goes sideways. That is one of the reasons HR is so powerful in Japanese companies – they decide the transfers to new roles and locations and they have the dirt file on everyone as they come up through the ranks.   So how do we get innovation going in our companies? The innovation process has trial and error built into it, by virtue of the fact that what we are going to do is new, untested, experimental. How do we test stuff if no one wants to try anything new because there is a risk of failure?   The fear of failure restricts people mentally from the very start. They are afraid to voice opinions because they have learnt from early childhood that going along is how you get ahead. Don’t stand out by taking a stand. Blend in, find the absolute middle of the fence and sit there. If the survey is a one to five scale select three for everything.   Just employing someone into your firm doesn’t erase years of brainwashing here about what is acceptable and what isn’t. Yet, we hear foreign executives moaning about they don’t get any quality ideas from below, that productivity is low, decisions are painstakingly slow, people don’t contribute during meetings, etc.   All true but not a fait accompli. The environment for failure has to be secured. The fear to step out has to be replaced with rewards for trying not just succeeding. Performance reviews and the measures used have to be changed away from outcomes to more process. Process in the sense of generating ideas, suggestions, taking risks, trying new things. All unrelated to actual success. If we only reward success, then we had better hope we have a bunch of geniuses working for us. In the Western work environment, we reward success but we don’t see failure as fatal, if people fail in the right way. Being incompetent in your current task is not acceptable. However, pioneering some new intervention or iteration is seen as good work and if it fails, the lessons learnt are considered valuable and the person is not terminated.   In a Japanese context nobody believes it is not fatal. It has to be shown that failure is acceptable as part of the innovation process. That means bosses have to walk the talk. The worst case is saying we welcome innovation and then whack someone in the head as soon as they fail. Maybe “innovation is good, we accept failure as part of the process” is the ethos in the dark wood paneled recesses of the executive floor, but it also has to permeate the culture throughout middle management. Getting middle management to accept this culture requires a lot of re-training in Japan. However, is this factored into the innovation process or are we hoping for the best instead? Let’s make sure we are all walking the same talk.   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]     About The Author   In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcast “THE Leadership Japan Series”, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.   Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.    

Bad Business Battlefield Promotions  In the military, junior officers are the equivalent of middle management in business. In times of warfare these middle managers are often wounded or killed in battle. There are no replacements from officer school, so the most capable member of the team is promoted on the battlefield, as the replacement leader. It makes no sense in business to have this as the model. Yet, this is often what happens.   The current middle manager is poached by a vigilant recruiter or they jump ship for greener pastures. The organisation has had no capacity or has given no great thought to the issue of succession planning and there is no opportunity to transfer in a seasoned manager as the replacement. The most capable member of the team is tapped on the shoulder to step up into a leadership role. How are these individuals judged to be the most capable? Usually, this is never based on their leadership capability, because they have never had an opportunity to display their latent talent. It is mainly based on their technical expertise, functional experience or longevity in the team.   Having selected the most likely leader, they are now thrust into the job and given the opportunity to learn how with OJT or On The Job Training. The “training” however is the self-paced, pick it up as you go along variety. The previous boss didn’t understand the importance of delegation as a way to groom successors, so no one got a taste of what being the boss was like. The new boss’s reporting line going up are too busy with their own work, to spend much time coaching the newbie boss. Trial and error is now the established curriculum of leadership.   Going from one of the team, to the leader is no easy task. Your colleagues have a broad range of reactions to the new order from incredulity, to disdain, to jealousy, to support. The new leader wonders how to project their authority with the former colleagues? They also discover that while variety amongst colleagues was previously an amusing observation, now that they have to lead them, they discover they are all quite disparate in their thinking, desires and expectations. They can’t be led as a mass group, like a herd of sheep. This lot walks on two legs and talks back to the boss.   The new leader also discovers that they are responsible for the results of the whole team. They are still working on their on their own tasks, because there was no replacement for them, once they moved up. The team is one down in fact and so the same amount of work has to be done by less people. Punching out the results requires a player/leader combination role. For the first year this works, because the new leader is capable of doing the work required, to get their own numbers. The team also shuffles along pretty much as before.   The new leader has no idea about how to leverage the team to get higher results. Delegation is an unknown. There is the perennial fear that the delegatee won’t be reliable. The delegatee in fact may be highly resistant, because they believe they are already busy, busy with their own work and they don’t see why they should be doing “the boss’s work” as well. No delegation capacity puts excess strain on the time management of the new leader. Actually, their time management wasn’t much chop before, but it was sort of containable. Now the pressure is on and the cracks start to open up.   With the new financial year comes the inevitable higher targets. Now the new leader finds that the team is still one short, the hours in the day haven’t increased, the team is working as they always have, producing what they have always produced. The difference is that the new leader has to produce both the team numbers and fulfill the tasks required by the organisation. These include exciting new tasks like reporting, carrying our performance reviews, handling the team administration, plus still doing their own job. This is now becoming unsustainable.   Their time management and leadership skills haven’t improved, so they are now stressed and run ragged. They don’t produce the numbers, the employee survey pastes them for their “poor” leadership ability and the organisation fires them. The machine then whips out another battlefield promotion and we start the same process once again.   The moral of the story? Have a succession plan developed, give your new leaders training on the difference between doing and leading, set them up to succeed and assign a senior leader as an active mentor to coach them through the minefields of middle management.   Action Steps   Ensure that all leaders in the organisation are delegating tasks to subordinates, as a way of exposing them to issues before they step up into leadership positions Work on the time management skills of all the leaders, so that they can do delegation properly Help the new leaders by giving them formal training Assign a mentor and hold the mentor accountable for their success as a leader   Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.     About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, THE Sales Japan Series and THE Presentations Japan Series, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: