The Leadership Japan Series

We recently completed an in-house Leadership Training for Managers programme for a local Japanese firm. The President founded the firm as a spin-out from a well-established international accounting company many years ago and has successfully grown the organisation. He is now considering succession planning and aims to develop his senior leadership team. He had an internal survey conducted on the training programme, which he then shared with the trainer who delivered the course and myself.

Survey results on training can sometimes be challenging, and this case was no different. Some participants felt the training was too long, while others thought it was too short. Some found the content very challenging, and others not challenging enough. As is often the case, the majority were neutral, while we mainly received strong feedback from the outliers.

However, there were some particularly intriguing comments. A few participants mentioned that they found the training exhausting, claiming it impacted their ability to perform their work after the sessions. The core training involved weekly 3.5-hour sessions over seven weeks. Concentrating on new content, which differs from daily tasks, can certainly be demanding.

Several participants also noted that the programme contained a lot of content, which is true – it is a course with substantial material. However, I wouldn’t describe any of the content as particularly complex. Dale Carnegie training is highly practical and addresses real-world needs rather than being theoretical. New concepts require the brain to engage, which some participants found challenging. We also employ the Socratic method, encouraging self-discovery through questioning.

This approach differs from the standard Japanese educational method, which still leans on Confucian principles of memorisation and rote learning. Our approach often surprises new participants, who arrive prepared to take notes on whatever the instructor says. Instead, we plant seeds of information, prompting participants to reflect on their beliefs, experiences, and ideas. When they share their thoughts, we ask them to explain their reasoning. This is much more demanding than simply reproducing what the teacher says, so it’s no surprise it can be tiring.

Some participants also mentioned fatigue from needing to speak up during the sessions. We incorporate extensive group discussions, often in small groups where there is nowhere to hide; everyone has to actively share their ideas and experiences. They can’t be passive, sitting silently – they need to think on their feet and articulate their ideas. This can be mentally taxing, as there is pressure to communicate clearly without appearing unprepared. Many also discover they are not naturally succinct, logical, or well-organised communicators, which can add a level of stress. They may observe peers expressing themselves well and feel a gap in their own skills, creating additional pressure. They also realise they haven’t engaged their minds this way in some time, so it can feel like dusting off mental cobwebs.

When I go to the gym, I push my muscles to lift heavier weights and increase repetitions. This is tiring and sometimes even painful. Challenging the brain is similar – it can be tough if you’re not doing it regularly. Many leaders in this team have been performing routine tasks that they have already mastered, so they haven’t faced much challenge in their work so far. Their focus has been on managing their teams, and the broader aspects of leadership have been outside their experience. This training has been an eye-opener, revealing what leadership should entail.

The idea that training should not be mentally taxing is interesting. Growth requires stepping out of your Comfort Zone and engaging with challenging content and new methodologies. This is how we grow. Expecting to progress without stepping beyond what’s familiar is a quaint notion. If we continue to do what we have always done, in the same way we have always done it, we will achieve the same results we have always achieved. Stepping up means trying new things or taking on different tasks – both of which are challenging and tiring. And that’s exactly how it should be.

Are you sitting too much and for too long at your desk every day?  Are you eating too much every meal because your mother told you when you were a kid to finish everything on your plate.  Are you hitting the booze after work with your mates or at home to rid yourself of your stress?  Are your kidneys and liver in good shape? Are you carrying around too much meat and making your muscles and organs work much harder than they should? Is your blood pressure elevated and too high every day?   Are you constantly thinking about all of your troubles at work?  Are you having trouble getting good quality consistent sleep?  Are you promising yourself to get to the gym, but don’t make it as often as you need to in order to make any progress?

Well, I have pretty much described myself here.  Knowing about it and doing something to fix it are two universes separated by infinite space.  Intellectually I know what I should do, but practically I struggle with a lifetime of negative habits which all need work.  I do a lot of pontificating in my content about what to do and how to do it, so I can imagine I can come across as Mr. Goody Two Shoes pseudo perfect. This time I will use myself and my failings as the mirror for you to think about yourself and what you are doing if you share these same attributes. 

Ironically, as I sit here writing this, I have been sitting at my home desk writing my weekly blogs for the last three hours and haven’t once stood up.  I know just sitting is bad, but I get into a concentration zone and I forget to stand up. Right, I am going to use a timer with an alarm and set it so that I stop what I am doing and stand up and walk around at set intervals, a bit like the pomodoro method of twenty-five minutes work, five-minute break and then after four pomodoros take fifteen minute break.

Eating less is a choice.  Leaving parts of the meal unconsumed is a choice. Another irony.  I am sitting here in Tokyo writing this blog and we have the “hara hachibu” tradition here in Japan of only eating until 80% full. This idea originally came from Okinawa and they are one of the longest lived peoples in the world. I have to break that habit driven deep into my mind by my Mum and not feel compelled to eat everything on the plate.  I had lunch the other day with my mate Tak and I noted he left most of his chicken uneaten, which was quite a feat, as the main meal was chicken.  Growing up in Japan, maybe he didn’t have to break free of the gravitational pull of “finish everything on your plate”.

Roughly once a week, over a meal with my wife, I like to drink Australian wine at home on Fridays after my hard toil at the Dale Carnegie Siberian Salt Mines.  I used to finish a bottle between us, but actually I was drinking most of it.  Today, I am down to a single glass to give my blood pressure, kidneys and liver a rest.  This is extremely hard because I want to keep drinking.  It is a weekly battle with myself to stop at one glass.

At one point back in the 1990s, when I was working in Nagoya, after many months of wining and dining and being wined and dined, my weight blew up to 90kilos.  I didn’t notice it, because it was gradual.  After one event where we were having a meal sitting on tatami, some kind soul sent me a photo from the evening.  It was taken from the side, so I got a full appraisal of the profile of my massive girth.  I was so shocked.   Today, my weight floats around 82-83 kilos at the moment and I need to get it floating around 80—81, and those last couple of kilos seem so hard to evaporate.  For reference purposes, when I was competing in karate competitions, I was fighting in the 75-80 kilo weight division, so getting close to my fighting weight is a good goal for me to have.

Switching off from work is a pain.  I think about my problems at work all day and night, and that black monster is always sitting there in the darkened corner of my mind.  Lately, I am also adding to my woes by not getting good quality sleep.  I am not sure why that is, but I think part of it is not enough exercise.  I need to be more tired at night so that I drift off to sleep quickly and smoothly.  I was walking every morning, then I caught a cold with the change of the seasons, so I took a break.  Then I tripped on the stairs at home, smashed my toe into the stair rise and it is a miracle I didn’t fracture it, but boy has it been sore.  Consequently, no walking in the morning.

I need to get back to that routine of awakening at 5.50am, get out the door, walk for an hour while listening to podcasts and then get off to work.  Getting to the gym regularly is a difficulty because I am often at networking events at night, but I know I can do better.  What about going to the gym on the weekends?  I can do better.

One item you may note that is prominent by its absence is smoking and the quitting thereof.  Both my parents died of lung cancer and my father at age 51, so I have never smoked.  If you are a smoker, then I haven’t got much to say from any personal experience.  I have read that as soon as you quit, the body starts to rebuild and you can repair the damage you have been doing to your lungs and broader health.  Apparently, after a year since you quit, your risk of heart disease is halved and after five years, your chances of a stroke and cervical cancer are the same as a nonsmoker.  Worthwhile thinking about I would say.

Everything I have talked about today is within my grasp, if I choose to grasp it.   I don’t need a Life Coach, a Personal Trainer, Ozempic or anything else but will, determination, consistency and making some decisions and sticking to them. How about you?

We know that AI has gone from the domain of geeky people in white lab coats to the mainstream of business in a nanosecond. Such speed is difficult to keep up with and the roll out of new options continues unabated. As the leader how do we surf this tech wave and prepare our people for this AI enabled future/ 

Making data backed decisions is always preferred in leadership and AI has the power to crunch large amounts of data and provide answers very quickly.  As long as it isn’t lying to us with so-called hallucinations about the results, then it is a big help.  Direction on using AI in our businesses is not going to bubble up from down below and we leaders need to get to work to harness this beast.

1.        Audit

We can start with an audit of where we think AI can bring savings in terms of time, money, effort and quality.  Doing this process with the team is required because we want them to own the process and the results.  There may be fears that certain jobs will disappear because of AI and we need to face that reality head on.  It doesn't necessarily mean the person leaves the firm because finding staff in Japan is at a premium, but it may mean their job content changes.  There will be flow on effects about required retraining and thought has to be put into the feasibility of doing that with the resources we have available.

2.        Strategy & Innovation

Having completed the audit we now have some insight into the opportunities and difficulties working with AI will bring, rather than relying on our imaginings of the future.  Where is the intersection of AI capabilities and the goals we have set for the firm?  The goals are usually revenue related and these won’t change much, but the way we deliver the results could.

People will have to work with AI, there is no escaping that fact, so what is the strategy to determine how this happens?  We don’t want to leave everyone to their own devices to wander off and somehow work it out by themselves.  Which AI platforms do we need, how much should we budget for them and who will take care of what, are leading questions we need to find answers for?

For some staff, AI may never be an immediate part of their world at this point, although that may also change.  We need to do an analysis of who needs it the most and who needs it first.  Which jobs will benefit the most from applying AI’s capabilities to the work?  That simple question may be difficult to answer because we have to explore the possibilities AI introduces.

We may need to appoint champions to drive the usage of AI inside the company, so that we can break the task up into smaller pieces. The scale of AI can be overwhelming.  How can we find ways of having AI help us with becoming more innovative or at least set out some frameworks for us to explore by ourselves?

3.        Staff Training

A lot of the training for the use of AI will be internal with people dedicating time to play with it.  If we think of AI as external to our work, then we won’t nominate the time for people to experiment and learn on the job.  The explosion of AI means that no one can keep up with the latest developments as functionalities are superseded by new alternatives.

There is also the issue of the broad range of platform variations and upgrades which are emerging every month.  How can we navigate this breadth and speed?  We can’t but we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed we don’t start.

We should select a few platforms which seem to have the greatest application for what we do and start there, realising we may need to jump on to the back of faster racehorse, once the gun has sounded and we are off barrelling down the track. 

We should block out a certain number of hours per week for our team members to play with AI and see where they can apply its power to the business.  If the leader nominates 4 hours a week, for example, then that gives people permission and time from within their work day to experiment. 

4.        Reporting

Naturally, we want to have reports and updates on the progress and learnings these hours experimenting are yielding.  This requires some time scheduling changes for everyone and for the boss too.  These ideas are all difficult in an already busy life, but we have to grant AI the priority or it will all just be hot air from the boss and there will be no follow through.  We are all touching different parts of the machine, so getting together to share makes a lot of sense and the boss can nominate a couple hours in a month to make sure that happens.

5.        Data

We will unearth and collect a host of data, but what do we do with it?  This seeking data for data’s sake is tremendous fun for some, but it all has to connect back to driving the firm forward.

There will be financial data we can use to try and pick up trends or patterns which will aid us in trying to set budgets and allocations for spending.  There will be customer data which can reveal aspects of our service we need to work on or areas where we need greater investment.  There will be market and buyer data we can get access to which may not have been available before, which can better inform the strategies we develop and the decisions we take. Can we find data which will help us maximise our efficiencies and drive the effectiveness of the business?

6.        Clients

Can we get deeper insights into our client’s situation?  Obviously clients don’t share everything with us and often we are working blind to the realities they are facing.  How can AI help us to better understand the buyer’s sector of the industry, what is happening with their competitors, government regulations, currency fluctuations, etc.

AI is here to stay and we are all riding the wave whether we like it or not.  Have we decided yet to deal with it intelligently or are we going to keep doing things in a sporadic fashion?  It is time for the leader to lead the firm’s AI revolution.

Recently, I was teaching a class of APAC executives on how to handle pushback to their ideas. Some participants were senior legal counsels, who frequently had to say "no" to their salespeople. As a salesperson myself, being told "no" is something that comes with the territory and is not intimidating at all. In fact, we often hear "no" most of the time. We're tough and have learned to persist until we achieve a "yes."

These executives spoke about how challenging it was to get the other side to accept their advice or point of view, which made a lot of sense. Think back to your school days—was there ever a course, or even a fragment of one, that taught you how to argue with someone to get them to agree with you? Academic debating is different; it's an arbitrated intellectual exercise. But the dynamics within a company are entirely different, and most of us aren't trained for these real-world, practical needs, even through corporate education.

Here are some key steps to successfully navigate resistance and disagreement, especially when you're battling over ideas, policies, direction, or decisions.

1. Truly Listen to the Other Side

We often think we are listening, but when we hear the word "no," it looms large in our minds. We become preoccupied with crafting our counterargument and, as a result, stop fully listening to what’s being said. People often make a statement we dislike and then provide their reasoning. If we've already stopped listening after the part we didn’t like, we can’t fully appreciate their logic.

2. Pause Before Responding

Before blurting out our disagreement, we need to pause and think. There are a few ways to do this. We can remain silent and think before speaking, although this can be tricky, as silence may prompt the other party to press harder and add more information. Another method is to use a "cushion"—a neutral, non-committal statement that neither agrees nor disagrees. This buys us valuable thinking time. Even a brief pause of five or six seconds can significantly improve the quality of what we say. Without that pause, we risk saying something we regret because we haven't had enough time to formulate a proper response.

3. Reflect Briefly

Use this pause to have a brief internal conversation about the topic. Ask yourself: What do I believe? And why do I believe it? Usually, our opinions are formed based on some personal experience, or something we’ve read, heard, or seen. Recalling the origin of our belief helps us structure our response.

4. Share Your Story

Once you've reflected, tell your story. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should clearly outline what happened, where, when, and who was involved. This method reminds me of Japanese grammar, where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, determining whether the action is positive, negative, past, present, or future. You can’t interrupt someone in Japanese until they finish their sentence because you don’t know where they’re going with it. In English, listeners often anticipate the conclusion and jump in or finish the sentence for the speaker. You can't do that in Japanese.

By telling your story, you provide background and context. While the listener can disagree with your conclusions, they can’t argue with your background or experience. Given the same context, they might reach the same conclusion. If you tell your story well, they might even reach your conclusion before you do. By holding off on the "punch line" until the very end, you prevent interruptions and ensure they hear you out. Even if they still disagree, they’ll have a clear understanding of why you hold your views.

By following these four steps, you can persuade others to consider your ideas and ensure you're heard and understood. In the worst-case scenario, even if they still disagree, at least they will fully understand your reasoning. This allows for a civil discussion without heightened emotions, preserving relationships and enabling you to agree to disagree.

Pulling rank on people is clearly the fastest and easiest way to get people to fly straight and do what we want. It is also a very dangerous choice in Japan in an era when the demand for people is so strong and the supply so limited. Mobility today means people have choices. If you are not interested in what they have to say or their ideas, they will jump ship to somewhere they think they will be better appreciated. The problem is their ideas are rarely much chop.  They don’t have the experience, sufficient information, enough understanding of the context or the weight of responsibility on their shoulders if it doesn’t work. In a busy boss life, the simplest thing is to tell them “that won’t work” and just keep moving forward because there is so much to do.

Here are some human relations principles we can  employ to do a better job in our communication with our people.

1.        The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.  This sounds a bit counterintuitive.  Does it mean I just fold and let them have their way? Not at all.  However we know that people rarely yield once they get into an argument and graciously accept our viewpoint.  Rather they have their ego wrapped up in what they are saying and they won’t let go, so they just keep arguing with us.  Our best response is to not respond in kind and try a different track.

2.        Show respect for the other person’s opinion – never say you are wrong.  This is a red flag to a bull.  One of my trigger words is to be told “no” and another is “you are wrong”, which is basically the same answer. We have to learn to disagree in a way which maintains the relationship.  Telling people they are wrong isn’t going to help with that aim. Whenever the urge seizes you to tell others they are wrong resist the temptation.

3.        If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.  Leaders have ego, position power, pride and status and admitting we are not perfect is not easy for us. If we admit it won’t we be eroding our power?  That fear is fair enough, but what we will find is that by giving up the God mantle and admitting we are human makes it easier for our team to emphasise with what we are trying to do.  The secret is all in the communication of how we admit we are wrong.

4.        Begin in a friendly way.  This sounds easy except when we are busy, harassed, pressured and under the gun we forget this part.  We bring our businesslike self to the conversation rather than stepping back and thinking about first impressions for this conversation.

5.        Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.  Manipulation was the first thing which sprang into my mind when I heard this Principle.  That obviously is a losing proposition.  What is meant here is that our communication skill is operating at a very high level.  We package up the idea and do it in such a way that the other person finds themselves in agreement.  This is a high level of communication skill and takes a lot of practice, but it works well when done correctly.

6.        Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.  Leaders love to talk.  They love to hog the limelight and dominate the conversation because they are such amazing individuals. Rather by giving the floor to others they in turn will feel appreciated and valued.  We already know what we know, so this also invites the opportunity for us to learn things we actually don’t know and broaden our perspectives.

7.        Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers.  Sounds like more manipulation, but it isn’t.  We remember that Socrates was famous for getting people to go deeper in their thinking by asking a series of questions which drove the quality of their understanding.  This is the same idea.  We communicate in such a way that the other person self-discovers the same thinking that we came up with and now we are in perfect agreement.

As the leader we can always do better and usually, it is our poor communication ability which leads us into trouble. By changing our approach and how we express ourselves we will have much more impact on getting others to follow us.  Brute force is not going to work in Japan anymore, so we need better tools. 

Have you ever had the experience of leaving a job and seeing your successor screw it up?  We spend so many hours at work and we are trying hard to lift the bar through our leadership.  However, if we do well, we get promoted or we join another company seeking a bigger job.  It is very disheartening to leave and see the place go backwards under your replacement.  You wonder what all those weekends spent working and long hours were al about.  We expect that we add to the cause and the firm progresses and moves forward, improving over time.  We expect those who come after us to be doing the same thing.

So it was very confronting to read some statistics recently about how short the term at the top is these days and thinking about what does that mean for the leader’s legacy?  According to data analysis firm Equilar, the median term for a CEO in the 500 largest US companies, is now down to 4.7 years, having dropped twenty percent over the last ten years.  Russell Reynolds says globally, for CFOs, the tenure is down to a five year low of 5.7 years.

If you are sent from Headquarters to Japan to run the local operation you don’t have much time.  If you realise this and decide to go gung-ho from Day One and drive change to get the results faster, then you will probably blow up the firm.  On the other hand, if you wait to understand the market, customers, the staff and the culture, then years of study will be required.  By the time you get it, it is time to pack for the next assignment or another job change.

The analogy I like is leading in Japan is like swimming in warm lake.  You land here from headquarters and you are immediately placed in a warm, nice lake, but the surface is covered in a heavy fog.  You can hear voices and vaguely make out shapes.  Over time, the fog lifts a little as you understand Japan better and you can make out the shoreline and some islands.  After about three years the fog lifts and it is now time to leave for your next post. What did you get done, what legacy have you left?

If we go too fast the Japanese team cannot keep up and we have new internal troubles.  This might include staff writing to the Chairman anonymously informing headquarters that you are ruining the business in Japan and destroying the firm here.  It might mean key staff conclude you are an idiot and they vote with their feet and join the opposition. In today’s society in Japan, job mobility has changed an enormous amount and shifting firms doesn’t have the same stigma it once had which used to ensure lifetime employment with the one company.  It might mean you decide to become “efficient” with customer relationships and after overcoming stubborn staff resistance, you force you will on everyone only to see your buyers depart and not come back.

On the other hand, headquarters are contacting you because they are not seeing the spike in revenue numbers they sent you out there for.  The staff engagement survey results are a disaster. Your bosses are not happy with your performance as a leader. You try to explain the subtleties and nuances of the Japanese market and how business is done here, but it all falls on deaf ears.  They are fully preoccupied with themselves and nobody cares about your problems.

There are no simple answers unfortunately.  Listening is a good idea at the initial six month stage, especially listening to customers.  Finding allies within the staff of firm who can get behind your changes is going to be vital.  You can pontificate and shoot out orders, to only find those below are sabotaging your efforts and are not doing anything to carry out your commands.

This country has a lot of informal lobbying going on underground and the big meetings are there to rubber stamp what has already been negotiated prior with the relevant parties. That means we have to persuade, rather than order, to coalesce rather the remonstrate.  Sadly, none of this is fast and your bosses want fast.

We are fighting two fires on two fronts at the same time. We are pushing headquarters to get behind what we are trying to do and we are persuading the team to do the same thing, but at a faster pace than what they are used to.  Staff are terrific at telling us what won’t work and why, if they are involved.  They are less help in coming up with creative solutions to overcome problems.  Often, we are the one to think differently and be prepared to try something new.  Bite sized experimentation suits Japan, given the general fear of failure and risk aversion.

Change takes time in Japan, lots of time and maybe it just isn’t possible in one rotation of your term here and you have to rely on your successor to pick up the gauntlet and keep pushing the strategy through the changes.  If you don’t get headquarters to sign on for it and therefore get them to engage your successor to keep going, then there will be lots of effort exuded by you and none of your legacy to show for it in Japan. 

You leave the county feeling unfulfilled and ashamed you didn’t make a difference.  Something you have been known for in your previous positions and one of the reason your were selected to go to Japan in the first place.  Your mouth is full of the bitter ashes of years wasted, as you head for the boarding lounge to catch your flight out of Japan. Or you approach it differently and get a better outcome.  Trust me,  it won’t happen by itself, so you have to box smart while you are here.

You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed.  Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients.  Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk.  A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level.  Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise.  Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”.  At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains.  They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality.  There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand.

When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice.  When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available.  The young lady checking me in, tells me she doesn’t know.   

I ask her for the name of the General Manager.  This is where it gets very interesting.  Her response - stone motherless silence.  Not one word in reply.  Nothing!   So I asked again.  More total silence.  I elevated the volume of my request to try and illicit a response.  More pure silence.  This low level of client service has now morphed across to the ridiculous zone. Finally I get a whispered “Andrew Zou”.  

So what am I thinking now?  Wow, this Andrew Zou character is a lousy General Manager, because his staff are so poorly trained.  There is no room ready for me and no indication of when it will be ready, so in that great Aussie tradition, I head for the bar and wait.  

Any number of things can go wrong with the delivery of a product or service.  We all understand that.  The problems arise when our client facing team members are not properly trained in how to deal with these issues.  Hotels have guest complaints all the time, so they should be absolute gold medal winning, total geniuses at dealing with them.  This would have to be a key area of training in that industry.  The poor training is a direct result of poor leadership.  If the leaders are working well, then the staff service levels will be working well.   

The Westin brand is global and I have stayed in a number of their properties in Asia.  The Taipei property was killing their global brand and that is an expensive thing in the world of cut-throat competition amongst leading Hotels. 

From this experience, I realized that I need to be very vigilant about the service levels in my own company.  Are we fully geared up for trouble, should it arise?  How do we protect the brand across 220 locations worldwide?  Can people get to me easily if there is a problem?  Are we doing enough training in client complaint handling?  The Westin Taipei leadership did a poor job.  We should go back a take a long hard look at our own operations.  We may be incorrectly assuming things are working, when they may not be functioning properly.  We have to protect the brand at every touch point with the clients.  That is the job of the leadership team, starting with the boss.

Is change good or bad?  When I was promoted or received a big bonus, I liked the change from my previous situation.  When the big boss changed at the very top, the person who hired me got fired the negative ramifications ultimately cascaded down the line. Eventually I had to look for another job and I didn’t like that change much.

Often organisations go through major internal changes and the middle level leaders are expected to rally the troops behind the change.  How do you do that if you don’t agree with the change or don’t like the change yourself?  If you buck the system and refuse to follow the changes, then you are automatically identifying yourself as someone who has to leave the organisation and the machine will crush you.

Change is such a tricky area for everyone, but it is so common in business.  Markets change, clients change, supply chains change, currency rates change – the list is long.  You would think that with all of these “normal” changes in business, we would all be excellent in adjusting to change.  However, that is not true, is it?

The status quo is so attractive to most of us because it is known and safe.  We have been doing the same thing for quite a while and we are good at it. We are doing skilled work in the current formation and suddenly we are being asked to change and are being pushed out of our Comfort Zone. Japan, in particular loves continuity and no change, because all the risk has been shaken out of the system and what we are left with is the lowest risk alternative.

As leaders we have to make a decision.  If we fundamentally disagree with the new approach then we should find another place to work, where we can be happy and in agreement with the direction.  The chances of us doing our best work there dramatically improve, compared to if we stay and conduct an underground personal resistance to the changes.  Ultimately, we will be outed by an ambitious rival or subordinate and probably fired.

If we are not willing to move companies, then we have to be willing to go with the new direction.  Here is the issue – a half-hearted compliance isn’t going to work well.  Our team members will feel the lack of commitment and enthusiasm to the cause. They in turn, will not rally around us as the leader and charge into the fire together. 

How can we make this change work within our small cog in the machine?  The big bosses set the direction back at headquarters, but they can never get their hands dirty with the daily minutiae at our section level.  That application piece is within our control.  We may be buffeted by the winds of macro change, but the micro where we deliver the change is within our grasp. We have almost total control over how we do it.

What we are feeling about the changes is no doubt being felt by the team members as well.  Turning up one Monday morning as some mealy mouthed, apparatchik mouthpiece of the machine isn’t going to go down well.  Cynicism is already rampart in modern society and this will push some people over the edge, as we try to order them about what they need to do.  All we can expect is resistance if we take this road. How can we approach this to get everyone behind us and the changes?

Rather than being definitive about how to make the needed changes, we need to have the “change” discussion with the team.  In Stage One we need people to be able to air their concerns and fears and be taken seriously.  Stage Two is where we move on to how we as a team can implement the change in our world.  Getting from Stage One to Stage Two is no easy feat, because many will remain unconvinced and unmoved. They will want to keep going with the old way of doing things.

For the “never changers”, we need to have private one-on-one discussions and have them make a decision about stay or go.  If it is “stay”, then they need to be part of the team decision-making process and contribute to practical solutions to make this work in a way we can all live with the changes. 

Just telling them to “suck it up and get back to work” is always a bad idea. It communicates you are not important. We are saying, “I have three stripes on my sleeve and so you have to do what I say, because I am pulling rank on you”. They may in fact stay, but they will join the underground guerrilla movement against the changes. We will wind up fighting each other internally when we need to form a united front against our competitors in the market. We need converts not resisters.

So as the leader we need to get the discussion out in the open and get team ownership of the way forward.  Maybe we all have to hold our noses against the stench of the changes, but we will hold them together and find a way through.

This Japanese expression “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会), linked to Zen, focuses on transience and can be translated as “one time, one meeting” or “treasure an unrepeatable moment”.  It is often closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, which is certainly never a hurried affair and the devil is definitely in the details of how the ceremony is conducted.  Contrast that with our modern leader life in business.  We are constantly in motion, always time poor and harassed for 24 hours a day by an avalanche of emails.  We migrate from one meeting room to another, confronting an endless assortment of meeting details. We have many agendas in our minds when we meet people and our shrinking concentration spans make a lot of what we do a blur, bereft of reflection.

This is a poor contextual background for dealing with people. Being so time challenged, we are constantly cutting corners and shaving off minutes to try and get it all done.  Being “efficient” with people is a bad idea for leaders, but often once we are on a roll, that efficiency bug takes us over.  The Ichi-Go, Ichi-E idea is that we treat each moment of interaction as special rather than just serial.

If our team members felt that we were treating them individually as “special”, their engagement levels would be at very high levels, in what is increasingly becoming a tech driven, impersonal world.  But often we are galloping too fast on horseback to smell the flowers, as we fly by.  If we break each staff interaction down to a single defining unit, we will change the pace we interact with people from busy and tormented, to calm and caring.

I remember a terrific example of Ichi-Go, Ichi-E by Ian Mackie, my old boss at Jones Lang Wootten In Brisbane.  It was after 6.00pm one evening and I was sitting in his office having a discussion about a deal, when one of the secretaries was walking past on her way home and she popped her head in the door to say something to him.  In those days Directors were like Gods compared to humble secretaries in that hierarchy.  Yet Ian stopped what he was doing and he gave her his complete and entire attention for that one moment.  He was showing his respect for her as a person, and it was a powerful experience for me to see how he handled that encounter.

Often, as the boss, we don’t show enough respect because we are rushing, preoccupied with what we need to get done and our people can become cogs in the fly wheels of our business.  Like Ian, we need to slow it down to a stop.  Focus on the person to the exclusion of everything else, stop our brain for racing ahead and give that person our full attention.  It sounds easy to say, but actually doing it is very difficult. We are usually caught up in the moment of what we want and what is important to us. We are perpetually rearranging things to suit what we need, when we need it.

I am the first one to raise his hand as guilty of trying to do too much, in too short a time and just constantly cramming stuff into my day, such that my interactions are very “businesslike”. That is not a great idea when we are dealing with people.  Ichi-Go, Ichi-E as a concept, reminds me to stop doing that and instead treat every staff interaction like a treasure.  Once I switch my mindset to that “treasure” construct, then everything changes, especially around my time allocation.  Just mentally slowing down while I am speaking to my team member, allows me to be more considerate, less selfish and self-centered.  Instead of being “me focused”, I can switch to being “them focused”.  I can ask about things that are important to them, rather than making sure that brief conversation is all about what is important to me at that moment.

I have learnt to stand my keyboard up, so I can’t use it, when one of my team comes to me to talk and this helps me to focus my eye contact on  them.  I was reminded of how important this is when I visited a doctor here recently.  The head of the clinic was sitting slumped in front of his screen and typing when I entered his office, he didn’t greet me, didn’t even look up at me and kept his face toward his computer keyboard and screen.  Frankly, it was unbelievable, especially in this modern age. It made me feel unimportant and irrelevant. 

This is how we make our team members feel when we don’t stop what we are doing and don’t focus on that one moment with them.  So, from now on, remember Ichi-Go, Ichi-E and practice treasuring every interaction with the team members and build their engagement and commitment one meeting at a time, one person at a time.  Do this instead of rushing through life in an often meaningless and unfulfilling scramble.  People do make the difference and how we treat them is what stands us apart as the leader and how successful we are in that role.

Recently, my social media has been full of short videos of various politicians and supporters giving talks at the Democratic National Convention.  It always begs the question for me about what are we doing as leaders in business?  We have the same goals.  We want our message to be heard and to be convincing.  The difference is, I am sure, all of these speakers have been well coached and have been practicing hard for their moment in the spotlight, given a global audience of massive proportions.  In business, we have our own team at our Town Hall or perhaps an audience at a business conference or maybe a small Chamber of Commerce gathering.  Actually, it doesn’t matter about the venue, because skill is skill, image is image and credibility is credibility.

I was reminded of this when one of my son’s friends complained about the organisation’s leader, when he has just joined the firm after graduating from varsity.  Being at the very bottom of the pile, young people are there to stay quiet and listen to their elders and betters.  The issue though is, they are not stupid. In this case, the top person was a poor speaker and so the new entrants first thought is, “have I made a mistake?”.  They worry that this company isn’t as good as they imagined it was.  If the top dog, the “face” of the organisation is a dud, then maybe the whole artifice is a problem too.

As business leaders, it would be rare that there is a lot of effort put into the talk preparation beforehand.  Smart, successful, assured people are confident about winging it.  The problem is we can become excessively confident over time and neglect the basics.  Here are seven points to reflect on when giving your next business talk to ensure you do a much better and more credible job.

1.         Rehearse.  This step is always the victim of tight schedules, but the downside of neglecting it serious because our personal and professional brands suffer.  Even if it is a minimalist approach on the prep front, at least do a run through before you launch forth in front of your listeners.  Remember they are judging you and your firm, on what they see you do.

2.        Eyes.  Make eye contact with your audience.  I don’t mean the usual fake eye contact, where the speaker dramatically scans the crowd but in fact doesn’t look at any one person.  I mean hard core, full on, six seconds of riveting eye contact, with as many people as possible, but delivered one by one,  maintained over the entire course of the talk.  Our listeners need to feel we are speaking directly to them and that we want their 100% attention.  Six seconds is enough to engage them without pulverising the audience into submission and coming across as being too intrusive. 

3.        Face.  We make the mistake of thinking that our slides are the most powerful visual tool in our armoury.  Not true.  Our face shines through much more brilliantly and powerfully.  Our facial expressions are absolute commanders of nuance, meaning and impression.  Many business speakers remind me of Noh masks, which are frozen in carved wood with only a single countenance.  Don’t be like that.  We need to use our face to amplify the emotions – belief, sincerity,  empathy, care, humanity - behind our message.

4.        Voice.  I noticed that many speakers at the Convention were loud, loud, loud  all the way through in their speech.  They were trying to speak powerfully, to inspire, to motivate.  That is all very well but modulation is a critical piece for really being heard. It allows us to amplify certain words and phrases, such that they stand above the other words placed around them.  Dropping to a whisper, after bellowing away in your talk, is the ultra power play in messaging.  That contrast pinpoints everyone’s attention to what we say next during the whisper and that is what we want to have happen for the key points in our talk.

5.        Gestures.  They are another amplifier.  Fifteen seconds is the maximum length for holding any gesture, before it becomes stale, dull and lifeless.  Eye power combined with voice power, combined with a powerful gesture is an unbeatable combo when speaking.  I see so many CEOs speaking with a vice like grip on the podium and thereby denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures to strengthen their key points.  It is a big mistake.  When I have a podium, I purposely stand back from it, so that my hands are not tempted to touch it.  Be careful with podiums, because there seems to be a magnetic facility drawing our hands to grab it and hold on to it, so it won’t escape.

6.        Pause.  We saw many good examples at the Convention of the better speakers employing pauses. These allow us to differentiate between what we have just said and what we are about to say. We create a small break, before we say the next thing.  That small gap allows the words to be heard clearly and gives the audience enough time to digest the previous content.  Pauses also create anticipation of what we are about to say, which is a great way of drawing the audience into us and our message. 

7.        Posture.  Stand up straight, don’t slouch, don’t kick one hip out and don’t look casual. A tall, straight back emanates authority and credibility.  It shows confidence and commitment to what we are saying.  These are subtle physical signals. We are all finely tuned into these signals, because that is how we have learnt to survive dangers over the centuries.  Our eyes spot some physical action in front of us, we then anticipate what comes next, as well as making a judgement about what we are seeing.  Slouching signals “unprofessional”, “casual”, “not serious”, “lazy”.  By going in the other direction and thinking to carefully control our posture, we can determine the signal the audience receives and make it a winner for us.

These seven elements are not difficult or beyond mastery. By the way, the bar for public speakers in Japan is super low.  Just by mastering these simple elements, we can catapult ourselves into the top 5% of speakers.

Twelve Steps To A Win-Win Conflict Resolution Part Two

We have looked at some of the steps in Part One, so let’s continue with the last six elements.

 7. Deal with facts, not emotions

In sports, as I have noted earlier, we say “play the ball, not the man” and in business we need to 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. Maybe we don’t like them, their manner, their attitude, their values, their style of speech, their rivalry. That situation is unlikely to change in a hurry. They won’t become our best buddy any time soon or ever.

Nevertheless, we have to work with them and overcome this conflict. We need to switch over to “outcome focus” and logic. This will take the personalities component out of the equation and help us get to an agreed solution faster. We bite our tongue, swallow our bile, gird our loins and get on with it, regardless of how irritating they are. In these situations, I keep telling myself, “Greg - big picture, big picture”.

8. 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.

Dale Carnegie’s human relations Principle Number Seventeen is useful here: “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”.  Strip out the emotion and be objective about their viewpoint. We also need to see our own perspective equally in an honest way.  Why do we hold our view?  What is really driving our position?

9. Present alternatives and provide evidence

Compromise is the assembly of other means 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.

Opinion is terrific, but it is just an opinion.  Data can contradict opinion in a way which is more acceptable than simply arguing the toss. Storytelling is the most effective way to introduce data.  Wrap the numbers up in a story and you will be heard.

10. 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. If you find yourself jumping in, finishing their sentences, or cutting them off when they are speaking, stop doing that.  Hear them out.

Hold your points instead of being in a rush.  We are rarely short of time for the discussion. Often our counterparty in the conflict feels they are not being listened to, treated fairly or taken seriously. We can do all of those things by just remaining silent and letting them talk. After they stop, feeding back that we have understood them is a good habit to develop.

By letting them talk, we may find out some additional information or angle we didn’t have, which can change our perspective on the situation and lead to a resolution.  Just bullying the other person with our opinion doesn’t lead to this type of win-win outcome.

11. 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.

12. 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 relationships 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.

 “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 may be won, but wars are lost. Energy that should be directed at the competitors is instead turned loose on our own team members, 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!

Conflict is with us everywhere, every day. 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 organisation, 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 powerful 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 maximise the creative possibilities rather than concentrating on the battling ourselves.

People tend to gravitate toward extremes. They either fold and don’t stand up for what they feel is right or they try to bulldoze everyone else and make them bend to their will. If we want progress, we need a better way forward, achieved through compromise and collaboration.

In Part One we are going to cover six fo the twelve Win-Win steps we can take to turn things around.

1. 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!  We have to step back from the fray and think about the bigger picture.  Our rivals are not dead, the market ignores our internecine feuds, and clients don’t care.  How can we afford to be focused inwards when there is so much happening on the outside of the organisation?  We have to become positive we can put the conflict into context and deal with it on that basis.

2.    Meet on mutual ground

Find a neutral location to remove all the residue of the past from the front of your mind. Meeting rooms are rarely the best choice for a meeting when we are in conflict with someone.  There is a formality about the situation, which can hinder gaining the flexibility we need to resolve this disagreement.  Go outside to a coffee shop or meet over lunch and try to “change the air”. Find a mutually agreeable time when you won’t have interruptions. Turn the phones off and give each other the time to be understood. Don’t try to deal with complex conflicts over the phone, online or by email warfare – always, where possible, do it face to face.

3. 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.

Misunderstandings based on language usage happen all the time.  We need to agree on the thing at stake in a way which both sides understand.  You meet people who are hard to understand.  Their way of expressing their thoughts is unclear to us and we struggle to get their point. We need to get clarity on what we both mean and what we are worried about.

4. Do your homework

Think about the issue from the other side’s perspective, as well as from your own. Normally, we don’t do this because we are fully focused on ourselves, what we want and why we want it. Some points are must haves and some are nice to haves – let’s be very 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. There may be no way to resolve the conflict and we have to push it up the hierarchy for resolution. This is usually not appreciated by the big bosses. They expect us to thrash it out amongst ourselves and let them concentrate on their own work.

5. 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?  Being told “no” is usually a powerful trigger for the adrenaline to hit the bloodstream, as we go into fight mode.  It always works with me!  I know that, so I have to control myself and calm down before I say something on the spot which I will regret at leisure.

6. Look for shared interests

Conflict pulls you to 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.  Usually there is a small percentage of the issue which is the real sticking point.  Rather than butting heads on that difference immediately, we can isolate out the areas where we agree or where we can compromise.  This builds up a positive energy of cooperation and it is no longer an all-or-nothing conversation.

We will continue with points Seven through Twelve in Part Two.

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 slow 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 all and we want it now baby 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. 

1. Process Conflict. Is this what we are dealing with? Processes are required by managers to do their job and by Compliance to protect everyone. Sometimes the process can be very directive, constrained, and inflexible. When times get tough, a lot of processes get screwed down very hard. When things improve, they are still left like that even though they should be loosened off. They no longer fit the circumstances we are facing at the coal face.

Let’s calculate how much process control 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 down the food chain. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and to get their ownership, come up with a joint action plan to fix it.

2. Role Conflicts. These easily arise in flat organisations. Turf wars can be legendary, as ambitious individuals duke it out internally for promotions, power, and control. Where are the boundaries of authority, accountability, and responsibility?  Besuited corporate pirates try to board us and have to be seen off. 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. 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. Role clarity is critical and must be clarified, or confusion can reign. This fix may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!).

3. Interpersonal Conflicts.  These are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actual actions, behaviours, words as well as the reported versions from others around us.   There may be some prior negative history there clouding our vision. We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Also, are people around me telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason?  Sycophants and corporate politicians see internal conflict as an opportunity and a ladder for themselves. They are keen to create trouble for us and a leg up for them.

 There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are, but actually 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 a successful one-on-one conversation.

4. Direction Conflicts.  These arise when the path forward is unclear. Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone, at the same time, about what needs to happen. Working at cross purposes is both expensive and damaging. 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.

5. External Conflicts. These are tough because, by definition, you lack power and 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 and effort whining about what you cannot control.

As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control, stop! Instead, 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 self-appointed “hardest working man in show business”, Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”! We need to move our psychology to positive mode.  We should start making adjustments to cope with the degree of control we can bring to this external process or situation which is inhibiting us.

Conflict is part and parcel of corporate life, but usually we are not strategic about how to deal with it.  We get locked into a stimulus-response loop, which means a constant flow of tactical solutions rather than looking for strategic solutions. We are also rarely trained on how to deal with conflict, so we are usually making it up as we go along. 

Analyse the situation and decide which one of these factors is the main one at play and then start working on solutions from there.  Sometimes there may be more than one factor we have to consider, so we have to prioritise where we should start, but we must start.  Getting overwhelmed or paralysed doesn’t fix the problem.  Focus on the key problem and get to work on that. Momentum will work in your favour.

I saw a video recently from Rampley and Co in the UK featuring Caryn Franklin, a Fashion and Identity Commentator, talking about something called “enclothed cognition”.  When I saw her work title - Fashion and Identity Commentator - and the reference to psychology, I was dubious.  I was thinking, “here we go, more psychobabble”.  She referenced a psychology study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky, published in the journal of Experimental Social Psychology in July 2012. They looked at the “diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors - the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them”.  In short, the influence of clothes depends on wearing them and their symbolic meaning.

For the leader, this means to me that what I choose to wear impacts how I feel about myself and how I am perceived by those around me.  For men in business in Japan, if you are a white-collar worker, that means wearing a suit.  If the choice of suit and all the other accoutrements like shirts, ties, pocket squares, cufflinks, watches, shoes, etc., are important, how much thought do we normally put into it?

We all know old sayings like “dress for success” and intrinsically, we get it.  Wearing a suit like a slob, with food stains on the tie and down at heel, scuffed shoes, is sending a message about our own self-worth and our professional brand to the public.  On the other hand, if we wear a well-cut suit, with an overall smart appearance, we feel more confident and more capable and the research bears this out.

If this is the case, then should we be better educated about what we are wearing?  When I moved from being a Griffith University Modern Asian Studies Ph.D. candidate to graduating and getting my first real corporate job, I had no idea what to wear.  I never saw my father wear a suit to work and I didn’t grow up with any concepts about men’s classic clothing.  Brisbane is a hot and humid climate, so generally, everyone dressed for the weather and I did too. 

One small blessing was that I had the self-awareness to know I was clueless.  I went to see Mitchell Ogilvie, who at that time, had his men’s clothing store in upper Edward Street in Brisbane and it had the dark wood panelling, leather chairs and was very swish.  I explained that I was about the start work at Jones, Lang, Wootton, but had no appropriate clothing to suit the work.  Mitch assured me he was dressing many of the Directors there, so he knew exactly what I needed to buy, to blend in.  He did a good job (thanks Mitch) and I always felt I was one of the better dressed employees there and this helped my confidence and how I was regarded.

Around that time, the Prime Minister of Australia became Paul Keating from the Labor Party.  He, like me, grew up in modest circumstances and yet he managed to get the highest position in the land.  I read somewhere that unlike his predecessors, he didn’t wear suits made in Australia, but wore Italian suits by Ermenegildo Zegna.  When I would see him on television, in the Parliament, giving speeches, he always looked very sharp and better dressed than his Tory political opponents. I decided I would wear Zegna suits too and have been a client for thirty years and their size 52 fits me like it was designed for my body. It gave me confidence, even when I was out of my depth, that at least I looked like I knew what I was doing.

Had I ever planned my wardrobe with my personal brand in mind?  Not really.  I had just accumulated suits over the years, especially when travelling to Italy on holiday.  I would wear them out and simply buy a replacement. Over the last decade, I have started to add more custom suits and have started to think more about what I am wearing and why. I wish I had done this much earlier, given the psychology of how you feel based on what you are wearing and how people regard you professionally, regarding your public brand.

I often get compliments about how well I am dressed and earlier this year I started a blog on social media called “Fare Bella Figura – Master First Impressions, Be A Sharp Dressed Man”.  I was highly hesitant to launch it, because I had never seen a businessman like myself, completely unrelated to the clothing business, talking about what he was wearing and why. 

The premise was that people make snap judgments about us, based on how we look, before we even get a chance to open our mouths, so why not do more to control that first impression?  At that time, I wasn’t aware of this research by Adam and Galinsky, but instinctively felt what I would choose to wear was impacting my confidence and my image with others before I had a chance to speak with them.

If it makes a difference, as leaders, we need to make the most of this opportunity to increase our strength internally and externally, vis-à-vis our business rivals.  It requires study and dough to do it, but if we take the long-term view, it is doable.  Don’t be like me and work all of this out too lethargically.  Instead, work on assembling your classic men’s clothing armour in Japan and wade into battle, duking it out with your competition and win!

I meet a lot of CEOs in Japan.  I am always out there networking and looking for clients.  If they cannot become a client, then I try to encourage them to be a guest on my podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews.  I get two groups in particular who will refuse the offer – women and Scandinavians.  They say that women are more reticent about putting themselves forward than men and my own unscientific survey would seem to bear that out.  If a man only has 60% of the qualifications for a job, he will raise his hand whereas a woman will only do so, if she has 90%.  This is what I guess is happening with my invitation to come on the podcast and talk about one topic - leading in Japan.  The women are lacking in confidence to talk about the subject, because they are not feeling they are perfect enough.

The Scandinavians I know here tell me that their culture is to not push yourself forward and to stay in the background.  Their podcast guest refusal rate stands out, so I guess this is what is happening with their thinking.  So far, 213 leaders have managed to spend an hour with me talking about leading in Japan for the weekly podcast, so I am finding enough of those in agreement.  It isn’t as if I cannot get guests, because no one wants to join me on video and audio to talk about leadership.

I think both groups reflect a misunderstanding of what their leader role is in Japan.  The leader here is the face of the business and particularly in this social media age, we need to be masters of this new universe.  I get it.  Taking your photo or even worse – video – is not something we all welcome.  We are very self-conscious about how lacking we are in terms of being photogenic or how awkward we look on video and when we hear our own voice, we shudder.  In life, I have found I am particularly unable to be photogenic, so I totally sympathise.  You know when you take that group shot and when you get it back you look for yourself – it is always a disappointment for me.

In this modern world of work, however, we are all in a life and death struggle to attract a declining demographic of young people and mid-careers hires to join us.  We must be competitive, and that means we need to be getting some clear messages out into the world about who we are and what are our values. We need to be good communicators and also add our image to go with the words.  If we can speak the words on video and audio even better.

I have been told by numerous guests on my podcast that they found that they were successful in attracting new staff who had checked them and seen the video interview.  I can believe that, because the nature of the interview is very authentic and no one so far has succeeded in pushing forth a fake version of themselves to fool the masses.  I don’t say much during the interview and just let the guests talk. Occasionally, I will dig down on a point to go a bit deeper, but the bulk of the time is theirs.  People watching the interview get a very clear picture of the boss and then can decide if this is the type of place where they want to work.

Clients also check us out and they are making decisions about us too in terms of do they want to have a relationship with our company.  They want to know who we are and what we stand for.  This is an important chance for the CEO to become active and provide the content the buyers are looking for.  They want to know who the boss is and what they are like. Hiding in the background is not a clever option.  It is much better to work on mastering the medium. 

Looking straight down the barrel of the camera lens is not that easy and for many people, it is a formidable obstacle.  Video is difficult to come across naturally, I find.  Using teleprompters is not easy either and getting the right rhythm is a challenge for me. I always have trouble with photo shoots because I manage to look like a dork more often than not.  I was watching something on TikTok where a male model was demonstrating how to move and stand, to get the right shot and I realised I have no ability to do that. Fortunately, Tia Haygood, who is my local photographer here, manages to make me look presentable enough to squeak by.

What I have found is that the more you do it, the better you become, and refusing to participate is a guarantee that you will never master the medium.  The CEO shouldn’t be hiding. Instead, they should be pushing their message forward at every opportunity.  So find Tia if you are in Tokyo and work on your official portrait shots to use on social media and on your website.  Get a videographer like Rionne McAvoy, who I use from Japan Media Services, involved to help you with creating quality videos.  I have been using Tia and Rionne for years and I trust their work, which is why I am mentioning them if you are looking for help locally here in Japan.

The point is the leader has to lead from the front and be the face of the business.  We need to break down any potential barriers to getting staff or clients.  Get the photos, the video, the audio, go on podcasts, do the interviews – do every possible thing you can to control the image you are projecting.  If you can’t speak confidently or coherently, then come and do some training with us and we will fix that for you.  There are no excuses anymore because there are plenty of people around to help.

Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader whose team gets results? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources.There is a perfect solution for you- To LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43sQHxV )

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About The Author

Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training

Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

Bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery".  He has also written "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めましょう) and his brand new book is “Japan Leadership Mastery”.

Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki.

He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Has 6 weekly podcasts:

1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series,

2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series

Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え

3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series

4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series

Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト

5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show

6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews

Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube:

1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV

2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery

3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews

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, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) 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.

Being an Aussie I don’t have the right to select the next US President or get involved in American politics.  I will steer clear of this minefield and concentrate on what we can all learn from the Biden train wreck. One moment he is a contender and in an instant he is struggling to hold on to power.  Why?  Because he gave a rambling speech in his debate with Donald Trump, viewed by over 50 million Americans. He was prepped for this debate by his handlers and yet it was a debacle.

What happens in business?  If you are the CEO of a listed company, there is a lot of public scrutiny of what you say and how well you say it.  If the company is not listed, then the internal team are studying the CEO to gauge how the firm is faring and if their jobs safe or what are the chances to do well within this company. 

One of the young people I know who has just finished university and has entered his company mentioned how shocked he was to hear the President speak in public for the first time.  Usually new entrants are vetted by HR and their initial supervisor, so their opportunities to hear the big boss are few and far between, until they have joined up. His feedback was an instant concern that he had chosen the wrong firm.  The President’s inability to make a competent professional speech was a coffee stain moment.  We all know that old saw about if the tray you pull down on your flight has coffee stains left there from a previous flight, it means this airline can’t be trusted and they are probably not maintaining the engines properly. 

We judge firms by what we see. If the leader is a shambles on their feet speaking to the troops, then doubts light up immediately. What is remarkable, though, is how few CEOs are excellent speakers.  I attend a lot of public speeches by corporate leaders here, covering a range of nationalities, and it is rare to hear a leader acquit themselves professionally. 

Recently, I was shocked to see a local leader of a major global firm have to read his self-introduction to convince the voting audience to elect him to the organisation’s committee. This gentleman wasn’t some fresh faced kid.  I am guessing early fifties.  That means he has been in business for around thirty years and yet he can’t even get up and promote himself for selection to a prestigious position on the committee.  I doubt he is anymore effective in rallying the staff around his vision for the future of the organisation. He was bad, but the other contenders weren’t impressive either.

All of us in Japan face a growing nightmare of Darwinian proportions as we compete for a diminishing resource of capable staff, in particular those who can speak English.  Being able to rally the team is only going to become more critical as the recruiters start hitting our people like sharks in a feeding frenzy.  They will be luring people way and picking up 40% placement fees of first year salaries on the way through. The substantial financial rewards for this very average group of individuals is way out of proportion to their actual business competencies and abilities.  That doesn’t matter though, because all they have to do is be a better siren to your people than you are and lure them across to greener pastures.

Most CEOs are in that position because they were technical people who made it to the top or they have been in management positions and have shown capabilities to get things done in their previous postings.  Japan is different and a track record overseas is not a real currency here.  The ability to adapt yourself to how things are done here and to be effective with a Japanese workforce are the critical make or break skills.

Communication skills are at a premium and it is more difficult here because the number of people who can understand English at a high level is limited.  Few of these foreign CEOs have sufficient Japanese skills to be effective.  To get a combo of Japanese fluency and high level speaking skills is an even more demanding recipe for local success.  I know plenty of foreigners here who are fluent in Japanese, but I don’t know so many who can carry a crowd, who can be persuasive and effective in Japanese.

Nevertheless, as Joe Biden has demonstrated, if you can’t make it as an effective communicator, your whole claim to the crown is in doubt.  What do I do about the unfortunate CEO who had to read his own self-introduction?  I would like to suggest that he do High Impact Presentations with us and learn how to give a talk and be a success.  This is a sensitive conversation, because I am saying he is a dud and we all have ego.  The key for CEOs is to realise that there is no point in letting your ego restrain your ability to become better as a presenter.  Communication skills are only going to get more important, particularly storytelling. None of us want to be on the wrong side of the demarcation line between competency and longevity and train wreck and removal.

I am a maniac.  A less charged descriptor might be an “enthusiast”.  Now Japan is a country chock full of enthusiasts.  They win best pizza maker, best sommelier, best hula dancer, best shoe maker awards, etc., out gunning the Westerners who supposedly should be winning these home town advantage awards.   This is a country where work is taken very seriously.  Growing up in laid back Brisbane, we didn’t live to work, we worked to live.  At 5.30pm most people were in the pub, the gym, the ocean, or at home getting ready for dinner. Japan took a different track.

Back in the day, working late wasn’t about productivity, because it was all about devotion, being part of the team, pulling your weight, in order to be taken seriously. In the late 1970s, I taught English at night while I was a student here at Jochi University, usually from 6.30pm – 9.30pm. I was always amazed to finish the classes and walking out see all of these people still there working.  Many of them, though, I observed, were seemingly engrossed in reading the sports newspapers or magazines, rather than doing anything productive.  But they were there, waiting for the boss to go home so that they could do the same thing, demonstrating their solidarity with the others, also in wait to depart.

Thirteen years later, I was going through piles of resumes for salespeople here in Japan looking to join our organisation.  This resume review process of mine has been going on for the last thirty-two years now. I noticed people would have blank periods in their employ.  Job mobility today is better, but that is a fairly recent phenomenon after the collapse of Yamaichi Securities (1999), the Lehman Shock (2008) and the pandemic (2020) had all thrown people out on to the street and over time, allowed the mid-career hire to become acceptable.  Back in the day, leaving a job meant a steady spiral down in socio-economic terms and so most people hung in there, no matter how bad it was.

When I would ask about these blanks in their resumes, a surprising number of people, particularly women, said they got physically sick from working until the last train every night and had to quit to recover their health. These were not isolated cases and many of the blanks were for months at a time, which made me really wonder about the cost of getting a salary and holding down a job in Japan.

We have made a lot of progress since then and I think that there is much higher awareness about getting the work done in less time and allowing people to have a life outside of work.  Young people are now all the equivalent of baseball free agents and can sell their services to the highest bidder, including demanding and getting, better work/life balance.  We should all be throwing rose petals in front of them and waving palm fronds above them, to thank them for allowing the rest of us to be more clever about how we work.

The problem we face now is not externally induced pressure for working long hours, but the internally driven ambition to get ahead and in the process work like Trojans.  Thanks to technology, there is now no longer a clear “work/non-work” break in the day, because we are checking our emails all day and night.  We are addicted to being in constant contact with our work demands. 

I mentioned I am a maniac and this constant checking of emails is what I am doing, too.  I could try to manufacture the justification that because we are a global organisation, email is arriving all the time and I need to be on top of what is happening in other time zones, but is that really true?  Would a few hours delay really make that big a difference?  Are there actually real fires occurring which require me to don my big coat and grab the fire hose?

What is happening is habit formation and combined with screen addiction, creating a toxic cocktail for all of us.  One of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principes is “rest before you get tired”.  On first blush, it sounds ridiculous.  What are we wimps?  Do we lack ambition, the guts to pay the price for success? No, we have to push through the pain barrier and keep driving. Allow no indulgence, no mercy, no regrets, no stopping.

If we hit the pause button though and consider how much more we know today about psychosomatic illnesses than he did back in his day, we can see the prescient wisdom of his advice. It doesn’t mean goofing off; it doesn’t mean delinquent behaviour and work avoidance.  He was talking about monitoring our condition to always aim for maximum productivity, and that means sustained productivity.

I think I have improved now, but I would work like crazy and drive myself hard, get sick, then be off work for days and once recovered, rinse and repeat. What if I had taken his advice and rested before I got tired?  Now I have broken that cycle and placed myself in a better position to have sustained productivity, rather than manic bursts followed by zero.

Japan keeps us busy, the tech is making us even busier and these issues won’t go away.  We have to play the long game, not the blame game. If you are a fellow manic like me, then stop the noise for a moment and seriously contemplate what “rest before you get tired” actually means for your life.

They are not making as many Japanese as they used to.  Every year we get these headlines about the new lows in numbers of births in Japan.  The demographic trend is obvious to everyone.  What is not obvious is how this is going to force a change in the way we lead.  Until now, we have all applied the like it or lump philosophy to staff working for us.  They were infinitely replaceable – lose one and go get another one.  Not anymore.

It is hard to understand, really.  The economy is not doing remarkably well.  The prospects for future growth are also not looking great, so why is it we are not seeing a parallel step down in business needs which translates into less need for staff?  I am not sure and I will let the economists duke that one out, but it is an interesting question to ponder.

We are certainly seeing an uptick in demand for people and a corresponding downturn in their availability.  That translates into higher costs, which is only starting to happen now and increased competition for people.  This isn’t only related to the hiring, it also covers the retaining bit as well.  The recruiters are having a field day with the revenues being generated from us for hiring staff and there isn’t much we can do about that in a staff bull market. 

What we can control is the retaining piece of the puzzle.  Delegating work to staff is a critical part of that effort.  Young people want to advance in their careers and they want to be given responsibility for their work.  Delegation serves both purposes well.  The issue with delegation is that when done poorly, it can lead to problems.

The biggest failure is selling the delegation to the person receiving it.  This sounds simple, but so often this is not done at all or not done very professionally.  Usually, the delegation process is a series of orders – do this and do that type of thing.  The person on the receiving end already has a job and may be thinking, “wait a minute, I am already busy and why do I need to do your job as well?”.  That would be a legitimate and logical conclusion of having your boss dump their work on your desk.

The selling component is making clear the benefit to the person receiving the delegation.  There is usually a selection process for internal promotions and the people making the decision want to know the new person can handle the tasks and are not going to blow anything up.  If we are changing companies, when we get to the interview stage, they will ask about our experience.  We are trying to step up and being able to reference completion of work at a level above where we are now is an advantage.  When it is put like this, people can understand how they can leverage these tasks at a future point and make it an advantage to themselves.

The other negative aspect of delegation is boss abandonment.  You are handed a bunch of tasks by your superior and that is the last you hear about it until the completion deadline.  This is very dangerous because if the person takes the project off on an incorrect tangent and you hit the deadline, then there is little which can be done to salvage the wreckage. 

Now there is a balance between the boss interfering and micro-managing the delegated project and keeping an eye on how things are going.  The latter is obviously the way to go, but where is the line between them?  One good idea is to discuss how they are going to approach the task.  Get them to tell us what they think about running this part of the work. We want their ideas because that is where the ownership is located.  We still need to monitor progress, though.

Agreeing a regular check in is a good practice.  All the boss is looking for is whether the project is on track.  There are many ways to the top of the mountain and we have to let the delegated person find that out for themselves, as part of the learning process, rather than being proscriptive about how to get there.

If we get both the sell the delegation part and the shepherding component right, then the delegation will be successful and help us to retain staff.  The team member will feel empowered, trusted, and valuable. These are all brilliant and required elements to keep people with us and not straying off to greener pastures.  We must deny the siren call of ravenous recruiters trying to lift our people out of our companies.  If we don’t start delegating, we will lose staff, find it hard to get new staff and gradually shrink in size. In turn, this will make us less attractive as a work destination, as we become too flat to be able to accommodate ambitious people.  It is a cycle which ultimately leads to oblivion.

Tough Love Or Fake Praise To Motivate Staff In Japan

This tough love or fake praise alternative is a dubious construct. Are these two alternatives really the only options?  For some leaders they may feel that the staff are getting paid to do a professional job and their corresponding need is to get on with it.  The boss doesn’t need to be pandering to their needs.  This is especially the case toward these self-indulgent, coddled, spoiled brats who are now entering the workforce.  Giving this lot praise is fake and not needed, is the view.

I certainly grew up in the “tough love” era of business leadership.  Praise wasn’t heard, and all you got was a hard time about not doing things well enough or fast enough.  They weren’t singling me out for a hard time, because this is what we all got.  In that sense, it was very democratic.  When you are raised that way in business, you think that is normal and how things are done, because the most experienced leaders in the company all operated that way.

Today, the problems arise thick and fast when you take this as your own operating standard and start handing out tough love to your own people.  Combining this mindset with youthful ambition is a powerful and potentially highly toxic cocktail which can end in disaster.  Today, Japanese young people are in short supply and they are not interested in tough love or fake praise.

It sounds silly to raise the question about “how to praise people”, but if you are not raised that way in business, it is not natural to you.  The danger is you try too hard and it comes across as completely fake. Flattery is instantly dismissed.  Your standing goes down the drain too, as you are perceived to be an idiot.

There are many opportunities where we can look to praise our staff.  One is “things” and although it looks easy, it is actually the most tricky.  Frankly, I would avoid this one altogether, even though it looks like the simplest thing to do.

They may have in their possession something very impressive or nice.  Today, men commenting on how women are dressed or do their hair or whatever is bound to be seen the wrong way from what you intend. The next thing you know HR is involved concerned about your “sexual harassment” of the female staff.

You might comment on your staff’s watch or pen or briefcase or some object they have chosen.  This is definitely on the cusp of fake praise, so it has to be handled very delicately. 

For example, I am not particularly into watches, so me praising someone for their watch may easily be revealed for what it is – desperation to find something to be positive about.  Better to find something you are knowledgeable about and recognise they have done well with acquiring an object you can recognise. Praise it and be able to back it up with some insider knowledge.

Recognising people’s achievements is safer ground and more relevant in the workplace.  The point is “good job” is highly dubious, as praise and reeks of flattery and insincerity.  You might think this passes muster, but believe me, it does not.  Every person has multiple projects underway, and their job content is incredibly various. “Good job” is by no means specific enough to get anyone excited about receiving that style of praise.  Exactly what was it they did that you want to recognise?   Call out the precise achievement, such as a report they prepared or a contribution in the meeting or anything solid and concrete.

Personal strengths and characteristics are powerful fodder for praise, but again, be very careful about wandering into what sounds like flattery.  “You are very intelligent” will set off alarm bells immediately in the recipient.  It is like “good job” and so is broad and fuzzy.  No one has a clue regarding what you are talking about.  We have to link the praise to the action.  They may have come up with an insight in the meeting and it may have been a very intelligent observation.  When you connect the dots like that, then the praise will land.

If you say, “you are resilient” that again is tremendously vague.  What did they do which demonstrated their resilience?  How did this come to your attention?  Why do you know they are resilient?  Bring the evidence and paste it to the praise. Otherwise, the whole effort will be tossed out as fake.  In fact, you wind up creating more problems for yourself than if you had just kept your head down and concentrated on doing your own work and praised no one.

In all of these cases, we need to relate the recognition to something we have witnessed, describe it and then encourage them to keep doing it.  Tough love won’t fly anymore and trying to replace it with “praise light and fluffy” will be a train wreck.  We need to be very careful to make sure we do praise our people and be particularly careful about how we do that.

APAC always ranks low in global engagement surveys. At the very bottom of the APAC calculation sits Japan. Part of the reasons are language and cultural. The translations from English can sometimes be off the mark and lead the Japanese to score lower.  I always recommend carefully checking the translations to try to tighten them up and make the meanings clearer.

Other hurdles can be cultural.  One question often asked is “would you recommend the company to your family and friends as a place to work”.  This is a straightforward question in most countries, but not in Japan. 

The sense of responsibility and accountability here is high and those taking the survey will answer this question with a low score.  It isn’t because they don’t like the company, but they are risk averse.  They worry if they recommend the company, their family or friends may complain to them and quit the company because it is not a match.  Alternatively, they worry the company will complain to them about the person they recommended.  They see no upside here and so the best course of action is to score low on this question.

There is hope, though, to see those scores go up.  They may never reach the zenith of your Brazilian or Indian colleagues, who always seem to shoot the lights out when answering these engagement surveys. There are three leverage points for gaining greater engagement amongst employees. 

1.        Relationship With the Supervisor

This is obvious as it covers one of the most high contact relationships inside the company and, as we say, we don’t quit companies – we quit bosses.  Has the leader made clear the purpose of the business?  This is often assumed to be understood, so there is no conversation on this point.  Let’s not assume anything and make it clear.  The goals and objectives are critical to the organisation’s success, so let’s make sure we keep repeating what they are.

The leader’s job is to understand how the staff feel about their work and the company, and the only way to do that is through conversation.  Sounds simple except that time is so limited and we are all cutting corners and being “efficient” with our time, which means not a lot of opportunity to ask staff about how they are feeling.

Taking orders from the boss makes for a dull day and a dull work environment.  Not many people want to be micro-managed that way.  As the leader, we need to give people direction and the freedom to decide how to achieve the goals.

2.         Confidence In Senior Leadership

Business is a cutthroat struggle for survival.  In the days of sail, everyone entrusted their lives to the skill, knowledge and experience of the captain to deliver them safely to their destination.  In 1834, my ancestors sailed for months across the raging seas from Bristol to Tasmania. Luckily they made it or I wouldn’t be here writing this blog.  Today, our sailing ships have been replaced with company formats to make sure our job security and therefore our livelihoods are protected and made safe.

Do the big bosses walk the talk about the values they promulgate?  Are they communicating changes and constantly reinforcing the purpose?  Do we feel like cogs in the wheel as the organisation grinds out shareholder value and enriches the bosses?  Or do we feel valued as a priority in the success of the enterprise? Are they competent enough to make sure the company can survive and even better prosper so that we have career opportunities to grow and flourish?  If the answers to these fundamental questions are not positive, then our people will not be engaged and, in fact, may be actively seeking greener pastures.

3.        Pride in the Organisation

In Japan, when people think about joining a company or changing companies, their spouse, parents, in-laws and grandparents will all have opinions about the decision.  This becomes even more important as a consideration when we are talking about foreign enterprises.  The gold standard are the biggest, safest Japanese companies, then comes the less big, but still safe middle size Japanese companies and bringing up the rear are the foreign companies.

Knowing this, as leaders we have to work hard to make sure everyone is motivated and proud to work in our organisation. Purpose has to be stressed over and over to smooth out the bumps which confront every company.  The public persona pf the company has to be one of a good citizen adding value to Japan. 

Japanese staff are very focused on their relationship with customers and the company has to respect that. Foreign based CFOs come up with crazy ideas which destroy that trust.  A common idea is that if we have a 100% no defect rate, we will make less profit than if we tolerated a 3% defect rate, so let’s go for the money.  This is abhorrent to Japanese staff and is a huge demotivator.  The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) idea may be popular in Silicon Valley ,but it doesn’t have a place in Japan because the buyers expect it to work perfectly and completely from the get go.

Japan is different in many ways and engagement of employees is certainly one area of prominence.  We can improve the engagement scores, if we know what we are doing and can consistently execute on the basics.

Alan Mulally has had a very successful career at Ford and Boeing.  Over his 45 years as a leader, he developed an approach called “Working Together: Principles, Practices and Management System”.  His number one principles is “People first….Love them up”. This type of declaration is simple to make, but not that easy to live when you are facing quarterly reporting of results and the full glare of the stock market.   We see so many cases of CEOs firing people, the stock price getting a big boost and that axing of the people turning into many millions of dollars for the CEO personally, as part of their stock-based remuneration package.

Mulally believes that “working together” must be based on a supportive culture propping up the headline.  Culture alone won’t do it, though.  His system has a governance aspect directing how the leadership team should work together and which maps out how to create value.  His review process is central to translating aspirations into realities.  The basis of all of this is the philosophy of building a “people first” culture, which is driven by the company structure and the management processes adopted.  He insisted that as part of that “people first” idea that “everyone is included”.

He arrived at a formula in three parts, which all operate in lockstep and which generates profitable and or successful growth for all.  To get to that end game, Part One is “everybody knows the plan”.  When you read this idea, like me, you might be thinking “so what?.  Of course, everyone knows the plan because I have told them already – end of conversation”. 

When we dig a bit deeper in our thinking, though, we recall that just because we have told people the plan doesn’t mean they accept it, agree with it, or want to execute on it.  At the top levels of the company, we come up with the purpose and strategy and then we expect everyone else to deliver what we have envisaged.  A Town Hall presentation and a broadcast email may have detailed the plan and we think everyone knows what to do. 

Where we fall down is in the follow-up to make sure the message actually got through. We are all business minimalists, shaving time off activities wherever we can, because we are super busy, all the time. We need to double check that what we think people know is fully understood and they are beavering away on it as we expect.

Part Two requires that everyone knows the status of the plan.  Often, though, access to sensitive information in companies can be restricted.  Not everyone may see the real numbers and the full picture.  My predecessor never showed the Profit and Loss numbers to the team. When I took over, I decided to make the financial situation totally transparent.  The only protected numbers are salary and commission information relating to individuals. If they wish to share that information amongst themselves, then that is their choice.

Part Three is everyone knows the areas that require special attention.  Business is lumpy.  Some parts of the business are flying and other parts are limping along.  Again, sharing such sensitive information may be restricted.  We need to keep referring back to what we stated was the purpose and strategy for the enterprise and keep measuring how well we are delivering against what we have set out for ourselves.

If things are going well, we feel motivated to do more.  If things are not going well, we are motivated to try harder to turn things around.  When things are not going well, this situation begs the question about how much open knowledge of the pain should be shared.  There is the fear for the leader that if the full extent of the problem is made known, the more capable people, who always have options, will exercise them and leave.  This is a tricky balance, and there are no clear parameters for leaders to follow. I would suggest that the leader share enough to galvanise the team to action without scaring the daylights out of everyone and people start abandoning ship.

Mulally’s viewpoint is based on many years of hard-won experience.  It is straightforward in its formulation.  The daily execution against the plan, though, is another question.  This is the role of the leader, to take ideas and turn them into living breathing systems which can maximise the potential of the people in the firm.

I was having lunch with an expat client who has been here about a year and a half.  We were talking about people not performing.  In passing conversation, I happened to mention that incompetence is not an acceptable reason, as far as the Japanese courts are concerned, to fire someone.  Japanese judges believe that it is our fault, because we have people in the wrong job and we should fix that problem, rather than fire them.  That was a total revelation for this client.

Nevertheless, we still have to deal with underperformance.  Here are some guidelines for doing that.

1.        Research

Do we have all the necessary information in front of us, before we raise the issue with the person we feel is not matching expectations? Sometimes, we are the problem.  We haven’t been clear enough about the KPIs or our expectations, and they are not aware that they are falling short.  We have to find objective measures which we can reference to underline the gap between their current and expected performance. 

2.        Begin with rapport

Our people are never 100% perfect nor 100% imperfect.  There are bound to be some areas where their performance is acceptable.  In Japan, the workforce is very serious about their job and they do their best.  We should start the conversation on a positive note recognising what they are doing well.

3.        Reference the Performance Deviation

We take the personality out of the equation at this point.  We are “paying the ball, not the man”.  We are not saying that they are a bad person, but that their performance is not matching our needs.  In some instances, this “not matching expectations” will be news to the staff member.  The reason for that is we have never flagged it before, even though we have long thought it.  We didn’t bring it up until now in previous performance reviews and it can be a surprise.

We need to get their view on this issue.  There may be factors we are not aware of, which are preventing or impeding their ability to do the job we want them to do.   This is a “moment of truth” where if the lack of performance is measurable and a legitimate issue, we will see if they are going to take responsibility for their lack of performance.  Does that happen, or do they want to argue the point and make excuses, blaming everyone else for the state of affairs?

4.        If they take the fork in the road of resistance, then we need to deal with it.  We have to restate the problem and the consequences for continued underperformance, which is code for: “we will fire you if you don’t get your act together”. 

5.        Continued denial, resistance and obfuscation is pointless, but that doesn’t stop people from doing it.  Fortunately, in Japan, there is such a high demand for staff that the old hysteria and bias toward mid-career hires has completely vanished. They know and we know, they can easily get another job.  This also dampens the court’s antagonism to us removing people who are not performing.

6.        Hopefully, they will decide to “fly straight” going forward and recover from this.  Naturally, having to confront your own removal from the business is very demoralising and impacts people’s confidence to do the work.  If their heart is in the right place and they have the will to succeed, then we need to work on restoring their confidence that they can do it.

7.        Reassurance must be backed up with support.  This may mean individual coaching and/or being sent off to get the additional training to give them the skills they need to succeed.

8.        Retention of people is now at peak need in Japan. The population decline is creating staff shortages in many industries and a Darwinian struggle amongst companies to recruit enough people to run their businesses.  We want the staff member to stay with us and overcome this gap in their performance.  This requires advanced people and communication skills on the part of the boss and our efforts must be ongoing.  A “one shot and we are done” approach won’t work and we need to make the time for these conversations.

There is no doubt that dealing with poor performance will become an even more important tool in the boss toolkit.  By definition, with less people to choose from, we will be voting to take ”anyone” rather than being left short staffed.  Companies which can learn how to play in this new world of work will find a way through and others will fall by the wayside of either diminishing prospects or outright failure.  Frankly, the prospects don’t look good for any of us in business, so buckle up for a bumpy ride.

Effective leaders actively coach their staff and move them through four stages. In Phase One, they create a psychologically safe environment.  In Phase Two, they engage the team members. In Phase Three, they evaluate the response to those engagement activities and finally, in Phase Four, they empower their subordinates. Let’s choose some of the most appropriate Dale Carnegie Human Relations Principles to help us execute on these four phases as a coach.

Phase One: Psychologically Safe Environment.

Principle 10 recommends that the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.  This makes sense because how often do those arguing with us become convinced we are right? Never.  Rather, they dig their heels in and argue the point with us.  If we want to keep the relationship with our staff and create a calm atmosphere, it is better to not go there.

Principle 11 says to show respect for the other person’s opinion and to never say they are wrong.  Bosses often think they have to coach people who hold a different viewpoint.  No need for that, because remember, we don’t have to make decisions based on their opinion. We can come to our own conclusion and we certainly don’t have to belittle their perspective and demotivate them.

Principle 12 is a difficult one for the boss.  If we are wrong, we should admit it quickly and emphatically.  The boss can get tied up with their own status and infallibility as prerequisites for being in charge of others.  If we can admit our own mistakes, it allows us to grant our team members the scope to make mistakes.  The process of innovation is often messy and mistakes will happen.  If we want people to come out of their comfort zone, then mistakes are bound to occur.  We have to see mistakes as part of the learning process and we can begin with being humble ourselves.

Phase Two: Engage The Team Members

Principle 13 is beginning in a friendly way which at first blush seems ridiculous.  Actually, we think we are friendly, but we may be very outcome oriented.  We get straight to the bottom line and forget we are talking to people.  Instead of going for the results, we could begin with some friendly banter and build the relationship first and then get to the numbers.

Principle 14 is getting the staff member to say “yes, yes” immediately, which can sound like manipulation.  What we are talking about here, though, is to make it easy for them to say “yes” to what we propose.  We do this through using our communication skills to frame the conversation in a way which makes agreement simple.  This is a key coaching skill.

Principle 15 suggests letting the other person do a great deal of the talking.  This is a boss special to avoid. We like to do all the talking.  Rather, we should let the person feel ownership of their work and hear their ideas and opinions, rather than rattling off orders like a mad pirate captain.

Phase Three: Evaluate The Response

Principle 16 is let the other person feel that the idea is theirs and this also sounds like manipulation.  What we really want is for them to come up with their own ideas.  We may need to seed that idea formation, and that is much better than telling them our idea.  Given the same context, it is natural to reach a common conclusion.  We bosses often go directly to the punchline and forget to share the background and context with them.

Principle 17 says to walk in their moccasins and see things from their viewpoint.  As the boss, we may have a very strong viewpoint and will always be driving for results.  Their position is different from ours and we need to keep that in mind when they may not respond as we expect.  It becomes easier to coach people when we understand what they think and what they want.

Principle 18 recommends to be sympathetic with their ideas and desires.  There can be one mountain top but that doesn’t mean only the boss has the path to the top.  There can be many tracks to take and perhaps they choose one different from us. That doesn’t mean we are right and they are wrong.

Phase Four: Empower The Team

Principle 19 says appeal to their better selves. The majority of people want to do a good job and want the company to succeed.  If we make this our starting point, we will talk to our staff in a positive, forward looking manner.  We give them a high reputation to live up to and they do the rest to fulfill that expectation.

Principle Twenty says we should dramatise our ideas.  This makes sense in a modern world where so much is coming at us and at warp speed.  If we want to have an impact, we have to break through all the brain clutter and grab their attention.

Principle Twenty One specifies to throw down a challenge.  Stretch goals are often set so high that everyone just concludes the goals are impossible and they give up.  There is a line in there somewhere that allows everyone to push further, believing it is possible to get the result.  This is another key skill of the coach. We have to know our people well and be clear about their individual capabilities to get the settings correct.

The Dale Carnegie Principles are easy to understand, but not so easy to live.  If we work on them, though, we will do a much better job to coach our team members.

Ideas are free and sometimes frivolous.  We can brainstorm anything we like and we will come up with a bunch of ideas. Often that is where things grind to a shuddering halt.  I have been in those rooms, where we covered all the walls with ideas great and mighty.  What happened thereafter?  Nothing.

In Australia, in the 1990s, the government tightened up their regulations on company expenditures and particularly looked more carefully at “off-site” session expenditures. In many cases, these were boozy get away weekends for the Directors and they could put the tab on the government’s bill by claiming it as a tax expense.  One year, the Directors decided to have an actual offsite with intention. 

They gathered a group of people christened “game changers” and called in a consulting company to run the weekend.  It was a phenomenal experience. We came back from that off-site ready to conquer the world.  Some seriously good and extremely practical ideas emerged.  They were all duly put into a canvas bag by the Directors and taken down to the river, and with rocks attached, plunged into the dark depths, never to be seen again. 

I still don’t know why they never used our ideas, but the feeling of deflation and subsequent decline in motivation on the part of we supposed “game changers” was pronounced.

Here is what should have happened with our genius ideas. 

1.        The outcomes should have been more clearly defined and tied into the strategic plan for the company.

2.        The current situation analysis needed more effort to better highlight the gap between where we were and where we wanted to be.

3.        Concrete goals needed to be set based on the ideas generated.

4.        Next steps needed to be carefully articulated. These must be defined in clear terms and should have been very specific.

5.        Time frames must be attached to the goals, because goals without a time limit are just a dream. There will be various goals and these will include both short-term and long-term outcomes. There needs to be a roadmap created in order to realise them.

6.        Ideas always attract money.  Maybe this is why our ideas got killed off.  The Directors all shared in the proceeds of the business, so perhaps they preferred to allocate the dough amongst themselves, rather than invest it in our thoughts and suggestions. 

Money isn’t the only resource required.  There is time and staffing required to back up the application of the ideas and if they are in short supply, nothing goes forward.

7.        Obstacle anticipation often gets neglected in idea generation, because we are at the front end.  When we get to the execution stage, though, this is when the problems emerge.  Rather than just dealing with these as they arise, it is good practice to try to scope them out at the start.  There will always be some means for overcoming problems. We can find ways to compensate for time, money and staff issues if they are insufficient to sustain the task execution.

8.        Measuring results is boring.  It is much more fun to brainstorm and then rush around like bees in a bottle executing.  Was it all worth it?  The only way to know that is to have milestones and measurables against which we can track the amount of progress we have made or not made.

Getting the ideas into reality is never easy, because so many actors have to get involved and it requires substantial cross-platform cooperation.  The NIHS or “Not Invented Here Syndrome” is a pain.  Our colleagues, who were not selected to be “game changers” or to get involved in the execution piece, are uninterested observers.  They have to work on our idea, but they resist being dragged into the work and are happier to lambast what is going on from the cheap seats.

Idea generation and idea application must come as a set.  It is better not to start at all, if the ideas cannot be applied.  From my experience, I know how devastating it is to waste your valuable time and effort to see your hard earned ideas squandered and slaughtered.

Japan has a lot of wisdom to share and one of my favourites is to not start with the solution to a problem.  In Japan, the idea is to start with making sure you have the right problem to solve.  This is not easy, because often we are super busy and moving at warp speed all the time, so just jumping in to fix a problem sounds like the best approach.  There is a follow-on metaphor of the scaling of the wall. We work hard and progress rung by rung up the ladder, getting us to the top - the solution – only to find our ladder is up against the wrong wall.  We don’t want that, do we?

Problem definition is sometimes obscured by having a number of factors to confront and not enough insight into which are the priority items.  This might be for a lack of a data or from conflicting opinions. The issue remains a large one, though, which we must deal with at the very start of the process. 

Here are some steps to consider in problem definition.

Step One: Silence Is Our Super Power

Once we get into an open discussion about identifying the problem, we can find we waste a lot of time and basically get no progress. We argue the toss on what to solve and can get stuck.  Instead, have around six people in a team and have them all sit in silence and think.  Now thinking is seriously hard work.  It is particularly difficult for us today, because we are being corralled by algorithms spewing out one minute videos, fostering shorter and shorter concentration spans.

Ask the team to sit there for fifteen minutes in Round One and do nothing but think and write their issues on Post-It notes. This will be torture for some and very challenging for most.  Nevertheless, as the organiser, we have to have guts to ignore the fervent and persistent impatient glancing at watches, head shaking, eyes rolling, yawning, etc., that will go on, as the team is possessed by a wave of boredom.

Step Two: Prioritise Issues

After the first fifteen minutes, everyone stays in silence and now we spend 3 minutes to arrange what we have come up with into a broad priority listing of where to start.

Step Three: Share Together - Round One

Now we start putting our ideas up on a chart or a wall.  We attach the Post Its in priority order to the wall and explain our thinking to our colleagues.  There is no judgement allowed at this point, because we are still on the journey and we don’t need any decision being taken yet.

Step Four: Whole Team Sharing

Once we get our teams idea’s out, we share it with the other teams and they do the same for us. We try to cross pollinate the thinking going on.  There is no evaluation of what has been produced at this point.

Step Five: Think and Prioritise

After that stimulation, again, in silence, we keep thinking for another ten minutes.  This is very hard because all the easy ideas have been tapped. Now we have to really dig to find the gold.  We will adjust our previous priorities based on our new ideas.

Step Six: Share Together - Round Two

We bring our Post-It notes and add to what we came up with in the first thinking bracket.  Again, we share the content with our teammates.

Step Seven: Whole Team Sharing Round Two

Again, each team presents what they have come up with, so that all the teams can share in the ideas.

Step Eight: Each Team Makes Selections

By this stage, we will have had a lot of information shared and we will have a pretty good idea of where everyone has placed their priorities.  Now we have to make some decisions about which will be the issues which we will take forward to solve.  Each team will coalesce the possibilities into a short list.

Step Nine: Whole Team Makes The Final Selections

Each team presents their selections and then decisions are taken on which issues are going to be picked up to work on.

There is usually a strong raft of similar issues which will have been highlighted.  These commonalities make it easy to drive decisions about the final problems to work on.  Remember, we are not after perfection here, so if we get good selections, then we are on the right track.  We have created a hierarchy of issues to work with and we can get to them all over time.  We start with what we consider the most burning issues.

The next stage is to use creative thinking to work on how to solve the issues once clarified and we covered that in a recent episode already.

Founded in 2000, Baidu has 39,800 employees and is one of the largest global AI and internet companies.  Based in China, its major success has been its search engine business.  Its quarterly revenues ending June 2024 were $4.67 billion, so it is a substantial company.  The Head of Public Relations and Vice-President, Ms. Qu Jing, posted a video on social media demeaning Baidu staff, telling them she “can make you jobless in this industry”.  She told staff she demanded they must be dedicated enough to travel by her side for 50 days straight and she doesn’t care about the impact on their families and personal lives, noting, “I’m not your Mum”.  Her mantra to the staff was “I only care about results”. She was proud to say she was so devoted to Baidu, that she didn’t know what school year her son was in. 

She publicly posted her video outlining her leadership philosophy as an example to her PR team of how to use social media to promote Baidu!  Her professional skills in PR seem dubious to me. Also, her EQ or “emotional quotient” - her people skills - seems abysmal.  From a Dale Carnegie “How to Win Friends And Influence People” viewpoint, this is a shocking leader mentality.

As a so-called PR professional, her genius use of social media created a firestorm of virulent criticism of Baidu.  She had to take the video down and apologise, saying she would “earnestly read people’s opinions and criticisms” and “deeply reflect” on them.  Days later, she was gone.  The company wasn’t saying the circumstances of her departure, but given the apparent brutality of their corporate culture, you can expect they had no hesitation in firing her.  Ironically, hoisting her on her own petard, so to speak. There are so many things wrong with this Baidu story, it is hard to know where to start.

Fundamentally, she was making a basic leader error to think that the staff wanted what she wanted. Her case may be extreme, but often as leaders, we do assume everyone wants to work as hard as we do, that they want to get promoted like we did and that they want to dedicate themselves to the business like we are.  I don’t know why she was blind to the reality that actually staff do not necessarily want what we want and that they have their own goals, motivations, and desires. However, sometimes we can suffer from the same malady as Ms. Qu. 

The enterprise has goals and values and as the leader, our job is to get everyone to fly in the same direction, in formation.  That means finding out what our team members want and then aligning the way we do the business to deliver what is important to the staff.  It also requires us to understand their value system and again find lots of cross-over points where the organisation’s values fit in with the staff member’s values. 

The only way to do that is to communicate with the staff and through casual conversation, uncover what is important to them.  Interrogating the team like a crime solving detective on their deeply held values isn’t the way to do it. Over coffee or lunch in an informal situation and built up gradually over time is the better approach. Creating a threatening video is definitely not the way to go and 99.99% of people would get that, even if Ms. Qu didn’t.  Nevertheless, ask yourself, are you making an assumption about what your team wants, based on your imagination and no actual conversations with them? 

As the boss, we get busy and we are working away in the business and so are too busy to work on the business.  This is a how things can slip by us and before you know it, the last time you have a meaningful conversation with your staff was years ago.  That is okay, except that people’s lives change.  They get married, have children, have to take care of aging parents, age themselves and what was important to them five years ago, isn’t the same today, but we don’t know that.

Using fear as the driver for motivation like Ms. Qu does work, but it is a very blunt tool.  Ms. Qu’s outburst is remarkable in an economy where there is a lot of job mobility.  Those staff suffering the mad ravings of a demonic leader, can move to a better company, because they have choices.  Japan is just the same and job mobility has never been higher or easier in this country.  As the boss, we have to be aware of that and make sure that what we do and what we say are working well, to keep our people engaged and with us.

What is the culture of Baidu?  I don’t know, but if Ms Qu can become head of PR and rise to VP, then it would seem things are pretty rotten inside the organisation.  What is the culture inside your organisation by comparison?  In our case, we have set priorities around our values: number one is your health, number two is your family’s health and number three is the company health.  Making that statement is one thing and living it is entirely different.  This is where leadership comes in by being congruent with what you are saying, by doing it.

I doubt we can find any framed posters inside Baidiu which say the company values are: number one – treat people like dirt, etc.  I am sure many of us have highfalutin value statements beautifully framed behind glass and placed in prominent positions within the walls of the company.  Fine.  What about the “walking the talk?”.  Are we living what we preach?  I doubt Baidu is doing that, but before we get too deep in schadenfreude, let’s take a cold hard look at ourselves.

The era of the boss who had done all the tasks in the section and was the main expert on the business has well and truly passed.  Today, it is more of a team effort and there are a lot more specialisations required than in the past.  Collaboration is the key to creativity by grouping all the brain power in one place and unleashing it to solve the problem. To my surprise, very few firms have any clear methodology on how to unleash the creative ideas of the team.  So far, I have done over 200 interviews with CEOs here in Japan for my podcast “Japan’s Top Business Interviews”. I ask them all about their house methodology to harvest the ideas of their teams, and I am struggling to recall anyone who could answer that question well. 

Here are some things to think about to create your own house brand on idea development and creativity.

Step One: Begin with the end in mind.

What is it you want to achieve with this exercise?  We are going to tie up the valuable time of a lot of key people, so the end must justify the means. What would success look like from doing this exercise?

Step Two: Gather what we already know. 

We rarely start with zero knowledge of the issue.  We have all built up experience and insights into this problem.  We also have data we can access to provide some deeper perspectives on the issue. We need to create a common understanding amongst the team about the issue and it ramifications.

Step Three: Clarify the question we are asking. 

Japan has a great insight about problem solving.  Unlike in the West, in Japan, the answer to the question is secondary.  Here deciding what is the right question to ask comes first, before worrying about any potential answers. That is quite smart isn’t it.  There can be so many layers to the issue as well and we need to spend some quality time at the beginning to really clarify what is the main issue we should be aiming to solve while being washed around in a sea of competing issues.

Step Four: Harvest the ideas. 

We start generating ideas with a strong proviso. There is no such thing as a dumb idea or crazy idea.  Yes, of course, some ideas will be better, more practical than others, but we want to bring forth as many choices as possible before we start allocating priorities about which answers we will pursue.  My crazy idea won’t go forward, but it may stimulate a better idea in your mind. This idea would never have come to light without the stimulation of you saying to yourself, “well that is a dumb idea but if we tweaked it like this, then we could….”.  This is how idea generation works. We bounce our ideas around and fire each up to come forward with a better alternative.

Step Five: Select the best ideas to take forward.

Many ideas will emerge and at a point in time we have to make some selections.  This is the most difficult part, because this is where we need a decision-making system which works well.  Usually in Japan, the better ideas are harmonised and moved to the top of the tree.  A good methodology is to find common themes and then isolate these themes out and rank ideas within those themes. Now we may have a disagreement about the order of the ideas generated, but if we take the top five ideas in the most commonly grouped themes we are in the right spot.

Step Six: Find the money, time and authority to move forward.

Ideas are great, but only become really great when applied. That takes investment. It might be dough or people’s time or the freedom to run the idea without interference or the means to overcome the idea killer - the NIHS – “Not Invented Here Syndrome”.

We have to promote the ideas generated to the big bosses and convince them to get behind what we have come up with.  There is absolutely nothing more soul destroying and spine decalcifying than to have your hard won ideas spurned by the machine and those who command it at the top.  You feel you have wasted your life for nothing and are very reluctant to take part in any future creativity sessions.

Step Seven: Start.

We don’t need to be perfect, because we won’t know everything we need to know at the very start, but we can adjust as we move forward.  This is a hard step for Japanese teams because they like to make sure everything is perfect and there is zero chance of failure.  They would prefer to never harvest the future benefits, if there was a possibility of failure occurring on their watch.  We have to make sure we give them permission to fail and make sure there is no blow back on anyone if it doesn’t work, otherwise it will never start.

Step Eight: Tweak the ideas.

Once we are underway, we learn so much more and we need to be flexible to analyse the results and to draw the right conclusions.  Often we have insufficient data to really know what we are looking at, so we need patience to give the innovation time to work. As we better understand the situation, we can make adjustments to improve the results or the performance.

Step Nine: Determine Benefits

We said we would start with the end in mind and did we achieve that or did we go off on a tangent that yielded something even more valuable?  Did we gain from the exercise or not?  Did the results of the organisation improve as a result of the implementation of the ideas we came up with?  We need to draw a line in the sand and make that judgement. 

Step Ten: Recognise the team

Whether we hit it out of the park or whether we made no gains, we still need to recognise the efforts made and the input provided from those involved. We never lose because we always learn. A wrap up party is always a good idea and if there can be awards attached to that, all the better.  Some people may have been drawn off to other work and not be there at the end, but they should be brought back too. Recognition is the key.

These ten steps are a good template to use when setting up your house brand of idea generation.

The leader has a different role to that of the manager.  The manager makes the business run on time, to quality and on budget.  The leader does all of those things, plus sets the strategic direction for the business, crafts the culture and builds the people.  If we want to control every aspect of the firm, then we have to micro-manage everything.  Obviously, that is a choice, but as the leader we need to develop our people too and so we need to delegate work to them so that they can grow.  In fact, as the leader, the ideal situation would be that we are only working on the most high-level things that only we can do.

If possible, we want to set the parameters of the business so that the team can self-manage themselves.  Those parameters come in the form of some very useful tools called Vision, Mission and Values.  Some people may think that Vision, Mission and Value are rather flowery, fluffy, flaky statements of little use, but they are denying themselves some important leverage points as the leader.

The Vision is a call out to what is the purpose of what we are doing.  This is a fundamental thing, but in many companies the staff have an unclear idea of the purpose.  We can recall the classic building the wall metaphor. Three stonemasons are asked what they are doing, and the first says, “building this wall”. The second one says, “I am building a new faculty building for the university”. The third one says, “I am building a facility to better educate future generation”.  The metaphor makes the point that the understanding of purpose is different, even though each person was laying stone blocks to build a wall.  We need to make sure that our team is clear on what is the purpose of why we are putting in all these long, hard hours.

The Mission is a clarification of what we do and, by definition, what we don’t do.  Making the main thing the main thing sounds simple, but there are so many bright shiny objects and fashionable trends which can divert us.  We need to make sure everyone understands what we need to concentrate on and not allow the business to be drawn off course.

The Values are the glue which bind us together. The leader’s job is to find out the common values of the team which will correspond with the values of the organisation and have everyone flying together in tight formation going in the same direction. The other important point is to make sure that the organisation lives the values and that the team lives the values.  When the organisation rhetoric strays from the stated values, the cynicism becomes a cancer which eats away at the morale and teamwork of the firm.

Once we have set the guide rails, we can set the strategy to achieve the Vision.  There will be a series of goals to be achieved to get us to where we want to be.  Obviously, revenue and profit goals are going to be critical to the health and longevity of the firm.  There will be quality considerations which relate to our brand and its positioning in the market.  Cost of customer acquisition and the success of our marketing to help grow the business will bring their own sets of goals.  Who we recruit and how we train them will have a major impact on the success of the company.  Business is a one team against another team head-to-head struggle and the best team wins in the long term.  Our sales team versus the opposition, our marketing prowess against that of so many rivals, our factory staff against the competition, our leadership bench strength against all comers in our industry sector.

We need to measure our progress and success in attaining our goals. There are activities and outcomes which we need to track.  We break these down for each financial year and for longer term considerations and they must add up to attaining the Vision we have set.  They must be objective and correct numbers, because incorrect data can hurt us and cause us to make poor decisions.  Getting correct data is not always that easy and we must have systems to keep checking that what we think is happening is actually the case.

So think of this strategic plan as a funnel.  The mouth of the funnel at the top is where we pour in the purpose, and gradually we keep refining the execution of the purpose by specifying more and more concrete details needed for its attainment.

As the boss, we are always super busy.  We have the management of the team and the results to work on.  Everything has to be progressing on cost, on time and on quality.  At the same time, we are setting the strategy, the direction for the team, communicating that so that everyone understands, establishing the values, and we are coaching and building the team members. Phew, I get tired just thinking about all of those boss roles. It is rare though that we can take a breath and reflect on the effectiveness of the teamwork.  When problems arise, we tend to work on those in isolation and never have a moment to see the team as a unit, as a whole.

Here are three things to look at in your team and reflect on if you are happy with the effectiveness of the team.

1.    Conflict

In a Western context, we might think we need to have constructive conflict which will help us to make better choices?  In Japan, disagreements are more likely to be ignored because if we surface them, we have to publicly deal with it and discretion is the better part of valor here.  Nevertheless, we cannot leave things fester and as the boss, we need to take action and sort things out. 

However, the Western idea of getting the two people in the room and thrashing it out will never work here. You might force people to get together, but no one will say anything in that meeting.  Conflict resolution is best done individually, privately, and quietly.  We have to take an entirely different approach to sorting out conflict in Japan.  We talk to each person many times and, like war time negotiators, we move them toward an armistice that can stick.  Hostilities will cease and the conflict will become muted, although never forgotten.

Japan is better at working together to come up with solutions when everyone is involved and has a sense of shared ownership.  We should concentrate on creating these occasions and the idea of creative conflict becomes replaced with creative cooperation, which suits the Japanese psyche much better.

2.    Cooperation

In teams, there can be contradictions where it can be difficult to square the circle.  Sales teams are being measured on sales results and the numbers tell everything.  There can be an issue though, depending on how the salespeople are paid. If they are on salary and bonus, then there is a natural preclusion to cooperate.  Japanese salespeople would love to have no individual responsibility. They always vote for salary and a group bonus, related to a group target. 

This is great for hiding and avoiding accountability and these are two aspects where the Japanese salesforce can operate at ninja levels of accomplishment. We don’t do this in our organisation because we know we will always underperform and no one will be accountable.  We want individuals to have specified numbers against their targets and for them to be held responsible for hitting those numbers. As you might imagine, this is not a popular idea here.

If they are on individual commissions with a base salary, then there is an inbuilt resistance to cooperating with anyone else.  It becomes “everyone for themselves” very easily. This is where values and culture need to play their part and glue the unglueable together.  The boss has to work hard at gluing the team together, even when there are these fundamental contradictions at play.  It can be done, but it takes a lot of consistency, brand building and communication.

3.    Communication

Working from home during covid definitely impacted the communication levels in our organisation.  We were all operating in our bunkers at home, and the level of clarity and common understanding went down in my observation.  Introverts like me loved it.  You didn’t have to see or talk to anyone.  For the organisation, though, it was not good. We have returned to the office and when we have people chatting in the office, it shows that what was missing before has been reclaimed.

Japanese culture is an impediment to clear communication.  The language is highly circular, purposely vague, very cautious about what is being said and against declarative or strong statements.  “Telling them how it is” just doesn’t fly here and people from overseas who do that are seen as children, unable to compose themselves properly.  The nuances of the message are what we have to focus on in communication in Japan and we have to keep checking what we think we understand is being said.  Does this suck up a lot of time – Yes.  Is it going to change – No.

So how did you go analysing your own organisation against these three items of conflict, cooperation and communication?  Working on our businesses rather than just working in our businesses is always a struggle.  We have to proactively make sure we step back from the fray and take a cold hard look at what is really going on from time to time.

Managers manage.  That means they make sure everything runs on time, to cost and to quality.  The leader does all of that, plus some additional important things. These include setting the strategic direction for the team and building the people’s capabilities.  Part of the leader’s role is to unite everyone behind the direction they are setting for the team.  There can be a lot of detail at the micro level about how to make the strategy a reality. One key component which needs to be set at the start is to re-clarify the purpose of the team.  You would think that was pretty obvious. However, if the leader doesn’t work on defining it, there could be 10 people in the team and eleven different purposes.

Here is a simple six-step guide to setting the purpose.

1.         What is meaningful about what your team does, from the perspective of the organisation as a whole (such as in relation to the stated purpose and vision)?

The team operates within the framework of the firm, but the leader must break that down to the team level and create a local version which matches the team’s reality in the field.  How does your team fit into the big picture?  Which colleagues from other departments are key partners and where is the coordination most required? There is often a firm wide Vision Statement which can be a good starting point and the task is to take that and create your own local version for the team.

2.        What is meaningful about what your team does from the perspective of your clients? 

We know what we sell, but sometimes we forget what the client is buying.  They are not always the same things. For example, we might think we are selling leadership training, but what the client is buying might be succession planning or greater productivity.  It is always important that every person in the team has a clear understanding of the client's needs.

Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” was an excellent guide to the importance of making sure the entire series of contact points with the client were aligned and operating at the same quality levels.  An example would be the person who answers the phone is pleasant and professional, but the person the client is then transferred to is rude or grumpy. The firm brand went from heavenly clouds to depths of hell in one second.

3.        How should your team members behave as they are delivering what matters?

This comes back to what are the team and organisational values?  The leader will always have a wide spread of values scattered across their team and their job is to unite everyone behind the core values of the team.  The value set defines how everyone thinks about the clients and that, in turn, defines how they interact with the clients.  There is also the issue of how the team members interact with each other? Is there a strong level of mutual respect or we are in a pit of vipers with corporate politics run amok?

 4.        What are the expected results for the team and what are we doing when we are acting according to our purpose?

We are establishing KPI, goals, targets etc., to make the outputs needed clear to everyone.  Does each individual have a target or are there team based goals?  In the latter case, do people within the team understand their role in delivering the team result?

5.        What actions do you, as the leader, need to do to help fulfill the purpose?

Taking care of the logistics, resources, permissions, interdepartmental cooperation are common leader roles.  There is also the key role of coach to the team members to bolster their motivation and skills.  Often though, as busy, busy leaders, we transition from coach to mad pirate captain barking out orders and making people walk the plank if they don’t perform.  We set the tone for the team and we set the role model of how we are going to operate in this team. 

6.        Who do you need to be as a leader to fulfill the purpose (characteristics/ qualities?

We should never forget that every single member of our team is a ninja level “boss watcher” and they are constantly scanning us for any signs of crumbling between what we say and what we do.  We set the pace and the quality levels for the team.  That means we have to be lifetime learners, very well organised and totally professional in our work.  It also means we have to be calm in the midst of the raging storms which hit our team from time to time and be the rock around which everyone can shelter.

Use these six prompts to create the purpose for your team, either for them or with them.  I would recommend “with them”, because the team who designs the purpose together has the best levels of ownership of the outcomes and is more likely to execute well on what they have produced.

There is a debate about whether Japan is any different from anywhere else when it comes to leading the team.  Intellectually, I can appreciate there are many similarities because people are people, but I always feel there are important differences.  One of the biggest differences is how people are trained to become leaders in Japan.  I should really clarify that statement and say how they are not trained to become leaders. The main methodology for creating leaders in Japan is through On The Job Training (OJT). I can see there is a crisp logic to the idea of OJT back in the day, however it is now a flawed system in the modern world of Japan.  In the West, leadership training is a given, because the value is recognised and so the investment is made to better educate the leadership cohorts through each generation.

The first problem with Japan OJT is it presumes your boss knows about leading.  There is very little formal leadership training going on in Japan.  I don’t believe it just about investing the money.  There is no great tradition here for corporate leadership training.  Before we dive into this subject, I believe we should clarify what is a leader in Japan and what is a manager and what is different. 

Japan, in my observation, is full of managers, and there are few leaders. A manager runs the machine on budget, on quality, and on time. The leader does all of that and two very important additional tasks.  The leader persuades the team that the direction they are advocating is the correct one and, secondly, they build up the capabilities of their staff through one-on-one coaching.  By the way, barking out orders like a mad pirate captain doesn’t qualify as coaching.

OJT probably made a lot of sense up until about fifty years ago, when it started to be disrupted by technology.  By the 1980s, desktop computing became common in Japan and gradually the boss lost his (and they were mainly men) typist and had to start doing his own typing on the computer.  The advent of email in the mid-1990s was the real death blow to the boss’s time management.  Now the boss had become super busy and time availability for coaching staff became much diminished.

What this means is that we have had been through multiple generations of staff mainly educated through OJT and who have been short-changed on the leadership modelling by their “manager” boss.  Each corporate generation passes on how to be a manager to the next generation and unless there is some intervention through formal leadership training, there is no real progress.

 Of course, there will always be exceptions who prove the rule and some managers who make it out of that gravitational pull of OJT and become real leaders.  This is the lightning strike theory of leadership development and isn’t a great proposition to ensure that the firm’s leadership bench is stacked with professionals.

The key plank in leadership is no longer task experience.  The old model was the boss had done all the tasks of their subordinates and knew their jobs inside out.  Today, there is much more speciality and technology is making sure it isn’t experience alone which will carry the day for the boss.  Many companies in Japan are moving away from the old model of age and stage and instead promoting people based on ability.  Just rotating through various jobs in the machine won’t be enough anymore.

Leaders have to become expert communicators and masters of environment building, such that individuals can motivate themselves.  How many leaders receive any training to assist their communication and people skills?  Very, very few and everyone else had to work it all out through trial and error. That hit and miss approach is very expensive.

The younger staff want different things to their parents and the modern boss in Japan has to adjust.  The bishibishi or super strict model of leadership is now cast out on to the rubbish tip of leadership history in Japan.  Bosses still using this model will see their younger staff departing in droves.  Already 30% are leaving after three to four years of employ and that number will only get worse as we run out of people to hire and the younger generation all become free agents.

The younger generation wants a psychologically safe environment and a lot of personal encouragement by the boss. One of the greatest elements to gaining engagement from staff is that they feel the boss cares about them.  The way they know that is through the boss’s communication skills.  If you believe that given people are getting paid, they should be engaged, then there is bound to be a lack of the needed communication of “I care about you” going on. If you don’t have well-developed communication skills, then being the boss is only going to get harder and harder. 

How much communication training do bosses get?  Very little and they certainly don’t get much value through OJT, because their own bosses were crap communicators, as were their bosses, and back we go through the generations. Japan needs to raise its white-collar worker productivity and investing in boss leadership and communication training makes a lot of sense.  OJT is a dead duck and won’t work as the vehicle to get the needed progress on the leadership front.  We need a change in thinking about leadership here in Japan to take us forward.

Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader whose team gets results? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources.There is a perfect solution for you- To LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43sQHxV )

To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj )

To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK)

If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training

Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

The bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery" and his new books "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めま

Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki.

He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Has 6 weekly podcasts:

1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series,

2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series

Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え

3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series

4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series

Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト

5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show

6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews

Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube:

1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV

2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery

3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews

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, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) 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.

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.

Here is a handy success equation which is easy to remember: our mindset plus our skill set, will equal our results.  This is very straightforward and unremarkable, but we get so embroiled in our day to day world, we forget to helicopter above the melee and observe the lay of the land.  A great mindset coupled with lacklustre skills, won’t get us very far.  A poor mindset with great skills won’t do it either, so we need both.

What is our mindset composed of?  How we think is critical.  Are we operating with a positive mindset?  If we are deep in depression about the circumstances of the business, we are stuck in a hole from which it can be hard to emerge.  We are what we think, so control over what we think becomes so important. That also means being strict about what we put into our minds.  Stay away for fluff, endless scrolling on social media and negativity.  Find the useful, positive and valuable and make that the diet for our mind.

Our opinions influence how we see the world.  Where do these opinions come from?  They are usually the product of our access to quality, correct information.  There is a tricky balance here because a lot of the news we need to consume is laced with negativity and that can pollute our positive attitude.  So we need to curate the information we take in, to help us make informed decisions, based on correct data.

Our beliefs are similarly formed from data, personal experience and what we hear from people we trust.  Our degree of success can be impacted by our self-belief. It can be a drag on our progress if we are limiting how we see our potential.

We believe we are operating logically, except we often make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. Being in control of our emotion is a fundamental first step to getting ourselves into a position to be successful. Wild mood swings make us a difficult person to work with or get close to.  A short temper can have us explode in haste and repent at leisure, after we have created havoc all around us.

We are all drowning is a sea of information today as the internet propels constant updates and new content at us.  When I was at University we went to the stacks in the library to find the few books available there and if someone else had that textbook you needed you dipped out. Microfiche was the big innovation to access information in a non-paper format. For the younger generation out there, microfiche was an ancient method of taking microphotographs of physical pages and putting it on to film you could scroll through, using a special microfiche reader. I noticed with my son’s education, his problem is the constant assault of data and the difficulty of working out which information was valuable amongst the flotsam and jetsam battering his attention everyday. Getting insight becomes the game of success because we don’t lack for content anymore.

Once we have the mindset correct then we have to take action.  This is often easier said than done. We are so busy and translating insight into outcomes is not a given in this constant rabid struggle against the demands on our time. Behaviour determines outcomes and the formation of good habits is the key here. If we form the right habits then we take the right actions and we form the right default behaviour which adds to our success.

The way we communicate flows from these habits and behaviours and we should be seeking inclusivity.  Business is too complex for relying on the hero worker who can do it all by themselves – that ship has sailed.  We need to be persuasive and able to garner collaboration in the workplace today.  There is so much technology available today and it spews out endless choices.  How do we get others to follow our ideas and adopt our suggestions? Our degree of cooperation from others is a compilation of our interactivity.  If we have good people skills then we can interact with other in a constructive and positive way which adds to our success. Often technical people struggle in this area because their education hasn’t focused on the human interaction dimension.  Communication and people skills are new sets of complexities they need to master otherwise they will always be soldiers and never become generals.

Our mindsets and skill sets combine to offer us opportunities to influence others and to direct the way forward. That is what it means to lead.  If we are busily working in our business, we may neglect to work on ourselves, so that we can work on the business.  It always good to step back and regroup around the fundamentals and refocus on where we need to put our energy and passion.

Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader whose team gets results? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources.There is a perfect solution for you- To LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43sQHxV )

To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj )

To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK)

If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training

Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

The bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery" and his new books "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めま

Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki.

He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Has 6 weekly podcasts:

1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series,

2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series

Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え

3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series

4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series

Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト

5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show

6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews

Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube:

1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV

2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery

3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews

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, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) 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.

It is very common to hear from expat leaders here about their frustrations with leading teams in Japan.  They get all of their direct reports together in a meeting room to work through some issues and reach some decisions.  All goes according to plan, just like at home.  Weeks roll by and then the penny drops that things that were agreed to in the meeting are not happening.  “Why is it so hard to get people who are being paid good money to do their job?”, they ask me.

One reason is that some of the people in the meeting room looked like they were in agreement because they don’t want to single themselves out as disagreeing with the boss in a public forum.  They keep a low profile and choose not to execute on a piece of work they think is a bad idea.  The Japanese methodology is the exact opposite. 

Before the meeting, the boss checks in with the key people about this idea they have and gets input and feedback.  Once these consultations have taken place and any necessary adjustments have been made, then the meeting is called.  The attendees rubber stamp the decision and then get busy making it a reality, with great haste and no resistance.  Which is better?  Well, in Japan, the nemawashi or groundwork method works very well because this is how things have been done around here for thousands of years.

For leaders, the preferred follower is both independent and highly engaged.  They know what to do and think about what they are doing, adding in extras without waiting around for the boss to tell them how to do things.  Another variety of follower, which by the way, is very common in Japan, is the dependent variety who are engaged, but need a lot of guidance.  Part of the reason here is that everyone is highly risk averse. The safest course of action is to do extremely well what the boss asks for, but don’t take any initiative. In this way, the buck stops with the boss and if things go pear-shaped, then there is no blow back on the staff member.

The more problematic types are the dependent staff who are disengaged.  In Japan, in big companies, the staff advancement method is based on age and stage, rather than outputs.  This breeds a uniformity which is easy to control but which does not generate great results.  They do their job at the minimum and that is it.  They do what they are told, but no more.

The much, much more worrying variety is the independent staff who is disengaged.  They are unhappy working for you, are capable, but are not aligned with your direction.  Maybe they think you are a dill and not adding any value here in Japan and the sooner you get on a plane and buzz off to your next posting, the better. They can be internal bomb throwers sabotaging you. 

As the leader we have many power plays we can utilize to get the team to follow us.  The obvious one is the three strips on the sleeve which says “I am the Boss, got it!”.  This authority power is backed up by the machine and gives us access to money and decision making.    Most staff get it and will respect the position even when they have doubts about the incumbent.

Expert power is a strong one because we show we bring firepower to the team and the operation.  People realise we have a lot of expertise they don’t possess and we are adding value to everyone’s efforts.  This type of authority is hard to push back on.

Reward power makes a lot of sense because we can facilitate pay rises, promotions, bonuses, study trips to cool brand name universities, choice projects, etc.  In Japanese we have the ame (飴) and the muchi (鞭) – the sweeties and the whip – this would be the sweets part.

Role model power is also effective.  We are the very model of a modern leader; we tick all the boxes.  We are skilled professionally and also with working with all different types of people and are excellent in communication.  We are a star who no one can deny.

The other power play is coercive power.  Those independent, disengaged saboteur staff may need a dose of this one.  If they don’t want to be part of the team, then go and we will help them out the door.  Very few staff need to experience our coercive power, so we are talking about the exceptions here. 

The point is there are many ways we can engage our staff and have them want to follow us willingly.  A good place to start is to determine which of these categories each of the followers fits into it.  Then we can arrange the power structure which is the best fit for that person.  Leading everyone in the same way is how amateurs approach it.  The professionals lead people one by one, with total customisation.

I was reading an article by Anjli Raval in the Financial Times about the transition for CFOs to the CEO job. She quoted a survey by Heidrick & Struggles which showed a third of CFOs in the FTSE 100 firms became the CEO.  This is up from 21% in 2019.  Raval makes an interesting observation, “research shows that CEOs promoted from the CFO job do not drive top-line revenue growth as quickly as those from other backgrounds, particularly in the first few years”.  Why is that the case?

The article offers a few reasons about these promoted CFOs having a “cash-preservation mindset over a drive to pursue new opportunities”. Also, as the CFO, they had been making tough budget allocation decisions which had not been popular with their division head colleagues. Now they are the boss, but not everyone is happy about it.  As Yogi Berra said, “Leading is easy. It is getting people to follow you, which is hard”.

That skill set isn’t taught to people trained in finance and accounting.  Analytical people, in general, are not particularly people focused.  They are focused on the numbers and protecting the cash flow.  Nothing is wrong with that but the leader’s role is different.  They need a defined set of skills and usually they are promoted to CEO, but given no training on the areas where there are bound to be gaps.

Sales skills are not part of their academic curriculums and usually nothing they have ever done themselves.  If you are the boss of an organisation with a salesforce, then your accounting credentials count for nothing.  No one in sales will take you seriously as having any opinion worth regard.  Salespeople are a tough crowd.  They are self-sufficient, robust, resilient, self-made in their careers based on their success in selling solutions to buyers.  From their point of view, someone who just counts up the numbers, but has never sat across from thousands of ornery buyers, won’t command much respect. Fancy degrees and letters after your name are irrelevant to salespeople.

If the new CEO wants to get salespeople behind them, then they had better spend a lot of time with their salespeople visiting buyers and hearing firsthand how tough the profession of sales is.  I am thinking back to all the CFOs I have worked with and in my experience, most of them looked down on salespeople.  That attitude won’t win any hearts and minds and as the boss, we need our salespeople to be fully committed and firing on all cylinders.  Treating the salespeople as the great unwashed may make the new boss feel superior, but salespeople are experts at reading between the lines and summing people up very quickly.  They won’t be fooled.

The other usual skill gap is in dealing with all different types of people.  When you spend your career in technical specialty areas, there is a common language and understanding with your immediate colleagues which is not shared outside your division.  Lawyers, engineers, IT people spring to mind.  Their education didn’t put much emphasis on communication and people skills and when they become the boss, that gap is highlighted. Does the organisation recognise that and give them any training?  Usually “no”.  Somehow it is imagined they will just magically transform themselves after a long career path in a box and become hale fellow well met types to the masses.

I am thinking of a lawyer I know here.  I see him at a lot of networking events and always wonder about what he is trying to achieve?  Presumably he is looking of potential business as a lawyer.  Interestingly, when I engage him in conversation, he is stiff, awkward and definitely does not make you feel welcome, comfortable or relaxed in his company.  The contradiction of aims and reality is quite profound.

If you make the leap from technical person to leader, then you need to work on yourself.  The company might give you an Executive Coach, but unless they are experts in communication and people skills, they will just ask a bunch of deep, meaningful and searching questions and provide no answers.  Very unsatisfying in my experience. Take personal accountability and get help on improving your communication skills pronto.  Also, make a bigger effort to learn how to get on with people who are just not like you and never will be like you.  We can’t fire everyone who is different to us, as much as we may think that is a good idea.  It is better to change ourselves and become more skilled in working with people than eliminating the very people we need to make the organisation a success.  If we don’t get the people and communciation parts right, then we will struggle to have people follow us and our time at the top with be brief.

It sounds very obvious, doesn’t it, to remind the team what we are trying to achieve, but are we doing it?  Yes, we had that team Town Hall a few months ago and as the leader we outlined where we need to be at the end of the financial year. After that session, we have all been head down and getting on with it. “They know right?  I told them everything they need to know, to get on with it” is what we have ringing in our internal conversation with ourselves.  Is this true, though?

Yes, we know the number we have to achieve, but what about the strategy to get there?  Is that clear enough to everyone? Do they all remember the details or have they been consumed by the minutiae of “doing” and have been neglecting the big picture of what we need to do to deliver the result?  The daily grind makes us small.  We are worn down by the doing and the bigger picture gets shoved into the background.  The leader’s job is to brush the dust off the plan and keep reminding the team what we have to do and how we are doing it.

The other issue we face is, as leaders, we are perfectly clear and we know what needs to be done, but have we properly communicated this to the team?  In Japan, we are working across two languages all the time. Even though we think we have been clear, we know that even amongst native speakers, there can be cases where we haven’t been clear enough.  Multiply that possibility when we are operating in imperfect Japanese or our team are using imperfect English and there are endless possibilities for a lack of clarity.

It happens all the time too, that what we expect to happen doesn’t happen at all or doesn’t happen when we thought it would happen.  Our staff member didn’t actually understand what they needed to do, but it is embarrassing to admit that to the boss, so they smile nicely and disappear. We find out weeks or months later that something key has been missed or done incorrectly.  Whose fault was that?  We might want to blame them, but we had better take responsibility for not checking that our understanding of what would happen next was shared by the staff member who was going to do the work.

I always keep in mind that “I don’t know” is a code phrase in Japan for “I don’t agree”.  No one in this country believes that direct confrontation with the boss is going to get you anywhere, so everyone operates at ninja levels of obfuscation.  “Why didn’t that project get done on time” is greeted with “I don’t know” and that conversation takes us precisely nowhere.

We may have explained the rationale for the thing we wanted done and to us, that made perfect sense, but to the staff member that may represent more work and they already feel overwhelmed by what they have on their plate right now.  That project gets pushed to the back of the cue.  Conveniently, their boss is super busy and distracted by numerous other projects, so there is a strong chance the boss may forget about this imposition entirely and they can keep doing what they want to do.  When we do circle back and find there are problems, we then hit this wall of denial.

We should always assume that what we said wasn’t entirely understood, in whichever language we were using.  That means we have to be well organised time wise to be able to check on progress on the way through, rather than neglecting the process and turning up at the end expecting results. 

We should also have a regular cadence for reminding everyone what we are supposed to be doing, in terms of getting results and also referring to the strategy on how we are going to make that happen.  Yes, we told them before, but let’s assume they have all been busy and have forgotten some of the finer points.  In particular, the WHY is a big factor which we need to keep reminding everyone about and not just the what and the how.

If we are well organised, we can do this and we can smooth out a lot of wrinkles.  We can make the work process much better.  This drops the stress levels and increases the joy of work for us and for everyone else.  What’s that, “no joy at work?”.  Well, if that is the case, then go back and have a look at some of the basics and make sure they are in place. If they are not, then get busy and re-introduce them. 

Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment.  Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer.  That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect.  Mid-career hires were frowned upon. If you bolted from your employer, you had almost zero chance of joining a competitor. You entered a dark forest and had to find your way through the brambles and undergrowth to meet out a living on the lower rungs of a netherworld of small firms willing to take you on.

In 1997, the venerable Yamaichi Securities blew up and a lot of competent, hard working finance industry people suddenly found themselves in the street without a job.  Other firms in the same sector employed them, because they were skilled and this was the first tear in the fabric of the stigma of the mid-career hire.  The Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 added another slash to lifetime employment in Japan, as many people lost their jobs.  The 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear power plant explosions disrupted many industries, throwing people out of work.  Covid did a similar job on particular industries like tourism and hospitality as borders closed.

The downturn in population has meant there is a strong demand for workers with a growing limitation on the supply side.  This throws up options for staff which were not there before and it impacts the loyalty factor of the worker-employer construct.  Thirty percent of young people in their third and fourth years of employ, after having been trained by the company who hired them, jump out and go somewhere else.  No loyalty and no qualms about leaving their employer.

A client of mine sent me a note the other day about doing some training and as an aside, he mentioned that one of his key people involved in that decision, who had been with him for 14 years, was suddenly leaving.  This is very disheartening because you lose the experience, their contacts and the continuity with their colleagues and clients.  That takes a long time to re-stitch together.

Sometimes it is the stupidity of our own construction.  An organisation I used to work for had a new leader appear.  He was not the usual standard of experience or capability for that complex work and decided to fire one of the staff who had been with the organisation for decades.  He had no conception of the network he was letting walk out the door.  Twenty-plus years of deep relationships with buyers in his industry was just vaporised.  It is not something obvious you can notice, like a chair has gone missing in the office, but the loss to the business is still there and manifests itself later when you least need it.

What can we do about this?  Sadly, not much.  We do our best to align the direction and values of the organisation with the staff’s interests.  It won’t always be a perfect fit.  Also, their interests change.  They now have aging parents, get married, have children, start to think about retirement, etc.  Covid has crushed many companies and those pressures can speed up changes, which lead to staff leaving. When things are rolling, there is less taste to leave because the rewards are coming thick and fast.  When things have been tough and you are crawling out of the hole together, the rewards are all in the future.

Two of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principles come in handy here. One is to cooperate with the inevitable and the other is to expect ingratitude.  It is inevitable that in a strong demand economy for staff, we will see people moving more and more than in the past. The old mid-career hire stigmas have become less potent and the era of the “free-agent” employee is upon us.  We have to face the reality and not pine for the good old days of a desk groaning under the weight of resumes of people seeking employ.  I should have photographed that phenomenon, because I will never see it’s like again in my working life.

The ingratitude aspect of no loyalty is also a bitter pill to swallow.  We do our absolute best to be fair with our people and give them as much as we can of the rewards, but they still up and leave us.  The departure event is one struggle, but our reaction is the bigger struggle.  If we get caught up in expectations which are too high or unrealistic for a changing market, then we are setting ourselves up for depression and stress.

If we believe we have been fair, but it hasn’t been enough, then we should get over it and go find a replacement, no matter how fraught, expensive and difficult that may be.  We also had better get used to it, because this has already become our reality from now on.

Loyalty Is Now Tenuous In Business In Japan

Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment.  Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer.  That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect.  Mid-career hires were frowned upon. If you bolted from your employer, you had almost zero chance of joining a competitor. You entered a dark forest and had to find your way through the brambles and undergrowth to meet out a living on the lower rungs of a netherworld of small firms willing to take you on.

In 1997, the venerable Yamaichi Securities blew up and a lot of competent, hard working finance industry people suddenly found themselves in the street without a job.  Other firms in the same sector employed them, because they were skilled and this was the first tear in the fabric of the stigma of the mid-career hire.  The Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 added another slash to lifetime employment in Japan, as many people lost their jobs.  The 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear power plant explosions disrupted many industries, throwing people out of work.  Covid did a similar job on particular industries like tourism and hospitality as borders closed.

The downturn in population has meant there is a strong demand for workers with a growing limitation on the supply side.  This throws up options for staff which were not there before and it impacts the loyalty factor of the worker-employer construct.  Thirty percent of young people in their third and fourth years of employ, after having been trained by the company who hired them, jump out and go somewhere else.  No loyalty and no qualms about leaving their employer.

A client of mine sent me a note the other day about doing some training and as an aside, he mentioned that one of his key people involved in that decision, who had been with him for 14 years, was suddenly leaving.  This is very disheartening because you lose the experience, their contacts and the continuity with their colleagues and clients.  That takes a long time to re-stitch together.

Sometimes it is the stupidity of our own construction.  An organisation I used to work for had a new leader appear.  He was not the usual standard of experience or capability for that complex work and decided to fire one of the staff who had been with the organisation for decades.  He had no conception of the network he was letting walk out the door.  Twenty-plus years of deep relationships with buyers in his industry was just vaporised.  It is not something obvious you can notice, like a chair has gone missing in the office, but the loss to the business is still there and manifests itself later when you least need it.

What can we do about this?  Sadly, not much.  We do our best to align the direction and values of the organisation with the staff’s interests.  It won’t always be a perfect fit.  Also, their interests change.  They now have aging parents, get married, have children, start to think about retirement, etc.  Covid has crushed many companies and those pressures can speed up changes, which lead to staff leaving. When things are rolling, there is less taste to leave because the rewards are coming thick and fast.  When things have been tough and you are crawling out of the hole together, the rewards are all in the future.

Two of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principles come in handy here. One is to cooperate with the inevitable and the other is to expect ingratitude.  It is inevitable that in a strong demand economy for staff, we will see people moving more and more than in the past. The old mid-career hire stigmas have become less potent and the era of the “free-agent” employee is upon us.  We have to face the reality and not pine for the good old days of a desk groaning under the weight of resumes of people seeking employ.  I should have photographed that phenomenon, because I will never see it’s like again in my working life.

The ingratitude aspect of no loyalty is also a bitter pill to swallow.  We do our absolute best to be fair with our people and give them as much as we can of the rewards, but they still up and leave us.  The departure event is one struggle, but our reaction is the bigger struggle.  If we get caught up in expectations which are too high or unrealistic for a changing market, then we are setting ourselves up for depression and stress.

If we believe we have been fair, but it hasn’t been enough, then we should get over it and go find a replacement, no matter how fraught, expensive and difficult that may be.  We also had better get used to it, because this has already become our reality from now on.

Leaders now face a pivotal moment in business in Japan.  Do they continue to cling to the past? Do they replay what they went through when they were younger and lead as they were taught by their seniors or do they change the angle of approach? 

Japan rebuilt itself after the devastation of the war.  The workers slaved away, adding a notch to their collective belts as they slowly overtook the GNP levels of leading European countries. I remember how proud some Japanese company employees were when they overtook the UK. They were winning the post-war economic battle after having lost the wartime military struggle. Getting to global number two status was built on the 6 days a week working dedication of today’s retired great grandparents.

Not only six days a week, but incredibly long hours and long commutes. Sundays were spent playing golf with clients.  Company holidays were shared with colleagues, as well as beers after hours.  In a nutshell, men worked at the same company until retirement and married women had to quit their jobs to raise the kids. For the men, there was not much family time, and the women were basically raising the kids on their own, like single mothers, but with more stable incomes.

When I arrived here on April 1st, 1979, it was still like that.  School and work were six days a week endeavours. There were few women in business after marriage and usually only one breadwinner in the household. While I was studying at university, I used to teach English at companies at night. Sure enough, they were still there, the salarymen reading the sports newspaper at their desk, wasting their time waiting for the boss to leave, so they could go home. 

Even when I came back for the third time to work in 1992, when interviewing sales staff for jobs, often they would tell me they quit their company because the long hours made them exhausted and ill.  When I heard that same story repeatedly, I connected it back to my earlier experiences of the 1970s and 1980s and knew they were telling me the truth.

These are the people who have been doling out the OJT - On-The-Job Training - to each succeeding generation.  What about today, though, when there are many more job openings than enough people to fill them?  The drop off in overseas study has made the competent English-speaking Japanese staff member a rare bird, compared to a few decades ago.  This young generation of Japanese staff holds the whip hand in the current employment configuration between boss and workers.

Are companies doing anything about this, other than whining about how hard it is to hire people?  From what I can see, they are focused on whining rather than taking the right actions.  OJT has been a smokescreen for doing very little for a long time. The spread of the personal computer drove a stake through the heart of OJT.  Let me explain why. Bosses now had to do their own typing, rather than having female secretaries do it for them. 

I am going to digress and tell an interesting story about how much things have moved on. The average age of my fellow Rotarians in my Tokyo Rotary Club is 70.  It is changing now, but twenty years ago, it was not uncommon for these gentlemen (and until very recently they were all men) to give me their business card, but sans an email address. Why?  They were captains of industry, but not computer literate. They depended on their secretaries to take care of all their correspondence, including this newfangled thing called email on a computer, involving something called the internet.

Their Middle Managers were also under attack. Their time was increasingly being consumed with emails and meetings.  In this messy mix of modernity and technology, time became tighter, and that meant the coaching component of OJT was truncated down to the bare minimum.  Over the last twenty years, the number of young Japanese has halved.  That process has been gradual, like a creeping demographic rust in the corporate machine. Now the Middle Manager class is waking up and discovering that there is a shortage of young people.

OJT hasn’t properly trained them in leadership and here they are, facing a dilemma which has never been confronted before in the post-war period.  This generation are the first free agents in the Japan working world, able to pack their stuff up and jump ship without stigma, hesitation or remorse. 

Until Yamaichi Securities went under in 1997 and put a lot of hard-working people on the street, there was a reluctance, a taint, to hiring people mid-career.  That event changed the stigma, as those staff were picked up by other companies in the finance sector.  The Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008, was another dam burst of good people losing their jobs in a bad economy and having to join companies as mid-career hires. 

Today’s younger generation have grown up in a completely different world and have no problem with changing companies after a few years.  The Dai Ni Shin Sotsu or second graduation generation has seen 30% of the three-to-four-year new entry staff quit.  This was unthinkable in the past and that number will just continue to grow. 

Are today’s Middle Managers in their thirties and forties able to handle this major change in work culture and rise of free-agentism?  Are companies giving them training to deal with this changed reality?  My observation is “not yet”. Clever companies will dump relying solely on OJT and provide the required training. They will be able to harvest a wave of available, mobile talent by creating environments attractive to these in-demand young people.  This war for talent is real. It is a zero-sum game in Japan of winners who can recruit and, importantly, retain key staff, and the losers who will become the training grounds for the staff who simply move to the winners.

 As leaders, we are busy bees.  We are buzzing around, going from meeting to meeting. We are getting together with clients over lunch, touching base with HQ, handling the media, talking to HR about our people and a host of other important activities. Usually poor time managers, we are constantly hemmed in by the demands on our schedules.  The upshot is we are constantly looking for corners to cut, minutes to be shaved off regular activities and feeling oppressed by the overwhelming workload we face. The common victim in all of this is our leader's communication with our team.  We have found we can save time if we get straight to the point and then we can move on.  We are packaging up orders to be given to get the team moving.  Orders are given and we move on to the next activity.

 We commonly forget to talk about the big picture, the background, the context, the WHY of what we want done.  We give the staff the short headline version of what we want done. We expect them to fill in the detail themselves, as we sleekly glide off to our next meeting, leaving them flummoxed in our wake. We are saving time, but in reality, we are slowing everything down.  If the staff don’t understand what we want, they will do a version of it.  Later, we find out that is not what we expected. We immediately get cranky because we have lost time and now we have to unwind what they have done and replace it with the correct version.  This is doubling the workload, including our own. 

 Recently, I introduced a new project which had elements required from a previous project.  I had told the team members what I wanted and a couple of years sail by.  When I wanted some elements from the previous project, I found out that they had not done what I wanted.  I thought I was clear about it, expected they understood my needs, but I made a fatal error – I didn’t check.  I was busy. I had already moved on to the next thing. Ouch!

 On reflection, I saw I had just issued an order which was crystal clear to me, but that was all I did.  I didn’t spend enough time with them at the outset to explain the WHY behind what I wanted.  I didn’t make time to communicate the context to them.  Even if my explanation wasn’t genius, if they have the context, the chances are high they would do what I wanted automatically, because they got it.  None of that happened.

I should have made remembering and understanding what I wanted clearer by wrapping it up in a story.  We are only so so at recalling facts, data and numbers, but we are really excellent at recalling stories.  Did I do that?  No.  I just blurted out the order in double time and promptly departed.  Don’t you know I am a busy boss?

 Did my story have to be a substantial precis of War and Peace?  No. I could have spent two minutes telling them the Why, wrapping it up in the context, told as a compelling story.  I could have aligned the reasoning for the project with the background.  I could have mentioned the necessity for this project, how it came up, who was involved, where I was when I first got involved, who I was with, etc.  All of this little detail is important because our objective is to mentally transport the listener to where we were at the time.  If we can get them to come with us in their imagination, then we will be very successful in also getting them to support the WHY. 

 When we have the same context and background, we usually come to the same conclusions.  In fact, before we have even gotten to the part in the story about what needs to happen next, they have already raced ahead and worked it out for themselves.  There is no convincing needed by us, because they have concluded the appropriate course of action – surprise, surprise - the same one we are recommending. 

They may come to a different conclusion after all, but that is fine.  They may actually come up with an idea which is better than ours.  The chances of their idea being radically different from ours, given the same context, would be possible, but rare.

When we next feel the urgent need to lurch forward with an order, let’s exercise some self-restraint.  Instead, we should hark back to the roots of this project or task and recall why we came to the conclusion it was important.  Instead of telling them what to do, we just re-run the story of how we came to see this as the way forward and share that context with them.  At the end of that exercise we will find they will be very receptive to our suggestion, not order, on what should happen next. 

This is a type of verbal jiujitsu.  We draw them in the direction we want, by getting their momentum to go where we want it.  It is a much superior method to barking out orders like a mad pirate captain – our usual leader reprise.  If we can help them to self-discover the conclusion, then we have been a very successful communicator. We will see ownership and commitment on their part.  This is so much smarter than the usual brute force of issuing orders backed up by the stripes on our sleeve pulling rank.

 There are many paths to the mountaintop in the leadership area.  Today, let’s go back to the practical realities of getting others to listen to you and, even more importantly, to follow you.  My favourite quote on leadership is from Yogi Berra, the American baseball coach rather infamous for murdering the English language. He said something profound though, when he noted: “Leading is easy.  It is getting people to follow you, which is hard”. 

If nobody likes you, what are your chances of uniting the team behind you?  Pretty dismal would be the obvious conclusion.  How many bosses are likeable, though? Often, they are demons, autocrats, channelling Genghis Khan for ideas on how to lead the team.  They enforce compliance, but don’t foster engagement. Their influence on what is possible for the team is limited in scope.

Understanding the members of the team and what each individual wants is a good place to start to reverse the lack of engagement.  When they scold staff, this creates barriers and subterranean resistance.  Handing out praise may not have been a feature of how they grew up in leadership, but in today’s modern business world, they need to learn how to do this.  Being a good listener and encouraging others to talk, rather than barking out orders all the time, is the smarter move.  Smiling, rather than maintaining a permanent frown, would be a good change to make. Communicating the value their staff brings to the organisation is a key to helping them feel what they do is important and that they are important.

Getting the team to accept your ideas can be achieved by pulling rank and threatening staff with removal.  It doesn’t get anyone particularly enthusiastic to do what the boss says though, let alone go the extra mile.  Resentment and discouragement become the order of the day.  In this permanent war for talent in Japan, the allergy to mid-career hires has evaporated and they can walk out the door to the warm embrace of your competitors.

We can show our humanity by not holding the team to a standard that we don’t apply to ourselves.  If we are wrong, we should admit it quickly and emphatically.  This says to the team, “I am not perfect and I don’t expect perfection from you either”.  We should never say, “you are wrong” when they venture forth an idea or proposal.  That kills the creativity spark right there and creates resentment. Let them do most of the talking, even if it is killing us to shut up.  This encourages staff to have ownership of the execution of our ideas.  Trying to see things for the staff member’s point of view will help them feel understood and therefore more committed to reach the team goals.

We need excellent communication skills to let the staff members feel the idea is theirs rather than ours.  We can use the Socratic Method of asking questions to lead them to self-discovery.  This is very empowering, and they will get right behind their own idea more than getting excited about executing on our direction on what needs to happen.  When they suggest things to us, we shouldn’t be dismissing their idea out of hand.  Yes, we may have more experience than them and yes, we may have tried that failed idea before.  The point is, we want them to be engaged. Taking their idea seriously is a key step to making that a reality. 

Being a leader isn’t about having the baton tucked up under our arm and issuing orders right and left.  Asking questions is a much better way to get people to follow us.  They feel included in the decision-making process.  That sense of ownership brings more energy to the completion of the tasks.  Again, our communication capability is critical to have our team happy about doing what we suggest.  We should try to avoid having to use position power to get things done.  We want volunteers rather than the “volunteered”. 

Mistakes will always happen and how we handle them makes all the difference.  I have seen a seriously senior executive explode in instant white-hot rage, up close and personal during a staff meeting.  It was horrific. No one in that room regarded him as their leader after than volcanic eruption. He should have shut up and instead reflected on all the mistakes he had made in his career. In particular, he should have recalled those he made at the same age and stage as his hapless victims assembled in that small meeting room.

If someone makes a mistake, in 99% of cases, they feel bad.  They also feel useless and lose their confidence to get back on the back of that bucking bull and keep participating in the corporate rodeo.  We have to show them they can recover from this and they can be successful here with us.  We need to encourage them to try again.  We need to restore their self-belief.  We have to look for the opportunity for them to regain their face. 

When we ask people to step outside their Comfort Zone, they will feel naked and vulnerable.  We have to look for the slightest improvement to praise and for each subsequent improvement.  We can communicate to them we see them as a winner and as a capable person. We purposely give them a fine reputation to live up to.

None of the things I have covered here are complex or difficult. It may, however, require some re-wiring of the mindset about leading others.  We often get the wrong idea and information from previous bosses and from the media.  Try these ideas and you will find success in being liked by your team, be able to have them follow you and gain their respect as the leader.

 You would think that organisations choose their leaders because they are skilled in communication.  What is the job after all, but communicating with the team to make sure everyone is clear about what they have to do and to encourage them to do it?  Well you would be wrong!  Leaders are usually selected for promotion because they are very good, often the best, at their current job. It is assumed that they will be the best person to lead the team on that basis.

 Just as we know that the talented sports person doesn’t necessarily migrate those skills into leadership roles as a successful coach, neither does the talented functional specialist transform into a successful leader.  The gun sales rep doesn’t become a great sales team leader.  The best architect doesn’t make the best choice to lead other draftsmen and women.  The list just goes on and on and we wonder why we keep repeating the same errors?  One aspect of that difficulty is that it is hard to see the immediate results of leadership, unless they really screw things up and people start quitting in droves. 

 There is the rub.  In the “goode olde days”, it didn’t matter.  You just lose one and simply get a replacement.  In the 1990s, I remember getting twenty or thirty resumes to go through, to fill a sales position.  Now, if you can find anyone, you feel blessed.  The competition for talent is a remorseless zero-sum game.  As leaders, if we cannot communicate well with our people, we will face irreconcilable supply and demand issues.  We will have to spend a lot of time and money to rectify our mistakes as our people will vote with their feet and leave the organisation.

 How can leaders improve their communication skills?  There are tons of things to work on, but let’s look at two specific items.

1.     I try to synchronise with the staff member when they are speaking by putting myself in their shoes.

 Bosses have poor memories.  They conveniently forget about how they were at the same age and stage as their staff.  They imagine they were perfectly formed and with no blemishes when they were coming up through the ranks.  Not true. Like everyone working for us, we also made a host of mistakes in our careers, and that is how we educated ourselves. 

Rather than putting on the superior boss hat when speaking to staff, let’s try to cast our mind back to our own shortcomings and inadequacies at the same point in our career.  This is a humbling exercise and bound to make us more sympathetic with the people who work for us, rather than getting annoyed with their work progress.

We can change the tone of how we speak with them to be less abrupt.  We can be more keen to have them relax with us, so that they can feel confident sharing their ideas or issues.  We can stop telling them what to do and how to do it.  Instead, we can ask them for their opinion on what and how we should do things around here.

We don’t cut them off when they are talking and we will encourage them to try things, even though we doubt that it is going to work.  We do this because we know that is how we learnt. We tried stuff and then sorted out the successes from the failures.  We are communicating a lot of trust when we do it this way, rather than micro-managing the hell out of the team.

2.     I observe the staff member for non-verbal clues

 Busy bosses are prone to shortcut everything.  They are moving from meeting to meeting, trying to squeeze in their own emails between slots and generally feeling frustrated with the overload. Feeling totally time poor, they like to get to the meat of the issues straight away. They want to cut out any down time, like having to listen to a detailed explanation from staff, when they could get the summary much faster.  This tends to become an internal dialogue between the boss and themselves, where they are concentrated on their frustration with their own lack of time and not with the person with whom they are speaking. 

This self-absorption means they are stuck with hearing the words of the staff but are not conscious of the non-verbal messages.  In professional card games, they talk about the players having “tics”.  These are patterns of unconscious behaviour that are linked to attitudes and thoughts.  The successful card players read their opponents in detail, looking for these clues as predictors of decision-making.  Bosses need to do the same.

We should slow down and carefully look for patterns in our staff beyond the words we hear.  We have all experienced this.  When we said something, we noticed they winced or moved in a certain way. Their body language was saying “I don’t like what you just said or you”, but there were no words coming out of their mouth. 

When we are busy laying down orders like a mad pirate captain, we can miss the verbal clues and continue on our merry way, oblivious to the carnage we leave in our wake. We may not have meant what we said to come across the way it did, but if we don’t spot the negative reaction, we cannot go into damage control.  In this war for talent, if we continue to make these types of mistakes, then we will try to fill job posts far too often, as people simply pull up stakes and leave.

 Communication is a skill and it must be mastered.  The worst time in Japan to be a boss is today and the bad news is that it will only get even more diabolical.  We have to face the reality and gear up accordingly.  If we don’t, then we will be the one leaving and not of our own volition.

Leaders may not even be aware that they are poor listeners.  They are very focused on telling others what to do. Being time poor, they are very focused on their own messaging, rather than the messaging efforts of others.  In the war for talent in Japan, that could be a fatal move.  One of the biggest factors driving engagement in Japan is the feeling that the boss values you.  If the leader isn’t really listening to the team members, they are not stupid and they will pick up on this.  Before you know it, they have fled to greener pastures.  They are off to your competitor, and the arduous and expensive task of replacing them begins.  We don’t want that.

Here are some hints on making sure you are a gold medal winning listening boss.

1.        You display an open and accepting attitude toward the speaker

This sounds easy, but are we doing it?  Have we stopped the noise in our own brain to refocus on the person in front of us and not let that internal message competition diminish our capacity to listen to what we are being told?  Are we in a neutral mindset and not bringing up silent annoyances from past associations with this person?  Maybe they screwed something up recently and your mind is having flashbacks while they are talking to you and you are thinking about what happened. 

How is your body language control?  I remember I caught myself shaking my head in disagreement while someone was telling me their idea.  It was something I didn’t agree with and I was showing it.  It was an automatic physical reaction. I realised right there that I couldn’t allow that to happen again. Now, I try to keep a strong lock on my body language, in case I am communicating a negative message.

2.        When someone approaches me with a question, I stop what I am doing and give them my full attention

I worked with a fellow Division Head once who was a shocker. When I visited his workstation, he had three screens set up and while I was sitting there talking; he continued to multi-task.  He would type away, reading the screen and listening to me, all at the same time.  It was a total insult in my mind.  His self-awareness was dismally low and I remember how it made me feel.  So, I made a pact with myself to never do this to others.

Whenever my staff comes to me while I am typing, I physically lift the keyboard up and rest it against my computer stand to show I am not doing anything else but listening to them.  I find this a good discipline, because when I am concentrating, the temptation is to type and listen at the same time – bad idea!

3.        I concentrate on what is being said even if it is of little interest to me

I saw a dramatic demonstration of this by my old boss.  He was a senior Director in the firm and had a very big job.  One evening, I was sitting in his office as he was explaining something to me, when one of the secretaries popped her head in the door to say something to him as she was leaving.  It was a light comment from her, nothing particularly important, but he stopped talking to me immediately and gave her his 100% concentration.  I thought “Wow, that is impressive”. He made her feel like a million dollars. No wonder he was one of the most popular leaders in that hierarchical, tough, hard edged, cutthroat world of serious big ticket real estate.

It is hard to focus on things we don’t consider important, because so much of our day is taken up with Quadrant One urgent and important items.  The interruption seems like a waste of our valuable time.  It might be important to them, but not to us. We have a lot to do baby, so the temptation is to brush them off and get back to the grindstone.  We have to overcome that habit and really appreciate that this topic is important to them. If they are important to the firm, then we have to give them our full attention to show we value them.

4.        I try to understand the viewpoint of the person who I disagree with

This is not easy.  Leaders are often very forceful people, used to breaking down walls and pushing forward regardless of the obstacles.  When we get pushback, we overcome it and drive hard toward the outcomes we want.  That becomes an automatic reaction and when combined with impatience, it can be a lethal cocktail.

The person we are talking to has come to a conclusion based on a series of factors – their experience, what they have read, what they have heard, etc.  They feel their viewpoint is valuable and legitimate. Here we are sloughing them off and not taking them seriously.  This will drive people out the door at breakneck speed to the welcoming arms of our rivals. 

It is probably killing us, but we have to suspend judgement and accept that there may be many paths to the mountaintop and they may have discovered an alternate route.  Maybe we are unmoved by their idea, but at least we have to afford them the respect of taking them seriously and listening carefully to what they have to say. 

As leaders, we think we are good listeners, but often we are good tellers and poor listeners in reality.  How did you fare with this short checklist about your listening skills?  We can all do better. These little hints are excellent reminders of best practice to retain staff.  We need to build the culture internally where people feel valued and want to stay with the firm.  The alternative is expensive, disruptive and very time consuming, if people leave us during this Japan war for talent.  Listening to our people is a vital skill we need to improve to protect and grow the business.

The S-Curve is a very simple concept.  Over time, a newly promoted employee goes through distinct stages in their performance achievement.  Initially, their performance declines as they grapple with the new set of responsibilities.  Gradually they get the swing of things and start to do well at their new accountabilities.  After a period of becoming comfortable with their role, they start to stagnate as they stop growing.

Within these stages are many nuances.  We select people for promotion based on their history and our hope for their future.  We expect that good work and result production in the current role is an important indicator of talent and ability and that these attributes can be transferred into their leadership role.   

One of the astounding things about modern business in Japan is that firms abandon these individuals at this point. Puzzlingly, they do not provide their newly promoted leaders with any great assistance to succeed.  The newly promoted are given the baton of command and left to themselves to use trial and error or copying what their previous bosses did, to work out how to lead.  Sounds like a plan except what if their previous boss role models were totally mediocre leaders.  This is how to create generational decline in a business and nobody would be voting for that.

You really have to wonder how we could still be using such a failed model in this modern day and age, in such a sophisticated country like Japan?  This country has a constant, savage battle for market share, going on across all industries.  The struggle for survival is real and yet the development of the people in middle management who can make a difference is being hamstrung by inertia.  Companies just keep doing what they have always done.  That is not very smart if your competitor is making the changes to succeed and you are not.

Part of the issue is that promoting one person doesn’t fit into any comfortable time frame for the machine. If ten people get promoted at the same time, then perhaps some group training can be arranged.  The green eye shade types hunkered down in the accounting department run the numbers, calculate the per head cost, the per hour numbers and conclude that this is doable. However, if it is just one person, then the calculations blow up and the required training gets the thumbs down as too expensive.

Consequently, there is no mechanism for developing these new leaders to play the role they have been handpicked for.  Individual coaching is ruled out as too expensive for such a low-level position.  For the senior Directors of course, an Executive Coach is deemed an acceptable expense, but not so for the newly minted section head. It is a case of “congratulations, work hard and good luck” and that is the full extent of the training programme.  Here is a hint for everyone - look for training companies like us, who offer public classes on leadership, where you can ship the newly promoted person off to a class with others in similar situations, assembled together from other industries and companies.  This is not hard and it is not expensive.

In the meantime, the new leader is struggling to work out what they should be doing in this unfamiliar leadership role.  Of course, the section targets haven’t been adjusted down to account for their struggle or lack of experience in this new role.  Initially, they work much harder than before as a player/manager to get to the required numbers.  This works for this first year and then what happens?  The next year the targets are higher again, and they are doing even more individual work. Not much leading is underway to get to the target for which they have responsibility because they don’t have any time.  They are not leveraging the team to produce a team result. Heroically they are trying to do it all by themselves. By year three, they blow-up and can’t match the increase in targets. Then the machine concludes they are a dud as a leader. They are replaced with the next victim; no lessons have been learnt and the cycle kicks off again.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Get some new leader training and support for them. Then they will start to produce results from the whole team.  The initial struggle with the unfamiliar starts to sort itself out. Through the training they discover the leverage points around having access to people, to get to the numbers, as a team.  They are still doing some trial and error, but it is off a base of knowledge and ideas, rather than desperate guess work.  They are executing on what they have been trained to do and they are now fine tuning it for their own idiosyncratic reality. 

There is a pivot point which must be cleared though.  This is to move from working in the business to working on the business.  A newly promoted leader, after three years of experience, has now worked out what to do and they are doing it well.  But this is where stagnation can set in.  They slip effortlessly into their Comfort Zone.  The machine is well oiled and working and they are just repeating the same steps over and over.  It would be good if business was left frozen at this point and not continually evolving or if their rivals were dormant and not innovating and pushing hard. Obviously that is not the case and there is no margin for cruising in modern commerce.

If there is a culture of learning established in the organisation, then the new leader is constantly encouraged to educate themselves and look for kaizen style improvement as well as possible innovation leaps to grow the operation.  They are also pushing to get further trained as an experienced leader.  If they are smart enough, they cannot just be satisfied with what they were provided with as a new leader.  The leadership training content is quite different, because now they are operating at a more complex stage and need more complete solutions. 

In Japan, very few leaders get this advanced leadership training because of the over-reliance on OJT – On The Job training.  In fact, in Japan, most leaders are not leaders at all because they are stuck as being simple managers.  They get the work done on time, on budget, at the required quality – all great and necessary.  However, they are not competent enough around bringing everyone together and persuading them on the direction for the business or developing the abilities of their staff, which are the additional tasks for the leader beyond running the machine well.

Leadership is a journey, there is nothing particularly new and you would think we would have all worked this out pretty well by now.  In Japan, that is not the case and there is a big opportunity to improve the productivity of firms through further developing the ability of their leaders.  If your leaders are relying on trial and error, then you have a big problem which needs fixing and fixing right now.

As leaders are we all perfect?  Are we perfect all the time?  Obviously, the answer is “no” to both counts, but that doesn’t mean we always face up to our own shortcomings.  An important part of growing and improving as a leader is to be honest about who we really are.  Let’s go through some common areas where leaders can improve.

1.     Uninspiring 

 This uninspiring tag covers a vast majority of leaders.  Ask yourself, “how many of my previous bosses would I describe as inspiring?”  The answer for most people is usually none or one. Now ask yourself, “if someone surveyed my team members, how many would say I was inspiring?”  This type of reality check is useful because it can help us become better in some key leadership areas.  What contributes to a leader being seen as uninspiring?  It usually relates to a lack of enthusiasm, someone going through the motions with no great passion. This is reflected in how they communicate.  The voice is dull, the energy low, the fire in the belly has long since smoldered out.  As a consequence, they lack direction for themselves and therefore cannot provide it for the team.  They are not leading an intentional life for themselves.

Leaders are not robots and we go through our ups and downs in business.  An important part of what we do is to provide electricity for our people. That spark inside us ignites a spark in them.  If our spark has been eclipsed, then we need to reignite it. That means finding meaning in what we do.  It means going back to the basics of what we do as a leader and rediscover the fundamentals of our role and why we are here.  If we cannot manage that, we won’t be around for very long as the organisation soon realizes we are not providing any particular value to the firm.  Find some aspect of the work which provides enjoyment.  Start there and try to build on that scope to include more tasks and gradually rebuild your enthusiasm for being the leader.

2.     Over-Focused On Self

It would be a hard task to find anyone who isn’t overly focused on themselves in this modern business world of sudden layoffs, deadly mergers and bankruptcies.  Leaders are not immune to these fears. Self-preservation gets more intense as you climb up the greasy pole and start costing the firm more dough.  Recently. a friend of mine here at a prestigious financial firm was asked to leave because his subordinate, who he developed, would take over as his bosses could save money this way.  So much for his long loyalty to the company and no wonder we become cynical.

Over-focus in this context though means not being concerned about the people under you and just looking out for yourself.  Actually, we can do both.  Notwithstanding my friends recent unfortunate collision with boss greed, we can protect ourselves and develop our team.  They are not mutually exclusive objectives. Over-focus on us means not delegating tasks so that others can develop their career path. They need to impress an interview panel that they can step up and do the job because they have some valuable experience in relevant parts of it. 

Delegation is not dumping one’s work on to others.  It is growing the people under you. We have to stop saying things like “it will be quicker if I do it myself”.  Instead, we have to devote some of our highly valuable time to developing others to have them learn the tasks. 

3.     Not Accountable

Perfhaps we are an avid resister of feedback.  We literally trash the 360-degree feedback because it is painful to read what others think about us, when they have the chance to freely express their views in a way which cannot be traced back to them individually.  Of course, we can all improve and even if the comments are “wrong” from our point of view, we accept that there is that perception of us.  We can work on improving that perception. 

If we ignore it, then retribution isn’t far away.  Before you know it, your boss and the HR department are all over you demanding changes anyway.  So why not be the arbiter of our own adjustments and start work on fixing the perceptions though improved communication and deleting behaviours which others find irritating or unacceptable.

Another aspect of lack of accountability is to cut yourself some slack, but be uber demanding of your team.  You take a two-hour lunch or head off to the gym during the workday, but hammer your people about their lack of results.  Remember staff are all card-carrying boss watchers and they see what is going on.  Having double standards will never fly because there is no consistency in that approach.  People under us like consistency and they dislike unpredictability. 

Also, don’t apply your standards of today against someone younger and less experienced.  Compare them to what you were like at their age and stage. The contrast can be very revealing.  When we do this, it helps to adjust how we approach them regarding the quality of their work.  We don’t have ridiculous expectations or standards which we could never have achieved in their place. 

None of these shortcomings are beyond repair.  We need to face the reality first and then work out a plan to improve on them.  If we don’t want to fix them, then someone above us will fix it by removing us.  That is avoidable if we choose to be someone who votes for leading an intentional life.  That angle makes such a difference in how we feel about what we are doing, such that improvements can come thick and fast.

Which is more important to us as the leader – what we choose to do or who we choose to be?  Most of our careers on the way up will have been concentrated on doing, achieving, delivering results, making the numbers, getting projects delivered on time and on budget.  Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that.  When we get into a position of leadership there is always a lot to do.  Previously we were responsible for ourselves and now we are responsible for a bunch of other people.  It is always breathtaking to discover that the people you are leading are nothing like you. They have different mindsets, motivations, values, fears, habits, desires and ambitions.  The old boss idea that “if you want to get ahead, be like me”, is a joke in this modern business world. 

The “doing” in business is so loud, we are often oblivious to how we are showing up.  Everyone of our staff are expert boss watchers.  They can notice the smallest variation in our demeanour from one day to another.  They are like those gazelles you see in nature documentaries, wandering around the African savannah, keeping a close eye on the nearby pride of lions.  Staff have learnt that self-preservation is improved by keeping a close eye on the mood of the boss, “maybe I shouldn’t raise that project today because the boss looks in a bad mood”.

I was reminded of this recently. I got to the office early and when one of my team arrived, he asked me if I was okay.  Without knowing it my face was showing a lot of stress.  I didn’t realise I was showing it, but he noticed it immediately.  Here is a hint for bosses – keep an eye on what is on your face, because we can be radiating messages and we might not be aware we are doing so. 

The ”do” part of our job has to line up with the “say” part as well.  Staff love consistency and predictability on the part of the boss.  They don’t want to work for duplicitous people.  Today they have lots of options and there is an army of hungry recruiters constantly on the lookout for poaching opportunities. 

Companies often frame their Vision, Mission and Values statements and hang them on the wall as a dedication to what the firm stands for.  Middle management leaders cannot even remember these statements, so you have to wonder what is the value of doing this.  I know that they cannot remember them because we test it every chance we get.  As a training company we are often brought in to give the Middle Managers leadership training.  At the very start of the class I take the frame off the wall and turn it around, so that no one can see it.  The class usually has around 20 plus people and when I ask what is the Vision or the Mission or the Values there is often a lot of shoe gazing gong on as they avoid eye contact with me. The best they come up with is two or maybe three of the Values and they cannot recall the rest.  I can’t see how you can live it, if you cannot remember it.

So as the boss, can you remember the Vision, Mission and Values?  Are you living them as a role model for the rest of the crew?  Are you congruent in your boss behaviour with what the firm says is the way we do things around here? 

Companies like to say things like, “there are no mistakes, only learning opportunities”. I agree and that is a very noble idea.  The problem arises when the boss chews out a member of the staff for benefiting from this learning opportunity by screwing something up.  This is where the “do” and the “be” are not aligning. It is so easy for this to occur because the “do” part of our work is so deafening and so overpowering.  We get sucked up into the vortex of constant meetings, tsunami of emails and task requirements exceeding the time available to do them. Tempers can fray, patience can erode and we say things we regret later, because we know we were not walking the talk.

Being a boss is an inside out process.  Who we are on the inside becomes obvious to everyone around us. They know if we are a fraud or if we are a true of heart.  This can be the Johari window quadrant of “known to everyone, but not known to us”.  Our “do” is not matching up with our “be”.  Being self-aware sounds good in theory, but in a busy world it can be hard to track and monitor. 

Busy bosses have no time allocated for self-reflection, because they are overwhelmed by the workload.  This taking a moment to think about our “be” and whether it is matched by our “do” is a very useful exercise.  We are not perfect human beings, but we can improve if we decided that it is worth it. 

If we want to keep our people from the ravages of the recruiter army, then it is worth it.

Leadership is about creating environments that influence others to achieve group goals. This works because people support a world they help create. There are five success areas for leaders to focus on that make all the difference. Rate your performance by giving yourself a mark on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) for each area. Self-direction This is a must for leaders. If you can’t organise yourself, your ability to have others follow you is doubtful. Effective self-directed leaders have a personal vision which they review each day to remind themselves that the compass is more critical than the clock. They write down this vision and they write down their goals. They do this because they know there is magic in committing generalities to specifics in written form. They have a broad range of goals around their main roles in life, so that the balance between business and non-business is never compromised. They have clearly defined values that guide their behaviour. This makes them predictable, congruent, consistent and reliable for those dealing with them. They understand the importance of self-direction and they are evangelistic about converting those they are responsible for into similar individuals. People skills Mainly because they lack self-awareness, are under-informed or uneducated, many people find these skills one of the most difficult areas to master. Leaders know that failure to form effective teams and partnerships at all levels, inside and outside the organisation, will have a critical negative impact on their personal influence capacity. Organisations that wish to prosper need their people to grow, and that requires a safe, open environment that encourages individual development. Effective leaders understand what turns people off and stop doing these things. In the same way, they study what works best and strive to interact with others accordingly. Many successful leaders have read Dale Carnegie’s classic text on developing an aptitude for human relations, and make it their bible for people skills. The primary reason leaders should develop people skills is to ensure they can build trust and respect between themselves and their subordinates. Process skills Such skills challenge a leader to ensure the system is not subjecting great people to poor systems and processes, ensuring that they will fail. We cannot see a process, but we can observe people using that process. It is, therefore, easier to blame the poor performer than the process, and leaders must be attuned to the difference. Leaders demonstrate the ability to plan, innovate, define clear performance objectives, delegate, utilise time effectively, analyse problems and make good decisions. As noted above, leaders know that people support a world they help create, so they enlist their people for reviewing and improving processes. Effective people skills ensure processes work optimally through users. Communication skills These make or break leaders. By demonstrating effective questioning and listening skills, leaders learn the most. They understand that, even during their first day on the job, associates can offer valuable insights and ideas for innovations. This is counterintuitive because leaders often fall into the habit of telling everyone what they need to do and how they need to do it. Leaders are usually the most experienced, smart, capable individuals in a group, and are willing to share their knowledge and insights. Learning how to ask questions instead of giving orders is an essential discipline for leaders. They also investigate the communication systems in the organisation to ensure they are right, and examine their processes to verify communication flows effectively throughout the organisation. Checking for understanding and being clear, transparent and concise are great strategies for leadership. Mass motivational speeches have been replaced in business by quality one-on-one questioning. Such questioning sessions spur the self-discovery process, and provide the best coaching opportunities. Accountability This success area is disseminated throughout the organisation by leaders who hold themselves and their team accountable. Leaders quickly and emphatically admit their own mistakes and lead by example. Following Mr. or Ms. Perfect is difficult. Leaders have the self-confidence to show their humanity, including their weaknesses, and have the communication skills to enlist their teams’ support. Leaders coach, guide, support, and train others to achieve mutually agreed goals and objectives, as well as provide direction and manage change. Leaders also create and monitor systems and processes of control and accountability within their organisation, so that people have the freedom to achieve results. And your mark is . . .? What mark did you give yourself out of 50? We all know we can do better on the basics. Take a moment out from your busy leadership role to gauge your performance in these five areas, then redirect yourself and move forward. Watch the clock but seize the compass!

We have probably all been on the receiving end of it or have been a witness to it. The presentation is completed, after which come the questions; some are fact finding, some seek clarification, while some are just plain nasty.

Perhaps the questioner is not trying to be mean, but the result is the same. All eyes in the room burn a hole into you as everyone waits to see how you are going to handle this little Scud missile that is thinly disguised as a question.

Some presenters splutter, nervousness sapping intellectual and verbal powers, while some give such a pathetic response we can see their credibility sail out the window as they speak. Some get angry, assuring everyone there that they are not fit for higher responsibilities because they can’t control their emotions.  Do these questions come up? Yes, so there is no point imagining that we won’t have to face the meeting room moment of truth.

Do we usually prepare beforehand, in the event that someone might decide to go after us? In 99% of cases the answer is “no”. The Scud catches us off guard and we simply flounder. This is a challenge that easily can be fixed.

Below are a few steps that will trounce your rivals, diminish your adversaries, and show everyone what a true professional you are.

Most preparation prior to any presentation generally focuses on the content and not the delivery. Taking questions, by the way, is part of the delivery and not something tacked on to the main proceedings. When preparing a speech or presentation, we are in control of the direction. However, once the questions start raining down, sadly, we are no longer in command of the situation.

The first step before the meeting is to imagine what trouble may lie ahead. Who will be in the room? Who has a vested interest in seeing you go down in flames? Who are the potential troublemakers and their acolytes, possibly beavering away at creating problems for you? What have been some of the historical issues between your section and other parts of the organisation? Will there be someone in the room still smarting over you getting his or her money for last year’s project? What are some of the current burning issues that have a lot of money or prestige attached to them that would invite someone to slice you up in front of the assembled masses?

Having identified the issues that are likely to become “hot” during the questioning period, let’s design some positive messages. Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, gave a great piece of advice once when announcing at a press conference, “Who has questions for the answers I have ready for you?” It is an amusing question, but also very smart. Rather than moving straight into damage control, which can often appear weak, squeamish, shifty and dishonest, go on to the front foot and put forward a strong positive message about the benefits of what you are proposing. Have at least two or three of these ready for each issue that you have designated as potential trouble. As a side note, be aware of your body language when doing this. Albert Mehrabian’s book, Silent Messages, has become well known for noting the disconnection between what we say and how we say it. If the two don’t match up, your message (your actual words) get lost, while 93% of everyone’s attention is focused on how you look and the style of your voice.

Thus, a positive message needs positive body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and strength to back it up—preferably with a steely eye that glints with confidence. Even if you don’t possess one of those, try to fake it until you make it. Focus on four response options that will help to provide a strategy when questions come assailing you. • Immediately deny what others say when it is factually incorrect, misinformation, rumour, hearsay, or when you have been misinterpreted. Be strong, brief and have clear evidence to support your denial. • Admit you are wrong when there has been a misunderstanding or mistake. This is disarming and leaves the questioner with nowhere to go. The wind has been drained from their sails; you look honest and reliable. • Reverse negative perceptions by turning them into positives. For example, when dealing with competing priorities within the organisation, you might say: “I understand that going through this reorganisation is costing us a lot of time right now. The fact that we are dedicating this time now to the issue should save us all time later by having a more efficient structure”. • Explain in more detail by providing further background and facts. The reason behind a decision or position is often news to the other party who may not have the same grasp of the details as you. The distance between our ear and our mouth is way too short! We blurt out the first thing that comes into our mind when we encounter trouble. We need a verbal cushion to slow down the response process. Our first response is rarely our best one, so delay it slightly. We can do this by paraphrasing, into neutral terms, what someone else has just said. This has a double benefit because you are now in control of the language of the question and you have given yourself some thinking time.

The question might be: “Is it true that the company is going to start firing people next month?” Your paraphrase might be: “The question was about future staffing”. Other cushions might include phrases such as: “Many people we have talked to have expressed similar concerns”; “That is an important issue, let’s talk about that for a moment”, and “Thank you for bringing that up so we can address it”.

Our brains work very fast, so we only need three or four seconds to get to a second response option, which will always outshine the first bluster that comes out of our mouths. Calm, considered responses, cushioned for effect, and delivering positive messages in a positive way will disarm any nasty boardroom pirates who are trying to scuttle you. Good luck!

Doing more, and doing it better, faster and with less is driving global business. A cadre of professional managers running organisations is going the same way as the typing pool. Organisations can no longer afford managers who only manage; instead, they also need them to be leaders. This begs the question: what is the difference between a manager and a leader? Simply put, leaders build people and manage processes, while managers just manage processes. The organisation has various processes that must be completed entirely, efficiently and reliably—the classic belief of “getting the paperwork sorted”. Attention to detail is paramount. Multi-tasking, time management, and personal effectiveness all contribute to process success. The manager must ensure these activities are being carried out correctly and so the supervision of staff is key. If the operation is not coordinated, then there is potential for chaos. However, it is more likely we are dealing with inefficiencies and costly delays. The manager has to monitor worker’s activities to ensure priorities are dealt with properly, the urgent is done first, the details are correct, the sequence is in proper play and employees are working correctly. The “mice” on the treadmill need to be present and correct. All this activity has to add up to planned outcomes, such as numbers around revenue, production volumes, quality milestones, speed of delivery, and consistency. The manager has to tally the score against the score sheet, note discrepancies and get them attended to promptly. Whether the organisation is new or mature, the goal is to reach an equilibrium between competing demands so that the organisation moves forward in a planned and expected manner. The goal is the maintenance of systems and the manager is the maintainer. All of this sounds wonderful. Yes, we want our brand to be safeguarded, by ensuring everything is working properly, and our salaries to be paid on time, thank you very much. The question is whether this is enough? We need our managers to be able to do all of this and more. The ability to handle people, as well as getting everyone doing what they should be doing, when they should be doing it, and how is a critical skill. The managerial role may seem mechanical, but those pesky people who resist mechanisation keep popping up in the system. They have personalities, ambitions, biases, demands, failings and strengths. This big confusing mess of humanity under the manager’s control needs to be led as well as managed. They are not a process! Supervision is one level of interaction, but it is inherently backward looking and historical in nature. Leaders, on the other hand, are thinking about motivating people, looking forward and trying to understand what makes each team member tick. They are striving to align the goals of the organisation with the inherent motivations of the individuals in their team, rather than trying the approach of injecting the “motivation syringe” into their heads. Leaders need to have a reservoir of trust and good human relations skills to make this work. Leaders are pointing people towards the future, not just reviewing the past. They are working with the team to create a vision. This may be a sub-vision of how to execute the organisation’s broader vision, itself perhaps designed on high during a boozy directors’ offsite gathering. The section leader can’t change this lofty vision but they can lead the team to conjure how to make it come to life. Even with the vision a given, there is still an opportunity to have the team design a mini vision for their section or department under the umbrella of the big picture. The point is to lead people—using an innovation methodology—to an outcome where there is shared ownership of what was created. Leaders always keep in mind that people “own the world they create”, so getting the team involved is a critical skill. Leaders are not able to function in stasis. They know the competition never sleeps and understand this is one marketplace and its name is “global”. The leader knows that incremental improvements may not be enough and, instead, breakthroughs are needed and these come from the people who work for us. Does anyone remember a great thing called i-mode? Gone! Steve Jobs leading the Apple team killed it off with an innovation. Breakthroughs count and innovation is how to produce them. Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group, announced as a hoax on 1 April, 1986, that his firm had created a supercomputer called Music Box, which would let anyone, anywhere download any music they wanted. Steve Jobs later told him that the idea inspired him, and Apple ultimately created iTunes, which would put a big hole in music stores’ business and directly impact Branson’s own Virgin Megastores. Virgin store managers who were “managing” a better process were not much help when leaders somewhere in California put Virgin’s music business to the sword. Innovation counts and this requires the leader to tap into the team’s full power. Change in organisations doesn’t happen by itself. The leaders must get busy coaching their employees and ensure their skills are constantly evolving. Challenging them to go faster, further and higher is not simply managing a process. Instead, it is igniting workplace enthusiasm to ensure the team themselves want to be better. The typists have all departed the typing pool and moved on. Managers who can only manage processes are going the same way. The modern business requirement is to be able to manage processes and build your people. Businesses that are slow to recognise this will be eating their competitors’ dust and wondering what happened.

“Hey, it’s a jungle out there”. A brilliant meeting followed by a woeful meeting; the emotional roller-coaster world of sales.You’re up and down within minutes, depending on the client’s interest and reaction. You’re always too early or too late for the business chance. The client is never on your timetable, especially your schedule around meeting the month’s quota. So how do we keep salespeople motivated to push through and produce the needed results?

Managing salespeople requires time-usage perspective. Break the team composition down to some key segments; the star, the non-performer, the new or developing, and the plateaued employee. Our natural instinct is to spend a disproportionate amount of our time on “fixing” non-performers. Stop doing this!

Instead, spend only 10% of your time on it and give them clear guidelines, firm activity targets, lots of encouragement and sell them hope.Tell them they can do it but let them do it—don’t do it for them. Send them to training to get the required skills.

The plateaued employee should get slightly more attention—around 15% of your valuable time. This group needs you to model the sales process, to go together on joint calls and to receive your coaching.

Set realistic activity levels, monitor achievement and let them know that your time becomes more available to them the more they achieve results. The new and developing deserve 25% of your attention. Their attitude and skills are good, but they lack experience. Extra coaching, your modelling of the sales technique, and priming the pump with some new leads all set them on a course for becoming high-level performers. In fact, they are keen and want to succeed, to challenge the more established performers for the top sales spot.

The star performer is often neglected because we see them as capable, skilful, competent, already producing—we think we just need to get out of their way and let them get on with it, and use our time to do other things. Big mistake! They need 50% of our time. Their capacity for even bigger deals, bigger clients and more strategic solutions is the greatest you have available to you.

Don’t waste this succulent opportunity by spending your time with low-level performers who, even if they doubled their production, would not make a great deal of difference to the overall monthly quota achievement.  

Get the star performers dealing exclusively with higher-level strategic accounts. With your seniority and contacts you often will have better initial access, and so can clear their path forward. Don’t use your prime client opportunities as a training exercise for less capable salespeople! Keep thinking of new ways to challenge the stars. They have the capacity to do more complex deals so keep pointing them in this direction.  At the same time, clear obstacles, find them needed resources, and don’t forget to praise and appreciate them.

Often these employees are highly driven, so we think they are totally self-contained and don’t need our recognition. Not true! They may not need it but they still want to hear it from you. Formal, informal and daily recognition tools are some of the basics in the sales manager’s toolbox. Examples of formal recognition are awards, reward trips, plaques and pins, while informal acknowledgment is a spontaneous recognition of milestones achieved.

Examples include an individual or team lunch, tickets to a film or sporting event, a holiday or food. Daily appreciation might include a simple “thank you”, a congratulatory handwritten note, or recognition in front of the group.Be careful with this last point in Japan. Being singled out for praise in front of one’s peers can be uncomfortable in a group-oriented culture like Japan, where fitting in is more valued than standing out.

  Murahachibu (banishment from village collective celebrations and joint activities) was a traditional exclusion technique used to punish those who didn’t fit in. Japanese know that in many cases if you stand out in Japan, the knives will come out! So, very often to give praise in private is a safer bet.

However, when you do give praise—whether in private or in public—be specific. Tell employees what you admire, the reason (with actual evidence), and then ask them a question so you can shut up and they can do the talking.

By the way, “good job” is the most pathetic form of praise as it is so meaningless. Many bosses use it; don’t be one of them. Rather, be clear and precise about exactly what workers did well. Top salespeople are competitive but money isn’t the only recognition tool available to you. Find out what else each of your sales team members want and tailor rewards to them.

Knowing what your individual team members want should be a big part of your psychoanalyst role as sales manager. There are many studies done on engagement, motivation and what employees want from their organisation. Read these for reference but, better still, just ask! Spend time uncovering the desires and aspirations of your people. By the way, these change over time, so keep checking what tangibles and intangibles they are seeking. To motivate your team, try this: praise early, praise often, praise with detail, and reward with what they want—not what you think they want.

Success is usually thought to be built on a combination of personal attributes such as intelligence, technical knowledge, street smarts, hard won experience (built on failures from pushing too hard), guts and tenacity.  Our varsity halls offer a vast array of academic knowledge, information, insights, concepts, theories, tomes, technology and debate.  Company education is usually focused on producing detailed product knowledge and navigation clarity around the organizational labyrinth.

Tick the boxes on all of these and you are off to the races for career progression.  Trouble usually starts though when they recognize you and start to expect leverage from your personal abilities.  Leverage means not just what you can individually contribute, but your capacity to get contribution from others they have placed in your charge.  As the old saw goes "all of our troubles in life walk on two legs and talk back".  Welcome to management!

Even if you are a powerhouse, a total workaholic,  pounding out 100 hours every week, your 5 staff working 40 hours  a week are doing twice as much as you are.  By the way, if you are putting in 100 hours a week, we need to talk!

The tricky part though is you got recognized for your personal qualities, which quite frankly, you are depressed to discover are not universal within your team.  You might even become a Theory X manager, who sees the glass as very much half full.  You have become a legend at finding faults and shortcomings in your team.  You perceive them as useless. They can’t be trusted, they are lazy, they make mistakes all the time, they don't take responsibility, they don’t have the required commitment, etc .  Theory Y managers, on the other hand, see the glass as half full.  They see their people as decent, capable, honest, doing their best, wanting to succeed, etc.  McGregor, who termed Theory X and Y, concluded that how you see them is what you will create for yourself. Uh oh!

This means we really have to be careful about our own attitude, more than worried about our staff’s attitude.  We have to be walking around looking for the ten things people are doing well rather than the one thing they are not doing well.  Leveraging strengths is more effective than trying to minimise weaknesses.

"Gotcha" however is a popular pursuit for bosses. They really enjoy finding fault and spend their time whining into their beers about what a pitiful deck they have been dealt back at the office.  Could they themselves be part of the problem?  Impossible they believe, why they are in this position of leadership, accountability and responsibility because they are superior!  If this is you, by the way, get ready for 200 hour work weeks.   You will have no leverage and will have to do all the work.  "Delegation" will be but a distant dream.

Here is a simple hint for looking for the good:  when wandering around, tell your team what they are doing now that is "good" in your opinion and then ask them what they think they could do "better". 

Here is another idea: "make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest".  Sounds simple, but how does that actually work?  Normally everyone thinks they are busy enough already thank you very much or they are deep in their comfort zone around the way things are done around here.  Usually the boss’s suggestion represents more work or doing things differently – neither considered particularly attractive prospects.  So how do we get people to engage?  Instead of giving orders we could ask questions.  This "self discovery" process leads to greater ownership and commitment to the execution of the task. 

We could break the task down to smaller pieces ("eat an elephant one bite at a time") and "praise the slightest improvement and praise very improvement".  It is too late to wait until task completion to tell people they did a good job.  We need to be intervening part the way through to recognize and appreciate their efforts.

We could follow Theory Y and "give the other person a fine reputation to live up to".  That means we assume they are good, serious, capable and treat them and communicate with them in that way.  They feel it and won’t let our expectations down.

We could also "talk about our own mistakes before criticizing the other person".  If we reflect that we are asking people to step out of their comfort zone, to do new things or things in a new way, how smart is it to whack them whenever they make a mistake?  There is always going to be differences in performance between doing something well practiced and something new – that is the messy innovation process. 

We are all the embodiment of all of our own mistakes.  We gained experience by being able to discern what works and what doesn’t, mainly by finding out the hard way.  We have to appreciate that our own team can’t be expected to be perfect at the beginning.  Shock, horror - they will be just like we were at their level or stage!  So we should share the mistakes we made to show it is part of the learning process.  We then plumb the depths of what was good and explore what we need to do better.

Being smart is not enough.  We have to be "people smart" and that is a learned skill available to all, regardless of rank or stage.  Congratulations on becoming smarter!

Corporate learning isn’t working. Heroically, time and treasure are being spent by company leaders to improve staff performance. Inherent in that goal is that we as recipients learn something new or re-learn what we supposedly should know already. Talking to companies interested in increasing people performance, we have noted some common barriers to making learning work. Business conditions, markets, the competition are all in a state of flux and change is now "constant". Companies attempt to respond. The clarion call goes out to the troops to rally behind the latest change. New policies, slogans, work methods, and systems "cascade" and are met with disinterest or just tacit compliance. The changes usually require everyone to "learn" to do things in a new or different way. The desired order is usually (1) learn, (2) change, (3) improve results. The breakdown point in this continuum is the one in the middle – change. The organisation may want improved performance, but is met with the mindset of "I" agree in principle, but no thank you - "I" don’t want to make any changes to what "I" do now. Insanity is defined as doing the same thing every time and expecting a different outcome. This "no thank you" attitude drives leaders nuts. So why don’t we want to change? Actually we are changing all the time, and with the influx of powerful hand held technology, which we lug around 24 hours a day, we are the leading generation of change adoption. Having some cool new piece of technology is fine, as far as change goes, but getting on board with the latest corporate direction is not as appealing. The bosses return from the executive off-site brimming with exuberance and high hopes, to find the troops don’t really buy into the change proposal. "Seen it all before" cynicism runs wild, and top down direction is resisted. By the way, "we own the world we create". So when there is no creation or ownership, leaders, at best, get passive compliance from subordinates. In the adoption of the new, change necessitates exposure to RISK. We are generally risk averse, that is why we are all firmly entrenched in our Comfort Zones. We have all learnt to reduce risk, so that is why we take the same route to work every day, eat the same range of cuisines, listen to the same range of music, have the basic same circle of friends, and have the same group of close colleagues at work. Hey, it’s comfortable and we will have boiled down a lot of complex choices to settle on these few safer alternatives. So don’t ask me to go through the whole process again and make changes, thank you very much! Break out of our Comfort Zone? Successful companies work on this to successfully drive the culture change required to meet the organisation’s goals. The barrier is the learning process inside most companies. There is no content component to expand their people’s Comfort Zones. "Learning" is often just data download, purely technical or simply product knowledge driven. Now is a good time to take a measured look at your current learning content. Where is the bit to build the confidence to take risks, to really expand those Comfort Zones, to actively adopt change, to learn, to improve performance? Will we ever learn?

"I don’t understand!".

Well in Nippon, particularly, what a pandora’s box or treasure trove that statement is, depending on your point of view. Employees who respond in this way may have a number of subterranean issues bubbling away. As managers, our ability to plumb the depths of what they are saying is integral for success.

Here are 5 hidden meanings behind that "I don’t understand" response. Gauging which one applies is the combined IQ and EQ test for managers. Here are few hints on passing the test and getting your just reward – keeping your job!

1 – They don’t know what to do

They may genuinely not understand the task content or have enough experience to execute what you require of them. They may not want to "fess up" to their lack of ability, because they fear the consequences.

2 – They don’t know how to do it

Funnily enough common sense is not so common it would appear. What is obvious to a seasoned, experienced manager may be "Swahili" to their staff. Logic works in mysterious ways, especially here in Japan, so the way forward can be unclear.

3 – Not believing they can do it

This is closely linked to the "Big Black Book of Failure". This infamous tome is usually squirrelled away in the bowels of the HR Department and it carefully captures and records everyone’s errors, mistakes, crimes and disasters. Therefore, a certain inspired logic informs it is better to do nothing, than to make a mistake. Fear of falling short of expectations or performance minimums is re-branded as "I don’t understand".

4 – Not knowing why they should do it

This has two variants. One is why should "I" be doing this? In other words, in my highly refined and defined world view, my guidebook of Big Black Book of Failure avoidance says only do precisely what is in my job description and avoid straying into exotic areas of interest to my manager. The second variant is more bold. It is the actual idea that this task or project has dubious, shallow or irrelevant value, so why do it at all.

5 – Not wanting to do it

Ah, we have arrived at last. They know what happens to "nails that stick out" and they know that challenging your whacky ideas is a path to pain. There is "no way" I am going to do this, but I will snow you and just say "I don’t understand".

So facing that sea of inscrutable staff faces, all certified masters of silence and obfuscation, how do we work out what is the problem.

Some gentle probing will ascertain whether they don’t know what to do. For example, "Have you ever done this task before?" will establish whether you are facing blank, terrified total ignorance or not. This usually covers off Hidden Responses 1 & 2.

If the answer is "No", the boss penchant for muscling up to the bar and displaying vast knowledge, capability, and experience should be avoided, unless you want to be doing their job as well as your own, with no reduction in headcount and no increase in your own remuneration.

If the answer is "Yes", we move on to see if Number 3 - self doubt - is the issue. "Is there anything about this task this time which you think is going be difficult (code word for "impossible" when rendered back into Japanese as "muzukashii"). If the answer comes back as a "No" or lists concerns that don’t seem insurmountable, then we need to see if Number 4 - the "why" - is the issue.

Here some background on why you chose them for this task could be helpful. "I chose you for this task because I know I can rely on you, even though you are so busy with other work. The reason why this project is important to me is ….’ A "trial close" at this point is useful. "Are you happy to do this task?". If they say "Yes", we are off to the races, if it is a "No" then we are getting down to it at last.

Their answer about why they are not happy will tell you all you need to know about why your idea won’t work in Japan. Always useful to get that type of feedback - just do your best to not nuke your staff member at this point. A studied pause, then "Oh, good point. Let’s get a few of the team together and see if it is possible to work our way through these barriers" works well.

Good luck!

I am putting this content together for me to remind myself that psychosomatic illness is a real thing and there are plenty of graveyards with ambitious thrusting leaders pushing up daisies, because the stress killed them.  Being an Aussie male is a health hazard.  We are taught from a young age to harden up, soldier on, keep going no matter what.  “She’ll be right” is our approach to health issues, which is why we don’t bother going to the doctor or taking good care of ourselves. 

Male leaders in general, I would say, are not good at taking care of their health.  Too many fags, too much grog, not enough exercise and bad eating habits piling up one on top of the other.  We add extra kilos and can’t figure out why we can’t shake that tummy roll as well down an excellent red.  We keep working late rather than get to the gym or we are permanently tired in the morning and can’t muster the energy to get out of bed to jog or walk, to get our aerobic exercise quotient. 

This is during normal times and then we get hit by additional stress from insufficient results, staff issues or any number of things in business which can drive you nuts.  Before you know it, your blood pressure is very high and this is the problem, you don't recognise it is high, because you have been functioning like this for so long, you don’t recognise anything has changed.  Annual health checks are good, because they flag things that are going sideways, but there is a long break between results and a lot can kill us in that one year interval.

My recent health check flagged high blood pressure and in typical Aussie male fashion I just dismissed it, because I didn't believe it.  It was just a one off, I said to myself, a small blip, nothing to worry about.  My wife being a lot smarter than me, bought one of those home blood pressure readers and now I realise this was not a blip.  By the way, I know exactly where the stress is coming from and I thought I was on top of it. I didn’t feel anything was particularly wrong, nothing felt different, but that is when we get ambushed. 

There are a range of medical solutions I will be discovering very shortly no doubt, but what else can we do to self-manage our stress.  One little four-point formula I like is the following:

1.      What is the problem?  This sounds easy, but it isn’t.  Often there are multiple problems and we are wandering through the day assaulted on all sides by various problems like a swarm of bees buzzing around inside our head all struggling for individual attention.  We have to decide which is the Queen Bee of problems, the biggie, the one we have to face down first?

2.     What are the causes of the problem? Again, sounds simple, but it isn’t.  There can be so many causes and inter-related causes and we are struggling to sort out where we should start.  We have to decide which is the most egregious cause of our main concern?  Which cause should we prioritise above the turmoil we are facing? 

3.     What are the possible solutions?  This is an important step because we move from the back foot to the front foot and we start to engage the positive part of our brain.  When we get to this stage, we need to suspend judgement and just go for as many ideas as we can manage. Some will be stupid, unrealistic, unworkable and some great, but we want to get them all out.  That stupid, crazy, dopey idea may trigger another thought.  “We can’t get that idea to work, but if we tweaked it like this, we could get this better result”, type of conversation with ourselves.  The better idea may not have emerged, without the help of the stupid idea.

4.     What is the best possible solution?  It may be the best of a bad bunch of alternatives and far from perfect, but at least we have arrived at a possible way forward.  We now have a possible map to navigate the future and to get to the best possible results, given where we find ourselves.  We may need to amend and improve the idea as we execute it, but that is what we do all day long in business isn’t it, so we are good at that sort of thing. 

We have gone from paralysis to movement.  This is not the end in itself, but we are least moving forward and that brings back some sense of control over out world.  Our stress is usually severely amplified when we feel we have no control and have that Damoclean sword perched above our neck threatening, to plunge forth at any moment.

So Greg, don’t make the typical Aussie male your role model.  Get checked out for stress. High blood pressure is a quick indicator you are not handling it as well as you thought pal.  Work on your bad habits, which you know intimately, but have been in denial about changing thus far.  Use this four-point formula to slay the big red Dragons troubling you.  Get busy getting healthier and that means from right now.

I have a short fuse for idiocy.  I know this about myself, so I have to work on me, to calm down and not just verbally unload both shotgun barrels into the idiot.  Like everything, there is best practice about giving errant staff feedback.  I find a useful ploy is to “time separate” my irritation with them from when I deliver the feedback.  When I get hot and irritated, I can be too powerful, direct, strong and cutting.   

Just putting the conversation off for a day, can make a big difference to how I can approach the topic of their failure.   It is rare that the conversation has to be had on the very spot, so buying a bit of time for yourself as the feedback giver, is worth it.  We can calm down and become more skilled in our angle of approach. When the blood is boiling, we will go straight for the jugular and wreak havoc.

How we approach the conversation is a key.  When our temper is up, we will get straight down to business and immediately go into the problem.  This can inspire a counter punch from the staff member as a defensive reaction and then we are into the depths of a heated argument.  Always remember, prior to raising this specific topic, the staff have been working away on something and they have this in their mind when we approach them for our conversation.  We need to use a cushion to create a breaker, a cushion, between what they have been thinking about and what we are about to discuss.

A cushion is a simple statement, which neither aggravates nor neutralises their current condition.  We can ask about their hobby or family or interests.  Something outside of work is a good breaker.  Following that we should look to praise them.  The praise has to be real and statements cannot be too vague.  A meaningful comment would be something like this: “I thought your suggestion in the team meeting last week, about changing the way we break down the sale’s lead flow was a very good idea, so thank you for making that point”.  The person we are talking to knows they made that statement and so it was real and now you are praising them for making it.  Hopefully they are not making errors in all parts of their work, so that we can find something they have done well to recognise.

Now we get to the point at issue.  Say for example, they failed to make an entry into the accounting system, which led to the initial P&L report being wrong and certain decisions were then taken on the basis of those incorrect numbers.  We could say, “Why did you screw up the entry process?  Don’t you know how important it is to have accuracy around our forecasting and decision-making process.  This error has had major consequences and cannot be tolerated”.  Now, this may be what we may be thinking, but it isn’t a great way to impart the feedback and to effectively correct the error going forward. 

We would be better to try another approach, such as “I see that key numbers were missed in the accounting process and this has led to important decisions being taken on the basis of the wrong numbers.  We don’t normally have these data entry issues, so I am wondering what happened on this occasion?”.  We turn the invective into a neutral question and allow them the chance to explain what went wrong.  It may in fact prove to not be their fault.  Or it may be that their workload was so overloaded at that time, that this caused the error.  Or it may be that they are an idiot.

The next question should be around, “How can we make sure that we don’t have a repeat of this problem”.  This gives them ownership of the solution and therefore they are more likely to make sure the error is not repeated.  If this was a regularly repeated mistake, then we would be talking about their future in the company at this point, but let’s assume this is a one off error.  We want them to keep going and to do a better job, so we have to resurrect their confidence.  They know they made a mistake and they feel bad about it.  This can lead them to try and retreat from task.  We don’t want that and so we need to leave them feeling like they can overcome this blip and be able to function as a professional. 

We can say, “This situation has come up and we have identified why it happened and we have come up with a plan to make sure it doesn't happen again. I am happy about that.  What I expect is that we will keep doing our best to make sure we don't allow these types of mistakes to happen.  I am sure we have the ability to get the data entry correct each and every time. If there is ever a need for better balancing of the workload, then please tell me and I will work on helping with that issue”.  You will note that we are saying “we” not “you” throughout and we do this on purpose to keep the whole conversation collegiate and not accusatory.  We have remained calm in manner and speech. We have also offered help to manage the workload, if that becomes a problem, so the individual doesn’t feel abandoned.  How we handle mistakes is being closely observed by the whole team and so we have to get this right when it occurs.

 Delegation is a perfect tool.  It is always in pristine condition because it stays on the shelf and gathers dust there, rather than getting dinged and banged around through robust application by leaders.  Why is that?  Fear is the biggest driver, followed by poor time management.  The accountability sits with the boss, no matter what delegation has been taking place.  If one of the team screw up the delegation, they don’t get hammered from above, because the boss is the target for not running the team properly.  No excuses allowed about , “well I delegated it to Kei so that he could develop his capabilities and start priming him for a future leadership role”.  The big bosses hold you responsible and that fear of losing control and being at the mercy of a subordinate’s mistake, convinces risk averse bosses that delegation is a non-starter.

The time management issue is another blocker.  To delegate properly, the boss needs to instruct the subordinate on what they need to do and discuss with them how to approach the task.  That takes time and bosses without good time management skills simply give up and make that classic excuse, “it will be quicker, if I do it myself”. The delegation tool goes straight back on the shelf to become a dust attractor again.

To make sure that the delegation doesn’t blow up in the boss’s face, here are some things to consider after having sold the delegation, having explained the task in detail and then you start to see things going wrong.

1.      What assumptions have I made about the delegate?

I expected that they would take the task in a certain direction, but they have started to deviate from the proper course.  Have I assumed they understood the task completely?  If that isn’t the case, then more time needs to be spent supervising to make sure they are zigging and not zagging in the future.

2.     Have I made the expected results clear enough?

It is very hard to hit a target, if you are not sure what the actual target is.  When we have a lot of experience we presume that knowledge is common and we assume common sense is universal.  Not true.  Many people seem to operate on a different cosmic dimension of common sense, so best not to rely on that hope.  We need to re-state the expected results and link that back to how to get there.

3.     Have I provided the requisite resources?

The key resource may be boss time.  We are busy because now that we have delegated the task, we can concentrate on those tasks that only we can do and we are happily ploughing our way through vast quantities of quality work.  We don’t want to micro-manage the action, but we need to make ourselves available to check in and make sure there are no deviations from the most effective course.  Finding out just at the end that they took it right off course, is way too late and we don’t want that.

4.     Have I provided the requisite knowledge?  Did we condense down all of the knowledge they need?  Or did we give them a scattering of information that didn’t fill in the holistic elements of the task?  We have a lot of experience and knowledge, but that doesn’t mean we are skilled in passing it on to others.  There are no training courses for bosses in this aspect of leading and everyone has to work it out for themselves, but don’t miss it - knowledge transfer is a real skill.

5.     Does the delegate have enough time to do the task?

The selection process for the delegate can be seriously flawed.  The boss surveys the team and thinks who doesn’t look too busy and so choose this person for the task.  What if that is a bad selection process and what if the boss doesn't know that person’s current workload in detail?  We are setting them up for failure from the outset.

6.     Was my coaching sufficient?

I may be the boss but that doesn’t mean I am a good coach or a good communicator.  We may have done a poor job of coaching the delegate and then we blame them for the issues which arise.  Maybe we left out some things because, to us, they are totally obvious, but may be unknown to others with less experience.

7.      Am I expecting the delegate to be me?

Bosses forget about age and stage.  They forget what they were like at the same age and stage as the delegate.  They expect an old head on young shoulders and get frustrated when life doesn’t work out like that.

 Delegation is a good idea, when done for the right reasons and in the right way.  Don’t let it become a dust collector.  Your access to time to do quality work is there if you pick up the tool and brandish it.

 Japan is a country where accountability and responsibility are avoided at all costs.  This is most often seen in staff engagement surveys where Japan usually comes last in the world.  One of the key questions western survey designers use for these global questionnaires is, “would you recommend our firm as a place to work for your relatives and friends?”.  Japanese staff will not give this question a positive score.  They worry that if they introduce their relative and it doesn’t work out, it will create a problem for their own career within the company.  They also worry if their relative hates the place, they will blame them for introducing the firm and this creates problems within the family.

The Japanese have come up with clever ways to reduce accountability for individuals. Decision-making uses the ringi method of consensus gathering so that we are all accountable and therefore no one person is individually accountable.  This is genius for staff.  At different times, though, we as the boss ask individuals to do a certain task.  This has very little currency, though.  Every Japanese worker knows that inability and incompetence are not legal grounds for getting fired, so “best effort but don’t too excited about the results boss”.

As the boss, we have to allocate tasks to our team members and we have to hold them accountable for the successful completion of those tasks.  We do this because we can move some of our workload across to members of the team we wish to elevate to a leadership role in the future.  When they go for their interview for the promotion, they can reference the fact that they have been doing part of the boss’s duties and therefore can be trusted to step up into the new role.  There might also be specialised skills which our team members hold and we can best complete the task using their expertise.  Today, the business world is too complex to expect the boss can do everything by themselves.  Also, by distributing the work, we can get through it faster.  Often the boss is the chokepoint on tasks because they are so busy and can’t get through everything fast enough.

How do we choose who to give the tasks to?  Often, the boss looks around at who they think isn’t super busy and gives them the task.  This is not a great selection process.  We would be better to choose who has the best ability to compete the task effectively and who would benefit the most from being given boss responsibilities for their future development.  We also need to consider how we will evaluate the successful completion of the tasks.

Not everyone is sold on the idea of doing the boss’s work.  They may feel they are already busy enough without being given additional tasks for the same pay.  Clever people have worked out that if you do a poor job or screw up the early stages, the boss will panic and take the task back.  As leaders, we say dumb stuff like, “Leave it with me” or “I will take care of this”.  We might take the task off them, but do nothing ourselves, because we are already overwhelmed by our own tasks. Now no one is working on this project and nothing is getting done. Our role is to make sure they keep doing the task and that they do it well.

How do we make sure they take accountability?  First off, we need to sell the task to them. We need to clarify that we are giving this work to them for their sake.  They will gain an advantage to do this work as it will help them step up in their career.  Those who are not interested in stepping up are a poor choice for the accountability because they don’t care.  They just want to keep a low profile, collect their monthly salary and have a quiet life.  We need to know who is motivated inside our team and talk to them about taking on this project. 

 In western society we say if you want something done, give it to a busy person.  The logic is that they are capable and fast and will knock it out in good time.  There is a logic for this in Japan, because someone who is motivated will take on the additional work if they feel there is some gain for them. Most Japanese companies, however, only advance their people based on age and stage, so there is little leverage in that system for delegating the boss’s work.  Even the motivated won’t care because it makes no difference to their career advancement.  In more modern Japanese companies or multi-national companies, this will work much better.

 Once we delegate the tasks, we need to monitor the progress.  We don’t want to drown them in love by pulling the roots up all the time to see how things are growing.  We need to leave them to get on with it.  We don’t micromanage, but we manage.  We may imagine they are taking the task completion in one direction, but discover too late they took it in the wrong direction.  We need to check in regularly to make sure that never happens.

 The key is our selection process and our regular maintenance of supervision of the task.  If we get these two aspects correct, then our accountability system will work well.

There is no one way to lead, but there are different perspectives on how to lead.  We might need a certain variety in one environment, but a different model in another ecosystem.  Often the danger is dragging the same model around with us which worked well in one locale and trying to slam the square peg into the round hole at the new shop.  I have tried that by the way and it didn’t go very well, so I don’t recommend it.

Let’s look at five power varieties to stimulate our thinking about whether we have the right set up in our current situation.

1.    Authority Power

We have been given the mandate to lead and we are accountable for the results.  None of the team were asked their approval for us to be their boss and here we are ready to do our job, as we define it, in the way we want to do it.  As the leader, we require the staff to do what we tell them and by accepting the salary, they have agreed to do it or they can leave.  We are pulling rank on everyone and using the machines muscle, to get compliance with what we say needs to be done.

We can expect some resistance from within the team.  Some individuals may have bonded with our predecessor or may believe they should be the boss and not us.  Depending on how we treat people and how well we run the operation, we may get respect and commitment from the team members.

2.    Coercive Power

We have the power to fire people, to deny bonuses and promotions. We are their boss and we let them know it.  “It is my way, baby or the highway around here.  Get on board or get lost”.  Sometimes this type of power needs to be pulled.  The organisation’s results may be insufficient and the entity is lost. It needs a complete makeover and you have been sent in there by the big bosses to panel beat it back into shape.  You have the authority to prune deadwood, rid the operation of resisters, chuck out charlatans, provocateurs and guerrilla combatants.

3.    Expert Power

This is an old model of ideal leadership where the boss knows more and is more capable than anyone in the team. The best engineer, salesperson, lawyer, creative, etc., type of thing - you get the idea. Sadly, these days business has become so complex and sophisticated that the boss, as one person, cannot carry the whole thing on their back.  We need personal expertise, but it isn’t enough anymore. We also need everyone else to pitch in and support the team effort.

4.    Reward Power

As the boss, we can hand out the sweeties to our people as we judge their loyalty, effort and commitment.  “You people get a bonus because you did well, but you lot over there get none, or a smaller bonus, because I judge you did less well.  If you want to survive or thrive around here, you better align with me or you will get the bare minimum”.  This has a transactional element to it, which will work in certain situations. There is a big downside to it though, as people only respond when we can keep handing out the goodies.  When the gravy train stops, they jump off.

5.    Role-Model Power

This is the saint model of leadership.  We ooze with integrity. Our vision is clear, people accept it and will happily follow us into corporate battle with our rivals.  We are really good at communicating with our team.  Our persuasion skills are at peak level and we are very excellent in dealing with people.  Maybe in another life, we could have been a psychologist, because we are so good at understanding what drives each person.  We are the right combo for the role. 

Now here is an important observation - we don’t start out as a saint though. Over time, we learn what works and what doesn’t and we apply our lessons everywhere we can, to improve as a leader.  The important element is that we are committed to being better with our team and we are without massive ego, so we are flexible and can win people over to our way of thinking.  Depending on the situation, we may get to this point after we have swept away a bunch of issues, using some of the other power models first.

Each of these power models has its place within the context of the firm, the market and the environment we find ourselves in.  We may even move through some of these within the same team as we push things along.  Leaders often turn over whole teams because they cannot get the resisters to reform and fly straight.  After you have hired all their replacements, though, these are now your people and you deal with them differently.  You cannot complain about them either, because you brought them onboard.

What are the starting points, the basic requirements of leadership?  There are actually many, which is why books on leadership are both numerous and thick.  Today, let’s look at four of the basics we need to be effective as a leader. 

1.     Self-Aware

In this category, we are living an intentional life, where we decide what happens to us, rather than being buffeted by the winds of change.  We are self-directed.  We have clear goals and we revise them regularly to accommodate all of the changes in business.  We make the compass the boss of the clock and we set our direction and then set our time to achieve the goals we have set.  We self-regulate, which means we control our physicality and out metal framework.  We don’t function at peak performance with a hangover, so we don’t get a hangover, because we control what we ingest and when we ingest it.  Drugs are for dopes so don't worry about getting involved in that loser scene.  We work on ourselves so we are constant students of business.  We consume information to become more innovative and more knowledgeable.  Scrolling through social media one minute short videos is an addiction best avoided.

2.     Accountability

Being honest and having integrity sounds like an obvious trait for the leader.  What is always surprising is how these attributes can collapse when really put to the test.  An economic downturn can shred high minded oft proclaimed virtues and pronouncements.  The leader also has to be the one driving toward the goals.  Expecting the staff to both deliver and drive toward the goals is a bit too much.  They can follow the direction and they can contribute to the direction but rarely are they able to drive toward it.  They get busy on the details and the leader’s job it to peak above the blood and mud and see if we are all still on track or not.  Making effective decisions is a tricky one.  How do we know the decision is going to be correct, when often there is a time lag in the achievement of the results?  We have to do the best with what we know and then monitor carefully to see if we are tracking in the right direction or not and be prepared to change direction if needed.

3.     Others-focused

This is a big step for leaders who for the most part are solidly focused on themselves and advancing their glorious career. The key to engagement with staff is to first make sure they feel valued.  How will they know that?  This is where the leader need so be disciplined to remind themselves to tell the staff they are valued, as opposed to just thinking it but never saying anything.  The leader is looking for ways to develop staff and that means delegating tasks so that they can operate at a higher level.  The key is to sell the delegation as to why it is helping the staff member and then monitor the task so that it keeps traveling in the right direction.  The leader cannot be a micro-manager, as that just trains passivity and mainly annoys people because none of us enjoy being told what to do and in detail.  Understanding what the team want to achieve as individuals is a big step forward to aligning the organisation’s goals with the goals of the team members.

Ego amongst leaders drives bad behaviour.  Large organisations suffer from cliques, factions and a lack of internal cooperation.  Fighting each other rather than the rival team is stupid, but it still goes on.  Divisions often get into fights and disagreements and the leader’s job is to make sure these don’t spiral out of control.  Bad mouthing the other sections in the company may make some people feel good but the leader can’t be one of them.  The big picture has to be constantly referenced and the team kept firmly focused on beating the competition as a united force.  Talking up the organisation has to be part and parcel of keeping the whole mothership together and that is a key leader role.

4.     Strategic

Innovation emanating from the boss is good, but it would be better to be emanating from the whole team.  The leader’s job is to stimulate thinking and capture the ideas from the rowdy and the quiet, from the quick thinkers and the deep thinkers.  Solving problems together is great glue for teams, but this needs the leader to orchestrate it.  Anticipating issues is the leader’s job.  Looking over the horizon to what may be coming and to be taking steps now to prepare needs elevation and that it what the organisation grants leaders.  The leader has the ability to get information, direction and data to be able to make long-range forecasts and to think through the blockers and barriers.  That vantage point is vital to see into the future and to see across the whole organisation at the same time.

There are many elements to being an effective leader, but these four pillars are a good place to start making sure we are doing what we should be doing and doing it well.

If one of our goals as a leader is to align our team members goals, aspiration, dreams and desires with those of the firm, it implies we know what they are aiming for.    How would we know that information?   We would gather that detail slowly over time and we would check back in occasionally to find out if things have changed or not.  This cannot be an interrogation, like a job interview.  We take our time and do these talks over coffee, lunches, dinners and in spare moments when chatting together.  The flow of the talks is casual but we are trying to assemble a clear picture of this staff member, so there is a structure to how we find out more about them.               

The structure is simple and the point needs to be made here that we are not doing this to better manipulate them to squeeze more productivity for them.  If that is your desire, then in today’s employment market in Japan, you are going to be supremely busy.  You will be doing a lot of things by yourself, because people won’t want to work with you.  As mentioned, our objective is to make sure that the firm’s alignment matches their own.   

There are different levels of understanding of our team members.  The most basic are simple factual items.  Where did they grow up, how many in their family, where did they go to school, where have they worked so far?  The questioning about these personal items has to be done carefully. We don’t want to come across as prying.   In today’s business world this has gotten a lot easier.  When I was growing up in business, the boss would never have ventured into these waters, considering the information too private. Younger people today expect us to know more about their needs and their history.  

We are trying to get some context on who this person is and where they have come from.  If they studied overseas in a certain country, then we can get some insight into who they are today.  If they studied a certain subject at university, we can get a clearer picture of their formative educational years.  If they are from a big family or an only child, then that gives more context for their upbringing.  They may have worked in certain industries so that again this will tell us more about their experiences and viewpoints.  We are accumulating all of this detail slowly and casually and in no hurry to force the issues.

The next level of enquiry is about the causations.  Why did they choose that particular line of study? Why did they join that industry?  Why did they choose that company?  Why do they have that particular hobby?  We are looking for their motivations to date.  What has been driving them so far in their life and career. They have been making choices and taking decisions. We are trying to get down to their motives and thinking about selecting alternatives.  This is a very important stage because it helps us to unravel how they think about things and what was driving some of their decisions.

For small companies in Japan, the Japanese staff have often moved around a lot.  We need to know why that was the case, especially in a time when mid-career hiring wasn’t so prevalent.  We may have covered this off in the interview process, but maybe you weren’t here when they were hired and you have inherited them from your predecessors.  Often quite a lot of information can get lost when bosses move around and the records you received may not be all that useful, beyond the basics.  It is a good change to fill in a lot of blanks.  Again, this will be done slowly over time rather than an interrogation when you turned up for the posting.

The last level is values.  Trying to align the values of the firm with their personal values requires you know your people quite well.  What things are a priority for them?  What things are non-negotiable?  How do they weigh up their choices?  What are the deal breakers?  These are very deep subjects and are not the type of thing you can knock over in a few minutes.  Also asking directly about values sounds like the boss is trying a bit too hard.  The conversation has to be natural and curious and then people will be willing to share their thoughts.  These items will emerge gradually over time and shouldn’t be rushed.   

The interesting thing is that life is not static and things we were told a few years ago may no longer be relevant.  If they get married, get divorced, have kids, lose a child, have their parents pass, become ill, etc. these realities can impact their future direction for their lives.  Many years ago, I caught pneumonia and spent six days in intensive care and another three weeks in hospital.  If I had been a smoker, this story wouldn’t be surfacing today.  That experience completely changed my thinking about life and about work. 

It will be the same for our people.  One conversation once, won’t work.  We need to be having these deep conversations continuously over time to make sure we are abreast of what is important to then.  Without that knowledge we cannot keep aligning  their and the company’s goals.

Japan is excellent at being two faced.  In the West, this has a pejorative air, but in Japan this is how harmony can be maintained and everyone plays their part in keeping the public and private faces far apart.  This means that a typical western approach of getting the two warring individuals into a room and thrashing out a solution usually doesn’t get very far.  In that mediated meeting, no one talks and they certainly won’t publicly voice their opinion of the other person or flag the issue of their disgruntlement.  Japanese society has learnt that some things are better not surfaced, because they can lead to an explosion from which there may no backing out.  Bringing things to a head could go nuclear and better to let the problem drift along.  Keep the issue underground and everyone will smile on the surface through gritted teeth and maintain a facade of teamwork on the surface, diligently applying two faces to the problem.

The issue though is the problem never goes away and we have individuals who don’t want to cooperate with each other and this makes teamwork especially hard to achieve.  They may choose to look the other way but the boss doesn’t have that option.  The warring  individuals cast a negative influence over the team and two camps can quickly arise, making the issue broader than just two people who don’t like each other.  Left to its own devices this conflict can become inflamed and a rift can be created within the team.  As the boss you have to take action, but what action should you take?  Talking to them together isn’t a formula for success in Japan, so private, individual, one-on-one conversations are required. 

Yes, this elongates the perceived time investment, but actually it saves time.  Trying to wrangle them together at once, will suck up a lot of time and build immense boss frustration and ultimately lead to no workable solution.  Meeting privately allows more frank talk, especially from the boss.  If the leader says something tough in the meeting when they are together, then one side will feel they are being picked on and the boss is favouring the other side, whether that is the case or not.  That is certainly what they will tell the rest of the team 

In that private conversation, the boss can draw some red lines which they must not cross.  Very strong behavior boundaries can be articulated and made clear to the individuals.  This is a delicate path to traverse though, because the risk is that one of them will quit and we have to waste a lot of time and treasure to replace them.  Going too hard, could even see both quit.  That does eliminate the issue, but just raises others around finding replacements and spending a year to educate the newcomers to get them up to speed. 

If we go too soft, nothing changes, so where is the magic demarcation line?  We really have to know the individuals as to how far we can push each one, before they crack.  In this type of situation, we usually have to push it fairly hard to get them to work together and not destroy the organisation.  This is especially the case if it is a small company, but generally even in large corporations, the section sizes are not that large, so the same problems remain. 

Th two faced nature of Japanese society is an advantage in this regard.  Holding two opposing positions - one public and one heartfelt is easier for Japanese people maybe, compared to westerners who say things like, “It is my right to speak up and speak my mind” and then drill everyone about their position, why they are correct and the other person is wrong, wrong, wrong.  What we are looking for in Japan is to keep the feud private and not bring it into the open, enflaming the situation or have them start recruiting supporters into a war between factions.  If those supporters start to assemble, then we have to have a word to them too, telling them to butt out of it and to not get involved in any factionalism within the organisation. 

With the main protagonists, we need to get them focused on what they can control.  We need to get them organised to do their work.  We need them to cooperate with the other person, through gritted teeth if necessary.  We want no public voicing of their unhappiness with the other person and it is for them to keep a lid on how they feel. 

If one of the two cannot follow the rules you have set down for cooperation and teamwork, then they have to go.  It is going to be a big pain to replace them, but if they won’t play ball then they have no place in the team. If there is one you want prefer to keep, then maybe the other one has to go instead, but one will definitely have to leave.

None of this is ideal, but trying to keep people together and strike a balance in the team is what the boss has to figure out and there are no good roadmaps for this type of thing in Japan.  Be very clear with both of them about what you won’t accept.  However, don’t expect that they will come to a healthy resolution, just because you have an interest in having them work together harmoniously. As the boss, you will need to monitor the situation constantly, for deviations from the behaviour guidelines you have set down.  These will need correcting immediately, so don’t hesitate once you perceive the problem.

Once upon a time in Japan there would be a thick pile of resumes sitting on your desk for you to go through and select the new potential hires for interview.  You would conduct rounds of meetings, put them to the test in certain skill sets and then make a studied decision to bring onboard the best person.  They were nervous and you had all the power in the discussion.  They were selling you on them and why they should be selected.  Ah, those fond memories of days gone by.

Today, unless you are some mega firm in Japan, highly attractive to job candidates, you are unlikely to be getting many resumes at all and the quality is usually not that great.  Instantly, you are in a bad place, because your selection horizon is limited and the scope is narrow.  The other interesting thing is that candidates cancel the meetings with barely any notice or don’t even bother to show up or do show up and try to auction the process, so they can get more dough somewhere esle.

Many bosses come up through the ranks from technical backgrounds or through the finance route.  Not that many leaders or hiring staff have come up through sales.  What we have here now is a mismatch between the hiring person, who needs to sell the candidate on their firm and that persons’ skill set. For many in the hiring process, the idea that they would have to sell in itself, is an anathema.  They look down their noses at sales and protest that they are professionals, not used car salespeople.  This is a good thing.  It means those of us who know what we are doing and understand how to sell the candidates on the company, are going to monopolise the minuscule hiring funnel that comes our way.

So how do we sell the candidate on joining our happy band of professionals?  If you have piles of money, then throw piles of money at the problem and you are done.  If that isn't you, then let’s see what we can do. You as the boss should meet them in the first interview and in the last interview.  Wait a minute buddy, I am a high-powered executive and I don’t have that sort of time to be running around meeting job candidates.  Quite correct and the chances are that your firm is in the throw piles of money at the problem category, so you can relax and get back to drowning in your email inbox.  For everyone else, meet them and control the image of the brand and the firm. 

Meeting the boss in one company and just meeting some apparatchik in a rival company, is a totally different value equation.  First, we have to work on first impressions. Your office may not be gorgeous, but you can be gorgeous.  I don’t mean you have to be handsome or beautiful, although in life that does seem to help.  Even if you are not a stunner, your way of greeting the candidates can be stunning.  It sounds ridiculous to say this, but greet them with a warm smile and friendly eyes.  Take your time shaking hands or bowing at that first greeting – absolutely don’t be in a rush to get down to business.  They will be nervous being in a strange environment, meeting someone they don’t know, so we need to take our time and help them to relax.  We never wear jackets in the interviews, so that we appear less fearsome and intimidating.

Engage them in some small talk, at the start and get a sense of how nervous they are and how they come across as a communicator and how they manage their own their first impression with us.  Explain how many rounds of interviews there are and what are the stages, if they progress through the different interviews.  In our case, we do three, with me being the first and last interviewer.  Most Japanese candidates are not very good at being interviewed, so I have found that getting them to relax is vital, so that who they are can be found more easily.  I always tell the candidates that in this first round interview there won’t be any hard or tricky questions.  I note that it will be a conversation and we will just go through their resume to get a sense of what they have done, so they should relax and know this will be the easiest interview they have ever had. 

I use the first interview as a screening process, to see if we want to have a more detailed conversation later.  I also tell them that we will talk money in the third round, so I take that topic off the table immediately.  Now they have to invest in this process, to find out how much money they can make here, rather than just trying to leverage the interview against another firm, they are already talking with in the background.

After going through their resume and finding out a lot more about what they have done and the reasons behind the choices they have made, I will have a strong idea whether there will be a further round or not.  At this point in the process, if I think I want them onboard, I start the sales push for why they should join.  I talk a lot about our positive, supportive culture and our values.  In our case, we try to avoid overtime, so that our team can have a good balance between work and non-work hours.  I tell them that if they tell me they want to take three weeks off in a row, that is terrific and we are happy for them to do that.  We encourage our people to take all of their leave and long breaks are not an issue.  I explain that our success is based on their success and that we are here to help then progress in their careers.  I explain to them that my job is to make them happy and if they are happy, our colleagues and clients will be happy. We then invite their questions.

The whole thrust is about how we can help them achieve their aspirations and I don’t talk about what we want from them for the company.  That conversation can come later in the process, after they have become more invested in working with us.  We don’t want to scare them off by going hard on what we want too early.  The second round is done by a senior person from my team, who is Japanese, so that they can relax with them.  They are also on a full charm offensive with the candidate as well.  Depending on the tasks they will be doing, we will do any skill testing at this point.

If they get through to the last round, I sell them on the package they will receive working with us, especially emphasising the large amount of training they will get.  Money is an important factor, but not the only factor.   Flexibility, culture, work atmosphere, training, coaching, development are all key points of interest for the candidates.  Even if they don’t join us, their experience of our firm throughout the process has been very friendly and supportive. They leave with a very good impression of us and our brand.  If they join, they find that everything we told them was true and they can trust our firm to do the right thing for the team members.

Leaders are different from managers.  Managers have to make sure everything is humming.  The quality standards have to be met.  The logistics have to flow smoothly, so that production is working well.  The budget has to be met and there should be no over spending taking place.  Leaders have to do all of this, plus two other key roles.  One is setting the direction and the other is developing the people.  This sounds fair enough, except that the roles described for the manager are a full time job and the leader’s bits and bobs are on top of that base.  Do leaders get more than 24 hours a day allotted to them unlike managers?  No, they get what we all get, yet somehow they have to accomplish all of these other tasks as well and this is where the problems start.

What normally happens is that strategy setting is a once a year affair. In large companies, there is a lot of bureaucracy attached to the planning stage and this can occupy a lot of time, as the plan works its way up the chain of command, before it is approved.  It is always a nerve-wracking exercise, because the machine is permanently hungry for improved results and the numbers being bandied about by the bosses are often daunting.  The local leader has to then sell these dubious growth increases to the team.  They are all card-carrying sceptics and don’t believe these numbers are fair or possible.  The motivation to attain them is dead on arrival when they hear the targets and you the leader have to whip up their enthusiasm to achieve them.

Actually, being a leader is a real test of your communication skills and many bosses are found wanting.  This is purely a factor of no training ever having been invested in this aspect of leadership. Why we would expect average leaders to be above average communicators, is a bit of a mystery and the same goes for why we think they can sell the unconvinced on the required numbers.  Being a skilled communicator is what lifts managers into leadership positions.  They are able to find the means for the team to self-discover their motivation and their own commitment to the common cause. 

As leaders we cannot motivate anyone.  Try it.  Keep repeating “be motivated” over and over to your team members and see what happens.  The answer will be nothing, because the mere notion of saying it is ridiculous.  The motivation has to come from within.  The team have to believe that the organisations strategy and direction are aligned with what they want to achieve.  This is the skill of the leader. They have to parse out where the bits line up and convince the team that working hard is in their interests, and will get them to where they want to go.

How will the leader know the details?  Working hard on their own tasks won’t do it.  This requires that most valuable element of leader power – time.  The hours allocated to talking with the team, in both formal and informal situations, is how the leader keeps up to date with what the team wants.  Someone in their twenties will have certain needs and these will change once they get married and will change again later, when they have children.  When their kids grow up the needs change again and the same occurs when their parents begin to age and need more help.  Knowing what their people want is a moving feast and this needs constant attention, because the needs keep changing.

One of the things team members want is help to do better in their careers.  They want coaching and mentoring by the boss, but the boss timetable is full of meetings and this will defeat staff aims very quickly.  Boss schedules seem to attract meetings like a magnet and before you know it, there is hardly any time for anything but attending and then following up from the meetings already held.  At different times in my corporate life, I felt like I was a professional meeting attendee.

If the boss’s job is to run the processes, set the direction and build the people, then this latter function needs to be worked on.  Left to spontaneous combustion, nothing will happen, the time will be drawn off by competing priorities and won’t be done in the fashion or volume required to make a difference.  If you take a look at your recent work schedules and add up the time you spent mentoring and coaching team members, you might be in for a shock. 

By the way, here is a hint – giving orders and telling people what to do, doesn’t count as coaching.  If this coach element is so important, then it needs time allocated to it.  We need to block that time out and defend it, just as we would a meeting with a client.  We don’t let anything distract us from client time and we have to think of our staff as internal clients, who deserve the same attention and treatment.  If we can do that, then we will be in a position to get a better balance in our leadership time allocation. If we want the team to pony up and do the impossible again this year, then we need their cooperation and motivation. They way to get both is to invest our precious time in them and if we don’t, then we are planting the seeds of our leader doom.

The Ongoing Nightmare Of Small Business Recruiting

 There are more jobs than candidates in Japan and this situation will only worsen from the boss’s viewpoint.  Those halcyon days of wading through a big pile of resumes and tossing most away, have well and truly gone.  If you get any resumes these days, you think you should go and buy a takurakuji (lottery) ticket, because your luck is obviously in.  Counterintuitively, in some of the high tech industries, whole teams of internal recruiters are being fired, because the demand for that industry is down and over hiring during Covid now requires firing people.  In most industries though, there is demand for staff, but they are hard to find in Japan.  Job mobility here is much less than in Western countries and so the people who are interested in looking for a new job, may not be the people you want to hire.

 Big companies, who can pay big base salaries and add various incentives, will always be in a strong position to hire staff.  They can afford to pay the numbers required for the quality they seek.  For the rest of us, we are duking it out in the alleyway, trying to find a decreasing resource, whose availability is declining.  Recruiting companies are swamped with demand and are starved of supply, so they are in a position where they will recommend people they know are not really a fit, because they have so few alternatives.

 So what do you do – compromise on quality for the sake of having a body with a pulse or wait for better people to turn up?  In the hospitality industry, these compromises are taking place a lot more than before.  A lot of people migrated away from the industry after the tumultuous upending of the economy because of Covid.  Hotels are looking down the barrel of increased tourist demand for stays and not enough staff to clean the rooms and run the Hotel services.  The release of Chinese tourists from the no-travel ban by the Xi Jinping government will just add more fuel to the fire, as the numbers ramp up even further.

 I have noticed it myself, in the decline on service quality in restaurants I regularly frequent.  I was in one recently and the woman serving my table was new, untrained, obviously didn’t like people and clearly hated her job.  I bumped into the restaurant owners not long after that and mentioned it to them.  I prefaced my remarks by saying I wasn’t complaining and that I was sympathising that this environment is one where getting staff requires more flexibility than before and they thanked me for pointing it out.  It doesn't fix their problem though.

 I have had four resumes for salespeople to look at over the last ten months, which in itself tells you a lot.  Three of them had mental health problems, some declared and some hidden.  None of those made it.  The one who was mentally healthy was so poorly presented it was a clear case of no common sense and so he can’t be placed in front of clients.  Sales is all about first impressions and his job was to sell me on hiring him and he clearly had very little awareness about that or about how he presents himself.  What would you think of a salesperson who turns up for the interview with a very cheap pen hanging from the outside suit jacket pocket, like some propeller head?  In his late forties, he hasn’t worked out that brown shoes shouldn’t be matched with a black belt, that the shirt cuff buttons need to be closed, as does the top button of the shirt, where you make your tie knot.  You couldn’t make this stuff up.  His resume was full of short term stays and a lot of moving around.  That isn’t a negative for me, depending on the reason for the short stays and constant movement.  In this case, it was a bit too short and too frequent.

 Today, I wouldn’t take him, but who knows what I will be doing in a few month’s time, if there are so few candidates or the subsequent candidates are worse?  This is the dilemma we all face in small business.  How far from our standards are we prepared to stray just to get someone on board?  I heard from a client recently about the chaos they were experiencing internally, as they hadn’t been able to replace someone who left with the right level of expertise and now they are getting serious grief from one of their major clients.  The replacement is just not cutting it.  As we let standards deteriorate, we start to attack our own brand and our market pricing.

 In my case, we are a training company, so I always know I can fill skill gaps with training – lots of training.  A lack of common sense though is probably not going to be something I can easily fix or would even bother to work on.  If you are in your forties and you cannot dress yourself properly, then forget it.  My impression is we are all going to take less qualified people and spend a lot more time onboarding and training them, to compensate for their deficiencies.  Is this in the plan or in the budget?  If it isn’t, then I suggest now would be a good time to start working on both.

The boss is the light on the hill, radiating positive energy, belief, confidence and possibility.  The moody boss can destroy the atmosphere in the office very quickly.  We all know that, so we have to become expert thespians, masking our true feelings and putting on a fun face to the outside world.  When things get tough, there are no people the boss can talk to, so all of the pressure gets bottled up in one person.  When things are not going well with the results and particularly when the profits are not where they need to be, the pressure really starts to pile on.  How can the boss function when any normal person would be laid waste with depression, insecurity, imposter syndrome and self-doubt?

As the boss, it is difficult to share the issues with your life partner, because you feel you are bringing them down too and they have almost zero influence on improving things to help you. That is why the boss tends to keep everything stitched up tightly inside.  There has to be a release though, or the pressure can build up in an unhealthy way. One outlet is to write down your fears.  Get it down on paper, someplace where only you can see it.  Write without restraint about what you are feeling and the depth of your fears.  Somehow there is magic in writing this stuff down.  The act of writing forces you to articulate what you are feeling and it forces you to make clear the scope of the issue.  The other thing you find is that there are only a few central planks to this problem. You don’t wind up writing some massive tome with so many issues, it is humanly impossible to address them all. 

Once we have captured our worst fears, we can start to work on them.  The first thing to do next is to delete any delusion.  We don’t see hope as much of a strategy, so we have to confront the issues head on.  That translates into assuming that the worst will happen, our gravest fears will be realised, the apocalypse will arrive unfettered.  This calls out the deepest fears of catastrophe and ruin.  There is no longer any illusion in play, disaster beckons.  This is painful and scary, but a necessary step on the road to redemption.

Having accepted that the meltdown is unavoidable, we start to work up some possible solutions.  We are not trying to perfect ideas as they emerge, we are just concentrating on getting them down on paper.  We are looking for volume at this point, not perfection.  We get as many ideas out as possible. All mad ideas are welcome.  A crazy, impractical idea may hold the seed for a better idea, which would never have arisen, without this initial lunatic stimulation. 

The interesting thing about this process is how hard it is.  After the initial burst of frenzied activity, we go blank.  We run out of ideas and the extraction of the next layer of gold thinking is seriously heavy lifting and hard.  It is critical though that we don’t crack and just move on.  We need to tough it out and go for deeper, better thoughts and keep pushing ourselves.  A five-minute period can feel like a lifetime in these circumstances, but we have to hang in there and keep going. 

From this list, we start to select ideas into a priority order.  This is seriously hard work as well and not an easy process.  Getting ideas into a priority format is the lever to help us select where we need to spend our time going forward.  What we come up with may not be perfect or complete, but it is the best we can do and we have to go with that.  Having a plan and having no plan are worlds apart.  The no plan scenario leaves us in mental turmoil, our confidence is sapped, and we trip over into depression and calamity.  A poor plan is much better than no plan and even a poor plan can be improved upon.  The act of doing seems to release more ideas and possibilities, which just operating at the theoretical level, does not do.  When you have brain fog because of all the stress, it is very hard to take action, but we must start somewhere and expect that it will not be where we will finish.

We know that what comes next is going to be unpleasant, with some tough decisions needed to be taken.  We have to grind this out and we have to be prepared for reversals and some aspect of the plan failing.  Regardless, we have to keep going and do everything we can to save the situation.  Where does our self-belief come from?  By this time self-belief has taken a hammering and is probably threadbare.  There are few alternatives and self-belief aplenty or not, we just have to keep pushing forward and tough it out.

Desperation may have replaced sunny optimism, but externally we have appear to be calm and in command. That is a hard act to pull off, but one we have to concentrate on perfecting.  The moment the team begins to think we have given up, they will cave in on the spot and the game is lost.  It is a long way to the top, if you want to rock and roll, but we have gotten to the top and we have to stay there.  It is also lonely at the top too and we have to get used that.  Even Executive Coaches cannot get the full version of what is really going on, because of our egos and self-regard.  Even with the coach, we will keep a public face in play, rather than reef back the tattered curtain and reveal the ruins.  Welcome to leadership.

I am always amused by rather youngish “life coaches” or “executive coaches”.  It seems incongruent, because their experience of business life seems so thin.  They haven’t risen inside their organisations, have never had massive responsibilty or a major P&L to worry about.  They seem to be everywhere and astoundingly they find people willing to give them money.  The person best able to provide coaching should be the boss and not some external freelance coach.  Bosses though often restrict their coaching to the detail of the task and don’t really educate their people on life success.  Part of the reason is the way we were all brought up in business. Work was over here and life outside of work was in a different basket and the boss’s role was to stick with one and not get involved in the personal business of the staff.  That is changing though and the demand is bottom up.

Younger people want more coaching, advice and direction and not just about tasks.  They expect more from the boss than previous generations. I was reminded of this the other day when watching a presentation by Jim Rohn.  He is one of the legends of self-development and after a long career in the nutritional supplements business, though Multi Level Marketing, he started his own motivational speaking business.  He relates how Earl Shoaff was his boss and mentor who taught him all the lessons of business he needed to be successful.  I was thinking to myself none of my bosses were like that.  They taught me how to do the job perhaps but nothing beyond that.  It was that era of a clear separation of work and non-work and bosses didn’t cross the line, because that was thought intrusive.  Earl Shoaff died in 1965, so obviously he wasn’t hamstrung by any issues about work and non-work.

So as the boss can we become a mentor to our people?  Jim Rohn has a very simple message and he nominates a few areas of concentration where we can help ourselves to become more successful.  He asks about our Philosophy.  No boss has ever asked me about my philosophy and through dint of self-study I have created one.  Now might be the time to share this with the team.  Our philosophy creates our guard rails about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad for us.  It informs us how to live and how to be successful. 

Another area he nominates is Attitude.  Are we a quitter or are we prepared to do what is required to be successful in an ethical honest means.  Are we buffered by the winds of good fortune and luck or are we determined to make our own luck?  Are we leaving it up the company to make us successful or are we talking full responsibility for our results?

He talks about Activity - doing the work.  Having a considered philosophy and attitude is great at the theoretical level, but nothing happens without doing the work.  That means doing the work when we don’t feel like doing it and when it is hard.  It means discipline to be consistent and to see the task to the end without distraction.

Another area of concentration is Results.  We need to check if we are making progress and that means we need some means of measuring where we are relative to the targets.  There can be any number of measures, some personal and some work oriented, but the point is to use them and to keep using them, so that we can achieve the end result we seek.

The fifth area is Life-Style.  How we decide to live is a very important decision and has ramifications for many areas.  We need to live an intentional life, so we need to decide the life-style we want and work towards achieving that.  This isn’t just about money.  I was attending my son’s university graduation in Bristol recently and there was a family there from another country staying at the same Hotel.  The way they were dressed showed they were obviously wealthy. The mother was massively overweight.  I don’t exaggerate when I say she was almost as wide, as she was tall, which is a very unhealthy situation.  She was rich, but very poor in her lifestyle, because dealing with that amount of additional weight must make even the most simple things in life difficult.

Jim Rohn’s experience with Earl Shoaff is a good role model for bosses to think about not just being the one who hands out the salary, but also being the one who becomes a mentor for the team.  What if the boss doesn’t know much about this stuff?  Then it seems like the boss needs to get busy and start studying about these things first and then be in a position to help others.  Start with the works of Jim Rohn would be my advice.  It is very homespun advice but also very sharp, on target and relevant to any era and any stage.

The contrast was striking.  I went from one boss, who was super demanding, scary even, to a very easy going leader.  I thought, “this is good”, well, at least for a while. When I realised that he would agree with whoever was last in his office, I realised there was no core here.  He was being nice to all and that meant he wasn’t taking any hard decisions, potentially upsetting some people.  You would convince him on some course of action and then a colleague would waltz into his office and then next thing you know, the positions have been reversed. What is going on here, I wondered?

Was the first leader an Emotional Quotient EQ leader.  Certainly not.  He was a despot and a he ruled with an iron rod.  You always knew where you stood with him and if he agreed to something, then he would stick with that decision.  He was scary, but predictable.  The second leader was definitely the EQ type – very caring, very sensitive to people’s feelings, considerate.  He was unpredictable, because he was so easily swayed by trying to keep everyone happy.

Who was the bigger nightmare boss?  I would say the EQ leader, because it was harder to get stuff done.  Does the EQ leader have to be such a soft touch though?  Was he just an extreme case?  I would say so and there has to be a balance.  The EQ leader doesn’t have to please everyone, but certainly has to be sensitive to people’s feeling and aspirations.  There has to be a solid core though, so that once a decision is taken, the organisation can get to work and not have to reverse course, because the boss has suddenly been convinced to go the opposite direction. 

If we think of most leaders we have worked for, they probably tended to be despots, more than EQ types.  The generation of leaders after the Second World War were ex-military veterans back from the front and were applying a top down, highly directional model, very suitable for military life and death struggles.  As we moved forward people started to realise the limitations of this model and wanted more from the leader. 

Today we have younger generations coming into the workplace who just will not put up with despots. Okay, there are certain industries where despots can still reign, the numbers in the salary bands are astronomical, so people in that industry put up with bad boss behaviour because the payout is so huge. There are not many industries like this though. In Japan’s case there are many more jobs available than those looking, so job mobility is high and easy, so why put up with anyone you don’t like.  That means the EQ boss is more in demand now because they have to be able to navigate the requirements of the team and keep people happy.  The danger here though is can we get anything done if we are pandering  to the egos and demands of relatively younger people, who are lacking in work years, wisdom and experience?

How do we get results and not have to become a despot to achieve that aim.  The key is a different approach to leading.  How do we find out the aspirations of the team members and get them to align those desires with the direction the company needs to move.  One of the first lessons of leadership we face is that the people we lead are not the same as we are.  They are motivated differently, have different values and assuming they want to be like us is delusional. We need to talk to them and find out what makes them tick and what they are trying to achieve. Ultimately, we want everyone to be happy and successful and for that to happen, the firm must prosper.  It can prosper more easily if we are all feeling that the direction we are going is the right one. 

Once we get the boss going one direction and the team the other, then trouble is right around the corner.  Work is not a democracy though and sometimes the boss has to do things which are unpopular.  Coming back to the office is the biggy at the moment.  Many bosses want this but many staff don’t.  So how to resolve this issue?  Some companies just say come in or quit and make it a very easy choice.  The economic conditions will impact how effective that threat is. As we rumble forward coming out of Covid, a lot of industries are struggling with too many staff, so firings are happening, which somewhat deflates the idea of refusing to work back in the office and quitting instead.

Generally speaking, the EQ boss knows their people well because they recognize this is an important part of their job as the boss. They try to make sure that the work environment is fulfilling and allows everyone to succeed, according their own individual definition of what success looks like.  In Japan, many staff have aging parents, so success may look like having the flexibility take a parent to the hospital during work hours.  If they are working mothers, it may mean going home earlier than everyone else or being able to leave the office during the day to pick up a sick child from their school.  These types of boss flexibility have not been common in Japan, but must become more so. 

The EQ boss knows that if they are fair, consistent and sensitive to the needs of the team, then the team will work diligently and with loyalty.  They know that a bit of flexibility goes a long way and in fact becomes a moat to protect the firm from having recruiters trying to lift their people out of the organisation.  Maybe the staff can make more money where the grass is greener, but they know there will be less flexibility and they may judge they would rather have the flexibility and will stay. The EQ boss makes sure that is the case.

Japan has always been a country which has adapted to weather and seismic conditions.  Traditional housing was built on the assumption that earthquakes would less easily destroy wooded houses with built in flex points.  High-pitched roof angles allowed snow to fall more easily from the roof and prevent the snow’s weight from crushing those inside.  Things have changed though and we now have typhoons going as far north as Hokkaido.  When I arrive here in April 1979, that possibility would have been unthinkable.  We have massive flooding of low-lying areas, which until relatively recently, could survive heavy rains.  Japan is also becoming unbearably hot.  Cities like Tokyo have lots of concreted surfaces, not that many trees and the heat at ground level is becoming more and more intense.  The NHK news today was reporting an average temperature for Tokyo of 36 degrees centigrade.  While I was driving around, my car temperature gauge was showing 39.5 degrees for outside the vehicle and trust me, it was red hot on the street level. This is the summer environment our people have to work in. 

Energy bills are going up dramatically, to a Government approved 42% increase in some cases, for this summer.  Global energy cost increases are now being are passed on to consumers.  Remote work has shifted the cooling bill to the individual.  There are many cases of older people suffering heatstroke, because they felt they couldn’t afford to use the air-conditioning, due to the high cost. This is also a formula for trouble for those working from home.  The idea is that you can be more creative working from home, than in the office.  During Covid it certainly made sense, from a safety point of view.  The “creativity” part, well, I don’t know about that idea.  I don’t think it easy to be creative at home, when the temperature outside is super-hot and you are not using air-conditioning to save money.

I have told my team to come to the office and use the air-conditioning there.  We pay for it anyway, whether there is one person or everyone present.  I also recommend commuting much earlier when it is cooler and the trains are less crowded.  Cool biz is absolutely a must in this heat and I don’t see any need for jackets anymore.  Salespeople are the one group in the organisation who want to visit clients, face it face, regardless of how hot it is.  That means heading out into the heat to do so.  While face-to-face is ideal, this heat tells me that virtual meetings which were okay during Covid for sales meetings will be okay now too.

As the leaders, we have to adjust our expectations to how much productivity we can expect from our team in these hot conditions.  It is hard to think well and clearly when your brain is frying.  Moving fast and expending lots of energy is not a good idea, when it is so hot. We need to leave earlier for appointments and pace ourselves for the heat.  The heat makes us feel lethargic. As the boss, we have to accept that now during these exceptionally hot summer months, our team will be affected. We have to adjust our expectations about both the quality and quantity of work we can receive.  Carrying on as usual makes no sense and any team working for a boss who has not addressed the productivity expectation issue during extreme heat, will find that the team will not be as motivated.

 This is the era in Japan of high demand for staff and high demand from staff for improved boss EQ levels.  Being unwilling or unable to adjust expectations to accommodate the heat is bound to be a stimulus for some people to seek another more caring boss and we know people leave bosses not companies.  This may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back this year. 

There are only a limited number of things a boss can do for staff in this heat.  If there is a requirement for staff to work from home, then for these hot months of the year, the company can add some additional monies to help with the increased air-conditioning costs at home.  Effective means should be sought for paying this allowance as otherwise the staff just pay increased tax.  Being flexible on the hours being worked in the office also helps.  Starting and finishing early makes sense and bosses need to adjust the company rules about working hours during the summer months and make this a permanent arrangement, because this situation is going to continue forever.

Adjusting work goals and targets is another important aspect of boss accommodation for the daily reality of working in extreme heat.  Speed and quality of non-sales staff can be looked at and changes made.  For salespeople, the monthly targets during summer have to reflect the new reality.  Just dividing the annual sales target into equal monthly allocations makes little sense.  There are always certain months of the year when sales are going to be down and this is no accident.  For example, January (Oshogatsu) , February (a short month) and August (Obon) are often slower months in sales because of the fewer workdays.  Bosses have to make some tweaks to the sales targets for these months and now additionally for the other summer months, to reflect this new extreme heat reality.

Obon has traditionally been a holiday time in August and perhaps the length of leave during Obon can be extended by another week or so. Clients are also taking time off during Obon, so this makes good sense to squeeze another week into the holiday schedule.  Getting staff to take their holidays is always a strange struggle in Japan, but with this increase in heat, I think bosses need to work on their persuasion skills to encourage staff to take more time off over the summer than previously.

This extreme summer heat In Japan is the new normal and we all have to look for ways to adjust to it.  Our staff expect it and we have to look for every area where we can make adjustments and make those permanent adjustments as well.

Japan is a unique country where underperformance is not considered a legitimate reason to terminate someone’s employ.  Leaders new to the country will often run into this issue.  They arrive with a mandate from HQ to “fix” Japan and get it up to a required performance standard.  As soon as the new broom brings in changes to achieve the HQ revenue targets, the trouble starts. Change is never an easy thing for Japan to deal with because the same old, same old is a known commodity and therefore a safe choice.  New represents risk and everyone here has been raised to avoid mistakes and errors and new things are inevitably going to be difficult to execute perfectly from the start.  Ergo, don’t do new things.

The new boss will have religion about the changes they want to see and in short order they discover that despite all of that head nodding agreement in the room, no one is executing the agreed changes.  The answer is simple.  As far as the Japanese leaders are concerned, they have not agreed but they have chosen not to raise their concerns in the meeting where they were discussed.  This is the western way of doing things – get everyone together, debate, then decide.  Japan doesn’t do it that way.

The nemawashi or groundwork method requires a lot of consensus building, so that the meeting is only there to rubber stamp something which has been worked out behind the scenes over a long period.  Every angle has been studied, every correlation considered, every impact divined.  Once this has been agreed to everyone’s satisfaction, then it will be raised to the top of the tree for a decision.

The new boss just raising this at a meeting before the proper due diligence has been undertaken is not considered the professional way of doing things and that is why the follow-up doesn’t get done.  People just haven’t agreed yet.  The boss remonstrates with his or her executive team but cannot get a handle on what is going on.  Some people are more resistant than others and these people get marked for removal, as individuals who are not aligned with HQ’s direction nor the new boss’s strategy. Who is right and who is wrong isn’t particularly clear, but resistance and non-performance are clear and that is how people are ejected from the team.

To the new boss, these resisters need to be dealt with ruthlessly or the mandate will never get done.  There is no tolerance for a perceived lack of loyalty.  The irony is often that the resisters are often super loyal and are trying to save the machine from itself.  They are usually super loyal to the clients and always take their side in any contest between what is good for the client and what is good for the organisation. A bunch of outside HQ ideas being forced on Japan is not seen as having the right amount of depth of understanding of the market and the customer base.  Not doing what HQ suggests is seen as the smarter move because the people sitting in HQ have close to zero understanding of Japan and how things really work.  The newly minted boss has been given their marching orders and they will be removed if they don’t follow them to the letter.  The new boss is therefore resisted as a clueless plant from HQ, doing the bidding of people even more clueless than they are.  It is a head-on collision just waiting to happen.

After a couple of years of experience gained in Japan and a better understanding of client needs, the new boss starts to open their eyes and become a lot less rambunctious.  The resisters have been canned or calmed.  Those who left have moved on to the next company and they won’t be coming back.  They took all the client relationships with them too, as the new boss slowly discovers to their chagrin.  This happened for one of the senior Japanese staff at an organisation I know well.  The new broom got rid of him and without knowing it, had just destroyed decades of deep relationship build with the buyers, once a market leading jewel in the crown for that organisation. That new broom was arrogant and clueless, so I am not sure if he ever appreciated what he had done.

New leaders have their marching orders from HQ but they would be wise to take their time trying to implement them.  Get to know the people first, especially the key clients.  It is much easier to educate HQ idiots about Japan, than to find people with decades of relationships and deep knowledge of the area.  Of course, there will be underperformers who should be removed, but make sure they actually are underperformers first before taking any drastic action.

It is very frustrating at times, being a leader.  Staff don’t hit their targets, forget things they need to do, complete tasks in a less than satisfactory manner and make stupid mistakes.  Time poor leaders are the norm, so we are always operating on minimums to get it all done.  We are usually in a rush, and this is when we get ourselves into trouble as the leader.  We genuflect in the general direction of empathy, being a critical aspect of the leader’s people skills but often we forget to walk the talk.  Our mouth gets ahead of our brain and we say things which may not have been the best choice or at the appropriate moment.  Too late, it is out there.

 Our internal tensions push us to being more direct than needed.  There can be a tough conversation requiredand a plan for that is the best course of action, but we sometimes go ahead with no plan.  Our emotional quotient, rather than just our intelligence quotient, is highlighted as being so important today, but that word “emotional” is hanging there.  We can be dragged off course and abandon the best laid plans because of that emotional preponderance to say what we are thinking with no filters.

 One habit we should get into is to beat around the bush a bit more.  That sounds counter-intuitive for a leader doesn’t it?  Leaders should be clear, concise and efficient.  Efficient is not the same as effective though.  Our concise communication skill can sometimes be too sharp for the situation and a more rounded, softer approach may be a better alternative.  We don’t have to go on verbal wanderings at length, but sometimes a detour may be the best way to get to where we want to arrive.

 The piece which we often miss in our communication with staff is the context or the background of our point or our thinking.  We just wade straight in with what we want.  This what is often followed up with by the how they should do it.  That is all fine and good but the why bit is missing. 

 The habit we have to develop is to start with the context and the background, and this is where the why is incorporated.  That means we have to break up a routine we may have been following for many years and it may take us some practice to get used to doing things this way, but we need to stick with it. So when we want to make a point, we should ask ourselves why we think what we think.  We will have come to this conclusion through experience, from something we have read, heard, or seen.  Usually we are not just making stuff up or winging it.  Rather, we are operating from a solid viewpoint which informs our opinion.  The key point here is to not just state the opinion, but to share how that opinion was arrived at.  The temptation though is to tell the staff stuff and we leave it at that, because that is what we have found is the fastest way of getting the message across, so we can get scurry back to the many other tasks confronting us.

 By leaving out the context, we run the danger of the staff not fully understanding the urgency or the rationale for the action needed.  We should begin with the background to the issue and then very succinctly nominate the action we need from them.  There should only be one action because the temptation is to load them up with a multitude of tasks which can dilute the key action required.  Immediately following the action requirement, we need to add why this will be the best course of action and what is the benefit if we do this.  Again, this should concentrate on the main benefit, even though there may be many.  If we keep adding benefits, we are again diluting the power of the main benefit and weakening our idea’s potency.

 This combination is disarming for the listener.  Often, while we are explaining the background, their mind is racing toward an action which will suit the situation being unveiled. In fact, they will often get there before we do and so when we state the action, it is already accepted and now old hat for them.  That would be a perfect outcome from a persuasion point of view.

 As I mentioned, this requires quite a shift in approach and we need to defuse the constant desire to shorten the time for everything.  Building new habits seems to take forever and there will be many failures along the way, as we just launch forth with the what and the how and then reflect, “damn, I forgot to talk about the context first and explain the why”.  The point is to keep trying and gradually make this the default mode of explanation to staff.

Some problems are relatively difficult and can be fixed, ignored or coped with.  Others are more substantial and can place the entire enterprise at risk.  Covid certainly struck some industries harder than others and we have seen many venerable establishments disappear.  The Japanese government wisely made low-interest loans available to many companies on the basis that keeping the doors open and the staff employed would be a better outcome for the economy.  In 2008, during the Global Financial Crisis, the Australian government pumped money into the economy and the country sailed through that crisis unscathed.  This works at the macro level but what about what is going on inside the organisations? 

Staff realise that business is bad and they become concerned about the ability of the organisation to survive.  When something like Covid affects a whole industry, there may be no real alternatives for those staff thinking of leaving.  A case of “am I jumping out of the frying pan into the fire?”.  What should the leader do, though?  Is transparency about the actual financial situation the right move?  Will a clearer knowledge of how bad things are spur the team on to work harder or will they collapse into lethargy, as nothing seems it will make a difference, because things are so bad?

 This is a broad stereotype, but in Japan, staff are loyal and willing to work hard to preserve the enterprise.  I believe transparency is a good idea up to a certain point.  It must be matched with a solid communication package of hope to go with it.  The boss must be upbeat, no matter how depressed they are about the financial situation.  They cannot share those feelings with anyone.  Even your spouse or partner has to be kept in the dark about how you are really feeling.  That may sound like bad marital advice, but scaring the family about the security of the family source of income doubles the stress levels.  Somehow, the boss has to be positive in every environment, no matter how dark their feeling or their sense of doom and gloom.

Exhortations to work harder is a fine thing for the boss to disseminate to the team, but that won’t be enough.  The team needs a plan of action.  Actually, they need to be told about Plans A, B and C.  They also need to see these plans being rolled out and they need to be kept up to date on progress, no matter how humble.

Preserving cash has to be the number one goal.  Cash is not King, as we often hear.  That designation only applies when things are going well.  In bad times, cash is oxygen.  We can last quite a long time with just water, but only a few minutes without oxygen and so that is the better metaphor.  There may be a call to be made over how transparent the boss is about the financial situation.  Explaining the current profit and loss situation is one level of transparency.  Revealing the cash burn rate and the cash reserve situation is another entirely different level of openness.  I don’t have a good answer on this one, because it will depend on so many things.  How much cash is left and how severe is the burn rate?  What is the revenue forecast for the coming months?  What monies can we stop paying for a while until things get better?

The danger is when some sectors in the industry recover faster than yours or when other industries are hiring and there are escape routes for those team members worried about the firm’s longevity.  This is when the communication skills of the leader are really tested.  Explaining that there is a future for the business and that this too will pass becomes critical for keeping people on board.  It is a delicate balance between expressing a strong sense of urgency without it beginning to sound like panic.  That is the needle we have to thread as leaders.  Be realistic but upbeat, open but not gloomy. 

 All of this has to be done against a background of sleepless nights and constant worries about the collapse of the enterprise.  The key is to protect our mental health.  We need to be directly working on managing our stress and inserting positive messages into our brain.  The negative messages will find their way in on their own without us helping them, so we need to accentuate the positive as a counterbalance.  We need to read positive texts and work on conditioning our brain to have hope and belief that we can pull through this period of turmoil.  Listening to positive motivational messages is a good thing to be doing, so we need to find those authors and then pump that good stuff into our mind.  None of these are instant fixes, but they will rally our hopes, change our perspectives and coalesce our strengths for the fight.

One of the simplest tools is this three-part analysis:

1.     Very carefully clarify, in minute detail, what is the worst thing which could happen

2.     Stop kidding yourself and accept that the worst will happen and you cannot stop it

3.     Try to find as many ways as possible to improve on the worst case scenario

Again, there is no panacea here. What we can do is switch our mental framework from falling apart while facing oblivion, to forging some degree of hope.  We have to look for how to survive the looming apocalyptic meltdown.

Artificial intelligence is bringing a lot of speed to tasks and helping with mundane work.  As we all become better at prompting the machine, we will uncover greater utility for it to propel our work.  It will not be able to replace the human aspect of leadership though. One thing it won’t fix is watching 40% of new hires walk out the door within the first three or four years of employ.  I was talking to an HR person from a very large international firm about this issue.  Originally, there had been a plan to provide training for these new recruits, with a view to keeping them in the company and not having them wander off to competitors.  In the end, they budgeted nothing for the training, so the whole idea collapsed.  The early departure problem is still there though.

I suggested that the actual issue is with the young recruits’ supervisors and that this group needs some remedial training.  I said “remedial” because they have to unlearn some bad thinking and bad habits.  Most of these supervisors will be section heads and they have grown up in business in eras when candidates for employ were plentiful.  If one left, no problem, you just hired in a replacement.  That is no longer that easy, as a declining youth population throws up an increasing free agent mentality on the part of the young. They know they can easily get a job somewhere else, if they don’t feel they are appreciated enough or that the firm culture is the right fit.  If the section heads don’t understand that point, then they are not adjusting their thinking about how to retain these vibrant and increasing sought after resources. 

Confusion about the difference between managing and leading will also become a barrier to retention.  Most Japanese leaders are actually managers.  What is the difference?  Leaders do three things in particular: (1) they set the direction for the team (2) they develop their people through coaching and feedback and (3) they make sure the processes run on time, on budget and at the quality standard required.  Japanese managers find all of their time taken up with just number three on this list and unfortunately, they neglect number two to the detriment of the firm.

To make it even worse, poor time management and delegation skills will ensure that the supervisors won’t have enough time to coach their young charges, even if they were to recognise this was an important part of their work.  Doubling down on the human dimension of leadership requires a lot of time.  Feedback that isn’t positive will not suit the young and they will soon feel dissatisfied with their bosses.  They want coaching and attention, but it will be a “leftover” activity, rather than a primary leadership time allocation. 

Delegation is widely misunderstood in Japan.  It is seen as shovelling the boss’s work on to the desk of an underling, as a way of reducing the boss workload.  In fact, delegation is a powerful coaching tool.  It enables younger staff to experience parts of the boss’s job and to build their skills as a springboard to taking on higher responsibility.  Even the peak industry body the Keidanren is talking about promotion through capability, rather than time in the company. If we are in an era of individual capability driving promotion, then the ability to do parts of the boss’s job will help select certain people to rise to the next step in their career path.

We know that staff engagement is triggered when the staff feel the boss really cares about them.  Busy bosses may not be able to communicate that because they are not putting in the time to make that feeing real. The boss’s communication skills may be underdeveloped and they may fail in that basic regard. They probably have never had leadership training.  So far, they have been piecing it together by themselves, but have ended up with a partially completed puzzle and important skill sets have remained undeveloped. When there were candidates aplenty, it probably didn’t matter, but those days are far behind us. Supervisors who cannot allocate the time will be puzzled when the young up and depart and their pleas for replacements to HR are not yielding any fruit.  The war for talent and especially the young and talented, will only become diabolical. 

It is going to get worse. The hiring costs of an in demand and in short supply group of young people will go up and they will start to hit the radar of ravenous recruiters.  Usually, the fees for placing the young are not worth the effort, but as recruiters become more desperate for revenues, they will lower their entry price points. The rising wage costs of the young will create a nexus of cross over that will work for the recruiters.  The next stage will be recruiters luring the young out of their current firms like the Pied Piper and placing them with the competitors.  They know that 40% of the population is ready to move and so this will become a happy hunting ground for recruiters - at your expense.

Companies need to train their supervisors to cope with this war for talent, which is rapidly becoming a zero-sum game of winners and losers.  Those firms who don’t get it will be the training ground for their competitors new hires, as the young are getting pried out of their current company to go elsewhere.

 Many of our clients have told us that Covid and especially remote working situations, revealed a lot about the leadership frailty of their organisations.  When everyone was in the office, the inability of mid-level leaders to lead was effectively masked.  However, once the big homeward bound migration took place, sizeable gaps suddenly became apparent. These gaps were around the communication of the firm’s strategy, direction, the alignment of the team and getting things done.  Each of these aspects had to be updated in a rapidly changing Covid environment, where in the early phases, there were no vaccines and people were dying in droves.

The latest Covid variants are highly contagious, but less lethal.  The government has moved Covid down the scale to be equivalent with the flu.  Current numbers are about 70% of firms are back in the office in Japan, so there is now a more complex hybrid challenge to deal with.  Communication becomes more difficult when some staff are meeting colleagues in person and others are at home not joining those spontaneous “water cooler” conversations.  This creates a two-tier work-force of those in the know and those who suffer “FOMO” – the fear of missing out.

The boss’s job is to make sure the coordination of the work and communication across the firm are working.  This has become more difficult and so new tools are required.  More frequent all-hands meetings create opportunities to get key messages out to everyone simultaneously.  Mid-level managers then need to drive that messaging further. We all know, a message once told, melts very quickly and people don’t recollect it for long.  The forgetting curve is vicious.  We forget half of what we are told in an hour, seventy percent in a day and ninety percent in a week.  No wonder we have to keep hammering important content to make sure everyone hears it and understands it.

A simple thing like the “chorei” or morning team meeting become more complex.  These were a standard tool for coordinating within the team and for messaging to the team from their supervisors.  If they are being held in the office again, then those at home cannot attend.  If it is held on-line, with those at home and those in the office all online, then what is the point of having people get together in the office?  We can easily find ourselves getting the worst of both worlds, if we are not careful.

Email and different apps become important tools of communication, which allow people to access the information at their pace.  Getting key details written creates a permanent record which can be referred to, easily shared and stored.  Verbal instructions and information sharing are effervescent however and don’t linger long.  Email becomes a bit of a pain because we are inundated with tsunamis of email into our inbox and we can quickly become overwhelmed.  The balance between the spoken and written word needs some consideration, to ascertain which communication vehicles are now needed, work best and also how the whole messaging strategy should hang together.

 Teamwork is like a muscle which atrophies when not exercised.  Trying to build teamwork when everyone was at home was difficult and probably for most firms, unsatisfying for the team members.  Even though we may troop back into the office, the assumption shouldn’t be made that we can just pick up the threads of where we were and everything will automatically fit back into place again. 

There are some bound to be some people who have become isolated during Covid and have retreated into themselves over these last three years.  Issues which may not have been apparent when everyone was mixing every day in the office may now require some close observation and monitoring.  We can physically bring them back to the office, but they remain isolated and avoid others, seeking seating arrangements where they can work alone, away from everyone.    Mental health issues become a concern in these cases and we need to gently and gradually re-tribalise some of the team. 

Many firm’s CFOs are re-thinking the layout of the office space to make it smaller, given there are rent savings to be had by outsourcing to the staff, to have them pay for and provide their own working space at home.  Others are keeping the same amount of space, but removing desks and creating more collaborative areas and also quiet spaces, to cater for a variety of working style preferences.  These are issues we never faced before, when we had traditional office working arrangements and naturally it all becomes an experiment to some extent. 

There is also a new question which is popping up in staff interviews. In the background are certain expectations, given there are more jobs going than candidates available to fill the positions.  The potential new hires are asking, “Can I work from home” and if the answer is “no”, then many are declining the opportunity to join.  Having everyone back together after three years may instil some buzz. We may be getting better engagement back into office, with people laughing and chatting together again, yet this new hire demand for isolation defeats the purpose of re-grouping.  Are we going to trade off the teamwork we want to resuscitate against the recruitment requirement to source more resources?  This is a tricky path we have to tread and sadly, there are no simple answers for this one. 

The post -Covid world of work has changed.  There is no reliable road map we can use and it will probably take a couple of years before some conclusions can be drawn about which path is the best one.  The keys will be greater flexibility and a willingness to host dual, possibly even contradicting systems simultaneously, until there is greater clarity about how best to move forward.

 Three candidates in a row with mental health problems and recruiting fees in the tens of thousands of dollars.  Am I just unlucky or is this a trend? Our first instinct as leaders will be to not recruit people who are broken and to avoid those who are suffering with mental health issues. We will worry they will just disappear into a prolonged medical leave absence and we will be footing the bills for the duration.  The issue though is these candidates are often ninja level masters of illusion and obfuscation. The hidden mental health problems don’t reveal themselves until after they have passed probation.  Some recruiting companies have nifty little clauses in their contracts that state if the person isn’t fired or resigns before the end of the first three months’ probation period, then there will be no contractual obligation to replace them and you are out of pocket.  Everyone, go back and read this clause in your existing contract with your recruiters and agitate to change it.  I think 60 days should be the period, rather than thirty, because you can’t tell anything much about the potential problems in such a short span. 

On the other hand, is this going to be the new reality?  I have written before about leaders having to brace themselves to deal with under-performance and low levels of ability on the part of their new hires.  This is another level up in the degree of difficulty we will potentially be facing.  The core reasons are the same - we just cannot get people.  Will we have to make some severe choices here?  Will we have to say to ourselves, “am I better off having someone with mental health problems and then try and deal with that problem, rather than have no one on board and have the other issues associated with a lack of resources?”.

Do we have to learn how to accommodate the needs of new hires with mental health problems and accept that they may disappear for extended periods of time?  There is a lot of talk today about having Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) inside companies.  This is seen as a way to invigorate the organisation, by enabling it to tap into creativity and innovation through promoting diverse thinking and ideas.  Does this approach extend to people with mental health issues?  Part of DEI is providing a psychologically safe environment where people can feel safe to contribute in their own way.  Is the logical extension of this idea, creating an environment where staff with mental health issues can feel safe and able to perform their roles, without having to retreat to sick leave to recover?

There is a lot of attention now on harassment of various types in the workplace.  Bosses scolding staff, yelling at them in public, pressuring people for results etc., are getting flagged as potential harassment.  For a lot of bosses dragged up in business in the “tough love” school of hard knocks, this is almost like a joke.  Increasingly, companies are not treating it as a joke. HR will be making the rounds to talk to bosses who are having claims of power harassment etc., made against them by their staff.  The pressure on bosses for results doesn't diminish by the way, so the navigation of this issue is getting increasingly more difficult.

Okay, where were the psychologically safe environments for me, when I was being pressured by my bosses for results, as I was growing up in business?  There were none.  So the issue is how do I adjust my expectations for this current reality?  I am sure many bosses recall their own experiences and tough times and think young people are weak and indulgent.  What do these bosses make of people with mental health issues wanting to work in their companies?  I am asking for a friend!

Many of us are adjusting our expectations, communication and manner to accommodate these young people, who come to us with quite different ideas to what we knew as our reality.  We do this because we have few choices about who we can hire these days and this generation all seem to have a similar need, which is quite different from our own experiences.

Do we now have to make another adjustment and accommodate people with mental health issues?  We still cannot get people, so we are making hard choices. Are we trained for this type of thing?  Are we flexible enough to make the necessary changes.  Let me tell a joke I made up to illustrate the point.  I tell people that Japanese staff love change.  The listeners look at me like I am totally nuts.  I then tell them that the Japanese staff want the boss, colleagues, clients, markets and organisation to change and they will stay just the same.  Is this us, the bosses?  Do we want everyone else to change, but we want to stay the exact same and keep leading as we always have, as if nothing has changed in society?

As a leader, try yelling “be inclusive, be inclusive, be inclusive” at your staff members.  You are trying to move the organisation toward achieving greater creativity and innovation through the benefits of diversity.  You know that becoming more inclusive is the catalyst for gaining diversity inside the firm.  The President and the Executive Team have made the official pronouncements about using diversity to better prepare for a more creative and successful future.  Whatever your own thoughts on the merits of diversity, it is your leader job to turn their pronouncement into reality.  Being a smart leader, you know that just yelling at your staff to be more inclusive is a nonsense and won’t work.  Great, so what do you do about those in your charge?

This type of major transformation is not the moment for shotgun style team meetings or town halls to convince everyone to get on board with senior management’s directions.  En masse, that blanket approach will yield a lot of tatemae or superficial acceptance, but the honne of entrenched resistance will still remain there, hidden and submerged.

In Japan, diversity actually means gender diversity, rather than LGBTQ, racial or religious diversity.  To drive gender diversity requires a lot of one-on-one meetings with the team members.  Busy leaders may think, “well diversity is a noteworthy aspiration, from the President, but in reality, I am already busy with my current workload. Where can I possibly fit in time for this additional activity?”.  All true, but there will be no change unless the leaders make the time available to have those individual conversations with their team members.

What will those conversations involve?  To get transformational change, we need to work on our emotional change (EC) and add to it changes in behaviour (BC), to get the performance change (PC) we need.  In our talks with our staff, we should explore their mindset about inclusion?  They may have never thought about it before, so this is a vital first step for them. What are they thinking about this new direction?  Do they think this new direction will harm the organisation and that the senior executives are mistaken in their approach?

What is their opinion about gender diversity?  Do they have female relatives or friends who may currently be affected by a lack of inclusion in their workplaces? What are their set of beliefs about this topic?  Have they inherited dated or mistaken ideas from others, rather than investigating what they think, based on their own research? What emotions does inclusion trigger for them?  Are they fearful of the consequences?  If they are men, do they see women as rivals or competitors for future promotion to senior positions? What insights do they have about how to secure an inclusive workplace?  If it was going to work here, how would we get it to work?  What could we do to make this environment more inclusive and more innovative by drawing on the strengths of the whole team?  How can we position ourselves to beat the competition?

 Today 54% of women are in the workplace in Japan, predominantly in low paying part-time jobs.  Assuming a five-day work week, 70% of men worked an eight-hour day or more while only 40% of women did the same. More women will have to enter the workforce to make up for the labour shortage being driven by the declining birth rate in Japan.  There will be some increased immigration for blue collars workers into Japan, as government policy has become more flexible to deal with a shortage of workers.  Nevertheless, the capacity of firms to access women will only grow in importance. Companies will need to become more inclusive to attract and retain them.

Leaders need to work through these scenarios with their staff. Everyone needs to understand this is a vital step for the economy, if Japan is to prosper as a sophisticated and advanced economy in the world.  They also need to align that macro view with what it means at the micro level for the team members.  None of us work in a bubble and what happens to the overall economy impacts all of us.  The point needs to be made that the whole country needs inclusivity first, in order to get to diversity, to tap into the full innovation potential of all the workers.

Once we have worked on the emotional component of the transformational change, we need the staff to engage in behaviour change.  Skill sets need to be upgraded around time management, teamwork and communication with colleagues. The actions each staff member takes adds up to the totality of the firm’s actions to embrace inclusivity to get to diversity.  It has to be clarified that this is not someone else’s responsibility and certain members of staff cannot simply continue doing what they have always done.  If we are going to do this, what do we need to change and what things do we need to introduce?

Behaviour change is difficult, but once awareness levels have been heightened, it gets easier to spot where a previous behaviour has to be replaced with a new behaviour.  Communication styles also need attention.  Inclusivity in communication may force old habits to change.  Clubby all male cliques will need to change, so that the women working in the organisation feel they are valued and welcomed too.  Interactions on a daily basis set the tone of the organisation’s commitment to inclusion.  This is where the EQ part comes in and the realisation made that the IQ component can’t solely be relied upon for change.

When we get the emotional and behavioural elements to work, then we can see actual results where inclusivity is happening on a daily basis.  This will provide the platform to sustain the diversity needed in the organisation.  Leaders will incorporate inclusivity into the leadership repertoire and deeper relations between colleagues will become a given.  We can open the door to diversity and with it to innovation.

“Does this candidate have a pulse?  Yes? Then we need to hire them”.  Does this sound ridiculous, a fantasy and dystopian snippet from the future?  The Japanese Government says that if we don’t see a turnaround in the population decline before 2030, then the country will get tipped over the edge and into a decline from which it cannot easily recover.  Covid wiped out the tourism and hospitality industries and there are still difficulties in hiring people.  A lot of workers decided these industries were too unstable and have quietly moved elsewhere and are not going back.

If you need English speakers, then good luck because they are in massive short supply.  The Kishida Cabinet says they are going to encourage 150,000 young Japanese to get degrees overseas.  This is up from the current 62,000 a year and they want to achieve this increased target by 2033.  That is good and we need this programme to work, but what do we do between now and 2033?  Once upon a time, the foreign multi-nationals had this English-speaking market for themselves.  Western educated English speakers were a challenge for Japanese companies, as they had been exposed to foreign concepts and weren't as easy to manage as local staff.

Things have changed.  Japanese companies have to search beyond Japan for new and larger markets, as Japan contracts and the domestic growth prospects are meager. The problem with this approach is you need people you can send off shore to run the show or you need people here, who can deal with the enterprise staff located overseas.  Now these domestic but internationalising companies are vying for the few English speakers.  The move toward meritocracy rather than the typical nenko joretsu (年功序列) escalator promotion system has made domestic companies more tolerable.  Mid-career hiring has also become more accepted, so this gradual increase in flexibility makes it easier for domestic companies to jostle for English speakers.

We are moving to a free agent system of employ, where the candidates are interviewing the hiring staff, rather than the other way around.  Does this firm provide training, allow working from home, what is the work/life balance philosophy here, etc., are the types of questions popping up in interviews, which we have never had to contemplate before.

We know that 80% of the staff account for 20% of the results and in the past we had some freedom of having the worst performers move on.  Given the hot market for candidates this is still a viable option, to have them depart willingly, except what do you about finding a replacement?  I heard a Japanese HR executive working for a foreign multinational making some macho remarks about moving out underperformers the other day and I was quietly thinking, is that really a sustainable policy, given where we are headed?  What fantasy world is this guy living in?

The future for leaders is going to be how to lead seriously underperforming staff?  We have all grown up in a buyer’s market and we are now in a seller’s market.  We were raised on tough love and no excuses for underperformance, but if we apply this regimen, we won’t have enough staff to run the organisation.  Suddenly, empathy has become a clear market differentiator for leaders between those who will keep staff and those who will see them tramp out the door to the competitors.  What empathy did we experience on the way up through the ranks?  Not much that I can remember, so how do we tap into this mysterious well of goodness and bonhomie?

Our staff are also getting older and it seems to me that there is a definite increase in sick leave requests.  I don’t know whether the pressure of modern business is causing more stress than before and therefore sick leave applications are increasing or is it because they are just getting older?  Time off has to be respected for illness and we can’t be beating the drum to ramming speed on the oars of the slave galley, just because we can. Bosses need a lot more patience with and empathy for the team and more tolerance for the days of productive work which are increasingly being lost. They are definitely lost but the targets are not coming down to compensate.

We are finding ourselves in a vice. We are being crushed by targets and the pressure to produce on the one side and a staffing situation on the other, where if you push too hard, you won’t have enough people left to run the ship. Despite our own harsh upbringing in business, we have to strike out in a new direction where communication, people skills, empathy and coming out of your Comfort Zone are the aces in the pack for leaders.

The big chiefs in the organisation have embraced the idea of Diversity, Equity and inclusion (DEI).  Even more, they expect Middle Management to get on board with this push and make it happen.  That means people who probably haven’t spent one second thinking about DEI now have to be the role models for the new cause.  I always tell people that the success or failure of DEI in Japan is decided at the kacho or section chief level.  This is where the bulk of the people are being supervised and where the decisions about coaching, promotion and role allocations are made.  The President has signed off on the idea and the kacho level leaders have to drive this throughout the ranks.  Here are nine ideas for kacho level leaders to consider regarding how to turn the rhetoric into a reality.

1.      Avoid negative self-talk

It is not unusual that change represents a challenge and the self-talk we generate as a result may easily become negative.  If we allow this to happen, then the people under our supervision will follow our lead. The change effort will flounder.  We may have concerns, fears and even resentment.  The President however, didn’t ask us for our input and expects us to lead the charge on getting DEI stitched into the fabric of the firm.  What comes out of our mouth will determine what everyone in the section will think about the change and so we must be highly disciplined to get the messaging right.

2.     Be open about your concerns

There is no problem with expressing our own struggle with the change.  That is different to saying this is nonsense and we can all just ignore the President’s initiatives.  It is a good launching point to get the team involved in how we can implement the new approach and what we can do about it in our part of the machine.  Never forget “people own the world they create”, so allow them to have ownership of the process.

3.     Be realistic

Installing a new accounting system or a production line, are relatively concrete changes which are easy to understand.   Having people adopt a new way of thinking and the values which go with that are much higher order tasks.  This is territory which is at the highest levels of complexity,  for which we have probably has very little training.  We need to adjust our expectations about the speed of change possible.

4.     Gather information through questions and research

The team is looking to our leadership. We have been made the leader because we have been an expert in our area of the business.  This DEI area is a new area concerning which we need to become expert.  Any new initiative requires study and we should approach DEI in the exact same manner.

5.     Be as productive as possible in your current role

DEI is the type of initiative which is a major change in how we think about the possibility of getting more creativity in our business and how we work together.  It doesn't mean that all of the other goals are dropped or that our accountability is reduced.  In fact the opposite, this is now a an additional role we must play and so do so to the best of our ability.  Our capacity to rise through the ranks is reflected in how well we adjust and adapt to change and this is an arena where we can demonstrate that capacity. 

6.     Give new ideas a chance

We may know little about the WHY of DEI and often organisations are not skilled in this department.  Nonetheless, we have to self-educate on this topic.  We can dwell on the negatives or we can look for the positives. As we are the leader, we can be assured our team members will have no problem identifying the negatives, so it is up to us to lead the charge on the positives.

7.     Recognise successes

Leaders have a tendency to wait until everything is completed before they celebrate success of recognise the efforts put into the project.  DEI isn't a project with a timeline.  It is a fundamental change in how we work, so there is no end point.  We need to be looking for any progress on the journey and making a point to embrace, recognise and celebrate it.

8.     Consider contacting your organisation’s internal resources

This could be a perfect opportunity to ask for coaching or mentoring on how to execute on delivering DEI.  This is new and maybe there are resources which can save us time and effort.  No one would be expected to know all there is to know about something as new as DEI and therefore there is no stigma to asking for help to become a better leader of the process on integration of DEI into daily work.

9.     Work on being a leader

Leaders do three things – set the direction, make sure all the processes are working well and build the people. Introducing DEI into the leadership equation is part of the building the people component.  If we are able to gather all of the creativity of our teams and our competitors cannot, then we will win against them over the long term.  We will out innovate them and our role is to make sure DEI does its part to deliver that innovation.

Big cultural changes like DEI can’t be easily forced downward from the Executive Suite.  At some point the people leaders have to get behind it or the whole thing becomes a box ticking exercise and none of the benefits accrue to the organisation.  Work on the kacho level leaders if you want to get real benefits from DEI, they hold the keys to the kingdom.

The organisation gets religion about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).  The senior management team, led by the President, decide this is a key path for moving forward.  The upside in achieving greater innovation and creativity by embracing a more inclusive workplace is seen as the Holy Grail.  The Middle Managers are told to get behind the push on DEI.  Brilliant that getting change in Japan is so easy.  Japanese staff love change.  They want their boss to change, their subordinates to change, their colleagues to change, their clients to change, but they want to stay precisely the same.  DEI in Japan is mainly about gender issues, rather than race, religion or national identity. The male Middle Managers themselves are part of the cohort of not wanting to change, regardless of what senior management may be saying.  No one will openly oppose the pronouncements from the top, but that doesn’t mean there is any real enthusiasm for change.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist wrote a book called “On Death and Dying” which identified five stages of grief, which can be extrapolated to assist our understanding about how humans deal with DEI change.   

1.     Shock

The initial reaction to hearing that the organization is going to embrace change around DEI, can be very confronting for male Middle Managers and the males in their teams.  Usually, the communication in organisations around change is minimal.  Basically, senior management has made this decision, this is why and get on with it.  The lack of what is considered satisfactory explanation sets off rumours, mis-information and confusion in the ranks.  This is why companies must do a thorough job of selling DEI to the team, in depth and continuously.

2.     Denial

After the initial shock of the announcement a sense of disbelief can spread and hopes that this will be a “light” intervention which won’t really affect the status quo.  Japan defers to age and stage in companies and what will DEI mean for the current hierarchy?  Will there be a lessening of opportunities for males to advance, in order to meet some arbitrary ratio of female managers?  Why do we need to change at all, when this is how it has always been done?  Senior management needs to recognise these fears and directly address them.  Information vacuums will get filled with gossip, inuendo and false flags unless there is a big sales effort on the positives of change.

3.     Anger

Isn’t this a stupid idea from senior management? Won’t this weaken the strength of the organisation, relative to our rivals and won’t clients have trouble accepting the change and therefore we will lose business?  Pronouncements are clearly not going to be enough.  When DEI first popped up on the radar in Japan, companies would ask us to train the women.  I always questioned that assumption.  The kacho or section head is the key person who needs educating.  Usually a he, the kacho determines who gets coached, given delegated tasks for personal development and who gets promoted. Unless the kacho gets it, there will be an underlying resistance to DEI which will never be vocalized, but which will continue regardless. 

4.     Bargaining

“DEI is okay in theory, but our case is different.  We have special circumstances here and so some adjustments have to be made”.  This is typically how Middle Management whittles away at changes they don’t like.  They are ninja at finding all the problems and can come up with tons of justifications to dilute the change effort, while all the while embracing the headline statements as gospel.  Naturally, there will be some flexibility needed to role out DEI programmes however senior management have to be very vigilant about how the processes are worked though.

5.     Dejection

When male Middle Managers realise that this DEI change is here to stay, they can become demotivated.  They fear their years of loyal service has been devalued and their future promotion prospects have been impinged, all for a fad.  They need to be told they are valued, they have a role here and that the form needs their contribution to arm it with the creativity and innovation needed to best the competition.

6.     Letting Go

People believe what they see.  When the benefits of greater inclusion become a reality, it is easier to get behind the idea, which is no longer seen as just some ivory tower theory.  Also, the consistent support for DEI from the senior leadership group underlines this isn’t going away and is becoming a permanent fixture of how the organisation functions. 

7.      Exploration

Diversity of opinion and inclusion of different angles around decision-making is what makes the adoption of DEI an advantage inside the organisation.  If the decisions are better and if the outcomes are better, than what could have been achieved before, then this initiates a different set of responses and changes thinking about what is possible.

8.     Acceptance

Gradually, it becomes clear that the worst fears were not realized. Even unexpected benefits appeared.  The doomsayers were proven wrong, the system settles down to a new reality and everyone moves forward. 

Planning for these stages would be a clever move by senior management, in addition to their various pronouncements from on high.  The DEI process is a process and as such, it has to be supported all the way through these seven stages, if it is going to stick.  That requires consistent work over many years, until DEI becomes part of the culture of the organisation.  Best to plan for that from the beginning.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are the end goal for companies today, because there is a recognition that the value derived warrants the effort.  The WHY part is certainly well understood and female manager ratios are often being set as company targets.  Key triggers to achieving a diverse workforce are through gaining inclusion within the work environment.  The issues arise though, as to just how to make that goal a reality.  Certainly, if there is an effective communication capability by the team, then understanding each other and accepting differences becomes that much easier.  We all have experienced arguments and fights with people because there has been some misunderstanding or poor communication going on, making it hard to work together.

Wishing to be more inclusive is fine, but it takes work and one area is in the communication skills remit.  We can find some people too fast when they are speaking so we are not catching the detail.  There are others who may be too cryptic and we can’t plumb the meaning of what they are saying.  We don’t like it when others finish our sentences, speak over us or cut us off, before we get to the point we want to make.

There are four communication styles we often uncover when listening to others:

1.     Friendly. They like people, are upbeat, confident and happy. 

2.     Analytical. They love detail, facts, statistics, evidence and can be very detail oriented.

3.     Excitable. Their mouth can get ahead of their brain and they can be quite hard to keep up with, as they move through topics at a rapid clip.

4.      Dominating.  They want to run things, make the decisions and have others follow what they want to do.

We might have some communication favourites or we may think that only one type of communication style is correct and the others need changing.  That usually proves to be impossible and we may want to step back and take a different approach.  We can decide to adapt to the style they like.  We are looking to build rapport based on the style they prefer.  They may have topics they want to talk about and we talk about these issues of importance to them.  If they are fast-paced, we may need to speed up or if they are more laconic, we may need to slow down from our usual delivery speed. If we want to persuade someone of our point of view, matching their preferred style of communication removes a lot of barriers from the beginning.

Another great tool is storytelling.  There are some aspects of storytelling which are more effective than others.  The start of the story needs to have a “hook”, which will cut through all the clutter going on in the listener's mind and grab their attention, so that they will give us their full attention.  We should make the story as personal as possible.  This really draws in an audience because it is easy to relate to what they are hearing.  It should exhibit emotion and these are usually things like anger, fear, excitement, anticipation, joy, etc. Lastly, it should have some aspect of conflict and challenge and attached to this some finality of the issue, either positive or negative. 

We need to introduce the characters in the story and the most effective are people they know, either directly or through reputation.  We need to transport them to a place in their mind’s eye, where these characters are located and we need to place them in a season and year if possible.  For example, “Let me tell you what happened recently, which could change the direction of the business. It was that snowy Tokyo day this year, rather late in the season in March, when I made my way downtown to a meeting with Bill Brown, the visiting global CFO.  We got together on the 28th floor of the Headquarters in the main Boardroom”.  The people listening know the Boardroom, probably know Bill Brown and have experienced a snowy day in Tokyo, so they can recreate this scene in their own mind.  The “hook” at the start about possibly changing the business is guaranteed to get everyone’s attention.

We need to introduce some tension into the story – a challenge or a problem which raises the stakes of the decision-making.  For example, “Frankly, I am really concerned about what is going to happen to us. Bill is considering reducing the Tokyo operation staffing by 25% and it is our job to persuade him otherwise”.  Now we have a problem which is a serious challenge to the business in Japan and people will want to know what happened in that meeting.  We have introduced an emotional element regarding how we feel about this outcome. Then we can say, “this is where I need your support”.  Next, let’s outline what they can do to help us and what the resolution we need will look like.

When these elements are combined, it doesn’t matter who is the storyteller.  They could be female, young, foreigner or Japanese. We are going to be listened to and taken seriously, because of the way we have crafted the communication piece.  We hone the delivery of this story to fit in with the preferred communication style of the listener, to make it as accessible as possible.  When we do this, we eliminate many of the barriers to inclusion and that brings us one step closer toward achieving a diverse workplace.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made the following comment on diversity in Japan, “My mission is to create a society where anyone regardless of age, gender and position would be able to play an active role and for people with various experiences and backgrounds to inspire each other”.  Today, most companies in Japan would agree with that statement and are working on improving the degree of diversity in their organisation. We know that to get to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in our organisations, the starting point is to work on improving the Inclusion component.  What happens though when we have disagreements with each other? Arguments tend to create division, bad feelings, distance and even hostility, which are all moving us further and further away from the goal of inclusion which we need to trigger diversity in the workplace. The reality is we will have differences of opinion within any team on how to spend the money, which projects to go forward with, who owns the client, etc. 

A good starting point is to understand who we are and this will help us to better respond when arguments break out.  There are basically three reactions to disagreements – passive, assertive and aggressive.  Passive reactions are where we put up no resistance and we go along with whatever the more dominant personality types decide.  We keep our opinion to ourselves and we try to not get involved.  This is a type of denial of service because we don’t bring our full array of abilities to the workplace. Assertive reactions, on the other hand,  allow the entertainment of differing opinions. You are confident in yourself and you have no hesitation to register your opinion, knowing it will not be accepted by everyone.  You are willing to take personal responsibility and will hold others to account. Aggressive reactions, however,  tend to be direct, confrontational and even combative.  You are happy to push your opinion and drive through any resistance.  You don’t care what others think.  This would be me, by the way, but it is not the best choice!

Being assertive is the best mix, I believe, because it has elements of a strong opinion mixed with diplomacy, which makes it easier to keep the people together.  So passive people need to speak up more and aggressive people (like me!) need to listen more.

Usually when we hear something we don’t like or disagree with, we tend to be consumed by our emotional reaction.  This reaction can be instantaneous, so we may be saying things which we regret later or which we subsequently think could have been expressed more effectively.  Too late.  It would be a lot better if we were to slow down our speed of reaction.  When we first hear the idea instead of reacting to it we can analyse it. Firstly, what do we think about this idea or proposal?  Now here is a very important step – consider why we think what we do?.  What have we seen, read, heard or experienced about this topic has provided us with an opinion?  We are searching our memories for the evidence which was the basis for forming our belief around this subject matter. We don’t have our opinions by accident – there is a reason, so we need to dig that basis out. 

Having gone through this process and we are talking seconds here not minutes, we are now in position to disagree with the other person’s point of view.  Rather than starting with stating our opinion, which is the normal route to begin an argument, we start with the evidence.  A very disarming way to communicate what we think is through storytelling. When a lot of people hear “storytelling” they are thinking of some convoluted long tale, but in fact, it could be completed in under a minute.

We relate where we discovered the evidence, which is the basis for forming our opinion.  We should try to frame the story in context – when was it, what season was it, where was it, who was there, what happened.  As an example, say we were facing a differing opinion over the marketing spend.  One side is thinking to reduce the spend while others are thinking to increase the investment.  Say we are in the increase the spend camp, we could make our point like this: “That is a good idea but…”.  That approach is almost guaranteed to get us into an argument.  “But”, “however” are trigger words indicating someone is going to push back on us and so we mentally gird our loins as soon as we hear these indicators.

Rather, we can relate our story to provide the background, the context, the rationale, e.g.

“In December, I was visiting our colleagues on a snowy day in London and was talking to the Head of Marketing there, Mary Smith.  She told me that they had seen a spike in leads and a substantial reduction in client acquisition costs, when they raised their ad words spend. The found that as clients were emerging from Covid, there were becoming more active in searching online for solutions to their problems.  Japan is a little behind the rest of the world in coming out of Covid, so it is likely that we will also benefit from spending more in search words over the next months here, to tap into that increasing latent demand”. 

Rather than just saying “let’s spend more money on marketing” we have marshalled our argument based on evidence and after presenting the evidence in a story format, we have made our recommendation.  We have tried to transport the listener to the London office, to have them see Mary Smith in their mind’s eye and to imagine a chilly London in winter.  We have provided the context to the point we are making.

It is easy to argue with our opinion, but harder to argue with our context.  The other side has to produce superior evidence to get us to change our position.  That is quite possible though and as the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions” and most of us are the same.  If we have better evidence than the other person we may be able to convince them or they may be able to convince us – either way, we can avoid arguing.  This process moves us closer to having an inclusive culture in the organisation and from that base we can move forward toward improving our diversity.

Internal conflict is like a cancer destroying our organisations.  This is normally a massive headache for leaders, but when trying to improve the diversity within the team, it becomes a blocker.  There is a pathway to diversity and that leads to gaining an acceptance of the necessity for inclusion first. Once achieved then diversity becomes a possibility.  Being inclusive with someone you are arguing with or now don’t like, because of some point of conflict, makes that possibility quite remote

Companies in Japan have been diligent in organising awareness sessions about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Often it is a box ticking exercise though and no one actually measures whether the firm achieved its diversity aims.  In other cases, they took it seriously but there was no result.  The awareness session ended and that was that.  The bridging from the “why” to the “how” wasn’t achieved.  There are many reasons why the transition didn’t occur and certainly one of them is unresolved conflict within the team, actively blocking attempts to become more inclusive.

Conflict can arise over processes, roles, direction, decisions and other individuals. We need to know what we are dealing with, so we need to understand exactly what is the cause of the conflict. To analyse the issues we are confronting let’s use this 5 phase prism.

1. What is the exact nature of the conflict

2. What are the conflict responses of the key people

3. what are the causes of the conflict, the root cause

4. what are the possible resolutions

5. what is the best resolution and then execute on that 

When everyone is “hot” that would be a bad time to start interrogating people about the issue.  A small delay is a good idea and allow people to cool down a bit before jumping in to sort this mess out. Don’t have the conversation in the office in a meeting room, which is quite a public forum. Instead, head outside and find a discreet coffee shop away from prying eyes so that the individuals can speak more freely.  Let’s ignore all the noise we have been hearing about what is going on and actually find out the real situation. Being questioned by the boss is never pleasant, so we must be seeking information in a way in which people are happy to share their thoughts on the matter. We need to frame our questions in a way which will allow them to bring forth all of the issues driving the conflict.  For example, we could ask, “I hear a lot of people talking about what is going on, which I am going to ignore, because I want to hear what are your concerns?”. 

We don’t want to sound accusatory, so we avoid focusing on the individuals.  Using a sports metaphor, we play the ball, not the man.  We make it clear we are here to sort this out and we are open to hearing all views on the problem. For example, “We have a big target this year, which we must hit, so what do I need to do, to make it possible for the team to achieve that goal?

The key now is to shut up and let them talk.  They will say things which will trigger a thought or generate a pertinent comment, but we should restrain those urges and let them tell us from their point of view why there is conflict in the team.  We use active listening techniques to signal we are listening, but we are not ending their sentences, jumping in with our worthy contribution or changing the subject.  We let them talk, so we can get to the bottom of the issue.  Not everyone responds the same way to conflicts so we have to be aware of the differences.

There are six conflict response styles which we should look for.

1.     Avoid. This is very common in Japan.  People decide it isn’t worth it, so they become passive.  They are opposed to what is going on so they are not getting involved in fixing the problem.

2.     Accommodate. They decide it is easier to give in to the other side so their views, ideas and insights are not being engaged.

3.     Compromise. A solution is sought, which while imperfect, will ease the tension and reduce the active conflict within the team.

4.     Collaborate. There is a willingness to find a way forward to work together for the good of the team.

5.     Immovable. No bending, no quarter given, no budging from a firmly held position.

6.     Dictate. They just tell everyone what is going to happen and they brook no disagreement.  They use the power of their personality or their position power, to force acquiescence.

Can you locate your people amongst these six reactions?  Identifying their reactions beforehand better prepares us for the conversations we will need to have and will help us to frame them in a way which is most successful.

Personalities, budget allocations, decision-making power are some of the most common sources of conflict in my experience.  Can we help with a solution which hasn’t occurred to the parties involved?  Do we need to bring in third party to help resolve this through an arbitration process. Do we need to move the final decision to the next level of executive leadership?  Can we all agree to disagree and move forward regardless? 

If our people are in conflict that is the antithesis of gaining inclusion, which is the necessary trigger to deliver diversity.  We must deal with the conflict, fully

face the realty and work on the “how” piece and not just the “why”.

日本のビジネスパーソンの方々にストレスマネジメントやビジョン設定についておはなしする機会があります。その中でいつもトピックに上がることは、日本社会はとても生きづらい。仕事イコール自分のすべてになっている。忙しすぎ。文字どおり、心を無くしている状態。。。という共有を聴くことはとても多いです。

このポッドキャストをお聴きの方々にも同じようなお気持ちを持ちの方々は多いかもしれません。

最近は、沢山の方々が日本を訪問してくださるようになりました。

私がお会いした海外の方々が口をそろえておっしゃること。それは、「日本大好きです。定期的に日本に来たいです！願わくば日本に住みたい！」中には「今年中に日本に仕事を見つけたいので準備に来日しています。」と言う方もいらっしゃいます。その中には、「日本語をもっと上達したいです！」と、ありがたいことに、海外でこのポッドキャストを聴いてくださっている方々もいらっしゃいます。 

さて、その方々とお話しをすると、彼らは口をそろえて、「日本の方々は日本に住めること自体がどれだけ恵まれているかに気づいていないのが歯がゆい。」という事をおっしゃいます。

四季があり、自然に恵まれ、経済大国であり、独自の文化があり、何よりも食べ物がおいしい、人々が親切で、治安が良い。とおっしゃるのです。

実際は、日本に既に住む私たちも、自分達は恵まれている環境に住んでいる事、そのことに感謝をすべきということはわかっている。という状況ではあると思います。

私も含めて、日本のビジネスパーソンの心の重さが軽くなるにはどうしたらいいのか。を日々様々な方々とディスカッションします。 

後半では、私が今週実際にお会いした海外の方のエピソードで、皆様の人生に何かヒントになるようなお話しだと思ったことを、この場でシェアをさせて頂きたいと思います。

Ｍさんと言う方のエピソードです。彼女とは仕事を通じてお会いしましたが、彼女は私の親しい友達であり、心から尊敬する女性の一人です。元気で、仕事もプライベートも充実し、大変な責任のある仕事を軽々とこなし、常に余裕があり、自分の時間もしっかり確保できる方です。誰にでも自分の考えを前向きに上手に伝えることができ、自分の幸せを心から追及している方です。そんなＭさんですが、「私も以前はこのような性格ではありませんでしたよ。」と壮絶な過去の経験を話してくださいました。「アメリカの同時多発テロが起こった2001年9月、私はニューヨークのツインタワーにオフィスがある会社に勤めていました。まさにあのテロが起こった9月11日は仕事が理由で体調を崩していて病院に行くため休暇を取っていたの。あの事件が起こった日、もしも体調を崩していなければ、自分は通常どうりに会議に参加していた他の同僚たちと同様に命を失っていたはずです。。。」とおっしゃいました。そして、「その後の日々の様子は言葉にすることができない悲しみと恐怖などが渦巻く中、生き残った事が嬉しいことなのかすらわからなくなり、その命にも感謝する余裕もなく、そしてその頃の自分は人にも自分にも厳しくつらく当たっていて、形がないはずの心が壊れていた感じがはっきりとあった」と話してくださいました。。。今、その頃の彼女の姿は影も形もなく、今の彼女は元気で自由で自信にみなぎっています。彼女は力強くおっしゃいます。「今は自分が生かされている事には意味があると思っています。自分が幸せを感じられる事にフォーカスすることを選択する。自分の人生のハンドルは自分で握る。やりたいことはすべてやろう。だから改めて、大好きな日本に家族の協力を得て、単身来ています。東京に住み、仕事をしたいという心の声に従った自分に感謝しています。」 

この話を聴くたびに、私は自分の毎日は、彼女が努力をして手に入れたかった毎日をありがたくも生まれた日から努力したわけでもなく送っているいる事に気づかされました。本当に今日からは今に感謝できることを数えていこうと思ったのでした。

日本のビジネスパーソンの私たちにとって、真のあるべき姿は幸福を数えそれらを常に忘れず感謝できる事だと言う事は、私たちは知っています。でも、つい、既にあるものに感謝する気持ちを忘れ、忙しい事、仕事のストレス、人間関係の難しさなどの欠けている部分を満たすことが自分の幸せと思い込んでいた。と改めて気づかされます。既にある感謝に感謝をすることで、ないものが在る状態にはならないかもしれません。自分の悩みに良い影響が及ぼされるのは少し先のことかもしれません。それでもこの場を借りて、宣言したいと思います！！

「私は、この今の自分にとっての当たり前が当たり前じゃないかもしれなかったことを肝に銘じ、感謝の気持ちで心を満します！そして、困難は文字通り「有難い！」と瞬時に思えるようになりました！」

ビジネスパーソンである私たち一人ひとりの影響はとてつもなく大きいのです。自分が少しでも幸せになったら、職場で笑顔が増え、職場全体が明るく変わっていく可能性もあります。そのことで、家族にも優しくなったり、休憩中で立ち寄ったコンビニの定員さんにちょっと笑顔で挨拶をしたくなったり、日々の生活の中で物や自然環境を大切にするようになったり、、、と周りの環境にも良い影響を与えられるようになります。満たされた気持ちでいる時間も増え、時間もお金も無駄遣いがなくなり、良いことばかりです！

これは私自身も、いつも言っている事ですが、自分でも実践することが難しいこともありました。これからの私は、皆さんと一緒にさらに実践してまいりたいと思います！

ですから皆さん、皆で一緒に自分自身の今日に有難うと感謝の気持ちを持ちましょう。そうすれば、明日、来年の私たちは大きく変わっていきます！

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has become an important topic in Japan and the trigger to getting to diversity is getting inclusion.  When people feel included in the team, they are more motivated, hard working and committed to the firm.  Retention is a nightmare problem which will unfold slowly and terrifyingly for all firms over the next few years.  Getting people to join is one problem in a declining population reality and keeping the ones you managed to hire, will be the bigger problem.  Training them, to then see them walk out the door to the competitor is a very painful prospect to entertain and no one wants to see that unfold. This is where the inclusion part helps us to keep our people with us and not have them stray.

One of the ways to improve the inclusion culture inside the organisation is to find the glue to meld everyone together as a team. We want people to be able to contribute and that  means we will have to deal with having different opinions and personality styles scattered amongst the team.  We can start by having the team members take a cold hard look at themselves.  How open are they to hearing different views on subjects? 

There are three options when having debates about what is the best for the firm.  Some people are very self-assured, confident, quick and can be aggressive in driving their opinion and having everyone else adopt what they think.  Others avoid any type of conflict and so become passive, just keeping their head down and going with the flow.  They keep their ideas from the group and don’t contribute to the search for the best solution.  Often these people are also deep thinkers and they take more time to process their thoughts, because they are going many layers deeper than others.  They can be run over by the more aggressive team members and are left out of the discussion entirely, so the organisation fails to get the benefit of their insights and experience. The third group are assertive and able to argue their case, but with tact and diplomacy.  Being assertive allows contribution, but doesn’t deny others the right to argue their ideas. This approach assists with gaining more internal inclusitivity.

Understanding where you sit on this continuum is useful to help access the greatest range of possible solutions for problems facing the team.  The aggressive can be encouraged to think more about how to move to an assertive position, because it is less abrasive and less likely to be rejected. The passive group, now that their degree of self-awareness has been heightened, can be supported to voice their opinions without fear of being steamrolled, critiqued or embarrassed.  The requirement here is to build a psychologically safe, inclusive working environment for all of the team members.

In most cases, when we have a debate and we state our position, we usually do this as a reflex action rather than one requiring a lot of introspection.  This tends to see us engaging our mouth before we engage our brain. Sometimes what comes out of our mouth may have not been the best option.  Rather, a good practice is to think before we speak and ask ourselves first, “what do I think, why do I think that and what has brought me to this belief – what have I read, seen, experienced to get me to this position?”.  That short piece of self-reflection goes a long way to changing the way we communicate what we think.

Just blurting out our opinion is just a statement without any supporting evidence to back it up.  Let’s change our style and instead start by conveying some context around why we think what we think, rather than just telling people what we think. The listener now has a lot more to consider rather than just rejecting the simple punchline. If both sides are doing this then the discussion is much richer and the chances of one side converting the other goes up dramatically, as opposed to getting bogged down in a bun fight over differing views.  When we get more information, we are allowed to change our views on the subject at hand. We also discover we share a lot of common ground too, where we are in agreement and this takes a lot of the heat out of the disagreement. 

Another useful exercise is to proactively identify our “hot button” words.  These are words which when we hear them, we typically go straight to an emotional response and we by-pass the brain completely.  Being told “no” to something we want or “you are wrong”, are very common examples.  We tune out the explanation of the why behind the “no” or “you are wrong”, because we are super busy working on our response, which contains the thousand golden reasons why the answer should be a “yes” or “why we are right”.  When we take the time to isolate out which words we react to the most strongly, we are on the first step to controlling our responses and building an inclusive culture. 

By doing this exercise first, when we hear the “hot button” word, we can elegantly move from ear, to brain, to mouth and in the process deal with the source of irritation much more diplomatically.  We may choose to delay our response, to help us cool down or we may ask for more information, to better understand why they are saying it this way.  We might seek other opinions before we respond to get some impartial advice.  We might decide to just ignore it and accept that not everyone is smart or a competent communicator or necessarily sufficiently self-aware in how they interact with others.  In other words, we are not just reacting to the provocation and instead are picking our battles to fight.  We might come to agree with their idea, because we gained some insight from the “why” part of the discussion which we were not previously aware of.  We can maintain the inclusivity of the group, even when there are some people who can be seriously annoying.

Being inclusive helps us to accept that not everyone is the same or that we will always be in agreement with each other.  We can agree to disagree, without destroying the relationship and descending into some old fashioned internecine trench warfare between the silos in the organisation, as often happens in the corporate world.  By becoming more self-aware, we can become more accepting and more inclusive, because we are engaging the brain first rather than getting run over by our emotions.  By becoming more inclusive we can create more diversity in the firm.

In Part One of Key Factors To Achieving Diversity, Equity & Inclusion In Japan, I covered Building Trust and Psychological Safety as well as looking at the issues around Cultural Awareness.  In Part Two, let’s tackle Dealing With Unconscious Bias In Japan.  Those living in Japan might be grimacing right now, because there is the view that the bias is quite conscious and out in the open. Some of our clients tell us that they have a good proportion of their male staff, who do not support the attention being given to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and say they feel they are the victims. 

The post-war period in Japan saw a number of transitions.  One was from farm-based work to factory and service industry work in cities, as people moved out from the countryside.  The US Occupation sponsored breakup of absentee landlord ownership of farms, to having tenant farmers becoming owners of their land, created the Middle Class.  Thanks to Japan becoming a major supplier to the US military during the Korean War, Japan’s economy started to recover from the devastation of World War Two.  The role of women changed too.  They had been important labour inputs for farming and factory work and now full-time motherhood became possible, as the economy improved.  The labour split was such that the men would become the breadwinners and work six days a week, putting in long hours every day and the mothers would raise the children and focus on their education.

This effectively meant that men monopolised the key jobs, incomes and promotions.  Today women are more active in the workforce, although many are working part-time.  For example, 70% of male workers work five days per week, whereas the corresponding number for women is 40%.  Surprisingly, overall, Japan has a greater rate of female workforce participation than the USA.  Men have had a monopoly on work opportunities, but that is being challenged by the emergence of well-educated and talented women and unsurprisingly some men working for our clients, are feeling threatened by all this talk about Diversity and Inclusion. Those are the conscious biases. 

The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates Japan’s population will decline by 21% to only 100 million by 2049.  Companies recognise this and so there is a greater requirement for female participation in work and the push is on the make Japan more inclusive of women in the workplace. Unconscious biases however still need addressing. Political correctness drives the resistance underground and unconscious biases become the next hurdle to overcome.  Here are seven biases which need addressing

1.     Confirmation Bias

This occurs when male bosses look for information which supports their bias or stereotype.  For example, working mothers won’t be able to be promoted, because they cannot put in the same hours as their male colleagues or be given the same amounts of responsibility, so better not to promote these women.  Or when women get married, they will disappear from the workforce to have children, so no point in giving them a lot of accountability, because they won’t be around. This reduces the opportunities that these women are given and negatively impacts their progress through the ranks into leadership positions. 

Data from the Teikoku Databank showed that in April 2021 only 8% of Japanese company Presidents were women.  Additionally, half of these women took over the family business when their husbands or relatives passed away. A lack of female role models becomes a vicious cycle where women conclude they cannot get to the top.  The system seems to be against women succeeding for those at the bottom levels. 

As companies move away from “hours contributed” to “results produced” this bias will be reduced.  Most of those long hours the men are putting in are not effective and are more a nod to social convention, than to increasing productivity.  Currently, according to a Robert Walters June 2022 survey, only 30% of respondents thought their compensation system was tied to their performance and skills.

2.     Groupthink Bias

This is when people want to fit into the group and this is a core tenant of Japanese society – how to fit in.  In the male dominated work world this means fitting in with how the men want to run things.  For example, “of course it is better to promote the men, because they will be sticking around, unlike the women who are not as able to commit everything to their work, because of raising children or talking care of aging parents”.

3.     Halo Effect Bias

This is a bit tricky, but it occurs when one characteristic dominates other characteristics and our perception is to see things through rose coloured glasses.  The ability of men to work unlimited overtime unlike the women, because they don’t have to pick up the kids or take care of aging parents, makes them seem more reliable to their male bosses.  Naturally this “reliability” results in them being given the lead for projects, which then become springboards to promotion and greater responsibilities.

4.     Horns Effect Bias

This is the opposite phenomenon, where women are judged negatively in one aspect and this is extrapolated across multiple fronts.  If one woman can’t stay back to complete the project, then all women are tarred with the same brush and as a gender they are not judged as being sufficiently reliable.  Or once they become pregnant, they take a year and a half off from work on maternity leave and the section has to carry their workload, so better not to give them critical areas of responsibility just in case.

Currently, Senior and Middle Management in Japan are 80% male according to a LinkedIn survey in February 2022.  Declining demographic trends however will force companies to face how increasingly difficult it is becoming to recruit and retain staff.   Consequently, they will have to become more flexible around retaining and promoting their female staff or risk losing them to competitors.  Companies here are facing a zero sum game future in the expanding war for talent. 

5.     In Group Bias

This occurs when men prefer working with men, rather than women.  The upshot is men favour each other and it seems obvious to them, to include men in the project or to promote men rather than women.

6.     Projection Bias

We do this when we assume that others think the same way we do.  Because women are seen as different, it is preferred to surround yourself with other men, because that seems the easier and a better way to work.  

Increasingly however there is a growing call for more diversity in the Japanese workforce.  Even the conservative peak business body the Keidanren, publicly came out in support of the need for greater diversity and promoting women’s active participation in the workplace back in 2019.  The “think the same as everyone else” mantra is recognised as not producing the innovative approaches companies are requiring. 

7.     Rush to Solve Bias

When under pressure we sometimes have to make rapid decisions.  This can mean male bosses or colleagues prefer to ask other men for help. The bias arises because women are not seen as reliable enough or tough enough or “non-emotional” enough to contribute.  The requirement for more diverse ideas however will increasingly force male leaders to gather more options. These will have to include the opinions of female staff, in order to respond in an effective manner to the competitive challenges the company faces. Ultimately, the best ideas will win in the market.

“We don’t know, what we don’t know” would be a good way of highlighting these different male biases in the workplace.  Every time one of these biases emerges, they have to be called out and challenged, if we are going to get to any real inclusivity in the workplace. Some part of the opposition will be ideological and other parts will be plain ignorance of the biases in operation.  Both have to be confronted and worked on or there will be no organic change for a thousand years in Japan.  This has to come from the very top of the organisation and has to be sustained until there is real change. 

There is a lot of noise and rhetoric in Japan about the importance of diversity, which here fundamentally means gender issues rather than age, race, religion or sexual identity.  Major companies, both foreign and domestic, proclaim its importance, but are they succeeding in doing anything effective about it, apart from holding cosmetic internal awareness sessions?  Are they addressing these unconscious biases we have covered, which are playing out inside their firms?  My judgment is we still have a long way to go here.

Inclusivity is the first rung on the ladder to get us to diversity, so let's start there. 

It is always good to discover new ways of looking at how we humans get on with each other.  As a new leader, inheriting an existing team, the first thing you discover is very few of the team are like you and that they are motivated individually, rather than as an amorphous group.  Understanding people is certainly a key to successful leadership.  I recently came across Ms. Shade Zahral in an interesting video, explaining a four quadrant intersection of courage and humanness.  In this format, courage is shown from bottom “low” to “high” on the left vertical and humanness on the right horizontal from left “low” to right “high”.  I thought this was a useful tool from which to examine the human dimension of work.

So if you are high in humanness, but low in courage, you are in the bottom right quadrant.  This quadrant is labelled as “People Pleasers”.  We meet this type of person don’t we.  They are often empathetic types who genuinely like people. They do everything they can to be accepted and avoid any criticism.  If they are critiqued at work by their boss or by colleagues, they take it personally and they retreat within themselves, never pushing higher and further to reach their potential. The low courage element makes it difficult for them to drive performance because they want to make everyone happy and focus on feelings rather than results and are rarely put into leadership positions.

The opposite quadrant, the top left, are high courage, low humanness and labelled Agitators.  It refers to people who are risktakers, super confident, self-assured, but lack empathy.  They climb over the bodies to get to the top to grasp the brass ring of success.  They are ready to push everyone hard to make sure their own career is a glorious success and don’t care about the team.  Everyone else is a tool to be used for their own self-aggrandisement.  This type is often successful in becoming a low level leader. They rise to a certain height in the organisation, but have difficulty getting to the top, because they don’t attract the required support of their teams. 

Those low in courage and low in humanness are labelled Apathetic and Toxic and in the bottom left quadrant.  They are often experts of the passive-aggressive social interaction techniques to fend off pressure and criticism.  They are often the resident politicians and sycophants in the organisation, always working on finding the weakness in the system, to exploit them for their own benefit in order to survive, when in fact they should be removed.  They are the masters of rumours and whispers as well, but they are clever enough to disguise what they are doing, so they can be hard to ferret out. Hopefully we haven’t allowed any of these horrible people to become leaders in our organisations.

The stars of this four box quadrant show of course are those in the top right quadrant, high in courage and high in humanness, labelled Partners in this construct. They can offer feedback in a way which is balanced with warmth and care.  They build relationships built on trust and these are the types of people who can unite teams and lead the organisation forward. 

I was reflecting on this four quadrant model, when I read an article in the Financial Times by Tarek Chehidi on Human Skills and what we will need in business.  He wrote, “The trend towards digitalisation and AI is well under way in many industries, allowing some technical skills to be automated, and leading employers to place a greater emphasis on human-centric skills such as problem-solving, creativity, critical thinking, cognitive agility and empathy”.  He added most education systems “prioritise knowledge transfer, memorisation and standardised tests, and fail to cultivate human-centric skills”.  If the higher education system isn’t producing the empathy and human-centric skills, then it is up to organisations to take a good hard look at who they are promoting, what they are modelling and what type of people they want running the business.

We can easily see that most current leader development efforts are focused on technical skills.  The best engineer, best accountant, best designer, best salesperson etc., is given responsibility for others, on the basis they were successful in their work.  They are often Agitators though, who are skilled in their work discipline, but lack empathy.  They expect others to be like them if they want to be successful and there is only one model of progress – the one they have mastered.  They get results, but the human cost is high and usually not sustainable.  Their successor has to come in and clean up the mess they have created.

This expert model is the “hero” archetype of leadership, where the boss is the most skilled and the most competent.  As technology keeps pushing us all forward, it is getting more complex in business and less easy for the boss to be the expert in all facets.  This is the new era of the team effort and we need to combine the full strength of the team to defeat our rivals who are unable to maximise the full strength of their team.  The Partner top right quadrant of courage to aim high, take risks and the means to push yourself out of your comfort zone is required.  At the same time, the humanness dimension means having empathy with the team members and an understanding that they are different to the boss.  They don't share the same dreams and aspirations and they march to different drummers.

Where would you locate yourself in that four-quadrant diagram?  Are you able to unite the whole team behind you, because of your capacity in empathy and communication?  If not what are you doing about it? Are you able to help the members of the team align their own purpose with the purpose of the organisation?  Is there enough overlap there to make the whole construct a success? If the education system is not producing enough empathy consciousness, what are you doing about it, when these young people turn up on your work doorstep?  How are you role modelling yourself, for others to aspire to?  What are you doing about becoming more human-centric down at your shop?

Actually, we don’t want to lead imperfect people – we want the winners, A Players, the motivated and the capable.  Fine and they cost a bomb, so I hope you have deep pockets.  If you work for a major corporation then that is exactly what you can command, because you have the bucks to sustain that type of ecosystem.  They are also attracted to work for your brand name firm, so it is a happy exchange.  If you work for a small to medium enterprise then life is quite different.  There is a constant trade off of financial resources to be tied up in someone who probably won’t make much money in the first year, against the cost of hiring, onboarding and training them.  The outlays go out in a flood and the return ebbs back in a trickle.

Japan, like many other economies is witnessing a population decline.  There will be roughly a million people less in Japan, every year, for the next ten years at least.  That translates into a smaller number of potential staff available to hire and that means compromises have to be made.  We are all getting closer and closer to being happy to get anyone, no matter how imperfect, because we need someone.  We will wind up hiring idiots too and then have to work out how to deal with them. 

I was reminded of this the other day. It was a chilly, windy evening in Tokyo when we decided to go for a pizza at the Ebisu branch of a famous Italian pizzeria from Napoli.  Our usual format is to drive there, my wife reconnoitres the table vacancy situation and it there is a table, then I turn the car around and head for the nearby carpark.  This evening I got the thumbs up and started to head for the carpark.  While I was doing this, I noticed in the rear view mirror that my wife was left waiting outside in the cold, which I thought was a bit odd.  When I got to the table, I asked her about it and she told me the waiter made her wait outside in the cold, while he served some other people before he organised the table.  When paying the bill I remonstrated with him about why he made my wife stand out in the cold.  He looked in his early forties, so he was no kid.  He offered an apology and I asked if he was the manager.  He pointed to the manager and I remonstrated with him too.

What I recognised was the manager had made one of those compromises we will all be making – hiring anyone, because you need staff and not being able to be selective about the process.  Being busy the training process was probably focused on systems and procedures rather than service standards.  There is also the issue of common sense is a given except when it isn’t.  I am sure the manager would never have imagined this staff member would be so stupid as to make a client wait out in the wind and cold, when they could gave waited inside.  How would you predict and train for that level of imbecilic behaviour?  We have been going to that restaurant for over a decade since it opened, but here we have an idiot member of staff jeopardising the lifetime value of a customer, in a street lined with competitors.

What this means for most of us is we have to change our way of thinking about leading staff.  We have to especially prepare for imperfect people entering our world and representing our brand.  The onboarding process really needs a re-think.  We cannot just be satisfied with teaching them our systems and procedures and then turning them loose on the clients.  I am not a great fan of micromanagement but in this new world that is going to be a greater requirement.  We will need to be monitoring what people are doing and how they are doing it in greater detail than ever before.  Because you cannot predict idiocy, you have to capture it early and eradicate it. 

Previously, in an earlier episode, I mentioned the issue of what is actually happening against what you think is happening.  As I noted, I tell the new people what I want them to do and then their peers tell them don’t bother doing that.  Who do they follow? To my amazement they follow their peers advice rather than mine.  How would I even know this deviation was happening?  Only because I am following up and checking – the micromanagement I hate having to do, but which becomes more important when hiring imperfect people.

Years ago, a boss told me the person has to fit the job, not the other way around.  That age has passed in Japan.  Today, we have to find ways for the job to fit the person, because they won’t be a perfect fit and we won’t have too many options to just pitch them overboard and hire a better replacement.  That requires a degree of flexibility most of us have probably never grown up with in work as leaders, but we have to change.  The external market situation is not in our favour.  If we can be more flexible than our competitors, then that is a bigbusiness advantage. 

Leadership requires discipline and accountability.  We claim to know more than the team about the strategy and direction we need to take.  Are we being honest with ourselves though?  We probably made some New Year Resolutions in January and here we are one quarter into the new calendar year and how are we looking on those commitments?  I see the influx of overweight executives booking up the personal trainers down at my private club gym every January.  They clearly are okay to spend the money, because both the club and these trainers are not cheap. These newbies are usually obese and are clearly interested in doing something about their weight to improve their health and performance.  Six weeks later they have quietly vanished.

I wonder what sort of corporate leaders they are, if they cannot maintain the discipline and commitment to take care of the most precious thing in their lives – their own health?  Are they credible with their teams?   Maybe I am wrong, but I doubt they can be a genius of organisation, consistency, reliability and delivered outcomes at work, if they can’t keep going with their own health improvement programme.  Maybe I am totally wrong and they are sacrificing their liver for the enterprise with extensive boozy dinners and long lunches to win business?  That could well be true, but it doesn’t seem sustainable does it?

If those January resolutions have been dumped, we can ask the question, “why don’t we keep the promises we make to ourselves?”.  The biggest problem in business is responding to change.  We face changes in technology, the market, currency rates, supply chain, the recruiting environment, etc.  Somehow, we are supposed to be agile, nimble, adaptable in business, but are we up to the task? If we cannot change our lifestyle to trigger the corrections we need to solve our weight problem or any of the other things we need to get done, then are we really able to handle change?

Don’t get me wrong. Everyone I meet loves change.  They tell me. They want the organisation to change, their boss to change, their staff to change, their colleagues to change.  For themselves though, they have very little interest in making any changes and prefer to keep doing what they have always done.  If the leader has this mentality regarding the personal things of most importance to themselves - their health - what are the odds they are going to be able to handle the needed changes in the business?

A big part of securing personal change is to have a coach.  Okay, the personal gym coaches are like new puppies in Japan at new year – six weeks later the pet owners are looking to hand them back, because they cannot handle the changes needed to look after the pups.  The gym coach gets the axe too, because the changes they are recommending for the executive are beyond their ability to sustain and they give up.  The idea itself is actually very good.

Having a mentor or a coach in business is a mechanism of accountability, an objective measuring device to be run over us, to make sure we are tracking to get where we want to go.  That is helpful, but we still have personal accountability for ourselves and one of the areas where we let ourselves down is time management and personal organisation.  I am always astounded by the number of executives who are ruled by the “muse” rather than by the compass and the clock. They don’t set goals, don’t set priorities, don’t work through tasks according to those priorities.  When you ask them why, they say cool stuff like “I don’t want to crimp my creativity”, “I need to be flexible”, “I am a free spirit” and “a set list of priorities won’t survive beyond 10.00am in our business”.

We can see they are intelligent people and very good at justifying their lack of control over their days.  This is why they cannot change their lifestyle around eating, drinking and exercising.  This is also why the new year resolutions go up in smoke every year, as these executives inch closer to that stroke or heart attack awaiting them, if they don’t make some major changes in their lifestyles.

If they cannot sustain the changes needed for their own longevity, should they be in charge of the corporate tiller?  Should they be the one setting the path forward?  Are they credible with their team and able to have people put in the effort needed for the organisation to succeed?  Are they well organised to do the follow-up to make sure what they think is happening, is in fact taking place?

Okay, obese people are easy to spot.  What about all the slim people who are also equally challenged to do what they say needs to be done?  What about when they drop their resolutions like a hot potato?  Can we entrust the organisation in their hands? 

How have you fared this first quarter?  Are you on track to reach your resolution goals?  Are you better organised than last year?  Do you have an iron grip on both the compass and the clock and are the one dictating the action, rather than the other way around?  If you are not on track, what are you going to do about it – waiting until January next year to try again?   

There is still time to re-group. Do some hard thinking about why you are struggling and what needs to change to fix this situation.  One thing for sure is the time will pass one way or another, regardless of what we do.  Why not get in control of your future and live a life of intention, rather than one of reaction.  Only you can make it happen.  Start small and add things as you succeed.  Expect it is going to be hard, painful, disappointingly slow and relentless.  When you do that, you won’t be surprised by the difficulties and will be ready for the onslaught.  If we tripped up in the first quarter, let’s make the second quarter our start to the year and keep pushing ourselves.  None of the alternatives look good for a leader.

In Japan, we are in a zero sum game, death struggle for talent.  Actually, we are in the same struggle for even the modesty talented.  We had better get used to a lowering of standards going forward, as we struggle to get people, any people. They aren’t making Japanese in the numbers we are used to and each year the media reports how the number of new babies has declined to a new record low.  The 15 to 34 year old population in Japan has halved over the last twenty years and it will just keep going down.  We are going to face a “free agent” youth population who will be in high demand. 

We talk about recruit, retain and advance people.  The recruit part will just get tougher and the retain part is on us as leaders to get it right.  If we can offer the right environment, then people will stay with us.  The problems arise when we have un-reconstructed middle managers who are asleep.  They are like Rip Van Wrinkle or Urashima Taro in the Japanese context.  They are not awake to these new changes and are still treating subordinates like they grow on trees and are easily replaceable.  They are stuck in the “goode olde days”. 

We are going to have to pay a lot more attention to our onboarding process and our internal training.  This is all good and fine, but there are surprises in store for us, which we wouldn’t be able to predict.  Is the onboarding training well designed?  Is it comprehensive enough?  One of the problems with the way we do things around here is we all know how things work and they are obvious to us, but not necessarily to the newbie.  We short-change new people by making too many assumptions about how to explain how things work and regarding what they have to do.  This is where we need to really think through the process and make sure that we are covering all of the bases. 

Now at the senior leadership level we are unlikely to be doing much of the onboarding process ourselves so we have delegated this task to others.  This is where things can start to depart from what we thought was happening.  Instead of on-boarding people at ahigh level of quality we find that the whole process is subject to the lowest common denominator.  Some of the information isn't getting shared or even worse the information being shared is contradicting what we think is happening.

The boss says one thing and then the new staff members colleagues assure them that they can ignore that or do it another way.  If these staff were geniuses and really producing, you might find some slack should be advanced, but invariably the lowest denominator theory nominates these are people at the bottom of the pile. Are they doing it on purpose to make sure the new person doesn't shine too brightly and show them up or is it just stupidity?  Either way, we are not getting the onboarding we expected or assumed was happening.

The bigger problem is how do you find out what is really going on?  We are busy bosses and have plenty on our plate and we have moved on to other things which are screaming for our attention.  Sadly, the lowest common denominator architecture forces us to find the time to circle back and check our assumptions. 

Maybe once upon a time it didn’t matter too much, when there were job candidates a plenty and we were whizzing through piles of resumes, sorting and evaluating who we would bother to meet.  That scenario is so ancient, I can barely remember doing that.  Today, if we get someone onboard, we have to treat them well and make the time to ensure they are getting the right information, training and assistance inside the organisation.  A good starting point is to assume your own veteran staff are telling them things which are different to what you want them to do.  They are more likely to listen to their colleagues who are doing the same work as they are, than the boss who is above the clouds and on another plane.

As the boss, we have to spend time with the new staff and just check they are getting the right onboarding as we designed it and eliminate lowest common denominator interventions by members of our own staff.  The problem is what do we check, as there are so many possibilities of error being played out without us knowing? Well simply, we cannot check everything, but we can check the most important things.  We can also schedule regular checks, because this whole onboarding process is a moving feast and things change from week to week. 

As the boss, we are trying to operate at the highest levels of sophistication in our business but we are going to have to fight against our own lowest common denominator people pulling that construct down to their level.  Annoying?  Time wasting? Yes, but this is the new reality for the leader.  We don't want to micro-manage things, but in this onboarding instance we should.  We cannot afford to have poorly trained new recruits or have them leave and joining our competitor.

 Some may believe that it is better to have staff who will argue back, than have a room full of yes-men and yes-women.  In Japan, in particular, it is hard to get anyone to dispute the boss’s opinion, so if we get counterpoints to what we think, we should be popping corks and celebrating.  This is a fine line for staff to tread.  How can they raise issues with the boss, without seeming to be in opposition with what the boss thinks or wants?  We hear a lot of talk about the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment and most of this is coming out of the West.  Japan certainly didn’t pioneer or promulgate this idea.  Are bosses really comfortable with a psychologically safe environment where their staff can challenge them on what they want done?  There is a lot of other rhetoric about becoming the “servant leader”.  The idea being that the boss’s job is to help the staff succeed, clearing obstacles and empowering people to go forth and prosper.   

The problem with a lot of this is we are dealing with human beings, who are emotional, status conscious, suffering from doubts and imposter syndrome.  The boss can be a fragile creature.  They often wear the mantle of leadership heavily on their shoulders are constantly wondering if what they have strategised was correct and whether they have what it takes to move the enterprise forward to success. 

The super confident boss is another danger.  They have no doubts about their own ability and are going to crash through or crash.  These sorts of people can blow up an organisation, if what they have decided doesn’t work or is incorrect in its assumptions.  Confidence is a double-edged blade, which must be wielded carefully.  Good to have surety, just not too much. 

Bosses are usually in the grip of a death spiral of too many meetings and too much email.  In other words they are chronically time poor.  This definitely translates into not much coaching going on for the team.  The classic error is to equate handing out orders like pirate captain with actually coaching the team members.  There is a world of difference there, which should be obvious, but in a time constrained world it is often masked and unclear as to what is really happening. 

It also translates into a type of boss short hand communication style, which is taking minimalism to a new low.  Speaking in headlines replaces speaking in full paragraphs, as the words pour forth in a staccato, rapid fire fashion, as the whirling dervish boss moves from one work scene to the next.  When the boss hits resistance, they are usually flying along and the reaction is rarely positive.  Being reasonable and contemplative needs time to consider, to ponder, to reflect on the issue and its ramifications. It is much simpler to bark out an order and keep moving. 

Bosses are usually more skilled, more experienced and more senior than their staff.  They are better informed of what is going on inside the organisation and get regular updates from the senior executives, so that they are highly in tune with the strategic direction of the firm.  They are giant sponges who absorb all of this information and they are miserly when it comes to sharing it with the staff. This can be a protective device to monopolise information so that they remain in control or it could be they don’t remember to share, because they are simply too busy.

The upshot is they feel they don’t need to listen to opinions from staff because they know more and know better.  Staff popping up with ideas can be brusquely dismissed as a result, with little thought to the impact of that dismissal.  Bosses are like sharks, they have to keep swimming and cannot stop moving – they don’t linger long.

What can the boss do instead?  Firstly – stop.  Stop whatever they are doing or thinking and really concentrate on what they are being told by their staff.  That means trying to plumb all of the body language and words, for what isn’t being stated openly.  Trying to fill in the gaps of the conversation to try and get a read on what is really happening.  Question what is being conveyed to get more depth to the point.  Often we all talk as if the other person is privy to our thoughts and they can understand the context.  That is actually rarely the case and getting to the background makes a big difference when weighing up options for a response. 

Let the other person do most of the talking.  This is painful for busy bosses.  Their brain is racing ahead, plugging into all the data and intelligence they have picked up inside the enterprise and out in the market.  They are rapidly scrambling all of this together, to arrive at a point of view on the topic.  The temptation is to go straight into “tell” mode and start sprouting ideas and suggestions and soon orders, in rapid succession.  Better to pause and ask what their staff member thinks is the way forward.  What they think may in fact be low value or even useless, but the point of asking is the key.  It is up to the boss to weight what they are being told, against what they think and make a judgement.  The issue is don’t short-circuit everything and tell the staff what to do, without giving them a shot at some ownership of the next steps.

If the staff member has an opposite opinion, the easiest thing in the world is to stand up tall, pull rank and start issuing declarations.  This is where the discipline part of leadership has to kick in and we have to restrain our natural reaction, which is to crush all opposition and smash through all obstacles standing in our path.  Hear them out.  Don’t make an instant judgement, unless it is a burning platform item. Think on it, even if you have made up your mind.  A bit more thought may dissuade you from your first reaction and it also shows the staff that you are taking their idea seriously.  Remember, getting a member of staff to be brave enough to tell the boss they are wrong is like a treasure in Japan, so we should savour the moment.

 Leaders are time poor.  There is too much to do and not enough time.  We are constantly being challenged to get control of our time management and for most of us, that struggle is often one we are losing.   Meeting and emails are time killers.  Multi-tasking is a given, which means that we are constantly losing time, as we keep having to get back up to speed on something we were concentrating on, to do something we hadn’t expected or diarised for that day. The upshot of all of this is our communication becomes very clipped.  We are speaking in short form all of the time, because we don’t have enough time for the full explanation. 

When we have children, we are constantly handing out orders.  Don’t do this or that, don’t touch this or that.  We don’t take the time to explain the why, we just tell them the what.  We carry that same methodology into the workplace.  If we recorded you for a full day, I think you would be shocked to hear how much of your day is telling people what to do. Often we give them no or very little context as to the why, apart for the fact that we are the boss and we want it done and we want it now.

“Someone convinced against their will, is of the same opinion still” is an old saw, but too true.  Dale Carnegie says if we can help people create a world, they will feel ownership of it.  What this means is that persuasion is very powerful, but often we don’t use this magnificent tool at our ready disposal.  We are time poor and issuing orders like a pirate captain, is much more efficient.  Not necessarily effective mind you, but it definitely takes less time and effort, which is why it is so attractive.

Context needs to be delivered in a story format.  When people hear this for the first time, they immediately think that this is impractical. The story they are thinking of is more like “War and Peace” in length, rather than a one or two minute window into a big issue.  There is no doubt that the global pandemic of ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder has made everyone’s attention span now microscopic in scale. The competition for the brain space of people has become unbelievably intense.

A very quick story on the WHY of what we want done is absolutely a habit we have to create. It won’t happen by itself though, because we are all being pushed into the delivery of rapid fire orders, rather than supplying the rationale.  The issue is we know all the detail, we understand the background, we have had time to think about this, we are privy to corporate information our subordinates don’t have access to.  We get to hear about the big picture from the big bosses.  We just distil all of this down to a couple of sentences, telling people what they need to do and then we move on to the next thing, because time is tight. 

Why do we believe the thing we want done is necessary or important?  We must have read, been told, heard or experienced something which has impacted our thought processes.  We should go back to that point – very briefly.  For example, “I was listening to this podcast by an expert on SEO and she said a review of our blog headlines will show we are not using enough key words and our descriptors on our website need to be much more potent to be picked up by Google’s crawlers”.  Now this is why, as the leader, we think we need to spend time reviewing aspects of our blogs and website – our rationale. 

Now we can make our suggestion and we should exercise all of our discipline and strength and not go into order mode at this point.  Instead, we should switch the terminology to using questions.  We can say, “Do you think a review of our information is possible and that we can invest some time to improve our SEO? Or do you have any ideas on where we can improve”.  The beauty of suspending that overwhelming urge to tell them, “Get on it now and rewrite our blogs and website descriptors” is that no one likes being ordered around and their engagement with that task will be very sparse.

We have provided some context as to why we think a change is needed but we have left the door open for them to own the world they are creating.  This is powerful and motivating because we haven’t been proscriptive and told them how to do it.  We have let them assume some leadership over the process.  Obviously we need to agree with it and maybe we will chip in some of our thoughts and ideas too, after they have made their contribution and make it a collaborative decision.

This takes more time to explain why we think what we think and to have a conversation around what they think. Maybe we get frustrated because their thinking isn’t as advanced or as good as ours and it would be easier just to tell them how to fly straight.  We have to keep in mind that this is only one part of the puzzle.  The next component is the execution piece and if we put in the time and the effort now, we will get a faster and higher quality outcome. This means little or no rework and a much happier staff member, who will be more motivated to do a good job on this project.  That saves us a lot of time and wear and tear down the track.

 Precious time invested in explaining the context will save us time overall.  Our biggest problem is ourselves – we have trained hard to issue orders and short circuit everything.  We have to re-train our habits, end inertia and we have to recalculate time. We specially need to start looking for expanding the proportion of our leader quality time.

 Business owners have a total stake in the enterprise and a commitment level that is always peaking at maximum. They have their wealth enveloped in the business and they take on debt, risk and the trials and tribulations of business cycles.  Executives are rewarded with salaries, bonuses and profit share depending on the organisation.  If you are an executive in America, the leader packages can get up to eight and nine figures.  Your commitment is going to be massive with that amount of reward involved. 

Yet, we read about leaders who fire the bottom ten percent every year or weed out all of those who are not peak performers.  What about Japan?  Executives here are modestly remunerated and the vast majority of privately held SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) don’t make a profit by design, so they can avoid paying tax.  Instead they run as many personal expenses through the business as possible.  The idea of firing non-performers as an architectural feature of the organisation isn’t a consideration in Japan.  There are a couple of reasons for that.  One is loyalty is highly valued.  The boss has to take care of the team and the team reciprocates with their loyalty to the boss.  What does staff loyalty actually mean?  It encompasses being committed to the firm and conscientious in your work.   Staff stick with the organisation, in preference to jumping around every couple of years chasing more money.

Legally, the firm has to fit the person, not the other way around.  This is quite the opposite of the Western model.  In Japan, you are going to have a hard time winning in court on the basis that the person you fired was incompetent.  The court expects the firm to find a job which can utilise this person’s talents, even if it is different from what they were hired to do. 

The market has also spoken and said “bosses, make the best of it” because we aren’t producing as many Japanese as before and the low rates of unemployment have moved the whip hand to the employee away from the leader.  Getting staff at all has become fraught.  In my experience, very few Japanese staff have any idea how to interview for jobs.  In the West, this is an art form and the most useless people can come across as geniuses, because we are all trained for mastering this point of entry.  After they get through probation, their true colours are struck and sometimes it is the skull and cross bones. Then we have to work on getting them out, before they do too much damage.

In Japan, few people interview well, so you have to become a sleuth to uncover their abilities.  I am often struck by the fact that they leave things out of their resumes which have a high value, such as courses they completed or time they spent overseas.  When you spot a gap in the timeline, you ask what they were doing and then you find out they spent that time studying in a foreign country, but you wouldn’t pick that up from the resume. 

The bottom line today, as the boss in Japan, is you are happy to get staff at all.  If they have talent in line with what you were expecting that is a bonus.  If they don’t, then you have to spend the time and effort to train them.  The University system here is weak.  The entry point for high school kids is horrendous, but the exit point of getting a degree is relatively easy.  There are few expectations that you will shoot the lights out during your studies.  If you need to take a qualifying exam for entry into your chosen profession then that is different and people study hard, but for the majority of students, they just smoothly glide out the varsity main gate with a degree.  

We need to recognise that in Japan, the commitment level is different to Western firms and it needs to be managed properly.  The team is a powerful motivation machine for staff.  Holding up your end of things is expected and valued.  Letting team members down is not respected and will draw a negative collegiate response. The whole culture here is designed to make sure we all fit it and that means fitting in with the team at work and being accountable to each other. 

Yes, loyalty is a plus in Japan, however the boss should never expect that the team members have the same level of commitment and motivation.  If they do, then heartbreak is next, because they will be disappointed on a regular basis. Rather mysteriously, sometimes despite all of that loyalty and conscientiousness, things still don’t get done at all or are not done to the quality level or timeliness leaders expect.  We need to be on top of everything in a well organised, regular, self-disciplined way.  Yes, there is the danger of micro-managing people but in Japan, I would recommend more of this than you would normally apply to a Western organisation.  Yes, people are loyal, but I have found that they are also quite capable of missing deadlines and even forgetting tasks completely.  If we don’t follow-up, stuff just fails to get done and the enterprise slips behind. 

The idea that they are getting paid to do their work is a partial truth.  Frederick Herberg’s research on motivation said that salaries were a given, an expected part of the puzzle and he called getting paid well a “hygiene factor”, not a feature.  This is even more so when labour demand outstrips supply, as it does in Japan. So we have to be able to go beyond transactional thinking of exchanging work for money, to look for other ways to get people committed. 

Adjusting our expectations is a good place to start and diligently following up is a key arrow in the boss quiver.  The leader makes more money as the owner or as the salaried boss, so naturally the commitment level is going to be higher.  Just don’t get caught up with how things should be and instead look at how things really are and go forward from there.  Work hard on emphasising teamwork, culture, care, empathy and understanding. Start by forgiving yourself that you don’t have perfect people working for you and try and find ways of attracting and retaining people, because that is the zero sum game going forward. 

Over the last couple of years I have participated in numerous webinars and training provided by different organisations on gaining Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in Japan.  The concentration has been on raising awareness about what DEI actually involves.  When we first received enquiries about Diversity training, the request was to provide training for the women.  For those outside Japan facing ethnic, racial and religious issues, as well as gender diversity, this may seem a bit strange. Diversity in Japan however primarily focuses on gender issues and to a much lesser extent on age and LGBTQ issues.  Also there just aren’t significant numbers of foreigners living here nor significant non-Buddhist or non-Shinto foreign religions present to be major issues. 

Diversity and equity are outcomes and we believe the key to the door is gaining inclusion.  The awareness discussions are important, but we need to go beyond that to looking at the “how” to get inclusion piece.  That is a big discussion and we cannot deal with all of it in this short piece, but here are two catalysts to start with, for delivering inclusion in Japan.

(1)   Build Trust and Psychological Safety

Trust, credibility and respect are all key requirements for inclusion. If I don’t trust you, then credibility and respect are missing.  If I don’t think you are credibile, then trust and repect are missing.  If there is no respect, then there will be no trust or credibility. 

There are certain actions which build trust including not playing favourites, being true to one’s word, being ethical, consistent, honest and transparent. These go a long way to establishing the trust needed.  Being able to admit when we are wrong and not being locked into fixed positions, because of our status or ego, also builds trust.  Not so easy to pull off when you are the boss.

There are also some human relations principles which are magic for building trust and psychological safety.  Not criticising others is a key start. If we want to create trouble and lifelong enemies, we can climb up on our high horse and start telling others they are wrong at every opportunity.  Instead, we could find areas where we can express our honest appreciation for the efforts of others.  Being genuinely interested in other people, instead of just talking about ourselves all of the time, is a good pivot.  Being a good listener is a rare skill today – let’s not finish their sentences, or cut them off and instead let the other person talk. They will feel the respect and that you genuinely consider them important.  Trying to see things from the other person’s point of view, instead of being absorbed by what we want, substantially changes the dynamic and builds a collaborative, positive environment.  We gain credibility when we do this.

There are four factors which will impact the amount of inclusion we can marshall. 

1.         How we look 

What is the actual expression on our face?  Do we look welcoming and friendly or are we displaying stress or anger.  Are we in fact showing a warning beacon to everyone to avoid us, because we don’t look happy or collegiate.

2.         How we act 

What is our body language communicating?  This can be tricky.  I remember once catching myself shaking my head from side to side, while someone was telling me their idea. Unconsciously I was telling them , “I don’t like your idea”. No words were being expressed by me but the message was crystal clear.

3.         What we say

Diplomacy is a learnt skill and there are ways of expressing things which will generate less resistance and pushback than other options and we have to be sensitive to the content and context of our message.

4.         How we say it

The tone of our voice can trump the actual words. In themsleves they may not be so combustible, until we add some nuance to the way we deliver the message.  Sarcasm is deadly because we take neutral words andspice them up into weapons of mass collaboration destruction.

(2)   Cultural Awareness

The issues of conscious and unconscious bias are central to gaining inclusion. Conscious biases are easier to understand but not necessarily easy to eliminate.  We are the products of our upbringing, our experiences, our thinking and our generational age.  The issue becomes “do I care”?  If we are not convinced of the benefits of diversity, we won’t make the effort. This is where the organisation needs to intervene, to spend time and effort establishing that “we take achieving diversity seriously here, because we see the clear business benefits”. If the upper levels of leadership cannot do that, then the inclusion cause is doomed to fail and nothing will change.

“We don’t know what we don’t know”, “blind spots”, “lack of self-awareness” are all the enemy of eliminating subterranean biases we may have.  Microaggressions are a common outcome of our lack of self-awareness.  We are barreling along in our career, sweeping all before us but also leaving a trail of destruction in our wake. We are ignorant of how we are coming across. When we have built up trust though, we can illuminate points of unconscious bias by colleagues and bosses. 

I tell all my new staff when they join, that if I am doing something which annoys them, I may be totally unaware of it. Let me know and I will stop doing it.  Especially with female staff members, I make the point that, as a man, I am often just unaware of how they may feel about my comments. If they let me know I will stop making those sorts of comments. 

We need to have an open mind about analysing ourselves and our negative outcomes with others. By better understanding ourselves we can improve our radar for trouble.  Inclusion is a one person at a time effort, but support and guidance from top leadership is vital.

What would you do if a parcel delivery staff and three confederates suddenly pushed past you and overpowered you when you opened the door?  What would you do if a lunatic neighbour broke into your house armed with a hammer and started attacking your whole family?  The recent deaths of 90 year old Kinuyo Oshio during a home invasion by the Luffy Gang and hearing about long-time Tokyo resident and friend, Bill Bishop and his entire family being killed by a lunatic neighbour, make this a reality we haven’t had to confront before.  We are leaders, so how should we lead our families to protect ourselves from this type of crime?  If you are quite a logical type and think that statistically, this would never happen to you or if you are squeamish about handing out severe physical violence to home invaders, then stop one now. It is a choice to defend yourself and your family or to submit to being tied up and robbed. For those who are wondering about options, based on my 52 years of karate training, here are my ideas on what we can do the protect our families. 

The Luffy gang weapon of choice is that razor sharp, box cutter.  They look for older, weaker people living in mansion buildings and individual homes with no parcel locker system.  If you cannot install such a system, here are some alternatives.  Install camera systems at the entrance to you house, so that the gang know they are being recorded, to dissuade them from choosing you as their next victim. If that can’t be done and it is just the door protecting you from the criminals, don’t open the door.  Tell them to leave the parcel in front of the door and you will retrieve it later.  If they say you have to sign for it, tell them to leave a slip with the delivery company name and phone number on it and you will arrange for the parcel to be received later.  If they are legitimate delivery staff this will be simple for them and if they are criminals, they will give up and go find someone else to rob.

The Luffy gang technique is to recruit amateurs unknown to each other, have them burst through the doorway en masse and overpower you.  They tie you up, threaten you or actually cut you up with the box cutter to find out where the valuables are located and then ransack your house.  The gang leader Luffy has also assured them they can kill you if they need to and as we see, this is what happened with Oshio san. Guns are obviously out of contention in Japan, so what can we do?  

Some self-defense weapons I like are a not too heavy hammer, nunchaku and a Bokuto or heavy wooden sword.  The Bokuto and nunchaku are distance weapons, which help against assailants armed with knives, boxcutters or hammers.  The nunchaku is very compact and can be used in close quarters, whereas the Bokuto needs some space to wield. For the nunchaku, the primary target should be the outside of the knees, so that you both deny them mobility and you place them in a large amount of stress and pain.  The ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is what we want to damage, so they cannot stand.  We go after both knees too, so they are taken out as a threat until the police arrive.

For the Bokuto, the wrists and forearm are the initial target so that they cannot hold their weapon and the secondary target again is the outside of the knees.  The hammer is a close range weapon and the primary target should be the sternum, that part of the chest from the solar plexus up to the throat.  A hammer blow to the sternum is extremely painful and they feel it every time they breathe. This will stun them long enough for you to hit them in the secondary target, which again will be the outside of the knees.  

I don’t recommend the face or temple for attack, because there is a good chance you will kill the assailant and find yourself in the dock facing a murder charge.  That target zone is also high and they may be able to avoid the swing, absorb the blow on their arm or lean back out of the way, because they have good vision of the trajectory.  The knee area though is down low and quite hard for them to see what you are doing when you suddenly drop down out of their eyeline, until they feel immense pain in the knee joint and discover they cannot support their body weight anymore.

We don’t need flashy Bruce Lee style whipping technique for the nunchaku.  Just simple practice to fling the extended wooden section at around knee height is enough.  The same with the Bokuto.  We don’t need to be Miyamoto Musashi, we just need to practice striking in front around where the arm and wrist will be on the assailant.  The key to strike is to push through the strike hard, backing it up with your body weight, so that it penetrates deeply, rather than resulting in a shallow, flicking type of strike.  Remember, if we are going to hit them anywhere, then we have to disable them.   If you can hit them hard enough to break their wrist or forearm then that is helpful to reduce the threat.  

The hammer uses the same technique we would use to drive a nail – let the weapon’s concentrated force do the work.  However, don’t practice by drawing the hammer back too far.  This will signal what is coming and the interval between drawing back and striking makes you vulnerable to counter-attack. Practice striking in close quarters with a short sharp forward strike, back up with your weight, rather than pulling back first.  Remember you can hit them more than once and as they recoil in pain, this provides some more distance to take a bigger swing going forward.  Once you start hitting, don’t stop until you can take out their knees.

If you have nothing to hand, another weapon I like Katei Gaho, that very thick magazine you can buy anywhere.  Roll it up very tightly.  We use the ends of the magazine as the weapon and the action is like a tennis backhand swing where you come across our body and then jam the end into the assailant. The secret is to get the body weight behind it for maximum effectiveness. We hold the magazine in the middle so that we can use either end.  Try jamming it as hard as you can into a desk or hard surface and you will quickly see why this is such a powerful attack weapon.  The target is this case is the temple, face area, solar plexus, throat and groin.  You have to hit hard when you use it and don’t stop with just one blow.  Our objective is to escape from them and call the police.

If there is no alternative, we can use our hands as weapons, if we know what we are doing.  If you don’t know what you are doing, then don’t bother, as you will only get yourself into trouble. Apart from aiming at the throat, I don’t recommend striking with the fist itself trying to punch them in the face.  Invariably we will break one of the bones in our hand on their hard head or elbow and then we lose access to one of our weapons.  We can use our fingers into their eyes as a way to distract them before we deliver the main blow.  I don’t mean to try and poke them in the eye with the one finger, but to hit the eye area with all the fingers of one hand in a top down, flailing motion.  Try it against a wall and you will surprised at how much hitting power this technique has. The eye area is very sensitive, so there is more than enough power in this technique to force them back and off balance. Also, there is a better chance of making contact with the eyes this way, whereas a single eye poke attempt may miss. This eye attack opens up a chance to punch them in the throat or kick them in the groin.  The kick we use is like the kick we see football players doing, called the punt kick and it has the same strong follow through rising action.  Again, our objective is to escape from them and call the police.

When striking the face, I like to use the heel of the palm, that thick fleshy bit where the hand connects to the wrist.  The target is the base of the nose just above the teeth.  This is a very sensitive area. A slam of the heel palm there will drive their weight up and back and again provide a clear shot at a throat or groin attack.

Finally, let’s look at the Armageddon scenario. Things are totally desperate and you absolutely believe you are going to be murdered right there and then.  Now, every Japanese home has a set of razor sharp Hocho or cutting knives for cooking.  If you get to this point of having to use a Hocho, then don’t use the knives for wildly slashing about, they are better for thrusting.  Pick a large thick knife, get both hands on the knife handle and your full body weight behind it when you thrust.  Don’t try anything fancy like you see so-called knife fighters doing in the movies.  Keep it simple, don’t run at them, don’t over-reach, but move in quickly and aim below the belt area, where it is very hard to defend against.  You will probably have to use multiple thrusts because arms and hands will get in the way, but don’t stop. If you survive their attack, you will be in court to face assault or murder charges, but that is better than being dead.  I may be wrong, but I believe if Bill Bishop, his wife and daughter had retreated to the kitchen and each armed themselves with Hocho and faced their lunatic neighbour assailant together, they may all still be alive today.

Of course, none of this is guaranteed to work, but at least it gives you an idea of what are some options other than surrender and hoping they don’t kill you after they have tied you up.  Naturally, these techniques do require practice.  The most important thing though is to generate the mindset for survival and to be prepared to defend yourself with everything you have when it gets real.  If it is to be, it is up to me. If it is “me” or “them”, I choose “me”.

There are lots of secrets for leaders.  They attend the executive meetings, the off-sites, the briefings from the big bosses and know what is going on before anyone else.  Divulging top secret corporate moves will get you fired, so leaders are usually tight-lipped about coming transformations, changes, expansions, downsizing etc.  This is fairly obvious and everyone knows where the boundaries are located regarding what you can and cannot say.  What about more personal matters though?

Japan is a place where a secret is a precious thing.  Living cheek-by-jowl for centuries in small villages or packed together in urban concentrations, often with concrete walls which seem paper thin, keeping a secret is no mean task.  Like most cases for small cities around the world, everyone seems to know everyone else’s business.  Sometimes I am taken by surprise. Suddenly one of my staff will tell me that they have gotten married or that they have had a child.  Until the deed is done, Japanese are pretty silent about what is going on, in case something goes wrong and they would lose face.

What about the boss though?  How much should the boss be prepared to share what is going on in their private life?  When I was growing up in Brisbane the answer was simple – you shared nothing!  Work and non-work were completely separate universes and there was a big wall keeping them apart.  You were expected to handle whatever was going on in your private life and turn up and turn out the work – no excuses. 

Today, things are different and staff are more likely to want to blur the boundary between private and work.  They are expecting to be cut some slack, to be granted some margin, to accommodate their private travails in the workplace.  Japanese are living longer,  so parents are still around and getting frail and needing medical care and assistance from their children.  The idea that this has nothing to do with the company is now a strange idea and bosses are expected to be supportive and flexible.  But what about the boss -where do they fit into this new world?

Usually, the private items which may move into the public domain will be ill health or divorce or re-marriage.  These three biggies are not for broad public consumption.  Clients don’t need to know the boss’s health issues or marital arrangements, unless they have become friends or the relationship is very close.  However how much should the boss tell the team?  There can be a fear that telling staff about the boss’s weaknesses will undermine their authority.  There is also the fear that nobody particularly cares about the boss’s issues, because they have an abundance of their own issues and don’t really want to know about what is going on.  There is also the aspect that bosses are totally replaceable.  If you have to disappear, or fall of the perch, then the machine will spit out a replacement and life continues.

In the case of company owners though there is a different calculation.  If the boss disappears, the company may disappear too and everyone is out of a job.  So is the boss wise to keep everything a secret, deal with their health issues privately and just carry on as if nothing is amiss?  We are in the era of more compliance and greater transparency, so how does this impact boss choices?

I believe in being transparent with my teams.  I wasn’t always so minded though and for a long time I kept everything under wraps and would not let anyone know what was going on with the financials in the business. I changed that mindset a number of years ago and now everyone knows exactly where we are financially, in real time.  Did making the change create a queue of people lined up outside my door demanding more money?  No, I found everyone understood the health of the company and were professional in their expectations.

Applying that same transparency logic, I am prepared to share serious health issues with the team.  Their lives are tied up in the company and they have a right to know about things which may impinge on that stability.  If you are going to disappear into hospital for week or more and need to recover at home for some weeks after that, it is pretty hard to shield that information from the team and people are not stupid. 

Yes, the “ironman or ironwoman” image may be revealed to have feet of clay, but so what?  The era of the hero leader has been replaced with the total power of the team and if the whole thing revolves around one person, then we have a serious problem with the way the business is being run.

What about things like getting divorced?  Is that for public consumption?  Will that be something you can keep secret forever?  It isn't really possible though is it.  The word will get out for sure. There is also the issue of changes in your demeanour and mood.  Breakups are highly emotional turning points for bosses, especially if there are children involved.  This can lead directly to impacting how we interact with the team.  They will notice something is wrong, because we have changed.  We don't have to try and get them to take our side in the dispute or to justify what we have decided to do, but we should explain that this is happening and that for a period the boss won’t be their same old predictable self.  The team are likely to be more understanding to mood swings or depression in the boss, if they know why.

The boss doesn’t have a road map with this stuff, because society and work are changing and every day is a new day, where a different path may need to be trod.  The point is to think about your approach or strategy to these issues, before it happens, rather than being caught on the back foot and being forced to react to changes. Not having a solid plan of action isn’t how we run companies and these issues are now part of the planning process.

I received a leave application request on a Saturday from one of my staff. It reminded me that we had missed our weekly meeting.  In fact, now that I think about it, we have missed quite a few of them, because of various scheduling conflicts.  My busyness has been a factor.  This made me recall that fantastic Bill Oncken and Don Wass article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) back in 1974 titled, “Management Time: Who’s Got The Monkey”.  In fact, HBR notes that this article is one of two of their best selling reprints ever.  If you haven’t read it, then take a look, it is gold.

In this article, a classic, they are talking about staff accountability and boss delegation.  The boss always has more interest in keeping abreast of what staff are doing than the staff have any interest in their accountability. Missing sessions with the boss is a plus from their point of view, because they are not having to provide any answers about their results or lack thereof.  With a bit of deft scheduling change, they can go for long periods with no actual supervision. 

I know that I am packing my schedule, that I am taking 100% accountability for the company’s results and this is the problem.  I haven’t factored in enough slack to deal with people who prefer to keep no profile or a low profile with the boss. It is very hard for the boss to turn the switch down from “full bore ahead” to “I am going to do less”.  What often makes us the boss in the first place is our drive, determination, pain threshold, commitment and ambition.  All sterling stuff, but sometimes we have to remember that the monkey is kept firmly on our back in these types of situations.

When we delegate and staff don’t match our expectations with the speed or quality of the work they are doing as part of the delegation, there is an overwhelming boss urge about to kick in.  That urge is called “buying back the delegation”.   We start having extremely dangerous thoughts such as, “it will be faster if I do it myself”.  Before you know it, your schedule is packed and you have no slack for checking up on slackers.  We are moving too quickly sometimes and that momentum just keeps carrying us forward.  As I mentioned, these life-long habits are what have spring boarded us to the boss position and they are hard to shake.

McGregor in his Theory X boss and Theory Y boss declaratory study said that, in simple terms, the X boss sees the bad side of people and the Y bosses see the good side of people and treat them accordingly.  I have to keep reminding myself of this when I gets thoughts like, “I wonder if this staff member is being clever about manipulating the boss’s busyness to escape from any accountability”.  I have to replace that thought with a more Y boss contribution like, “Everyone wants to do a good job and this person is just busy too. Our schedules are just not matching well enough and I need to cut myself some slack here to be more available”.

I am always amazed when people own up to the fact they don’t plan their day, based around the priorities they have set themselves for their work.  Actually, I was teaching a leadership class recently and roughly half of the class said they didn’t set daily priorities for their job.  I don’t understand that and of course I am religious about planning my day.  Naturally priorities can change but that is okay because I can get back to what I should be doing after the diversion.  Certainly those days when I am not able to do that classic Time Management Quadrant Two – not urgent and important – planning function are never as productive or as satisfying as when I can do it.  Being able to tick that a task has started and then being able to add that additional tick to note it has been completed is an absolute  dopamine rush. This may be part of the problem though. I am too tightly bound in that scheduling to leave any slack for myself.  My super efficiency may not actually be enabling me to be as effective as I need to be.

As the boss I need to keep that monkey of delegated tasks off my back and I need to be leavening the day with little blank spaces to make sure I can spend the time with the team where it is needed.  When I am in my super commander mode, I start barking out orders like a pirate captain and I am missing important leadership aspects like asking questions instead of telling people what to do.  Command mode also means that any coaching is out the window and a rain of orders are flowing forth from me to everyone.

Bill Oncken’s article is always a good reminder of what I should be doing as opposed to what I am actually doing.  When I got that leave request it triggered the thought that “oh yeah, we have been missing meetings and these are my opportunity to coach this staff member and to make sure all relevant monkeys are sitting firmly on their back and not on mine”.  How about you?  How are you going building some slack into your day to be less efficient and maybe more effective.  For me it is a constant struggle, and while I am far from perfect, at least I know I am operating with some awareness of the issue.  That awareness is the first step to finding the balance and solution I need.  How would you calibrate your own awareness of this issue?

Western leadership is a meritocracy where the most driven, talented, hardest working and ambitious are given the responsibility for those cannot make it to the top.  Everyone knows the rules and the system works pretty well.  The American version is at one end where the degree of ruthlessness is more pronounced and accepted.  Other Western nations have less stringent variations, but fundamentally follow the same basic ideas about who deserves to be a leader.  What happens when you put these leaders in charge of a Japanese team?

The hero’s journey is not pronounced so much in Japan because the hero cannot make it alone.  Here the team is required to pull together as a unit and strengths and weaknesses are evened out across jobs and personalities.  The idea of 1 + 1 = 5 is often talked about in the West as a aspiration but in Japan it is the reality.  The component parts are harmonised and concentrated to get the results.  Individual requirements are not promoted above the good of the group.

Landing into Tokyo and applying the Western hard driving leadership model will end in tears for everyone and make the newbie’s stay here brief and frustrating.  Intangibles are important and connections is a big one.  I remember a previous staff member of mine seeking advice on what to do about his new bolshie boss.  I told him to hang in there and wait until to he got posted somewhere else.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t bear it anymore and quit.  When he quit, 200 others quit as well.  They weren’t other staff, they were key relationships in that industry built up over multiple decades.  My previous staff member was no doubt was replaced but those relations of his will only be replaced over decades to come and that loss is huge.  The new broom was clueless about that aspect, because he thought he was getting the staff aligned with the new direction.  His own glorious career was uppermost in his mind as he wrought havoc left and right.

As I have talked about before, getting change in Japan is tough, tough, tough.  It is also tough for Japanese leaders too and requires immense amounts of time to be invested and one-on-one persuasion.  This effort requires trust, communication and persuasion skills.  Imagine trying to do that where there is no common language level capability.  Mistakes, misunderstandings and confusion are bound to be the product of two people trying to communicate but doing so imperfectly. Also imagine if in 2023 you were illiterate and trying to run a complex organisation.  That is the reality for maybe 99% of foreign leaders in Japan, because few speak Japanese and even fewer can read or write in Japanese.  It is hard to be majestically self-assured when you cannot read or write.

“All of our staff speak English”, is the supposed antidote to the plight of the illiterate leader.  Just to make it more interesting, as foreign leaders we speak too quickly, to directly and pepper our language with idioms and uncommon phrases.  Even as a foreigner here, I find American English can be challenging, because I didn’t watch their television programmes and I didn’t grow up there.  I don’t listen to rap music and I don’t watch many movies these days.  Sometimes I have no idea what they are talking about and have to ask for a clarification. Now I am a native speaker, who coming from sporty Australia and fairly used to sporting metaphors.  If I have grown up in Japan though and English is a language I have earnt at school and varsity, there are bound to be huge gaps in understanding.  Being a diligent Japanese team member, I won’t embarrass the boss by admitting their communication is flawed and that I have little clue as to what they are talking about. I will nod, smile and act polite and wonder what is going on.

Pushing a piece of string is a good metaphor for the driving foreign leader in Japan.  Strength of will, will only get us so far in our own cultures and will basically get you nowhere here because that isn’t how things work.  Firing people who won’t do what you want isn’t considered a valid reason for termination in Japan, so persuasion is the required method.  Often the reason is related to the client relationship.  The foreign boss may be here for three to five years, but the client is here forever, long after the memory of that pesky boss has faded away.

Also we should add in time – lots of time.  If you are in a hurry, then you are piling on heaps of unnecessary pressure.  Rushing things through, getting lots of stuff done, making quick decisions and driving the results are the hallmark of the successful boss in the West.  That would be a list very hard to apply to most Japanese leaders.  Quick decision making here is seen as being flippant and not being considered enough, not taking the time to gather the facts and information needed to make the right decision. 

In fact, rather than the right answer, Japan is more concerned in getting the question right.  Think about that and you see what a different approach is being taken here. Japanese leaders are masters at building a consensus, smoothing out obstacles and finding a harmonious path forward.  They don’t want hidden resistance and slowing down the execution of the decision. They know the clients and the staff and they know the limits of how far they should push and where they should compromise today for the future benefit. 

Humility and a desire to learn new skills and methods is a worthy set of aspirations for the foreign leader transplanted here for a few years, rather than imagining business infrastructure and customs have to now change because the foreign leader has now landed at Haneda.  Japan has a lot to teach us and we should be open to the lessons, because these will hold us in good stead whereever we go in the world.

Getting change anywhere is a difficult process, but Japan is a special case.  Often in business, we represent the change.  We are the potential new supplier and that means a change.  They have been doing business with someone else and we want them to stop doing that and do business with us instead.  There are many currents underpinning Japanese culture and its resistance to change. I have been training in traditional Japanese karate for 52 years and part of that process is learning set sequences called kata.  These are fixed moves that cannot be varied in any way.  There is one way to do the movement, one order and our job is to replicate that same movement thousands of times until we have perfected it.  There is no possibility of doing it a different way - in other words, no change is possible. 

This is a powerful metaphor for many things in Japan where there is only one way of doing things and it cannot be varied.  This is prime change resistance in action.  I find this at home too.  My wife is Japanese and there are certain things which must be done in a certain way.  Being an Aussie, I am pretty easy going and flexible on trying to do things in a different way, but she brooks no variation.  There is a certain way specific things must be done and that it is that.

This is the culture and here you are, trying to break into the market.  By definition, you are a change and there is plenty of change resistance already built into the culture to start off with.  Anything that represents a change for a company has to get signed off by all of the stakeholders.  This is the famous ringi seido system of everyone applying their chop to the piece of paper to show they are in agreement.

There will always be more resistance to change in Japan, than enthusiasm for something better.  Part of this issue is no one wants to take responsibility if problems arise, so the safest career path is to say "no".  Hence, a change in suppliers is not easy here. Risk aversion means they have worked out who is the most reliable and consistent partner in their supplier relationship.  They are the incumbent low risk option, they have track record and they have built credibility over a long time. 

You however are shiny and new.  Maybe you are reliable, maybe you are not.  Who knows, so no change is a better path forward for people who don't want to be accountable.  So we have to come up with ways to eliminate or mitigate the risk.  in our case as a training company we only ask one question - are you satisfied with the training?  If the answer is no, then no debate, no haggling, the training is free and there is no cost to the company, apart from the time they have invested. 

We do this because we have to make it easy for the line manager or the HR managers to give us a chance to become a new supplier of training services to this company.  What about your case?  What can you do to take away the risk of doing business with you?  Remember we are dealing with individuals who are super deep in their comfort zone.  They have reduced risk in all aspects of their life.  They are seeking the maximum efficiency, at the lowest cost and the fastest speed. 

I am the same.  I get up at the same time, catch the same train to work, choose the same carriage because it will be the closest to the stairs or escalator at the other end.  I eat in the same twenty restaurants within a kilometer of my office.  This comfort zone is a powerful resister to change. It encourages us to keep doing the same things over and over.  We are doing the same thing in business - the fastest, cheapest, safest way of doing things.  That refinement makes it hard to break in when you are the Angel they don't know.  The opportunity cost of continuing with the same supplier, the Devil they know, and not gaining additional or superior benefits from a new supplier, is not easily considered in Japan. 

The individuals we are dealing with are worried about themselves and making sure they don’t get into any trouble.  So the same things, get done the same way, with the same results.  This is just fine with them. Underperformance won’t get you fired here in Japan, but mistakes can.  We are new for them, we are a comfort zone expander for them, a pattern disruptor for them and so we meet heavy resistance. 

To persuade the company that we are the better option, all risks considered, means we have to be working on more than just our champion inside the company.  Remember, the person we are dealing with is usually not the sole decision-maker. There are so many people inside the company who can say no. We need to make sure we are working on them too. 

It is possible to have change here in Japan, because we do get new clients.  It just takes a long time and is difficult.  It is not uncommon to create a “new” client we met four years, three years, two years ago.  We have been in business for 111 years, 60 years in Japan, have massive track record, plenty of runs on the board, but potential new clients still want to test us with a small amount of training first.  This drives you nuts, but that is just the client seeking risk removal and we are not about to change that buyer preference anytime soon.  Bringing new businesses to Japan needs patience and extended timeframes, if you want to overcome the inherent resistance to change.

Society approves titles and status, especially in Japan.  We rise through the ranks and following the Peter Principle, we peak at our upper level of incompetence.  On the way up, we pick up titles and accrue status, respect and credence amplified through the power of our title.  Our personal power though could be suddenly exposed as bogus, when we get up to open our mouths in public.  This is one of those “The Emperor Has No Clothes” moments, when all is revealed, and we are found severely wanting.

I was at a function recently and one of the bureaucratic elite in Japan was there to give a keynote presentation.  You generally get to become an elite official in Japan because you went to the right elementary school, middle school, high school and then University.  The reason these were the right schools up until University, is because they have the absolute best system in place to help you be a legend in memorization, rote learning and test taking.  At University you take a couple of years off, before you start cramming for the national selection exam, where again memory and exam technique are the most rewarded skills.

You join a Ministry and work like a dog for a squillion hours every day, for years, simultaneously looking for a powerful patron to whom you can pledge total loyalty.  After decades of glacial progress, you emerge a grey haired, elite official.  Now part of the bureaucratic upper crust, you are often called upon to represent your organization and speak in public and the whole edifice comes crushing down.

This was the case with this official – sent out into the firing line to promulgate the new way forward for his political masters, to impress everyone with the potency of their new policies, to win adherents to the path forward.  Total fizzer. 

Why?  Because he spoke without energy or passion – nothing to indicate he felt at all impressed with his own recommendations.  He looked down at his papers and hardly glanced at the audience.  The opportunity to make eye contact, to combine words with the power of his face and to use the tonal variations available to his voice,  were in total absence. 

He was a truly dull correspondent and we were completely dulled to his message.  There were no converts that day.  He could tick the box though – the task was completed, a total failure, but completed. 

Astonishingly, during the post speech Q&A session, he perked up like a man really engaged – sadly it was only sustained for 30 seconds, but it showed he could do it. 

So why didn't he do it while he commanded the stage?  No concept and no appreciation for the immense power at his beck and call, I would proffer.  His self-concept seemed to be that he was just a grey bureaucrat, whose job was to be grey and boring.  Obviously he had received no training or preparation for his task.  So his brilliant university pedigree meant little when he was publically outed at the podium.  He was a total failure as a communicator, he became a message killer, a brand assassin instead. 

Was he an exception, a one-off, the runt of the litter among the bureaucratic ranks of the gifted, great and plausible public speakers?  No he was typical of that bevy of elite officials, who are mainly acquired status and have almost no personal power projection.

Another vaunted profession is that of the elite government official who works in the foreign service.  This has been a bad week for me, as I suffered more of the same, this time from an Ambassador. 

You would think that given the high profile nature of their job, they would be experts in promoting their countries.  No, this was another national reputation suicide effort. 

Monotone, weak voice sputtering forth Ums and Ahs aplenty, with no engagement with the audience.  A voice that sounded so very weary and where the last three to four words in every sentence, just slowly petered out.  The energy and tone just subsided, guaranteeing the key message was a total downer, regardless of the actual content of the words. 

Was this a one off – just the Ambo having a bad day?  No, I have seen this gentleman in action on many occasions and there is a scary consistency to his public speaking murder of his country’s brand.  He is not unusual – in my 37 years of survey here, I have found that most Ambassadors are hopeless public speakers.  Yes, yes, there are some exceptions, but they just prove the rule (send me a list of more than 10 Ambassadors you know who are any good?).

Do these career diplomats get proper training in the art of public speaking?  Astoundingly no!  They become elite government officials due to their ability to write cables and reports, which usually almost no one reads, by the way.  They have large analytical abilities and very big brains. They can really shine in small meetings, where they can one up their rivals and be the smartest intellect in the room. 

So they get promoted and then get propelled to the front of the stage, handed the mic and away they go into ineptitude, writ large under lights, in front of the assembled masses.  The good thing is that all of their colleagues are equally hopeless, so it seems normal to them.  The fundamental error is they simply don’t value having a skilled public presentation facility.

The worst public speaking experience of my diplomatic career was giving a speech on behalf of one of our Ambassadors.  I was “our man in Osaka” and had to deliver the speech on his behalf.  The talk was in Japanese, which was no issue, as I had given around 400 public speeches in Japanese.  The content however was challenging.  There are four main types of speeches – to inform, to persuade, to entertain and to impress.  Foreign Ministries around the world, tend to love the data dump, inform variety.  This automatically leads to lots of dull information being imparted.  Why they don’t go for the persuade type is a bit of a mystery to me and all countries seem to make that selection.  I absolutely gave it my best shot to liven it up, while sticking religiously to the approved Ambassadorial text, but what torture it was! 

Imagine when you combine dead data with a dead delivery?  You have a massive bromide of winter surf Hawaiian North Shore frightening proportions, thundering down to bludgeon unsuspecting audiences into stupefaction. This is what we usually get from elite Government officials and it doesn't have to be like that. 

There are some bright spots of hope though, even in Japan!  Previous Ambassador Motohiko Nishimura, who I met in Osaka in the mid-1990s, during his posting to the Kansai (yes, Kansai is considered a foreign country by Tokyo, so they have to send an Ambassador down there), was skilled and excellent.  English or Japanese, it did not matter, he was the consummate diplomat in the sense he could use his speaking power, to capture an audience and have them love Japan.  He finished his career as Ambassador to Portugal, and I am sure he was a tremendous asset for his country in creating support for Japan there.

Hello to all of you elite officials and aspirants out there, stop boring us all to death, get some proper training and represent your Ministries with aplomb.  Boys and girls – be ambitious? No be persuasive!

The calendar year represents the start of a new year for many businesses. Others will be looking at April 1st for their financial year start.  Nevertheless, everyone will be facing the change of year period and it is always a great time for reflection.  The holidays should be fully occupied with family responsibilities or pure down time, to rest and recharge. Take some time when you get back to the office, to start reflecting on the coming year. Are we where we need to be in the business? Is this thought depressing? We all enter year three of Covid hell. Runaway war inspired energy shortages and inflation are now rampart globally.  It is hard to be optimistic in many industries.  Certainly my industry, the training business, hasn’t seen any daylight in the long hard night as yet.

As leaders, it is good to step away from the daily grind of the business to spend some time thinking.  Usually most of our thinking time is very immediate, responding to problems and crises.  The melee of daily battle is not the best time to think about the big picture.  The new year is a key opportunity to work on our business and not just work in the business.  By this stage the business plans for the next calendar year or the April start of the fiscal year will have been completed or pretty much advanced.

Here are some additional things to contemplate.

Is our Why strong enough?

The rationale for our existence as a business has the obvious outcomes of revenues produced and shareholder value provided.  Are we doing better than that though?  The intrinsic value of the work will differ from individual to individual, so we probably will never get it perfectly right.  Directionally though, are we satisfied that we have the team all focused on the same goals and coordinated in their understanding of the rationale for that direction?

As we get swept up in the busyness of day after day, we can get separated from our cause, our mission.  We will have referred to the Why at some point for sure, but did it permeate the minds of the team?  Is everyone interpreting the Why in a similar way?  How regularly do we bring this topic up?  Once a year is definitely not going to be enough, so the start of the year is a good chance to remind us all of the bigger picture here.

In our company’s case, we go through the Vision, Mission, Values every single day with our Daily Dale morning meeting.  By rotation, one of the team will take the lead and go through the process.  These days we do it online rather than physically in the office, but we kept it going, Covid or otherwise, because it is important to remind us all of what we are doing here.  Is it enough?  Frankly “no”.  One of the problems with doing something like this every day is we all go into semi-automatic mode and the words don’t always fully penetrate.  As the leader, I need to top it up with a regular exploration of the Why behind the words to stimulate everyone’s thinking.  What is your cadence to bring up the Why for attention?

Do we have the right people, on the right bus and in the right seats?

Our options in Japan are rapidly closing out regarding quality of staff.  They just aren’t making enough Japanese anymore and so the population decline is creating a zero sum game of recruiting and retaining staff.  The difficulties in recruiting new staff means that we have to be able to keep existing staff, even if they are not the right people, on the right bus or in the right seat.  Do we need to move some people around or create some new positions to better use their talents? 

In the old days, we would simply fire them and replace them with more capable people, but that path is fraught today. Do we need to spend more time training some of the crew who are not producing at the level we need.  Do we need to hire at a lower talent level, train them well and create more support systems, so that the real stars in the firm can outperform?  If a low performer goes from increasing revenues from ¥500,000 a month to ¥1,000,000 a month that looks like a really good result.  However, if a top performer can go from ¥5,000,000 a month to ¥6,000,000, the overall result is at scale and much more significant.  How can we help that top performer hit the high notes of production?

What about my ongoing professional education?

Ask yourself, what did I do to improve my professional abilities as a leader last year?  If the answer is “I worked really hard”, then count that as a failing grade.  Everyone can work hard over long hours, so that is not as tremendous differentiator.  What was the quality of your thinking?  How was the depth of your strategy for the business?  How well could you anticipate trouble and head it off at the pass?  What were the new initiatives you introduced and how did they fair?  Did you stray out of your comfort zone and push yourself to grow as a professional?

Often we are the impediment to progress, because we are not good enough.  We have been too busy to study, to train, to read, to listen, to challenge ourselves with new perspectives.  How many insights did we achieve in the last year?  How many new initiatives did we introduce?  How much experimentation did we try?  Were we driving for more speed and leading the charge in that regard?  What do we need to change up for this next year?

Carve out some time for yourself at the start of the New Year.  It is easy to get swept back up into the whirlwind of the everyday demands of the business, but resist that temptation.  Give yourself a chance to reflect, think, imagine and plan.