The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

We have seen Hollywood pumping out comic heroes as movie franchises to get the money flowing into the studios.  The premise is always the same.  The super hero comes to the rescue and saves everyone.  What about for leaders when coaching their team members?  Fortunately, we have four super heroes we can rely on to help us do a better job as the leader. They are Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower.   Encouraging our team sounds pretty unheralded and straightforward. But do we actually do it?  Leaders are busy people and have tons of pressure on their shoulders.  Life is a whirlwind of meetings and pushing the plan’s execution.  Expecting people to do what they are being paid to do, can easily supplant the encouragement vibe from the leader.  Telling people you recognise their strengths, means taking the time to audit and then communicate those strengths.  Being supportive means taking the time to be across what is happening at the individual level.  Do we do that?  Giving positive reinforcement means having

The chain of command is a well established military leadership given.  I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else.  In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers.  This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback against the Vietnam War, when all authority began to be challenged.  Modern leaders are currently enamoured with concepts like the “servant leader”.  The leader serves the team as an enabler for staff success.  Dominant authority is out and a vague negotiated power equilibrium has replaced it.  Delegation, responsibility, accountability, mistake handling and punishment are all swirling around in this fog of the new order.   Japan makes the whole construct even more interesting by having built up a legal perspective on staff issues that favours the worker against the company.  Judges, also do not see company staff non-performance of duties as necessarily career ending.  Add into the mix the fact that

Best laid plans of mice and men.  That was 2020 wasn’t it.  We all started that year with our plans, hopes, aspirations and strategies in place.  They all went down in flames and business became a game of catch as can, as we tried to grapple with an unfolding disaster.  In our company’s case, our financial year starts in September and we were up 25% on revenues compared to the same period the previous year.  I hired four more staff in January and had a record breaking year looming in sight.  It was a record breaking year all right, but in the opposite direction to what I expected. What about this year?  Are we any better positioned to plan for 2021?   Japan has seen a state of emergency declared and virus cases leaping higher and higher each day, like the flames of an uncontrollable bush fire wreaking havoc on everything in its path.  Japan, being Japan, won’t accept the vaccine test results like the rest of the world.  No, we have to replicate the tests here again because, well, we are Japanese and are diffe

Most leaders are not properly trained for leadership.  This is especially the case in Japan.  Here you study under the mentorship of your busy, time poor, over worked boss.  Your access to formal leadership training is constrained by the firm’s buy in to the dubious virtues of On The Job Training or OJT.  I am sure that at one point in time the OJT worked like a charm but the used by date has well and truly passed on that methodology.  Busines is a lot more complex today, technology rampant and the younger generation are increasingly feral.   The core required skills of the leader form three inter connecting circles.  These comprise leading, selling and presenting.  Now for many leaders they only see the one circle of leading as relevant and see the other two as less important.  The point here is that these circles each connect so that there is an overlap between all three.  If you are a leader you are in the business of sales.  You may have come through the CFO or Chief Scientists or General Management track

Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape.  We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk.  We have two types of people working for us.  There are those who receive a salary of some dimension, be they full time or part-time and then there are those who get paid for their services.  Some of these services are delivered regularly throughout the year.  Others are intermittent, on a needs basis.  Regardless, we need to take a good look at these every year to make sure they are still fit for purpose.   As a training company, we have some regular suppliers.  Our landlord charges us rent for the space we use and that lease pops up every two years.  Regardless of the economy, the office space vacancy rate, the consumer price index or any other intergalactic factors, the numbers always go up at renewal time.  It is no good finding ourselves at renewal time and think

Looking back, 2020 started quite well and then rapidly descended into a nightmare for most of us.  Very few industries boomed. The majority of us were fully concentrated on not going bust.  In 2021, we know we will have more of the same from the virus and the business disruptions which result.  It is a new year though, regardless of when your financial year kicks off, so there is some residual societal energy there to draw on, for a new start.  Our mindset, as always, is going to be important. Shall we allow things to play out, continue on as they have been or do we decide to seek to control our minds and strive for a different direction?   There are five mindset tools at our disposal.  Number one is thinking.  Sounds obvious enough.  “Of course I am going to be thinking in 2021”.  But what will you be thinking?  Has Covid-19 shrunk your world to the boundaries of your own abode, as you control your empire from super safe seclusion in your eyrie?  Fatigue sets in for individuals in the team, when being vigila

I met the owner of a successful business recently.  He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction.  So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange.  It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful.  Why was that my expectation?  Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are like, so I expected a Japanese equivalent.  He was totally different to what I expected.   He had no personal power at all from what I could see.  One reason may be that we were speaking in Japanese. It is a subtle, circular language that masks and obfuscates like few others.  He had two senior staff members with him, his direct reports and they too were rather underwhelming.  It got me thinking about what does it take in Japan to become a successful leader?  Here were three of them in front of me and I wouldn’t hav

The ad on social media said, “we are looking for sales A players”.  I know the guy who put out the ad and he had recently moved to a new company, a new entrant into Japan and they were aggressively going after market share here.  I was thinking I would love to be able to recruit A players for sales as well, but I can’t.  The simple reason is that A players in Japan are seriously expensive.  If you are a big company, with deep pockets in a highly profitable sector, then this is a no brainer.  Why would you bother with B or C players, if you can afford A players?  What do you do though, when you are running a small to medium sized company in a tough market, with thin margins and lots of competitors?   Being a leader, able to recruit the best talent, isn’t the same requirement as being at the sharp end of the stick, where you have to create something out of nothing on a daily basis.  We have to take D players and turn them into C players and take C players and turn them into B players. Maybe we can even create t

Years ago I inverted the pyramid and promoted the best salespeople to become the branch leaders.  The existing branch leaders were shuffled around to new branches and they provided the grey hair and the credibility needed by the older rich clientele, but didn’t have responsibility for driving revenues anymore.  They were moved because if they had stayed in the same branch, they would have undermined the authority of these “upstarts” recently promoted.  The revenue generation responsibility was shifted from guys in their 50s to a 60/40 mix of younger guys and gals, taking the average age down to 35 years of age.  It was a revolution in Japanese retail banking.   Not all made the transition from selling to leading but most did.  This was the American Dream brought to Japan.  In this brave new world, a young woman could become a branch head at the age of 35.  That was previously unimaginable.  The impact on recruiting talented, bright kids out of the best universities was profound.  We were bringing on board you

Time is the enemy of good leadership.  It takes time to develop a team of individuals.  A common metaphor is the orchestra conductor.  Each instrument player has a specific role and it is the job of the leader to meld them together to work harmoniously and effectively.  The conductor takes a significant amount of time to get this working correctly.  That is their sole purpose.  They make the best of the talent in the team, get them working well together and develop the individual talents of those involved.  In business, we have to do all of these things and worry about the P&L, the Balance Sheet, the competition, quarterly earnings, changes in Government regulations, the media, shareholders, where the market is heading and the latest developments in technology.  We are kept pretty busy.   Consequently we are time poor from the moment our eyes open until we drift off to into slumber at night.  There is a tension between the time needed to work with our team members to work effectively together and the time

I remember reading once about a President reflecting on the cost controls he had instituted inside his organisation.  The industry had emerged from a recession and even though the economy and the company had recovered, he had forgotten to ease the strict controls he had instituted to protect the company.  Covid-19 has forced many of us to institute strict controls in order to survive the business disruption caused by the virus.  When should we release some of those stringent controls?   This is a tricky subject at any time, but it becomes more pungent when you are coming out of a long tunnel.  As Winston Churchill once remarked ,“If you are going through hell, keep going”.  Very clever and witty, but when we have come out the other side of Covid-19 hell exactly at what point do we need to ease off the vice like pressure we have been applying to expenses and investment?   In any business there is always tension around a couple of staples.  Control and innovation can be in contradiction.  Compliance, regulation

Working from home can easily become working apart. Japan is a group oriented society and now the group has been flung to the winds, while people are at home working in isolation.  Ronin were masterless samurai and for many Japanese white collar workers they can feel they have been tossed from the castle.  Japan is a curious mixture of discipline, conscientiousness and also escapism.  The staff’s job description is of vital interest to employees, because it defines the scope of responsibility.  Their main interest is to avoid all mistakes and problems and small targetism is definitely in vogue here.  Collective responsibility is preferred.  We are all responsible, so that no single individual is responsible.   What many companies have found during Covid-19 is how low is the productivity of certain individuals.  Unprotected by the group and having to stand on their own two feet, they stumble.  Innovation, out of scope responsibility, flexibility are not hallmarks of the office worker in Japan.  Plunging them in

Giving people orders is fine and fun, when you are the leader.  Not so great when you are on the receiving end though.  Collaboration and innovation are two seismic shifts in workstyle  that are fundamentally different from the way most leaders were educated.  Command and control were more the order of business back in the day.  Hierarchy was clear, bosses brooked no opposing ideas or opinions and everyone below knew their place.  Things have moved on, but have the bosses moved on with it?   Basically, the people you see in your daily purview are arraigned against a similar team in another steel and glass, high rise monstrosity somewhere across town.  The quality of their teamwork and their ideas determines who wins in today’s marketplace.  All the cogs have to intersect smoothly and the quality and speed of the output are the differentiators.  Are your salespeople better than the opposition, is the marketing department punching above its weight, are your mid level leaders really rocking it?  Clarity of purpo

Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School and INSEAD Business School are all awesome institutions.  My previous employer shelled our serious cash to send me there for Executive education courses.  Classes of one hundred people from all around the world engaging in debate, idea and experience exchange.  One of my Indian classmates even wrote and performed a song at the final team dinner at Stanford, which was amazing and amazingly funny, as it captured many of the experiences of the two weeks we all shared together there.    When you get off the plane and head back to work, you realise that the plane wasn’t the only thing flying at 30,000 feet.  The content of the course was just like that.  We were permanently at a very macro level.  The day to day didn’t really get covered and the tactical pieces didn’t really feature much.  This isn’t a criticism because you need that big picture, but the things on your desk waiting for you are a million miles from where you have just been.   Fortunately, there are

The President of a company is a very powerful force.  They drive the direction, the strategy and the culture formation inside the enterprise.  In Western corporations, there are big salaries and big incentives tied to the leader’s performance, especially around profit achievement and share price gains for shareholders.  We project this idea on to Japanese companies and imagine they are basically built in the same way.  This idea seems fine, until you ever have to get a decision from a Japanese company.  This is when you enter the twilight zone of differences about how things are really done here.   Japan has some specific features which make the leadership terrain quite unique.  Mid-career hires are the norm in the West and the exception in Japan, as far as larger firms are concerned.  New graduates are malleable and the company leadership wants to install their group think, culture and conservative action methodologies in them.  Seniority is a respected Confucian attribute in Japan, which has little currency

Tokusan the scholar visited Ryutan the Zen Master to learn about Zen.  Tokusan was a very smart fellow and very confident in his knowledge and experience.  He was good at impressing others with his capabilities and many people looked to him for guidance and advice.  After about ten minutes of conversation, Ryutan invited Tokusan to enjoy some green tea.  As the Zen master poured the hot tea into the cup, the tea began to flood over the brim, but Ryutan kept pouring the tea.  Tokusan became agitated and said to stop pouring, because the cup was already full.  Ryutan then told Tokusan that he couldn't understand Zen until he emptied his own mental cup, to allow new ideas to enter.   This is a famous zen story in Japan and we leaders are Tokusan.  We can be convinced of our ideas and become stubborn and inflexible about departing from them.  We have risen through the ranks based on our abilities, experience and results.  We had to work things out for ourselves and our decisions were correct.  Over time we came t

Key Competencies Needed To Lead Others (Part Two)   In Part One we looked at two broad categories of leadership competences around being Self-Aware and having Accountability.  In this next tranche, we will look at being Others-Focused and at being Strategic.    Others-Focused has many sub-points, but today we will investigate five key aspects   Inspiring   Through role modelling and communication skills, leaders can and should inspire followers.  The olde days of the boss having to know more than everyone else has gone.  The focus has shifted to developing followers, through personal interest and example.  Are you consciously, systematically doing this?   Develops Others   Once upon a time, certainly when I first started work,  there was no particular concept that it was the leader’s role to develop others.  Individuals had to step up and do it by themselves. This is fundamentally what all leaders had done in the past.  Today however, business is more complex and fast moving, so everyone needs help.  One of t

Leading is super easy.  You are given the title, the authority, the budget, the power and then you just tell people what they need to do.  How hard can that be?  As we know, leading is a snap, but getting others to follow you is the tricky bit. Our awesome power will certainly bludgeon compliance. Sadly, the troops turn off their commitment and engagement switch whenever they come into contact with kryptonite bosses.  We get promoted because we personally did a rather good job on our individual tasks.  That is a false flag though when it comes to being able to communicate, coach, set the direction and inspire others.  Few great athletes become great coaches. It is a totally different skill set.    There are four broad areas we will focus on to help us become successful leaders: Being Self-Aware, Accountable, Others-Focused and Strategic.  The possibilities are endless, but these four areas will serve us well to elevate our thinking about what is required to be a great leader.   Under the umbrella of Self-Awar

Japan has some set pieces around leadership.  The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen.  This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t.  They can be observed every day, all day long.  What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss.  Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, what is happening with that report?”.  Now the team are at home, away from the constant surveillance of the boss.  The boss has little idea how they spend their days and our clients tell us many Middle Managers  are struggling to supervise the diaspora.   In many cases, the day would start with the chorei, the morning huddle, getting the team together to go through what is on for that day.  These meetups can continue even when everyone is at home. We have just moved it online. Everyone needs to be on camera at 9.00

Clients sometimes ask us to help their Japanese executives have more “presence”.  This is rather a vague concept with a broad range of applications. There is a relevant Japanese concept called zanshin ( 残心 ).  A rather difficult term to translate into English, but when you see it, you will recognise it.  In Karate we do the predetermined, specified forms called kata (型).  When someone is performing one of these kata, there are different points of emphasis and after the physical action is completed, there is a residual energy and intensity of commitment that continues.  It is the same in the kumite (組手) or free fighting.  After a powerful punch or kick is completed, the karateka keeps driving their energy, intensity and focus into their opponent.  In business, we call this intensity “executive presence” but usually without the concomitant violence.   When the executive makes a comment, there is an energy that remains after they have stopped speaking and the audience feels that intensity.  We also call this hav