The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In business we live in the world of shallow statements of opinion.  Imagine there is a topic for discussion amongst the leadership team.  People will let fly with their thoughts and this becomes the basis for decision making, based on people’s statements on the matter.  Usually everyone is pretty busy, so the drill is to listen to what was said and then make the choice from amongst the various alternatives and move on.  There is a problem with this.  We are trapped in Phase One thinking if we continue in this way.  Phase One thinking is that first reaction level of contemplation on what you have just heard.  Instantly, you pour out your immediate thoughts on the issue.  The problem with this is, although it is quick and saves time, there is pretty light contemplation going on here. The famous Greek philosopher Socrates lived from 470-399 BC and was famous for his questioning techniques.  He used this method to help others dig deeper into their thinking.  We have to take inspiration from him and develop our ow

Leadership is stressful during normal times.  Dramatically different situations being enforced to deal with Covid-19, such as working from home, just adds to the stress. The current business revenues may be under water.  You may now owe the Japanese government a sizeable chunk of cash just to keep the firm alive.  The strain may be apparent or it may be quietly building up like a cartoon pressure cooker about to explode.  Folk law says, as we get older our tempers get shorter.  So if that is true for older leaders, now exposed to more than usual stress, this might be a dangerous cocktail being shaken, rather than stirred.  My wife assures me that as I have gotten older, my temper has quickened.  Personally, I can’t notice it, but like most things, she is probably right.  Is it because we are getting closer to falling off the perch, that we have less patience with everything, in our flickering twilight years on this planet?  I am sure there is many a psychologist thesis written on this subject, but I will rely

Kokorogamae is one of those Japanese concepts which are a bit tricky to translate.  Kokoro by itself as a word has a wide variety of meanings – mind, spirit, mentality, idea, thought, heart, feeling, sincerity, intention, will, true meaning, etc.  It is a radical in the Japanese kanji ideographic script and so appears in a large number of compound words.  Kamae comes from the verb kamaeru meaning take a posture, assume an attitude, be ready for, etc.  In Japanese, when the two words are combined, there is a phonetic shift of the “k” in kamae to a “g” sound. I first heard these two Japanese words in my karate dojo back in 1971, but never as a compound word.  Every class we were given the command “kamae”, meaning to take our fighting stance. For anyone doing Japanese martial arts, this is a very familiar word. The Kokorogamae concept is closely linked to Japanese ideas around perfectionism and mindset.  You cannot produce a perfect output, if your mind is not properly aligned with the action.  A great calligrap

In any organisation we are going to have our A, B and C players.  Hopefully no D players but if you do, then commiserations.  The Pareto Principle tells us that 20% of our team will produce 80% of the results.  Quite straightforward.  Why don’t we just fire the 80% and keeping adding to the 20%.  Well mathematically it doesn't work and also practically it is problematic.  If you have very deep pockets and you can hire the best, then go for it. The rest of us are just hellbent on making payroll.  We do our best to hire well, but after the probation period has ended, certain things become apparent. As Warren Buffet famously observed, once the tide goes out you can see who was skinny dipping.  In a properly functioning labour market, the poorer performers, could be terminated and replaced.  This is where Japan makes the whole premise more interesting. Covid-19 has crushed the hospitality and tourism industries, so there are a lot of people available on the market for that type of work.  Some other industries hav

Leaders are now leading invisible people.  Their staff are no longer in sight or at best are only visible in person a couple of days a week.  What are their people doing at home?  How are they spending their time, how motivated are they, how engaged?  Being in the office brings a certain level of discipline with it.  You can see if people are goofing off.  In an open office environment, you can hear the phone conversations with clients to gauge what is going on.  When people are at home though, there is no way to be sure the team are using their time effectively. Time is life.  Time management is life management.  The key tool to controlling time is the schedule, daily, weekly, monthly and annually. The temptation is to just imagine that time management is only about work time management.  We are holistic beings, multifaceted, with multiple responsibilities.  We play different roles in our lives and the work role is only one of those.  Concentrating all of our time on work throws our lives out of balance. The

Leaders who are remote from staff have long been identified as a problem.  They don’t delegate, preferring to do it all themselves. This subtly tells everyone, “I don’t trust you”.  They keep the drip, drip, drip of information from above firmly to themselves, as a means of maintaining their position power.  They are poor communicators and don’t know how to inspire the people who work for them.  They have poor people skills and are generally regarded as duds, as far as the troops are concerned.  They dislike mistakes and will publicly flay the perpetrators, effectively driving passivity and fear into the team. Now, all of this was taking place in the office, where heads can easily be counted. People can simply be engaged by calling their name out and telling them to come and see you.  Judgements can be made on who is working hard and who isn’t, by observing body language and activity.  Meetings can be called quickly and coordination is relatively straight forward.  Life gets a lot more complex when we start t

Leaders do dumb things and sometimes they have to do difficult things.  The line between which is which can sometimes be a bit hard to plumb.  I clearly remember the senior bosses coming back from a boozy weekend offsite, embraced with the idea that we, the great unwashed salespeople, would identify the top guns working for our rivals, so that the firm could recruit them.  What could possibly be wrong with this idea, in an industry that rapidly hires in market upswings and ruthlessly cuts staff in the downturns? Shareholder value in the US is another serious thing.  Quarterly earnings reports are weighty matters, which drives leader behaviours in directions you just have to shake your head at.  Capitalism gone mad in many cases.  Fortunately, for most of the world, this lunacy has been restrained to some degree.  Downturns turn out badly for employees.  Lofty rhetoric is tossed aside and “thoughts and prayers” becomes the common lament, as they toss you out on your ear.  The survivors are taking all of this i

Many decades ago, I remember a visiting Korean business delegation coming to my home town of Brisbane.  At the end of the day, in thanking us for being their hosts, the leaders noted it was very valuable visit and said “we didn’t know what we didn’t know about Australia”.  I had never heard that phrasing before and thought that was pretty cool and that these Korean chaps were pretty switched on. Nowadays, I realise how dangerous that “we don’t know, what we don’t know” business is in commerce and especially in leadership.  Shocking statistics emerged from a recent research piece we did on engagement in companies across 15 countries.  Respondents who had answered that they were “very satisfied” with their immediate supervisor, I would have expected were also among the most highly engaged staff in those companies we surveyed.  If my staff said they were “very satisfied” with me as their leader, I would be pretty chipper and upbeat about what a legend of leadership I was. Unfortunately, when we correlated that g

In Part Two we have looked at getting engagement, having transparency and the impact of tech.   One issue can be the lack of means to measure whether what the big bosses are saying is actually happening or not.  The Culture Champions do measure and track progress, so that they can correct issues.  These can be staff anonymous postings on speciality externally hosted third party sites, that allow the team to freely talk about problems with no fear of attribution.  Staff satisfaction and engagement surveys also work.  In the old days, these used to be every couple of years, but in some cases companies are doing light versions every quarter.  When Covid-19 settles down, we are all returning to back to the War for Talent.  Recruit and retain will again become major concerns of the organisation’s leaders. An attractive culture is a strong enabler in being successful in this regard.  How will you fare in this talent grab scrap?   The research we did was interesting, because even though the Culture Champions and the

How To Join The Culture Champion Workplaces – Part Two In Part One, we have looked at how to identify the culture in the organisation and if it is a keeper, the numerous obstacles to maintaining that culture.  In this instalment we look at what the best in class companies are doing about building an unbeatable culture. Our proprietary research showed that for all companies the main challenge to both creating and maintaining positive culture was the pressure to produce results. This makes sense, because all of those high-falutin words coming out of the C-Suite, tend to evaporate by the time they loft down to the engine room and the down and dirty world of revenue production tends to take over everyone’s concentration.  Saying you believe something is easy, but losing money to show you believe it, now that takes a lot more courage.  In the good times, your CEO airily says cool stuff like, “Our staff are our most valuable resource”, “Our most important assets go down the elevator every evening”.  This is very hi

How To Join The Culture Champion Workplaces – Part One Harvard Emeritus Professor James Heskett’s comparative study of the impact culture has on corporate financial performance was shocking.  He found that “as much as half of the difference in operating profit between organisations can be attributed to effective culture”.  Half, wow.  Now that is a big impact point, especially when we are talking operating profit rather than just gross revenues.  What is going on here? Corporate culture is like a glue that holds everything together.  It impacts the formation of the strategy, how decisions are taken and followed, clarity around the WHY, respect for those at the top and how customers are thought about and therefore how they are treated.  Edgar Schein’s famous study of organisational culture identified how to uncover your existing culture.  If you have a great culture, a so so culture or an underperforming culture, how would you know that in detail and where should you look.  He found there were three levels of

Sales Leadership For The Online World   Covid-19 hit business in Japan like a brick thown through a shop window.  All of a sudden everything was a mess and there were glass shards, dangerously sprinkled around everywhere.  We were all tiptoeing around trying to find a safe way through this catastrophe. Companies were upended and people were vanquished to their rabbit hutch homes to conduct business from there.  Commerce ground to a halt, as we went into lockdown.  Toilet paper, rice, pasta and Zoom licenses were selling well, but for most of us, things came to crashing halt.   In this scramble to adjust to the new situation, sales leaders were struggling to handle the new working conditions, themselves now sharing a small space at home with the spouse and kids.  Most Japanese bosses were not familiar with the new technology, so there was a period where a lot of energy had to be invested to learn how to connect using the new medium with the team.   The first thing we all found was that communication was much h

Back To The Future At The Workplace   Let’s presume you have all of the safety protocols in place for providing a safe working environment.  How do we co-exist with Covid-19, while gathering together back at the workplace?   Human interaction is definitely something that many people long for after months of working from home.  Yes, there were the online catch ups, maybe even virtual lunches, coffee breaks and happy hours, but it has not quite been the same.  It doesn’t mean everyone has to rush back to the workplace though.  There may be some people who are better off continuing to work from home, so organisational flexibility is the key.  In fact we must now question the logic of some of our workflows.  This deadly virus may have also been deadly for workplace inertia.  Pre-Covid-19,we just did things a particular way, because that is how it has always been done around here.   Sharing our lock down lives is a good way of bonding the returning team together.  With appropriate social distancing, get together i

The Great “Safe” Return To The Workplace In Japan Congratulations on escaping the Covid-19 virus by staying safe and working from home.  We all want to see our businesses succeed and we all want to stay healthy.  If it is time now to go back to the workplace, understand that there will be members of the team, who are concerned about their continued safety.  As the boss, you have a responsibility to ensure a safe working environment for the team. Here are some things for everyone to think about. We all have to learn how to co-exist with Covid-19, so why try and replicate the old work style?   Avoiding crowded transport and elevators are smart ideas. Try working from home in the morning, go in a bit later to the office to avoid the crowds and do the same thing by leaving earlier than normal.  When you get back home continue working.  Yes, it may mean continuing to work after 5.00pm or 6.00pm,  but this is the trade off, for coexisting with the virus. You will get the same amount of work done in a day spread out

Seize The Moment With Your Leader Storytelling   Covid-19 has changed the world from a personal health risk point of view and has also trashed industries, careers and livelihoods.  This is not the time for leaders to be simple observers of the meltdown, but to be collectors of stories from the devastation and the rising phoenixes.  These stories can be for those “rallying the troops” moments or for public consumption in the wider world, as you detail your organisation’s saga. This crisis has a lot of dramatic tension bound within it, which lends itself to great storytelling material. So let’s make the effort to carefully collar what is going on around us.   Typical business storytelling will have the hero’s journey and the trials, tribulations and triumphs therein.  If this isn’t a time of trials and tribulations and hopefully, triumphant organisational survival, then I don’t know what is.  It is easy in theory, but harder in practice.  We can be swept up in the maelstrom of each day’s specific challenges and

Social Intelligence For Leaders In Covid-19   We admire people with very high IQs, as badges of intellectual prowess.  Members of Mensa International are an elite group established in 1946, for people who scored in the ninety-eight percentile or higher in the standardised IQ test.  We respect technical experts be they lawyers, medicos, engineers, architects, etc.  The thing we desire most is that we be treated well by our boss, Mensa reject or otherwise.  Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman was a bestseller and we would all prefer that our employers be people who voraciously devoured the gospel according to Goleman, chapter and verse.   The obvious things for leaders are often subsumed by society’s devotion to brainpower.  Having social intelligence means being able to get on well with all sorts of other people.  It means being the boss the team would crawl across a mile of broken glass for.  How do we up the ante on our social intelligence?   We need to invest time in relationships.  Too obvious you cry

The Leader Must Be The Flagbearer Of Hope   Daily reports of doom and gloom descend on all of us through the media.  Unemployment, enterprise obliteration, crashing growth rates, plague and pestilence run rampant.  The short term looks bad, but the long term looks worse.  Unlock in haste and repent at leisure or stay locked in and gamble with elimination. I was participating in a German Chamber webinar where the speaker flagged his company’s current research which said 39% of Japanese worried they would lose their job and the same number feared their firm would collapse.  Every continent has trouble and every continent is enmeshed in global supply chain configurations, that line up the national economic dominos for big scale, long lasting recessions.  Optimists like me are running on fumes right now.   As a leader, I have to be a fully paid up, active member of Optimists International.  I have to give my team hope of a way through and a future – together.  US firms are fast to furlough and fire, compared to J

Embracing Change In This Covid-19 Crisis   The concept of co-existence with the virus puts a different spin on the “new normal”.  Yes, the lockdowns are coming off, but what will we need to be doing from now going forward?  We may be moving to a murky world that is not quite office and not quite home.  We will be keeping aspects of both, but not having the totality of either.   Here are sixteen ways to master on-going coexistence with the virus.   Every morning, get your brain into 100% productivity by getting into your work battle dress as per usual.You may be going to the office or you may be working at home, or you may be doing a bit of both, with a late flex-time dash to downtown. Anyway, you are not on holiday, so no jammies, shorts or T-shirts.   Start everyday with a group huddle at 9.00am. Whether some are in the office and others are at home, cameras must be switched on to set the professional tone for the work day.  It is important that everyone can see each other to feel connected.  It also aler

Bad Bosses In Covid-19   Douglas McGregor coined the descriptors Theory X and Theory Y bosses back in the 1960s.  Basically, Theory X bosses doubted people working for them and felt their worst elements had to be watched carefully.  Theory Y bosses saw the potential in their team and wanted to develop them further.  It was not quite black and white, one was 100% good the other was 100% bad.  It was more a question of where to sit on the scale in view of the team and circumstances you faced.  Theory X bosses did have to deal with people who were not motivated and couldn’t be trusted.  The problem became that they started from a negative position, rather than a neutral one.  Another researcher into human motivation, Abraham Maslow, presciently warned us, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.   Here we are today, with a lot of our staff out of sight, locked away at home.  How do bosses know what they are doing?  Have some bosses moved more to the Theory X side of the equation, expecting th

Many leaders get to the top because they are very smart, technically skilled people, with broad experience and high levels of competence in their area of speciality.  In Japan, they often become the leader because they have been with the company for a certain number of years or have reached a certain age and stage. Scary thought that, isn’t it.  In our collective Covid-19 world, whether you are legend of your area speciality or just of a certain chronological age, the leadership skills we need today are going to be different from the “previous normal”.  Here are eight ninja skills to help us shine as capable leaders in lockdown.   Arouse in the other person an eager want Leaders want stuff and their bosses want stuff too.  That often means we are telling people what we want, how we want it and when we want it.  Reflect on this last week for you – does that summarise your monologue of late?  Leaders with better communication skills express desired outcomes in ways which resonate with the highest self interes