The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

When Things Go Wrong Everyone Dives for Cover In Japan   Japan is a no mistake culture.  This breeds timidity, resistance to change, lower levels of innovation, avoiding accountability and an aversion to responsibility.  Fine, but what happens when mistakes actually occur?  As the boss, you face a conspiracy amongst the team to keep anything damaging, embarrassing or lethal from you.  If you discover one mistake, then you can probably guess that you never even heard about the other forty nine.  The biggest nightmare for the boss is to uncover an issue when it is too late to fix it.  As the boss, you have money and authority available to make things happen and resuscitate a catastrophe.  Usually that becomes too little too late, because the crew hid it until it ballooned out of control.   I remember an incident which occurred with a client.  It was a very small piece of business, but there was some dissatisfaction.  The account manager was requested to bring the problem to my attention by the client’s staff me

Six Staff Members To Be Careful Of In Japan   In most cases, as leaders we inherit the staff employed by our predecessors.  It is a rare chance to employ everyone yourself right from the start.  That means there have been varying degrees of thinking about who constitutes excellent staff.  Even if everyone preceding us had clear visions and great skills in selecting staff, times change and things happen in organisations which can disaffect staff.  Also, we are all consummate actors in the job interview, thrusting forth an image of ourselves most likely to win the affections of the interviewing panels.  The reality can be bitterly disappointing.   Organisations do their best, but sometimes get it wrong and some of these mistakes are now your responsibility.   You arrive bright eyed and bushy tailed ready for your new assignment and to meet your new team.  Here is the handy dandy guide to identifying trouble early.   Doom and Gloomers This is a hard sub-group to identify in Japan, because everyone here is so c

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

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

The Leader Imposter Syndrome   In any field the people at the top can be plagued with self-doubt.  It is especially prominent in the artistic world where creativity is so important.  Am I creative enough, original enough, talented enough?  It happens in sports too.  The top players worry if they are past it, can they get out of this performance slump?  Will they be replaced by cheaper, younger teammates?  So it is no surprise that this crops up in business too.    The leader has a couple of key jobs.  One is setting the direction and vision forward.  What if they get this wrong, if the troops don’t support it, or if it proves to be their folly?  They have to run the processes.  This is not too taxing, because most companies processes have been well refined. All it takes is to be well organised, to make sure everything that is happening is at the quality, speed and cost level required.  The other tricky component is building the people.  How hard can that be? It sounds simple enough but is it?   The boss has t

The Five Drivers Of A Positive Workplace   As the leader you set the culture and tone of the form.  In Japan, up until a few years ago, you could get away with whatever you liked as the leader.  You could create a hellhole to work in and everyone caught up in the vortex had to put up with it.  There was shame attached to changing companies and mid-career hires were given the cold shoulder by the HR hiring teams.  The end of the Bubble economy in the late eighties, the IT industry meltdown at the turn of the century, the Lehman Shock in 2008 and the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in 2011 shaken things up here over the last forty years.  In particular, basic demographics of a declining population have moved the locus of power to the employment candidate away from the hiring firm.  Having a positive workplace becomes even more important to attracting and retaining good staff.   As leaders we need to work on our skills in five areas.   Self-Confidence This world of rapid change is throwing up new risks,

Leader First Impression Success     In our presentation training classes we ask the participants, “how long does it take for you to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time?”.  How about you? How long do you take to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time? People in our classes would say 30 seconds, others would say up to a couple of minutes.  Today, the answers are down to three to five seconds!  What does that mean for us in leadership?  People judge everyone who works in our company on the impression they form about us.    If we are impressive, then they think the rest of the troops are impressive too. It goes the other way of course.  If they meet someone from our firm who is a dill, then they think we are all dills down there.  Now as the leader we set the tone, the standards, the expected behavioral norms for our operation and this includes everyone’s personal presentation. Based on this new three second norm, we all have such a small window to make that

The Mental Game Of Coaching In Businesss   Today there is a lot of discussion about conscious and unconscious bias in the workplace, especially when directed towards women.  This is a significant issue. What a lot of people don’t realise though, is that this also extends into the coaching area as well.  The heart of the problem is how we see our people.  In the 1960s, Douglas McGregor was researching the sources of motivation in teams and he came up with an interesting insight called Theory X and Theory Y leaders.    Theory X leaders see their people as being basically stupid, lazy, unreliable and disloyal.  They have to be managed very closely and watched all the time.  This means anticipating trouble, catching errors, looking for mistakes and watching their behavior carefully.  They require very close supervision.  We need to tell them what to do and how to do it in great detail, because left to themselves, they will make a big mess of it.  We expect they will fail, so a lot of leader time is taken scanning

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

Why Coaching Is So Important Today   We all accept that high performance athletes need high level coaches.  What about in the work place?  Are we providing our staff with the necessary high level coaching so that they can be their most productive possible.  We often look at the staff’s deficiencies but remain blind to our own failings as coaches. Where do we start? What do we need to do? Do we need to coach everyone?   Well, what sort of staff need coaching?  We can apply a triage to the team to decide what is needed where.  In a Level One case, if they are still learning their job, then they need skill development coaching.  In Level Two, if they are experienced, but have hit a plateau in their performance, they need to learn how to motivate themselves, through receiving additional coaching.  At Level Three, if they are already a high performer, coaching can groom them for future leadership positions. Sounds tremendously logical but there is a problem though.   Let’s look at the best case, the Level Three st

What Sort Of Coach Are You?   Many Japanese executives have grown up in the “tough love” school of OJT – On The Job Training. They were scolded severely by their bosses and given a very hard time.  Their bosses did this in the belief that this is how to get people to perform correctly.  It might have worked in a different era, but not today.  Young people won’t put up with that type of treatment and they don’t have to put up with it.  The next generation are the first “free agent” employees in Japanese history. There are already 1.6 job offers open for those seeking work.  In the case of youth, they are in serious, serious short supply.  This situation is not going to change or improve.  This means that anyone imagining that “tough love” is how to coach and develop people is in for a rude shock, as young people will simply quit and walk out the door to the competitor.   What sort of coach do we need to become?  We have to be an excellent listener.  How hard can that be?  Not very hard you might be thinking, e

How To Identify When You Need Help As A Leader   Asking others for help can be difficult.  The psychology of driven, perfectionist people though is to prefer doing everything themselves.  Others never seem to match up to their expectations and standards.  Founders, entrepreneurs, strong willed individuals are often guilty of this “I will do it myself” mentality.  I am one of them.  For various reasons to do with different backgrounds and experiences, we are seized with the need for independence and self-reliance.  This works fine up to a point.  The modern age though has seen business become so much more complex.  Specialisation, niche dominance, technology, the need for light speed are all driving us toward realising we cannot do it all by ourselves.  How do we audit ourselves so we know we have to turn off that independent streak spigot and unleash that “get help” flexibility?   Here are 7 indicators that we need to rethink our approach and tackle issues from a different mind set.   When we need more exper

Problem Solving In Business For Leaders   Leaders are problem solving experts.  They have the authority, money and time to apply their skills to fixing things that are broken in the business.  In fact, they spend a lot of their time eyes peering toward the horizon, trying to identify future trouble.  They are detail oriented around systems because they have learnt if the systems break down and they don’t know about it, things get ugly very quickly.  They also know that their staff are card carrying Keep The Boss In The Dark experts too.  Japan is great like that.  Most of the things that go wrong, you as the boss, never get to hear about.  That is because people bury the problem from your purview, never fess up that something has fallen off the rails.  You usually only find this stuff out by chance.   Well if your team fail to keep it hidden from the boss and you do discover a problem, what is the best way of dealing with it.  Here are four handy steps.   Clarify what exactly is the problem? There tends to

Leading Virtual Teams   We have seen some major changes within Japanese corporates as they move overseas. In the old days, the Japanese headquarters would dispatch a generalist company man, as an expat to be posted for five years in a foreign clime.  They would be forgotten for five years until they came back to work in Japan.  Typically, to be sent to some totally unrelated business area than where they had been gaining valuable skills. This was the established logic of moving people around throughout the company, over many years, to make sure they understood how the whole thing operated.   With the predictions quite clear about the limitations to the market in Japan for good and services, many large companies have begun buying offshore companies in their industries, so that they can continue to make profits, even as the home market declines.  In the new model, staff situated in Japan will be running virtual teams located around the globe.  Foreign business heads will have Japanese staff here in Japan report

The Secret World Of Conflict When Leading In Japan   Japan doesn’t like conflict.  As the foreign boss you will be super busy and may be missing some areas of conflict operating within the team.  You can’t deal with it, if you don’t know about it, so the difficulty scale can get high here quite quickly.  You are also often tied up in meetings or visiting clients, so things may be boiling over and you don’t hear about it.  As is the case with any part of the world the boss is always the last to be told about bad news.   Conflict can be situational.  Something was supposed to happen or didn’t happen and someone is now unhappy with someone else.  Words are exchanged and now we have a tense situation between people in the team. It might be a communication trigger point that leads to the conflict.  Attempted humour is often the offender in this case. An amusing remark isn’t amusing at all to the person on the receiving end and they take offense.  It might be a miscommunication.  We meant one thing, but they take i

Managing Or Leading - Which One Are You Doing??   Last week I was teaching a leadership programme for new leaders and this key question of what is the difference between leading and managing came up quite a bit.  They are not the same thing.  Also, most of those so called “leaders” are only managing and not doing much leading. In Japan, we promote people into leadership roles running sections and don’t give them any training.  They continue with this pattern throughout their career, rising, ever rising, but never doing much leading on the way up.   Managers are the Swiss watch mechanics.  All the little interlocking wheels must be properly aligned, integrated, running in a well oiled fashion, not suffering from breakdowns or disruptions. The point is efficiency of process, in both design and execution.  It does require adroitness to create work arounds, when things lurch out of control or to apply first aid solutions to an open wound in the system.  A mastery of logistics and detail makes the job much easier.