The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Stop Making Yourself Invaluable   It is rather counterintuitive to suggest we leaders become less invaluable isn’t it. When you are climbing over the bodies on the corporate climb to grasp the top positions, you have to show you stand out. You have to show you are “the one”, better than the rest, the most talented candidate for the big job. To get the big job you have to keep repeating this self promotion process at every level, as you climb higher and higher. If it is your own business, you have so much knowledge and passion for the business, you automaticly become the one person holding all the complexity together. This is the Great Man or Woman theory of leadership, a bit like the same phenomenon in understanding history.   The story of kings and queens got a bit of a hiding in the modern histories, as scholars began searching for other factors to explain what has occurred in the past. In leadership terms, the era of the single powerful individual has yielded to a much more complex structure, better reflec

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the Ameri

Dealing With Companies’ “Senior Problem” In Japan   A senior problem in the past meant having a “senior moment”, where you forgot something and this lapse hinted at oncoming dementia. Today in Japan it has an entirely different meaning and refers to the demographic problems Japan is facing. Japan is aging rapidly and there is a lot of discussion about the impact that will have on the welfare, health and pension systems. What is not being discussed much as yet is what to do with all of these “young” oldies?   They are reaching 60, which is retirement age, yet they will have many decades of life ahead of them. They are healthy, active, relatively digital, have large networks and considerable experience. They all know the Government pension system will breakdown under the weight of their cohort’s numbers impacting on the cost of the system. They are not confident about having enough money to last their lifespan, so they want to keep working.   Japan’s working population of those aged 15-64 will decline from 65.7

The Foreign Leader In Japan   We know leaders who are friction magnets. They upset those working with them on a regular basis. They are quick to point out their opinion and their view. Their rights are paramount and we are soon informed of them. They are highly driven, powerful, even intense individuals. They are upwardly mobile and have sharp elbows. Basically they are a pain in most countries, but they are a disaster in Japan.   Crash or crash through sounds cool, but it is not a great formula for getting change embedded in the organization. Often Japan can drive everyone nuts because it is so hard to introduce change here. This is not just the frustration of Western leaders sent to Japan on assignment. Japanese leaders are also frustrated that they cannot get the changes they want implemented fast enough.   The forceful expatriate leader in Japan soon discovers that their will is not everyone’s command. At some point they find that force of status won’t work here. Japanese employees have a social contract

How To Guide Your Team In Japan Through Change   Up until these last few years being capable and loyal was enough in Japan. Technology has changed the business landscape completely. Post the 1990 bubble burst, the previous many layers of management in Japanese corporations have been substantially compressed. Globalisation is forcing change within Japan and no one is immune from this trend. Team members in Japan have to deal with change and will have to face even greater changes in the future. As their boss, what are some things you can do to help them manage the transition into the new era?   Mentoring the team is going to be critical. To do that you have to become much better organised than you are now. We are all time poor already, constantly swimming against a floodtide of email and social media posts. The inflight passenger safety information videos always talk about in the case of emergency, grab your oxygen mask for yourself first, then help those around you. This is the same. The boss has to be able to

How To Get Change In Japan   Japan doesn’t have a monopoly on resisting change. Having said that, it will probably rank fairly high in terms of business environments where it is hard to introduce change. There is a very dogged, well established risk averse culture here which works against change. The Tokugawa family froze change in Japan for 400 years and this allowed them to keep control. It is hard to come up with a local opposite example where massive change was a real winner. Kaizen is more acceptable because it is small increments of change spread out over long periods of time.   To engender change in Japan we have to work through the team members. They have fairly consistent attitudes toward change. Fear of change is a strong driver to resist it. Will the change be a positive or a negative for us? The glass is always half empty in Japan, so the prospect of change being a positive is not a widespread idea. The communication piece around the change becomes very important to negating the negative impressio

The Leader Is The Mood Maker   When you are on the executive floor, the carpet is thick, the mood is quiet and the décor is sumptuous. It is a world removed from the scramble going on floors below. Maybe you are in your own President’s office, shielded from the fray outside the door. The further you place yourself away from the troops the harder it is to influence the mood of the team. Of course, you have direct reports overseeing the work and they too should be mood makers in their own right. There is something very powerful though when the boss is also the mood maker.   I visited President Nambu of Pasona a number of years ago, I was super impressed. To get to see him I had to walk past a large open plan workspace, in the center of which was a raised platform, which housed all the senior executives at their desks. I had to then walk on through the shokudo or cafeteria to get to Nambu san’s office. I was curious so I asked him about all these snakes and ladders to get to see him. He said he wanted the execut

Whose Really In Charge?   Japan is going through one round of revelations after another in different industries, where the proper compliance procedures were not followed. In some cases they have not been followed for decades. Which begs the question of who is actually in charge? The senior executives are given reports and rely on those below to feed them the correct information. To make it more interesting the company decides to reduce expenses and raise targets. This is when the creative accounting can really start to ramp up. The shareholders are happy, the Board is happy and so we continue with the winning formula. The only problem is that corners are being cut and procedures are being subverted, in order to meet the “reduce costs, increase revenue” mantra.   Then the whole mess is sprayed across the front page of the newspapers, evening newscasters lead with your firm’s lies and the magazines live off the debris for months. The fake news phenomenon has pointed up the fact that the media is a business. The

Staff On-Board or Over Board?   Recruit and retain must be the mantra for all of us in Japan. If you have been following me, you will know I have been talking about the coming demographic crunch of not enough young people to go around, for the last two years. A number of years ago we had 40% plus of the new recruits fleeing their companies, after getting trained. They were heading off to greener pastures, which they no doubt discovered were not all that green after all. The current number is in the low 30 percentile area and the bad news is it will start to rise again.   We have all seen the news broadcasts of truckloads of the young all wearing exactly the same outfits, sitting diligently in their rows at the major firms recruiting intake in April, at the start of the new financial year. This will continue of course, but the mid-career hiring of the young will become the new black for HR people in Japan.   As the young discover they are in demand and are being scouted, they will start leaving the firms that

Karoshi Is BS. Overwork Rarely Kills You   So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork. This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice. This is fake news. The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke. In Japan, that cause of death from overwork rarely happens. The vast majority of cases of karoshi death are related to suicide by the employee. This is a reaction to mental and physical exhaustion and the associated stress that piles up, until it is overwhelming. So the real source of death from karaoshi is stress, not physically working too hard. Just where is that stress coming from?   It is coming from two sources: the individual’s inability to deal with the stress of long hours, long commutes, and no time for recovery driving them to depression and ending their own precio

Team, I’ve Got Your Back   We don’t run perfect organisations stocked with perfect people, led by perfect bosses. There are always going to be failings, inadequacies, mistakes, shortcomings and downright stupidity in play. If we manage to keep all of these within the castle walls, then that is one level of complexity. It is when we share these challenges with clients that we raise the temperature quite a few notches. How do you handle cases where your people have really upset a client? The service or product was delivered, but the client’s representative is really unhappy with one of your team.   Often, being the boss, you are the last to find out what is going on. Japan, in particular, is excellent at hiding bad news from bosses. “The less the boss knows about the source of the trouble the better” is the mantra here. Japan is a zero mistake tolerance culture and so everyone has learnt to be circumspect about sharing the bad news around.   The irony though is the boss is the one person with the capacity of po

How To Snuggle Up To Employees   We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Drive type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested.   The snag in all of this though is employees don’t want that. They want the boss to be more interested in them, their career and their family. The feeling of being valued by the boss has been found to be an important trigger to create strong engagement in staff. Driver bosses rarely pull that trigger. They believe you need to “harden up baby”, do it yourself “like I did”. They wonder why we need to mollycoddle this lot.   In fact they don’t k

Vulnerable Leaders   The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them.   When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them. Organisations seem to be stacked with politicians who are excellent at ingratiating themselves with the higher ups and climbing over the bodies of their rivals to get to the top. Their political nous seems to be in inverse proportion to their lack of real leadership ability.   Given we have much flatter organisations today and the correspondent pressure to do more faster and better with less, the pressure on leader

Six Nightmare Listeners - Are One Of Them?   We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run into. By the way, do any of these stereotypes sound a bit too familiar to you?   The “preoccupieds” are those breathless types, racing around, multi-tasking on steroids, permanently distracted. They don’t make much eye contact because their eyes are constantly scanning for things other than you in front of them. When we meet this reaction we need to grab their brain. We can say, “Is this a good time to talk?” or “I need your undivided attention for just a moment”. Once we do get their attention, we have to get to the point, because their attention span is fleeting.   The “ou

My Boss Doesn’t Listen To Me   If you reading this title and thinking this has nothing to do with my leadership, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants on our training. They complain that the boss doesn’t talk to them enough because they are too busy, don’t have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers into a few. The other has been the democratization of information access. Bosses have been struggling to keep up.   When we had more layers in our company structures, leaders matured like a fine wine. They rose up the ladder in small increments, over an extended period of time and were groomed for responsibility. There were assistants aplenty to do mundane, time consuming tasks. The striping out of the layers, for the sake of

Leadership Blind Spots   Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep adding more and more certainty to what they say is important, correct, valuable and needed to produce the best return on investment.   With an army of sycophants in the workforce, the leader can begin to believe their own press. There is also the generational imperative of “this is correct because this was my experience”, even when the world has well and truly moved on beyond that experience. If you came back from World War Two as

Leadership Success Formula For Japan   In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks received and others are not. This extends into the world of work where the bell curve is used to decide who are the star players, who are in the middle and who at the bottom are going to be fired.   The modern world of work though demands different things from what we have had in the past. The sheer volume of information available is mind boggling. When I was at University, your world of knowledge was what was on the shelves

Japan Street Fight Leadership   Change is hard to create anywhere in the world. Getting things to change in Japan also has its own set of challenges. The typical expat leader, sent to Japan, notices some things that need changing. Usually the Japan part of the organisation is not really part of the organisation. It is sitting off to the side, like a distant moon orbiting the HQ back home.   There are major differences around what is viewed as professional work. The things that are valued in Japan, like working loyally (i.e. long hours) even with low productivity, keeping quiet, not upsetting the applecart, not contributing in meetings, getting deep into the factional constructs of the organisation, are not seen as positive.   Inefficiencies seem to beg for correction. Innovation seems to be a foreign concept in both senses of the word. Doing what we have always done, in the same way as we have always done it, has eliminated most of the opportunities for making mistakes, so why change anything? Doing things in

How to Glue Your Team Together   Teams are composed of people. That requires many skills but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival’s bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars; category experts; long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing. Usually communication skills and people skills were not prominent in their rise to this position of trust.   What does it take to be successful as a team leader? Here are nine different adhesives to help glue the team together.   Don’t criticize, condemn or complain When we criticize people for mistakes or poor performance they stop listening to us and use all of their brainpower to marshal their defense or assemble their excuses, about why it isn’t their fault. We have created a barrier with them and they are in deni

The Four Stages Of Building A Team     When do we create teams? Usually we inherit teams from other people, stocked with their selections and built around their preferences and prejudices, not ours. Sometimes we might get to start something new and we get to choose who joins. Does that mean that “team building” only applies when we start a new team? If that were the case, then most of us would never experience building a team in our careers. This idea is too narrow. In reality, we are building our teams every day, regardless of whether we suddenly became their leader or whether we brought them in or we started from scratch.   Teams are fluid. People come and go, so there is never an end point of team building. “Yeah, it’s built” would be fatal last words, because before you have even drained the champagne flute in celebration, your best performer is heading off to bigger and better things with your competitor.   So we are constantly adding to the team, even if we kicked it off ourselves. New people arrive wit