The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Thrusting oneself into leadership positions usually relies on confidence, drive, capability and ambition.  All good stuff, but those are not necessarily the key reasons we follow someone.  Of course, if they lack confidence, then they are radio-active and won’t command any followship.  To take on the accountability of the leader, you need to have that inner drive and ambition to want to position yourself above others.  Finally, you have to have the goods. If you are not good at the business then you lack credibility, especially with smart, competent people.  However, these attributes are not enough.  The calibration by the team on whether they will follow you has a big values component.  We might initially be snowed by the confidence, drive, capability and ambition, but if we flag the values are not correct, then things fall apart rapidly.   We can admire leaders for what they have.  They could be physically attractive people, well dressed and bristling with the accoutrements of power.  The big house in a ton

Kokorogamae means to clarify your true intention. It is a compound word combining two characters – one for kokoro and the other for kamae, which becomes gamae when in the compound format.  Kokoro can be translated as our spirit and kamae as our stance.  If you have studied a Japanese traditional martial art, you will recognise kamae as the command to take your fighting stance.  Why is this idea of your true intention important for those of us in business?   We talk a lot about trust is business, but this is the outward manifestation of our inner thoughts, which in turn guides our actions.  Kokorogamae as a concept goes straight to the spark of the idea, the attitude, the approach, the true intention.  In traditional Japanese arts such as ikebana, the master will strip the stems of the leaves themselves, rather than leaving it to their assistants.  Similarly, in shodo, the master will grind the inkstone to produce the ink for the calligraphy to be written.  In martial arts, the master will sit quietly at the s

When we think about leadership what is the perspective we are taking?  There are many ways of thinking about this, but today let’s consider some different perspectives which create tension for us as leaders.  “Make sure everyone follows the rules and we will get ahead”, sounds like reasonable advice.  Compliance, regulatory rules, internal systems, standard operating procedures all push us in this “conform” direction.    “Break all the rules, innovate, practice shoshin – the beginner’s mind – and let’s start with a blank sheet of paper”, sounds like reasonable advice.  Freeing our people from group think, conformity, too many proscribing rules, pushes us in non-conformist directions.  How can we hold these two countervailing thoughts in our minds at the same time and lead others, all the while providing a clear direction?   Usually, we are promoted to leader because we followed the rules, did a brilliant job on our accountabilities and have proven we can be trusted.  We are told to take care of others now and

Business is stressful.  It becomes very stressful when your industry is hit by a global pandemic.  Just when you start to believe we might be finally escaping the death roll of the virus, we get Omicron pop up and raise the ante completely.  Just to add to the stress levels we now look like we are entering a global economic meltdown, because of the impact of the war in the Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia.  Oil, gas and grains are rapidly rising in price as are the delivery mechanisms of the global supply chain. If you are in certain industries the pandemic has smashed you, however other sectors have been sailing along quite unaffected. A global recession however, is much more democratic and will share the pain with everyone.  As leaders we have to be the rock for our teams.  Everyone gets nervous about their job and in some cases about whether the company can survive a one-two punch of the pandemic followed by a global recession?   “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is an old mantra.  For le

Giving feedback at any time about performance issues is always fraught. Providing constructive feedback is one of those areas which we often dread, only surpassed by the prospect of having to give negative feedback.  Ideally, we can avoid negative feedback altogether and turn it into a more positive version. Nevertheless, those on the receiving end of anything but adulation and lavish praise, are rarely in a positive mindset about receiving corrective feedback.  They are keen to justify what they did, sometimes deny it was their fault or try to wriggle out of it and shift the blame to someone else.  It is extremely rare for someone to put their hand up and take ownership for problems.  What can we do about giving feedback?   Here are nine ideas on giving better, positive feedback. Be certain the feedback is positive and constructive. Don’t boost your own ego or pull an authority powerplay of blatant status affirmation, by putting down others less knowledgeable or less skilled. Whenever someone is struggling

How did it go last week delegating to your team members?   This week we will look at accountability.   Having delegated a task, we must make sure that the delegate maintains a strong sense of accountability for the results.  If we did a good job selling the delegation to the individual we have chosen for the task, then there shouldn’t be too much to worry about regarding them carrying out the project.  The issues arise when we think we were successful in persuading them why this task completion is in their best interests, but we weren’t as persuasive as we imagined.    Business moves quickly and perhaps when we spoke to them, there was some margin in their schedule, but now something else has popped up and they start allocating more time to that endeavour and let our delegated task slip and slide. They are reallocating their priorities and we have a mismatch between what we think is happening and what is really happening.  How do we make sure that isn’t the case?    Micro-managing people isn’t effective.  Nob

This week we will look at becoming a master of delegation.   Delegation is a mystery for many leaders.  They don’t know how to get it to work properly, so they ignore its power. This is a busy life and business is becoming more and more complex each year.  The leader needs to delegate for a couple of reasons.     The most important one is to help their subordinates become ready to step up into their own leadership positions.  The fear that a subordinate will replace you is a misplaced concern in my view.  Every organisation is looking for leaders and if you can show you are a dynamite leader production machine then the organisation will give you a bigger job to spread that magic further.  For our own capacity to move up the ranks we need a replacement.  If there is no one to succeed us, then we will be kept right where we are.   The other reason for delegation is to make sure we are only working on the most high level tasks that only we can do.  If someone else can do it, then we should give it to them and gi

This week we will look at getting the team members engaged.   Now this is a tricky subject in Japan because what is the native Japanese word for engagement?  We always have this dilemma when we try to translate “engagement” into Japanese.  In the end, we just leave it as “engagement” in the katakana script which reproduces the sound, but which in itself has no meaning, as opposed to kanji pictographs, which have actual meanings.    So, if there is no word for engagement in Japan, how on earth can you get people more engaged?  Also, how do you measure it?  Gallup have been running engagement surveys around the world on a regular basis for a long time and invariably Japan scores low by comparison with other countries.  Usually only around 7% of the working population are “highly engaged”.  This always triggers a reaction back at HQ for multi-national companies who run these global surveys.    I have sat in those regional heads’ meetings and seen the world’s scores paraded up on screen, with APAC the lowest regi

Meetings, email, social media, reporting, coaching, planning, performance reviews, firefighting, supervising re-work, the list goes on regarding where our leader time gets taken up.  Our talent got us into this illustrious position as the leader but do we have enough talent to sustain staying in this job over time.  Can we move up to an even higher position and what additional talent development would that take?  Are we investing enough of our treasure in ourselves, beyond anything the organisation may be providing?   I have the most powerful hand held tools at my command 24 hours a day.  I have access to the fastest communication tools ever produced.  I can access any information I want at lightening speed.  Do I feel I have more time?   Am I keeping up with the demands of business in this modern world of global interconnectivity and the global 24 hour work cycle?  In simple terms “no”.  If feel constantly pressured to do more, faster with less.  I have a continual anxiety about FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. 

We have seen the Hollywood version of leaders who are master blaster motivators.  These charismatic leaders gather the team together and give a rousing call to arms to slay the problem. They persuade the team to go beyond their personal limitations and get the job done.  In real life, usually the leader isn’t necessarily charismatic, nor a spirited orator. If you are leading in Japan, there is a strong chance that there are two languages in play and you are more likely to be better in one than the other.  Despite my now 37 years in Japan, my vocabulary in Japanese cannot hold a candle to my vocabulary in my native English. That means I can be more subtle, powerful, convincing in English than I can in Japanese.  Native Japanese speakers have the same issue trying to persuade others in English.   The days of the rousing locker room call to action are pretty much done for in sports teams, often the model for business leadership. The modern sports leader is more likely a skilled expert in understanding human natu

One of the big differences in the job when you move up in the ranks into a leadership position is you are now responsible for others and their development.  That means we need to coach our team members by ourselves.  Yes, HR may be able to organise valuable training opportunities, but that still leaves our role to follow up on that training and also to do on the job coaching every day. To better understand how to coach others, let’s look at the Seven Step Coaching Process   Identify Opportunities There are five ways to identify opportunities for your staff to receiving coaching.   1. You identify an opportunity for another person. You notice a weakness in their current skill set or you notice they haven’t been trained for a certain part of the task or you give them a new task that they don’t have any experience with.   2. The person identifies an opportunity for themselves. The staff member finds they don’t know what they are doing or finds they can’t do the task well.  They may have little experience with

How did it go in the last episode working on Performance Alignment?  This week we look at one of the most difficult areas of leadership – assessing others’ work performance.  This whole process is important because it leads to promotions, bonuses, bigger responsibilities and also to people being deleted from the enterprise.  No wonder each side of the table finds this process stressful.   Employees become nervous in this situation and bosses can also feel very uncomfortable.  There is nothing worse than having to let people go who have been in your team, unless they are completely hopeless or evil. That is rarely the case.  We are usually having to fire people who are average or slightly below average, who the big bosses have nominated for the cut.    I used to hate those department head meetings, where the whole population of the organisation is plotted on a bell curve of performance.  By definition, a group of people will be in the bottom 10% and that will include your own team members at different times. 

Organisations are made up of many internal moving parts, so coordination becomes an important aspect of success in business.   Divisional rivalries, egos, personal competition, “not invented here”, the list goes on and on concerning factors which make it difficult to operate as one smooth functioning machine. There are also various external challenges we have to deal with like regulation changes, mergers and acquisitions among our competitors, natural disasters, market movements, etc.  As the leader we have to make sure we have solid alignment amongst the team members within what the company wants to achieve. There are eight elements to make sure we have alignment between the individuals and the organisation.   Vision and Mission Our Vision is our window to a brighter future and our goals for where we want to be.  Usually there are two visions.  We have the overall company vision at the macro level and then we have our unit vision, which is a subset of the broader enterprise vision. This is important becaus

For a big chunk of my working life, I have been ruled by fear by my bosses.  With the value of hindsight and having run Dale Carnegie Training here in Tokyo now into my twelfth year, I wonder why it was like that or had to be like that.  Not every boss was a tyrant, but most were.  Today we are talking about psychological safety, diversity and inclusion, the end of power harassment, etc. I didn’t see any of that in my career as an employee.  Sadly, I inherited some of these negative leadership traits myself and ran my teams hard.  I was ignorant and thought that was how it was done, because that was how I was being managed.  I am a slow learner, but I have subsequently learnt that leading through fear gets you compliance, but it doesn’t get you brilliance.   I wonder how many bosses out there in supremo land are still running their teams in this fear first mode?   My way or the highway is a dead duck for a recruitment strategy today.  Many big Japanese companies have recruitment staff from HR clinging to the

It is an irony that in the most technologically advanced era, the human dimension is so much more critical to success in business.  When I was first entering business, the boss knew every aspect of the company and knew it better than everyone else. Education was working on the basis of limited access to information, so a lot of memorization was required.  An entrepreneur was a rare bird in those days.  A mainframe computer was huge and housed in it’s own hermetically sealed environment. Only a select few had access to the machine itself or the computations it was possible of.  A telex machine, something the size of a washing machine today, sat in a corner of the floor spitting out large sheets of paper with perforated edges, as a means of semi-automatic communication.  All the eligible young women sat in the typing pool on their own floor, so any excuse which could be found to head down there was a major opportunity to be seized.   A lot has changed, but the importance of human to human relations, has only be

We have all heard that old saw we “don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan” and we go back to our work, somehow imagining we have mastered the planning process. It is very insightful to however to watch a team when given a simple project.  Our instinct for action seems to overwhelm us and we leap straight into the details.  The nitty gritty of the execution is occupying all of the brain space. No planning is going on whatsoever. How can that be when we know we need to plan if we don’t want to fail?   One of the problems is that very few people are ever given any training on how to do the planning itself and we wind up copying what our bosses did.  This is especially the case in Japan, where following orders and reproducing what your seniors did is accepted behaviour.  If the bosses were master of the planning process, then this wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately that is far from the reality, so we need to make sure the team are cognisant on how to plan projects and work.   Project Planning can be broken down to

Doing more, faster, better with less is inescapable in modern commerce.  The demands just keep going up and the resources available always seem to be tightening.  We find ourselves in a vicious vice of contradictions without end.  And then we have this global pandemic, to just make it all that much more character building.  Have I depressed you enough?  How do we get out of this mess?  What can we do to improve on the situation?    Getting innovative ideas is critical for our businesses to survive, but how do we generate creative ideas?  No matter how genius the boss, there are limits to how many worthwhile ideas can be generated by one individual.  Also, the further you climb up the greasy pole within organisations, the further you get away from the coal face of what is really going on.  The most recent, most junior hire may have the best ideas. The organisation’s employee generation which best reflects the profile of the buyer or the buyer’s customers, may have the best insights.  The problem is we rarely a

Listen to Dr. Greg Story’s interview with William Farmer, Managing Director of Dale Carnegie Australia on “Business: The Art of Winning Podcast!” In the interview, Dr. Story shares valuable insight on leading in Japan, surviving COVID-19 as a training company, building lifelong partnerships with clients, and developing one’s personal and professional brand.   Dr. Story shares his three guiding values as a leader. First is to have “kokorogamae” – meaning true intention. Having the “kokorogamae” to build lifetime partnerships, build a good reputation, and achieving success is an important starting point. Secondly, being reliable and accountable is key in a conservative, risk-averse business environment like Japan. Thirdly, building helpful relationships and seeking support through mentors and resources like podcasts is crucial in continuous growth and success.   In addition to being President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo and a Dale Carnegie Master Trainer, Dr. Story has written several Amazon #1 Bestsellers

The reality of business today is that we are navigating the constant tension between Time, Quality and Cost.  We don’t have the luxury of concentrating on only one element.  They are interrelated and as we move toward one, we move away from the other two.  There is no perfect synchronicity either, because business is in a constant flux.   For a leader though、 their use of time is a big factor in their success.  Getting things done is a complete function of where they choose to invest their time.  You would like to believe that technology is saving us time today.  Somehow, I don’t feel that at all.  In fact, I feel I am getting busier every year, because the technology allows me to do more and do it faster.  The constant hunger for improvements and success keeps driving the pressure of the clock.   In time management, we talk about the Tyranny Of The Urgent.  This is when we are being run off our feet, kept permanently busy with one urgent item after another.  There is a hierarchy of tasks and we need to under

We have so many things pulling us in different directions at the same time, we can get a bit overwhelmed by all the work we have to do.  How can we get the right focus and make our effort better coordinated?  There is a simple method we can use which is very quick and simple.   Firstly, we need to take a brief moment and draw a focus map of what we need to be working on.  How do we draw a focus map?    In the center of a piece of paper put a small circle around the one or two words which make up the key area of focus.  Now add separate related words which come to mind that fit this category and then circle those words to make sub categories.  On the page, these circled words will be arranged around that original central circle like planets around the sun.    For example, we might think of key topics like Better Time Management, or Better Followup, or Better Planning, or Better Communicator, etc.  Taking one of these topics as the center circle, in a few minutes the list of related words will soon come forth.