THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Train 4l2l3b

Smirks emerge quite quickly when you mention “role model” and “leaders” in the same breath.  Most peoples’ experiences with leaders as role models have been that they encom the “what not do as a leader” variety.  Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) or teacher by negative example, as we have noted in Japanese.  What are some of the things we should be focused on in our quest to become a real role model for our teams? We can break the role model aspect into four major areas: Self-Aware; ability; Others-Focused and Strategic.  Within these four categories, there are eleven sub-categories on which we are going to focus today.  Do a mental audit on yourself and see how many boxes you can check, acknowledging that you are doing a good job. 1.    Self-Aware covers a number of sub-categories: “Self-Directed”. Leaders have to give others direction, so they must be independent types who don’t have to rely on others to know what to do.  They have to be “Self-Regulated” which is a fancy pants way of saying they need strong personal discipline.  The leader has to decide what needs to be done and then marshals everything needed to get the job done.  This effort has to be sustained over time and that is where the self-discipline aspect kicks in. “Develop Self” talks about taking 100% responsibility for one’s own career.  Depending on others, or the company in general, to take care of your career is folly.  We need to represent value to an employer, because if we don’t, then we will be replaced by someone who does.  The tricky thing about business is they keep moving the goalposts.  What was required when you started and what is required today may be quite different. Scarily different. I see so many senior leaders and friends sacked by the organisation, despite many years of loyal and successful service.  A new CEO arrives, a merger takes place or a new direction for the firm is set and the next thing you know, you are out.  If you have been pursuing your own personal growth, then there is a safety factor involved there to enable you to weather the storms.  If you have just been working hard, which is irable, you are left tired and then on the street. “Confident” is a vague term, really.  What actually defines being “confident”.  We can recognise it more easily than we can articulate it.  A leader who has confidence speaks in a certain way, with gravitas, with a certain finality.  Hesitation never arises and the body language backs up the confident words. 2.    ability is another area with sub-categories: “Competent” describes our capability to understand the business and do the work.  Most people rise through the ranks, so they have done the jobs their staff are doing, so they know the content well.  Changing jobs and entering as a mid-career hire can sometimes make the competence piece a challenge, though.  We have to be a fast learner to build credibility. “Honesty and Integrity” are both problem sub-categories.  Honesty is easier to gauge than integrity.  We can see if you are honest and can measure it.  However, while everyone says how important integrity is, defining it is a challenging task.  Saying and doing what you say is a fundamental basis of demonstrating integrity, as is standing for higher ideals.  How do you actually behave when no one is watching?  3.    Others-Focused is a big sub-category and so not all aspects can be covered here, but we will focus on some key areas: “Inspiring” is in the eyes of the beholder, so as the boss, you have to create the environment where everyone can be inspired.  We need to uncover what the range of views on the subject are amongst the troops, to get an idea of how we need to appeal to everyone’s individual needs.  This means making time to talk to people, rather than just barking out leader commands all day long. “Develops Others” means going beyond the managerial functions of everything done on time, to spec and to budget.  We have looked at this earlier. It means putting time into coaching staff and giving them stretch tasks through delegation.  Most people stay functionally at the manager level and never quite level up sufficiently to become a true leader.  Whose fault is that? I would argue it is their boss who has failed them.  The leader’s job is to create other leaders, and every organisation is crying out for good leaders. “Positively Influences Others” is an all weather skill for leaders. Our grumpy mood, short temper, irritability can bring down the motivation of the team.  Also, speaking ill of other divisions or sections to knit our own team together, a weak leader favourite, makes the team doubt the robustness of the organisation. “Effectively Communicates” sounds reasonable, except most leaders are not very good at speaking in public.  They do not generate confidence in what they are saying by the unprofessional way in which they are saying it.  The solution is simplicity itself: we need to get the training to master this attribute. 4.  The last category we will cover here is Strategic. We will deal with just one sub-category “Uses Authority Appropriately”.  We are talking ing our position power for good, rather than self-aggrandisement.  Bossing people around to boost our own fragile ego and having the need for power over others is totally sad.  We are given power to help our people do better - that is the only reason.  So how was your self-audit?  We now have a framework to place around the term “role model” and we know where we have more work to do.  Always a good thing for a leader.   

We are recognised for our capabilities and potential and promoted into our first leadership role.  We have been given charge over our colleagues and now have additional responsibilities.  In many cases we don’t move into a pure “off the tools” leadership role. We are more likely to be a player/leader hybrid, because we have our own clients and also produce revenue outcomes.  One of the biggest difficulties is knowing how to balance the roles of “doer” and “urger”.  Jealousy, bruised egos, sabotage, mild insurrection can be found amongst our former colleagues as we are now their new boss.  There will be some who feel the organisation has made a massive error and they should have been the one promoted. Their enthusiasm for striving for the greater good has become diminished and results begin to suffer.  The more Machiavellian may be thinking how they can unseat the new boss, by lowering outcomes enough, so that it damages the new boss’s credibility, without getting themselves fired.  They are happy to spend long hours conspiring with others to calculate the nexus of those two points.  The danger here is we double down on our own production because we have more control over that and we actually don’t lead.  We are busy with dealing with all the accoutrements of power, exciting stuff like approving leave applications, tracking sick leave, filling out reports and general paperwork which is the bane of a leader’s life.   Leaders have four main jobs.  Set the strategy, create the culture, maintain the machine so it runs on time and on budget and we build our people.  When we were team we were given guidance and direction by the boss, now we are the boss.  Are we sufficiently knowledgeable and talented enough to take the organisation in the right direction?  Are we relying on what we knew before we became the boss?  Are we studying, reading, listening to podcasts, watching TED talks and doing everything we can to better educate ourselves for the different demands of this leadership role?  If we are busy, busy, busy working on our new leader tasks or servicing our own clients, we may not be devoting the time needed to grow.  The leader needs to have a long term perspective, but our subordinates tend to have a short term view and invariably so do our superiors.  They expect results from us and in short order or they start wondering if they made the right choice about who should have stepped up and be the boss.  The boss has to challenge orthodoxy.  If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will get the same results.  How can we get better results?  That is what the boss needs to be working on.  We need to persuade others to follow us and to have influence.  Often none of those factors were part of the selection process though.  We got the job because we were the best salesperson, ant, engineer, bookkeeper, architect, etc.  Actually, many new leaders don’t even like people and much prefer numbers. Many are poor public speakers have big brains and no friends.  Do the new leaders get any training to build on their skill sets and give them the tools to succeed?  Often they get nothing.  They keep focused on what they can control which are their own clients, don’t build the people and they wind up carrying the team.  That works as long as the outcome demands don’t go up.  As the ask increases, the gap starts to form between how much one person can do to hit the targets and the total team contribution.  Because we haven’t developed our people, they are not filling in the gap between where we are and where we need to be.  After three years of this, the new leader gets fired and the cycle begins again with a new person sitting in the boss’s chair. New leaders relying on their companies for their security to remain in their elevated position are pretty optimistic.  The tasks of the leader are different to those of the led, so either through personal study or company sponsored training, there must be the investment to grow their capabilities.  The mindset element is important, as that is the trigger for changing the required behaviors in order to grow in the new position.  So bosses, are you sufficiently investing in your newly promoted leaders.  So newly promoted leaders, are you taking responsibility for your own career and investing in yourself.  If the answer to either question is “no”, then whether you realise it or not, you have entered the dander zone.  Don’t go there.  

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 ?  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 ive means taking the time to be across what is happening at the individual level.  Do we do that?  Giving positive reinforcement means having the right conversations at the right time.  The word “time” keeps popping up, because that is the deadly enemy of good intentions. If we flipped open your calendar from last week and we added up how much one-on-one encouragement you gave to the your team, would we be talking in of hours or milliseconds of conversation?  Time management is a key to people management.  You can’t manage people if you are not in control of your time and if you have not made certain choices about where you will prioritise your time.  We see this in family time being sacrificed on the alter of getting the results.  The employees can easily be in the same group as the family, missing out on the leader’s attention. The second super hero of leadership coaching is Focus.  Managers manage processes, budgets, timelines and the execution of results.  The machinery of the firm runs flawlessly.  There are no defects and no delays.  Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction for the firm and they build the people.  The building the people part is where there has to be intentional focus on the individual.  All of the other components of executing and gaining results can means the focus is not on the people development. We need to track the assignments we have given people, to make sure that we are there for them, if they need help.  We need to offer up our undivided attention to listen to our people. No thoughts of what needs to be done scrambling around in our brain, while we sit there half listening to what we are being told.  Elevate is probably the most difficult of the super hero leader coaching efforts to pull off.  We can tell everyone what to do and how to it.  We can do it all by ourselves.  Neither of these choices develop our people though.  We must coach them by asking what they need to do. We need to push them to operate with the mindset of the leader.  We need them to self discover things that will guide them around what needs to be done and how they should be done. We have to challenge them in ways that inspire, as opposed to crushing them.  There is a fine line between applying the right dimension of push and crushing someone. We all get into a rut in our work. As the leader coach if we can have our people challenge typical ways of thinking or doing, then that potentially unleashes a tremendous opportunity for creativity.  It means we need to allocate the time to interact with our team and that time may not be very easy to find.  We can also suggest they do less of or more of something.  We can challenge them to consider doing the opposite of what they are currently doing. All of these “more”, “less”, “opposite” alternatives are there to get the team thinking in a different way about our business.  If we see an opportunity for improvement, we can push for immediate change.  This can become an issue though if we push too hard at the wrong time.  Getting the balance right is the equation we need to solve. Our fourth super hero is to Empower.  There is no word in Japanese which can easily capture this idea.  That makes the communication of the idea a bit tricky. We know that the Johari Window describes leadership blindspots.  We need to work on our high potential’s awareness of what everyone knows, but they don’t know about themselves.  Doing 360 surveys and educating them on how to get are positive actions that will build the leadership bench.  Having an improved perspective enables them to make the changes necessary to become a more effective leader. Getting them to think about how to transfer experiences from one environment to another is a stretch that is needed.  We all tend to be trapped by the limitations of our previous experiences.  The issue becomes that, “to a hammer everything looks like a nail”.  We need to educate our people about not falling into that leadership trap.  Engaging emotions is a powerful driver of commitment and ability.  Understanding what is important to each person is the necessary key to the door of change.  That means spending the time and making the communication effort to uncover the trigger emotions, the drivers for positive change.  We need to model it for them and then encourage them to do the same, when they have the responsibility of leadership. The four drivers of coaching composed of Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower make for powerful leadership precepts.  These take time and the best time to start using them was yesterday.  The second best time is today.  

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, ability, 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 in the last 20 years, the number of people aged between 15 and 34 has halved.  The bad news is that it is going to halve again over the next forty years.  Young people will be in high demand, regardless of how useless they are.  We complain today about millennium entitlement.  That will be nothing compared to what is coming.  Smaller families means more single child households. The Boomer generation will be spoiling their grandchildren on an industrial scale.  Scarce resource spoilt brats will be entering society and business.  I can hardly wait. The Universities here in Japan will be taking anyone with a pulse, because they are going to be bleeding red ink all over the place.  Does anyone the Tandai system of two year colleges?  They have all disappeared or morphed into four year schools to survive.  Diabolical entrance exams will linger for the most elite schools in Japan, but for the rest it is a race to the bottom of academic standards to keep the doors open.  ing academic classes at a Japanese University has been a joke.  If you turn up to class, the chances are pretty good you will be ed.  A rather low bar compared to what is happening at varsity in the rest of the advanced world. So dealing with undereducated, spoilt, entitled lay abouts are our collective future when hiring staff.  Even now, between 30%-35% of staff into their third to fourth year of employ are bailing out and heading for the exists, seeking supposed greener pastures.  Covid-19 may have put a temporary dampener on this exodus for the moment, but if that is your staff retention strategy, then the future looks bleak for you.  Business is so complex today.  The hero boss who can do every part of the business process has become a distant memory. Even if we could do it, should we?  The boss should be concentrating on those activities that only the boss can do and should be pushing everything else down to subordinates.  Now that is the theory.  The reality is most bosses in Japan are doing too much.  They don’t trust the delegation system because they have been burnt before.  Actually, that is not quite true – they don’t have a delegation system.  A dumping of the work system yes, but an intelligent, best practice delegation system, well no. Probably a good time to revisit how that works for all the bosses out there, because they are going to need it.  If we can’t unleash hell as bosses and we have to gain willing cooperation to get the youth engaged, what do we need to do?  Communication skills are going to be at a .  The whole modern apparatus of leadership rests on persuasion power, rather than raw position power.  Do bosses know what these young people want?  That would be a good starting point.  “What is in it for me” is a tried and true motivator across time and geography.  Once upon a time that was focused on what the boss wanted but times have changed.  Bosses need to spend time with young people, individually, to understand them better.  Yes, they may be spoilt little brats, but these are the cards you are dealt, so learn how to play them.     

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 thinking “maybe I should have investigated if there were more appropriately priced alternatives”.  Too late by that time, because it takes quite a while to find the size of space you need, in the location and configuration you require, at a number that makes sense.  Better to engage a real estate broker early to start telling you what the alternatives are so that when the time comes you can have some choices available.  That data is also a potential bargaining chip in the arm wrestle for the next two years of tenant penal servitude. Another key player is your ant.  If you outsource your ing to a firm, they will receive the data from your people and then get into a P&L and Balance Sheet format that you can come to with.  It also enables someone externally to see what are the patterns of spending and spot any anomalies.  Japanese staff are very honest.  However, like staff in other countries, they can find themselves in the newspaper for embezzling vast sums from their employers, sustained over breathtaking amounts of time. If you need an English speaking ant, we are now fishing in a very small pond.  This tends to mean that we lock someone in to do the books and we just keep them forever.  We all seek an equilibrium comfort point.  We get the service, we are happy with it and we are generally too busy to investigate if we can better it.  Once a year, list up some ing service delivery alternatives and have a conversation about what they offer.  Existing suppliers can become robotic in their delivery of their services and they have pruned their services down to the minimum necessary to maximise their return.   It might be a good time to see if you can maximise your return instead. In our case, we need things designed and printed, because we distribute flyers to clients and training manuals to class participants.  I am using the same printing company now which I have used for over ten years.  I know there are other companies who are slightly cheaper, but I need high quality service, delivered at speed. Being able to get things designed very quickly is something I value highly and will pay more for that service.  If that service was diminished then there would be a reason to change.  The point here though is, I need to keep track of the size of the disparity between what I pay and what they deliver.  I can’t just go to sleep at the wheel and keep using the same folk because I am too busy to know the relative price, quality and scope of the service I am receiving. Labor lawyers do well here in Japan.  The regulations are changing, there is government pressure to not have unpaid overtime and numerous arcane labor rules abound.  Our labor lawyer is a pretty good businessman and signed my firm up on a monthly retainer.  I took my COO’s advice on this retainer, though I had my doubts.   I reviewed that service need and that retainer and guess what?  After I cut it, there has been no difference in what we needed as a service.  Instead, we are saving that money every month  now.  Maybe at one point there was a point.  My point though is, don’t let these things just drift along, without making a conscious decision to decide if the service is really what you still need or not.  End of the year clean up time is a good time to survey new potential providers and clean up unneeded service expenses too.      

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 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 have crossed the road to meet any of them. Position rather than personal power counts for lot in Japan.  You meet a lot of people here with big titles and pretty much no personal firepower.  That is not to say there aren’t charismatic, powerful leaders here.  Mr. Nambu who founded the massive Persona organisation is a very charismatic person, who has tons of personal power.  He has nearly 20,000 employees spread across his 67 subsidiaries and 11 s.  I know him personally and he is very good at dealing with people, both high and low.  He started the company while he was still at university, so he is a rare bird in Japan, to take a start-up to serious stardom and himself to billionaire status. What is the difference between some of the successful Japanese I have met and the nobodies leading many firms.  When we teach leadership, we make a point of differentiating it from management.  Managers make sure the processes are running on time, cost and at the required quality.  Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction and build the people.  By this definition most Japanese leaders we meet in business would be classified as “managers”.  Japan is a country of detail, long term planning, caution and perseverance.  You can go a long way on the back of that line-up and many do. My new acquaintance is a manager I would say.  I am guessing that he fell into the business he is in, rather than it being the product of strategic planning.  What a contrast with Jordan Wang.  Jordan is the Dale Carnegie franchisee in Sydney and took the business over two years ago from basically nothing growing it very quickly to a substantial size.  I was attending his talk to the Franchisee Association on how he runs his business.  His planning frameworks were very sophisticated.  Because they started with basically nothing, he said, he had to come up with a road map. He spent some serious time studying the various frameworks out there and then adjusted them to his reality.  Over the next two years he shaped and crafted those frameworks into a formidable machine, to help run his business.  One of the very experienced and successful American franchisees commented that “I am feeing less smart” after listening to Jordan.  I know exactly what he means, because I too was blown away by Jordan regarding his thinking, energy and that word – charisma. In Japan, trust is a key requirement for retaining staff, gaining clients and remaining successful.  This is the same everywhere, but somehow Japan just brings a much great intensity to the word.  If you can gain trust with others, you can build a business here. Over time you can build it, if you happen to have chosen a niche or a sector that is growing and profitable.  Being high on trust and low on charisma is no impediment to success here in Japan. So when you meet a Japanese leader and they are a fizzer in the charisma stakes, don’t necessarily write them off.  Look at their numbers, particularly staff numbers as an indicator of how much credence you should attach to them.  In my experience, few Japanese excel individually, but put them together in a group and they are most formidable.  To keep the group together, their leaders need to have been able to build the trust.  The other question you need to ask is have they been able to sustain this over decades?   If they have, then you may have a business partner in front of you, even if they seem grey, dull and boring.

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 the odd A player, given enough time and consistency. In theory, this sounds all very plausible and straightforward.  Good so far, but how do you bring your talent alchemy to the forefront? Leaders are pretty busy, so who develops these D, C and B people?  It stands to reason that the sales section heads or sales department heads are not sales A players either, so their sales role modelling is a limiting factor.  The leader has to be highly selective where they put their time and effort.  Pumping a lot of work into someone, to see them walk out the door is heartbreaking, mind numbing, costly and depressing stuff.  Adjusting expectations is a big factor in leadership.  Trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle takes time.  So we cannot expect new people to be producing results any time soon.  Having a really good record of salespeople results is a start.  Over time, you can build up averages, so that you can know what is a reasonable expectation, for a certain point in time.  I have a spreadsheet that tracks all the salespeople from ground zero.  This way I am comparing salesperson against salesperson, quarter by quarter.  I know what a first year average revenue result is and so forth, year by year. Knowing this is a big help, because I don’t load up new people with too much pressure.  In fact, it gives me the ability to encourage them.  I can tell them that I am not expecting them to hit the moon straight out the gate. The first year is a giant learning curve and I want them to do their best and that will be fine.  By taking away the pressure, they can fit into the team, absorb the culture and begin their training.  A players are expensive, so bosses want results immediately, to justify the big bucks they are paying them.  Fair enough, but the rest of us need to tread a different path of patience and encouragement, to gradually mould the new people into performers. The other thing we need to do is inject ourselves into the mix and work on developing talent.  We cannot leave it all to our direct reports.  Even though we are super busy, we need to have some regular personal interaction with the new team and need to keep close tabs on how they are going.  We need to create the time to coach them.  We cannot be there all of the time, but we have to select precise interventions to help them keep moving forward.  Maybe we can do thirty minutes early mornings, a couple of times a week, to work with them as a group.  We also have to scale for their ability to absorb pressure.  Some are robust and others are more delicate flowers.  We need to adjust our time expectations for how long it will take to get everyone up to speed to handle the pressure to perform.  A players are already forged in the furnace of high performance, so they are application ready.  The balance of getting cash in the door every month to pay the bills and being patient with people, is a high wire act that leaders have to learnt to walk. It is easy to get this wrong and fall to your demise and see the business go backwards or even down.  There is no road map here either, because every case is different, every group of individuals is different.  You have to play the cards you can afford and not spend any time wishing to be dealt a better hand. The country may be going to hell in a basket, but salespeople are in high demand. When hiring salespeople people, I am constantly astonished at the prices other companies will pay for a warm body.  Very challenged E players, with no experience, are getting offers that make you want to cry.  That is the market.  We are all going to be constantly faced with this struggle of how to develop people we can afford, in an already overheated hiring market, that will just get worse.  The demographics are not on the leader’s side here, as the lack of young people coming into sales drives up the price.  This will become the sales era of the C player, with intermittent light showers of B players.  Get ready for it folks.  

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 young people who were incredible and they chose us over the bigger more powerful competition, because they saw a new future here in Japan for themselves that hadn’t existed before. There were many reasons for instituting this revolutionary change, but one of them was the generational divide between the older male branch leaders and the younger people they were responsible for.  Like me, they had all grown up under the tough love school of boss supervision.  When this is how you were raised in business, it is extremely hard to break free of that and try something unfamiliar and different.  The intentions are always good and were to make the younger staff better.  The issue had become the style of communication to achieve that.  Straight talk, for many in my generation, means tons of critique, criticism and maybe even verbal abuse.  That is what we got from our bosses, so we are ing it on down the generations. The younger people today though have a lot more options than we had.  They have compliance systems, staff surveys of bosses and a fundamental change in societal attitudes working in their favour.  The demographic decline in the numbers of young people means there is a strident war for talent going on, as companies try their best to find enough young people to hire.  The young are a finite resource in a sea of strong demand.  That changes the power equation substantially from when I was a kid. We were all assured we were quite disposable.  In the modern era, criticism has to be replaced with words of encouragement.  Bosses have to adjust their expectations.   This sounds simple, but it is confronting.  I once calling one of my younger staff and I left a message to call me back. There had been some internal staffing changes and I wanted to assure them that everything would be fine.  I also wanted to gauge how they were was feeling about the changes.  No call back, but later I did see a text message to my phone that said they were “not mentally ready to speak with me yet”. I don’t know about you, but for someone brought up on tough love, that statement seemed so soft, indulgent, entitled, namby-pamby, no guts and divorced from reality.  I tell you I had fire and sparks coming out of my ears and eyes immediately I read their message.  I was furious. I could never imagine I would say such a thing to the President of the company, if I were a junior employee.  If the President left a phone message saying “call me back” then I would drop everything and make that call as soon as I got that message.  We lead a different generation today.   In their mind, there was no problem with brushing off the President, because they weren’t ready to have that conversation. I eventually spoke with the staff member and accommodated some concerns they had and all was good and resolved - for them. I wasn’t resolved though.  Maybe I should have just left it, but I couldn’t. I had to address their phone message to me.  This person was talented and I didn't want to lose them, so I knew I was walking on a tightrope.  My tough love upbringing had their “immature, naïve, stupid, unacceptable” comments stuck firmly in my craw.  I told them quietly, calmly but firmly, that if they ever got another message from me to call me back, then they should do so pronto.  If they couldn’t manage that, then they should find another President to work for.  They could do that easily by the way, because they are in the zone of high talent demand.  Where do we draw the line today though?  I know the way I was raised in business wasn’t the most ideal and that I am a hangover from a bygone era, but I am still here and still leading. How much crap do we have to put up with from this younger generation?  I would guess a whole lot more, certainly more than we anticipate or want.  There is no finite answer, but clearly our method of communication is going to have to change.  It has to  become much more nuanced than anything we ever experienced from our bosses.  I will try to keep Principle #17 in my mind, “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”.  Also, Principle #8, “Talk in of the other person’s interests”.  And I will definitely follow Principle #1, “Don’t criticise, condemn or complain”.  If I can keep the fire and sparks within me from burning the whole thing down, then there may be hope for me yet.  

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 to work effectively together and the time we have available to do just that. So we cut corners.  We start to lead from a macro perspective.  We are prone to broadcast emails to the whole team, mass Town Halls where we what is going on, Zoom calls to the whole team where we pontificate on how things should be.  It is terribly efficient but is it particularly effective? We know from sports that all the modern coaches coach each individual based on who they are and what they are capable of doing.  The old style game half-time coach thunderous moments of inspired oratory are the thing of Hollywood movie celluloid relics of a past long ed.  Leaders need to focus on each person, one by one. Some players are easy going, amazingly talented athletes who can perform the most unexpected feats of spontaneous physical dexterity, that a coach can never teach.  They are Amiables who like people and are understated.  They don’t speak in a loud voice, in fact they are laconic to the extreme.  Loud incandescent outbursts about the requirement for getting the numbers are lost on them.  We have people like that on our business teams.  They are the solid quiet performers, often the social glue inside the team, holding all the superstructure together. The opposite stye are the Drivers.  They are highly numbers and outcome oriented.  They want the big bucks which comes with producing results.  They don’t need external motivation, because the fire burns deep inside them and it is permanently self-igniting.  They don’t need public acclaim or affirmation, because they march to the beat of their own drummer.  They don’t listen to any praise because they are sceptical and they don’t feel any need of it. They can handle extreme pressure from above to perform. They have no problem with straight talk about getting the numbers or getting out of Dodge. They need to be strongly corralled to play as a team member, because they are oriented as an individual player and believe they rise or fall on their own efforts.  They have severe outcome focus, rather than people focus, so often they can be limited in application as the leader. That doesn’t stop organisations putting them in charge though, because they produce results. Analyticals are data freaks.  They only react to proof and evidence. They suspect any opinions which cannot be backed up with the statistics, expert testimonials, key numbers or facts.  They are very well organised and thorough in their approach to everything.  You have to persuade them with the data.  They are not stirred by emotional calls to action.  “Do it for the Gipper” doesn't do anything for them.  Whether in sport or in the office, they need to be convinced by proof of the right course of action and once on board, they then knuckle down and get right behind the effort. The opposite style is the Expressive.  They are outgoing, like being with people and are very confident, often too confident.  They are usually the pranksters inside the team, making the jokes, geeing everyone up.  They are flamboyant and enjoy the accolades, public acclaim and attention.  Titles, prizes, trophies, incentives – bring them on they say. Inside the company they are the “hail fellow well met” crew, who work hard and play harder.  Pumping up their ego has no bounds.  The less fizzy, more sensible variety are often the most attractive leaders inside the organisation. As leaders we need to know which style we are and what are our own strengths and weaknesses.  We need to know the same detail about our team .  We should spend time with them individually.  Time constraints push us away from doing this, but we have to fight against the unrelenting drive to harmonised mediocrity.  There is no point in being a macro leader in a modern micro world.  

I 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, regulations, controls are there to protect the business.  Systems have to work at scale, regardless of who is employed in the business.  There has to be consistency and production sequences need to work to make deadlines or to ensure the required quality.  When I worked in retail banking, there were so many regulations and audits, regarding what we were doing.  Every process had to be documented and followed according to the letter of the specified designation. People didn’t get into trouble for varying from the procedures.  It was hiding the variation that proved to be career ending.  They were too scared to it they had not followed the procedures and so tried to hide the fact away.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t work and at some point it all comes rolling out and rolls right over the top of the individual and they are summarily fired for hiding the offence. On the other hand, we want people to be innovative.  We know the danger of groupthink and also of being left behind by more creative rivals.  Staff witnessing the career ending variances from the established tried and true methods, are not much induced to try new stuff. How do we get innovation, when we have the system tied down so tight there is no room for mistakes? There has to be a different mentality around mistakes.  Japan is a mistake free zone.  There have been decades of bosses very publicly screaming abuse at staff for screwing up.  This curtailed people’s interest in doing anything new or better.  The boss has to now take the lead here.  The staff need to be told clearly what can’t be played around with for compliance or regulatory purposes, but also what is up for grabs.  Mistakes can be said to be tolerated but if the talk isn’t matched by the walk, the experiment in a “hundred flowers” blooming, dies on the spot. Sounds easy, but just where is the line?  How big a mistake are you personally, as the boss, prepared to tolerate?  When Lee Iacocca called in one of his marketing executives at Chrysler following a major failure on a new model launch, that executive was expecting to be fired.  To his amazement Iacocca said, “Fire you!  We just spent million educating you”.  Can you be like that? We set the temperature for innovation, by how much we celebrate the learnings from failures.  We might not be as big minded about losing millions like Lee baby was, but still there will be opportunities to demonstrate that we never fail, because we always learn.  We are going to come out of Covid-19 in 2021, so although we can’t set a specific date to loosen the controls, we still need to set a date to remind ourselves that we need to reevaluate where we are in the business cycle.  Now is also the time to look for innovations which can be implemented, once the cash flow has been stabilised. Plan now and pour in the investment when the time is right, rather than waiting for the cash to be there first and then start the planning. We need systems and rules to protect the company and we need innovation to take the company forward.  It cannot be “either”, it has to be “and”.  Striking that balance has no road map and is difficult to get right, but if we can be directionally right and at the right scale, then we are going to be on the right track.  

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 purpose, inculcation into the cult of the WHY, dedication combined with smarts, make so much difference when competing with rival organisations. The leaders are what make the difference.  They are hiring the people, training them and promoting them.  There are so many deeper aspects to this.  Is the culture profound or anaemic?  Is talent recognised, rewarded and embraced as a competitive advantage or are we checking the age and seniority of the straps on the slave galley oars?  What is the communication mode?  Is this monologue boss city or are we engaging with a firestorm of vibrant, powerful ideas from below.  Is the boss the chief know-it-all or the orchestra conductor, moulding the raw untrained troops into a stellar team? Communication is at the center piece to all of this.  When the boss communication is focused on direct orders on the what and how all day long, we breed robots.  Why don’t we push ourselves much higher and go for motivational leadership, where words capture souls and move mountains.  The key to this pivot is to dump the olde style locker room halftime rousing call for maximum blood and guts in the second half.  Today’s sports coaches are geniuses of psychology.  They know their athletes’ temperaments, aspirations, fears and hot buttons at such an intimate level, that it is simply breathtaking. Bosses have to be in the same mould.  Knowing each person thoroughly as an individual is the starting point.  On top of that is knowing what they are trying to achieve.  We become their cagy corner man in the ring, wiping away the blood and helping to focus their dizzy brains through the fog of the daily beatings going on in the marketplace.  When we tell someone what to do, all we do is trigger negativity.  Their cynical brains are burning with reasons why that is a bad idea. They feel the prime insult of being told what to do and consequently lack interest in executing a plan not of their own design, desire or creation.  The reason they are so sceptical is that the plan is unleashed in a finished format, with no context or background attached. We need to get to the point tangentially with a short story.  By the way, we don’t say, “I am going to tell you a story from my glorious past”.  That would be amusing. I would love to see their reaction to that little doozy of an opener.  No, instead we go straight into a place in time, to a location they can identify, with people they probably will know and we spin a yarn, a true yarn, about what happened to us and what we learnt from it.  This whole narrative is short, under two minutes.  We certainly don’t flag our conclusion MBA executive summary style at the start.  No, we are more crafty than that.  We are like Iga Ninja, luring the listener into our web of charm. We expose the background that led us to an experience and viewpoint on a topic.  At the very end, we give them the order, the action we want them to take and then we finish off with the benefit to doing it that way. Next comes the hard bit for olde style leaders like me.  We ask them if they can see a way of taking that idea or method further and bettering it.  The old ego can take a battering at this point, when they trot out their half baked and crappy ideas, with all the aplomb of tender, ignorant youth.  That is why we make an important intervention. We say, “Get together with others, you select them and then together think about what I have said and come back to me tomorrow with your best ideas”.  This momentum breaker is important, otherwise only first phase, shallow musings will spill out of their mouths. We have also forced them to collaborate with their peers, giving us a better chance to reap richer alternatives. In the end, they either adopt your suggestion as the best alternative or they adapt and improve on it.  Either way, they have been given ownership of the next steps and so are more likely to execute it with commitment and enthusiasm, compared to following your lofty commands.  This is a different way of leading. It is the methodology needed to match the future of work we are all facing.  

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 some leadership principles which can cover off the day to day needs.  Principle #22 is “begin with praise and honest appreciation”.  Such an obvious thing, how could this even be mentioned as a principle?  It may be obvious, but are you a master of this principle?  We talk about providing psychological safety for our teams.  Well that is great and just how do you do that, when you have pressure to produce results from above and are feeling the stress of the current business disruption?  It is too easy to begin with an interrogation about the current state of play, the numbers, the revenues, the cash flows. How about if you started every interaction off with finding something real to praise about the team .  Not fakery but something real, that shows you are paying close attention to what they are doing well. Mistakes happen.  Except in Japan.  In Japan mistakes are not allowed and the penalties to career advancement are large.  “Fail faster” might make you a legend in Silicon Valley but would see you cast out in Japan.  That is why the entire population here are all ninjas at concealing any errors, so that the boss never finds out.  How do we get innovation going if we can’t tolerate mistakes?  That is one big reason why there is so little white collar work innovation in Japan.  Principle #23 says “call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly”.  Rubbing in it some one’s face that they screwed up is a pretty dumb, but universally adopted, idea by bosses. Principle #26, “let the other person save face” isn’t an “oriental idea”.  It is a human idea and no one likes losing face in front of others and it doesn’t increase people’s engagement levels.  In fact, is has them thinking about leaving for greener pastures.  Principle #24 also helps, “talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person”.  We want our team to feel empowered to take responsibility, to step up and try stuff.  That is how we create an innovation hub inside the organisation.  If you have a hotbed of ideas from your team and the competition is still canning people who make mistakes, then you will win. Principle #25 is so powerful.  “Ask questions instead of giving direct orders”.  Bosses are staff super-visors, because we have super-vision.  Probably true once upon a time in the olde days, but no longer the case.  Business is too complex today, so we need to grow our people and to be able to rely on their ideas.  If I spend all my time telling you what I think, I haven’t learnt anything.  Bosses need to think of questions which will push the team’s thinking muscle hard and get people really engaged.  Instead of laying our your thoughts, chapter and verse and falling in love with the sound of your own voice, try asking questions instead. After asking the question, shut up and let your people answer without interruption. It may be killing you, but do it. Being asked for your opinion and ideas is empowering.  Maybe the boss has all the answers, great, but what if the staff have questions the boss hasn’t even thought about.  In Japanese business, asking the right question is more valued, that having the right answer. All of these principles have things in common.  They are common sense, but not common practice.  They are super easy to understand, but devilish to execute consistently.  They are game changers in our relationship with our staff.  Having some leadership principles to live by just takes the action of thinking out of the equation.  These become the reflex actions we take because they have become a habit.  These are the types of habits we need to cultivate.        

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 to believe in ourselves and our decisions and we would plough ahead regardless of what others might have thought. We have always had to overcome resistance.  We are now in the leader danger zone. There is tricky line between knowing what you are doing and actually being correct.  We became the boss because our previous ideas were proved correct and superior to what others were advocating. We have seen off the idiots, doubters, naysayers, critics and rivals.  We have climbed the greasy pole and they haven’t. Everyone should listen to us and believe what we say, because we are right and they are wrong.  Case closed. This is the classic hero journey favoured by the independent, tough, driven, Type A, alpha mammals. For a very long time this worked just fine.  Business however has grown more enmeshed with technology changes.  More complex organisations have arisen and operate at hyper speed.  Also, a different animal has been entering our companies, coming in straight out of college. Are we actually able to deal with these unparalleled changes? Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution put more importance of adaptability than strength or brains.  Are we maintaining our full cup and therefore not well placed to adapt?  Are we trying to do it all by ourselves?  Many bosses are unable to hire smart people, because they cost too much, relative to the size of the cash flow in the company.  Others won’t hire smart people, because they are scared of becoming a victim of future corporate internecine struggles, where they can be replaced with someone younger and cheaper. How exactly can we work through others? Covid-19 has disrupted business globally and the future is uncertain.  How do leaders know what to do going forward?  How do you know if your strategy is the correct one or not?  Strong willed leaders see asking others for advice as a sign of timidity and weakness.  They have attached their personal inner resilience to always knowing the correct answer, to being right, to being smarter and more savvy than everyone else. Complexity today exceeds the capability of one person leading the team to have all the answers.  A superman or superwoman is no longer required.  What happens though if you, as the leader, have low self awareness and can’t see that you need to empty your cup?  Exactly how do you empty your cup?  What should go inside the now empty cup?  Lack of self awareness is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.  Once that is accomplished then the emptying and refilling of the cup can start to happen. We have to face ourselves and ask why do we think we are able to keep operating as we have always done, when the current situation is more difficult. There are no indications we are ever going back to how things used to be?  Emptying the cup requires humility, often in short supply with powerful leaders.  Running faster, pushing aside and overtaking the other lemmings to ultimately be sprinting off the cliff, is of no help.  This is the moment to stop and consider your own cup.  Is it full of your baloney, that you have convinced yourself is correct?  Have you surrounded yourself with “yes men” or the meek and compliant?  Have you bullied everyone into submission? Are there ways to tap into more ideas and solutions than you can possibly produce by yourself?  Are there people closer to the action on a daily basis, who will have greater and better insights than you can possibly have.  Your frontline experience is way out of date by now, as you have arisen through the ranks over these many years. This is scary.  Your self belief is what has driven you thus far and questioning it unravels a lot of your personal construct about your right to lead others.  That is the old model of leadership, so let it go.  The used by date has expired on that one.  Empty your cup and your ego and find ways of learning more from others, including those who work for you and may even be quite junior.  Tokusan thought he knew everything until Ryutan started pouring that tea.  I am pouring your tea for you right now and challenging whether your cup is going to stay full or will you make the effort to empty it?  

In Part One we looked at two broad categories of leadership competences around being Self-Aware and having ability.  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 the issues is the struggle between selfishly focusing on your own glorious career and the role of others in boosting that cause and your own efforts to selflessly boost the careers of your direct reports.   Companies need leader producing machines. The talented rise faster and higher by demonstrating they are that very elevating machine. Those who can demonstrate they can produce leaders are given a bigger remit to do that at scale.  Can you do it and are you doing it? Positively Influences Others Rabid rivalry and internecine warfare between competing thrusters amongst the leadership team permeate the wrong messages to those below.  Disciples pin their hopes to the banner of the thruster they think will go higher and take them with them. Everyone is grasping the greasy pole, trying to climb over each other to the top.  Politicians and sycophants abound inside companies and are a vicious form of poison, because they are playing all ends against the middle to feather their own nest.  The leader sets the tone.  Not whining about others in the company, not playing petty internal power games and keeping firmly focused on beating the external rivals is the correct path.  Are you and all of your colleagues on it? Effectively Communicates Personal capabilities and mastery of one’s designated tasks are the usual path to promotion.  Being 100% responsible for oneself is different to being responsible for a team.  This is where leadership communication skills are soon shown to be frayed and tatty.  Speaking the lingua franca is frankly so what? Communicating key messages and inspiring and persuading others to your path are the required skills.  Few leaders do a great job because many are locked into the belief that all this communication stuff is fluff and hard skills are the only currency.  They are doomed to be low altitude flight path denizens, because companies are looking for people who can move the masses forward.  Is what you are doing every day moving them forward? Providing Direction This sounds so simple.  I mean how hard can this be?  What if it is the wrong direction though? What if we are all being urged to sprint faster off the cliff?  This is the VUCA world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Setting the correct direction isn’t the easiest thing for leaders these days.  We can’t know if the direction is correct until we start down the path.  The clue is to adjust when confronted by unpleasant hints about the actual truth. We need to keep adjusting to the market realities and not become too convinced of our own genius and superiority.  Has your leader ego convinced you that you are always correct? Being strategic is one of those tropes of leadership, but what does it actually involve?  Let’s look at couple of issues. Innovative This competency sounds obvious and easy except that very few companies, let alone people, are actually innovative.  Think of all the companies you have worked for and nominate how many came up with any significant innovations?  We are better off developing the innovation muscle of the entire team, than relying on our own scampy offerings. If you are substantially personally gifted in the innovation department then hats off to you.  How many people like you then have you ever worked with?  The answer is clear.  The collective team, if harnessed properly to the task of coming up with innovative ideas, can do it together.  The sticking point is, do you know how to marshal your team to do that? Solves Problems The is another obvious competency, except that are you the one running yourself ragged solving everything? Have you delegated tasks sufficiently so that others can share the burden?  Leaders should be involved with big strategic issues, not with every small fry decision.  If you are in the problem weeds and getting down and dirty with minor issues, it is time to rethink how you have positioned yourself as a leader.  Uses Authority Appropriately Does every decision have to run by you?  Are you in too many meetings?  Are you hooked on your own authority and feel the need to be on top of everything?  Developing staff means letting go and giving them some things to try and possibly fail with.  “There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities” is a good mental intervention, for when your staff screw things up.  Delegating your own power is a tough one for driven leaders.  However, if you want to rise, you have to breed successors like rabbits, so that there are plenty of people to take over so that you can rise up the ranks.  

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 in the Darwinian, performance outcomes oriented West.  Age and stage make sense in Japan, when you spend your entire career with the one firm and are part of the fabric of that company, gradually being stitched in over decades.  The risk aversion predominance in Japanese business weighs against change and bolsters constancy.  We foreigners represent change.  To become a trusted partner with a Japanese firm means they have to make some internal changes to accommodate the new thing we bring to them or the old thing we are tweaking in a new way.  The question is, who inside the Japanese decision making hierarchy is going to take responsibility for the change.  In Western companies there is a big personal payoff to taking risks, but Japanese salaries and bonuses are not on the same planet as a country like America. So, the upside of taking a risk in Japan is far outweighed by the potential career damage if there is a failure. We have all grown up with a British Raj model of decision making.  Convert the leaders and you get the whole company to snap into gear and get with your programme.  It doesn’t work like that here unless the President is the founder or the owner.  This is the “one man shacho” formula, the classic dictator President, who rules with an iron fist and drives everyone to do what ever they say.  Most big corporates though, have a structure where the President has P&L responsibility for the whole company, but the direct reports have P&L responsibility for their part of the business. The President can’t force them to make expenditure allocations impacting their turf without their agreement.  Hence the reputation of Japan as the country of glacial decision making.  I find this is a bit boring, because the Raj approach is much faster and easier for me.  No one in Japan could care less what I want. I deal with a lot of Presidents, as I try my best “convert the Raj” techniques to get them to buy my training services.  Being the President of my firm, I can get access to the senior echelons of the client company and get a hearing.  This is where Western logic departs from Japanese best practice. The leaders I speak with won’t personally do anything themselves.  The company has internal compliance methodologies to reduce risk and protect the firm.  The work to investigate my idea will get sent right down to the very bottom of the pile.  That lower level designated officer or tanto will start pulling together information on our company, our offer, our pricing, the market, the competitors, resources required and the prospective ROI.  The tanto will then present that report to their superior, the next up the line, who if they approve it, will place their hanko or personal seal on the document.  This is a public acknowledgment that it has ed their stringent evaluation process and they are willing to take responsibility and place it before their superior.  The hanko marks on the document will also include any divisions or sections that will be impacted by the buying decision. This is an internal harmonisation and communication process to provide checks and balances.  In this way, there are no surprises and no issues, when it comes to coordinating the execution piece.  This process is repeated all the way up to the President’s direct reports who have P&L responsibility to fund the deal.  If it is a big enough decision, there may be a senior executive meeting required.  This is usually a formality to bless the decision, rather than make a decision. The plan executive sponsor will outline the idea at the meeting, there will be no questions and it is therefore agreed. Next item! The surprising thing is that the President isn’t the final decision maker.  And I had such a good meeting with that President too and I thought I had the Raj technique working on steroids! Actually, the person I needed to meet was the tanto. I could either work with them directly or I could supply the information they required, for them to do their due diligence. When meeting with the President, I need to finish the meeting off, by asking to have my people get together with their tanto, to supply whatever information they need. Japan being such a polite culture, the President will happily make that introduction even if knowing that there is no chance of this deal going anywhere.  This is because it conveniently avoids anyone having to tell me a direct “no”.  If it has legs, then the tanto’s job is to navigate the decision through the system. So in Japan, it is better to start at the bottom and work your way up, than try to go top down, as we are more familiar with in the West.  The tanto has to become a key messenger for us. If we can’t win over a relatively junior, seemingly unimportant staff member to our cause, then the decision outcome will be remain vague and lifeless.  Now we don’t want that do we.  

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 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, able, 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-Awareness we have four focus areas. Self-Directed There is a mental and physical requirement for leadership, driven by a strong desire to be successful. We explore inside ourselves to understand what we need to do and why we need to do it.  Someone who can only function on the basis of the advice of others is a follower not a leader.  Of course, taking advice is good, but leaders have their own sense of True North and keep moving forward, charting their own course Self-Regulated Being a self-regulator requires supreme discipline.  Knowing what not to do is as important as making action step choices.  Shiny objects abound, multiplying like amoeba, but time, money and resources are limited.  Be it business focus or our temper, we need to rein them both in and assert control. Develops Self Constant application of self-improvement sounds obvious, but many leaders are cruising.  The more diligent may be doing a good job working in the business, but they are too busy to be working on the business. Is that you? Technology, society, company culture and organisational development overtake some leaders and ultimately they are ejected from the firm.  Where is the locus of self-development to be found?  Good question and there are multiple options. Good choices will have a lasting impact on our longevity as leaders. Confident “We don’t know what we don’t know” is a big problem.  Before you become a leader there is that misplaced confidence that you know what to do in the role. As you rise through the ranks, you keep making new discoveries.  The more you learn, the less you find you really know.  Imposter syndrome is a big factor here after we step up into new responsibilities.  Constant self-development is the cure for this, as we grow into the job. ability covers four sub-topics. Competent This is often mistaken for technical knowledge or business content cover.  That capability within your old job is what thrust you into a leadership role.   What about your competency as the leader?  What do you really know about leading?  How persuasive are you?  How well do you understand the aspirations of the team?  Can you coach others who are just not like you?   Can you set the correct course in a raging sea? This requires study and doesn’t happen by osmosis. Honest and Having Integrity Are you honest?  Would your people agree?  Seeing people as cogs in the machine elevating your brilliant career, jousting with rivals for the next job using the team resources for that purpose and being all about me, me, me is often the leader reality.  Think about some of your bosses up to this point. The crust on top of this reality is a false veneer disguising what is really going on.  Subterranean self-interest is often voiced over with pious pronouncements.  Being honest is about sincerely wanting to develop the team and integrity is what you do or think when no one is observing you.  Manages Progress Towards Goals Obvious.  Yet are the goals clear to your team? Is there an intelligent plan? Are people engaged and bought in? Are you the pirate captain simply bellowing out orders and threatening the crew with the plank? Makes Effective Decisions When do you know a decision was effective?  Certainly never at the time of making it.  In that moment, we are working on hope rather than certainty.  Are the team convinced of the wisdom of the decision?  Was there any input opportunity for them?  Does our power of personality or position power just crush access to the diversity of opinions available?  When it isn’t working, are we trapped by pride, ego and arrogance to keep running faster off the cliff?   In Part Two, we will investigate being Others Focused and Strategy for Leaders.  

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 many of 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 still 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. During Covid, we moved it online. Everyone had to be on camera at 9.00am, dressed for business, rather than in a T-shirt.  If they didn’t come on camera that was a red flag.  There may have been some depression issues bubbling away in the background, as the isolation started to get to people. They began to withdraw.  One of my team didn’t come on camera for three days in a row, saying there was an issue with the laptop webcam.  Was there really an issue?  How would I know that was the case, sitting in my study, at my home?  I immediately started organising another laptop to be sent out. I need to see everyone’s face every day, to check how they are doing.  In the end, it was a technical issue around the privacy settings in Teams.  The point though is, I didn’t really know what was going on.  I have to be continuously keeping an eye out for the emergence of any stress or depression in my team. At the chorei we would go through good news reports, the vision, mission, values, the Dale Carnegie Principle for that day, who we are visiting virtually or otherwise and who was visiting us, each person’s top three priorities for the day and a motivational quote.  The whole thing took about ten minutes.  I usually spent another ten minutes talking about things like taking care of your health, standing up regularly because we tend to sit for too long, issues around coordination which have arisen, the latest news in our business, the cash flow situation and recognising good work.  We also had Coffee Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day for anyone who wants to just shoot the breeze and catch up with colleagues, they don’t physically meet anymore.  It wasn’t that popular so we dropped it. The meeting cadence with direct reports continued online but it was easy for this to fade or drift.  People’s new work from home schedules seem to make it harder to connect.  Back in February 2020, when we started working from home, it had a temporary feel about it.  On reflection, I didn’t immediately embed some processes I should have.  These direct report meetings were a discipline I found I had to really enforce, because many of my staff seem to possess ninja level skills at avoiding talking with boss. I usually want stuff from them, I want it yesterday and I am very demanding. Talking with me is probably a pain, so some are quite creative in escaping the supervision.  The biggest issue was coordination across the whole business, as we all descended into our little pockets of responsibility and started losing sight of the big picture.  I had to spend a lot more time making sure that key information was being shared and that I was also sharing key information, rather than hogging it to myself.  This was a time consuming activity, but we dropped the ball a couple of times because it wasn’t done properly.  Before I knew it, timelines started to drift, activities dropped out of completion sequence and confusion was not far behind. This was when I discovered just how detail challenged some people in the team actually were.  In the office it got covered off somehow.  Being subterranean, it wasn’t noticeable. In isolation from each other however, wrong data inputs have a horrendous impact.  They spark a lot of effort to clean up the mess created. It draws people away from what they should be doing, dragging them into the morass of re-work. We tried to get around these coordination and communication issues by creating one truth. There was a live document in Teams that everyone could access and all changes were noted there.  As a training company, we had training events scheduled LIVE On Line or in the Super Safe Classroom, so we could see which ones were being executed, which were postponed, who was involved, etc.  A limited number of people were allowed to feed into this document to enforce ability and control.  Today, with people at home, you may need a similar live document that tells everyone what is going on, which is being updated continuously as things change. GIGO (garbage in garbage out) is an issue for any document, so the details have to be monitored carefully. To overcome the isolation, one on one meetings were being held more frequently than when we were in the office.  However, I found it even harder than normal to get hold of people because they are often holding online meetings or were on the phone.  In the office, I could just walk over to their desk and signal to them to see me after they finished their call or grab them when they came back from their meeting.    I find our younger people are not phone savvy.  They don’t check their phones for incoming calls they have missed. This wastes a lot of time trying to get hold of people, so I had to be pretty bolshie with them, about checking their phones for missed messages and to check their voice mail regularly.  It is a real pain, but sending emails or text messages as well seems to be the way to get their attention. Many people are still working from home and are liberated from the daily grind of commuting in Tokyo which is good.  They are not necessarily pouring this extra time into their work though. As the boss, I have had to become a much more “supervising” leader than before, which I actually hate.  There are many more moving pieces now due to the residue of Covid-19, so whether I like it or not, I have become more interventionist to make sure it all hangs together.  How about you?  Has this been your experience too?  

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 having gravitas.  Emilio Bortin was the CEO of the Santander Bank, which was a shareholder in the Shinsei Bank, when I was an executive there.  He was visiting Japan to check on his investment and we were assembled to give him a presentation on what was happening with the Retail Bank.  He was a broad shouldered but not so tall man, but when he entered the meeting room, he was like a Spanish Bull entering the arena, looking for a matador to emasculate.  He completely filled that large room with his presence.  It was absolutely palpable.  He hadn’t even said a word, yet you felt his energy, intensity, determination, ion, strength and confidence.  He was radiating zanshin - “presence” big time. “When I am a billionaire like Emilio baby, I will have presence too”, you might be thinking.  So, did he get presence when he became a billionaire or did he become a billionaire, because he had presence?  We know it was the latter.  Right, very good, but how do we aspirant billionaire punters get executive presence? The energy being pumped out is a big factor.  Low energy, low intensity people have zero zanshin and so zero presence.  Softly spoken people can have presence too I guess, but frankly, you just don’t meet too many of those.  There is a vast difference though between being raucous and loud and having presence.  Being loud is basically just annoying.  To have presence, your vocal strength and your body language must both be engaged at a higher than normal level.  In casual conversation we speak at a certain level of intensity, usually fairly mild.  When we are in a meeting or presenting, we need to ramp that up by at least 20%.  When I am teaching participants in our classes to increase their vocal strength and speak more loudly, they struggle.  I say to them “double that energy” and they raise by 1%. They resist because they feel like they are screaming.  However, when they see themselves on video, it just seems confident and credible, not loud.  This is one element of having presence. Pauses, ma (間), are another critical element.  This space between the phrases or sentences, allows the audience to actually distill what you are saying.  When you rush the words together, each thought overwhelms the previous thought. Each successive idea canibalises its predecessor and so not much content is consumed in the end.  Our messages, in effect,  are competing with each other.  We speak at a good pace, so that the energy button has been pushed, but we need to break the content down to smaller brackets, which people can more easily digest.  We are not rushing, so it shows control and no pressure being felt.  This emanates confidence.  We hit key words for additional emphasis, rather than allotting equal importance to each word. This focuses the audience attention on what we want them to focus on, rather than trying to ask them to swallow the whole talk, in one gulp.  This communicates “I am confident”.  This level of control requires us to be very concise.  Too many words and the message becomes less clear, drowning in surplus words.  We need to trim the fluffy bits right back. Our eye is a powerful engagement tool.  Spraying the eye around the room is fake eye and meaningless.  We focus 100% of our attention on one person, look them in the eyes for 6 seconds and then repeat the same formula with each person, one by one.  They feel they are the only person in the room and we are speaking directly to them. Previous American President Bill Clinton was famous for his ability to engage strangers in crowds, when he was mixing with the masses.  He focused his eye completely on that person in front of him and engaged them at the highest level. Standing up straight or sitting up straight is super easy, but few can do it.  They kick out one hip when standing or sway around all over the place, while they are talking.  It distracts from their message and dissipates their strength and intensity.  When they are seated, they are sprawled out in their chair, looking way too casual to be taken seriously.  They don’t use gestures and just talk, talk, talk.  Talking way too much means they are always taking the long way round to get to the point.  Little chance for zanshin in this case. Absolutely exude your belief, confidence and power from inside. Drive it into your audience.  Use your voice and eyes for powering up your messages.  Be concise, so you are distilling and focusing only on the key messages.  Break the rhythm with pauses and engage people with your power eye .  Strong posture says a lot about who you are. People believe body language, so ramp it up.  This is how to have zanshin, which is the key to having executive presence.  

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 own questioning techniques.  If we do, we will get to a deeper realm of understanding of the issues.  This is the platform we need to make the best decisions. I notice this issue in our training classes.  When we ask someone for their opinion on something, they will give us an immediate Phase One answer.  Because Dale Carnegie was a devotee of the Socratic method of asking questions, our teaching methods rely on us digging in a bit deeper.  We are trained to never take what someone says at the Phase One Level, but to always push further.  This applies to leadership and to sales.  In both disciplines, the students in the classes are encouraged to go further and question more deeply.   In sales, for example, imagine we were talking to a customer.  They tell us they need the widget in green.  We train our students to ask why they want it in green, as opposed to accepting the green option at face value.  This gets us to a Phase Two much deeper answer.  That is good information, but it isn’t enough.  We need the client to go to Phase Three thinking and we do that through further questions. If they said they wanted green, because of XYZ reason, we don’t stop there.  In Phase Three we ask, “what would be the impact on your business if your were able to get XYZ?”.  We have now elevated the discussion to the achievement of their strategic goals.  We have taken them to a much richer source of information to help them clarify what they are doing.  In sales, we have started to position ourselves as the customer’s trusted advisor. In leadership it is the same thing.  of the executive team will give their opinions on an aspect of the business.   Normally we collect all of these various opinions and then we make a decision based on that discussion.  Often, we are influenced by the force of personality behind the opinion. This is only Phase One thinking though.  If we ask them to explain why they think that, we have now driven deeper down to Phase Two.  Once we hear everyone’s Phase Two level of thinking, we could make a decision at this point.  We shouldn’t stop there however, instead we should keep going.  Push them to go to Phase Three and tap into their ideas on how XYZ would strategically impact the business.  This is a tremendously simple process.  It does take slightly longer than just tapping Phase One thinking outcomes, but the harvest is so much richer.  We have all had the experience of having had a discussion with someone, often an argument and a couple of hours later, we are having a conversation with ourselves.  We are telling ourselves genius things such as, “I should have said this” and “I should have said that” etc.  This is because in the interval, our thinking has moved way beyond the simple Phase One responses we were applying in the conversation.  We have moved to Phase Two and Phase Three thinking, but we have missed the boat. Instead of having to wait a couple of hours to get a richer response in meetings, as the leader, we have to get our Socrates mojo working and go for Phase Two and Phase Three responses right there and then.  We have to guide our people to start thinking more strategically about the business. You will be surprised by the improved quality of thinking that you trigger.  This means the leadership group discussion and the decisions made will also be much better.  Let’s all decamp to the Phase Three world and live there from now on.  

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 calligraphy master will establish their Kokorogame before they wield the brush, the ikebana master will do the same before they place the flowers, as will the master of tea ceremony before they begin to whisk the tea.  They perfect their mindset, to produce the perfect output. In my first book Japan Sales Mastery, I wrote about Kokorogamae in the context of sales.  What was your true intention as a salesperson.  Was it to secure a big commission, bonus or promotion for yourself or was it to help the client to succeed in their business?  The mindset is totally different and the output can be a single sale or a lifetime partnership with the client.  If you are a salesperson, which is your intention? Leaders also have their Kokorogame.  Hanging on many walls, protected behind glass, tastefully framed, clearly written is the Kokorogame of the organisation.  In English, we call it the Vision, Mission, Values of the firm.  Someone or a group of people, thought about where do we want to take the organisation in a perfect world, in other words what is the Vision going forward?  What we do that is the Mission?  Why we do that are the Values.  This is the Kokorogamae at the macro level. The culture of the organisation is there to police the individual adherence to the corporate Kokorogamae.  The leader’s key role is to bring clarity to the Why of what we are all doing.  But where does that concept of the Why spring from?  Simon Sinik has more or less, become the owner of the Why since his YouTube video went viral.  The Kokorogamae concept starts up one step before what Simon is talking about.  He concentrates on concentrating on the importance of establishing the Why, but how do you determine the Why of the Why? Where does that come from? This is where Kokorogamae is useful.  It makes us reflect on what we believe and why we believe it.  As the leader, is my true intention to build up the people in my team and help them become the absolute best that they can be?  Or, are they there to serve me, to propel my rise through the corporate ranks, with them arrayed like worker bee slaves to me, the Queen bee.  Just as in sales, these goals are not mutually exclusive.  A famous sales trainer Zig Ziglar said, “you can have everything you want, if you just help other people get what they want”.  Your Kokorogamae can create your own success wrapped up inside the success of your client.  As a leader, you can rise through the ranks on the back of the results created by a highly engaged team, who feel you have their back and are focused on their success. The key point is where is the focus of your thoughts about the people in the business?  How do you really see them, when we strip away all the psychobabble?  To get better clarity on that, we can use the handy Japanese concept of tatemae and honne, meaning the superficial reality and the actual reality.  Are you leading based on a tatemae version of what you are supposed to say and do or is the real you, the honne, the one your people see everyday?  What is your true intention?  What is your Kokorogamae as a leader regarding your team and the organisation?