THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Train 4l2l3b

Leaders are now leading invisible people.  Their staff are no longer in sight or at best are only visible in person a couple of days a week.  What are their people doing at home?  How are they spending their time, how motivated are they, how engaged?  Being in the office brings a certain level of discipline with it.  You can see if people are goofing off.  In an open office environment, you can hear the phone conversations with clients to gauge what is going on.  When people are at home though, there is no way to be sure the team are using their time effectively. Time is life.  Time management is life management.  The key tool to controlling time is the schedule, daily, weekly, monthly and annually. The temptation is to just imagine that time management is only about work time management.  We are holistic beings, multifaceted, with multiple responsibilities.  We play different roles in our lives and the work role is only one of those.  Concentrating all of our time on work throws our lives out of balance. The schedule is the key tool, so what goes into that schedule determines the life we lead.  We have parents or children or siblings or partners or friends.  Devoting all of our tine to work means that these key personal relationships are starved of the time needed to be allocated to them, in order for us to have a more rounded life.  If we are late for lodging our personal taxes, unfocused about our finances because we are too busy working, then we will suffer both now and in the future.  Getting our financial lives in order needs time and that time is in our schedule.  We either allocate the time for that purpose or it gets allocated for something else. Our health is the same.  If we just work all of the time and don’t schedule time for exercise or relaxation, then we will encounter health issues.   It is like running the machines 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  The production numbers are initially impressive until the whole enterprise has shut down to spend time repairing the broken machines. We start by nominating the key roles we play in life.  Work is certainly one of them, but not the only thing.  After we establish the roles we play, we can now attach some goals for each of those roles.  This becomes important, because the schedule prioritisation process will be run off the achievement of these goals.  When we consider the competing goals, we have to make a choice about which goals have a higher priority than others and then time is allocated for the attainment of each of those goals.  It sounds so simple and it is.  The surprising thing is that you realise you are a multifaceted person and not just someone who works all the time.  You need to allocate time to call your mother, to see the kids sports fixture, to go to the dentist, to check your bank s, to go for a run, etc. As the leader, this is the concept of time usage we need to be teaching to our team .  If you are running in the wrong direction, going faster doesn’t help.  If you rapidly climb the ladder and find it is on the wrong wall, that doesn’t help.  What do we want to have, do and be?  We need to think about these aspects first, then set the direction, the goals to that effort and the scheduling, based on priorities, to make it all a reality.  Teaching people how to get more done each day at work is fine, but the modern leader needs to see their people in holistic .  If they become sick or experience family breakups or financial instability because they only concentrated on time allocation for work, then they will not be able to fully contribute to the organisation.  What’s more they will be very unhappy and unmotivated and that doesn’t produce the culture that breeds the quality of professionalism we need.  The machine will break and require extended downtime.  Having a key person in the business experience illness, which takes them out of the picture, can be devastating to the firm.  We want our clients served by happy, engaged, healthy, satisfied and motivated staff.  The leader’s job is to educate the team about proper holistic time management.  If we do that, we will have a much more successful and sustained business.  We all spend a lot of our time working, so making that a happy, fulfilling experience rests on getting all these aspects of people’s lives to be in alignment.  For that, they need time and we teach them how to allocate that time in their schedules.  Are you doing it?  

Staffing is a subject that gets a lot of attention from those within and without the organisation.  Those outside see staff movements as a bellwether of how the company is travelling. High turnover indicates disruption and uncertainty about the future.  Rapid high turnover indicates real trouble within the ranks.  When executives arrive in Japan, they often discover a lot of deadwood and they get about cleaning them out.  They are wholly focused on internal issues.  The outside perspective hasn’t been a consideration in their minds. They have forgotten about their competitors and how they will try to use this information to damage the firm. They think they can operate in a vacuum. Japan being such a risk averse culture, unscrupulous rivals have a field day playing up your instability and therefore heightened risk as a business partner.  I running ads for sales staff when I was in Osaka.  I merrily ran the ads looking to expand the sales team.  Now I knew that, but interestingly our rivals took that as a sign of weakness not strength. Japan loves secrets and rumours.  With everyone living on top of each other for centuries, keeping secrets is almost impossible and salacious talk and spreading rumours are up there with dining out and shopping as national sports. It was made to look as if we were in chaos and there was high turnover in the ranks.  Our customers began to ask probing questions about our stability. No doubt they were doing this after they had been briefed by our competitors on what a mess we were and how we were not a suitable supplier anymore. That negative fallout from the ads never occurred to me in a million years because I was upbeat, focused on the positive, the expansion, the growth. After that near death experience with our customers, I made sure that every ad thereafter had the explanation that we were hiring because we were expanding.  What was the additional costs of including those few vital words in the ads – nothing.  It was only my ignorance and single focus that allowed our rivals to seek a way in. The same issues can arise from within.  Whenever there is an organisational change, do people start high fiving each other, celebrating the new structure as a way to steal a march on the competitors?  No, they are concerned about losing their jobs, or having someone invade their turf, lose face, or being dragged kicking and screaming out of their comfort zone. This is a great breeding ground for rumours.  The formal explanation of what and why this is happening never seems to outpace the rumours.  The top executives are all on board with the changes, because they thought of them, but for everyone else, this is new.  In the vacuum, the rumour mill kicks into high gear.  The impact is that everyone forgets about the customer, the competitors and concerns themselves with their own best interests and imagining all the bad things that are about to unfold. We have to make sure that every person  is spoken to directly and so quash the rumours and misinformation before THEY can gain momentum.  Yes, this takes time.  But the focus on the customer and the competitor is where we want people concentrating, rather than on what is going on inside the firm.  They need to get back to work and the sooner their fears and concerns can be addressed, the faster they can do that. When people quit, the assumption is there is something wrong in the company.  Key people departing is especially unnerving for a lot of people, who immediately jump to all sorts of misconceptions about what this means for their own security or the stability of the enterprise.   Sending out a blanket email heaping praise on the departing is guaranteed to set up the vacuum, allowing it to weave its magic spell of impending doom for the survivors. We need to tell each person, one by one, what is really going on and assure them that everything will be okay.  We will find a great replacement, we can carry on in the departing person’s absence, it is not the end of the world.  This is time consuming, but it is the best way to ensure that the official version is the only version floating around. Action Steps When you have turnover whether it is positive or negative, be aware of external perceptions about the change – that perception will always be a negative one, so prepare to counter it Whenever a vacuum in information appears, it will be filled with rumours and misinformation, so you have to grab hold of the narrative and control it Internally, make sure every single person is spoken to directly and don’t imagine for one second that a blanket email will do the trick –it won’t

The usual advice is to get off the tools and concentrate on being the leader and focus your energies getting leverage from the team who work for you. This makes a lot of sense because as the leader we are supremely busy these days and the pace of business in only speeding up and growing more complex.  It also depends on how big your company is.  When you get large numbers of people working for you, then the chance of doing anything other than attending meetings basically dries up. And this is exactly the problem. Without noticing it we have been consumed by the beast and we now live in its belly. We are surrounded on all sides by our own team .  We might meet clients, but usually they are not our client and belong to one of the troops.  We are there for ceremonial purposes and not to seal the deal. We live at the margins of the business and we are gradually separated from knowing what is really going on. Some leaders may protest and tell me they know what is going on because their Division Heads, their direct reports, tell them.  I would answer that what your Division Heads are telling you is what they want you know and that may not necessarily be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It may be difficult, but where possible I would recommend keeping a couple of clients for yourself.  That way you keep your hand in with the market, the issues, the problems, the ups and downs of the flow of business.  You are getting this news unfiltered and your clients are telling you like it is, with no sugar coating.  More than couple of clients will be logistically very hard. We can all probably manage a couple and the intelligence we hear from these sources will be very valuable. We can also evaluate more effectively what our own staff are telling us. There is no doubt that the boss hears the bad news last, because everyone is hell bent on covering it up for as long as possible.  But as the boss we operate on a different plane.  We know we have the power, money and resources to fix problems and the faster we find out about the issue the less costly it is for us to fix it.  So we have staff motivations and our own going in different directions. There is nothing worse than thinking our systems are certainly correct, to only find out that is not the case.  We assume things are being put in place as part of the overall ecosystem, but actually there can be gaps.  We don’t discover these gaps fast enough when we rely on others to tell us about the gap. In fact, think back to the last time someone on the team told you about the gap compared to when you unearthed it yourself?  I am struggling to when that happened because it is so rare.  The snapper there is if no one is volunteering this information then how do  we discover it? This is where keeping your hand in the game comes in handy.  We are more likely to see problems or imperfections is we remain part of the process.  I was reminded of this recently.  I had been teaching our High Impact Presentations Course which has two days in the classroom, then a follow-up half day, a twenty eight week self-paced programme so that the class participants don’t forget what they learned and a monthly Professional Ongoing Education class. As I was talking about these things at the very end of the class, I saw some blank faces. That set off a warning siren in my head to check how we keep people informed about the follow-up programme.  And not just for this programme, but for all of them.  If I hadn't been teaching that class, I may not have found this gap at all or for many months.  We try to really work on providing added value beyond the class content, but all of this effort is wasted if people don’t know about it.  I think I have systems in place to make sure the communication is working smoothly, but sometimes it isn’t and I have to fix it.  The scary part is I only ever fix the gaps I know about and what happens to all the gaps I don’t know about?  There is a cost to being on the tools but also some clear benefits. So take a look at your work and see where you can keep a hand it without the work devouring you.      

Large organisations have many willing hands.  Often, the quality of the people employed is very high, and the firm has the deep pockets sufficient to attract and retain them. Leading smaller firms is more challenging. There is a large degree of multi-tasking going on, as the workload gets spread across the troops.  Everyone is busy, busy, busy and that especially applies to the boss.  Time is in short supply, so corners are cut, elements are skipped and the quality of work produced can be an issue. The temptation is for the boss to concentrate on their meetings with their direct reports, as individual one-on-one get togethers.  The time left over for regular meetings of the leadership team can be compromised quite easily.  It is never blatant.  The direct reports don’t rise up and storm the barricades chanting “death to more meetings”.  Instead, the scheduling process becomes the enemy of progress, as trying to get a number of busy people together to coordinate availability can be the death knell of the meeting.  The boss is usually the one with the worst schedule openings. You might have tried to circumvent the issue by not over scheduling the number or frequency of the meetings.  Maybe they are held fortnightly, in the belief that getting everyone together will be easier. Often, though, this proves to be a false hope and something always comes up to ensure not everyone can make it.  When you have a small leadership team, the point of the meeting becomes compromised. The purpose of the leadership team meeting all together is to make sure information is being shared and that alignment of purpose and execution of the business is going on in an effective manner.  I belong to Tokyo Rotary Club and Rotary itself was founded to connect disparate industry representatives together, so that we wouldn’t be locked into our Guilds and become insular.  The leadership team meeting has the same objective, to get people together to talk and share what is going on in their sections with everyone else.  It is so easy to become wrapped up in what you are doing and to forget to let others know what is going on with your area of responsibility. The boss has to drive this process, and this is where we meet the first big hurdle.  The boss is always the busiest person and the one who most often cancels the meeting because their schedule changes so frequently.  In a small company, the boss will not only be liaising with the Mothership back home, leading the team locally, talking to their direct reports one-on-one, checking on the company finances, tracking the revenue achievement and keeping a close eye on HR issues, they will also be dealing directly with clients. As we all know, that meeting with the client will take priority over a meeting of the section heads. This is why the boss is the hardest one to pin down for the meeting.  When the boss is also the scheduler and driver to hold the meeting, things drift very easily. Before you know it, the leadership team hasn’t met for weeks.  Time flies at the best of times and unless this leadership team meeting is made a priority, then there will never be a regular cadence for the get together of the section heads. It is always a good practice to look for a day and a time when things are less frantic.  I know that for many of us, that would be a very good question: “just precisely when is it not frantic around here?”.  Everything is relative, so look for a fortnightly cadence which will give the meeting enough regularity to make it relevant, without the time drifting too much.  Next pick a time of the day when it will work best.  This might even be a bento lunch together, because lunch times are usually a less scheduled time during the day for most of us.  Because of the morning rush hour phenomenon, breakfasts are a lot more complex to pull off.  Getting the kids off to school, fighting for space on the train to get to work, exhausts everyone too, so early is rarely good.  Evenings are difficult too because people want to get home and they are tired after a hard day at work, so the collective brainpower available is down. There is never an easy time to hold these meetings, but unless a strong will is enlisted, they just won’t happen.  Make them over lunch, make them every fortnight, and make them a high priority.  Will this work perfectly every month?  I severely doubt it, but at least the strike rate will improve and better coordination and team building will occur compared to the usual chaos. .  

  Teams don’t build themselves. They are delicate, fragile and unstable. They need constant care and attention from the leader. Despite the sexiness, a team of stars is not what we want either. They will always lose to a star team, a united front of uncompromising commitment to each other and to winning. Here are some things to think about when building and maintaining the team. 1.        The Role Of the Leader One of the better metaphors for leaders is the orchestra conductor.  They are uniting and harmonising a group of stars to work together.  Each person brings their specialist role, talent and commitment. The leader is the one to glue the team together.  The leader creates the environment where the team can coalesce around the tone, direction, culture, values, vision and mission. Central to achieving this cooperation is the leader’s communication and people skills. The trust won’t be created by a bumbling, disorganised, incoherent, selfish, small minded person claiming the glory for themselves and basing their leadership mantle on their received status power. 2.        Identifying Strengths One of the follies of leadership, and I speak from deep experience here, is trying to fix the gaps and weaknesses of the people in the team. We can easily find our time is tied up in resuscitation efforts for people who are struggling or underperforming. We are better to have a mix of people, with a variety of skills, talent and abilities and work across the sum of the whole, rather than trying to put band aids on their weaknesses.  By definition, 80% of the team are producing 20% of the results.  We need to get more out of the 20% producing 80% of the outputs. This is the true alchemy through informed division of labour. 3.        Clarity Around Responsibilities The worst part of being a leader is thinking people are clear on what they need to do. You have told them right? Then you find they are not doing what you expected or need.  Part of this is the fact that a single communication is never sufficient. We cannot just bark out orders and then wander off.  We need to manage the people and their work, without micro-managing and pulverising them into submission.  We need to keep abreast of progress. If things are not working, then we need to know about it early and intervene to right the ship. 4.        Encouraging Collaboration Teams are usually small affairs, even in big corporations, because people are divided into sections. In this modern high-tech era, that invariably means people are doing a lot and are super busy.  This doesn’t lend itself to having excess bandwidth to help others in the team or even more vitally, helping people in other sections. We also have the danger of the leader trying to unite their tribe by making the other section’s tribes the enemy.  This is a disaster. The true enemy are the opposition team in the rival company. We need to make them the bad guys, not our own colleagues.  That doesn’t stop ambitious leaders from trying to gain advantage internally, by using their team as a weapon for supremacy, domination and relentless ladder climbing. The leader’s job is to contribute to the entire enterprise effort and make sure the firm wins in the marketplace. 5.        Proactive Team Building The leader has to create the opportunities for the team to get together.  These could be Town Halls, brainstorming sessions, team lunches and dinners or any other excuse to get the group together.  With work from home so prevalent, the team don’t see each other every day, as they usually did before Covid.  Team projects are a good tool for getting people from different sections together who normally may not have a chance to work with each other. It introduces diversity into the creative process and creates the human bonds needed to keep everyone together.  I am such a business genius and guru.  I hired four new people in January 2020, seconds before the pandemic wrecked the training industry. One of them drew her secure salary happily every month through the devastation and simply up and quit at the end of Covid.  Ouch. She was in her late twenties when she ed the firm and spent the pandemic working for us from her room in her parent’s house in Shinjuku.  I realised later that she didn’t have any close friends inside the company and so it was easy for her to depart.  Yes we had meetups online, but it wasn’t enough and not the same as being together in-person.  This was my first pandemic, so I made a number of leader mistakes during Covid as a result. This is not a comprehensive list of items on the subject of team building, but there is plenty of food for thought to get to work on.  The leader is the driver here. We go for role clarity and keep reviewing what is working and not working.  Retaining our talent is the name of  the game for the modern leader in population declining Japan and if we make a mess of it, the penalties are potentially fatal. Team building never goes out of fashion or relevance.  The problem is we are never properly trained for this part of the role and we bumble along through trial and error. We all need to do a better job of educating ourselves in this regard. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is today.

When I first got to Tokyo in 1979, there was a very well established corporate educational system in Japan.  Unlike Universities in Australia where you studied a subject and expected to work in a closely related field, Japan was concentrating on producing generalists.  It didn’t matter what you had studied at University, because the company would educate you on what you needed to know. I also discovered that the tertiary educational system was broken, so companies couldn’t rely on Universities to educate the young. I was so surprised to realise that except for those entering professions like law, medicine, architecture, etc., and needing to national exams, most students were living their best life (at their parents’ expense). Think a four-year sojourn at Club Med and you get the flavour of spending most of your time engaging in club activities and working part-time jobs, rather than studying. The principal education tool for companies wasn’t formal training.  There were a few weeks at the start as new grads were onboarded, where you learnt about the firm, systems and the basic etiquette of business. After that, your sempai or seniors and your boss would teach you the ropes. As everyone ed the firm for life, there was a logic in the boss spending their valuable time grooming the next generation. In 1978, the first Japanese language word processor was developed, which allowed everyone to type in Japanese more easily.  There were still secretarial pools in those days, so the boss didn’t have to get their hands dirty playing around with this tech. In November 1995 Windows 95 was launched in Japan, which made it easy for anyone to access the internet.  With the take up of email, the boss was now required to write their own emails and gradually the secretarial pool went the way of the Dodo. The upshot is that this change meant the boss and the sempai were now much busier than before, doing their own emails and their own typing. The amount of time available to train the next generation on the job went down and has been down ever since. There was no supplementation with formal training, because the OJT system was so accepted as all that was needed.  These changes are glacial, so they didn’t attract much attention on the way through, but things did change. Where are we today?  During Covid, we found a not very amusing contradiction with Japanese corporate training.  Those domestic Japanese companies who had already come to the realisation that corporate training was required just stopped in their tracks.  They cancelled set classes because of Covid and were worried about the safety aspects of people gathering together.  Dale Carnegie in the US had started online training delivery in 2010, so fortunately, we had specialized manuals for online delivery and certification systems in place for trainers and producers when Covid hit.  We could teach them global best practice techniques accumulated over the previous decade. We ran our first online class in March 2020, free for our clients and covering Stress Management.  We quickly found that WebEx at that time had a 100 person limit and we crashed the system.  We regrouped and completed the training session. We proved to ourselves that using the Dale Carnegie approach of highly interactive training also in the online training environment was a viable option. Unfortunately, many domestic Japanese companies didn’t think so and refused the online option, believing that it couldn’t provide sufficient delivery quality compared to face-to-face. That actually wasn’t true, but nobody in Japan ever gets fired for foregoing opportunities to embrace change and do something new. They didn’t want to return to the classroom, and they didn’t want to do it online, so with this Catch 22, they did nothing. Some of these companies are slowly coming back to face-to-face training.  What Covid revealed though, was that the Middle Manager level of capability wasn’t well developed, having relied only on OJT and they needed to fix this problem.  We have been doing a lot of leadership training as a result.  The gaps we notice are that the managers are totally undereducated on what is required to be a leader. They have spent time on the job so they can run the machine.  They can see that it runs on time, to cost and at the required quality, but these managerial attributes do not make them a leader. The difference between a manager and a leader is that the leader does all of those things a manager does, plus sets the direction for the team, builds the culture and develops the people. The upshot is that those companies who invest in their people and give their Middle Managers leadership training will do better in the zero sum game for retaining staff. People leave bosses, not companies. With the declining population and permanent shortage of people, replacing staff can be extremely difficult and potentially fatal to companies.  I believe the continued reliance on the broken OJT system for training leaders is a nonsense and a suicidal choice.  Get your people trained if you want to survive this war for talent. Young people are much more mobile and one in three are departing their companies after three or four years and ing the competitors. This is very expensive after they have been trained and they are hard to replace. With properly educated Middle Managers, the retention rates will be much higher and will yield a competitive advantage against rivals who have only been trained through OJT. This is no joke and the consequences of getting the equation wrong are deadly serious. OJT is dead. Companies should stop relying on it and should instead get professional leadership training for their Middle Managers before it is too late.    

The blow torch has never been applied more ferociously to how leaders lead than what we see today.  Once upon a time, there were resumes pilling up to consider who we would hire.  We had the whip hand, and the applicants felt the lash.  Now the roles have been reversed and the applicants are interviewing us, rather than the other way around.  I have done my weekly podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews now for over five years, talking to CEOs here about one topic – leading in Japan.  It was never intended for this when I started five years ago, but many of the leaders tell me it is having a positive impact on getting people they want to hire to the company, in preference to another firm.  The reason is that my style of interviewing allows the leader to be authentic and talk in their natural voice.  There is no corporate propaganda being issued or false flags being flown. This is what employees want from their companies and, in particular, from their supervisors.  It is easy to proclaim your superior values when times are good.  When times get tough, that is when you discover if what you have been told by your boss is real or fake.  I had this experience, and it was very disappointing.  I heard all about the importance of our customer, but when the economy went off the rails, the customer was instantly propelled overboard and everything was about the sole interests of the firm.  Short-termism took over, and many bridges were burnt to the ground.  Promises were retracted and customer collateral damage was waved away as “unfortunate”.  Any faith I had in the senior leadership and their commitment to the stated values of the firm evaporated. As the boss, we have to be very careful about the congruency between what we say and what we do.  If we talk about wellness, but we expect people to drive themselves to ill health, then we are revealed for who we were really are.  Our interests are the real priority. Over the years, when looking through people’s resumes, I would ask about some blank spaces. They would tell me they had to quit the company because the horrendous overtime had made them ill. As an Aussie, I always thought to myself “how ridiculous”, but that was the norm in Japan back in those dark days. If we talk about work/non-work balance, but we push people to work long hours, we are hypocrites and, even worse, obviously stupid hypocrites to boot. If we talk about work ethic, but we are cruising along as the boss, while whipping the troops along, it is clear to everyone that we are applying an indulgent, different set of rules to ourselves.  We can be clever and come up with all sorts of justifications and corporate double speak, but nobody is fooled by our deceit.  Treat others how you want to be treated is the most basic level required for boss-subordinate interactions.  This is commonly called the “golden rule”. The actual true target level should be to treat subordinates how they want to be treated and is called the “platinum rule”.  Let’s go for the platinum rule, shall we? This sounds easy enough, but there is no necessary uniform idea on this and every person can have quite different expectations.  As the boss, we need to keep enquiring about what our people want.  We may have had that conversation once before, but a lot can happen in the space of a few years, and these desires are not stagnant.  Changes can include getting married, having children, taking care of aged parents, buying a home, paying for the kid’s education, etc.  The list of changes are long and we need to appreciate that our subordinates’ needs change. Taking the view that it doesn’t matter because we pay them is an antiquated idea stuck back in the day when resumes were numerous and boss choices were many.  Money is important, of course, but as life speeds up time becomes in short supply.  Flexibility can create the time our people need and we can help them achieve things they need.  If we are dogmatic about the rules and procedures, that may make us feel powerful, but it will be counterproductive inside the culture.  Our research has clearly shown that the key to getting teams engaged is that they feel the boss cares about them.  The way they know that is actually the case is through the way the boss communicates and the boss’s capacity to be flexible and ive of the needs of the staff. As the boss, you can’t fake this stuff.  You are either ive or you are not.  The basic posture has to be an inside out job, where the natural instinct is there to our staff in every way we can. Prancing around as if you are ive and using sweet words and pleasant smiles isn’t going to cut it if just fluff.  When the decisions get attached to real money, this is when we all see if what the leader says and does is the same thing or not.  People are not stupid.  They can tell what is smoke and mirrors and what they can trust and rely upon, so let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence.  

We recently completed an in-house Leadership Training for Managers programme for a local Japanese firm. The President founded the firm as a spin-out from a well-established international ing company many years ago and has successfully grown the organisation. He is now considering succession planning and aims to develop his senior leadership team. He had an internal survey conducted on the training programme, which he then shared with the trainer who delivered the course and myself. Survey results on training can sometimes be challenging, and this case was no different. Some participants felt the training was too long, while others thought it was too short. Some found the content very challenging, and others not challenging enough. As is often the case, the majority were neutral, while we mainly received strong from the outliers. However, there were some particularly intriguing comments. A few participants mentioned that they found the training exhausting, claiming it impacted their ability to perform their work after the sessions. The core training involved weekly 3.5-hour sessions over seven weeks. Concentrating on new content, which differs from daily tasks, can certainly be demanding. Several participants also noted that the programme contained a lot of content, which is true – it is a course with substantial material. However, I wouldn’t describe any of the content as particularly complex. Dale Carnegie training is highly practical and addresses real-world needs rather than being theoretical. New concepts require the brain to engage, which some participants found challenging. We also employ the Socratic method, encouraging self-discovery through questioning. This approach differs from the standard Japanese educational method, which still leans on Confucian principles of memorisation and rote learning. Our approach often surprises new participants, who arrive prepared to take notes on whatever the instructor says. Instead, we plant seeds of information, prompting participants to reflect on their beliefs, experiences, and ideas. When they share their thoughts, we ask them to explain their reasoning. This is much more demanding than simply reproducing what the teacher says, so it’s no surprise it can be tiring. Some participants also mentioned fatigue from needing to speak up during the sessions. We incorporate extensive group discussions, often in small groups where there is nowhere to hide; everyone has to actively share their ideas and experiences. They can’t be ive, sitting silently – they need to think on their feet and articulate their ideas. This can be mentally taxing, as there is pressure to communicate clearly without appearing unprepared. Many also discover they are not naturally succinct, logical, or well-organised communicators, which can add a level of stress. They may observe peers expressing themselves well and feel a gap in their own skills, creating additional pressure. They also realise they haven’t engaged their minds this way in some time, so it can feel like dusting off mental cobwebs. When I go to the gym, I push my muscles to lift heavier weights and increase repetitions. This is tiring and sometimes even painful. Challenging the brain is similar – it can be tough if you’re not doing it regularly. Many leaders in this team have been performing routine tasks that they have already mastered, so they haven’t faced much challenge in their work so far. Their focus has been on managing their teams, and the broader aspects of leadership have been outside their experience. This training has been an eye-opener, revealing what leadership should entail. The idea that training should not be mentally taxing is interesting. Growth requires stepping out of your Comfort Zone and engaging with challenging content and new methodologies. This is how we grow. Expecting to progress without stepping beyond what’s familiar is a quaint notion. If we continue to do what we have always done, in the same way we have always done it, we will achieve the same results we have always achieved. Stepping up means trying new things or taking on different tasks – both of which are challenging and tiring. And that’s exactly how it should be.    

Are you sitting too much and for too long at your desk every day?  Are you eating too much every meal because your mother told you when you were a kid to finish everything on your plate.  Are you hitting the booze after work with your mates or at home to rid yourself of your stress?  Are your kidneys and liver in good shape? Are you carrying around too much meat and making your muscles and organs work much harder than they should? Is your blood pressure elevated and too high every day?   Are you constantly thinking about all of your troubles at work?  Are you having trouble getting good quality consistent sleep?  Are you promising yourself to get to the gym, but don’t make it as often as you need to in order to make any progress? Well, I have pretty much described myself here.  Knowing about it and doing something to fix it are two universes separated by infinite space.  Intellectually I know what I should do, but practically I struggle with a lifetime of negative habits which all need work.  I do a lot of pontificating in my content about what to do and how to do it, so I can imagine I can come across as Mr. Goody Two Shoes pseudo perfect. This time I will use myself and my failings as the mirror for you to think about yourself and what you are doing if you share these same attributes.  Ironically, as I sit here writing this, I have been sitting at my home desk writing my weekly blogs for the last three hours and haven’t once stood up.  I know just sitting is bad, but I get into a concentration zone and I forget to stand up. Right, I am going to use a timer with an alarm and set it so that I stop what I am doing and stand up and walk around at set intervals, a bit like the pomodoro method of twenty-five minutes work, five-minute break and then after four pomodoros take fifteen minute break. Eating less is a choice.  Leaving parts of the meal unconsumed is a choice. Another irony.  I am sitting here in Tokyo writing this blog and we have the “hara hachibu” tradition here in Japan of only eating until 80% full. This idea originally came from Okinawa and they are one of the longest lived peoples in the world. I have to break that habit driven deep into my mind by my Mum and not feel compelled to eat everything on the plate.  I had lunch the other day with my mate Tak and I noted he left most of his chicken uneaten, which was quite a feat, as the main meal was chicken.  Growing up in Japan, maybe he didn’t have to break free of the gravitational pull of “finish everything on your plate”. Roughly once a week, over a meal with my wife, I like to drink Australian wine at home on Fridays after my hard toil at the Dale Carnegie Siberian Salt Mines.  I used to finish a bottle between us, but actually I was drinking most of it.  Today, I am down to a single glass to give my blood pressure, kidneys and liver a rest.  This is extremely hard because I want to keep drinking.  It is a weekly battle with myself to stop at one glass. At one point back in the 1990s, when I was working in Nagoya, after many months of wining and dining and being wined and dined, my weight blew up to 90kilos.  I didn’t notice it, because it was gradual.  After one event where we were having a meal sitting on tatami, some kind soul sent me a photo from the evening.  It was taken from the side, so I got a full appraisal of the profile of my massive girth.  I was so shocked.   Today, my weight floats around 82-83 kilos at the moment and I need to get it floating around 80—81, and those last couple of kilos seem so hard to evaporate.  For reference purposes, when I was competing in karate competitions, I was fighting in the 75-80 kilo weight division, so getting close to my fighting weight is a good goal for me to have. Switching off from work is a pain.  I think about my problems at work all day and night, and that black monster is always sitting there in the darkened corner of my mind.  Lately, I am also adding to my woes by not getting good quality sleep.  I am not sure why that is, but I think part of it is not enough exercise.  I need to be more tired at night so that I drift off to sleep quickly and smoothly.  I was walking every morning, then I caught a cold with the change of the seasons, so I took a break.  Then I tripped on the stairs at home, smashed my toe into the stair rise and it is a miracle I didn’t fracture it, but boy has it been sore.  Consequently, no walking in the morning. I need to get back to that routine of awakening at 5.50am, get out the door, walk for an hour while listening to podcasts and then get off to work.  Getting to the gym regularly is a difficulty because I am often at networking events at night, but I know I can do better.  What about going to the gym on the weekends?  I can do better. One item you may note that is prominent by its absence is smoking and the quitting thereof.  Both my parents died of lung cancer and my father at age 51, so I have never smoked.  If you are a smoker, then I haven’t got much to say from any personal experience.  I have read that as soon as you quit, the body starts to rebuild and you can repair the damage you have been doing to your lungs and broader health.  Apparently, after a year since you quit, your risk of heart disease is halved and after five years, your chances of a stroke and cervical cancer are the same as a nonsmoker.  Worthwhile thinking about I would say. Everything I have talked about today is within my grasp, if I choose to grasp it.   I don’t need a Life Coach, a Personal Trainer, Ozempic or anything else but will, determination, consistency and making some decisions and sticking to them. How about you?  

We know that AI has gone from the domain of geeky people in white lab coats to the mainstream of business in a nanosecond. Such speed is difficult to keep up with and the roll out of new options continues unabated. As the leader how do we surf this tech wave and prepare our people for this AI enabled future/  Making data backed decisions is always preferred in leadership and AI has the power to crunch large amounts of data and provide answers very quickly.  As long as it isn’t lying to us with so-called hallucinations about the results, then it is a big help.  Direction on using AI in our businesses is not going to bubble up from down below and we leaders need to get to work to harness this beast. 1.        Audit We can start with an audit of where we think AI can bring savings in of time, money, effort and quality.  Doing this process with the team is required because we want them to own the process and the results.  There may be fears that certain jobs will disappear because of AI and we need to face that reality head on.  It doesn't necessarily mean the person leaves the firm because finding staff in Japan is at a , but it may mean their job content changes.  There will be flow on effects about required retraining and thought has to be put into the feasibility of doing that with the resources we have available.   2.        Strategy & Innovation Having completed the audit we now have some insight into the opportunities and difficulties working with AI will bring, rather than relying on our imaginings of the future.  Where is the intersection of AI capabilities and the goals we have set for the firm?  The goals are usually revenue related and these won’t change much, but the way we deliver the results could.   People will have to work with AI, there is no escaping that fact, so what is the strategy to determine how this happens?  We don’t want to leave everyone to their own devices to wander off and somehow work it out by themselves.  Which AI platforms do we need, how much should we budget for them and who will take care of what, are leading questions we need to find answers for?   For some staff, AI may never be an immediate part of their world at this point, although that may also change.  We need to do an analysis of who needs it the most and who needs it first.  Which jobs will benefit the most from applying AI’s capabilities to the work?  That simple question may be difficult to answer because we have to explore the possibilities AI introduces. We may need to appoint champions to drive the usage of AI inside the company, so that we can break the task up into smaller pieces. The scale of AI can be overwhelming.  How can we find ways of having AI help us with becoming more innovative or at least set out some frameworks for us to explore by ourselves?   3.        Staff Training A lot of the training for the use of AI will be internal with people dedicating time to play with it.  If we think of AI as external to our work, then we won’t nominate the time for people to experiment and learn on the job.  The explosion of AI means that no one can keep up with the latest developments as functionalities are superseded by new alternatives.   There is also the issue of the broad range of platform variations and upgrades which are emerging every month.  How can we navigate this breadth and speed?  We can’t but we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed we don’t start.   We should select a few platforms which seem to have the greatest application for what we do and start there, realising we may need to jump on to the back of faster racehorse, once the gun has sounded and we are off barrelling down the track.    We should block out a certain number of hours per week for our team to play with AI and see where they can apply its power to the business.  If the leader nominates 4 hours a week, for example, then that gives people permission and time from within their work day to experiment.    4.        Reporting Naturally, we want to have reports and updates on the progress and learnings these hours experimenting are yielding.  This requires some time scheduling changes for everyone and for the boss too.  These ideas are all difficult in an already busy life, but we have to grant AI the priority or it will all just be hot air from the boss and there will be no follow through.  We are all touching different parts of the machine, so getting together to share makes a lot of sense and the boss can nominate a couple hours in a month to make sure that happens.   5.        Data We will unearth and collect a host of data, but what do we do with it?  This seeking data for data’s sake is tremendous fun for some, but it all has to connect back to driving the firm forward.   There will be financial data we can use to try and pick up trends or patterns which will aid us in trying to set budgets and allocations for spending.  There will be customer data which can reveal aspects of our service we need to work on or areas where we need greater investment.  There will be market and buyer data we can get access to which may not have been available before, which can better inform the strategies we develop and the decisions we take. Can we find data which will help us maximise our efficiencies and drive the effectiveness of the business?   6.        Clients Can we get deeper insights into our client’s situation?  Obviously clients don’t share everything with us and often we are working blind to the realities they are facing.  How can AI help us to better understand the buyer’s sector of the industry, what is happening with their competitors, government regulations, currency fluctuations, etc.   AI is here to stay and we are all riding the wave whether we like it or not.  Have we decided yet to deal with it intelligently or are we going to keep doing things in a sporadic fashion?  It is time for the leader to lead the firm’s AI revolution.

Recently, I was teaching a class of APAC executives on how to handle pushback to their ideas. Some participants were senior legal counsels, who frequently had to say "no" to their salespeople. As a salesperson myself, being told "no" is something that comes with the territory and is not intimidating at all. In fact, we often hear "no" most of the time. We're tough and have learned to persist until we achieve a "yes." These executives spoke about how challenging it was to get the other side to accept their advice or point of view, which made a lot of sense. Think back to your school days—was there ever a course, or even a fragment of one, that taught you how to argue with someone to get them to agree with you? Academic debating is different; it's an arbitrated intellectual exercise. But the dynamics within a company are entirely different, and most of us aren't trained for these real-world, practical needs, even through corporate education. Here are some key steps to successfully navigate resistance and disagreement, especially when you're battling over ideas, policies, direction, or decisions. 1. Truly Listen to the Other Side We often think we are listening, but when we hear the word "no," it looms large in our minds. We become preoccupied with crafting our counterargument and, as a result, stop fully listening to what’s being said. People often make a statement we dislike and then provide their reasoning. If we've already stopped listening after the part we didn’t like, we can’t fully appreciate their logic. 2. Pause Before Responding Before blurting out our disagreement, we need to pause and think. There are a few ways to do this. We can remain silent and think before speaking, although this can be tricky, as silence may prompt the other party to press harder and add more information. Another method is to use a "cushion"—a neutral, non-committal statement that neither agrees nor disagrees. This buys us valuable thinking time. Even a brief pause of five or six seconds can significantly improve the quality of what we say. Without that pause, we risk saying something we regret because we haven't had enough time to formulate a proper response. 3. Reflect Briefly Use this pause to have a brief internal conversation about the topic. Ask yourself: What do I believe? And why do I believe it? Usually, our opinions are formed based on some personal experience, or something we’ve read, heard, or seen. Recalling the origin of our belief helps us structure our response. 4. Share Your Story Once you've reflected, tell your story. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should clearly outline what happened, where, when, and who was involved. This method reminds me of Japanese grammar, where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, determining whether the action is positive, negative, past, present, or future. You can’t interrupt someone in Japanese until they finish their sentence because you don’t know where they’re going with it. In English, listeners often anticipate the conclusion and jump in or finish the sentence for the speaker. You can't do that in Japanese. By telling your story, you provide background and context. While the listener can disagree with your conclusions, they can’t argue with your background or experience. Given the same context, they might reach the same conclusion. If you tell your story well, they might even reach your conclusion before you do. By holding off on the "punch line" until the very end, you prevent interruptions and ensure they hear you out. Even if they still disagree, they’ll have a clear understanding of why you hold your views. By following these four steps, you can persuade others to consider your ideas and ensure you're heard and understood. In the worst-case scenario, even if they still disagree, at least they will fully understand your reasoning. This allows for a civil discussion without heightened emotions, preserving relationships and enabling you to agree to disagree.  

Pulling rank on people is clearly the fastest and easiest way to get people to fly straight and do what we want. It is also a very dangerous choice in Japan in an era when the demand for people is so strong and the supply so limited. Mobility today means people have choices. If you are not interested in what they have to say or their ideas, they will jump ship to somewhere they think they will be better appreciated. The problem is their ideas are rarely much chop.  They don’t have the experience, sufficient information, enough understanding of the context or the weight of responsibility on their shoulders if it doesn’t work. In a busy boss life, the simplest thing is to tell them “that won’t work” and just keep moving forward because there is so much to do. Here are some human relations principles we can  employ to do a better job in our communication with our people. 1.        The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.  This sounds a bit counterintuitive.  Does it mean I just fold and let them have their way? Not at all.  However we know that people rarely yield once they get into an argument and graciously accept our viewpoint.  Rather they have their ego wrapped up in what they are saying and they won’t let go, so they just keep arguing with us.  Our best response is to not respond in kind and try a different track. 2.        Show respect for the other person’s opinion – never say you are wrong.  This is a red flag to a bull.  One of my trigger words is to be told “no” and another is “you are wrong”, which is basically the same answer. We have to learn to disagree in a way which maintains the relationship.  Telling people they are wrong isn’t going to help with that aim. Whenever the urge seizes you to tell others they are wrong resist the temptation. 3.        If you are wrong, it it quickly and emphatically.  Leaders have ego, position power, pride and status and itting we are not perfect is not easy for us. If we it it won’t we be eroding our power?  That fear is fair enough, but what we will find is that by giving up the God mantle and itting we are human makes it easier for our team to emphasise with what we are trying to do.  The secret is all in the communication of how we it we are wrong. 4.        Begin in a friendly way.  This sounds easy except when we are busy, harassed, pressured and under the gun we forget this part.  We bring our businesslike self to the conversation rather than stepping back and thinking about first impressions for this conversation. 5.        Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.  Manipulation was the first thing which sprang into my mind when I heard this Principle.  That obviously is a losing proposition.  What is meant here is that our communication skill is operating at a very high level.  We package up the idea and do it in such a way that the other person finds themselves in agreement.  This is a high level of communication skill and takes a lot of practice, but it works well when done correctly. 6.        Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.  Leaders love to talk.  They love to hog the limelight and dominate the conversation because they are such amazing individuals. Rather by giving the floor to others they in turn will feel appreciated and valued.  We already know what we know, so this also invites the opportunity for us to learn things we actually don’t know and broaden our perspectives. 7.        Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers.  Sounds like more manipulation, but it isn’t.  We that Socrates was famous for getting people to go deeper in their thinking by asking a series of questions which drove the quality of their understanding.  This is the same idea.  We communicate in such a way that the other person self-discovers the same thinking that we came up with and now we are in perfect agreement. As the leader we can always do better and usually, it is our poor communication ability which leads us into trouble. By changing our approach and how we express ourselves we will have much more impact on getting others to follow us.  Brute force is not going to work in Japan anymore, so we need better tools. 

Have you ever had the experience of leaving a job and seeing your successor screw it up?  We spend so many hours at work and we are trying hard to lift the bar through our leadership.  However, if we do well, we get promoted or we another company seeking a bigger job.  It is very disheartening to leave and see the place go backwards under your replacement.  You wonder what all those weekends spent working and long hours were al about.  We expect that we add to the cause and the firm progresses and moves forward, improving over time.  We expect those who come after us to be doing the same thing. So it was very confronting to read some statistics recently about how short the term at the top is these days and thinking about what does that mean for the leader’s legacy?  According to data analysis firm Equilar, the median term for a CEO in the 500 largest US companies, is now down to 4.7 years, having dropped twenty percent over the last ten years.  Russell Reynolds says globally, for CFOs, the tenure is down to a five year low of 5.7 years. If you are sent from Headquarters to Japan to run the local operation you don’t have much time.  If you realise this and decide to go gung-ho from Day One and drive change to get the results faster, then you will probably blow up the firm.  On the other hand, if you wait to understand the market, customers, the staff and the culture, then years of study will be required.  By the time you get it, it is time to pack for the next assignment or another job change. The analogy I like is leading in Japan is like swimming in warm lake.  You land here from headquarters and you are immediately placed in a warm, nice lake, but the surface is covered in a heavy fog.  You can hear voices and vaguely make out shapes.  Over time, the fog lifts a little as you understand Japan better and you can make out the shoreline and some islands.  After about three years the fog lifts and it is now time to leave for your next post. What did you get done, what legacy have you left? If we go too fast the Japanese team cannot keep up and we have new internal troubles.  This might include staff writing to the Chairman anonymously informing headquarters that you are ruining the business in Japan and destroying the firm here.  It might mean key staff conclude you are an idiot and they vote with their feet and the opposition. In today’s society in Japan, job mobility has changed an enormous amount and shifting firms doesn’t have the same stigma it once had which used to ensure lifetime employment with the one company.  It might mean you decide to become “efficient” with customer relationships and after overcoming stubborn staff resistance, you force you will on everyone only to see your buyers depart and not come back. On the other hand, headquarters are ing you because they are not seeing the spike in revenue numbers they sent you out there for.  The staff engagement survey results are a disaster. Your bosses are not happy with your performance as a leader. You try to explain the subtleties and nuances of the Japanese market and how business is done here, but it all falls on deaf ears.  They are fully preoccupied with themselves and nobody cares about your problems. There are no simple answers unfortunately.  Listening is a good idea at the initial six month stage, especially listening to customers.  Finding allies within the staff of firm who can get behind your changes is going to be vital.  You can pontificate and shoot out orders, to only find those below are sabotaging your efforts and are not doing anything to carry out your commands. This country has a lot of informal lobbying going on underground and the big meetings are there to rubber stamp what has already been negotiated prior with the relevant parties. That means we have to persuade, rather than order, to coalesce rather the remonstrate.  Sadly, none of this is fast and your bosses want fast. We are fighting two fires on two fronts at the same time. We are pushing headquarters to get behind what we are trying to do and we are persuading the team to do the same thing, but at a faster pace than what they are used to.  Staff are terrific at telling us what won’t work and why, if they are involved.  They are less help in coming up with creative solutions to overcome problems.  Often, we are the one to think differently and be prepared to try something new.  Bite sized experimentation suits Japan, given the general fear of failure and risk aversion. Change takes time in Japan, lots of time and maybe it just isn’t possible in one rotation of your term here and you have to rely on your successor to pick up the gauntlet and keep pushing the strategy through the changes.  If you don’t get headquarters to sign on for it and therefore get them to engage your successor to keep going, then there will be lots of effort exuded by you and none of your legacy to show for it in Japan.  You leave the county feeling unfulfilled and ashamed you didn’t make a difference.  Something you have been known for in your previous positions and one of the reason your were selected to go to Japan in the first place.  Your mouth is full of the bitter ashes of years wasted, as you head for the boarding lounge to catch your flight out of Japan. Or you approach it differently and get a better outcome.  Trust me,  it won’t happen by itself, so you have to box smart while you are here.    

You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed.  Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients.  Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk.  A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level.  Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise.  Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”.  At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains.  They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality.  There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand. When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice.  When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available.  The young lady checking me in, tells me she doesn’t know.    I ask her for the name of the General Manager.  This is where it gets very interesting.  Her response - stone motherless silence.  Not one word in reply.  Nothing!   So I asked again.  More total silence.  I elevated the volume of my request to try and illicit a response.  More pure silence.  This low level of client service has now morphed across to the ridiculous zone. Finally I get a whispered “Andrew Zou”.   So what am I thinking now?  Wow, this Andrew Zou character is a lousy General Manager, because his staff are so poorly trained.  There is no room ready for me and no indication of when it will be ready, so in that great Aussie tradition, I head for the bar and wait.   Any number of things can go wrong with the delivery of a product or service.  We all understand that.  The problems arise when our client facing team are not properly trained in how to deal with these issues.  Hotels have guest complaints all the time, so they should be absolute gold medal winning, total geniuses at dealing with them.  This would have to be a key area of training in that industry.  The poor training is a direct result of poor leadership.  If the leaders are working well, then the staff service levels will be working well.    The Westin brand is global and I have stayed in a number of their properties in Asia.  The Taipei property was killing their global brand and that is an expensive thing in the world of cut-throat competition amongst leading Hotels.  From this experience, I realized that I need to be very vigilant about the service levels in my own company.  Are we fully geared up for trouble, should it arise?  How do we protect the brand across 220 locations worldwide?  Can people get to me easily if there is a problem?  Are we doing enough training in client complaint handling?  The Westin Taipei leadership did a poor job.  We should go back a take a long hard look at our own operations.  We may be incorrectly assuming things are working, when they may not be functioning properly.  We have to protect the brand at every touch point with the clients.  That is the job of the leadership team, starting with the boss.

Is change good or bad?  When I was promoted or received a big bonus, I liked the change from my previous situation.  When the big boss changed at the very top, the person who hired me got fired the negative ramifications ultimately cascaded down the line. Eventually I had to look for another job and I didn’t like that change much. Often organisations go through major internal changes and the middle level leaders are expected to rally the troops behind the change.  How do you do that if you don’t agree with the change or don’t like the change yourself?  If you buck the system and refuse to follow the changes, then you are automatically identifying yourself as someone who has to leave the organisation and the machine will crush you. Change is such a tricky area for everyone, but it is so common in business.  Markets change, clients change, supply chains change, currency rates change – the list is long.  You would think that with all of these “normal” changes in business, we would all be excellent in adjusting to change.  However, that is not true, is it? The status quo is so attractive to most of us because it is known and safe.  We have been doing the same thing for quite a while and we are good at it. We are doing skilled work in the current formation and suddenly we are being asked to change and are being pushed out of our Comfort Zone. Japan, in particular loves continuity and no change, because all the risk has been shaken out of the system and what we are left with is the lowest risk alternative. As leaders we have to make a decision.  If we fundamentally disagree with the new approach then we should find another place to work, where we can be happy and in agreement with the direction.  The chances of us doing our best work there dramatically improve, compared to if we stay and conduct an underground personal resistance to the changes.  Ultimately, we will be outed by an ambitious rival or subordinate and probably fired. If we are not willing to move companies, then we have to be willing to go with the new direction.  Here is the issue – a half-hearted compliance isn’t going to work well.  Our team will feel the lack of commitment and enthusiasm to the cause. They in turn, will not rally around us as the leader and charge into the fire together.  How can we make this change work within our small cog in the machine?  The big bosses set the direction back at headquarters, but they can never get their hands dirty with the daily minutiae at our section level.  That application piece is within our control.  We may be buffeted by the winds of macro change, but the micro where we deliver the change is within our grasp. We have almost total control over how we do it. What we are feeling about the changes is no doubt being felt by the team as well.  Turning up one Monday morning as some mealy mouthed, apparatchik mouthpiece of the machine isn’t going to go down well.  Cynicism is already rampart in modern society and this will push some people over the edge, as we try to order them about what they need to do.  All we can expect is resistance if we take this road. How can we approach this to get everyone behind us and the changes? Rather than being definitive about how to make the needed changes, we need to have the “change” discussion with the team.  In Stage One we need people to be able to air their concerns and fears and be taken seriously.  Stage Two is where we move on to how we as a team can implement the change in our world.  Getting from Stage One to Stage Two is no easy feat, because many will remain unconvinced and unmoved. They will want to keep going with the old way of doing things. For the “never changers”, we need to have private one-on-one discussions and have them make a decision about stay or go.  If it is “stay”, then they need to be part of the team decision-making process and contribute to practical solutions to make this work in a way we can all live with the changes.  Just telling them to “suck it up and get back to work” is always a bad idea. It communicates you are not important. We are saying, “I have three stripes on my sleeve and so you have to do what I say, because I am pulling rank on you”. They may in fact stay, but they will the underground guerrilla movement against the changes. We will wind up fighting each other internally when we need to form a united front against our competitors in the market. We need converts not resisters. So as the leader we need to get the discussion out in the open and get team ownership of the way forward.  Maybe we all have to hold our noses against the stench of the changes, but we will hold them together and find a way through.

This Japanese expression “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会), linked to Zen, focuses on transience and can be translated as “one time, one meeting” or “treasure an unrepeatable moment”.  It is often closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, which is certainly never a hurried affair and the devil is definitely in the details of how the ceremony is conducted.  Contrast that with our modern leader life in business.  We are constantly in motion, always time poor and harassed for 24 hours a day by an avalanche of emails.  We migrate from one meeting room to another, confronting an endless assortment of meeting details. We have many agendas in our minds when we meet people and our shrinking concentration spans make a lot of what we do a blur, bereft of reflection. This is a poor contextual background for dealing with people. Being so time challenged, we are constantly cutting corners and shaving off minutes to try and get it all done.  Being “efficient” with people is a bad idea for leaders, but often once we are on a roll, that efficiency bug takes us over.  The Ichi-Go, Ichi-E idea is that we treat each moment of interaction as special rather than just serial. If our team felt that we were treating them individually as “special”, their engagement levels would be at very high levels, in what is increasingly becoming a tech driven, impersonal world.  But often we are galloping too fast on horseback to smell the flowers, as we fly by.  If we break each staff interaction down to a single defining unit, we will change the pace we interact with people from busy and tormented, to calm and caring. I a terrific example of Ichi-Go, Ichi-E by Ian Mackie, my old boss at Jones Lang Wootten In Brisbane.  It was after 6.00pm one evening and I was sitting in his office having a discussion about a deal, when one of the secretaries was walking past on her way home and she popped her head in the door to say something to him.  In those days Directors were like Gods compared to humble secretaries in that hierarchy.  Yet Ian stopped what he was doing and he gave her his complete and entire attention for that one moment.  He was showing his respect for her as a person, and it was a powerful experience for me to see how he handled that encounter. Often, as the boss, we don’t show enough respect because we are rushing, preoccupied with what we need to get done and our people can become cogs in the fly wheels of our business.  Like Ian, we need to slow it down to a stop.  Focus on the person to the exclusion of everything else, stop our brain for racing ahead and give that person our full attention.  It sounds easy to say, but actually doing it is very difficult. We are usually caught up in the moment of what we want and what is important to us. We are perpetually rearranging things to suit what we need, when we need it. I am the first one to raise his hand as guilty of trying to do too much, in too short a time and just constantly cramming stuff into my day, such that my interactions are very “businesslike”. That is not a great idea when we are dealing with people.  Ichi-Go, Ichi-E as a concept, reminds me to stop doing that and instead treat every staff interaction like a treasure.  Once I switch my mindset to that “treasure” construct, then everything changes, especially around my time allocation.  Just mentally slowing down while I am speaking to my team member, allows me to be more considerate, less selfish and self-centered.  Instead of being “me focused”, I can switch to being “them focused”.  I can ask about things that are important to them, rather than making sure that brief conversation is all about what is important to me at that moment. I have learnt to stand my keyboard up, so I can’t use it, when one of my team comes to me to talk and this helps me to focus my eye on  them.  I was reminded of how important this is when I visited a doctor here recently.  The head of the clinic was sitting slumped in front of his screen and typing when I entered his office, he didn’t greet me, didn’t even look up at me and kept his face toward his computer keyboard and screen.  Frankly, it was unbelievable, especially in this modern age. It made me feel unimportant and irrelevant.  This is how we make our team feel when we don’t stop what we are doing and don’t focus on that one moment with them.  So, from now on, Ichi-Go, Ichi-E and practice treasuring every interaction with the team and build their engagement and commitment one meeting at a time, one person at a time.  Do this instead of rushing through life in an often meaningless and unfulfilling scramble.  People do make the difference and how we treat them is what stands us apart as the leader and how successful we are in that role.  

Recently, my social media has been full of short videos of various politicians and ers giving talks at the Democratic National Convention.  It always begs the question for me about what are we doing as leaders in business?  We have the same goals.  We want our message to be heard and to be convincing.  The difference is, I am sure, all of these speakers have been well coached and have been practicing hard for their moment in the spotlight, given a global audience of massive proportions.  In business, we have our own team at our Town Hall or perhaps an audience at a business conference or maybe a small Chamber of Commerce gathering.  Actually, it doesn’t matter about the venue, because skill is skill, image is image and credibility is credibility. I was reminded of this when one of my son’s friends complained about the organisation’s leader, when he has just ed the firm after graduating from varsity.  Being at the very bottom of the pile, young people are there to stay quiet and listen to their elders and betters.  The issue though is, they are not stupid. In this case, the top person was a poor speaker and so the new entrants first thought is, “have I made a mistake?”.  They worry that this company isn’t as good as they imagined it was.  If the top dog, the “face” of the organisation is a dud, then maybe the whole artifice is a problem too. As business leaders, it would be rare that there is a lot of effort put into the talk preparation beforehand.  Smart, successful, assured people are confident about winging it.  The problem is we can become excessively confident over time and neglect the basics.  Here are seven points to reflect on when giving your next business talk to ensure you do a much better and more credible job. 1.         Rehearse.  This step is always the victim of tight schedules, but the downside of neglecting it serious because our personal and professional brands suffer.  Even if it is a minimalist approach on the prep front, at least do a run through before you launch forth in front of your listeners.  they are judging you and your firm, on what they see you do. 2.        Eyes.  Make eye with your audience.  I don’t mean the usual fake eye , where the speaker dramatically scans the crowd but in fact doesn’t look at any one person.  I mean hard core, full on, six seconds of riveting eye , with as many people as possible, but delivered one by one,  maintained over the entire course of the talk.  Our listeners need to feel we are speaking directly to them and that we want their 100% attention.  Six seconds is enough to engage them without pulverising the audience into submission and coming across as being too intrusive.  3.        Face.  We make the mistake of thinking that our slides are the most powerful visual tool in our armoury.  Not true.  Our face shines through much more brilliantly and powerfully.  Our facial expressions are absolute commanders of nuance, meaning and impression.  Many business speakers remind me of Noh masks, which are frozen in carved wood with only a single countenance.  Don’t be like that.  We need to use our face to amplify the emotions – belief, sincerity,  empathy, care, humanity - behind our message. 4.        Voice.  I noticed that many speakers at the Convention were loud, loud, loud  all the way through in their speech.  They were trying to speak powerfully, to inspire, to motivate.  That is all very well but modulation is a critical piece for really being heard. It allows us to amplify certain words and phrases, such that they stand above the other words placed around them.  Dropping to a whisper, after bellowing away in your talk, is the ultra power play in messaging.  That contrast pinpoints everyone’s attention to what we say next during the whisper and that is what we want to have happen for the key points in our talk. 5.        Gestures.  They are another amplifier.  Fifteen seconds is the maximum length for holding any gesture, before it becomes stale, dull and lifeless.  Eye power combined with voice power, combined with a powerful gesture is an unbeatable combo when speaking.  I see so many CEOs speaking with a vice like grip on the podium and thereby denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures to strengthen their key points.  It is a big mistake.  When I have a podium, I purposely stand back from it, so that my hands are not tempted to touch it.  Be careful with podiums, because there seems to be a magnetic facility drawing our hands to grab it and hold on to it, so it won’t escape. 6.        Pause.  We saw many good examples at the Convention of the better speakers employing pauses. These allow us to differentiate between what we have just said and what we are about to say. We create a small break, before we say the next thing.  That small gap allows the words to be heard clearly and gives the audience enough time to digest the previous content.  Pauses also create anticipation of what we are about to say, which is a great way of drawing the audience into us and our message.  7.        Posture.  Stand up straight, don’t slouch, don’t kick one hip out and don’t look casual. A tall, straight back emanates authority and credibility.  It shows confidence and commitment to what we are saying.  These are subtle physical signals. We are all finely tuned into these signals, because that is how we have learnt to survive dangers over the centuries.  Our eyes spot some physical action in front of us, we then anticipate what comes next, as well as making a judgement about what we are seeing.  Slouching signals “unprofessional”, “casual”, “not serious”, “lazy”.  By going in the other direction and thinking to carefully control our posture, we can determine the signal the audience receives and make it a winner for us. These seven elements are not difficult or beyond mastery. By the way, the bar for public speakers in Japan is super low.  Just by mastering these simple elements, we can catapult ourselves into the top 5% of speakers.

Twelve Steps To A Win-Win Conflict Resolution Part Two We have looked at some of the steps in Part One, so let’s continue with the last six elements.  7. Deal with facts, not emotions In sports, as I have noted earlier, we say “play the ball, not the man” and in business we need to look at problems, not personalities. This sounds fair enough, but it is not easy to do. We may find we are attacking the person, their ideas and opinions rather than looking at solving the problem. Maybe we don’t like them, their manner, their attitude, their values, their style of speech, their rivalry. That situation is unlikely to change in a hurry. They won’t become our best buddy any time soon or ever. Nevertheless, we have to work with them and overcome this conflict. We need to switch over to “outcome focus” and logic. This will take the personalities component out of the equation and help us get to an agreed solution faster. We bite our tongue, swallow our bile, gird our loins and get on with it, regardless of how irritating they are. In these situations, I keep telling myself, “Greg - big picture, big picture”. 8. Be honest Politicking, game playing, one upping are all well known in business, but stay away from these pursuits. Focus on the reason everyone is working hard in the company. Remind yourself what we are we trying to achieve relative to our competitors. We need to come back to the basics of the vision, mission, and values. Dale Carnegie’s human relations Principle Number Seventeen is useful here: “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”.  Strip out the emotion and be objective about their viewpoint. We also need to see our own perspective equally in an honest way.  Why do we hold our view?  What is really driving our position? 9. Present alternatives and provide evidence Compromise is the assembly of other means of solving an issue. Things that make sense and are workable are very hard to argue against.   Concessions in non-core areas should be made to build trust and the cooperation muscle. Look at options in of the other side’s interests. When promoting your own ideas, make sure these are backed up with strong evidence, so that they are easy to agree with and hard to argue against. Opinion is terrific, but it is just an opinion.  Data can contradict opinion in a way which is more acceptable than simply arguing the toss. Storytelling is the most effective way to introduce data.  Wrap the numbers up in a story and you will be heard. 10. Be an expert communicator Communication skills are essential to finding resolution to points of difference and can be done in a way that the relationship is maintained. Really listen to the other side. We often think we are listening, but actually inside our brain, we are formulating what we will say next and so are not really taking in the other side’s points. If you find yourself jumping in, finishing their sentences, or cutting them off when they are speaking, stop doing that.  Hear them out. Hold your points instead of being in a rush.  We are rarely short of time for the discussion. Often our counterparty in the conflict feels they are not being listened to, treated fairly or taken seriously. We can do all of those things by just remaining silent and letting them talk. After they stop, feeding back that we have understood them is a good habit to develop. By letting them talk, we may find out some additional information or angle we didn’t have, which can change our perspective on the situation and lead to a resolution.  Just bullying the other person with our opinion doesn’t lead to this type of win-win outcome. 11. End on a good note Win-win means feeling like we all did well. Shake on it, agree the next action steps and milestones. Nominate who is responsible for what and how progress and success will be measured. Also decide how further disputes which may arise during the execution phase will be handled. 12. Enjoy the process Companies benefit from having a range of views and diverse experiences when it comes to solving problems. The process of resolving disputes educates us on how to see things differently and to entertain other ways of doing things. We can often build stronger relationships having gone through this type of dispute resolution because we have come to know and understand each other much better than we would have otherwise. Resolving conflicts is not easy, but most people pour their energy into winning the conflict rather than trying to find the win-win. The latter is the better option every time if you want to win in the market. Fighting amongst ourselves makes no sense, and we can do better than that. These 12 steps will get us pointed in the right direction.    

 “ that other people may be totally wrong, but they don’t think so”. This quote from Dale Carnegie sums up the problem. All those other people we have trouble with had better fly straight. All they need is a better understanding of why they are wrong and we are right. By force of will, strenuous, sustained argument and politicking, we will win the day. Or will we? Actually, getting a clear win in internal conflict situations is rarely the result. Battles may be won, but wars are lost. Energy that should be directed at the competitors is instead turned loose on our own team , to no good outcome. We need to be able to deal with internal conflicts in a way that resolves the issues in a positive way. Not so easy! Conflict is with us everywhere, every day. That is the nature of the human condition. We have different desires and thinking. Some conflicts can be very low level and minor and we continue to cruise through the day. In other cases, however, it becomes a lot more problematic. In any organisation, when the machine is fighting against itself, progress becomes suspended. Instead of concentrating on beating the other guy, we have suddenly become locked into an internal battle against ourselves. In large firms, these can be driven by powerful personalities thrusting themselves forward to get to the top. They bring their divisions with them into the fight and a lot of energy and time is wasted dropping large rocks on our own feet!  We need to see the bigger picture here and look for how we can marshal our strength, access the diversity in our ranks and maximise the creative possibilities rather than concentrating on the battling ourselves. People tend to gravitate toward extremes. They either fold and don’t stand up for what they feel is right or they try to bulldoze everyone else and make them bend to their will. If we want progress, we need a better way forward, achieved through compromise and collaboration. In Part One we are going to cover six fo the twelve Win-Win steps we can take to turn things around. 1. Have a positive attitude Our attitude is a big factor. If we shift our thinking to how this conflict situation can be converted into a learning and growth opportunity, we will have more success. Easy to say, but not so easy to do!  We have to step back from the fray and think about the bigger picture.  Our rivals are not dead, the market ignores our internecine feuds, and clients don’t care.  How can we afford to be focused inwards when there is so much happening on the outside of the organisation?  We have to become positive we can put the conflict into context and deal with it on that basis. 2.    Meet on mutual ground Find a neutral location to remove all the residue of the past from the front of your mind. Meeting rooms are rarely the best choice for a meeting when we are in conflict with someone.  There is a formality about the situation, which can hinder gaining the flexibility we need to resolve this disagreement.  Go outside to a coffee shop or meet over lunch and try to “change the air”. Find a mutually agreeable time when you won’t have interruptions. Turn the phones off and give each other the time to be understood. Don’t try to deal with complex conflicts over the phone, online or by email warfare – always, where possible, do it face to face. 3. Clearly define and agree on the issue We might be arguing at cross purposes, so let’s clarify precisely what the real issue is and concentrate on that. If it has many facets and is complex, let’s break it up into component parts. Attach priorities and start with the most pressing core issues. Misunderstandings based on language usage happen all the time.  We need to agree on the thing at stake in a way which both sides understand.  You meet people who are hard to understand.  Their way of expressing their thoughts is unclear to us and we struggle to get their point. We need to get clarity on what we both mean and what we are worried about. 4. Do your homework Think about the issue from the other side’s perspective, as well as from your own. Normally, we don’t do this because we are fully focused on ourselves, what we want and why we want it. Some points are must haves and some are nice to haves – let’s be very clear about which is which. Also, at the very start, define your BATNA or Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement – basically your walk away position. There may be no way to resolve the conflict and we have to push it up the hierarchy for resolution. This is usually not appreciated by the big bosses. They expect us to thrash it out amongst ourselves and let them concentrate on their own work. 5. Take an honest inventory of yourself You know yourself. You know your own “hot buttons” that need to be reined in. Are your feelings leading the charge or is your brain determining how this should progress?  Being told “no” is usually a powerful trigger for the adrenaline to hit the bloodstream, as we go into fight mode.  It always works with me!  I know that, so I have to control myself and calm down before I say something on the spot which I will regret at leisure. 6. Look for shared interests Conflict pulls you to the extremes and compromise meets in the middle. To get agreement, we need to emphasise where we are similar, have shared interests and objectives. Move the discussion to the future, rather than raking over the coals of the past disputes, crimes and misdemeanors.  Usually there is a small percentage of the issue which is the real sticking point.  Rather than butting heads on that difference immediately, we can isolate out the areas where we agree or where we can compromise.  This builds up a positive energy of cooperation and it is no longer an all-or-nothing conversation. We will continue with points Seven through Twelve in Part Two.

Business is more fast-paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained.  Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to , we are severely irritated. Twenty years ago, we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations! Imagine our forebears who, when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super slow snail mail ping-pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity. Not today. We want it all and we want it now baby and look out anyone who gets in our way. We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace. We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention.  1. Process Conflict. Is this what we are dealing with? Processes are required by managers to do their job and by Compliance to protect everyone. Sometimes the process can be very directive, constrained, and inflexible. When times get tough, a lot of processes get screwed down very hard. When things improve, they are still left like that even though they should be loosened off. They no longer fit the circumstances we are facing at the coal face. Let’s calculate how much process control we have in this particular case we are facing? We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner. They may not be aware this is causing problems for others down the food chain. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and to get their ownership, come up with a t action plan to fix it. 2. Role Conflicts. These easily arise in flat organisations. Turf wars can be legendary, as ambitious individuals duke it out internally for promotions, power, and control. Where are the boundaries of authority, ability, and responsibility?  Besuited corporate pirates try to board us and have to be seen off. What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue? We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead. This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is. We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. Role clarity is critical and must be clarified, or confusion can reign. This fix may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!). 3. Interpersonal Conflicts.  These are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actual actions, behaviours, words as well as the reported versions from others around us.   There may be some prior negative history there clouding our vision. We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Also, are people around me telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason?  Sycophants and corporate politicians see internal conflict as an opportunity and a ladder for themselves. They are keen to create trouble for us and a leg up for them.  There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are, but actually we don’t want to do them. However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself. This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the issues. Before you do that, though, forget about what you want for the moment and put yourself in their shoes. Reflect on how you would see the issue from their perspective. This will make it easier to have a successful one-on-one conversation. 4. Direction Conflicts.  These arise when the path forward is unclear. Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone, at the same time, about what needs to happen. Working at cross purposes is both expensive and damaging. Check that you are, in fact, clear yourself on the organisation’s current direction or vision. Bring up the discrepancy between you and the other party in respectful , in a neutral way. This is not about establishing blame (although we often like doing that!), but about getting t clarity about what is the aim and how it should be delivered together. 5. External Conflicts. These are tough because, by definition, you lack power and control. Ask yourself whether you have a dog in this fight or not? Choose your battles carefully and concentrate on what you can do to improve things, rather than wasting energy and effort whining about what you cannot control. As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control, stop! Instead, re-set your mind around how the situation can be improved. Ask yourself, “in what way can we continue to move the organisation forward?”. In the words of the self-appointed “hardest working man in show business”, Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”! We need to move our psychology to positive mode.  We should start making adjustments to cope with the degree of control we can bring to this external process or situation which is inhibiting us. Conflict is part and parcel of corporate life, but usually we are not strategic about how to deal with it.  We get locked into a stimulus-response loop, which means a constant flow of tactical solutions rather than looking for strategic solutions. We are also rarely trained on how to deal with conflict, so we are usually making it up as we go along.  Analyse the situation and decide which one of these factors is the main one at play and then start working on solutions from there.  Sometimes there may be more than one factor we have to consider, so we have to prioritise where we should start, but we must start.  Getting overwhelmed or paralysed doesn’t fix the problem.  Focus on the key problem and get to work on that. Momentum will work in your favour.