The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

The Clubhouse global audio conversation App is hot, hot, hot.  It is only available on Apple iOS so far, but the landgrab is on and massive hours are being invested in this bonseki style activity.  What is bonseki?  This is an original Japanese throw away art, where you create designs in the sand, on a tray and then toss it all out at the end.  That is your Clubhouse conversation, thrown out each day, with no distribution and no repurposing, as yet. Clubhouse might be the next great thing or it may be superseded by copycat platforms launched on Face Book, Twitter etc.  The concept though looks like it will become a permanent feature of our lives, in the same way podcasts have done.  Be careful though fellow leaders, we are now walking on the high wire with no safety net.  We have put our leader personal and professional brands at risk.   If you are asked to give a talk, you usually have time to think about it, prepare, gather visual aids and rehearse.  Despite that most leaders make a mess of the opportunity.

Recruiting and developing the perfect team is an illusion, a Fool’s Gold hot pursuit for leaders.  Even if you do manage to recruit great people, an increasingly difficult task in Japan where the population is in decline and the improvement of English skills is getting nowhere, they leave.  They start a family, get poached for more dough, get sick, need to take care of aging parents or a myriad of other reasonable reasons and you have to start again.  The reality is we are always going to be dealing with people in different stages of their career and ability build.  It is useful to know which solutions are appropriate for particular situations.   Japan loves the middle of the fence and sitting there is the most comfortable position.  In fact, in a mistake, defect free work culture like Japan that makes a lot of sense.  Building slack into your world means you never get strained to a point where you might make mistakes.  On the other hand, there is a lot of underperformance associated with being in the Comfort

Leaders are often poor listeners in the modern age.  To listen to our team members requires the allocation of precious time. Advances in technology, especially hand held devices, was trumpeted as unfurling access to more time for contemplative pursuits and work-life balance.  Is there anyone out there who feels they are now more ebullient, because of all the extra time the technology has thrown our way?  Probably not.  In fact, as the pace of life has sped up, we are more time poor than ever.    The mobile phone has become addictive and we are reaching for it almost every second of the day.  We carry it around, we keep it close and we are plugged in 24/7.  Leaders are probably the most time poor in society and so interactions with our team members becomes more and more transactional.  We want something from them in exchange for salary.  We want that report, that update, that meeting and then we rush to the next thing on our To Do list.  If we clocked how much time we spend we each day coaching our people, the

We know the name Achilles because of Brad Pitt and Hollywood or we may have read the Iliad.  He was a famous mythical Greek hero whose body was invulnerable, except for the back of his heel.  His mother plunged him into the river Styx to protect his body, but her fingertips covered the heel, leaving it vulnerable.  Research by Dr. Jack Zenger identified four common elements which comprise Achille’s heels for leaders. Blind spots are a problem for all of us.  We can’t see our foibles, issues and problems, but they are blindingly obvious to everyone else working for us.  Remember, subordinates are all expert “boss watchers”.  They examine us in the greatest detail every day, in every interaction. Let’s examine what Zenger found and see what we can learn as leaders.   Lacking Integrity Not too many leaders would be saying they lacked integrity about themselves but that may not be how they are seen by their subordinates.  The organization may be zigging but we decide to zag.  We don’t agree with the policy, so

In today’s business world, leaders need to be “authentic” leaders. We have all come across this somewhere, endorsed by self-proclaimed gurus and prophets.  I often ponder what does that actually mean?  I am sure all of those Japanese leaders screaming abuse at their staff, when they make mistakes, are being authentic.  They are authentically terrible, dictatorial, abusive leaders.  Actually this worked like a charm for a very long time in postwar Japan.  You joined a company for life and there was only one route for those who changed jobs and that was down into a netherworld of strife, insecurity and lower salary.  In the goode olde days you had to dodge the flying ashtrays thrown at you by your authentically enraged boss, endure their publicly delivered abuse and keep going. Yamaichi Securities going down in 1997, made changing jobs mid-career respectable for the first time for those who became unemployed through no fault of their own.   Can a boss be passive at the other end of the scale? No.  Bosses have

We have met them.  Thrusters, mad with power and hungry to control others.  Organisation insider politicians who spend all of their time sucking up to the powerful, while lobbying for themselves to be granted more and more status and authority.  The absolute nobody, who controls approval processes and who milks it for all it is worth.  The psychologically damaged and emotionally stunted intent on making our life hell, now that they have been promoted.  The mixture of leaders and power can be a powerful tonic and it can also be a toxic cocktail.  Let’s take a look at five power constructs for leaders.  Have you worked for any of these bosses? Which amongst these are you?   Authority power is the absolute refuge of scoundrels. They have nothing going for them individually, but they have three stripes on their sleeve and we have none, so they can control our lives.  They flaunt their position power and try to suppress everyone under them. They often hate their job and take it out on everyone they can bully.  Th

Engaging your team as a leader is a relatively new idea.  When I first started work in the early 70s, none of my bosses spent a nanosecond thinking about they could engage their staff as a leader.  What they were thinking about was catching mistakes, incompetence, error and willfull negligence, before these problems went nuclear.  That meant micro managing everyone.  “Management by walking around” meant checking up on people.  The construct was that the team were problematic and the boss needed to have forensic skills to stop problems escalating.  That was the age of the hero boss, who was the best at everything, knew more than everyone else and could do it all.  That won’t fly today because technology has made business so much more complex.   Back in 1971 Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon noted, “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention”.  This is where we bosses are today, with hand held devices which keep us permanently connected through the flood release valves of the internet.  We are time

Smirks appear quite quickly when you mention “role model” and “leaders” in the same breath.  Most peoples’ experiences with leaders as role models have been that they encompass the “what not do as a leader” variety.  Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) or teacher by negative example, as we say in Japanese.  What are some of the things we should be focused in our quest to become a real role model for our teams?   We can break the role model aspect into four major areas: Self-Aware; Accountability; Others-Focused and Strategic.  Within these four categories there are eleven sub-categories on which we are going to focus today.  Do a mental audit on yourself and see how many boxes you can check acknowledging that you are doing a good job.   Self-Aware covers a number of sub-categories: “Self-Directed”. Leaders have to give others direction, so they must be independent types who don’t have to rely on others to know what to do.  They have to be “Self-Regulated” which is a fancy pants way of saying they need strong personal disc

402: The New Leader Mindset Shift Needed We are recognised for our capabilities and potential and promoted into our first leadership role.  We have been given charge over our colleagues and now have additional responsibilities.  In many cases we don’t move into a pure “off the tools” leadership role. We are more likely to be a player/leader hybrid, because we have our own clients and also produce revenue outcomes.  One of the biggest difficulties is knowing how to balance the roles of “doer” and “urger”.  Jealousy, bruised egos, sabotage, mild insurrection can be found amongst our former colleagues as we are now their new boss.  There will be some who feel the organisation has made a massive error and they should have been the one promoted. Their enthusiasm for striving for the greater good has become diminished and results begin to suffer.  The more Machiavellian may be thinking how they can unseat the new boss, by lowering outcomes enough, so that it damages the new boss’s credibility, without getting thems

The exodus from the office started a year ago, when we decided the safest thing was for everyone to work from home.  We had moved to an office free seating arrangement a few years ago, so we all had mobile phones and laptops and in that sense, we were able to relocate at a moment’s notice.  Did we still expect to be working for home for the next two years?  No, but that is the reality.  Now that everyone has tasted the freedom of avoiding rush hour and the fact that technology allows work from anywhere, life will never go back to what it was.  The first thing we realised was that the systems set up for working in the office did not travel well.  Just to make it even more challenging we had hired four new key staff in January 2020.  The whole onboarding process had that raw edge to it.  I got very busy, very quickly, in a frantic treading water kind of way.   The training business has been classroom based, so boom! - suddenly no classroom.  Fortunately, eleven years ago in September 2010 Dale Carnegie in Ameri

The WHO team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan came up empty.  A lot of fairy floss was wrapped around the report, but reading the outcomes there were no outcomes.  If we don’t want to face the reality of why this occurred in the first place, then there is no comfort that we can prevent Covid-20 arriving unannounced at some time in the future.  As leaders what are we going to be working on between pandemics?  The current one will hopefully quiet down over the course of 2021.  There are five pillars of leadership we can rely on to be prepared for the next round of viral mayhem or any other VUCA events.   Take responsibility for the future. We lead intentional lives and we help our team members to do the same.  Most people in first world countries are leading accidental lives, buffeted by whatever happens to them, unable to exercise any control of their fate.  You can understand it when poverty, lack of resources and no useful assistance are your third world reality, but not in our a

In the movie “To Sir, With Love”, Sidney Poitier was brilliant in the role of a black teacher in a tough London East End high school.  He was trying to make a difference for these young outcasts to better prepare them for the life they would face after graduating from school.  A very uplifting story about what is possible when we encourage others to be their best.  So what has this got to do with business, you may be asking?  As leaders, we have four jobs.  Run the machinery of the operation so everything works well, provide the vision on where we are going, explain the WHY and build our people.  This “build our people” part is a communications exercise which most leaders fail to do well enough, myself included.   Many of us grew up in business in a era when your boss just expected you to get on with your job.  No encouragement was needed, because you were required to do a full day’s work for a full day’s pay.  Praise didn't exist and you found your own sources of encouragement.  Things are different today, b

Covid-19 popped up out of nowhere in January 2020 and we began following the news reports about this mysterious virus coming out of China.  We all remembered the SARS era and how Japan had sailed through that pretty well. We weren’t particularly worried and expected Japan would sail through this one too. However, around the middle of February our clients starting postponing scheduled in-house training.  This is when we realised Covid-19 was a serious issue.  We had public classes scheduled too and at our own volition, worrying about people’s safety, we decided to postpone them.  We also said to our team to work from home.  If they had to come to the office, they could do so, but try to come in late to avoid rush hour trains and go home early for the same reason.  On March 3rd we had a socially distanced, mask wearing Town Hall. This was the last mass gathering of the clan to date.  We were able to piggyback on our American colleagues ten years of experience delivering LIVE On Line training and we pivoted acro

We have seen Hollywood pumping out comic heroes as movie franchises to get the money flowing into the studios.  The premise is always the same.  The super hero comes to the rescue and saves everyone.  What about for leaders when coaching their team members?  Fortunately, we have four super heroes we can rely on to help us do a better job as the leader. They are Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower.   Encouraging our team sounds pretty unheralded and straightforward. But do we actually do it?  Leaders are busy people and have tons of pressure on their shoulders.  Life is a whirlwind of meetings and pushing the plan’s execution.  Expecting people to do what they are being paid to do, can easily supplant the encouragement vibe from the leader.  Telling people you recognise their strengths, means taking the time to audit and then communicate those strengths.  Being supportive means taking the time to be across what is happening at the individual level.  Do we do that?  Giving positive reinforcement means having

The chain of command is a well established military leadership given.  I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else.  In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers.  This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback against the Vietnam War, when all authority began to be challenged.  Modern leaders are currently enamoured with concepts like the “servant leader”.  The leader serves the team as an enabler for staff success.  Dominant authority is out and a vague negotiated power equilibrium has replaced it.  Delegation, responsibility, accountability, mistake handling and punishment are all swirling around in this fog of the new order.   Japan makes the whole construct even more interesting by having built up a legal perspective on staff issues that favours the worker against the company.  Judges, also do not see company staff non-performance of duties as necessarily career ending.  Add into the mix the fact that

Best laid plans of mice and men.  That was 2020 wasn’t it.  We all started that year with our plans, hopes, aspirations and strategies in place.  They all went down in flames and business became a game of catch as can, as we tried to grapple with an unfolding disaster.  In our company’s case, our financial year starts in September and we were up 25% on revenues compared to the same period the previous year.  I hired four more staff in January and had a record breaking year looming in sight.  It was a record breaking year all right, but in the opposite direction to what I expected. What about this year?  Are we any better positioned to plan for 2021?   Japan has seen a state of emergency declared and virus cases leaping higher and higher each day, like the flames of an uncontrollable bush fire wreaking havoc on everything in its path.  Japan, being Japan, won’t accept the vaccine test results like the rest of the world.  No, we have to replicate the tests here again because, well, we are Japanese and are diffe

Most leaders are not properly trained for leadership.  This is especially the case in Japan.  Here you study under the mentorship of your busy, time poor, over worked boss.  Your access to formal leadership training is constrained by the firm’s buy in to the dubious virtues of On The Job Training or OJT.  I am sure that at one point in time the OJT worked like a charm but the used by date has well and truly passed on that methodology.  Busines is a lot more complex today, technology rampant and the younger generation are increasingly feral.   The core required skills of the leader form three inter connecting circles.  These comprise leading, selling and presenting.  Now for many leaders they only see the one circle of leading as relevant and see the other two as less important.  The point here is that these circles each connect so that there is an overlap between all three.  If you are a leader you are in the business of sales.  You may have come through the CFO or Chief Scientists or General Management track

Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape.  We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk.  We have two types of people working for us.  There are those who receive a salary of some dimension, be they full time or part-time and then there are those who get paid for their services.  Some of these services are delivered regularly throughout the year.  Others are intermittent, on a needs basis.  Regardless, we need to take a good look at these every year to make sure they are still fit for purpose.   As a training company, we have some regular suppliers.  Our landlord charges us rent for the space we use and that lease pops up every two years.  Regardless of the economy, the office space vacancy rate, the consumer price index or any other intergalactic factors, the numbers always go up at renewal time.  It is no good finding ourselves at renewal time and think

Looking back, 2020 started quite well and then rapidly descended into a nightmare for most of us.  Very few industries boomed. The majority of us were fully concentrated on not going bust.  In 2021, we know we will have more of the same from the virus and the business disruptions which result.  It is a new year though, regardless of when your financial year kicks off, so there is some residual societal energy there to draw on, for a new start.  Our mindset, as always, is going to be important. Shall we allow things to play out, continue on as they have been or do we decide to seek to control our minds and strive for a different direction?   There are five mindset tools at our disposal.  Number one is thinking.  Sounds obvious enough.  “Of course I am going to be thinking in 2021”.  But what will you be thinking?  Has Covid-19 shrunk your world to the boundaries of your own abode, as you control your empire from super safe seclusion in your eyrie?  Fatigue sets in for individuals in the team, when being vigila

I met the owner of a successful business recently.  He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction.  So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange.  It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful.  Why was that my expectation?  Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are like, so I expected a Japanese equivalent.  He was totally different to what I expected.   He had no personal power at all from what I could see.  One reason may be that we were speaking in Japanese. It is a subtle, circular language that masks and obfuscates like few others.  He had two senior staff members with him, his direct reports and they too were rather underwhelming.  It got me thinking about what does it take in Japan to become a successful leader?  Here were three of them in front of me and I wouldn’t hav