The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has become an important topic in Japan and the trigger to getting to diversity is getting inclusion.  When people feel included in the team, they are more motivated, hard working and committed to the firm.  Retention is a nightmare problem which will unfold slowly and terrifyingly for all firms over the next few years.  Getting people to join is one problem in a declining population reality and keeping the ones you managed to hire, will be the bigger problem.  Training them, to then see them walk out the door to the competitor is a very painful prospect to entertain and no one wants to see that unfold. This is where the inclusion part helps us to keep our people with us and not have them stray. One of the ways to improve the inclusion culture inside the organisation is to find the glue to meld everyone together as a team. We want people to be able to contribute and that  means we will have to deal with having different opinions and personality styles scattered amongst the team.

In Part One of Key Factors To Achieving Diversity, Equity & Inclusion In Japan, I covered Building Trust and Psychological Safety as well as looking at the issues around Cultural Awareness.  In Part Two, let’s tackle Dealing With Unconscious Bias In Japan.  Those living in Japan might be grimacing right now, because there is the view that the bias is quite conscious and out in the open. Some of our clients tell us that they have a good proportion of their male staff, who do not support the attention being given to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and say they feel they are the victims.  The post-war period in Japan saw a number of transitions.  One was from farm-based work to factory and service industry work in cities, as people moved out from the countryside.  The US Occupation sponsored breakup of absentee landlord ownership of farms, to having tenant farmers becoming owners of their land, created the Middle Class.  Thanks to Japan becoming a major supplier to the US military during the Korean War, Japa

It is always good to discover new ways of looking at how we humans get on with each other.  As a new leader, inheriting an existing team, the first thing you discover is very few of the team are like you and that they are motivated individually, rather than as an amorphous group.  Understanding people is certainly a key to successful leadership.  I recently came across Ms. Shade Zahral in an interesting video, explaining a four quadrant intersection of courage and humanness.  In this format, courage is shown from bottom “low” to “high” on the left vertical and humanness on the right horizontal from left “low” to right “high”.  I thought this was a useful tool from which to examine the human dimension of work. So if you are high in humanness, but low in courage, you are in the bottom right quadrant.  This quadrant is labelled as “People Pleasers”.  We meet this type of person don’t we.  They are often empathetic types who genuinely like people. They do everything they can to be accepted and avoid any criticism

Actually, we don’t want to lead imperfect people – we want the winners, A Players, the motivated and the capable.  Fine and they cost a bomb, so I hope you have deep pockets.  If you work for a major corporation then that is exactly what you can command, because you have the bucks to sustain that type of ecosystem.  They are also attracted to work for your brand name firm, so it is a happy exchange.  If you work for a small to medium enterprise then life is quite different.  There is a constant trade off of financial resources to be tied up in someone who probably won’t make much money in the first year, against the cost of hiring, onboarding and training them.  The outlays go out in a flood and the return ebbs back in a trickle. Japan, like many other economies is witnessing a population decline.  There will be roughly a million people less in Japan, every year, for the next ten years at least.  That translates into a smaller number of potential staff available to hire and that means compromises have to be m

Leadership requires discipline and accountability.  We claim to know more than the team about the strategy and direction we need to take.  Are we being honest with ourselves though?  We probably made some New Year Resolutions in January and here we are one quarter into the new calendar year and how are we looking on those commitments?  I see the influx of overweight executives booking up the personal trainers down at my private club gym every January.  They clearly are okay to spend the money, because both the club and these trainers are not cheap. These newbies are usually obese and are clearly interested in doing something about their weight to improve their health and performance.  Six weeks later they have quietly vanished. I wonder what sort of corporate leaders they are, if they cannot maintain the discipline and commitment to take care of the most precious thing in their lives – their own health?  Are they credible with their teams?   Maybe I am wrong, but I doubt they can be a genius of organisation,

In Japan, we are in a zero sum game, death struggle for talent.  Actually, we are in the same struggle for even the modesty talented.  We had better get used to a lowering of standards going forward, as we struggle to get people, any people. They aren’t making Japanese in the numbers we are used to and each year the media reports how the number of new babies has declined to a new record low.  The 15 to 34 year old population in Japan has halved over the last twenty years and it will just keep going down.  We are going to face a “free agent” youth population who will be in high demand.  We talk about recruit, retain and advance people.  The recruit part will just get tougher and the retain part is on us as leaders to get it right.  If we can offer the right environment, then people will stay with us.  The problems arise when we have un-reconstructed middle managers who are asleep.  They are like Rip Van Wrinkle or Urashima Taro in the Japanese context.  They are not awake to these new changes and are still tre

 Some may believe that it is better to have staff who will argue back, than have a room full of yes-men and yes-women.  In Japan, in particular, it is hard to get anyone to dispute the boss’s opinion, so if we get counterpoints to what we think, we should be popping corks and celebrating.  This is a fine line for staff to tread.  How can they raise issues with the boss, without seeming to be in opposition with what the boss thinks or wants?  We hear a lot of talk about the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment and most of this is coming out of the West.  Japan certainly didn’t pioneer or promulgate this idea.  Are bosses really comfortable with a psychologically safe environment where their staff can challenge them on what they want done?  There is a lot of other rhetoric about becoming the “servant leader”.  The idea being that the boss’s job is to help the staff succeed, clearing obstacles and empowering people to go forth and prosper.    The problem with a lot of this is we are dealing

 Leaders are time poor.  There is too much to do and not enough time.  We are constantly being challenged to get control of our time management and for most of us, that struggle is often one we are losing.   Meeting and emails are time killers.  Multi-tasking is a given, which means that we are constantly losing time, as we keep having to get back up to speed on something we were concentrating on, to do something we hadn’t expected or diarised for that day. The upshot of all of this is our communication becomes very clipped.  We are speaking in short form all of the time, because we don’t have enough time for the full explanation.  When we have children, we are constantly handing out orders.  Don’t do this or that, don’t touch this or that.  We don’t take the time to explain the why, we just tell them the what.  We carry that same methodology into the workplace.  If we recorded you for a full day, I think you would be shocked to hear how much of your day is telling people what to do. Often we give them no or

 Business owners have a total stake in the enterprise and a commitment level that is always peaking at maximum. They have their wealth enveloped in the business and they take on debt, risk and the trials and tribulations of business cycles.  Executives are rewarded with salaries, bonuses and profit share depending on the organisation.  If you are an executive in America, the leader packages can get up to eight and nine figures.  Your commitment is going to be massive with that amount of reward involved.  Yet, we read about leaders who fire the bottom ten percent every year or weed out all of those who are not peak performers.  What about Japan?  Executives here are modestly remunerated and the vast majority of privately held SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) don’t make a profit by design, so they can avoid paying tax.  Instead they run as many personal expenses through the business as possible.  The idea of firing non-performers as an architectural feature of the organisation isn’t a consideration in Japan.  Th

Over the last couple of years I have participated in numerous webinars and training provided by different organisations on gaining Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in Japan.  The concentration has been on raising awareness about what DEI actually involves.  When we first received enquiries about Diversity training, the request was to provide training for the women.  For those outside Japan facing ethnic, racial and religious issues, as well as gender diversity, this may seem a bit strange. Diversity in Japan however primarily focuses on gender issues and to a much lesser extent on age and LGBTQ issues.  Also there just aren’t significant numbers of foreigners living here nor significant non-Buddhist or non-Shinto foreign religions present to be major issues.  Diversity and equity are outcomes and we believe the key to the door is gaining inclusion.  The awareness discussions are important, but we need to go beyond that to looking at the “how” to get inclusion piece.  That is a big discussion and we canno

What would you do if a parcel delivery staff and three confederates suddenly pushed past you and overpowered you when you opened the door?  What would you do if a lunatic neighbour broke into your house armed with a hammer and started attacking your whole family?  The recent deaths of 90 year old Kinuyo Oshio during a home invasion by the Luffy Gang and hearing about long-time Tokyo resident and friend, Bill Bishop and his entire family being killed by a lunatic neighbour, make this a reality we haven’t had to confront before.  We are leaders, so how should we lead our families to protect ourselves from this type of crime?  If you are quite a logical type and think that statistically, this would never happen to you or if you are squeamish about handing out severe physical violence to home invaders, then stop one now. It is a choice to defend yourself and your family or to submit to being tied up and robbed. For those who are wondering about options, based on my 52 years of karate training, here are my ideas o

There are lots of secrets for leaders.  They attend the executive meetings, the off-sites, the briefings from the big bosses and know what is going on before anyone else.  Divulging top secret corporate moves will get you fired, so leaders are usually tight-lipped about coming transformations, changes, expansions, downsizing etc.  This is fairly obvious and everyone knows where the boundaries are located regarding what you can and cannot say.  What about more personal matters though? Japan is a place where a secret is a precious thing.  Living cheek-by-jowl for centuries in small villages or packed together in urban concentrations, often with concrete walls which seem paper thin, keeping a secret is no mean task.  Like most cases for small cities around the world, everyone seems to know everyone else’s business.  Sometimes I am taken by surprise. Suddenly one of my staff will tell me that they have gotten married or that they have had a child.  Until the deed is done, Japanese are pretty silent about what is

I received a leave application request on a Saturday from one of my staff. It reminded me that we had missed our weekly meeting.  In fact, now that I think about it, we have missed quite a few of them, because of various scheduling conflicts.  My busyness has been a factor.  This made me recall that fantastic Bill Oncken and Don Wass article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) back in 1974 titled, “Management Time: Who’s Got The Monkey”.  In fact, HBR notes that this article is one of two of their best selling reprints ever.  If you haven’t read it, then take a look, it is gold. In this article, a classic, they are talking about staff accountability and boss delegation.  The boss always has more interest in keeping abreast of what staff are doing than the staff have any interest in their accountability. Missing sessions with the boss is a plus from their point of view, because they are not having to provide any answers about their results or lack thereof.  With a bit of deft scheduling change, they can go fo

Western leadership is a meritocracy where the most driven, talented, hardest working and ambitious are given the responsibility for those cannot make it to the top.  Everyone knows the rules and the system works pretty well.  The American version is at one end where the degree of ruthlessness is more pronounced and accepted.  Other Western nations have less stringent variations, but fundamentally follow the same basic ideas about who deserves to be a leader.  What happens when you put these leaders in charge of a Japanese team? The hero’s journey is not pronounced so much in Japan because the hero cannot make it alone.  Here the team is required to pull together as a unit and strengths and weaknesses are evened out across jobs and personalities.  The idea of 1 + 1 = 5 is often talked about in the West as a aspiration but in Japan it is the reality.  The component parts are harmonised and concentrated to get the results.  Individual requirements are not promoted above the good of the group. Landing into Tokyo

Getting change anywhere is a difficult process, but Japan is a special case.  Often in business, we represent the change.  We are the potential new supplier and that means a change.  They have been doing business with someone else and we want them to stop doing that and do business with us instead.  There are many currents underpinning Japanese culture and its resistance to change. I have been training in traditional Japanese karate for 52 years and part of that process is learning set sequences called kata.  These are fixed moves that cannot be varied in any way.  There is one way to do the movement, one order and our job is to replicate that same movement thousands of times until we have perfected it.  There is no possibility of doing it a different way - in other words, no change is possible.  This is a powerful metaphor for many things in Japan where there is only one way of doing things and it cannot be varied.  This is prime change resistance in action.  I find this at home too.  My wife is Japanese and

Society approves titles and status, especially in Japan.  We rise through the ranks and following the Peter Principle, we peak at our upper level of incompetence.  On the way up, we pick up titles and accrue status, respect and credence amplified through the power of our title.  Our personal power though could be suddenly exposed as bogus, when we get up to open our mouths in public.  This is one of those “The Emperor Has No Clothes” moments, when all is revealed, and we are found severely wanting. I was at a function recently and one of the bureaucratic elite in Japan was there to give a keynote presentation.  You generally get to become an elite official in Japan because you went to the right elementary school, middle school, high school and then University.  The reason these were the right schools up until University, is because they have the absolute best system in place to help you be a legend in memorization, rote learning and test taking.  At University you take a couple of years off, before you start

The calendar year represents the start of a new year for many businesses. Others will be looking at April 1st for their financial year start.  Nevertheless, everyone will be facing the change of year period and it is always a great time for reflection.  The holidays should be fully occupied with family responsibilities or pure down time, to rest and recharge. Take some time when you get back to the office, to start reflecting on the coming year. Are we where we need to be in the business? Is this thought depressing? We all enter year three of Covid hell. Runaway war inspired energy shortages and inflation are now rampart globally.  It is hard to be optimistic in many industries.  Certainly my industry, the training business, hasn’t seen any daylight in the long hard night as yet. As leaders, it is good to step away from the daily grind of the business to spend some time thinking.  Usually most of our thinking time is very immediate, responding to problems and crises.  The melee of daily battle is not the best

Fads are a constant in business.  Consultants have a field day. They rush around providing companies with ideas on how to ride the new fashion wave.  They then have to milk it as hard as possible, because they know it will be soon supplanted by the next fad.  Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is right up there as the latest fad in Japan.  I am not saying that DEI isn’t legitimate or important.  What I am saying is that for many companies, this is a patina of legitimacy, a fig leaf, as they seek to show good citizenship rather than a heartfelt belief in the importance of DEI itself.  “If others are doing it, then we should be doing it too”, is more the motivation, in many cases in Japan. The benefits of DEI in the West are numerous.  These include faster problem-solving, better decision-making, increased innovation, employee engagement and better financial performance.  None of these outcomes have been accepted as relevant in Japan as yet.  The scope is also quite different. In the West, we are dealing wit

Shaun Tomson was a famous South African world champion surfer and the recent guest on Tim Reid’s podcast Small Business Big Marketing, of which I am a fan.  In the show, Shaun was talking about what he called his Code concept, based around 12 “I will” statements.  In fifteen minutes, we have to come up with twelve statements, each starting with the words “I will…”.  The idea is that we have to use our stream of consciousness to get down ideas about what we need to be doing.  In Shaun’s case he is getting people to think about things they need to do to improve their lives, but it can also be used for more specific business purposes.  I tried it for myself and thought this was a useful idea for strengthening the commitment of the team, to hit our goals and targets. I changed the naming from Code to Commitment, because I wanted a purely business oriented focus in this methodology.  Tim asked Shaun why the number twelve and there was not a particular reason for him to choose twelve, but I kept the same format.  I

Every month, I check the leave balance for my staff and am always unhappy with the numbers.  The team can accrue up to 20 days a year for a maximum of two years, so technically they can have 40 days available, if they don’t take any leave at all.  Anything beyond that 40 days they lose.  In my company we provide an additional 4 days of company paid holidays, plus a CSR day, which they can use anyway they like.  There are 16 national holidays in Japan, so you would think the team would be able to use their leave without feeling they were losing too much of it, but that has not proven to be the case.  I found they still weren’t taking enough leave and thought maybe they were worried about sick leave and so were hoarding their annual leave to cover that possibility off.  I subsequently gave them an extra 5 days of sick leave, but it made absolutely no difference – they keep stowing away their leave and don’t use it enough. As an Aussie, this whole Japanese non-leave taking thing is mystifying.  I try to set a go