The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the last three episodes we have covered not criticizing people, giving appreciation, understanding wants, being interested in others, smiling and remembering people’s names.  Let’s explore the last three human relations skills we need to succeed.   Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. “Some people are boring when they talk about themselves and I tune out, because I only want to hear stuff that is of interest to me, like where are the results”. That doesn’t sound like a good approach to build an engaged team, does it?  Remember we need to develop a genuine interest in our people and then ask questions. Sometimes we may not know how to engage others to get to know them better. We can find out what are some key areas of importance to them using a memory linking technique - Nameplate, House, Family, Briefcase, Airplane, Tennis Racket, Ideas.   Nameplate obviously refers to their name.  Are we pronouncing it correctly.  I was leading a training session recently and an Indian gentle

In the last episode we covered the first three principles for strengthening relationships, focusing on avoiding criticism, expressing sincere appreciation and arousing in others an eager want.  We will explore how to advance the relationship building process with the next three human relations principles.   Become genuinely interested in other people. Society has entered a very narcissistic stage, where many people are highly focused on themselves. Additionally, we are all time poor and focused on what we need to do and have little mental bandwidth for what other people are thinking or need.  Efficiency is a difficult approach to apply to building good human relations.  It is very hard to build up trusting relationships with such a time poor, highly transactional approach. If we don’t build trust, then what sort of relationships do we have with the team members?    The way to build trust is to get to know people and get them to know us.  The more things we share in common, the easier it is to get on with ea

As leaders, naturally we all want to build a strong relationship with our team.  However, not all relationships with our team members work well.  The Pareto Principle says that 20% of our team produce 80% of the results.  That means we are paying for 80% of the people, who only produce 20% of the results.  That is bound to be an irritation for leaders, when they cast their eye across those members of their team who are not producing as much as others.  We might think they should change, so that they are doing a lot better and so make it easier for us to lead them.  Unfortunately, we can’t change others. We can only change how we think and behave.   If we see them as a problem, then the chances are high that we won’t have a positive relationship with them. We won’t spend much time with them and will obviously prefer to be around the high performing producers. This in turn de-motivates the 80% group and we set up a cycle of grief.  On the other hand, if we accept that there will always be a statistical 20% and

There are many things which lead to successful leadership.  You might have hit a purple patch in the market and things are going swimmingly.  Five Star Hotels in Japan, prior to the pandemic were doing brilliantly with very high occupancy rates and the General Managers looked like rock stars. Covid hit and closed the border, locked everyone up at home and desperation was the order of the day for the hospitality and tourism industries.  Or you might have inherited a bunch of well trained stars, thanks to your immediate predecessor.  We all hope for good business conditions and a good crew.  Hope however isn’t much of a strategy.   When it is down to us, what do we need to do? For leaders there are some key areas where we need to concentrate our time, energy and strength.  There are Five Drivers of Leadership Success which help us to be effective leaders.  Let’s go through them. Self Direction Leaders are self directed, have a vision and set clear goals.  They are self sufficient.  They know what they are acc

We are super busy people, hitting our targets, ploughing through the workload, coming in early, staying late, working weekends, constantly studying and investing in ourselves and then it happens.  We get promoted to be the leader, to be in charge of other people, usually our erstwhile colleagues.  Our brain though is still in production mode.  We not only have the results we were personally accountable for before, but now we are accountable for the entire team’s production as well.  We have to make that mental leap from being in total control of what were doing, to being in zero control over what others do.     We immediately gravitate toward the mechanical pieces of the job, because they are the easy bits.  Checking the numbers, the milestones, the sequencing, the reporting, the details, etc., are all doable for us.  We are not yet a leader though, because we have decided to become a manager.  What the organisation is in dire need of though, are leaders not managers.  Managers are a dime a dozen, but leaders

Starting something new means we start with a clean slate and can create the culture we want to predominate throughout our organisation.  However how many people get that opportunity?  We are talking about a miniscule collection of opportunities here and it is much more likely we will be inheriting an existing culture, created over time by our predecessors.  That statement in itself may be problematic, because did they actually have a view on the type of culture they wanted or did it just evolve over time or in spite of them.    If we are inheriting an existing workplace culture, that doesn’t mean we cannot change it for the better. However, we should keep in mind that “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and we may be tempted to import the dominant headquarter culture to Japan.  Good luck with that and let me know how it is working out for you.  Actually don’t bother – I know the answer already.   What Are The Right Questions, Rather Than Right Answers   Our starting point is the most difficult.  Japan