The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

 Delegation is a perfect tool.  It is always in pristine condition because it stays on the shelf and gathers dust there, rather than getting dinged and banged around through robust application by leaders.  Why is that?  Fear is the biggest driver, followed by poor time management.  The accountability sits with the boss, no matter what delegation has been taking place.  If one of the team screw up the delegation, they don’t get hammered from above, because the boss is the target for not running the team properly.  No excuses allowed about , “well I delegated it to Kei so that he could develop his capabilities and start priming him for a future leadership role”.  The big bosses hold you responsible and that fear of losing control and being at the mercy of a subordinate’s mistake, convinces risk averse bosses that delegation is a non-starter. The time management issue is another blocker.  To delegate properly, the boss needs to instruct the subordinate on what they need to do and discuss with them how to approac

 Japan is a country where accountability and responsibility are avoided at all costs.  This is most often seen in staff engagement surveys where Japan usually comes last in the world.  One of the key questions western survey designers use for these global questionnaires is, “would you recommend our firm as a place to work for your relatives and friends?”.  Japanese staff will not give this question a positive score.  They worry that if they introduce their relative and it doesn’t work out, it will create a problem for their own career within the company.  They also worry if their relative hates the place, they will blame them for introducing the firm and this creates problems within the family. The Japanese have come up with clever ways to reduce accountability for individuals. Decision-making uses the ringi method of consensus gathering so that we are all accountable and therefore no one person is individually accountable.  This is genius for staff.  At different times, though, we as the boss ask individuals

There is no one way to lead, but there are different perspectives on how to lead.  We might need a certain variety in one environment, but a different model in another ecosystem.  Often the danger is dragging the same model around with us which worked well in one locale and trying to slam the square peg into the round hole at the new shop.  I have tried that by the way and it didn’t go very well, so I don’t recommend it. Let’s look at five power varieties to stimulate our thinking about whether we have the right set up in our current situation. 1.    Authority Power We have been given the mandate to lead and we are accountable for the results.  None of the team were asked their approval for us to be their boss and here we are ready to do our job, as we define it, in the way we want to do it.  As the leader, we require the staff to do what we tell them and by accepting the salary, they have agreed to do it or they can leave.  We are pulling rank on everyone and using the machines muscle, to get compliance wit

What are the starting points, the basic requirements of leadership?  There are actually many, which is why books on leadership are both numerous and thick.  Today, let’s look at four of the basics we need to be effective as a leader.    1.     Self-Aware In this category, we are living an intentional life, where we decide what happens to us, rather than being buffeted by the winds of change.  We are self-directed.  We have clear goals and we revise them regularly to accommodate all of the changes in business.  We make the compass the boss of the clock and we set our direction and then set our time to achieve the goals we have set.  We self-regulate, which means we control our physicality and out metal framework.  We don’t function at peak performance with a hangover, so we don’t get a hangover, because we control what we ingest and when we ingest it.  Drugs are for dopes so don't worry about getting involved in that loser scene.  We work on ourselves so we are constant students of business.  We consume infor

If one of our goals as a leader is to align our team members goals, aspiration, dreams and desires with those of the firm, it implies we know what they are aiming for.    How would we know that information?   We would gather that detail slowly over time and we would check back in occasionally to find out if things have changed or not.  This cannot be an interrogation, like a job interview.  We take our time and do these talks over coffee, lunches, dinners and in spare moments when chatting together.  The flow of the talks is casual but we are trying to assemble a clear picture of this staff member, so there is a structure to how we find out more about them.                The structure is simple and the point needs to be made here that we are not doing this to better manipulate them to squeeze more productivity for them.  If that is your desire, then in today’s employment market in Japan, you are going to be supremely busy.  You will be doing a lot of things by yourself, because people won’t want to work with

Japan is excellent at being two faced.  In the West, this has a pejorative air, but in Japan this is how harmony can be maintained and everyone plays their part in keeping the public and private faces far apart.  This means that a typical western approach of getting the two warring individuals into a room and thrashing out a solution usually doesn’t get very far.  In that mediated meeting, no one talks and they certainly won’t publicly voice their opinion of the other person or flag the issue of their disgruntlement.  Japanese society has learnt that some things are better not surfaced, because they can lead to an explosion from which there may no backing out.  Bringing things to a head could go nuclear and better to let the problem drift along.  Keep the issue underground and everyone will smile on the surface through gritted teeth and maintain a facade of teamwork on the surface, diligently applying two faces to the problem. The issue though is the problem never goes away and we have individuals who don’t w

 Once upon a time in Japan there would be a thick pile of resumes sitting on your desk for you to go through and select the new potential hires for interview.  You would conduct rounds of meetings, put them to the test in certain skill sets and then make a studied decision to bring onboard the best person.  They were nervous and you had all the power in the discussion.  They were selling you on them and why they should be selected.  Ah, those fond memories of days gone by. Today, unless you are some mega firm in Japan, highly attractive to job candidates, you are unlikely to be getting many resumes at all and the quality is usually not that great.  Instantly, you are in a bad place, because your selection horizon is limited and the scope is narrow.  The other interesting thing is that candidates cancel the meetings with barely any notice or don’t even bother to show up or do show up and try to auction the process, so they can get more dough somewhere esle.  Many bosses come up through the ranks from technical

Leaders are different from managers.  Managers have to make sure everything is humming.  The quality standards have to be met.  The logistics have to flow smoothly, so that production is working well.  The budget has to be met and there should be no over spending taking place.  Leaders have to do all of this, plus two other key roles.  One is setting the direction and the other is developing the people.  This sounds fair enough, except that the roles described for the manager are a full time job and the leader’s bits and bobs are on top of that base.  Do leaders get more than 24 hours a day allotted to them unlike managers?  No, they get what we all get, yet somehow they have to accomplish all of these other tasks as well and this is where the problems start. What normally happens is that strategy setting is a once a year affair. In large companies, there is a lot of bureaucracy attached to the planning stage and this can occupy a lot of time, as the plan works its way up the chain of command, before it is ap

The Ongoing Nightmare Of Small Business Recruiting  There are more jobs than candidates in Japan and this situation will only worsen from the boss’s viewpoint.  Those halcyon days of wading through a big pile of resumes and tossing most away, have well and truly gone.  If you get any resumes these days, you think you should go and buy a takurakuji (lottery) ticket, because your luck is obviously in.  Counterintuitively, in some of the high tech industries, whole teams of internal recruiters are being fired, because the demand for that industry is down and over hiring during Covid now requires firing people.  In most industries though, there is demand for staff, but they are hard to find in Japan.  Job mobility here is much less than in Western countries and so the people who are interested in looking for a new job, may not be the people you want to hire.  Big companies, who can pay big base salaries and add various incentives, will always be in a strong position to hire staff.  They can afford to pay the numb

The boss is the light on the hill, radiating positive energy, belief, confidence and possibility.  The moody boss can destroy the atmosphere in the office very quickly.  We all know that, so we have to become expert thespians, masking our true feelings and putting on a fun face to the outside world.  When things get tough, there are no people the boss can talk to, so all of the pressure gets bottled up in one person.  When things are not going well with the results and particularly when the profits are not where they need to be, the pressure really starts to pile on.  How can the boss function when any normal person would be laid waste with depression, insecurity, imposter syndrome and self-doubt? As the boss, it is difficult to share the issues with your life partner, because you feel you are bringing them down too and they have almost zero influence on improving things to help you. That is why the boss tends to keep everything stitched up tightly inside.  There has to be a release though, or the pressure ca

I am always amused by rather youngish “life coaches” or “executive coaches”.  It seems incongruent, because their experience of business life seems so thin.  They haven’t risen inside their organisations, have never had massive responsibilty or a major P&L to worry about.  They seem to be everywhere and astoundingly they find people willing to give them money.  The person best able to provide coaching should be the boss and not some external freelance coach.  Bosses though often restrict their coaching to the detail of the task and don’t really educate their people on life success.  Part of the reason is the way we were all brought up in business. Work was over here and life outside of work was in a different basket and the boss’s role was to stick with one and not get involved in the personal business of the staff.  That is changing though and the demand is bottom up. Younger people want more coaching, advice and direction and not just about tasks.  They expect more from the boss than previous generation

The contrast was striking.  I went from one boss, who was super demanding, scary even, to a very easy going leader.  I thought, “this is good”, well, at least for a while. When I realised that he would agree with whoever was last in his office, I realised there was no core here.  He was being nice to all and that meant he wasn’t taking any hard decisions, potentially upsetting some people.  You would convince him on some course of action and then a colleague would waltz into his office and then next thing you know, the positions have been reversed. What is going on here, I wondered? Was the first leader an Emotional Quotient EQ leader.  Certainly not.  He was a despot and a he ruled with an iron rod.  You always knew where you stood with him and if he agreed to something, then he would stick with that decision.  He was scary, but predictable.  The second leader was definitely the EQ type – very caring, very sensitive to people’s feelings, considerate.  He was unpredictable, because he was so easily swayed by

Japan has always been a country which has adapted to weather and seismic conditions.  Traditional housing was built on the assumption that earthquakes would less easily destroy wooded houses with built in flex points.  High-pitched roof angles allowed snow to fall more easily from the roof and prevent the snow’s weight from crushing those inside.  Things have changed though and we now have typhoons going as far north as Hokkaido.  When I arrive here in April 1979, that possibility would have been unthinkable.  We have massive flooding of low-lying areas, which until relatively recently, could survive heavy rains.  Japan is also becoming unbearably hot.  Cities like Tokyo have lots of concreted surfaces, not that many trees and the heat at ground level is becoming more and more intense.  The NHK news today was reporting an average temperature for Tokyo of 36 degrees centigrade.  While I was driving around, my car temperature gauge was showing 39.5 degrees for outside the vehicle and trust me, it was red hot on

Japan is a unique country where underperformance is not considered a legitimate reason to terminate someone’s employ.  Leaders new to the country will often run into this issue.  They arrive with a mandate from HQ to “fix” Japan and get it up to a required performance standard.  As soon as the new broom brings in changes to achieve the HQ revenue targets, the trouble starts. Change is never an easy thing for Japan to deal with because the same old, same old is a known commodity and therefore a safe choice.  New represents risk and everyone here has been raised to avoid mistakes and errors and new things are inevitably going to be difficult to execute perfectly from the start.  Ergo, don’t do new things. The new boss will have religion about the changes they want to see and in short order they discover that despite all of that head nodding agreement in the room, no one is executing the agreed changes.  The answer is simple.  As far as the Japanese leaders are concerned, they have not agreed but they have chose

It is very frustrating at times, being a leader.  Staff don’t hit their targets, forget things they need to do, complete tasks in a less than satisfactory manner and make stupid mistakes.  Time poor leaders are the norm, so we are always operating on minimums to get it all done.  We are usually in a rush, and this is when we get ourselves into trouble as the leader.  We genuflect in the general direction of empathy, being a critical aspect of the leader’s people skills but often we forget to walk the talk.  Our mouth gets ahead of our brain and we say things which may not have been the best choice or at the appropriate moment.  Too late, it is out there.  Our internal tensions push us to being more direct than needed.  There can be a tough conversation requiredand a plan for that is the best course of action, but we sometimes go ahead with no plan.  Our emotional quotient, rather than just our intelligence quotient, is highlighted as being so important today, but that word “emotional” is hanging there.  We ca

Some problems are relatively difficult and can be fixed, ignored or coped with.  Others are more substantial and can place the entire enterprise at risk.  Covid certainly struck some industries harder than others and we have seen many venerable establishments disappear.  The Japanese government wisely made low-interest loans available to many companies on the basis that keeping the doors open and the staff employed would be a better outcome for the economy.  In 2008, during the Global Financial Crisis, the Australian government pumped money into the economy and the country sailed through that crisis unscathed.  This works at the macro level but what about what is going on inside the organisations?  Staff realise that business is bad and they become concerned about the ability of the organisation to survive.  When something like Covid affects a whole industry, there may be no real alternatives for those staff thinking of leaving.  A case of “am I jumping out of the frying pan into the fire?”.  What should the

Artificial intelligence is bringing a lot of speed to tasks and helping with mundane work.  As we all become better at prompting the machine, we will uncover greater utility for it to propel our work.  It will not be able to replace the human aspect of leadership though. One thing it won’t fix is watching 40% of new hires walk out the door within the first three or four years of employ.  I was talking to an HR person from a very large international firm about this issue.  Originally, there had been a plan to provide training for these new recruits, with a view to keeping them in the company and not having them wander off to competitors.  In the end, they budgeted nothing for the training, so the whole idea collapsed.  The early departure problem is still there though. I suggested that the actual issue is with the young recruits’ supervisors and that this group needs some remedial training.  I said “remedial” because they have to unlearn some bad thinking and bad habits.  Most of these supervisors will be sect

 Many of our clients have told us that Covid and especially remote working situations, revealed a lot about the leadership frailty of their organisations.  When everyone was in the office, the inability of mid-level leaders to lead was effectively masked.  However, once the big homeward bound migration took place, sizeable gaps suddenly became apparent. These gaps were around the communication of the firm’s strategy, direction, the alignment of the team and getting things done.  Each of these aspects had to be updated in a rapidly changing Covid environment, where in the early phases, there were no vaccines and people were dying in droves. The latest Covid variants are highly contagious, but less lethal.  The government has moved Covid down the scale to be equivalent with the flu.  Current numbers are about 70% of firms are back in the office in Japan, so there is now a more complex hybrid challenge to deal with.  Communication becomes more difficult when some staff are meeting colleagues in person and others

 Three candidates in a row with mental health problems and recruiting fees in the tens of thousands of dollars.  Am I just unlucky or is this a trend? Our first instinct as leaders will be to not recruit people who are broken and to avoid those who are suffering with mental health issues. We will worry they will just disappear into a prolonged medical leave absence and we will be footing the bills for the duration.  The issue though is these candidates are often ninja level masters of illusion and obfuscation. The hidden mental health problems don’t reveal themselves until after they have passed probation.  Some recruiting companies have nifty little clauses in their contracts that state if the person isn’t fired or resigns before the end of the first three months’ probation period, then there will be no contractual obligation to replace them and you are out of pocket.  Everyone, go back and read this clause in your existing contract with your recruiters and agitate to change it.  I think 60 days should be th

As a leader, try yelling “be inclusive, be inclusive, be inclusive” at your staff members.  You are trying to move the organisation toward achieving greater creativity and innovation through the benefits of diversity.  You know that becoming more inclusive is the catalyst for gaining diversity inside the firm.  The President and the Executive Team have made the official pronouncements about using diversity to better prepare for a more creative and successful future.  Whatever your own thoughts on the merits of diversity, it is your leader job to turn their pronouncement into reality.  Being a smart leader, you know that just yelling at your staff to be more inclusive is a nonsense and won’t work.  Great, so what do you do about those in your charge? This type of major transformation is not the moment for shotgun style team meetings or town halls to convince everyone to get on board with senior management’s directions.  En masse, that blanket approach will yield a lot of tatemae or superficial acceptance, but