The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

How To End A Project Team   There are no shortage of projects and project teams inside companies.  Often, for big projects, various people are brought together to create a specialist team for that particular project.  The projects eventually come to an end and most commonly, start with a bang and go out with a whimper.  Are we gaining all that we can from these non-permanent team formations? What are we doing about the people part of ending the project team?  Are we leaving on a high or low note?   Teams have their own cycle. There is the Formation Stage where a team is chosen, and clear goals and direction are defined.  The next element is the Stabilisation Stage where everyone settles into their roles.  Following that we have the Integration Stage where the big goals are being broken down to smaller bits and being worked on.  People are starting to get used to working with each other in  cooperative way.  Actualisation comes after that stage and the team is really starting to gel well together.  Things are

Leaders Who Fail To Follow Up, Fail Their Business   Companies spend considerable time and treasure to improve the business.  Ideas are generated and projects initiated.  New hires are brought in to expand the business. Training is delivered to raise skill and ability levels.  All of these types of activities need leadership.  Why then are leaders so poor at doing the follow up?  Everyone is busy, but the leader’s job is to translate all of that busyness into results and outputs.  In Japan, a big part of this problem is the incomplete self-awareness about the true role of the leader.   I have seen this same scenario so many times over the years.  We gather for the offsite or a similar innovation session.  We break into groups and start brainstorming ideas to drive the business forward.  We spend hours digging out creative ideas, debating the priorities, getting them down on to large sheets of paper and sticking these sheets up on the wall.  We take our colleagues through the findings and then listen to their

Coaching Team Members   Coaching has been wildly misinterpreted in Japan.  It should be there to motivate and encourage people in their work but these current generations of Middle Managers have corrupted the idea.  Mistakenly they imagine that blasting out orders like a mad pirate captain is coaching.  Or that telling their people they are wrong is helping to correct them to fly straight. They are fault finders extraordinaire, never giving any praise.  Or if they do manage to break the mould and give some praise, it falls on stony ground and is totally ineffective, never believed.   When we criticise, condemn or complain about others, what are their reactions?  Do they dive deep into contemplation and self reflection? No, they go straight into justification of their position and become dogged and ideological or they spiral down into depression.  When we tell our staff that their idea is wrong or their opinion is wrong, do they bow before the boss’s greater experience, knowledge and capability? No. They whine

What Is Your Tone As A Leader?   We understand tone very easily when we think about voice tone.  A soft, gentle tone when speaking contrasts with a harsh, strident tone.  What about the tone we set for the workplace and for the team, in our role as leader?  Have we decided what the tone will be or is it just what it is naturally?  Why would we set a tone and what would it be?  Tone in this regard relates to the dynamic between the team members themselves and what type of behavior is required.  It imprints on to the team an attitude about how we regard and how we treat our clients.   As the boss, this is all going on in the background, because you are super busy.  When you are juggling so many balls in the air at once, you need everyone to get on with what they are doing, because you have no additional bandwidth to be running around after others. Often we don’t set a tone, because we are so very busy ourselves and we just expect everyone to be an adult and behave accordingly. The issue here is your version of

Banish Personal Negativity   The boss is the fountain of positivity for the team, like a fountain of youth of lore and legend.  We have to stand tall, no matter what is going on, because people rely on us to lead.   That means reassuring them that the company will be okay or the section will be okay and that we will all get through this current difficulty.  When things look grim, who are the people first out the door?  The low or average performer? No, it is always the best people who jump ship, because they always have options.  The first sign of top performer overboard has everyone else worrying about what did that person know that they don’t?  The feeling of insecurity triggers people searching for exits, before it is too late. The boss is the bulwark standing firm against the tide of panic and confusion. What happens however when the boss becomes negative?   We all know what we are supposed to do, what type of role model we should be. But we have human frailties.  We are not robots, devoid of feelings, wh

Dealing With Really Toxic Staff   Be it big organisations or small organisations, the things nobody wants are rust or termites.  Rust in your car rots out the floorboards, the metal fabric, but it does so unseen.  Termites in your house silently eat out the boards, leaving a paint covered, paper thin illusion of a wall, that when you touch it totally collapses. The rust and termites in organisations are toxic people, equally quietly going about destroying the business from within.   Here are some types of toxic people to be careful of:   Negatives They are down on everything and everyone.  No one is good enough in their view, the world is bad and the future looks dismal. They are angry, depressed, frustrated people and want to enlist others to be like them.  They can list long and hard all the things that are wrong with the organization.  However, ask them what to do about any of it and they will quickly tell you that it is not their job to fix it.  If you are the boss, you need to sort them out.  Tell them t

This Year It Will Be Different   The new calendar year is always a time for reflection and goal setting.  We get a few days off and can put some distance between ourselves and the everyday bustle and minutiae of the business.  This affords an opportunity to think more strategically about where we want to be over the next few years and how to get there.  We look at our waist line and think we should strike a blow for freedom and do something about removing that fatty liver build up.  We also know this is not our first rodeo and we have done and said all this before. We have notes scattered amongst bits of paper or maybe even collected diligently in one place.  If you want a good laugh, go back and look at what you said you would do in the business or personally, a few years ago.   But this year it will be different.  Well, the Einstein take on insanity was repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  We were crazy kids in the past, but now we have seen the light.  So far so g

“Never Forget A Customer; Never Let A Customer Forget You”   This is an old saying in sales and one we forget at our cost.  We might have made the sale and then we keep moving forward.  We get wrapped up in the intricacies of the getting other customers to commit and in the logistical details of delivering our previously sold service or product.  Our schedule fills up quickly and we have filled it with the present and future, not the past.  That customer we sold to gets forgotten in this busy life and they return the compliment and forget about us too.  We know that creating new customers is more expensive on an acquisition cost basis and that selling again or selling more to our existing customers is easier than making a new sale.  Why then don’t we do a better job of developing further business with our existing customers?   We usually do a good job in the immediate post sales service period, but the key word there is “immediate”.  We don’t schedule in the “just checking in “ contact, because we are too bus

I’m Not Negative, I’m Realistic. Really?   Japan is a highly risk averse culture, so it is also a workplace with a lot of negativity built into it.  The best way to avoid mistakes is to make sure there are no unforeseen problems. That means being negative about ideas and propositions, until it is proven that the risk factor is super low or even better, non-existent.  We all have negative ideas floating around in our heads.  Our poisonous self talk can be based on ancient humiliations from things that failed in the past, concern for the future and recent poundings by the boss for screwing up.  In japan, when we lump a whole bunch of people together in an enterprise or a project, the tone can easily turn negative, unless we make sure it doesn’t. That is the boss’s job – turn back the tide of negativity and get the whole contraption moving forward.    There are five drivers we can use in this process.   Self-confidence In our modern world, where risk, challenge, change and competition are in engaged in mortal

Team Success Is No Accident   What are some things we can do to make sure our teams are operating at a high level.  We see plenty of dysfunctional teams in operation and the opportunity costs of this are prohibitive, in today’s super competitive environment.  Quite simply if our team is better than the competition, then we will win.  It is a team against team equation here.  How well we work together, the degree of engagement, motivation, commitment and innovation is what wins the day.  Getting this equation to work is no given and there are best practices which do work.   Define and agree on a collective vision Often the senior executives come up with the vision and then cascade it down throughout the firm.  The troops were usually not involved, so it is received from on high. Well even if they were involved, as new troops arrive they were not part of the creation process, so involvement is only a piece of the puzzle.    What is more important is creating a culture where decisions and work are executed, ba

Japanese Young Grads: “I Want To Start At The Top Thank You”   One great thing about those fresh out of University in Japan joining the workforce is they are fully primed to start at the top and work their way up.  Grinding it out to gain experience and insight is boring.  “Hey Boss, whisper the magic formula in my ear, so I can skip all that tedium” is their most attractive career plan.  How do we manage young people who do not want to be like their sempai or seniors?   In the past, such unrealistic expectations would have been knocked out of them pretty quickly. Their bosses would have straightened them out about what they are supposed to do – work like a dog for forty years, so you can retire on a company pension.  They would have been given them the worst, most boring jobs to teach them the ropes from the very start.  Progress would have been glacial and the mindlessness of the some of the tasks, asphyxiating.  “That is how we roll around here in Japan work world”, was the culture.  Well that used to be i

How To Become A Team Builder Extraordinaire   In our organization, we may be asked to create a new division, new section, create a new team around a new piece of business or create a project team.  Well then, where should we start?  What is the best practice around doing this?  Is there a handy road map we can follow, to make this a bit more friction free?  Fortunately, we don’t have to work this out for ourselves or use any expensive  trial and error construct.  There are six stages for establishing an effective team.   Stage One: Formation The team leader’s job in the “forming” stage is to create a team bristling with trust, establish a clear structure, set the goals and direction and assign roles according to experience, fit, potential and capability.  In the first days, a lot of energy will be spent defining the team and its responses.  This is especially the case around determining what we are not going to do, just as much as what we will do.  The planning work is in Quadrant Two of time management – not

Leader Roles We Must Play   LinkedIn posts can throw up some valuable insights and contributions.  I am posting everyday, so I aim to be in that category.  I also look for interesting things that other people are posting that will help me.  Someone called Tamray Vora created an infographic called Nine Roles For GREAT Leadership.  Whether these role designations were Tamray’s original contribution or the infographic medium is the contribution I don’t know, but anyway, great work Tamray and thank you for sharing.   I liked this infographic because it does draw out our roles very well.  Architect refers to the leader setting the vision, mission, values and clarity in the business.We all know this but do our people know it. Does the most newly joined, most junior person know what the Vision of the organization is?  When we do leadership training in companies we take the nicely framed Vision, Mission, Values statement off the wall and turn it around so no one can read it. When we ask for these key drivers of the

Do You Have To Be A Saint When Leading In Japan?   Leadership can be broken up into two main activities.  One is making sure that the processes of the operation are all delivering what they should, when they should and where they should.  This is relatively straightforward, because usually all the processes are known and the people doing them have done them before and know what to do.  There are clear measurements around quantity, quality, and timeliness, so we can keep track of how we are doing.    The other aspect of leadership is building our people.  This means constantly skilling up to meet the changing demands of business, to make sure they are highly engaged and producing both effectively and efficiently. We need innovation in business to move forward and the people reporting to us are usually great sources of innovative ideas - if we are able to get them to care.   How we make the operation run smoothly is a choice.  We can be a tyrant and brutalise our people, using fear, retribution, punishment and

 AI Armageddon   Software development went down two paths. One was as a means to better control the employees and the other was to empower them.  China’s ubiquitous face recognition technology is way beyond anything predicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”.  This is the software control function on steroids.  On the other side, technology has freed up our time, has made complex processes incredibly fast and economical.  The technology itself is just a tool, so managers need to make the decision to harness it as a shackle or as a springboard.  AI will just take this whole decision making process further and faster.    We fear AI will take away jobs and that fear is predicated on our historical understanding of the advances in technology to date.  Luddites saw their textile making craft decimated by steam powered machines.  Horse drawn carriages were replaced by cars.  Those carriage building craftsmen lost their jobs.  Salespeople working for newspapers sold job ad space to companies and it was a ri

Modern Leaders Fear Talent In The Ranks   Business today has become vicious.  Having a long career in a company is not something that is highly probable anymore. Firms have no compunction about throwing people on the scrapheap, despite the years of loyal service they have put in.  We have all become part of the gig economy, only some of us haven’t worked that one out yet.  Just look at banking.  Having a long career in banking was once a thing.  Not today.  People are forced to move, divisions are expunged and the people are shed as easily as cats shed their fur.  Bin liners are handed out and low paid, burly security guards see you off the premises. Industry after industry, tenure has become a tenuous construct.   Politics in big organizations, patronage, new brooms, new boards, new shareholders – you name it, there are multiple launching pads in companies now ready and able to blast you out of the organization.  In this mix isn’t it natural for leaders to look for places to get a fingernail hold? If there a

Leaders Who Don’t Know What They Don’t Know And Why It Matters   In 1955, psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, in a burst of errant egotism, foisted the words Johari Window on the world.  It is a clever idea, with a dog of a name (Joe + Harry).  A bit like those hokey Mum and Pop company names, formed by combining the spouses two personal names.  Anyway, they came up with a cognitive psychological tool to analyse our behavior. They created four quadrants named Arena, Facade, Blind Spot and Unknown.  Arena referred to things about yourself which were known to you and others. Façade were things known to you, but not others.  Blind Spot was not known to you, but known to others and Unknown was not known to you or others.   We were recently doing some leadership training and looking at the Blind Spot leader areas in Japan. What were some things that leaders were doing in Japan that they were unaware of, but which were obvious to their followers.  The group nominated being self-centered as one of them.

What Type of Leaders Do Followers Want In Japan?   Leaders want many things from followers.  Results, top line, bottom line, efficiency, cost  cutting, loyalty, engagement, consistency, honesty, skills, etc.  Great, but so what?  I love that Yogi Berra quote about leading is easy, getting people to follow you is the hard bit. As you might expect from a professional baseball player, that is pretty straight to the point, and what we would expect from someone who did well in one of the most fierce meritocracies on the planet.  So what do followers want from their leaders?     They want effective leaders.  Fine, but what does that mean in practice?  We recently held some leadership training and the participants were asked about what they meant by effective leaders. They want leaders to praise their people.  This sounds pretty straightforward doesn’t it, except that few leaders make the time to do it or do it regularly enough.  I am one of them!!!    I do appreciate how hard my team works, but my own busy, busy hi

What Type of Leaders Don’t Followers Want In Japan?   During a leadership training session here we looked at what the group thought were the traits of ineffective leaders.  Followers are pristine boss watchers.  They scrutinise the boss every day for a safety readout.  Is today the time to raise my idea about that project.  Is the coast clear to ask for money for this project. How is the mood for granting my leave approval?  Every nuance of facial, body and voice expression are minutely dissected to see if this is a fight or flight moment of interaction with the boss.  Miraculously bosses forget this and don’t recall how skilled they were at studying their own bosses, when they were on their way up through the ranks.  There were things we didn’t like about our bosses, but have we cleverly overlooked them in our own regard?   Staff don’t like bosses who give very little or no feedback.  Often the traits that self select bosses work against this.  They can be ippiki okamior lone wolf types.  They are independen