The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

Managing Up   Why do we want to manage up? All the brains and good ideas in an organization don’t exclusively aggregate to the top of the hierarchy. In fact, one of the depressing aspects of becoming a leader, with responsibilty for others, is that you are taken away from the front line.  This is especially the case if you have been enjoying working with clients and in your new vice-regal role, you can only do that osmotically, through others in your team. You rapidly find yourself out of date with what is happening in the market and the nitty gritty of what is going on in the front line.    You see the macro numbers and can see trends, but you don’t see what is fully behind those numbers. This means that the people at the bottom will always have a perspective on the business that is denied to the boss. This is okay, as long as the boss is tapping into the knowledge and viewpoint of those in the field, those on the front line.  In a perfect word that would be the case, but in this time poor world, that is not

Mentor Others To Help Yourself   The title sounds terrible doesn’t it.  So selfish and self-serving.  The truth is we don’t mentor others because we are too busy and we can’t justify the distraction from concentrating on our own business.  That may be true, but we all know that great aphorism about “work on your business, not just in your business”.  This idea invites us to climb out of the mud, blood and chaos of daily battle in business, to check we have our ladder up against the right wall. When we look at the situation of others, we become geniuses, but somehow we are too close to our own micro world, to apply the same level of insight.  Mentoring gives us a chance to think without the internally induced pressure and therefore to see things which we are often blind to.   Finding people to mentor isn’t hard.  Within your company or business circles there will be no shortage of people who can use some additional help and will be open to learning from someone more senior and a lot more experienced.  “You can

Five Phase Practical Creative Thinking   More, faster, better with less sounds ideal, but if you are continuing to do the same things, in the same way, then the sadly, results will be the same.  That means we need to be introducing changes. The creative quotient in change has the capacity to really lift our game.  Are we maximizing the total power of the group to come up with creative interventions, which will impact our performance?  Usually the boss is barking out orders like a mad pirate or is shredding ideas from the group, as they begin to hatch.  This destroys any individual motivation to put up any further ideas and plunges the future of the organisation into idea darkness.  Not ideal.   We all know that the ability to think creatively, analyse problems and opportunities in new innovative ways are critical organisational skills, which are still underdeveloped here in most companies in Japan.  We want new discoveries, better ways of doing things, reduced costs and improved performance, but we often defe

Coaching People Out Of Downward, Negative Spirals   You are resilient, sturdy, capable, independent, hardy, self-motivated, constantly pushing and challenging the organization to go forward.  You don’t need anything in terms of social recognition or internal worth validation from others.  You are the leader and you get the job done.  Bully for you. The issues arise with those working for you, who are not like you.  They may be younger, less experienced, less educated, less confident and less convinced they can change the world through working at your firm.   Leading a bunch of clones is easy, because everyone gets it and they will file into line on command. We never get this situation though, unless we are in the elite military units perhaps, where a fearsome pruning process has been applied to whittle the punters down to the right group of super high achievers.  What we get is what the person or people before us hired and which the company can afford.  We may be able to hire a few of our own selections while

Celebrating Wins When Doing Business In Japan   We imagine we are celebrating our wins, but are we really?  I think about myself and I realize, I am not doing it.  This is a good reminder for myself, that I should be doing it more often. Japan is a highly risk averse culture, so when we ask people to step out of their comfort zone, they are hesitant to do so.  Most people don’t like change, so there needs to be encouragement and recognition to do so. Avoiding risk, responsibility and accountability are gold medal winning traits on the part of most Japanese people. This is their risk averse nature coming through.   We are all looking for innovation and progress and that means doing things we aren’t automatically good at, it means mistakes and possible failures.  All of these things get penalized in Japan. No wonder people like doing the same and safe routines they are familiar with.  We have to think about how to reward people for stepping up and stepping out.    That means praise and recognition and celebrati

Handling Mistakes In Business In Japan   Mistakes happen.  The important thing though is how we handle mistakes in Japan?  How do you handle mistakes by your staff?  We want innovation , we want improvement, we want people stepping out to grow the business.  The problem in Japan is making a mistake is taken very seriously and bosses will berate staff for errors and colleagues will be less than supportive. Consequently, staff have learned to avoid all possibility of making a mistake by not taking any risks and by avoiding all additional responsibility and accountability.  We want the opposite, but the problem is people are reluctant to do that.  When mistakes happen everyone is watching to see how the boss will react and handle the problem.  They are all thinking what will happen to me, if I make a mistake.  When they see their colleagues being hauled over the coals, they judge that is something to avoid. The best way to avoid that, is keep doing the same old safe things and don’t try anything new.   So we nee

  Time When Doing Business In Japan   Time is life, time is money and time is your business.  Business decisions are glacial here in Japan but buyer expectations of you regarding your response and follow times are exceedingly high.  Tokyo especially bustles along.  You see it in the mornings. I catch my subway train around 7.15am in the morning and to my astonishment I see people dressed for business, running through the subway station.  Why are they running at 7.15am in the morning? Who knows, but it just reinforces that things are moving fast here in this crazy capital.  The pace of life is fast so we have to be very well organised to keep up with buyer’s expectations.   It is so much harder to be well organised today.  Emails are hitting our inboxes like a tsunami, just wave upon wave of new emails, without remorse and without relent.  You cannot call any one anymore either because they are in meetings, everyone is in meetings.  You know your email will get drowned in their inbox and you cannot get them on