The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Most leaders genuinely want a strong relationship with their team, yet day-to-day reality can be messy—especially when performance feels uneven. The trap is thinking "they should change." The breakthrough is realising: you can't change others, but you can change how you think, communicate, and lead.  Why do leaders get annoyed with the "80%" of the team (and what should they do instead)? Because the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) makes it feel like you're paying for effort you're not getting—but the fix is to lead the whole system, not just the stars. In most teams, a smaller group carries a disproportionate chunk of the output, and that can irritate any manager trying to hit targets, KPIs, OKRs, or quarterly numbers.   But treating the "80%" as a problem creates a self-fulfilling spiral: you spend less time with them, they feel it, motivation drops, and performance follows.  In Japan-based teams (and in global teams post-pandemic, with hybrid work and remote collaboration), this spiral gets worse because "rel