THE Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan podcast

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Leadership

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The War and Treaty Are Getting Carried Away 46:55

11 hours前46:55

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46:55

The War and Treaty’s Michael and Tanya Trotter grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and Washington, DC, respectively, but both have family roots in the South. They also grew up in the musical traditions of their churches – Tanya in the Black Baptist Church and Michael in the Seventh Day Adventist Church – where they learned the power of song to move people. After becoming a father at a very young age, Michael eventually joined the armed forces and served in Iraq and Germany, where he took up songwriting as a way of dealing with his experiences there. Meanwhile Tanya embarked on a singing and acting career after a breakthrough appearance in Sister Act 2 alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Lauryn Hill. Now, after a long and sometimes traumatic journey, Michael and Tanya are married, touring, winning all sorts of awards, and set to release their fifth album together, and their fourth as The War and Treaty. Sid talks to Michael and Tanya about the new record, Plus One , as well as their collaboration with Miranda Lambert, what it was like to record at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, and how they’re blending country, soul, gospel, and R&B. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…

THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

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THE Leadership Japan Series is powered with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The Series is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of leadership, who want to the best in their business field.

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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

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updated 約 6 日前

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Leaders Need To Empty Their Cup 13:41

約 6 日前13:41

13:41

Tokusan the scholar visited Ryutan the Zen Master to learn about Zen. Tokusan was a very smart fellow and very confident in his knowledge and experience. He was good at impressing others with his capabilities and many people looked to him for guidance and advice. After about ten minutes of conversation, Ryutan invited Tokusan to enjoy some green tea. As the Zen master poured the hot tea into the cup, the tea began to flood over the brim, but Ryutan kept pouring the tea. Tokusan became agitated and said to stop pouring, because the cup was already full. Ryutan then told Tokusan that he couldn't understand Zen until he emptied his own mental cup, to allow new ideas to enter. This is a famous zen story in Japan and we leaders are Tokusan. We can be convinced of our ideas and become stubborn and inflexible about departing from them. We have risen through the ranks based on our abilities, experience and results. We had to work things out for ourselves and our decisions were correct. Over time we came to believe in ourselves and our decisions and we would plough ahead regardless of what others might have thought. We have always had to overcome resistance. We are now in the leader danger zone. There is tricky line between knowing what you are doing and actually being correct. We became the boss because our previous ideas were proved correct and superior to what others were advocating. We have seen off the idiots, doubters, naysayers, critics and rivals. We have climbed the greasy pole and they haven’t. Everyone should listen to us and believe what we say, because we are right and they are wrong. Case closed. This is the classic hero journey favoured by the independent, tough, driven, Type A, alpha mammals. For a very long time this worked just fine. Business however has grown more enmeshed with technology changes. More complex organisations have arisen and operate at hyper speed. Also, a different animal has been entering our companies, coming in straight out of college. Are we actually able to deal with these unparalleled changes? Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution put more importance of adaptability than strength or brains. Are we maintaining our full cup and therefore not well placed to adapt? Are we trying to do it all by ourselves? Many bosses are unable to hire smart people, because they cost too much, relative to the size of the cash flow in the company. Others won’t hire smart people, because they are scared of becoming a victim of future corporate internecine struggles, where they can be replaced with someone younger and cheaper. How exactly can we work through others? Covid-19 has disrupted business globally and the future is uncertain. How do leaders know what to do going forward? How do you know if your strategy is the correct one or not? Strong willed leaders see asking others for advice as a sign of timidity and weakness. They have attached their personal inner resilience to always knowing the correct answer, to being right, to being smarter and more savvy than everyone else. Complexity today exceeds the capability of one person leading the team to have all the answers. A superman or superwoman is no longer required. What happens though if you, as the leader, have low self awareness and can’t see that you need to empty your cup? Exactly how do you empty your cup? What should go inside the now empty cup? Lack of self awareness is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. Once that is accomplished then the emptying and refilling of the cup can start to happen. We have to face ourselves and ask why do we think we are able to keep operating as we have always done, when the current situation is more difficult. There are no indications we are ever going back to how things used to be? Emptying the cup requires humility, often in short supply with powerful leaders. Running faster, pushing aside and overtaking the other lemmings to ultimately be sprinting off the cliff, is of no help. This is the moment to stop and consider your own cup. Is it full of your baloney, that you have convinced yourself is correct? Have you surrounded yourself with “yes men” or the meek and compliant? Have you bullied everyone into submission? Are there ways to tap into more ideas and solutions than you can possibly produce by yourself? Are there people closer to the action on a daily basis, who will have greater and better insights than you can possibly have. Your frontline experience is way out of date by now, as you have arisen through the ranks over these many years. This is scary. Your self belief is what has driven you thus far and questioning it unravels a lot of your personal construct about your right to lead others. That is the old model of leadership, so let it go. The used by date has expired on that one. Empty your cup and your ego and find ways of learning more from others, including those who work for you and may even be quite junior. Tokusan thought he knew everything until Ryutan started pouring that tea. I am pouring your tea for you right now and challenging whether your cup is going to stay full or will you make the effort to empty it?…

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Leadership-Key Competencies Needed To Lead Others – Part Two 12:24

約 13 日前12:24

12:24

In Part One we looked at two broad categories of leadership competences around being Self-Aware and having Accountability. In this next tranche, we will look at being Others-Focused and at being Strategic. Others-Focused has many sub-points, but today we will investigate five key aspects Inspiring Through role modelling and communication skills, leaders can and should inspire followers. The olde days of the boss having to know more than everyone else has gone. The focus has shifted to developing followers, through personal interest and example. Are you consciously, systematically doing this? Develops Others Once upon a time, certainly when I first started work, there was no particular concept that it was the leader’s role to develop others. Individuals had to step up and do it by themselves. This is fundamentally what all leaders had done in the past. Today however, business is more complex and fast moving, so everyone needs help. One of the issues is the struggle between selfishly focusing on your own glorious career and the role of others in boosting that cause and your own efforts to selflessly boost the careers of your direct reports. Companies need leader producing machines. The talented rise faster and higher by demonstrating they are that very elevating machine. Those who can demonstrate they can produce leaders are given a bigger remit to do that at scale. Can you do it and are you doing it? Positively Influences Others Rabid rivalry and internecine warfare between competing thrusters amongst the leadership team permeate the wrong messages to those below. Disciples pin their hopes to the banner of the thruster they think will go higher and take them with them. Everyone is grasping the greasy pole, trying to climb over each other to the top. Politicians and sycophants abound inside companies and are a vicious form of poison, because they are playing all ends against the middle to feather their own nest. The leader sets the tone. Not whining about others in the company, not playing petty internal power games and keeping firmly focused on beating the external rivals is the correct path. Are you and all of your colleagues on it? Effectively Communicates Personal capabilities and mastery of one’s designated tasks are the usual path to promotion. Being 100% responsible for oneself is different to being responsible for a team. This is where leadership communication skills are soon shown to be frayed and tatty. Speaking the lingua franca is frankly so what? Communicating key messages and inspiring and persuading others to your path are the required skills. Few leaders do a great job because many are locked into the belief that all this communication stuff is fluff and hard skills are the only currency. They are doomed to be low altitude flight path denizens, because companies are looking for people who can move the masses forward. Is what you are doing every day moving them forward? Providing Direction This sounds so simple. I mean how hard can this be? What if it is the wrong direction though? What if we are all being urged to sprint faster off the cliff? This is the VUCA world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Setting the correct direction isn’t the easiest thing for leaders these days. We can’t know if the direction is correct until we start down the path. The clue is to adjust when confronted by unpleasant hints about the actual truth. We need to keep adjusting to the market realities and not become too convinced of our own genius and superiority. Has your leader ego convinced you that you are always correct? Being strategic is one of those tropes of leadership, but what does it actually involve? Let’s look at couple of issues. Innovative This competency sounds obvious and easy except that very few companies, let alone people, are actually innovative. Think of all the companies you have worked for and nominate how many came up with any significant innovations? We are better off developing the innovation muscle of the entire team, than relying on our own scampy offerings. If you are substantially personally gifted in the innovation department then hats off to you. How many people like you then have you ever worked with? The answer is clear. The collective team, if harnessed properly to the task of coming up with innovative ideas, can do it together. The sticking point is, do you know how to marshal your team to do that? Solves Problems The is another obvious competency, except that are you the one running yourself ragged solving everything? Have you delegated tasks sufficiently so that others can share the burden? Leaders should be involved with big strategic issues, not with every small fry decision. If you are in the problem weeds and getting down and dirty with minor issues, it is time to rethink how you have positioned yourself as a leader. Uses Authority Appropriately Does every decision have to run by you? Are you in too many meetings? Are you hooked on your own authority and feel the need to be on top of everything? Developing staff means letting go and giving them some things to try and possibly fail with. “There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities” is a good mental intervention, for when your staff screw things up. Delegating your own power is a tough one for driven leaders. However, if you want to rise, you have to breed successors like rabbits, so that there are plenty of people to take over so that you can rise up the ranks.…

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How Decisions Are Really Made Inside Japanese Companies 13:54

約 16 日前13:54

13:54

The President of a company is a very powerful force. They drive the direction, the strategy and the culture formation inside the enterprise. In Western corporations, there are big salaries and big incentives tied to the leader’s performance, especially around profit achievement and share price gains for shareholders. We project this idea on to Japanese companies and imagine they are basically built in the same way. This idea seems fine, until you ever have to get a decision from a Japanese company. This is when you enter the twilight zone of differences about how things are really done here. Japan has some specific features which make the leadership terrain quite unique. Mid-career hires are the norm in the West and the exception in Japan, as far as larger firms are concerned. New graduates are malleable and the company leadership wants to install their group think, culture and conservative action methodologies in them. Seniority is a respected Confucian attribute in Japan, which has little currency in the Darwinian, performance outcomes oriented West. Age and stage make sense in Japan, when you spend your entire career with the one firm and are part of the fabric of that company, gradually being stitched in over decades. The risk aversion predominance in Japanese business weighs against change and bolsters constancy. We foreigners represent change. To become a trusted partner with a Japanese firm means they have to make some internal changes to accommodate the new thing we bring to them or the old thing we are tweaking in a new way. The question is, who inside the Japanese decision making hierarchy is going to take responsibility for the change. In Western companies there is a big personal payoff to taking risks, but Japanese salaries and bonuses are not on the same planet as a country like America. So, the upside of taking a risk in Japan is far outweighed by the potential career damage if there is a failure. We have all grown up with a British Raj model of decision making. Convert the leaders and you get the whole company to snap into gear and get with your programme. It doesn’t work like that here unless the President is the founder or the owner. This is the “one man shacho” formula, the classic dictator President, who rules with an iron fist and drives everyone to do what ever they say. Most big corporates though, have a structure where the President has P&L responsibility for the whole company, but the direct reports have P&L responsibility for their part of the business. The President can’t force them to make expenditure allocations impacting their turf without their agreement. Hence the reputation of Japan as the country of glacial decision making. I find this is a bit boring, because the Raj approach is much faster and easier for me. No one in Japan could care less what I want. I deal with a lot of Presidents, as I try my best “convert the Raj” techniques to get them to buy my training services. Being the President of my firm, I can get access to the senior echelons of the client company and get a hearing. This is where Western logic departs from Japanese best practice. The leaders I speak with won’t personally do anything themselves. The company has internal compliance methodologies to reduce risk and protect the firm. The work to investigate my idea will get sent right down to the very bottom of the pile. That lower level designated officer or tanto will start pulling together information on our company, our offer, our pricing, the market, the competitors, resources required and the prospective ROI. The tanto will then present that report to their superior, the next up the line, who if they approve it, will place their hanko or personal seal on the document. This is a public acknowledgment that it has passed their stringent evaluation process and they are willing to take responsibility and place it before their superior. The hanko marks on the document will also include any divisions or sections that will be impacted by the buying decision. This is an internal harmonisation and communication process to provide checks and balances. In this way, there are no surprises and no issues, when it comes to coordinating the execution piece. This process is repeated all the way up to the President’s direct reports who have P&L responsibility to fund the deal. If it is a big enough decision, there may be a senior executive meeting required. This is usually a formality to bless the decision, rather than make a decision. The plan executive sponsor will outline the idea at the meeting, there will be no questions and it is therefore agreed. Next item! The surprising thing is that the President isn’t the final decision maker. And I had such a good meeting with that President too and I thought I had the Raj technique working on steroids! Actually, the person I needed to meet was the tanto . I could either work with them directly or I could supply the information they required, for them to do their due diligence. When meeting with the President, I need to finish the meeting off, by asking to have my people get together with their tanto , to supply whatever information they need. Japan being such a polite culture, the President will happily make that introduction even if knowing that there is no chance of this deal going anywhere. This is because it conveniently avoids anyone having to tell me a direct “no”. If it has legs, then the tanto’s job is to navigate the decision through the system. So in Japan, it is better to start at the bottom and work your way up, than try to go top down, as we are more familiar with in the West. The tanto has to become a key messenger for us. If we can’t win over a relatively junior, seemingly unimportant staff member to our cause, then the decision outcome will be remain vague and lifeless. Now we don’t want that do we.…

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Leadership-Key Competencies Needed To Lead Others-Part One 14:11

約 20 日前14:11

14:11

Leading is super easy. You are given the title, the authority, the budget, the power and then you just tell people what they need to do. How hard can that be? As we know, leading is a snap, but getting others to follow you is the tricky bit. Our awesome power will certainly bludgeon compliance. Sadly, the troops turn off their commitment and engagement switch whenever they come into contact with kryptonite bosses. We get promoted because we personally did a rather good job on our individual tasks. That is a false flag though when it comes to being able to communicate, coach, set the direction and inspire others. Few great athletes become great coaches. It is a totally different skill set. There are four broad areas we will focus on to help us become successful leaders: Being Self-Aware, Accountable, Others-Focused and Strategic. The possibilities are endless, but these four areas will serve us well to elevate our thinking about what is required to be a great leader. Under the umbrella of Self-Awareness we have four focus areas. Self-Directed There is a mental and physical requirement for leadership, driven by a strong desire to be successful. We explore inside ourselves to understand what we need to do and why we need to do it. Someone who can only function on the basis of the advice of others is a follower not a leader. Of course, taking advice is good, but leaders have their own sense of True North and keep moving forward, charting their own course Self-Regulated Being a self-regulator requires supreme discipline. Knowing what not to do is as important as making action step choices. Shiny objects abound, multiplying like amoeba, but time, money and resources are limited. Be it business focus or our temper, we need to rein them both in and assert control. Develops Self Constant application of self-improvement sounds obvious, but many leaders are cruising. The more diligent may be doing a good job working in the business, but they are too busy to be working on the business. Is that you? Technology, society, company culture and organisational development overtake some leaders and ultimately they are ejected from the firm. Where is the locus of self-development to be found? Good question and there are multiple options. Good choices will have a lasting impact on our longevity as leaders. Confident “We don’t know what we don’t know” is a big problem. Before you become a leader there is that misplaced confidence that you know what to do in the role. As you rise through the ranks, you keep making new discoveries. The more you learn, the less you find you really know. Imposter syndrome is a big factor here after we step up into new responsibilities. Constant self-development is the cure for this, as we grow into the job. Accountability covers four sub-topics. Competent This is often mistaken for technical knowledge or business content cover. That capability within your old job is what thrust you into a leadership role. What about your competency as the leader? What do you really know about leading? How persuasive are you? How well do you understand the aspirations of the team? Can you coach others who are just not like you? Can you set the correct course in a raging sea? This requires study and doesn’t happen by osmosis. Honest and Having Integrity Are you honest? Would your people agree? Seeing people as cogs in the machine elevating your brilliant career, jousting with rivals for the next job using the team resources for that purpose and being all about me, me, me is often the leader reality. Think about some of your bosses up to this point. The crust on top of this reality is a false veneer disguising what is really going on. Subterranean self-interest is often voiced over with pious pronouncements. Being honest is about sincerely wanting to develop the team members and integrity is what you do or think when no one is observing you. Manages Progress Towards Goals Obvious. Yet are the goals clear to your team? Is there an intelligent plan? Are people engaged and bought in? Are you the pirate captain simply bellowing out orders and threatening the crew with the plank? Makes Effective Decisions When do you know a decision was effective? Certainly never at the time of making it. In that moment, we are working on hope rather than certainty. Are the team convinced of the wisdom of the decision? Was there any input opportunity for them? Does our power of personality or position power just crush access to the diversity of opinions available? When it isn’t working, are we trapped by pride, ego and arrogance to keep running faster off the cliff? In Part Two, we will investigate being Others Focused and Strategy for Leaders.…

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The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune Running A Virtual Team 14:06

約 27 日前14:06

14:06

Japan has some set pieces around leadership. The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen. This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t. They can be observed every day, all day long. What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss. Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, what is happening with that report?”. Now many of the team are at home, away from the constant surveillance of the boss. The boss has little idea how they spend their days and our clients tell us many Middle Managers are still struggling to supervise the diaspora. In many cases, the day would start with the chorei, the morning huddle, getting the team together to go through what is on for that day. These meetups can continue even when everyone is at home. During Covid, we moved it online. Everyone had to be on camera at 9.00am, dressed for business, rather than in a T-shirt. If they didn’t come on camera that was a red flag. There may have been some depression issues bubbling away in the background, as the isolation started to get to people. They began to withdraw. One of my team didn’t come on camera for three days in a row, saying there was an issue with the laptop webcam. Was there really an issue? How would I know that was the case, sitting in my study, at my home? I immediately started organising another laptop to be sent out. I need to see everyone’s face every day, to check how they are doing. In the end, it was a technical issue around the privacy settings in Teams. The point though is, I didn’t really know what was going on. I have to be continuously keeping an eye out for the emergence of any stress or depression in my team. At the chorei we would go through good news reports, the vision, mission, values, the Dale Carnegie Principle for that day, who we are visiting virtually or otherwise and who was visiting us, each person’s top three priorities for the day and a motivational quote. The whole thing took about ten minutes. I usually spent another ten minutes talking about things like taking care of your health, standing up regularly because we tend to sit for too long, issues around coordination which have arisen, the latest news in our business, the cash flow situation and recognising good work. We also had Coffee Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day for anyone who wants to just shoot the breeze and catch up with colleagues, they don’t physically meet anymore. It wasn’t that popular so we dropped it. The meeting cadence with direct reports continued online but it was easy for this to fade or drift. People’s new work from home schedules seem to make it harder to connect. Back in February 2020, when we started working from home, it had a temporary feel about it. On reflection, I didn’t immediately embed some processes I should have. These direct report meetings were a discipline I found I had to really enforce, because many of my staff seem to possess ninja level skills at avoiding talking with boss. I usually want stuff from them, I want it yesterday and I am very demanding. Talking with me is probably a pain, so some are quite creative in escaping the supervision. The biggest issue was coordination across the whole business, as we all descended into our little pockets of responsibility and started losing sight of the big picture. I had to spend a lot more time making sure that key information was being shared and that I was also sharing key information, rather than hogging it to myself. This was a time consuming activity, but we dropped the ball a couple of times because it wasn’t done properly. Before I knew it, timelines started to drift, activities dropped out of completion sequence and confusion was not far behind. This was when I discovered just how detail challenged some people in the team actually were. In the office it got covered off somehow. Being subterranean, it wasn’t noticeable. In isolation from each other however, wrong data inputs have a horrendous impact. They spark a lot of effort to clean up the mess created. It draws people away from what they should be doing, dragging them into the morass of re-work. We tried to get around these coordination and communication issues by creating one truth. There was a live document in Teams that everyone could access and all changes were noted there. As a training company, we had training events scheduled LIVE On Line or in the Super Safe Classroom, so we could see which ones were being executed, which were postponed, who was involved, etc. A limited number of people were allowed to feed into this document to enforce accountability and control. Today, with people at home, you may need a similar live document that tells everyone what is going on, which is being updated continuously as things change. GIGO (garbage in garbage out) is an issue for any document, so the details have to be monitored carefully. To overcome the isolation, one on one meetings were being held more frequently than when we were in the office. However, I found it even harder than normal to get hold of people because they are often holding online meetings or were on the phone. In the office, I could just walk over to their desk and signal to them to see me after they finished their call or grab them when they came back from their meeting. I find our younger people are not phone savvy. They don’t check their phones for incoming calls they have missed. This wastes a lot of time trying to get hold of people, so I had to be pretty bolshie with them, about checking their phones for missed messages and to check their voice mail regularly. It is a real pain, but sending emails or text messages as well seems to be the way to get their attention. Many people are still working from home and are liberated from the daily grind of commuting in Tokyo which is good. They are not necessarily pouring this extra time into their work though. As the boss, I have had to become a much more “supervising” leader than before, which I actually hate. There are many more moving pieces now due to the residue of Covid-19, so whether I like it or not, I have become more interventionist to make sure it all hangs together. How about you? Has this been your experience too?…

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How To Have Executive Presence 13:51

5 weeks前13:51

13:51

Clients sometimes ask us to help their Japanese executives have more “presence”. This is rather a vague concept with a broad range of applications. There is a relevant Japanese concept called zanshin ( 残心 ). A rather difficult term to translate into English, but when you see it, you will recognise it. In Karate we do the predetermined, specified forms called kata (型). When someone is performing one of these kata, there are different points of emphasis and after the physical action is completed, there is a residual energy and intensity of commitment that continues. It is the same in the kumite (組手) or free fighting. After a powerful punch or kick is completed, the karateka keeps driving their energy, intensity and focus into their opponent. In business, we call this intensity “executive presence” but usually without the concomitant violence. When the executive makes a comment, there is an energy that remains after they have stopped speaking and the audience feels that intensity. We also call this having gravitas. Emilio Bortin was the CEO of the Santander Bank, which was a shareholder in the Shinsei Bank, when I was an executive there. He was visiting Japan to check on his investment and we were assembled to give him a presentation on what was happening with the Retail Bank. He was a broad shouldered but not so tall man, but when he entered the meeting room, he was like a Spanish Bull entering the arena, looking for a matador to emasculate. He completely filled that large room with his presence. It was absolutely palpable. He hadn’t even said a word, yet you felt his energy, intensity, determination, passion, strength and confidence. He was radiating zanshin - “presence” big time. “When I am a billionaire like Emilio baby, I will have presence too”, you might be thinking. So, did he get presence when he became a billionaire or did he become a billionaire, because he had presence? We know it was the latter. Right, very good, but how do we aspirant billionaire punters get executive presence? The energy being pumped out is a big factor. Low energy, low intensity people have zero zanshin and so zero presence. Softly spoken people can have presence too I guess, but frankly, you just don’t meet too many of those. There is a vast difference though between being raucous and loud and having presence. Being loud is basically just annoying. To have presence, your vocal strength and your body language must both be engaged at a higher than normal level. In casual conversation we speak at a certain level of intensity, usually fairly mild. When we are in a meeting or presenting, we need to ramp that up by at least 20%. When I am teaching participants in our classes to increase their vocal strength and speak more loudly, they struggle. I say to them “double that energy” and they raise by 1%. They resist because they feel like they are screaming. However, when they see themselves on video, it just seems confident and credible, not loud. This is one element of having presence. Pauses, ma (間), are another critical element. This space between the phrases or sentences, allows the audience to actually distill what you are saying. When you rush the words together, each thought overwhelms the previous thought. Each successive idea canibalises its predecessor and so not much content is consumed in the end. Our messages, in effect, are competing with each other. We speak at a good pace, so that the energy button has been pushed, but we need to break the content down to smaller brackets, which people can more easily digest. We are not rushing, so it shows control and no pressure being felt. This emanates confidence. We hit key words for additional emphasis, rather than allotting equal importance to each word. This focuses the audience attention on what we want them to focus on, rather than trying to ask them to swallow the whole talk, in one gulp. This communicates “I am confident”. This level of control requires us to be very concise. Too many words and the message becomes less clear, drowning in surplus words. We need to trim the fluffy bits right back. Our eye contact is a powerful engagement tool. Spraying the eye contact around the room is fake eye contact and meaningless. We focus 100% of our attention on one person, look them in the eyes for 6 seconds and then repeat the same formula with each person, one by one. They feel they are the only person in the room and we are speaking directly to them. Previous American President Bill Clinton was famous for his ability to engage strangers in crowds, when he was mixing with the masses. He focused his eye contact completely on that person in front of him and engaged them at the highest level. Standing up straight or sitting up straight is super easy, but few can do it. They kick out one hip when standing or sway around all over the place, while they are talking. It distracts from their message and dissipates their strength and intensity. When they are seated, they are sprawled out in their chair, looking way too casual to be taken seriously. They don’t use gestures and just talk, talk, talk. Talking way too much means they are always taking the long way round to get to the point. Little chance for zanshin in this case. Absolutely exude your belief, confidence and power from inside. Drive it into your audience. Use your voice and eyes for powering up your messages. Be concise, so you are distilling and focusing only on the key messages. Break the rhythm with pauses and engage people with your power eye contact. Strong posture says a lot about who you are. People believe body language, so ramp it up. This is how to have zanshin , which is the key to having executive presence.…

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Why We Need Phase Three Thinking 13:48

6 weeks前13:48

13:48

In business we live in the world of shallow statements of opinion. Imagine there is a topic for discussion amongst the leadership team. People will let fly with their thoughts and this becomes the basis for decision making, based on people’s statements on the matter. Usually everyone is pretty busy, so the drill is to listen to what was said and then make the choice from amongst the various alternatives and move on. There is a problem with this. We are trapped in Phase One thinking if we continue in this way. Phase One thinking is that first reaction level of contemplation on what you have just heard. Instantly, you pour out your immediate thoughts on the issue. The problem with this is, although it is quick and saves time, there is pretty light contemplation going on here. The famous Greek philosopher Socrates lived from 470-399 BC and was famous for his questioning techniques. He used this method to help others dig deeper into their thinking. We have to take inspiration from him and develop our own questioning techniques. If we do, we will get to a deeper realm of understanding of the issues. This is the platform we need to make the best decisions. I notice this issue in our training classes. When we ask someone for their opinion on something, they will give us an immediate Phase One answer. Because Dale Carnegie was a devotee of the Socratic method of asking questions, our teaching methods rely on us digging in a bit deeper. We are trained to never take what someone says at the Phase One Level, but to always push further. This applies to leadership and to sales. In both disciplines, the students in the classes are encouraged to go further and question more deeply. In sales, for example, imagine we were talking to a customer. They tell us they need the widget in green. We train our students to ask why they want it in green, as opposed to accepting the green option at face value. This gets us to a Phase Two much deeper answer. That is good information, but it isn’t enough. We need the client to go to Phase Three thinking and we do that through further questions. If they said they wanted green, because of XYZ reason, we don’t stop there. In Phase Three we ask, “what would be the impact on your business if your were able to get XYZ?”. We have now elevated the discussion to the achievement of their strategic goals. We have taken them to a much richer source of information to help them clarify what they are doing. In sales, we have started to position ourselves as the customer’s trusted advisor. In leadership it is the same thing. Members of the executive team will give their opinions on an aspect of the business. Normally we collect all of these various opinions and then we make a decision based on that discussion. Often, we are influenced by the force of personality behind the opinion. This is only Phase One thinking though. If we ask them to explain why they think that, we have now driven deeper down to Phase Two. Once we hear everyone’s Phase Two level of thinking, we could make a decision at this point. We shouldn’t stop there however, instead we should keep going. Push them to go to Phase Three and tap into their ideas on how XYZ would strategically impact the business. This is a tremendously simple process. It does take slightly longer than just tapping Phase One thinking outcomes, but the harvest is so much richer. We have all had the experience of having had a discussion with someone, often an argument and a couple of hours later, we are having a conversation with ourselves. We are telling ourselves genius things such as, “I should have said this” and “I should have said that” etc. This is because in the interval, our thinking has moved way beyond the simple Phase One responses we were applying in the conversation. We have moved to Phase Two and Phase Three thinking, but we have missed the boat. Instead of having to wait a couple of hours to get a richer response in meetings, as the leader, we have to get our Socrates mojo working and go for Phase Two and Phase Three responses right there and then. We have to guide our people to start thinking more strategically about the business. You will be surprised by the improved quality of thinking that you trigger. This means the leadership group discussion and the decisions made will also be much better. Let’s all decamp to the Phase Three world and live there from now on.…

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Kokorogamae For Leaders 11:58

7 weeks前11:58

11:58

Kokorogamae is one of those Japanese concepts which are a bit tricky to translate. Kokoro by itself as a word has a wide variety of meanings – mind, spirit, mentality, idea, thought, heart, feeling, sincerity, intention, will, true meaning, etc. It is a radical in the Japanese kanji ideographic script and so appears in a large number of compound words. Kamae comes from the verb kamaeru meaning take a posture, assume an attitude, be ready for, etc. In Japanese, when the two words are combined, there is a phonetic shift of the “k” in kamae to a “g” sound. I first heard these two Japanese words in my karate dojo back in 1971, but never as a compound word. Every class we were given the command “ kamae ”, meaning to take our fighting stance. For anyone doing Japanese martial arts, this is a very familiar word. The Kokorogamae concept is closely linked to Japanese ideas around perfectionism and mindset. You cannot produce a perfect output, if your mind is not properly aligned with the action. A great calligraphy master will establish their Kokorogame before they wield the brush, the ikebana master will do the same before they place the flowers, as will the master of tea ceremony before they begin to whisk the tea. They perfect their mindset, to produce the perfect output. In my first book Japan Sales Mastery, I wrote about Kokorogamae in the context of sales. What was your true intention as a salesperson. Was it to secure a big commission, bonus or promotion for yourself or was it to help the client to succeed in their business? The mindset is totally different and the output can be a single sale or a lifetime partnership with the client. If you are a salesperson, which is your intention? Leaders also have their Kokorogame. Hanging on many walls, protected behind glass, tastefully framed, clearly written is the Kokorogame of the organisation. In English, we call it the Vision, Mission, Values of the firm. Someone or a group of people, thought about where do we want to take the organisation in a perfect world, in other words what is the Vision going forward? What we do that is the Mission? Why we do that are the Values. This is the Kokorogamae at the macro level. The culture of the organisation is there to police the individual adherence to the corporate Kokorogamae. The leader’s key role is to bring clarity to the Why of what we are all doing. But where does that concept of the Why spring from? Simon Sinik has more or less, become the owner of the Why since his YouTube video went viral. The Kokorogamae concept starts up one step before what Simon is talking about. He concentrates on concentrating on the importance of establishing the Why, but how do you determine the Why of the Why? Where does that come from? This is where Kokorogamae is useful. It makes us reflect on what we believe and why we believe it. As the leader, is my true intention to build up the people in my team and help them become the absolute best that they can be? Or, are they there to serve me, to propel my rise through the corporate ranks, with them arrayed like worker bee slaves to me, the Queen bee. Just as in sales, these goals are not mutually exclusive. A famous sales trainer Zig Ziglar said, “you can have everything you want, if you just help other people get what they want”. Your Kokorogamae can create your own success wrapped up inside the success of your client. As a leader, you can rise through the ranks on the back of the results created by a highly engaged team, who feel you have their back and are focused on their success. The key point is where is the focus of your thoughts about the people in the business? How do you really see them, when we strip away all the psychobabble? To get better clarity on that, we can use the handy Japanese concept of tatemae and honne , meaning the superficial reality and the actual reality. Are you leading based on a tatemae version of what you are supposed to say and do or is the real you, the honne , the one your people see everyday? What is your true intention? What is your Kokorogamae as a leader regarding your team members and the organisation?…

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Holistic Time Management For Leaders 10:57

8 weeks前10:57

10:57

Leaders are now leading invisible people. Their staff are no longer in sight or at best are only visible in person a couple of days a week. What are their people doing at home? How are they spending their time, how motivated are they, how engaged? Being in the office brings a certain level of discipline with it. You can see if people are goofing off. In an open office environment, you can hear the phone conversations with clients to gauge what is going on. When people are at home though, there is no way to be sure the team are using their time effectively. Time is life. Time management is life management. The key tool to controlling time is the schedule, daily, weekly, monthly and annually. The temptation is to just imagine that time management is only about work time management. We are holistic beings, multifaceted, with multiple responsibilities. We play different roles in our lives and the work role is only one of those. Concentrating all of our time on work throws our lives out of balance. The schedule is the key tool, so what goes into that schedule determines the life we lead. We have parents or children or siblings or partners or friends. Devoting all of our tine to work means that these key personal relationships are starved of the time needed to be allocated to them, in order for us to have a more rounded life. If we are late for lodging our personal taxes, unfocused about our finances because we are too busy working, then we will suffer both now and in the future. Getting our financial lives in order needs time and that time is in our schedule. We either allocate the time for that purpose or it gets allocated for something else. Our health is the same. If we just work all of the time and don’t schedule time for exercise or relaxation, then we will encounter health issues. It is like running the machines 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The production numbers are initially impressive until the whole enterprise has shut down to spend time repairing the broken machines. We start by nominating the key roles we play in life. Work is certainly one of them, but not the only thing. After we establish the roles we play, we can now attach some goals for each of those roles. This becomes important, because the schedule prioritisation process will be run off the achievement of these goals. When we consider the competing goals, we have to make a choice about which goals have a higher priority than others and then time is allocated for the attainment of each of those goals. It sounds so simple and it is. The surprising thing is that you realise you are a multifaceted person and not just someone who works all the time. You need to allocate time to call your mother, to see the kids sports fixture, to go to the dentist, to check your bank accounts, to go for a run, etc. As the leader, this is the concept of time usage we need to be teaching to our team members. If you are running in the wrong direction, going faster doesn’t help. If you rapidly climb the ladder and find it is on the wrong wall, that doesn’t help. What do we want to have, do and be? We need to think about these aspects first, then set the direction, the goals to support that effort and the scheduling, based on priorities, to make it all a reality. Teaching people how to get more done each day at work is fine, but the modern leader needs to see their people in holistic terms. If they become sick or experience family breakups or financial instability because they only concentrated on time allocation for work, then they will not be able to fully contribute to the organisation. What’s more they will be very unhappy and unmotivated and that doesn’t produce the culture that breeds the quality of professionalism we need. The machine will break and require extended downtime. Having a key person in the business experience illness, which takes them out of the picture, can be devastating to the firm. We want our clients served by happy, engaged, healthy, satisfied and motivated staff. The leader’s job is to educate the team about proper holistic time management. If we do that, we will have a much more successful and sustained business. We all spend a lot of our time working, so making that a happy, fulfilling experience rests on getting all these aspects of people’s lives to be in alignment. For that, they need time and we teach them how to allocate that time in their schedules. Are you doing it?…

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Killing Rumours And Misconceptions 11:05

10 weeks前11:05

11:05

Staffing is a subject that gets a lot of attention from those within and without the organisation. Those outside see staff movements as a bellwether of how the company is travelling. High turnover indicates disruption and uncertainty about the future. Rapid high turnover indicates real trouble within the ranks. When executives arrive in Japan, they often discover a lot of deadwood and they get about cleaning them out. They are wholly focused on internal issues. The outside perspective hasn’t been a consideration in their minds. They have forgotten about their competitors and how they will try to use this information to damage the firm. They think they can operate in a vacuum. Japan being such a risk averse culture, unscrupulous rivals have a field day playing up your instability and therefore heightened risk as a business partner. I remember running ads for sales staff when I was in Osaka. I merrily ran the ads looking to expand the sales team. Now I knew that, but interestingly our rivals took that as a sign of weakness not strength. Japan loves secrets and rumours. With everyone living on top of each other for centuries, keeping secrets is almost impossible and salacious talk and spreading rumours are up there with dining out and shopping as national sports. It was made to look as if we were in chaos and there was high turnover in the ranks. Our customers began to ask probing questions about our stability. No doubt they were doing this after they had been briefed by our competitors on what a mess we were and how we were not a suitable supplier anymore. That negative fallout from the ads never occurred to me in a million years because I was upbeat, focused on the positive, the expansion, the growth. After that near death experience with our customers, I made sure that every ad thereafter had the explanation that we were hiring because we were expanding. What was the additional costs of including those few vital words in the ads – nothing. It was only my ignorance and single focus that allowed our rivals to seek a way in. The same issues can arise from within. Whenever there is an organisational change, do people start high fiving each other, celebrating the new structure as a way to steal a march on the competitors? No, they are concerned about losing their jobs, or having someone invade their turf, lose face, or being dragged kicking and screaming out of their comfort zone. This is a great breeding ground for rumours. The formal explanation of what and why this is happening never seems to outpace the rumours. The top executives are all on board with the changes, because they thought of them, but for everyone else, this is new. In the vacuum, the rumour mill kicks into high gear. The impact is that everyone forgets about the customer, the competitors and concerns themselves with their own best interests and imagining all the bad things that are about to unfold. We have to make sure that every person is spoken to directly and so quash the rumours and misinformation before THEY can gain momentum. Yes, this takes time. But the focus on the customer and the competitor is where we want people concentrating, rather than on what is going on inside the firm. They need to get back to work and the sooner their fears and concerns can be addressed, the faster they can do that. When people quit, the assumption is there is something wrong in the company. Key people departing is especially unnerving for a lot of people, who immediately jump to all sorts of misconceptions about what this means for their own security or the stability of the enterprise. Sending out a blanket email heaping praise on the departing is guaranteed to set up the vacuum, allowing it to weave its magic spell of impending doom for the survivors. We need to tell each person, one by one, what is really going on and assure them that everything will be okay. We will find a great replacement, we can carry on in the departing person’s absence, it is not the end of the world. This is time consuming, but it is the best way to ensure that the official version is the only version floating around. Action Steps When you have turnover whether it is positive or negative, be aware of external perceptions about the change – that perception will always be a negative one, so prepare to counter it Whenever a vacuum in information appears, it will be filled with rumours and misinformation, so you have to grab hold of the narrative and control it Internally, make sure every single person is spoken to directly and don’t imagine for one second that a blanket email will do the trick –it won’t…

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590 Stay On The Tools For As Long As You Can When Leading In Japan 10:45

11 weeks前10:45

10:45

The usual advice is to get off the tools and concentrate on being the leader and focus your energies getting leverage from the team who work for you. This makes a lot of sense because as the leader we are supremely busy these days and the pace of business in only speeding up and growing more complex. It also depends on how big your company is. When you get large numbers of people working for you, then the chance of doing anything other than attending meetings basically dries up. And this is exactly the problem. Without noticing it we have been consumed by the beast and we now live in its belly. We are surrounded on all sides by our own team members. We might meet clients, but usually they are not our client and belong to one of the troops. We are there for ceremonial purposes and not to seal the deal. We live at the margins of the business and we are gradually separated from knowing what is really going on. Some leaders may protest and tell me they know what is going on because their Division Heads, their direct reports, tell them. I would answer that what your Division Heads are telling you is what they want you know and that may not necessarily be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It may be difficult, but where possible I would recommend keeping a couple of clients for yourself. That way you keep your hand in with the market, the issues, the problems, the ups and downs of the flow of business. You are getting this news unfiltered and your clients are telling you like it is, with no sugar coating. More than couple of clients will be logistically very hard. We can all probably manage a couple and the intelligence we hear from these sources will be very valuable. We can also evaluate more effectively what our own staff are telling us. There is no doubt that the boss hears the bad news last, because everyone is hell bent on covering it up for as long as possible. But as the boss we operate on a different plane. We know we have the power, money and resources to fix problems and the faster we find out about the issue the less costly it is for us to fix it. So we have staff motivations and our own going in different directions. There is nothing worse than thinking our systems are certainly correct, to only find out that is not the case. We assume things are being put in place as part of the overall ecosystem, but actually there can be gaps. We don’t discover these gaps fast enough when we rely on others to tell us about the gap. In fact, think back to the last time someone on the team told you about the gap compared to when you unearthed it yourself? I am struggling to remember when that happened because it is so rare. The snapper there is if no one is volunteering this information then how do we discover it? This is where keeping your hand in the game comes in handy. We are more likely to see problems or imperfections is we remain part of the process. I was reminded of this recently. I had been teaching our High Impact Presentations Course which has two days in the classroom, then a follow-up half day, a twenty eight week self-paced programme so that the class participants don’t forget what they learned and a monthly Professional Ongoing Education class. As I was talking about these things at the very end of the class, I saw some blank faces. That set off a warning siren in my head to check how we keep people informed about the follow-up programme. And not just for this programme, but for all of them. If I hadn't been teaching that class, I may not have found this gap at all or for many months. We try to really work on providing added value beyond the class content, but all of this effort is wasted if people don’t know about it. I think I have systems in place to make sure the communication is working smoothly, but sometimes it isn’t and I have to fix it. The scary part is I only ever fix the gaps I know about and what happens to all the gaps I don’t know about? There is a cost to being on the tools but also some clear benefits. So take a look at your work and see where you can keep a hand it without the work devouring you.…

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589 Leading Direct Reports When You Are A Small Team In Japan 10:30

12 weeks前10:30

10:30

Large organisations have many willing hands. Often, the quality of the people employed is very high, and the firm has the deep pockets sufficient to attract and retain them. Leading smaller firms is more challenging. There is a large degree of multi-tasking going on, as the workload gets spread across the troops. Everyone is busy, busy, busy and that especially applies to the boss. Time is in short supply, so corners are cut, elements are skipped and the quality of work produced can be an issue. The temptation is for the boss to concentrate on their meetings with their direct reports, as individual one-on-one get togethers. The time left over for regular meetings of the leadership team can be compromised quite easily. It is never blatant. The direct reports don’t rise up and storm the barricades chanting “death to more meetings”. Instead, the scheduling process becomes the enemy of progress, as trying to get a number of busy people together to coordinate availability can be the death knell of the meeting. The boss is usually the one with the worst schedule openings. You might have tried to circumvent the issue by not over scheduling the number or frequency of the meetings. Maybe they are held fortnightly, in the belief that getting everyone together will be easier. Often, though, this proves to be a false hope and something always comes up to ensure not everyone can make it. When you have a small leadership team, the point of the meeting becomes compromised. The purpose of the leadership team meeting all together is to make sure information is being shared and that alignment of purpose and execution of the business is going on in an effective manner. I belong to Tokyo Rotary Club and Rotary itself was founded to connect disparate industry representatives together, so that we wouldn’t be locked into our Guilds and become insular. The leadership team meeting has the same objective, to get people together to talk and share what is going on in their sections with everyone else. It is so easy to become wrapped up in what you are doing and to forget to let others know what is going on with your area of responsibility. The boss has to drive this process, and this is where we meet the first big hurdle. The boss is always the busiest person and the one who most often cancels the meeting because their schedule changes so frequently. In a small company, the boss will not only be liaising with the Mothership back home, leading the team locally, talking to their direct reports one-on-one, checking on the company finances, tracking the revenue achievement and keeping a close eye on HR issues, they will also be dealing directly with clients. As we all know, that meeting with the client will take priority over a meeting of the section heads. This is why the boss is the hardest one to pin down for the meeting. When the boss is also the scheduler and driver to hold the meeting, things drift very easily. Before you know it, the leadership team hasn’t met for weeks. Time flies at the best of times and unless this leadership team meeting is made a priority, then there will never be a regular cadence for the get together of the section heads. It is always a good practice to look for a day and a time when things are less frantic. I know that for many of us, that would be a very good question: “just precisely when is it not frantic around here?”. Everything is relative, so look for a fortnightly cadence which will give the meeting enough regularity to make it relevant, without the time drifting too much. Next pick a time of the day when it will work best. This might even be a bento lunch together, because lunch times are usually a less scheduled time during the day for most of us. Because of the morning rush hour phenomenon, breakfasts are a lot more complex to pull off. Getting the kids off to school, fighting for space on the train to get to work, exhausts everyone too, so early is rarely good. Evenings are difficult too because people want to get home and they are tired after a hard day at work, so the collective brainpower available is down. There is never an easy time to hold these meetings, but unless a strong will is enlisted, they just won’t happen. Make them over lunch, make them every fortnight, and make them a high priority. Will this work perfectly every month? I severely doubt it, but at least the strike rate will improve and better coordination and team building will occur compared to the usual chaos. .…

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588 Transform Your Team Leadership. Secrets For Building Cohesion and Performance In Japan 12:29

13 weeks前12:29

12:29

Teams don’t build themselves. They are delicate, fragile and unstable. They need constant care and attention from the leader. Despite the sexiness, a team of stars is not what we want either. They will always lose to a star team, a united front of uncompromising commitment to each other and to winning. Here are some things to think about when building and maintaining the team. 1. The Role Of the Leader One of the better metaphors for leaders is the orchestra conductor. They are uniting and harmonising a group of stars to work together. Each person brings their specialist role, talent and commitment. The leader is the one to glue the team together. The leader creates the environment where the team can coalesce around the tone, direction, culture, values, vision and mission. Central to achieving this cooperation is the leader’s communication and people skills. The trust won’t be created by a bumbling, disorganised, incoherent, selfish, small minded person claiming the glory for themselves and basing their leadership mantle on their received status power. 2. Identifying Strengths One of the follies of leadership, and I speak from deep experience here, is trying to fix the gaps and weaknesses of the people in the team. We can easily find our time is tied up in resuscitation efforts for people who are struggling or underperforming. We are better to have a mix of people, with a variety of skills, talent and abilities and work across the sum of the whole, rather than trying to put band aids on their weaknesses. By definition, 80% of the team are producing 20% of the results. We need to get more out of the 20% producing 80% of the outputs. This is the true alchemy through informed division of labour. 3. Clarity Around Responsibilities The worst part of being a leader is thinking people are clear on what they need to do. You have told them right? Then you find they are not doing what you expected or need. Part of this is the fact that a single communication is never sufficient. We cannot just bark out orders and then wander off. We need to manage the people and their work, without micro-managing and pulverising them into submission. We need to keep abreast of progress. If things are not working, then we need to know about it early and intervene to right the ship. 4. Encouraging Collaboration Teams are usually small affairs, even in big corporations, because people are divided into sections. In this modern high-tech era, that invariably means people are doing a lot and are super busy. This doesn’t lend itself to having excess bandwidth to help others in the team or even more vitally, helping people in other sections. We also have the danger of the leader trying to unite their tribe by making the other section’s tribes the enemy. This is a disaster. The true enemy are the opposition team in the rival company. We need to make them the bad guys, not our own colleagues. That doesn’t stop ambitious leaders from trying to gain advantage internally, by using their team as a weapon for supremacy, domination and relentless ladder climbing. The leader’s job is to contribute to the entire enterprise effort and make sure the firm wins in the marketplace. 5. Proactive Team Building The leader has to create the opportunities for the team to get together. These could be Town Halls, brainstorming sessions, team lunches and dinners or any other excuse to get the group together. With work from home so prevalent, the team members don’t see each other every day, as they usually did before Covid. Team projects are a good tool for getting people from different sections together who normally may not have a chance to work with each other. It introduces diversity into the creative process and creates the human bonds needed to keep everyone together. I am such a business genius and guru. I hired four new people in January 2020, seconds before the pandemic wrecked the training industry. One of them drew her secure salary happily every month through the devastation and simply up and quit at the end of Covid. Ouch. She was in her late twenties when she joined the firm and spent the pandemic working for us from her room in her parent’s house in Shinjuku. I realised later that she didn’t have any close friends inside the company and so it was easy for her to depart. Yes we had meetups online, but it wasn’t enough and not the same as being together in-person. This was my first pandemic, so I made a number of leader mistakes during Covid as a result. This is not a comprehensive list of items on the subject of team building, but there is plenty of food for thought to get to work on. The leader is the driver here. We go for role clarity and keep reviewing what is working and not working. Retaining our talent is the name of the game for the modern leader in population declining Japan and if we make a mess of it, the penalties are potentially fatal. Team building never goes out of fashion or relevance. The problem is we are never properly trained for this part of the role and we bumble along through trial and error. We all need to do a better job of educating ourselves in this regard. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is today.…

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587 The Collapse Of On-the-Job Training in Japan: A Wake-Up Call for Companies 12:14

14 weeks前12:14

12:14

When I first got to Tokyo in 1979, there was a very well established corporate educational system in Japan. Unlike Universities in Australia where you studied a subject and expected to work in a closely related field, Japan was concentrating on producing generalists. It didn’t matter what you had studied at University, because the company would educate you on what you needed to know. I also discovered that the tertiary educational system was broken, so companies couldn’t rely on Universities to educate the young. I was so surprised to realise that except for those entering professions like law, medicine, architecture, etc., and needing to pass national exams, most students were living their best life (at their parents’ expense). Think a four-year sojourn at Club Med and you get the flavour of spending most of your time engaging in club activities and working part-time jobs, rather than studying. The principal education tool for companies wasn’t formal training. There were a few weeks at the start as new grads were onboarded, where you learnt about the firm, systems and the basic etiquette of business. After that, your sempai or seniors and your boss would teach you the ropes. As everyone joined the firm for life, there was a logic in the boss spending their valuable time grooming the next generation. In 1978, the first Japanese language word processor was developed, which allowed everyone to type in Japanese more easily. There were still secretarial pools in those days, so the boss didn’t have to get their hands dirty playing around with this tech. In November 1995 Windows 95 was launched in Japan, which made it easy for anyone to access the internet. With the take up of email, the boss was now required to write their own emails and gradually the secretarial pool went the way of the Dodo. The upshot is that this change meant the boss and the sempai were now much busier than before, doing their own emails and their own typing. The amount of time available to train the next generation on the job went down and has been down ever since. There was no supplementation with formal training, because the OJT system was so accepted as all that was needed. These changes are glacial, so they didn’t attract much attention on the way through, but things did change. Where are we today? During Covid, we found a not very amusing contradiction with Japanese corporate training. Those domestic Japanese companies who had already come to the realisation that corporate training was required just stopped in their tracks. They cancelled set classes because of Covid and were worried about the safety aspects of people gathering together. Dale Carnegie in the US had started online training delivery in 2010, so fortunately, we had specialized manuals for online delivery and certification systems in place for trainers and producers when Covid hit. We could teach them global best practice techniques accumulated over the previous decade. We ran our first online class in March 2020, free for our clients and covering Stress Management. We quickly found that WebEx at that time had a 100 person limit and we crashed the system. We regrouped and completed the training session. We proved to ourselves that using the Dale Carnegie approach of highly interactive training also in the online training environment was a viable option. Unfortunately, many domestic Japanese companies didn’t think so and refused the online option, believing that it couldn’t provide sufficient delivery quality compared to face-to-face. That actually wasn’t true, but nobody in Japan ever gets fired for foregoing opportunities to embrace change and do something new. They didn’t want to return to the classroom, and they didn’t want to do it online, so with this Catch 22, they did nothing. Some of these companies are slowly coming back to face-to-face training. What Covid revealed though, was that the Middle Manager level of capability wasn’t well developed, having relied only on OJT and they needed to fix this problem. We have been doing a lot of leadership training as a result. The gaps we notice are that the managers are totally undereducated on what is required to be a leader. They have spent time on the job so they can run the machine. They can see that it runs on time, to cost and at the required quality, but these managerial attributes do not make them a leader. The difference between a manager and a leader is that the leader does all of those things a manager does, plus sets the direction for the team, builds the culture and develops the people. The upshot is that those companies who invest in their people and give their Middle Managers leadership training will do better in the zero sum game for retaining staff. People leave bosses, not companies. With the declining population and permanent shortage of people, replacing staff can be extremely difficult and potentially fatal to companies. I believe the continued reliance on the broken OJT system for training leaders is a nonsense and a suicidal choice. Get your people trained if you want to survive this war for talent. Young people are much more mobile and one in three are departing their companies after three or four years and joining the competitors. This is very expensive after they have been trained and they are hard to replace. With properly educated Middle Managers, the retention rates will be much higher and will yield a competitive advantage against rivals who have only been trained through OJT. This is no joke and the consequences of getting the equation wrong are deadly serious. OJT is dead. Companies should stop relying on it and should instead get professional leadership training for their Middle Managers before it is too late.…

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586 Why Authenticity Matters – Inspiring Leadership For Japan’s Evolving Workplace 12:33

15 weeks前12:33

12:33

The blow torch has never been applied more ferociously to how leaders lead than what we see today. Once upon a time, there were resumes pilling up to consider who we would hire. We had the whip hand, and the applicants felt the lash. Now the roles have been reversed and the applicants are interviewing us, rather than the other way around. I have done my weekly podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews now for over five years, talking to CEOs here about one topic – leading in Japan. It was never intended for this when I started five years ago, but many of the leaders tell me it is having a positive impact on getting people they want to hire to join the company, in preference to another firm. The reason is that my style of interviewing allows the leader to be authentic and talk in their natural voice. There is no corporate propaganda being issued or false flags being flown. This is what employees want from their companies and, in particular, from their supervisors. It is easy to proclaim your superior values when times are good. When times get tough, that is when you discover if what you have been told by your boss is real or fake. I had this experience, and it was very disappointing. I heard all about the importance of our customer, but when the economy went off the rails, the customer was instantly propelled overboard and everything was about the sole interests of the firm. Short-termism took over, and many bridges were burnt to the ground. Promises were retracted and customer collateral damage was waved away as “unfortunate”. Any faith I had in the senior leadership and their commitment to the stated values of the firm evaporated. As the boss, we have to be very careful about the congruency between what we say and what we do. If we talk about wellness, but we expect people to drive themselves to ill health, then we are revealed for who we were really are. Our interests are the real priority. Over the years, when looking through people’s resumes, I would ask about some blank spaces. They would tell me they had to quit the company because the horrendous overtime had made them ill. As an Aussie, I always thought to myself “how ridiculous”, but that was the norm in Japan back in those dark days. If we talk about work/non-work balance, but we push people to work long hours, we are hypocrites and, even worse, obviously stupid hypocrites to boot. If we talk about work ethic, but we are cruising along as the boss, while whipping the troops along, it is clear to everyone that we are applying an indulgent, different set of rules to ourselves. We can be clever and come up with all sorts of justifications and corporate double speak, but nobody is fooled by our deceit. Treat others how you want to be treated is the most basic level required for boss-subordinate interactions. This is commonly called the “golden rule”. The actual true target level should be to treat subordinates how they want to be treated and is called the “platinum rule”. Let’s go for the platinum rule, shall we? This sounds easy enough, but there is no necessary uniform idea on this and every person can have quite different expectations. As the boss, we need to keep enquiring about what our people want. We may have had that conversation once before, but a lot can happen in the space of a few years, and these desires are not stagnant. Changes can include getting married, having children, taking care of aged parents, buying a home, paying for the kid’s education, etc. The list of changes are long and we need to appreciate that our subordinates’ needs change. Taking the view that it doesn’t matter because we pay them is an antiquated idea stuck back in the day when resumes were numerous and boss choices were many. Money is important, of course, but as life speeds up time becomes in short supply. Flexibility can create the time our people need and we can help them achieve things they need. If we are dogmatic about the rules and procedures, that may make us feel powerful, but it will be counterproductive inside the culture. Our research has clearly shown that the key to getting teams engaged is that they feel the boss cares about them. The way they know that is actually the case is through the way the boss communicates and the boss’s capacity to be flexible and supportive of the needs of the staff. As the boss, you can’t fake this stuff. You are either supportive or you are not. The basic posture has to be an inside out job, where the natural instinct is there to support our staff in every way we can. Prancing around as if you are supportive and using sweet words and pleasant smiles isn’t going to cut it if just fluff. When the decisions get attached to real money, this is when we all see if what the leader says and does is the same thing or not. People are not stupid. They can tell what is smoke and mirrors and what they can trust and rely upon, so let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence.…