The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Effective Team Building Is Not A Snap   You are sitting there at your desk beavering away as usual when you get the phone call. Suddenly you are called upstairs by your boss to their office. You are informed there is a new project needed and that “we want you to head up a new team to get it done. There is a lot counting on this and time is of the upmost urgency”.   This is good and bad. You are already very busy with a bunch of other work not yet completed and this project sounds very high risk. If the project doesn’t get done well and on time, you know your head is on the block. On the other hand it is a chance to shine and show the big bosses you are more than ready to join their elite company.   The only problem is you cannot do the whole project by yourself. Fortunately, you have been given permission to pull together the team you need to get the job done. In a perfect world, like you see in the movies, you would be selecting the all star team of high achievers and the most motivated dudes and dudesses on

My Japanese Managers Are Duds      The foreign firm sets up in Japan and they hire an experienced senior Japanese President. Things roll along, although with Japan operating like another planet. VIPs visit. Meetings are held, plans are made. The results never seem to come to fruition, despite the passing of time. “Japan is different” is trotted out each time to explain. Finally headquarters snaps, fires the extremely well paid Japanese President and send in their own guy or gal to turn things around. The newbie arrives into a heavy fog engulfed landscape, where nothing seems quite right. Three years fly by, the fog is lifting a little, but no real progress has been made. The newbie is transferred out and another one is dispatched to Nippon.   Now in the process of trying to reattach Japan to the mothership, for the first time, headquarters has better information about what is going on in Japan. It doesn’t seem to be helping much though. The new President surveys the team and finds major gaps, especially with

Me, Me, Me Leaders   Getting to the very top of a company is a zero sum game where you either make it or you don’t. There are winners, losers and wannabees. For the highly ambitious, the efforts start early. Often from childhood they have self-selected themselves to become the leader. To earn their spot at the top they have to show they can shine, as they make their way up through the ranks. They shine all right. In fact they shine all the light on themselves to make sure they eventually get the top seat. They are selfish, self centered, self-promoting and out of date.   The world of work has moved. Sheer will, dominance of others, baring of teeth and the pointed display of claws isn’t as important as it once was. In the modern firm, we need to see teams working well together, both internally at the section level and at the broader level of a total company-wide team effort. This requires an aspirant for the big job to have a greater degree of big picture vision and strong sense of holistic responsibility for

Japan's Big Challenge   The demographic challenge for Japan is looming on the horizon.  The decrease in the numbers of young people is permanent. What companies will face is a shift in power from the company side to the employee side.  The young entrants into Japanese companies will start to realise they are in super demand.  This will end lifetime employment as we currently know it.  If you meet someone from a Western country who has spent their entire working life with the same company you are always surprised.  This is because we move between companies and this is unremarkable.  Japan will become like this in the future. The issue in Japan will be the two Rs - Recruit and Retain.  How to be an attractive employer who young people want to work for will be the test.  Today with social media there is a tonne of information about companies which allow the young prospects to check us out.  They will particularly be looking for is information on how their supervisors will treat then. Once they get inside the com

Stop Making Yourself Invaluable   It is rather counterintuitive to suggest we leaders become less invaluable isn’t it. When you are climbing over the bodies on the corporate climb to grasp the top positions, you have to show you stand out. You have to show you are “the one”, better than the rest, the most talented candidate for the big job. To get the big job you have to keep repeating this self promotion process at every level, as you climb higher and higher. If it is your own business, you have so much knowledge and passion for the business, you automaticly become the one person holding all the complexity together. This is the Great Man or Woman theory of leadership, a bit like the same phenomenon in understanding history.   The story of kings and queens got a bit of a hiding in the modern histories, as scholars began searching for other factors to explain what has occurred in the past. In leadership terms, the era of the single powerful individual has yielded to a much more complex structure, better reflec

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com   If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.   About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.   A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the Ameri

Dealing With Companies’ “Senior Problem” In Japan   A senior problem in the past meant having a “senior moment”, where you forgot something and this lapse hinted at oncoming dementia. Today in Japan it has an entirely different meaning and refers to the demographic problems Japan is facing. Japan is aging rapidly and there is a lot of discussion about the impact that will have on the welfare, health and pension systems. What is not being discussed much as yet is what to do with all of these “young” oldies?   They are reaching 60, which is retirement age, yet they will have many decades of life ahead of them. They are healthy, active, relatively digital, have large networks and considerable experience. They all know the Government pension system will breakdown under the weight of their cohort’s numbers impacting on the cost of the system. They are not confident about having enough money to last their lifespan, so they want to keep working.   Japan’s working population of those aged 15-64 will decline from 65.7

The Foreign Leader In Japan   We know leaders who are friction magnets. They upset those working with them on a regular basis. They are quick to point out their opinion and their view. Their rights are paramount and we are soon informed of them. They are highly driven, powerful, even intense individuals. They are upwardly mobile and have sharp elbows. Basically they are a pain in most countries, but they are a disaster in Japan.   Crash or crash through sounds cool, but it is not a great formula for getting change embedded in the organization. Often Japan can drive everyone nuts because it is so hard to introduce change here. This is not just the frustration of Western leaders sent to Japan on assignment. Japanese leaders are also frustrated that they cannot get the changes they want implemented fast enough.   The forceful expatriate leader in Japan soon discovers that their will is not everyone’s command. At some point they find that force of status won’t work here. Japanese employees have a social contract

How To Guide Your Team In Japan Through Change   Up until these last few years being capable and loyal was enough in Japan. Technology has changed the business landscape completely. Post the 1990 bubble burst, the previous many layers of management in Japanese corporations have been substantially compressed. Globalisation is forcing change within Japan and no one is immune from this trend. Team members in Japan have to deal with change and will have to face even greater changes in the future. As their boss, what are some things you can do to help them manage the transition into the new era?   Mentoring the team is going to be critical. To do that you have to become much better organised than you are now. We are all time poor already, constantly swimming against a floodtide of email and social media posts. The inflight passenger safety information videos always talk about in the case of emergency, grab your oxygen mask for yourself first, then help those around you. This is the same. The boss has to be able to

How To Get Change In Japan   Japan doesn’t have a monopoly on resisting change. Having said that, it will probably rank fairly high in terms of business environments where it is hard to introduce change. There is a very dogged, well established risk averse culture here which works against change. The Tokugawa family froze change in Japan for 400 years and this allowed them to keep control. It is hard to come up with a local opposite example where massive change was a real winner. Kaizen is more acceptable because it is small increments of change spread out over long periods of time.   To engender change in Japan we have to work through the team members. They have fairly consistent attitudes toward change. Fear of change is a strong driver to resist it. Will the change be a positive or a negative for us? The glass is always half empty in Japan, so the prospect of change being a positive is not a widespread idea. The communication piece around the change becomes very important to negating the negative impressio

The Leader Is The Mood Maker   When you are on the executive floor, the carpet is thick, the mood is quiet and the décor is sumptuous. It is a world removed from the scramble going on floors below. Maybe you are in your own President’s office, shielded from the fray outside the door. The further you place yourself away from the troops the harder it is to influence the mood of the team. Of course, you have direct reports overseeing the work and they too should be mood makers in their own right. There is something very powerful though when the boss is also the mood maker.   I visited President Nambu of Pasona a number of years ago, I was super impressed. To get to see him I had to walk past a large open plan workspace, in the center of which was a raised platform, which housed all the senior executives at their desks. I had to then walk on through the shokudo or cafeteria to get to Nambu san’s office. I was curious so I asked him about all these snakes and ladders to get to see him. He said he wanted the execut

Whose Really In Charge?   Japan is going through one round of revelations after another in different industries, where the proper compliance procedures were not followed. In some cases they have not been followed for decades. Which begs the question of who is actually in charge? The senior executives are given reports and rely on those below to feed them the correct information. To make it more interesting the company decides to reduce expenses and raise targets. This is when the creative accounting can really start to ramp up. The shareholders are happy, the Board is happy and so we continue with the winning formula. The only problem is that corners are being cut and procedures are being subverted, in order to meet the “reduce costs, increase revenue” mantra.   Then the whole mess is sprayed across the front page of the newspapers, evening newscasters lead with your firm’s lies and the magazines live off the debris for months. The fake news phenomenon has pointed up the fact that the media is a business. The

Staff On-Board or Over Board?   Recruit and retain must be the mantra for all of us in Japan. If you have been following me, you will know I have been talking about the coming demographic crunch of not enough young people to go around, for the last two years. A number of years ago we had 40% plus of the new recruits fleeing their companies, after getting trained. They were heading off to greener pastures, which they no doubt discovered were not all that green after all. The current number is in the low 30 percentile area and the bad news is it will start to rise again.   We have all seen the news broadcasts of truckloads of the young all wearing exactly the same outfits, sitting diligently in their rows at the major firms recruiting intake in April, at the start of the new financial year. This will continue of course, but the mid-career hiring of the young will become the new black for HR people in Japan.   As the young discover they are in demand and are being scouted, they will start leaving the firms that

Karoshi Is BS. Overwork Rarely Kills You   So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork. This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice. This is fake news. The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke. In Japan, that cause of death from overwork rarely happens. The vast majority of cases of karoshi death are related to suicide by the employee. This is a reaction to mental and physical exhaustion and the associated stress that piles up, until it is overwhelming. So the real source of death from karaoshi is stress, not physically working too hard. Just where is that stress coming from?   It is coming from two sources: the individual’s inability to deal with the stress of long hours, long commutes, and no time for recovery driving them to depression and ending their own precio

Team, I’ve Got Your Back   We don’t run perfect organisations stocked with perfect people, led by perfect bosses. There are always going to be failings, inadequacies, mistakes, shortcomings and downright stupidity in play. If we manage to keep all of these within the castle walls, then that is one level of complexity. It is when we share these challenges with clients that we raise the temperature quite a few notches. How do you handle cases where your people have really upset a client? The service or product was delivered, but the client’s representative is really unhappy with one of your team.   Often, being the boss, you are the last to find out what is going on. Japan, in particular, is excellent at hiding bad news from bosses. “The less the boss knows about the source of the trouble the better” is the mantra here. Japan is a zero mistake tolerance culture and so everyone has learnt to be circumspect about sharing the bad news around.   The irony though is the boss is the one person with the capacity of po

How To Snuggle Up To Employees   We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Drive type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested.   The snag in all of this though is employees don’t want that. They want the boss to be more interested in them, their career and their family. The feeling of being valued by the boss has been found to be an important trigger to create strong engagement in staff. Driver bosses rarely pull that trigger. They believe you need to “harden up baby”, do it yourself “like I did”. They wonder why we need to mollycoddle this lot.   In fact they don’t k

Vulnerable Leaders   The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them.   When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them. Organisations seem to be stacked with politicians who are excellent at ingratiating themselves with the higher ups and climbing over the bodies of their rivals to get to the top. Their political nous seems to be in inverse proportion to their lack of real leadership ability.   Given we have much flatter organisations today and the correspondent pressure to do more faster and better with less, the pressure on leader

Six Nightmare Listeners - Are One Of Them?   We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run into. By the way, do any of these stereotypes sound a bit too familiar to you?   The “preoccupieds” are those breathless types, racing around, multi-tasking on steroids, permanently distracted. They don’t make much eye contact because their eyes are constantly scanning for things other than you in front of them. When we meet this reaction we need to grab their brain. We can say, “Is this a good time to talk?” or “I need your undivided attention for just a moment”. Once we do get their attention, we have to get to the point, because their attention span is fleeting.   The “ou

My Boss Doesn’t Listen To Me   If you reading this title and thinking this has nothing to do with my leadership, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants on our training. They complain that the boss doesn’t talk to them enough because they are too busy, don’t have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers into a few. The other has been the democratization of information access. Bosses have been struggling to keep up.   When we had more layers in our company structures, leaders matured like a fine wine. They rose up the ladder in small increments, over an extended period of time and were groomed for responsibility. There were assistants aplenty to do mundane, time consuming tasks. The striping out of the layers, for the sake of

Leadership Blind Spots   Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep adding more and more certainty to what they say is important, correct, valuable and needed to produce the best return on investment.   With an army of sycophants in the workforce, the leader can begin to believe their own press. There is also the generational imperative of “this is correct because this was my experience”, even when the world has well and truly moved on beyond that experience. If you came back from World War Two as