The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

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 havin

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 ow

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 calligrap

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

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 a

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

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 meeti

  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 basin

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 gr

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 val

We recently completed an in-house Leadership Training for Managers programme for a local Japanese firm. The President founded the firm as a spin-out from a well-established international accounting company many years ago and has successfully grown the organisation. He is now considering succession planning and aims to develop his senior leadership team. He had an internal survey conducted on the training programme, which he then shared with the trainer who delivered the course and myself. Survey results on training can sometimes be challenging, and this case was no different. Some participants felt the training was too long, while others thought it was too short. Some found the content very challenging, and others not challenging enough. As is often the case, the majority were neutral, while we mainly received strong feedback from the outliers. However, there were some particularly intriguing comments. A few participants mentioned that they found the training exhausting, claiming it impacted their ability to

Are you sitting too much and for too long at your desk every day?  Are you eating too much every meal because your mother told you when you were a kid to finish everything on your plate.  Are you hitting the booze after work with your mates or at home to rid yourself of your stress?  Are your kidneys and liver in good shape? Are you carrying around too much meat and making your muscles and organs work much harder than they should? Is your blood pressure elevated and too high every day?   Are you constantly thinking about all of your troubles at work?  Are you having trouble getting good quality consistent sleep?  Are you promising yourself to get to the gym, but don’t make it as often as you need to in order to make any progress? Well, I have pretty much described myself here.  Knowing about it and doing something to fix it are two universes separated by infinite space.  Intellectually I know what I should do, but practically I struggle with a lifetime of negative habits which all need work.  I do a lot of po

We know that AI has gone from the domain of geeky people in white lab coats to the mainstream of business in a nanosecond. Such speed is difficult to keep up with and the roll out of new options continues unabated. As the leader how do we surf this tech wave and prepare our people for this AI enabled future/  Making data backed decisions is always preferred in leadership and AI has the power to crunch large amounts of data and provide answers very quickly.  As long as it isn’t lying to us with so-called hallucinations about the results, then it is a big help.  Direction on using AI in our businesses is not going to bubble up from down below and we leaders need to get to work to harness this beast. 1.        Audit We can start with an audit of where we think AI can bring savings in terms of time, money, effort and quality.  Doing this process with the team is required because we want them to own the process and the results.  There may be fears that certain jobs will disappear because of AI and we need to fac

Recently, I was teaching a class of APAC executives on how to handle pushback to their ideas. Some participants were senior legal counsels, who frequently had to say "no" to their salespeople. As a salesperson myself, being told "no" is something that comes with the territory and is not intimidating at all. In fact, we often hear "no" most of the time. We're tough and have learned to persist until we achieve a "yes." These executives spoke about how challenging it was to get the other side to accept their advice or point of view, which made a lot of sense. Think back to your school days—was there ever a course, or even a fragment of one, that taught you how to argue with someone to get them to agree with you? Academic debating is different; it's an arbitrated intellectual exercise. But the dynamics within a company are entirely different, and most of us aren't trained for these real-world, practical needs, even through corporate education. Here are some key steps to successfully navigate resistance and disagr

Pulling rank on people is clearly the fastest and easiest way to get people to fly straight and do what we want. It is also a very dangerous choice in Japan in an era when the demand for people is so strong and the supply so limited. Mobility today means people have choices. If you are not interested in what they have to say or their ideas, they will jump ship to somewhere they think they will be better appreciated. The problem is their ideas are rarely much chop.  They don’t have the experience, sufficient information, enough understanding of the context or the weight of responsibility on their shoulders if it doesn’t work. In a busy boss life, the simplest thing is to tell them “that won’t work” and just keep moving forward because there is so much to do. Here are some human relations principles we can  employ to do a better job in our communication with our people. 1.        The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.  This sounds a bit counterintuitive.  Does it mean I just fold and let

Have you ever had the experience of leaving a job and seeing your successor screw it up?  We spend so many hours at work and we are trying hard to lift the bar through our leadership.  However, if we do well, we get promoted or we join another company seeking a bigger job.  It is very disheartening to leave and see the place go backwards under your replacement.  You wonder what all those weekends spent working and long hours were al about.  We expect that we add to the cause and the firm progresses and moves forward, improving over time.  We expect those who come after us to be doing the same thing. So it was very confronting to read some statistics recently about how short the term at the top is these days and thinking about what does that mean for the leader’s legacy?  According to data analysis firm Equilar, the median term for a CEO in the 500 largest US companies, is now down to 4.7 years, having dropped twenty percent over the last ten years.  Russell Reynolds says globally, for CFOs, the tenure is down

You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed.  Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients.  Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk.  A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level.  Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise.  Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”.  At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains.  They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality.  There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand. When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice.  When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available

Is change good or bad?  When I was promoted or received a big bonus, I liked the change from my previous situation.  When the big boss changed at the very top, the person who hired me got fired the negative ramifications ultimately cascaded down the line. Eventually I had to look for another job and I didn’t like that change much. Often organisations go through major internal changes and the middle level leaders are expected to rally the troops behind the change.  How do you do that if you don’t agree with the change or don’t like the change yourself?  If you buck the system and refuse to follow the changes, then you are automatically identifying yourself as someone who has to leave the organisation and the machine will crush you. Change is such a tricky area for everyone, but it is so common in business.  Markets change, clients change, supply chains change, currency rates change – the list is long.  You would think that with all of these “normal” changes in business, we would all be excellent in adjusting t

This Japanese expression “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会), linked to Zen, focuses on transience and can be translated as “one time, one meeting” or “treasure an unrepeatable moment”.  It is often closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, which is certainly never a hurried affair and the devil is definitely in the details of how the ceremony is conducted.  Contrast that with our modern leader life in business.  We are constantly in motion, always time poor and harassed for 24 hours a day by an avalanche of emails.  We migrate from one meeting room to another, confronting an endless assortment of meeting details. We have many agendas in our minds when we meet people and our shrinking concentration spans make a lot of what we do a blur, bereft of reflection. This is a poor contextual background for dealing with people. Being so time challenged, we are constantly cutting corners and shaving off minutes to try and get it all done.  Being “efficient” with people is a bad idea for leaders, but often once we are on