The Leadership Japan Series

The leader has a different role to that of the manager. The manager makes the business run on time, to quality and on budget. The leader does all of those things, plus sets the strategic direction for the business, crafts the culture and builds the people. If we want to control every aspect of the firm, then we have to micro-manage everything. Obviously, that is a choice, but as the leader we need to develop our people too and so we need to delegate work to them so that they can grow. In fact, as the leader, the ideal situation would be that we are only working on the most high-level things that only we can do. If possible, we want to set the parameters of the business so that the team can self-manage themselves. Those parameters come in the form of some very useful tools called Vision, Mission and Values. Some people may think that Vision, Mission and Value are rather flowery, fluffy, flaky statements of little use, but they are denying themselves some important leverage points as the leader. The Vision is a call out to what is the purpose of what we are doing. This is a fundamental thing, but in many companies the staff have an unclear idea of the purpose. We can recall the classic building the wall metaphor. Three stonemasons are asked what they are doing, and the first says, “building this wall”. The second one says, “I am building a new faculty building for the university”. The third one says, “I am building a facility to better educate future generation”. The metaphor makes the point that the understanding of purpose is different, even though each person was laying stone blocks to build a wall. We need to make sure that our team is clear on what is the purpose of why we are putting in all these long, hard hours. The Mission is a clarification of what we do and, by definition, what we don’t do. Making the main thing the main thing sounds simple, but there are so many bright shiny objects and fashionable trends which can divert us. We need to make sure everyone understands what we need to concentrate on and not allow the business to be drawn off course. The Values are the glue which bind us together. The leader’s job is to find out the common values of the team which will correspond with the values of the organisation and have everyone flying together in tight formation going in the same direction. The other important point is to make sure that the organisation lives the values and that the team lives the values. When the organisation rhetoric strays from the stated values, the cynicism becomes a cancer which eats away at the morale and teamwork of the firm. Once we have set the guide rails, we can set the strategy to achieve the Vision. There will be a series of goals to be achieved to get us to where we want to be. Obviously, revenue and profit goals are going to be critical to the health and longevity of the firm. There will be quality considerations which relate to our brand and its positioning in the market. Cost of customer acquisition and the success of our marketing to help grow the business will bring their own sets of goals. Who we recruit and how we train them will have a major impact on the success of the company. Business is a one team against another team head-to-head struggle and the best team wins in the long term. Our sales team versus the opposition, our marketing prowess against that of so many rivals, our factory staff against the competition, our leadership bench strength against all comers in our industry sector. We need to measure our progress and success in attaining our goals. There are activities and outcomes which we need to track. We break these down for each financial year and for longer term considerations and they must add up to attaining the Vision we have set. They must be objective and correct numbers, because incorrect data can hurt us and cause us to make poor decisions. Getting correct data is not always that easy and we must have systems to keep checking that what we think is...

As the boss, we are always super busy. We have the management of the team and the results to work on. Everything has to be progressing on cost, on time and on quality. At the same time, we are setting the strategy, the direction for the team, communicating that so that everyone understands, establishing the values, and we are coaching and building the team members. Phew, I get tired just thinking about all of those boss roles. It is rare though that we can take a breath and reflect on the effectiveness of the teamwork. When problems arise, we tend to work on those in isolation and never have a moment to see the team as a unit, as a whole. Here are three things to look at in your team and reflect on if you are happy with the effectiveness of the team. 1. Conflict In a Western context, we might think we need to have constructive conflict which will help us to make better choices? In Japan, disagreements are more likely to be ignored because if we surface them, we have to publicly deal with it and discretion is the better part of valor here. Nevertheless, we cannot leave things fester and as the boss, we need to take action and sort things out. However, the Western idea of getting the two people in the room and thrashing it out will never work here. You might force people to get together, but no one will say anything in that meeting. Conflict resolution is best done individually, privately, and quietly. We have to take an entirely different approach to sorting out conflict in Japan. We talk to each person many times and, like war time negotiators, we move them toward an armistice that can stick. Hostilities will cease and the conflict will become muted, although never forgotten. Japan is better at working together to come up with solutions when everyone is involved and has a sense of shared ownership. We should concentrate on creating these occasions and the idea of creative conflict becomes replaced with creative cooperation, which suits the Japanese psyche much better. 2. Cooperation In teams, there can be contradictions where it can be difficult to square the circle. Sales teams are being measured on sales results and the numbers tell everything. There can be an issue though, depending on how the salespeople are paid. If they are on salary and bonus, then there is a natural preclusion to cooperate. Japanese salespeople would love to have no individual responsibility. They always vote for salary and a group bonus, related to a group target. This is great for hiding and avoiding accountability and these are two aspects where the Japanese salesforce can operate at ninja levels of accomplishment. We don’t do this in our organisation because we know we will always underperform and no one will be accountable. We want individuals to have specified numbers against their targets and for them to be held responsible for hitting those numbers. As you might imagine, this is not a popular idea here. If they are on individual commissions with a base salary, then there is an inbuilt resistance to cooperating with anyone else. It becomes “everyone for themselves” very easily. This is where values and culture need to play their part and glue the unglueable together. The boss has to work hard at gluing the team together, even when there are these fundamental contradictions at play. It can be done, but it takes a lot of consistency, brand building and communication. 3. Communication Working from home during covid definitely impacted the communication levels in our organisation. We were all operating in our bunkers at home, and the level of clarity and common understanding went down in my observation. Introverts like me loved it. You didn’t have to see or talk to anyone. For the organisation, though, it was not good. We have returned to the office and when we have people chatting in the office, it shows that what was missing before has been reclaimed. Japanese culture is an impediment to clear communication. The language is highly...

Managers manage. That means they make sure everything runs on time, to cost and to quality. The leader does all of that, plus some additional important things. These include setting the strategic direction for the team and building the people’s capabilities. Part of the leader’s role is to unite everyone behind the direction they are setting for the team. There can be a lot of detail at the micro level about how to make the strategy a reality. One key component which needs to be set at the start is to re-clarify the purpose of the team. You would think that was pretty obvious. However, if the leader doesn’t work on defining it, there could be 10 people in the team and eleven different purposes. Here is a simple six-step guide to setting the purpose. 1. What is meaningful about what your team does, from the perspective of the organisation as a whole (such as in relation to the stated purpose and vision)? The team operates within the framework of the firm, but the leader must break that down to the team level and create a local version which matches the team’s reality in the field. How does your team fit into the big picture? Which colleagues from other departments are key partners and where is the coordination most required? There is often a firm wide Vision Statement which can be a good starting point and the task is to take that and create your own local version for the team. 2. What is meaningful about what your team does from the perspective of your clients? We know what we sell, but sometimes we forget what the client is buying. They are not always the same things. For example, we might think we are selling leadership training, but what the client is buying might be succession planning or greater productivity. It is always important that every person in the team has a clear understanding of the client's needs. Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” was an excellent guide to the importance of making sure the entire series of contact points with the client were aligned and operating at the same quality levels. An example would be the person who answers the phone is pleasant and professional, but the person the client is then transferred to is rude or grumpy. The firm brand went from heavenly clouds to depths of hell in one second. 3. How should your team members behave as they are delivering what matters? This comes back to what are the team and organisational values? The leader will always have a wide spread of values scattered across their team and their job is to unite everyone behind the core values of the team. The value set defines how everyone thinks about the clients and that, in turn, defines how they interact with the clients. There is also the issue of how the team members interact with each other? Is there a strong level of mutual respect or we are in a pit of vipers with corporate politics run amok? 4. What are the expected results for the team and what are we doing when we are acting according to our purpose? We are establishing KPI, goals, targets etc., to make the outputs needed clear to everyone. Does each individual have a target or are there team based goals? In the latter case, do people within the team understand their role in delivering the team result? 5. What actions do you, as the leader, need to do to help fulfill the purpose? Taking care of the logistics, resources, permissions, interdepartmental cooperation are common leader roles. There is also the key role of coach to the team members to bolster their motivation and skills. Often though, as busy, busy leaders, we transition from coach to mad pirate captain barking out orders and making people walk the plank if they don’t perform. We set the tone for the team and we set the role model of how we are going to operate in this team. 6. Who do you need to be as a leader to fulfill the purpose (characteristics/ qualities? We should never forget that every single member of our team is a ninja level “boss watcher” and they are constantly...

There is a debate about whether Japan is any different from anywhere else when it comes to leading the team. Intellectually, I can appreciate there are many similarities because people are people, but I always feel there are important differences. One of the biggest differences is how people are trained to become leaders in Japan. I should really clarify that statement and say how they are not trained to become leaders. The main methodology for creating leaders in Japan is through On The Job Training (OJT). I can see there is a crisp logic to the idea of OJT back in the day, however it is now a flawed system in the modern world of Japan. In the West, leadership training is a given, because the value is recognised and so the investment is made to better educate the leadership cohorts through each generation. The first problem with Japan OJT is it presumes your boss knows about leading. There is very little formal leadership training going on in Japan. I don’t believe it just about investing the money. There is no great tradition here for corporate leadership training. Before we dive into this subject, I believe we should clarify what is a leader in Japan and what is a manager and what is different. Japan, in my observation, is full of managers, and there are few leaders. A manager runs the machine on budget, on quality, and on time. The leader does all of that and two very important additional tasks. The leader persuades the team that the direction they are advocating is the correct one and, secondly, they build up the capabilities of their staff through one-on-one coaching. By the way, barking out orders like a mad pirate captain doesn’t qualify as coaching. OJT probably made a lot of sense up until about fifty years ago, when it started to be disrupted by technology. By the 1980s, desktop computing became common in Japan and gradually the boss lost his (and they were mainly men) typist and had to start doing his own typing on the computer. The advent of email in the mid-1990s was the real death blow to the boss’s time management. Now the boss had become super busy and time availability for coaching staff became much diminished. What this means is that we have had been through multiple generations of staff mainly educated through OJT and who have been short-changed on the leadership modelling by their “manager” boss. Each corporate generation passes on how to be a manager to the next generation and unless there is some intervention through formal leadership training, there is no real progress. Of course, there will always be exceptions who prove the rule and some managers who make it out of that gravitational pull of OJT and become real leaders. This is the lightning strike theory of leadership development and isn’t a great proposition to ensure that the firm’s leadership bench is stacked with professionals. The key plank in leadership is no longer task experience. The old model was the boss had done all the tasks of their subordinates and knew their jobs inside out. Today, there is much more speciality and technology is making sure it isn’t experience alone which will carry the day for the boss. Many companies in Japan are moving away from the old model of age and stage and instead promoting people based on ability. Just rotating through various jobs in the machine won’t be enough anymore. Leaders have to become expert communicators and masters of environment building, such that individuals can motivate themselves. How many leaders receive any training to assist their communication and people skills? Very, very few and everyone else had to work it all out through trial and error. That hit and miss approach is very expensive. The younger staff want different things to their parents and the modern boss in Japan has to adjust. The bishibishi or super strict model of leadership is now cast out on to the rubbish tip of leadership history in Japan. Bosses still using this model will see their younger staff departing in...

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 an officer, you saw a certain type of leadership being employed and the chances are that was why there were so many “command and control” leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. The Woodstock generation questioned what had been accepted logic and wanted a different boss-employee relationship, where those below had more input into the direction of the company. Technology breakthroughs made hard skill warriors the gurus of leadership. Steve Jobs abusing and belittling his engineers was accepted, because he was so smart. Technology has however democratized the workplace. The boss is no longer the only one with access to key information. Being smart and abusive isn’t acceptable anymore. The boss-employee relationship has changed. It is going to keep changing too, especially here in Japan where there are 1.5 jobs for every person working. Recruiting and retaining people becomes a key boss skill. The degree of engagement of the team makes a big difference in maintaining existing customer loyalty and the needed brand building to attract new customers. Social media will kill any organisation providing sub-standard service, because the damage travels far, wide and fast. The role of the boss has changed, but have the bosses kept up? Recent Dale Carnegie research on leaders found four blind spots, which were hindering leaders from fully engaging their teams. None of these were hard skill deficiencies. All four focused on people skills. We just aren’t doing it enough. With the stripping out of layers in organisations, leaders are doing much bigger jobs with fewer team members. Time is short and coaching has been replaced by barking out commands. Work must get done fast because there is so much more coming behind it. We are all hurtling along at a rapid clip. The boss can forget that the team are people, emotional beings, not revenue producing machines. Interestingly, 76% of the research respondents said they would work harder if they received praise and appreciation from their boss. Take a reality check on yourself. How often to do you recognise your people and give them sincere praise? The scramble up the greasy pole requires enormous self-belief and image building. Mistakes hinder rapid career climbs and have to be avoided. Often this is done by shifting the blame down to underlings. The credit for work well done, of course, flows up to the genius boss who hogs all the limelight. The team are not stupid. They see the selfishness and respond by being only partially engaged in their work. In 81% of the cases, the research found that bosses who can admit they made mistakes are more inspirational to their team members. Who knows the most? Often the boss assumes that is them, because they have been anointed “boss”. They have more experience, better insights and a greater awareness of where the big picture is taking the firm. So why listen to subordinate’s mediocre and half baked ideas? Engaging people means helping them feel they are being listened to by their...

Here is a handy success equation which is easy to remember: our mindset plus our skill set, will equal our results. This is very straightforward and unremarkable, but we get so embroiled in our day to day world, we forget to helicopter above the melee and observe the lay of the land. A great mindset coupled with lacklustre skills, won’t get us very far. A poor mindset with great skills won’t do it either, so we need both. What is our mindset composed of? How we think is critical. Are we operating with a positive mindset? If we are deep in depression about the circumstances of the business, we are stuck in a hole from which it can be hard to emerge. We are what we think, so control over what we think becomes so important. That also means being strict about what we put into our minds. Stay away for fluff, endless scrolling on social media and negativity. Find the useful, positive and valuable and make that the diet for our mind. Our opinions influence how we see the world. Where do these opinions come from? They are usually the product of our access to quality, correct information. There is a tricky balance here because a lot of the news we need to consume is laced with negativity and that can pollute our positive attitude. So we need to curate the information we take in, to help us make informed decisions, based on correct data. Our beliefs are similarly formed from data, personal experience and what we hear from people we trust. Our degree of success can be impacted by our self-belief. It can be a drag on our progress if we are limiting how we see our potential. We believe we are operating logically, except we often make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. Being in control of our emotion is a fundamental first step to getting ourselves into a position to be successful. Wild mood swings make us a difficult person to work with or get close to. A short temper can have us explode in haste and repent at leisure, after we have created havoc all around us. We are all drowning is a sea of information today as the internet propels constant updates and new content at us. When I was at University we went to the stacks in the library to find the few books available there and if someone else had that textbook you needed you dipped out. Microfiche was the big innovation to access information in a non-paper format. For the younger generation out there, microfiche was an ancient method of taking microphotographs of physical pages and putting it on to film you could scroll through, using a special microfiche reader. I noticed with my son’s education, his problem is the constant assault of data and the difficulty of working out which information was valuable amongst the flotsam and jetsam battering his attention everyday. Getting insight becomes the game of success because we don’t lack for content anymore. Once we have the mindset correct then we have to take action. This is often easier said than done. We are so busy and translating insight into outcomes is not a given in this constant rabid struggle against the demands on our time. Behaviour determines outcomes and the formation of good habits is the key here. If we form the right habits then we take the right actions and we form the right default behaviour which adds to our success. The way we communicate flows from these habits and behaviours and we should be seeking inclusivity. Business is too complex for relying on the hero worker who can do it all by themselves – that ship has sailed. We need to be persuasive and able to garner collaboration in the workplace today. There is so much technology available today and it spews out endless choices. How do we get others to follow our ideas and adopt our suggestions? Our degree of cooperation from others is a compilation of our interactivity. If we have good people skills then we can interact with other in a constructive and positive way which adds to our success. Often technical people struggle in this area because their...

It is very common to hear from expat leaders here about their frustrations with leading teams in Japan. They get all of their direct reports together in a meeting room to work through some issues and reach some decisions. All goes according to plan, just like at home. Weeks roll by and then the penny drops that things that were agreed to in the meeting are not happening. “Why is it so hard to get people who are being paid good money to do their job?”, they ask me. One reason is that some of the people in the meeting room looked like they were in agreement because they don’t want to single themselves out as disagreeing with the boss in a public forum. They keep a low profile and choose not to execute on a piece of work they think is a bad idea. The Japanese methodology is the exact opposite. Before the meeting, the boss checks in with the key people about this idea they have and gets input and feedback. Once these consultations have taken place and any necessary adjustments have been made, then the meeting is called. The attendees rubber stamp the decision and then get busy making it a reality, with great haste and no resistance. Which is better? Well, in Japan, the nemawashi or groundwork method works very well because this is how things have been done around here for thousands of years. For leaders, the preferred follower is both independent and highly engaged. They know what to do and think about what they are doing, adding in extras without waiting around for the boss to tell them how to do things. Another variety of follower, which by the way, is very common in Japan, is the dependent variety who are engaged, but need a lot of guidance. Part of the reason here is that everyone is highly risk averse. The safest course of action is to do extremely well what the boss asks for, but don’t take any initiative. In this way, the buck stops with the boss and if things go pear-shaped, then there is no blow back on the staff member. The more problematic types are the dependent staff who are disengaged. In Japan, in big companies, the staff advancement method is based on age and stage, rather than outputs. This breeds a uniformity which is easy to control but which does not generate great results. They do their job at the minimum and that is it. They do what they are told, but no more. The much, much more worrying variety is the independent staff who is disengaged. They are unhappy working for you, are capable, but are not aligned with your direction. Maybe they think you are a dill and not adding any value here in Japan and the sooner you get on a plane and buzz off to your next posting, the better. They can be internal bomb throwers sabotaging you. As the leader we have many power plays we can utilize to get the team to follow us. The obvious one is the three strips on the sleeve which says “I am the Boss, got it!”. This authority power is backed up by the machine and gives us access to money and decision making. Most staff get it and will respect the position even when they have doubts about the incumbent. Expert power is a strong one because we show we bring firepower to the team and the operation. People realise we have a lot of expertise they don’t possess and we are adding value to everyone’s efforts. This type of authority is hard to push back on. Reward power makes a lot of sense because we can facilitate pay rises, promotions, bonuses, study trips to cool brand name universities, choice projects, etc. In Japanese we have the ame (飴) and the muchi (鞭) – the sweeties and the whip – this would be the sweets part. Role model power is also effective. We are the very model of a modern leader; we tick all the boxes. We are skilled professionally and also with working with all different types of people and are excellent in communication. We are a star who no one can deny. The other power play is coercive power. Those independent, disengaged saboteur staff may need a dose of this one. If they don’t want to be part of the...

I was reading an article by Anjli Raval in the Financial Times about the transition for CFOs to the CEO job. She quoted a survey by Heidrick & Struggles which showed a third of CFOs in the FTSE 100 firms became the CEO. This is up from 21% in 2019. Raval makes an interesting observation, “research shows that CEOs promoted from the CFO job do not drive top-line revenue growth as quickly as those from other backgrounds, particularly in the first few years”. Why is that the case? The article offers a few reasons about these promoted CFOs having a “cash-preservation mindset over a drive to pursue new opportunities”. Also, as the CFO, they had been making tough budget allocation decisions which had not been popular with their division head colleagues. Now they are the boss, but not everyone is happy about it. As Yogi Berra said, “Leading is easy. It is getting people to follow you, which is hard”. That skill set isn’t taught to people trained in finance and accounting. Analytical people, in general, are not particularly people focused. They are focused on the numbers and protecting the cash flow. Nothing is wrong with that but the leader’s role is different. They need a defined set of skills and usually they are promoted to CEO, but given no training on the areas where there are bound to be gaps. Sales skills are not part of their academic curriculums and usually nothing they have ever done themselves. If you are the boss of an organisation with a salesforce, then your accounting credentials count for nothing. No one in sales will take you seriously as having any opinion worth regard. Salespeople are a tough crowd. They are self-sufficient, robust, resilient, self-made in their careers based on their success in selling solutions to buyers. From their point of view, someone who just counts up the numbers, but has never sat across from thousands of ornery buyers, won’t command much respect. Fancy degrees and letters after your name are irrelevant to salespeople. If the new CEO wants to get salespeople behind them, then they had better spend a lot of time with their salespeople visiting buyers and hearing firsthand how tough the profession of sales is. I am thinking back to all the CFOs I have worked with and in my experience, most of them looked down on salespeople. That attitude won’t win any hearts and minds and as the boss, we need our salespeople to be fully committed and firing on all cylinders. Treating the salespeople as the great unwashed may make the new boss feel superior, but salespeople are experts at reading between the lines and summing people up very quickly. They won’t be fooled. The other usual skill gap is in dealing with all different types of people. When you spend your career in technical specialty areas, there is a common language and understanding with your immediate colleagues which is not shared outside your division. Lawyers, engineers, IT people spring to mind. Their education didn’t put much emphasis on communication and people skills and when they become the boss, that gap is highlighted. Does the organisation recognise that and give them any training? Usually “no”. Somehow it is imagined they will just magically transform themselves after a long career path in a box and become hale fellow well met types to the masses. I am thinking of a lawyer I know here. I see him at a lot of networking events and always wonder about what he is trying to achieve? Presumably he is looking of potential business as a lawyer. Interestingly, when I engage him in conversation, he is stiff, awkward and definitely does not make you feel welcome, comfortable or relaxed in his company. The contradiction of aims and reality is quite profound. If you make the leap from technical person to leader, then you need to work on yourself. The company might give you an Executive Coach, but unless they are experts in communication and people skills, they will just ask a bunch of deep, meaningful and searching questions and provide...

It sounds very obvious, doesn’t it, to remind the team what we are trying to achieve, but are we doing it? Yes, we had that team Town Hall a few months ago and as the leader we outlined where we need to be at the end of the financial year. After that session, we have all been head down and getting on with it. “They know right? I told them everything they need to know, to get on with it” is what we have ringing in our internal conversation with ourselves. Is this true, though? Yes, we know the number we have to achieve, but what about the strategy to get there? Is that clear enough to everyone? Do they all remember the details or have they been consumed by the minutiae of “doing” and have been neglecting the big picture of what we need to do to deliver the result? The daily grind makes us small. We are worn down by the doing and the bigger picture gets shoved into the background. The leader’s job is to brush the dust off the plan and keep reminding the team what we have to do and how we are doing it. The other issue we face is, as leaders, we are perfectly clear and we know what needs to be done, but have we properly communicated this to the team? In Japan, we are working across two languages all the time. Even though we think we have been clear, we know that even amongst native speakers, there can be cases where we haven’t been clear enough. Multiply that possibility when we are operating in imperfect Japanese or our team are using imperfect English and there are endless possibilities for a lack of clarity. It happens all the time too, that what we expect to happen doesn’t happen at all or doesn’t happen when we thought it would happen. Our staff member didn’t actually understand what they needed to do, but it is embarrassing to admit that to the boss, so they smile nicely and disappear. We find out weeks or months later that something key has been missed or done incorrectly. Whose fault was that? We might want to blame them, but we had better take responsibility for not checking that our understanding of what would happen next was shared by the staff member who was going to do the work. I always keep in mind that “I don’t know” is a code phrase in Japan for “I don’t agree”. No one in this country believes that direct confrontation with the boss is going to get you anywhere, so everyone operates at ninja levels of obfuscation. “Why didn’t that project get done on time” is greeted with “I don’t know” and that conversation takes us precisely nowhere. We may have explained the rationale for the thing we wanted done and to us, that made perfect sense, but to the staff member that may represent more work and they already feel overwhelmed by what they have on their plate right now. That project gets pushed to the back of the cue. Conveniently, their boss is super busy and distracted by numerous other projects, so there is a strong chance the boss may forget about this imposition entirely and they can keep doing what they want to do. When we do circle back and find there are problems, we then hit this wall of denial. We should always assume that what we said wasn’t entirely understood, in whichever language we were using. That means we have to be well organised time wise to be able to check on progress on the way through, rather than neglecting the process and turning up at the end expecting results. We should also have a regular cadence for reminding everyone what we are supposed to be doing, in terms of getting results and also referring to the strategy on how we are going to make that happen. Yes, we told them before, but let’s assume they have all been busy and have forgotten some of the finer points. In particular, the WHY is a big factor which we need to keep reminding everyone about and not just the what and the how. If we are well organised, we can do this and we can smooth out a lot of wrinkles. We can make the work process much better. This drops the stress levels and increases the joy of work for us and for...

Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment. Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer. That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect. Mid-career hires were frowned upon. If you bolted from your employer, you had almost zero chance of joining a competitor. You entered a dark forest and had to find your way through the brambles and undergrowth to meet out a living on the lower rungs of a netherworld of small firms willing to take you on. In 1997, the venerable Yamaichi Securities blew up and a lot of competent, hard working finance industry people suddenly found themselves in the street without a job. Other firms in the same sector employed them, because they were skilled and this was the first tear in the fabric of the stigma of the mid-career hire. The Lehman Shock on September 15, 2008 added another slash to lifetime employment in Japan, as many people lost their jobs. The 2011 earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear power plant explosions disrupted many industries, throwing people out of work. Covid did a similar job on particular industries like tourism and hospitality as borders closed. The downturn in population has meant there is a strong demand for workers with a growing limitation on the supply side. This throws up options for staff which were not there before and it impacts the loyalty factor of the worker-employer construct. Thirty percent of young people in their third and fourth years of employ, after having been trained by the company who hired them, jump out and go somewhere else. No loyalty and no qualms about leaving their employer. A client of mine sent me a note the other day about doing some training and as an aside, he mentioned that one of his key people involved in that decision, who had been with him for 14 years, was suddenly leaving. This is very disheartening because you lose the experience, their contacts and the continuity with their colleagues and clients. That takes a long time to re-stitch together. Sometimes it is the stupidity of our own construction. An organisation I used to work for had a new leader appear. He was not the usual standard of experience or capability for that complex work and decided to fire one of the staff who had been with the organisation for decades. He had no conception of the network he was letting walk out the door. Twenty-plus years of deep relationships with buyers in his industry was just vaporised. It is not something obvious you can notice, like a chair has gone missing in the office, but the loss to the business is still there and manifests itself later when you least need it. What can we do about this? Sadly, not much. We do our best to align the direction and values of the organisation with the staff’s interests. It won’t always be a perfect fit. Also, their interests change. They now have aging parents, get married, have children, start to think about retirement, etc. Covid has crushed many companies and those pressures can speed up changes, which lead to staff leaving. When things are rolling, there is less taste to leave because the rewards are coming thick and fast. When things have been tough and you are crawling out of the hole together, the rewards are all in the future. Two of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principles come in handy here. One is to cooperate with the inevitable and the other is to expect ingratitude. It is inevitable that in a strong demand economy for staff, we will see people moving more and more than in the past. The old mid-career hire stigmas have become less potent and the era of the “free-agent” employee is upon us. We have to face the reality and not pine for the good old days of a desk groaning under the weight of resumes of people seeking employ. I should have photographed that phenomenon, because I will never see it’s like again in my...

Leaders now face a pivotal moment in business in Japan. Do they continue to cling to the past? Do they replay what they went through when they were younger and lead as they were taught by their seniors or do they change the angle of approach? Japan rebuilt itself after the devastation of the war. The workers slaved away, adding a notch to their collective belts as they slowly overtook the GNP levels of leading European countries. I remember how proud some Japanese company employees were when they overtook the UK. They were winning the post-war economic battle after having lost the wartime military struggle. Getting to global number two status was built on the 6 days a week working dedication of today’s retired great grandparents. Not only six days a week, but incredibly long hours and long commutes. Sundays were spent playing golf with clients. Company holidays were shared with colleagues, as well as beers after hours. In a nutshell, men worked at the same company until retirement and married women had to quit their jobs to raise the kids. For the men, there was not much family time, and the women were basically raising the kids on their own, like single mothers, but with more stable incomes. When I arrived here on April 1st, 1979, it was still like that. School and work were six days a week endeavours. There were few women in business after marriage and usually only one breadwinner in the household. While I was studying at university, I used to teach English at companies at night. Sure enough, they were still there, the salarymen reading the sports newspaper at their desk, wasting their time waiting for the boss to leave, so they could go home. Even when I came back for the third time to work in 1992, when interviewing sales staff for jobs, often they would tell me they quit their company because the long hours made them exhausted and ill. When I heard that same story repeatedly, I connected it back to my earlier experiences of the 1970s and 1980s and knew they were telling me the truth. These are the people who have been doling out the OJT - On-The-Job Training - to each succeeding generation. What about today, though, when there are many more job openings than enough people to fill them? The drop off in overseas study has made the competent English-speaking Japanese staff member a rare bird, compared to a few decades ago. This young generation of Japanese staff holds the whip hand in the current employment configuration between boss and workers. Are companies doing anything about this, other than whining about how hard it is to hire people? From what I can see, they are focused on whining rather than taking the right actions. OJT has been a smokescreen for doing very little for a long time. The spread of the personal computer drove a stake through the heart of OJT. Let me explain why. Bosses now had to do their own typing, rather than having female secretaries do it for them. I am going to digress and tell an interesting story about how much things have moved on. The average age of my fellow Rotarians in my Tokyo Rotary Club is 70. It is changing now, but twenty years ago, it was not uncommon for these gentlemen (and until very recently they were all men) to give me their business card, but sans an email address. Why? They were captains of industry, but not computer literate. They depended on their secretaries to take care of all their correspondence, including this newfangled thing called email on a computer, involving something called the internet. Their Middle Managers were also under attack. Their time was increasingly being consumed with emails and meetings. In this messy mix of modernity and technology, time became tighter, and that meant the coaching component of OJT was truncated down to the bare minimum. Over the last twenty years, the number of young Japanese has halved. That process has been gradual, like a creeping demographic rust in the corporate machine. Now the Middle Manager class is waking up and...

As leaders, we are busy bees. We are buzzing around, going from meeting to meeting. We are getting together with clients over lunch, touching base with HQ, handling the media, talking to HR about our people and a host of other important activities. Usually poor time managers, we are constantly hemmed in by the demands on our schedules. The upshot is we are constantly looking for corners to cut, minutes to be shaved off regular activities and feeling oppressed by the overwhelming workload we face. The common victim in all of this is our leader's communication with our team. We have found we can save time if we get straight to the point and then we can move on. We are packaging up orders to be given to get the team moving. Orders are given and we move on to the next activity. We commonly forget to talk about the big picture, the background, the context, the WHY of what we want done. We give the staff the short headline version of what we want done. We expect them to fill in the detail themselves, as we sleekly glide off to our next meeting, leaving them flummoxed in our wake. We are saving time, but in reality, we are slowing everything down. If the staff don’t understand what we want, they will do a version of it. Later, we find out that is not what we expected. We immediately get cranky because we have lost time and now we have to unwind what they have done and replace it with the correct version. This is doubling the workload, including our own. Recently, I introduced a new project which had elements required from a previous project. I had told the team members what I wanted and a couple of years sail by. When I wanted some elements from the previous project, I found out that they had not done what I wanted. I thought I was clear about it, expected they understood my needs, but I made a fatal error – I didn’t check. I was busy. I had already moved on to the next thing. Ouch! On reflection, I saw I had just issued an order which was crystal clear to me, but that was all I did. I didn’t spend enough time with them at the outset to explain the WHY behind what I wanted. I didn’t make time to communicate the context to them. Even if my explanation wasn’t genius, if they have the context, the chances are high they would do what I wanted automatically, because they got it. None of that happened. I should have made remembering and understanding what I wanted clearer by wrapping it up in a story. We are only so so at recalling facts, data and numbers, but we are really excellent at recalling stories. Did I do that? No. I just blurted out the order in double time and promptly departed. Don’t you know I am a busy boss? Did my story have to be a substantial precis of War and Peace? No. I could have spent two minutes telling them the Why, wrapping it up in the context, told as a compelling story. I could have aligned the reasoning for the project with the background. I could have mentioned the necessity for this project, how it came up, who was involved, where I was when I first got involved, who I was with, etc. All of this little detail is important because our objective is to mentally transport the listener to where we were at the time. If we can get them to come with us in their imagination, then we will be very successful in also getting them to support the WHY. When we have the same context and background, we usually come to the same conclusions. In fact, before we have even gotten to the part in the story about what needs to happen next, they have already raced ahead and worked it out for themselves. There is no convincing needed by us, because they have concluded the appropriate course of action – surprise, surprise - the same one we are recommending. They may come to a different conclusion after all, but that is fine. They may actually come up with an idea which is better than ours. The chances of their idea being radically different from ours, given the same context, would be possible, but rare. When we next feel the...

There are many paths to the mountaintop in the leadership area. Today, let’s go back to the practical realities of getting others to listen to you and, even more importantly, to follow you. My favourite quote on leadership is from Yogi Berra, the American baseball coach rather infamous for murdering the English language. He said something profound though, when he noted: “Leading is easy. It is getting people to follow you, which is hard”. If nobody likes you, what are your chances of uniting the team behind you? Pretty dismal would be the obvious conclusion. How many bosses are likeable, though? Often, they are demons, autocrats, channelling Genghis Khan for ideas on how to lead the team. They enforce compliance, but don’t foster engagement. Their influence on what is possible for the team is limited in scope. Understanding the members of the team and what each individual wants is a good place to start to reverse the lack of engagement. When they scold staff, this creates barriers and subterranean resistance. Handing out praise may not have been a feature of how they grew up in leadership, but in today’s modern business world, they need to learn how to do this. Being a good listener and encouraging others to talk, rather than barking out orders all the time, is the smarter move. Smiling, rather than maintaining a permanent frown, would be a good change to make. Communicating the value their staff brings to the organisation is a key to helping them feel what they do is important and that they are important. Getting the team to accept your ideas can be achieved by pulling rank and threatening staff with removal. It doesn’t get anyone particularly enthusiastic to do what the boss says though, let alone go the extra mile. Resentment and discouragement become the order of the day. In this permanent war for talent in Japan, the allergy to mid-career hires has evaporated and they can walk out the door to the warm embrace of your competitors. We can show our humanity by not holding the team to a standard that we don’t apply to ourselves. If we are wrong, we should admit it quickly and emphatically. This says to the team, “I am not perfect and I don’t expect perfection from you either”. We should never say, “you are wrong” when they venture forth an idea or proposal. That kills the creativity spark right there and creates resentment. Let them do most of the talking, even if it is killing us to shut up. This encourages staff to have ownership of the execution of our ideas. Trying to see things for the staff member’s point of view will help them feel understood and therefore more committed to reach the team goals. We need excellent communication skills to let the staff members feel the idea is theirs rather than ours. We can use the Socratic Method of asking questions to lead them to self-discovery. This is very empowering, and they will get right behind their own idea more than getting excited about executing on our direction on what needs to happen. When they suggest things to us, we shouldn’t be dismissing their idea out of hand. Yes, we may have more experience than them and yes, we may have tried that failed idea before. The point is, we want them to be engaged. Taking their idea seriously is a key step to making that a reality. Being a leader isn’t about having the baton tucked up under our arm and issuing orders right and left. Asking questions is a much better way to get people to follow us. They feel included in the decision-making process. That sense of ownership brings more energy to the completion of the tasks. Again, our communication capability is critical to have our team happy about doing what we suggest. We should try to avoid having to use position power to get things done. We want volunteers rather than the “volunteered”. Mistakes will always happen and how we handle them makes all the difference. I have seen a seriously senior executive explode in instant white-hot rage, up close and personal during a staff...

You would think that organisations choose their leaders because they are skilled in communication. What is the job after all, but communicating with the team to make sure everyone is clear about what they have to do and to encourage them to do it? Well you would be wrong! Leaders are usually selected for promotion because they are very good, often the best, at their current job. It is assumed that they will be the best person to lead the team on that basis. Just as we know that the talented sports person doesn’t necessarily migrate those skills into leadership roles as a successful coach, neither does the talented functional specialist transform into a successful leader. The gun sales rep doesn’t become a great sales team leader. The best architect doesn’t make the best choice to lead other draftsmen and women. The list just goes on and on and we wonder why we keep repeating the same errors? One aspect of that difficulty is that it is hard to see the immediate results of leadership, unless they really screw things up and people start quitting in droves. There is the rub. In the “goode olde days”, it didn’t matter. You just lose one and simply get a replacement. In the 1990s, I remember getting twenty or thirty resumes to go through, to fill a sales position. Now, if you can find anyone, you feel blessed. The competition for talent is a remorseless zero-sum game. As leaders, if we cannot communicate well with our people, we will face irreconcilable supply and demand issues. We will have to spend a lot of time and money to rectify our mistakes as our people will vote with their feet and leave the organisation. How can leaders improve their communication skills? There are tons of things to work on, but let’s look at two specific items. 1. I try to synchronise with the staff member when they are speaking by putting myself in their shoes. Bosses have poor memories. They conveniently forget about how they were at the same age and stage as their staff. They imagine they were perfectly formed and with no blemishes when they were coming up through the ranks. Not true. Like everyone working for us, we also made a host of mistakes in our careers, and that is how we educated ourselves. Rather than putting on the superior boss hat when speaking to staff, let’s try to cast our mind back to our own shortcomings and inadequacies at the same point in our career. This is a humbling exercise and bound to make us more sympathetic with the people who work for us, rather than getting annoyed with their work progress. We can change the tone of how we speak with them to be less abrupt. We can be more keen to have them relax with us, so that they can feel confident sharing their ideas or issues. We can stop telling them what to do and how to do it. Instead, we can ask them for their opinion on what and how we should do things around here. We don’t cut them off when they are talking and we will encourage them to try things, even though we doubt that it is going to work. We do this because we know that is how we learnt. We tried stuff and then sorted out the successes from the failures. We are communicating a lot of trust when we do it this way, rather than micro-managing the hell out of the team. 2. I observe the staff member for non-verbal clues Busy bosses are prone to shortcut everything. They are moving from meeting to meeting, trying to squeeze in their own emails between slots and generally feeling frustrated with the overload. Feeling totally time poor, they like to get to the meat of the issues straight away. They want to cut out any down time, like having to listen to a detailed explanation from staff, when they could get the summary much faster. This tends to become an internal dialogue between the boss and themselves, where they are concentrated on their frustration with their own lack of time and not with the person with whom they are speaking. This self-absorption means they are stuck with hearing the words of the staff but are...

Leaders may not even be aware that they are poor listeners. They are very focused on telling others what to do. Being time poor, they are very focused on their own messaging, rather than the messaging efforts of others. In the war for talent in Japan, that could be a fatal move. One of the biggest factors driving engagement in Japan is the feeling that the boss values you. If the leader isn’t really listening to the team members, they are not stupid and they will pick up on this. Before you know it, they have fled to greener pastures. They are off to your competitor, and the arduous and expensive task of replacing them begins. We don’t want that. Here are some hints on making sure you are a gold medal winning listening boss. 1. You display an open and accepting attitude toward the speaker This sounds easy, but are we doing it? Have we stopped the noise in our own brain to refocus on the person in front of us and not let that internal message competition diminish our capacity to listen to what we are being told? Are we in a neutral mindset and not bringing up silent annoyances from past associations with this person? Maybe they screwed something up recently and your mind is having flashbacks while they are talking to you and you are thinking about what happened. How is your body language control? I remember I caught myself shaking my head in disagreement while someone was telling me their idea. It was something I didn’t agree with and I was showing it. It was an automatic physical reaction. I realised right there that I couldn’t allow that to happen again. Now, I try to keep a strong lock on my body language, in case I am communicating a negative message. 2. When someone approaches me with a question, I stop what I am doing and give them my full attention I worked with a fellow Division Head once who was a shocker. When I visited his workstation, he had three screens set up and while I was sitting there talking; he continued to multi-task. He would type away, reading the screen and listening to me, all at the same time. It was a total insult in my mind. His self-awareness was dismally low and I remember how it made me feel. So, I made a pact with myself to never do this to others. Whenever my staff comes to me while I am typing, I physically lift the keyboard up and rest it against my computer stand to show I am not doing anything else but listening to them. I find this a good discipline, because when I am concentrating, the temptation is to type and listen at the same time – bad idea! 3. I concentrate on what is being said even if it is of little interest to me I saw a dramatic demonstration of this by my old boss. He was a senior Director in the firm and had a very big job. One evening, I was sitting in his office as he was explaining something to me, when one of the secretaries popped her head in the door to say something to him as she was leaving. It was a light comment from her, nothing particularly important, but he stopped talking to me immediately and gave her his 100% concentration. I thought “Wow, that is impressive”. He made her feel like a million dollars. No wonder he was one of the most popular leaders in that hierarchical, tough, hard edged, cutthroat world of serious big ticket real estate. It is hard to focus on things we don’t consider important, because so much of our day is taken up with Quadrant One urgent and important items. The interruption seems like a waste of our valuable time. It might be important to them, but not to us. We have a lot to do baby, so the temptation is to brush them off and get back to the grindstone. We have to overcome that habit and really appreciate that this topic is important to them. If they are important to the firm, then we have to give them our full attention to show we value them. 4. I try to understand the viewpoint of the person who I disagree with This is not easy. Leaders are often very forceful people, used to breaking down walls and pushing forward...

The S-Curve is a very simple concept. Over time, a newly promoted employee goes through distinct stages in their performance achievement. Initially, their performance declines as they grapple with the new set of responsibilities. Gradually they get the swing of things and start to do well at their new accountabilities. After a period of becoming comfortable with their role, they start to stagnate as they stop growing. Within these stages are many nuances. We select people for promotion based on their history and our hope for their future. We expect that good work and result production in the current role is an important indicator of talent and ability and that these attributes can be transferred into their leadership role. One of the astounding things about modern business in Japan is that firms abandon these individuals at this point. Puzzlingly, they do not provide their newly promoted leaders with any great assistance to succeed. The newly promoted are given the baton of command and left to themselves to use trial and error or copying what their previous bosses did, to work out how to lead. Sounds like a plan except what if their previous boss role models were totally mediocre leaders. This is how to create generational decline in a business and nobody would be voting for that. You really have to wonder how we could still be using such a failed model in this modern day and age, in such a sophisticated country like Japan? This country has a constant, savage battle for market share, going on across all industries. The struggle for survival is real and yet the development of the people in middle management who can make a difference is being hamstrung by inertia. Companies just keep doing what they have always done. That is not very smart if your competitor is making the changes to succeed and you are not. Part of the issue is that promoting one person doesn’t fit into any comfortable time frame for the machine. If ten people get promoted at the same time, then perhaps some group training can be arranged. The green eye shade types hunkered down in the accounting department run the numbers, calculate the per head cost, the per hour numbers and conclude that this is doable. However, if it is just one person, then the calculations blow up and the required training gets the thumbs down as too expensive. Consequently, there is no mechanism for developing these new leaders to play the role they have been handpicked for. Individual coaching is ruled out as too expensive for such a low-level position. For the senior Directors of course, an Executive Coach is deemed an acceptable expense, but not so for the newly minted section head. It is a case of “congratulations, work hard and good luck” and that is the full extent of the training programme. Here is a hint for everyone - look for training companies like us, who offer public classes on leadership, where you can ship the newly promoted person off to a class with others in similar situations, assembled together from other industries and companies. This is not hard and it is not expensive. In the meantime, the new leader is struggling to work out what they should be doing in this unfamiliar leadership role. Of course, the section targets haven’t been adjusted down to account for their struggle or lack of experience in this new role. Initially, they work much harder than before as a player/manager to get to the required numbers. This works for this first year and then what happens? The next year the targets are higher again, and they are doing even more individual work. Not much leading is underway to get to the target for which they have responsibility because they don’t have any time. They are not leveraging the team to produce a team result. Heroically they are trying to do it all by themselves. By year three, they blow-up and can’t match the increase in targets. Then the machine concludes they are a dud as a leader. They are replaced with the next victim; no lessons have been...

As leaders are we all perfect? Are we perfect all the time? Obviously, the answer is “no” to both counts, but that doesn’t mean we always face up to our own shortcomings. An important part of growing and improving as a leader is to be honest about who we really are. Let’s go through some common areas where leaders can improve. 1. Uninspiring This uninspiring tag covers a vast majority of leaders. Ask yourself, “how many of my previous bosses would I describe as inspiring?” The answer for most people is usually none or one. Now ask yourself, “if someone surveyed my team members, how many would say I was inspiring?” This type of reality check is useful because it can help us become better in some key leadership areas. What contributes to a leader being seen as uninspiring? It usually relates to a lack of enthusiasm, someone going through the motions with no great passion. This is reflected in how they communicate. The voice is dull, the energy low, the fire in the belly has long since smoldered out. As a consequence, they lack direction for themselves and therefore cannot provide it for the team. They are not leading an intentional life for themselves. Leaders are not robots and we go through our ups and downs in business. An important part of what we do is to provide electricity for our people. That spark inside us ignites a spark in them. If our spark has been eclipsed, then we need to reignite it. That means finding meaning in what we do. It means going back to the basics of what we do as a leader and rediscover the fundamentals of our role and why we are here. If we cannot manage that, we won’t be around for very long as the organisation soon realizes we are not providing any particular value to the firm. Find some aspect of the work which provides enjoyment. Start there and try to build on that scope to include more tasks and gradually rebuild your enthusiasm for being the leader. 2. Over-Focused On Self It would be a hard task to find anyone who isn’t overly focused on themselves in this modern business world of sudden layoffs, deadly mergers and bankruptcies. Leaders are not immune to these fears. Self-preservation gets more intense as you climb up the greasy pole and start costing the firm more dough. Recently. a friend of mine here at a prestigious financial firm was asked to leave because his subordinate, who he developed, would take over as his bosses could save money this way. So much for his long loyalty to the company and no wonder we become cynical. Over-focus in this context though means not being concerned about the people under you and just looking out for yourself. Actually, we can do both. Notwithstanding my friends recent unfortunate collision with boss greed, we can protect ourselves and develop our team. They are not mutually exclusive objectives. Over-focus on us means not delegating tasks so that others can develop their career path. They need to impress an interview panel that they can step up and do the job because they have some valuable experience in relevant parts of it. Delegation is not dumping one’s work on to others. It is growing the people under you. We have to stop saying things like “it will be quicker if I do it myself”. Instead, we have to devote some of our highly valuable time to developing others to have them learn the tasks. 3. Not Accountable Perfhaps we are an avid resister of feedback. We literally trash the 360-degree feedback because it is painful to read what others think about us, when they have the chance to freely express their views in a way which cannot be traced back to them individually. Of course, we can all improve and even if the comments are “wrong” from our point of view, we accept that there is that perception of us. We can work on improving that perception. If we ignore it, then retribution isn’t far away. Before you know it, your boss and the HR department are all over you demanding changes anyway. So why not be the arbiter of our own adjustments and...

Which is more important to us as the leader – what we choose to do or who we choose to be? Most of our careers on the way up will have been concentrated on doing, achieving, delivering results, making the numbers, getting projects delivered on time and on budget. Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. When we get into a position of leadership there is always a lot to do. Previously we were responsible for ourselves and now we are responsible for a bunch of other people. It is always breathtaking to discover that the people you are leading are nothing like you. They have different mindsets, motivations, values, fears, habits, desires and ambitions. The old boss idea that “if you want to get ahead, be like me”, is a joke in this modern business world. The “doing” in business is so loud, we are often oblivious to how we are showing up. Everyone of our staff are expert boss watchers. They can notice the smallest variation in our demeanour from one day to another. They are like those gazelles you see in nature documentaries, wandering around the African savannah, keeping a close eye on the nearby pride of lions. Staff have learnt that self-preservation is improved by keeping a close eye on the mood of the boss, “maybe I shouldn’t raise that project today because the boss looks in a bad mood”. I was reminded of this recently. I got to the office early and when one of my team arrived, he asked me if I was okay. Without knowing it my face was showing a lot of stress. I didn’t realise I was showing it, but he noticed it immediately. Here is a hint for bosses – keep an eye on what is on your face, because we can be radiating messages and we might not be aware we are doing so. The ”do” part of our job has to line up with the “say” part as well. Staff love consistency and predictability on the part of the boss. They don’t want to work for duplicitous people. Today they have lots of options and there is an army of hungry recruiters constantly on the lookout for poaching opportunities. Companies often frame their Vision, Mission and Values statements and hang them on the wall as a dedication to what the firm stands for. Middle management leaders cannot even remember these statements, so you have to wonder what is the value of doing this. I know that they cannot remember them because we test it every chance we get. As a training company we are often brought in to give the Middle Managers leadership training. At the very start of the class I take the frame off the wall and turn it around, so that no one can see it. The class usually has around 20 plus people and when I ask what is the Vision or the Mission or the Values there is often a lot of shoe gazing gong on as they avoid eye contact with me. The best they come up with is two or maybe three of the Values and they cannot recall the rest. I can’t see how you can live it, if you cannot remember it. So as the boss, can you remember the Vision, Mission and Values? Are you living them as a role model for the rest of the crew? Are you congruent in your boss behaviour with what the firm says is the way we do things around here? Companies like to say things like, “there are no mistakes, only learning opportunities”. I agree and that is a very noble idea. The problem arises when the boss chews out a member of the staff for benefiting from this learning opportunity by screwing something up. This is where the “do” and the “be” are not aligning. It is so easy for this to occur because the “do” part of our work is so deafening and so overpowering. We get sucked up into the vortex of constant meetings, tsunami of emails and task requirements exceeding the time available to do them. Tempers can fray, patience can erode and we say things we regret later, because we know we were not walking the talk. Being a boss is an inside out process. Who we are on the inside becomes obvious to everyone around us. They know if we are a fraud or if we are a true of heart. This can be the Johari window...

Leadership is about creating environments that influence others to achieve group goals. This works because people support a world they help create. There are five success areas for leaders to focus on that make all the difference. Rate your performance by giving yourself a mark on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) for each area. Self-direction This is a must for leaders. If you can’t organise yourself, your ability to have others follow you is doubtful. Effective self-directed leaders have a personal vision which they review each day to remind themselves that the compass is more critical than the clock. They write down this vision and they write down their goals. They do this because they know there is magic in committing generalities to specifics in written form. They have a broad range of goals around their main roles in life, so that the balance between business and non-business is never compromised. They have clearly defined values that guide their behaviour. This makes them predictable, congruent, consistent and reliable for those dealing with them. They understand the importance of self-direction and they are evangelistic about converting those they are responsible for into similar individuals. People skills Mainly because they lack self-awareness, are under-informed or uneducated, many people find these skills one of the most difficult areas to master. Leaders know that failure to form effective teams and partnerships at all levels, inside and outside the organisation, will have a critical negative impact on their personal influence capacity. Organisations that wish to prosper need their people to grow, and that requires a safe, open environment that encourages individual development. Effective leaders understand what turns people off and stop doing these things. In the same way, they study what works best and strive to interact with others accordingly. Many successful leaders have read Dale Carnegie’s classic text on developing an aptitude for human relations, and make it their bible for people skills. The primary reason leaders should develop people skills is to ensure they can build trust and respect between themselves and their subordinates. Process skills Such skills challenge a leader to ensure the system is not subjecting great people to poor systems and processes, ensuring that they will fail. We cannot see a process, but we can observe people using that process. It is, therefore, easier to blame the poor performer than the process, and leaders must be attuned to the difference. Leaders demonstrate the ability to plan, innovate, define clear performance objectives, delegate, utilise time effectively, analyse problems and make good decisions. As noted above, leaders know that people support a world they help create, so they enlist their people for reviewing and improving processes. Effective people skills ensure processes work optimally through users. Communication skills These make or break leaders. By demonstrating effective questioning and listening skills, leaders learn the most. They understand that, even during their first day on the job, associates can offer valuable insights and ideas for innovations. This is counterintuitive because leaders often fall into the habit of telling everyone what they need to do and how they need to do it. Leaders are usually the most experienced, smart, capable individuals in a group, and are willing to share their knowledge and insights. Learning how to ask questions instead of giving orders is an essential discipline for leaders. They also investigate the communication systems in the organisation to ensure they are right, and examine their processes to verify communication flows effectively throughout the organisation. Checking for understanding and being clear, transparent and concise are great strategies for leadership. Mass motivational speeches have been replaced in business by quality one-on-one questioning. Such questioning sessions...

We have probably all been on the receiving end of it or have been a witness to it. The presentation is completed, after which come the questions; some are fact finding, some seek clarification, while some are just plain nasty. Perhaps the questioner is not trying to be mean, but the result is the same. All eyes in the room burn a hole into you as everyone waits to see how you are going to handle this little Scud missile that is thinly disguised as a question. Some presenters splutter, nervousness sapping intellectual and verbal powers, while some give such a pathetic response we can see their credibility sail out the window as they speak. Some get angry, assuring everyone there that they are not fit for higher responsibilities because they can’t control their emotions. Do these questions come up? Yes, so there is no point imagining that we won’t have to face the meeting room moment of truth. Do we usually prepare beforehand, in the event that someone might decide to go after us? In 99% of cases the answer is “no”. The Scud catches us off guard and we simply flounder. This is a challenge that easily can be fixed. Below are a few steps that will trounce your rivals, diminish your adversaries, and show everyone what a true professional you are. Most preparation prior to any presentation generally focuses on the content and not the delivery. Taking questions, by the way, is part of the delivery and not something tacked on to the main proceedings. When preparing a speech or presentation, we are in control of the direction. However, once the questions start raining down, sadly, we are no longer in command of the situation. The first step before the meeting is to imagine what trouble may lie ahead. Who will be in the room? Who has a vested interest in seeing you go down in flames? Who are the potential troublemakers and their acolytes, possibly beavering away at creating problems for you? What have been some of the historical issues between your section and other parts of the organisation? Will there be someone in the room still smarting over you getting his or her money for last year’s project? What are some of the current burning issues that have a lot of money or prestige attached to them that would invite someone to slice you up in front of the assembled masses? Having identified the issues that are likely to become “hot” during the questioning period, let’s design some positive messages. Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, gave a great piece of advice once when announcing at a press conference, “Who has questions for the answers I have ready for you?” It is an amusing question, but also very smart. Rather than moving straight into damage control, which can often appear weak, squeamish, shifty and dishonest, go on to the front foot and put forward a strong positive message about the benefits of what you are proposing. Have at least two or three of these ready for each issue that you have designated as potential trouble. As a side note, be aware of your body language when doing this. Albert Mehrabian’s book, Silent Messages, has become well known for noting the disconnection between what we say and how we say it. If the two don’t match up, your message (your actual words) get lost, while 93% of everyone’s attention is focused on how you look and the style of your voice. Thus, a positive message needs positive body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and strength to back it up—preferably with a steely eye that glints with confidence. Even if you don’t possess one of those, try to fake it until you make it. Focus on four response options that will help to provide a strategy when questions come assailing you. • Immediately deny what others say when it is factually incorrect, misinformation, rumour, hearsay, or when you have been misinterpreted. Be strong, brief and have clear evidence to support your denial. • Admit you are wrong when there has been a misunderstanding or mistake. This is...