588 Transform Your Team Leadership. Secrets For Building Cohesion and Performance In Japan
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 12/04/2024
Common Leader Achilles’ Heels
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We know the name Achilles because of Brad Pitt and Hollywood or we may have read the Iliad. He was a famous mythical Greek hero whose body was invulnerable, except for the back of his heel. His mother plunged him into the river Styx to protect his body, but her fingertips covered the heel, leaving it vulnerable. Research by Dr. Jack Zenger identified four common elements which comprise Achilles’ heels for leaders. Blind spots are a problem for all of us. We can’t see our foibles, issues and problems, but they are blindingly obvious to everyone else working for...
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Are You Authentically Aggressive Or Assertive As A Leader
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
In today’s business world, leaders need to be “authentic” leaders. We have all come across this somewhere, endorsed by self-proclaimed gurus and prophets. I often ponder what does that actually mean? I am sure all of those Japanese leaders screaming abuse at their staff, when they make mistakes, are being authentic. They are authentically terrible, dictatorial, abusive leaders. Actually this worked like a charm for a very long time in postwar Japan. You joined a company for life and there was only one route for those who changed jobs and that was down into a...
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Three Tools To Engage Your Team
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Engaging your team as a leader is a relatively new idea. When I first started work in the early 70s, none of my bosses spent a nanosecond thinking about they could engage their staff as a leader. What they were thinking about was catching mistakes, incompetence, error and willful negligence, before these problems went nuclear. That meant micro managing everyone. “Management by walking around” meant checking up on people. The construct was that the team were problematic and the boss needed to have forensic skills to stop problems escalating. That was the...
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How To Be A Role Model As A Leader
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Smirks emerge quite quickly when you mention “role model” and “leaders” in the same breath. Most peoples’ experiences with leaders as role models have been that they encompass the “what not do as a leader” variety. Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) or teacher by negative example, as we have noted in Japanese. What are some of the things we should be focused on in our quest to become a real role model for our teams? We can break the role model aspect into four major areas: Self-Aware; Accountability; Others-Focused and Strategic. Within these four categories,...
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The New Leader Mindset Shift Needed
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We are recognised for our capabilities and potential and promoted into our first leadership role. We have been given charge over our colleagues and now have additional responsibilities. In many cases we don’t move into a pure “off the tools” leadership role. We are more likely to be a player/leader hybrid, because we have our own clients and also produce revenue outcomes. One of the biggest difficulties is knowing how to balance the roles of “doer” and “urger”. Jealousy, bruised egos, sabotage, mild insurrection can be found amongst our former colleagues...
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Four Superheroes Of Coaching For Leaders
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We have seen Hollywood pumping out comic heroes as movie franchises to get the money flowing into the studios. The premise is always the same. The super hero comes to the rescue and saves everyone. What about for leaders when coaching their team members? Fortunately, we have four super heroes we can rely on to help us do a better job as the leader. They are Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower. Encouraging our team sounds pretty unheralded and straightforward. But do we actually do it? Leaders are busy people and have tons of pressure on their shoulders. ...
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Working Through Others Who Are Not Working
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The chain of command is a well established military leadership given. I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else. In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers. This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback against the Vietnam War, when all authority began to be challenged. Modern leaders are currently enamoured with concepts like the “servant leader”. The leader serves the team as an enabler for staff success. Dominant authority is out and a vague...
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House Clean The Team Every Year
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape. We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk. We have two types of people working for us. There are those who receive a salary of some dimension, be they full time or part-time and then there are those who get paid for their services. Some of these services are delivered regularly throughout the year. Others are intermittent, on a needs basis. Regardless, we...
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Is Japanese Charisma The Same As Western Charisma
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
I met the owner of a successful business recently. He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction. So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange. It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful. Why was that my expectation? Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are like, so I expected a Japanese equivalent. He was totally...
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Leadership Silk Purses From Sow's Ears
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The ad on social media said, “we are looking for sales A players”. I know the guy who put out the ad and he had recently moved to a new company, a new entrant into Japan and they were aggressively going after market share here. I was thinking I would love to be able to recruit A players for sales as well, but I can’t. The simple reason is that A players in Japan are seriously expensive. If you are a big company, with deep pockets in a highly profitable sector, then this is a no brainer. Why would you bother with B or C players, if you can afford A players?...
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Teams don’t build themselves. They are delicate, fragile and unstable. They need constant care and attention from the leader. Despite the sexiness, a team of stars is not what we want either. They will always lose to a star team, a united front of uncompromising commitment to each other and to winning. Here are some things to think about when building and maintaining the team.
1. The Role Of the Leader
One of the better metaphors for leaders is the orchestra conductor. They are uniting and harmonising a group of stars to work together. Each person brings their specialist role, talent and commitment. The leader is the one to glue the team together. The leader creates the environment where the team can coalesce around the tone, direction, culture, values, vision and mission.
Central to achieving this cooperation is the leader’s communication and people skills. The trust won’t be created by a bumbling, disorganised, incoherent, selfish, small minded person claiming the glory for themselves and basing their leadership mantle on their received status power.
2. Identifying Strengths
One of the follies of leadership, and I speak from deep experience here, is trying to fix the gaps and weaknesses of the people in the team. We can easily find our time is tied up in resuscitation efforts for people who are struggling or underperforming. We are better to have a mix of people, with a variety of skills, talent and abilities and work across the sum of the whole, rather than trying to put band aids on their weaknesses. By definition, 80% of the team are producing 20% of the results. We need to get more out of the 20% producing 80% of the outputs. This is the true alchemy through informed division of labour.
3. Clarity Around Responsibilities
The worst part of being a leader is thinking people are clear on what they need to do. You have told them right? Then you find they are not doing what you expected or need. Part of this is the fact that a single communication is never sufficient. We cannot just bark out orders and then wander off. We need to manage the people and their work, without micro-managing and pulverising them into submission. We need to keep abreast of progress. If things are not working, then we need to know about it early and intervene to right the ship.
4. Encouraging Collaboration
Teams are usually small affairs, even in big corporations, because people are divided into sections. In this modern high-tech era, that invariably means people are doing a lot and are super busy. This doesn’t lend itself to having excess bandwidth to help others in the team or even more vitally, helping people in other sections.
We also have the danger of the leader trying to unite their tribe by making the other section’s tribes the enemy. This is a disaster. The true enemy are the opposition team in the rival company. We need to make them the bad guys, not our own colleagues. That doesn’t stop ambitious leaders from trying to gain advantage internally, by using their team as a weapon for supremacy, domination and relentless ladder climbing. The leader’s job is to contribute to the entire enterprise effort and make sure the firm wins in the marketplace.
5. Proactive Team Building
The leader has to create the opportunities for the team to get together. These could be Town Halls, brainstorming sessions, team lunches and dinners or any other excuse to get the group together. With work from home so prevalent, the team members don’t see each other every day, as they usually did before Covid.
Team projects are a good tool for getting people from different sections together who normally may not have a chance to work with each other. It introduces diversity into the creative process and creates the human bonds needed to keep everyone together.
I am such a business genius and guru. I hired four new people in January 2020, seconds before the pandemic wrecked the training industry. One of them drew her secure salary happily every month through the devastation and simply up and quit at the end of Covid. Ouch.
She was in her late twenties when she joined the firm and spent the pandemic working for us from her room in her parent’s house in Shinjuku. I realised later that she didn’t have any close friends inside the company and so it was easy for her to depart. Yes we had meetups online, but it wasn’t enough and not the same as being together in-person. This was my first pandemic, so I made a number of leader mistakes during Covid as a result.
This is not a comprehensive list of items on the subject of team building, but there is plenty of food for thought to get to work on. The leader is the driver here. We go for role clarity and keep reviewing what is working and not working. Retaining our talent is the name of the game for the modern leader in population declining Japan and if we make a mess of it, the penalties are potentially fatal.
Team building never goes out of fashion or relevance. The problem is we are never properly trained for this part of the role and we bumble along through trial and error. We all need to do a better job of educating ourselves in this regard. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is today.