Leadership-Key Competencies Needed To Lead Others – Part Two
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 02/19/2025
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?...
info_outlineIn Part One we looked at two broad categories of leadership competences around being Self-Aware and having Accountability. In this next tranche, we will look at being Others-Focused and at being Strategic.
Others-Focused has many sub-points, but today we will investigate five key aspects
Inspiring
Through role modelling and communication skills, leaders can and should inspire followers. The olde days of the boss having to know more than everyone else has gone. The focus has shifted to developing followers, through personal interest and example. Are you consciously, systematically doing this?
Develops Others
Once upon a time, certainly when I first started work, there was no particular concept that it was the leader’s role to develop others. Individuals had to step up and do it by themselves. This is fundamentally what all leaders had done in the past. Today however, business is more complex and fast moving, so everyone needs help. One of the issues is the struggle between selfishly focusing on your own glorious career and the role of others in boosting that cause and your own efforts to selflessly boost the careers of your direct reports. Companies need leader producing machines. The talented rise faster and higher by demonstrating they are that very elevating machine. Those who can demonstrate they can produce leaders are given a bigger remit to do that at scale. Can you do it and are you doing it?
Positively Influences Others
Rabid rivalry and internecine warfare between competing thrusters amongst the leadership team permeate the wrong messages to those below. Disciples pin their hopes to the banner of the thruster they think will go higher and take them with them. Everyone is grasping the greasy pole, trying to climb over each other to the top. Politicians and sycophants abound inside companies and are a vicious form of poison, because they are playing all ends against the middle to feather their own nest. The leader sets the tone. Not whining about others in the company, not playing petty internal power games and keeping firmly focused on beating the external rivals is the correct path. Are you and all of your colleagues on it?
Effectively Communicates
Personal capabilities and mastery of one’s designated tasks are the usual path to promotion. Being 100% responsible for oneself is different to being responsible for a team. This is where leadership communication skills are soon shown to be frayed and tatty. Speaking the lingua franca is frankly so what? Communicating key messages and inspiring and persuading others to your path are the required skills. Few leaders do a great job because many are locked into the belief that all this communication stuff is fluff and hard skills are the only currency. They are doomed to be low altitude flight path denizens, because companies are looking for people who can move the masses forward. Is what you are doing every day moving them forward?
Providing Direction
This sounds so simple. I mean how hard can this be? What if it is the wrong direction though? What if we are all being urged to sprint faster off the cliff? This is the VUCA world of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Setting the correct direction isn’t the easiest thing for leaders these days. We can’t know if the direction is correct until we start down the path. The clue is to adjust when confronted by unpleasant hints about the actual truth. We need to keep adjusting to the market realities and not become too convinced of our own genius and superiority. Has your leader ego convinced you that you are always correct?
Being strategic is one of those tropes of leadership, but what does it actually involve? Let’s look at couple of issues.
Innovative
This competency sounds obvious and easy except that very few companies, let alone people, are actually innovative. Think of all the companies you have worked for and nominate how many came up with any significant innovations? We are better off developing the innovation muscle of the entire team, than relying on our own scampy offerings. If you are substantially personally gifted in the innovation department then hats off to you. How many people like you then have you ever worked with? The answer is clear. The collective team, if harnessed properly to the task of coming up with innovative ideas, can do it together. The sticking point is, do you know how to marshal your team to do that?
Solves Problems
The is another obvious competency, except that are you the one running yourself ragged solving everything? Have you delegated tasks sufficiently so that others can share the burden? Leaders should be involved with big strategic issues, not with every small fry decision. If you are in the problem weeds and getting down and dirty with minor issues, it is time to rethink how you have positioned yourself as a leader.
Uses Authority Appropriately
Does every decision have to run by you? Are you in too many meetings? Are you hooked on your own authority and feel the need to be on top of everything? Developing staff means letting go and giving them some things to try and possibly fail with. “There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities” is a good mental intervention, for when your staff screw things up. Delegating your own power is a tough one for driven leaders. However, if you want to rise, you have to breed successors like rabbits, so that there are plenty of people to take over so that you can rise up the ranks.