Leadership Principles Are An Absolute Must
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 03/05/2025
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_outlineHarvard Business School, Stanford Business School and INSEAD Business School are all awesome institutions. My previous employer shelled our serious cash to send me there for Executive education courses. Classes of one hundred people from all around the world engaging in debate, idea and experience exchange. One of my Indian classmates even wrote and performed a song at the final team dinner at Stanford, which was amazing and amazingly funny, as it captured many of the experiences of the two weeks we all shared together there.
When you get off the plane and head back to work, you realise that the plane wasn’t the only thing flying at 30,000 feet. The content of the course was just like that. We were permanently at a very macro level. The day to day didn’t really get covered and the tactical pieces didn’t really feature much. This isn’t a criticism because you need that big picture, but the things on your desk waiting for you are a million miles from where you have just been.
Fortunately, there are some leadership principles which can cover off the day to day needs. Principle #22 is “begin with praise and honest appreciation”. Such an obvious thing, how could this even be mentioned as a principle? It may be obvious, but are you a master of this principle? We talk about providing psychological safety for our teams. Well that is great and just how do you do that, when you have pressure to produce results from above and are feeling the stress of the current business disruption? It is too easy to begin with an interrogation about the current state of play, the numbers, the revenues, the cash flows. How about if you started every interaction off with finding something real to praise about the team members. Not fakery but something real, that shows you are paying close attention to what they are doing well.
Mistakes happen. Except in Japan. In Japan mistakes are not allowed and the penalties to career advancement are large. “Fail faster” might make you a legend in Silicon Valley but would see you cast out in Japan. That is why the entire population here are all ninjas at concealing any errors, so that the boss never finds out. How do we get innovation going if we can’t tolerate mistakes? That is one big reason why there is so little white collar work innovation in Japan.
Principle #23 says “call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly”. Rubbing in it some one’s face that they screwed up is a pretty dumb, but universally adopted, idea by bosses. Principle #26, “let the other person save face” isn’t an “oriental idea”. It is a human idea and no one likes losing face in front of others and it doesn’t increase people’s engagement levels. In fact, is has them thinking about leaving for greener pastures. Principle #24 also helps, “talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person”. We want our team members to feel empowered to take responsibility, to step up and try stuff. That is how we create an innovation hub inside the organisation. If you have a hotbed of ideas from your team and the competition is still canning people who make mistakes, then you will win.
Principle #25 is so powerful. “Ask questions instead of giving direct orders”. Bosses are staff super-visors, because we have super-vision. Probably true once upon a time in the olde days, but no longer the case. Business is too complex today, so we need to grow our people and to be able to rely on their ideas. If I spend all my time telling you what I think, I haven’t learnt anything. Bosses need to think of questions which will push the team’s thinking muscle hard and get people really engaged. Instead of laying our your thoughts, chapter and verse and falling in love with the sound of your own voice, try asking questions instead. After asking the question, shut up and let your people answer without interruption. It may be killing you, but do it. Being asked for your opinion and ideas is empowering. Maybe the boss has all the answers, great, but what if the staff have questions the boss hasn’t even thought about. In Japanese business, asking the right question is more valued, that having the right answer.
All of these principles have things in common. They are common sense, but not common practice. They are super easy to understand, but devilish to execute consistently. They are game changers in our relationship with our staff. Having some leadership principles to live by just takes the action of thinking out of the equation. These become the reflex actions we take because they have become a habit. These are the types of habits we need to cultivate.