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Working Through Others Who Are Not Working

THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Release Date: 05/07/2025

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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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Japan makes the whole construct even more interesting by having built up a legal perspective on staff issues that favours the worker against the company. Judges, also do not see company staff non-performance of duties as necessarily career ending. Add into the mix the fact that in the last 20 years, the number of people aged between 15 and 34 has halved. The bad news is that it is going to halve again over the next forty years. Young people will be in high demand, regardless of how useless they are. We complain today about millennium entitlement. That will be nothing compared to what is coming. Smaller families means more single child households. The Boomer generation will be spoiling their grandchildren on an industrial scale. Scarce resource spoilt brats will be entering society and business. I can hardly wait.

The Universities here in Japan will be taking anyone with a pulse, because they are going to be bleeding red ink all over the place. Does anyone remember the Tandai system of two year colleges? They have all disappeared or morphed into four year schools to survive. Diabolical entrance exams will linger for the most elite schools in Japan, but for the rest it is a race to the bottom of academic standards to keep the doors open. Passing academic classes at a Japanese University has been a joke. If you turn up to class, the chances are pretty good you will be passed. A rather low bar compared to what is happening at varsity in the rest of the advanced world.

So dealing with undereducated, spoilt, entitled lay abouts are our collective future when hiring staff. Even now, between 30%-35% of staff into their third to fourth year of employ are bailing out and heading for the exists, seeking supposed greener pastures. Covid-19 may have put a temporary dampener on this exodus for the moment, but if that is your staff retention strategy, then the future looks bleak for you.

Business is so complex today. The hero boss who can do every part of the business process has become a distant memory. Even if we could do it, should we? The boss should be concentrating on those activities that only the boss can do and should be pushing everything else down to subordinates. Now that is the theory. The reality is most bosses in Japan are doing too much. They don’t trust the delegation system because they have been burnt before. Actually, that is not quite true – they don’t have a delegation system. A dumping of the work system yes, but an intelligent, best practice delegation system, well no. Probably a good time to revisit how that works for all the bosses out there, because they are going to need it.

If we can’t unleash hell as bosses and we have to gain willing cooperation to get the youth engaged, what do we need to do? Communication skills are going to be at a premium. The whole modern apparatus of leadership rests on persuasion power, rather than raw position power. Do bosses know what these young people want? That would be a good starting point. “What is in it for me” is a tried and true motivator across time and geography. Once upon a time that was focused on what the boss wanted but times have changed. Bosses need to spend time with young people, individually, to understand them better. Yes, they may be spoilt little brats, but these are the cards you are dealt, so learn how to play them.

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