How To Enhance Corporate Credibility
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 08/27/2025
Time Management For Leaders
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Leaders today are stuck in a constant three-way tug-of-war: time, quality, and cost. In the post-pandemic, hybrid-work era (2020–2025), the pressure doesn’t ease—tech just lets us do more, faster, and the clock keeps yelling. This is a practical, leader-grade guide to getting control of your calendar without killing your standards or your people. Why does leadership time management feel harder now, even with better technology? It feels harder because technology increases speed and volume, so your workload expands to fill the space. Email, chat, dashboards, CRMs, and...
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How To Get Better Results
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
When you’ve got a dozen priorities, meetings, emails, and “urgent” requests hitting you at once, the real problem usually isn’t effort—it’s focus. This is a simple, fast method to get your thinking organised, coordinate your work, and choose actions that actually improve results: build a focus map, then run each sub-topic through a six-step action template. How do I get focused when I’m overwhelmed with too much work? You get better results by shrinking the chaos into one clear “area of focus,” then organising everything else around it. In practice, overwhelm...
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How Leaders Can Strengthen Relationships With Their Team (Part Three)
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
In Parts One and Two, we covered the relationship fundamentals: stop criticising, give sincere appreciation, understand what people want, show genuine interest, smile, and remember names. In Part Three, we move to the final three skills that make those principles work in real leadership: listening, speaking in terms of the other person’s interests, and making people feel important—sincerely. 1) Be a good listener and encourage others to talk about themselves Many leaders unintentionally weaken relationships because they listen selectively. If the conversation isn’t “useful,”...
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How Leaders Can Strengthen Relationships With Their Team (Part Two)
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
In Part One we covered three foundational human relations principles: avoid criticism, offer honest appreciation, and connect your requests to what the other person wants. In Part Two, we level up the relationship-building process with three more principles that are simple, timeless, and strangely rare in modern workplaces. How do leaders build trust when everyone is time-poor and transactional? Trust is built by slowing down “relationship time” on purpose—because rushed efficiency kills human connection.In post-pandemic workplaces (hybrid, remote, overloaded calendars), teams can...
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How Leaders Can Strengthen Relationships With Their Team (Part One)
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Most leaders genuinely want a strong relationship with their team, yet day-to-day reality can be messy—especially when performance feels uneven. The trap is thinking “they should change.” The breakthrough is realising: you can’t change others, but you can change how you think, communicate, and lead. Why do leaders get annoyed with the “80%” of the team (and what should they do instead)? Because the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) makes it feel like you’re paying for effort you’re not getting—but the fix is to lead the whole system, not just the stars. In most...
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The Five Drivers of Leadership Success
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
When markets are kind, anyone can look like a genius. The test arrives when conditions turn—your systems, skills, and character decide what happens next. What are the five drivers every leader must master? The five drivers are: Self Direction, People Skills, Process Skills, Communication, and Accountability. Mastering all five creates resilient performance across cycles. In boom times (think pre-pandemic luxury hotels in Japan) tailwinds mask weak leadership; in shocks (closed borders, supply chain crunches) only strong drivers keep teams delivering. As of 2025, executives in...
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Balancing People and Process—and Leading and Doing
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Newly promoted and still stuck in “super-doer” mode? Here’s how to rebalance control, culture, and delegation so the whole team scales—safely and fast. Why do new managers struggle when they’re promoted from “star doer” to “leader”? Because your brain stays in production mode while your job has shifted to people, culture, and systems. After promotion, you’re accountable not only for your own KPIs but for the entire team’s outcomes. It’s tempting to cling to tasks you control—dashboards, sequencing, reporting—because they’re tangible and quick wins. But...
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How to Stop Forgetting Things
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Feeling busier and more distracted than last year? You’re not imagining it—and you’re not powerless. This guide turns a simple “peg” memory method into a fast, executive-friendly workflow you can use on the spot. Why do we forget more at work—and what actually helps right now? We forget because working memory is tiny and modern work shreds attention; the fix is to externalise what you can and anchor what you can’t. As channels multiply—email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Line, Telegram—messages blur and retrieval costs explode. First, move details out of your head and into...
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The Right Japan Workplace Culture
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
How to reshape culture in Japan without breaking what already works. What is the first question leaders should ask when inheriting a Japanese workplace? Start by asking better questions, not hunting faster answers. Before imposing a global “fix,” map what already works in the Japan business and why. In post-pandemic 2025, multinationals from Toyota to Rakuten show that culture is a system of trade-offs—language, seniority, risk appetite, client expectations—not a slogan. Western playbooks prize decisive answers; Japan prizes deciding the right questions. That shift...
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How To Remember People’s Names at Networking and Business Events
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Short intro: Forgetting names kills first impressions. The good news: a few simple, repeatable techniques can make you memorable and help you recall others—consistently, even in noisy, post-pandemic mixers and business events. Is there a simple way to say my name so people actually remember it? Yes: use “Pause, Part, Punch.” Pause before you speak, insert a brief “part” between your first and last name, then punch (emphasise) your surname. The pause stops the mental scroll, the parting creates a clean boundary (helpful in loud rooms or across accents), and...
info_outlineInnovation is not the monopoly of the R&D Department. Everyone of our staff has highly tuned antennae which pick up valuable commercial intelligence about consumer trends, supplier data and client feedback. Just because they are not wearing white lab coats, doesn’t mean their insights should be ignored. Yet that is what we do in most companies. Innovation is the application of creative ideas into practical products and services. The germ of the idea is where the creativity component comes in and this is available to anyone. The journey from creative idea to idea application treads a path which transcends the scope of one individual. This is where the wheels fall off and most companies cannot capitalize on the latent creativity inside their firms.
Our recent global survey on creative ideas at work uncovered some disturbing findings. Given the intense competition in the marketplace for companies, you would expect that leaders would be doing all they could to seize and shepherd creative ideas through to application. Yet the survey showed that only 21% of leaders were really actively seeking ideas from anywhere and anyone in their organisations. Only 23% of survey respondents answered that it is very easy to get support for good ideas in their firm.
That germ of an idea will start with one person, but will it start at all? If you don’t care about the firm and you are not engaged, you don’t care if the mousetrap being built is better or not. Our research on the emotional triggers for high engagement showed that leaders need to make their people feel valued, confident, empowered and connected. These are all leader soft skills and depend on attitude orientation and communication skills to work. However, the numbers do not look promising. Only 27% of respondents said their manager makes them feel really valued, just 24% strongly agree they feel empowered and 62% said they don’t feel particularly confident in their skills and abilities at work.
Purpose is a key word in business today. Are the leaders actively promoting an emotional connection to the team’s work? Are the daily tasks being connected back to the company’s purpose by the leader? You might be thinking, “no problem, I do that”. However, if we recorded your conversations with your staff for a full day, how much time would have been spent connecting work with purpose? By the way the boss waxing lyrical about “shareholder value” won’t cut it, as a defining purpose for the staff. We need a higher purpose here to motivate people to get out of first gear.
Psychological safety is a phrase we didn’t anything about at work until recently. Today, crusty old leaders like me, have to re-invent ourselves and become more skilled at creating, coaching and maintaining workplace psychological safety. This is not that easy. Many of us grew up in the “suck it up” ethos of fight or flight. “If you can’t take it, then leave and we will replace you with someone tougher who can handle the pressure”. Namby-pamby whiners complaining about their lack of psychological safety are an affront to everything we did in our careers, because we did tough it out and we did climb the greasy pole to the top.
So what? That is not the current workplace. Times have changed and we have to change with them. The War for Talent is unending and is actually becoming more intense. We can’t throw people overboard today, because replacing them will be a nightmare. We just cannot afford to ignore people with ideas, because we are running the show like a demented pirate captain. If the environment is considered safe for idea generation then there is a higher willingness to take risks such as putting forward new and original ideas.