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Sisällön tarjoaa Dr. Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Japan. Dr. Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Japan tai sen podcast-alustan kumppani lataa ja toimittaa kaiken podcast-sisällön, mukaan lukien jaksot, grafiikat ja podcast-kuvaukset. Jos uskot jonkun käyttävän tekijänoikeudella suojattua teostasi ilman lupaasi, voit seurata tässä https://fi.player.fm/legal kuvattua prosessia.
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Lipstick on the Rim
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1 Amy Schumer & Brianne Howey on the Importance of Female Friendships, Navigating Hollywood's Double Standards, Sharing Their Birth Stories, and MORE 50:05
This week, in what might be the funniest episode yet, Molly and Emese are joined by co-stars Amy Schumer and Brianne Howey. They get candid about motherhood, career evolution, and their new film, Kinda Pregnant —which unexpectedly led to Amy’s latest health discovery. Amy opens up about how public criticism led her to uncover her Cushing syndrome diagnosis, what it’s like to navigate comedy and Hollywood as a mom, and the importance of sharing birth stories without shame. Brianne shares how becoming a mother has shifted her perspective on work, how Ginny & Georgia ’s Georgia Miller compares to real-life parenting, and the power of female friendships in the industry. We also go behind the scenes of their new Netflix film, Kinda Pregnant —how Molly first got the script, why Amy and Brianne were drawn to the project, and what it means for women today. Plus, they reflect on their early career struggles, the moment they knew they “made it,” and how motherhood has reshaped their ambitions. From career highs to personal challenges, this episode is raw, funny, and packed with insights. Mentioned in the Episode: Kinda Pregnant Ginny & Georgia Meerkat 30 Rock Last Comic Standing Charlie Sheen Roast Inside Amy Schumer Amy Schumer on the Howard Stern Show Trainwreck Life & Beth Expecting Amy 45RPM Clothing Brand A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us at @sonypodcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…
THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Manage series 1283444
Sisällön tarjoaa Dr. Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Japan. Dr. Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Japan tai sen podcast-alustan kumppani lataa ja toimittaa kaiken podcast-sisällön, mukaan lukien jaksot, grafiikat ja podcast-kuvaukset. Jos uskot jonkun käyttävän tekijänoikeudella suojattua teostasi ilman lupaasi, voit seurata tässä https://fi.player.fm/legal kuvattua prosessia.
THE Leadership Japan Series is powered with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The Series is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of leadership, who want to the best in their business field.
…
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608 jaksoa
Merkitse kaikki (ei-)toistetut ...
Manage series 1283444
Sisällön tarjoaa Dr. Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Japan. Dr. Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Japan tai sen podcast-alustan kumppani lataa ja toimittaa kaiken podcast-sisällön, mukaan lukien jaksot, grafiikat ja podcast-kuvaukset. Jos uskot jonkun käyttävän tekijänoikeudella suojattua teostasi ilman lupaasi, voit seurata tässä https://fi.player.fm/legal kuvattua prosessia.
THE Leadership Japan Series is powered with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The Series is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of leadership, who want to the best in their business field.
…
continue reading
608 jaksoa
Kaikki jaksot
×The President of a company is a very powerful force. They drive the direction, the strategy and the culture formation inside the enterprise. In Western corporations, there are big salaries and big incentives tied to the leader’s performance, especially around profit achievement and share price gains for shareholders. We project this idea on to Japanese companies and imagine they are basically built in the same way. This idea seems fine, until you ever have to get a decision from a Japanese company. This is when you enter the twilight zone of differences about how things are really done here. Japan has some specific features which make the leadership terrain quite unique. Mid-career hires are the norm in the West and the exception in Japan, as far as larger firms are concerned. New graduates are malleable and the company leadership wants to install their group think, culture and conservative action methodologies in them. Seniority is a respected Confucian attribute in Japan, which has little currency in the Darwinian, performance outcomes oriented West. Age and stage make sense in Japan, when you spend your entire career with the one firm and are part of the fabric of that company, gradually being stitched in over decades. The risk aversion predominance in Japanese business weighs against change and bolsters constancy. We foreigners represent change. To become a trusted partner with a Japanese firm means they have to make some internal changes to accommodate the new thing we bring to them or the old thing we are tweaking in a new way. The question is, who inside the Japanese decision making hierarchy is going to take responsibility for the change. In Western companies there is a big personal payoff to taking risks, but Japanese salaries and bonuses are not on the same planet as a country like America. So, the upside of taking a risk in Japan is far outweighed by the potential career damage if there is a failure. We have all grown up with a British Raj model of decision making. Convert the leaders and you get the whole company to snap into gear and get with your programme. It doesn’t work like that here unless the President is the founder or the owner. This is the “one man shacho” formula, the classic dictator President, who rules with an iron fist and drives everyone to do what ever they say. Most big corporates though, have a structure where the President has P&L responsibility for the whole company, but the direct reports have P&L responsibility for their part of the business. The President can’t force them to make expenditure allocations impacting their turf without their agreement. Hence the reputation of Japan as the country of glacial decision making. I find this is a bit boring, because the Raj approach is much faster and easier for me. No one in Japan could care less what I want. I deal with a lot of Presidents, as I try my best “convert the Raj” techniques to get them to buy my training services. Being the President of my firm, I can get access to the senior echelons of the client company and get a hearing. This is where Western logic departs from Japanese best practice. The leaders I speak with won’t personally do anything themselves. The company has internal compliance methodologies to reduce risk and protect the firm. The work to investigate my idea will get sent right down to the very bottom of the pile. That lower level designated officer or tanto will start pulling together information on our company, our offer, our pricing, the market, the competitors, resources required and the prospective ROI. The tanto will then present that report to their superior, the next up the line, who if they approve it, will place their hanko or personal seal on the document. This is a public acknowledgment that it has passed their stringent evaluation process and they are willing to take responsibility and place it before their superior. The hanko marks on the document will also include any divisions or sections that will be impacted by the buying decision. This is an internal harmonisation and communication process to provide checks and balances. In this way, there are no surprises and no issues, when it comes to coordinating the execution piece. This process is repeated all the way up to the President’s direct reports who have P&L responsibility to fund the deal. If it is a big enough decision, there may be a senior executive meeting required. This is usually a formality to bless the decision, rather than make a decision. The plan executive sponsor will outline the idea at the meeting, there will be no questions and it is therefore agreed. Next item! The surprising thing is that the President isn’t the final decision maker. And I had such a good meeting with that President too and I thought I had the Raj technique working on steroids! Actually, the person I needed to meet was the tanto . I could either work with them directly or I could supply the information they required, for them to do their due diligence. When meeting with the President, I need to finish the meeting off, by asking to have my people get together with their tanto , to supply whatever information they need. Japan being such a polite culture, the President will happily make that introduction even if knowing that there is no chance of this deal going anywhere. This is because it conveniently avoids anyone having to tell me a direct “no”. If it has legs, then the tanto’s job is to navigate the decision through the system. So in Japan, it is better to start at the bottom and work your way up, than try to go top down, as we are more familiar with in the West. The tanto has to become a key messenger for us. If we can’t win over a relatively junior, seemingly unimportant staff member to our cause, then the decision outcome will be remain vague and lifeless. Now we don’t want that do we.…
Leading is super easy. You are given the title, the authority, the budget, the power and then you just tell people what they need to do. How hard can that be? As we know, leading is a snap, but getting others to follow you is the tricky bit. Our awesome power will certainly bludgeon compliance. Sadly, the troops turn off their commitment and engagement switch whenever they come into contact with kryptonite bosses. We get promoted because we personally did a rather good job on our individual tasks. That is a false flag though when it comes to being able to communicate, coach, set the direction and inspire others. Few great athletes become great coaches. It is a totally different skill set. There are four broad areas we will focus on to help us become successful leaders: Being Self-Aware, Accountable, Others-Focused and Strategic. The possibilities are endless, but these four areas will serve us well to elevate our thinking about what is required to be a great leader. Under the umbrella of Self-Awareness we have four focus areas. Self-Directed There is a mental and physical requirement for leadership, driven by a strong desire to be successful. We explore inside ourselves to understand what we need to do and why we need to do it. Someone who can only function on the basis of the advice of others is a follower not a leader. Of course, taking advice is good, but leaders have their own sense of True North and keep moving forward, charting their own course Self-Regulated Being a self-regulator requires supreme discipline. Knowing what not to do is as important as making action step choices. Shiny objects abound, multiplying like amoeba, but time, money and resources are limited. Be it business focus or our temper, we need to rein them both in and assert control. Develops Self Constant application of self-improvement sounds obvious, but many leaders are cruising. The more diligent may be doing a good job working in the business, but they are too busy to be working on the business. Is that you? Technology, society, company culture and organisational development overtake some leaders and ultimately they are ejected from the firm. Where is the locus of self-development to be found? Good question and there are multiple options. Good choices will have a lasting impact on our longevity as leaders. Confident “We don’t know what we don’t know” is a big problem. Before you become a leader there is that misplaced confidence that you know what to do in the role. As you rise through the ranks, you keep making new discoveries. The more you learn, the less you find you really know. Imposter syndrome is a big factor here after we step up into new responsibilities. Constant self-development is the cure for this, as we grow into the job. Accountability covers four sub-topics. Competent This is often mistaken for technical knowledge or business content cover. That capability within your old job is what thrust you into a leadership role. What about your competency as the leader? What do you really know about leading? How persuasive are you? How well do you understand the aspirations of the team? Can you coach others who are just not like you? Can you set the correct course in a raging sea? This requires study and doesn’t happen by osmosis. Honest and Having Integrity Are you honest? Would your people agree? Seeing people as cogs in the machine elevating your brilliant career, jousting with rivals for the next job using the team resources for that purpose and being all about me, me, me is often the leader reality. Think about some of your bosses up to this point. The crust on top of this reality is a false veneer disguising what is really going on. Subterranean self-interest is often voiced over with pious pronouncements. Being honest is about sincerely wanting to develop the team members and integrity is what you do or think when no one is observing you. Manages Progress Towards Goals Obvious. Yet are the goals clear to your team? Is there an intelligent plan? Are people engaged and bought in? Are you the pirate captain simply bellowing out orders and threatening the crew with the plank? Makes Effective Decisions When do you know a decision was effective? Certainly never at the time of making it. In that moment, we are working on hope rather than certainty. Are the team convinced of the wisdom of the decision? Was there any input opportunity for them? Does our power of personality or position power just crush access to the diversity of opinions available? When it isn’t working, are we trapped by pride, ego and arrogance to keep running faster off the cliff? In Part Two, we will investigate being Others Focused and Strategy for Leaders.…
Japan has some set pieces around leadership. The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen. This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t. They can be observed every day, all day long. What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss. Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, what is happening with that report?”. Now many of the team are at home, away from the constant surveillance of the boss. The boss has little idea how they spend their days and our clients tell us many Middle Managers are still struggling to supervise the diaspora. In many cases, the day would start with the chorei, the morning huddle, getting the team together to go through what is on for that day. These meetups can continue even when everyone is at home. During Covid, we moved it online. Everyone had to be on camera at 9.00am, dressed for business, rather than in a T-shirt. If they didn’t come on camera that was a red flag. There may have been some depression issues bubbling away in the background, as the isolation started to get to people. They began to withdraw. One of my team didn’t come on camera for three days in a row, saying there was an issue with the laptop webcam. Was there really an issue? How would I know that was the case, sitting in my study, at my home? I immediately started organising another laptop to be sent out. I need to see everyone’s face every day, to check how they are doing. In the end, it was a technical issue around the privacy settings in Teams. The point though is, I didn’t really know what was going on. I have to be continuously keeping an eye out for the emergence of any stress or depression in my team. At the chorei we would go through good news reports, the vision, mission, values, the Dale Carnegie Principle for that day, who we are visiting virtually or otherwise and who was visiting us, each person’s top three priorities for the day and a motivational quote. The whole thing took about ten minutes. I usually spent another ten minutes talking about things like taking care of your health, standing up regularly because we tend to sit for too long, issues around coordination which have arisen, the latest news in our business, the cash flow situation and recognising good work. We also had Coffee Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day for anyone who wants to just shoot the breeze and catch up with colleagues, they don’t physically meet anymore. It wasn’t that popular so we dropped it. The meeting cadence with direct reports continued online but it was easy for this to fade or drift. People’s new work from home schedules seem to make it harder to connect. Back in February 2020, when we started working from home, it had a temporary feel about it. On reflection, I didn’t immediately embed some processes I should have. These direct report meetings were a discipline I found I had to really enforce, because many of my staff seem to possess ninja level skills at avoiding talking with boss. I usually want stuff from them, I want it yesterday and I am very demanding. Talking with me is probably a pain, so some are quite creative in escaping the supervision. The biggest issue was coordination across the whole business, as we all descended into our little pockets of responsibility and started losing sight of the big picture. I had to spend a lot more time making sure that key information was being shared and that I was also sharing key information, rather than hogging it to myself. This was a time consuming activity, but we dropped the ball a couple of times because it wasn’t done properly. Before I knew it, timelines started to drift, activities dropped out of completion sequence and confusion was not far behind. This was when I discovered just how detail challenged some people in the team actually were. In the office it got covered off somehow. Being subterranean, it wasn’t noticeable. In isolation from each other however, wrong data inputs have a horrendous impact. They spark a lot of effort to clean up the mess created. It draws people away from what they should be doing, dragging them into the morass of re-work. We tried to get around these coordination and communication issues by creating one truth. There was a live document in Teams that everyone could access and all changes were noted there. As a training company, we had training events scheduled LIVE On Line or in the Super Safe Classroom, so we could see which ones were being executed, which were postponed, who was involved, etc. A limited number of people were allowed to feed into this document to enforce accountability and control. Today, with people at home, you may need a similar live document that tells everyone what is going on, which is being updated continuously as things change. GIGO (garbage in garbage out) is an issue for any document, so the details have to be monitored carefully. To overcome the isolation, one on one meetings were being held more frequently than when we were in the office. However, I found it even harder than normal to get hold of people because they are often holding online meetings or were on the phone. In the office, I could just walk over to their desk and signal to them to see me after they finished their call or grab them when they came back from their meeting. I find our younger people are not phone savvy. They don’t check their phones for incoming calls they have missed. This wastes a lot of time trying to get hold of people, so I had to be pretty bolshie with them, about checking their phones for missed messages and to check their voice mail regularly. It is a real pain, but sending emails or text messages as well seems to be the way to get their attention. Many people are still working from home and are liberated from the daily grind of commuting in Tokyo which is good. They are not necessarily pouring this extra time into their work though. As the boss, I have had to become a much more “supervising” leader than before, which I actually hate. There are many more moving pieces now due to the residue of Covid-19, so whether I like it or not, I have become more interventionist to make sure it all hangs together. How about you? Has this been your experience too?…
Clients sometimes ask us to help their Japanese executives have more “presence”. This is rather a vague concept with a broad range of applications. There is a relevant Japanese concept called zanshin ( 残心 ). A rather difficult term to translate into English, but when you see it, you will recognise it. In Karate we do the predetermined, specified forms called kata (型). When someone is performing one of these kata, there are different points of emphasis and after the physical action is completed, there is a residual energy and intensity of commitment that continues. It is the same in the kumite (組手) or free fighting. After a powerful punch or kick is completed, the karateka keeps driving their energy, intensity and focus into their opponent. In business, we call this intensity “executive presence” but usually without the concomitant violence. When the executive makes a comment, there is an energy that remains after they have stopped speaking and the audience feels that intensity. We also call this having gravitas. Emilio Bortin was the CEO of the Santander Bank, which was a shareholder in the Shinsei Bank, when I was an executive there. He was visiting Japan to check on his investment and we were assembled to give him a presentation on what was happening with the Retail Bank. He was a broad shouldered but not so tall man, but when he entered the meeting room, he was like a Spanish Bull entering the arena, looking for a matador to emasculate. He completely filled that large room with his presence. It was absolutely palpable. He hadn’t even said a word, yet you felt his energy, intensity, determination, passion, strength and confidence. He was radiating zanshin - “presence” big time. “When I am a billionaire like Emilio baby, I will have presence too”, you might be thinking. So, did he get presence when he became a billionaire or did he become a billionaire, because he had presence? We know it was the latter. Right, very good, but how do we aspirant billionaire punters get executive presence? The energy being pumped out is a big factor. Low energy, low intensity people have zero zanshin and so zero presence. Softly spoken people can have presence too I guess, but frankly, you just don’t meet too many of those. There is a vast difference though between being raucous and loud and having presence. Being loud is basically just annoying. To have presence, your vocal strength and your body language must both be engaged at a higher than normal level. In casual conversation we speak at a certain level of intensity, usually fairly mild. When we are in a meeting or presenting, we need to ramp that up by at least 20%. When I am teaching participants in our classes to increase their vocal strength and speak more loudly, they struggle. I say to them “double that energy” and they raise by 1%. They resist because they feel like they are screaming. However, when they see themselves on video, it just seems confident and credible, not loud. This is one element of having presence. Pauses, ma (間), are another critical element. This space between the phrases or sentences, allows the audience to actually distill what you are saying. When you rush the words together, each thought overwhelms the previous thought. Each successive idea canibalises its predecessor and so not much content is consumed in the end. Our messages, in effect, are competing with each other. We speak at a good pace, so that the energy button has been pushed, but we need to break the content down to smaller brackets, which people can more easily digest. We are not rushing, so it shows control and no pressure being felt. This emanates confidence. We hit key words for additional emphasis, rather than allotting equal importance to each word. This focuses the audience attention on what we want them to focus on, rather than trying to ask them to swallow the whole talk, in one gulp. This communicates “I am confident”. This level of control requires us to be very concise. Too many words and the message becomes less clear, drowning in surplus words. We need to trim the fluffy bits right back. Our eye contact is a powerful engagement tool. Spraying the eye contact around the room is fake eye contact and meaningless. We focus 100% of our attention on one person, look them in the eyes for 6 seconds and then repeat the same formula with each person, one by one. They feel they are the only person in the room and we are speaking directly to them. Previous American President Bill Clinton was famous for his ability to engage strangers in crowds, when he was mixing with the masses. He focused his eye contact completely on that person in front of him and engaged them at the highest level. Standing up straight or sitting up straight is super easy, but few can do it. They kick out one hip when standing or sway around all over the place, while they are talking. It distracts from their message and dissipates their strength and intensity. When they are seated, they are sprawled out in their chair, looking way too casual to be taken seriously. They don’t use gestures and just talk, talk, talk. Talking way too much means they are always taking the long way round to get to the point. Little chance for zanshin in this case. Absolutely exude your belief, confidence and power from inside. Drive it into your audience. Use your voice and eyes for powering up your messages. Be concise, so you are distilling and focusing only on the key messages. Break the rhythm with pauses and engage people with your power eye contact. Strong posture says a lot about who you are. People believe body language, so ramp it up. This is how to have zanshin , which is the key to having executive presence.…
In business we live in the world of shallow statements of opinion. Imagine there is a topic for discussion amongst the leadership team. People will let fly with their thoughts and this becomes the basis for decision making, based on people’s statements on the matter. Usually everyone is pretty busy, so the drill is to listen to what was said and then make the choice from amongst the various alternatives and move on. There is a problem with this. We are trapped in Phase One thinking if we continue in this way. Phase One thinking is that first reaction level of contemplation on what you have just heard. Instantly, you pour out your immediate thoughts on the issue. The problem with this is, although it is quick and saves time, there is pretty light contemplation going on here. The famous Greek philosopher Socrates lived from 470-399 BC and was famous for his questioning techniques. He used this method to help others dig deeper into their thinking. We have to take inspiration from him and develop our own questioning techniques. If we do, we will get to a deeper realm of understanding of the issues. This is the platform we need to make the best decisions. I notice this issue in our training classes. When we ask someone for their opinion on something, they will give us an immediate Phase One answer. Because Dale Carnegie was a devotee of the Socratic method of asking questions, our teaching methods rely on us digging in a bit deeper. We are trained to never take what someone says at the Phase One Level, but to always push further. This applies to leadership and to sales. In both disciplines, the students in the classes are encouraged to go further and question more deeply. In sales, for example, imagine we were talking to a customer. They tell us they need the widget in green. We train our students to ask why they want it in green, as opposed to accepting the green option at face value. This gets us to a Phase Two much deeper answer. That is good information, but it isn’t enough. We need the client to go to Phase Three thinking and we do that through further questions. If they said they wanted green, because of XYZ reason, we don’t stop there. In Phase Three we ask, “what would be the impact on your business if your were able to get XYZ?”. We have now elevated the discussion to the achievement of their strategic goals. We have taken them to a much richer source of information to help them clarify what they are doing. In sales, we have started to position ourselves as the customer’s trusted advisor. In leadership it is the same thing. Members of the executive team will give their opinions on an aspect of the business. Normally we collect all of these various opinions and then we make a decision based on that discussion. Often, we are influenced by the force of personality behind the opinion. This is only Phase One thinking though. If we ask them to explain why they think that, we have now driven deeper down to Phase Two. Once we hear everyone’s Phase Two level of thinking, we could make a decision at this point. We shouldn’t stop there however, instead we should keep going. Push them to go to Phase Three and tap into their ideas on how XYZ would strategically impact the business. This is a tremendously simple process. It does take slightly longer than just tapping Phase One thinking outcomes, but the harvest is so much richer. We have all had the experience of having had a discussion with someone, often an argument and a couple of hours later, we are having a conversation with ourselves. We are telling ourselves genius things such as, “I should have said this” and “I should have said that” etc. This is because in the interval, our thinking has moved way beyond the simple Phase One responses we were applying in the conversation. We have moved to Phase Two and Phase Three thinking, but we have missed the boat. Instead of having to wait a couple of hours to get a richer response in meetings, as the leader, we have to get our Socrates mojo working and go for Phase Two and Phase Three responses right there and then. We have to guide our people to start thinking more strategically about the business. You will be surprised by the improved quality of thinking that you trigger. This means the leadership group discussion and the decisions made will also be much better. Let’s all decamp to the Phase Three world and live there from now on.…
Kokorogamae is one of those Japanese concepts which are a bit tricky to translate. Kokoro by itself as a word has a wide variety of meanings – mind, spirit, mentality, idea, thought, heart, feeling, sincerity, intention, will, true meaning, etc. It is a radical in the Japanese kanji ideographic script and so appears in a large number of compound words. Kamae comes from the verb kamaeru meaning take a posture, assume an attitude, be ready for, etc. In Japanese, when the two words are combined, there is a phonetic shift of the “k” in kamae to a “g” sound. I first heard these two Japanese words in my karate dojo back in 1971, but never as a compound word. Every class we were given the command “ kamae ”, meaning to take our fighting stance. For anyone doing Japanese martial arts, this is a very familiar word. The Kokorogamae concept is closely linked to Japanese ideas around perfectionism and mindset. You cannot produce a perfect output, if your mind is not properly aligned with the action. A great calligraphy master will establish their Kokorogame before they wield the brush, the ikebana master will do the same before they place the flowers, as will the master of tea ceremony before they begin to whisk the tea. They perfect their mindset, to produce the perfect output. In my first book Japan Sales Mastery, I wrote about Kokorogamae in the context of sales. What was your true intention as a salesperson. Was it to secure a big commission, bonus or promotion for yourself or was it to help the client to succeed in their business? The mindset is totally different and the output can be a single sale or a lifetime partnership with the client. If you are a salesperson, which is your intention? Leaders also have their Kokorogame. Hanging on many walls, protected behind glass, tastefully framed, clearly written is the Kokorogame of the organisation. In English, we call it the Vision, Mission, Values of the firm. Someone or a group of people, thought about where do we want to take the organisation in a perfect world, in other words what is the Vision going forward? What we do that is the Mission? Why we do that are the Values. This is the Kokorogamae at the macro level. The culture of the organisation is there to police the individual adherence to the corporate Kokorogamae. The leader’s key role is to bring clarity to the Why of what we are all doing. But where does that concept of the Why spring from? Simon Sinik has more or less, become the owner of the Why since his YouTube video went viral. The Kokorogamae concept starts up one step before what Simon is talking about. He concentrates on concentrating on the importance of establishing the Why, but how do you determine the Why of the Why? Where does that come from? This is where Kokorogamae is useful. It makes us reflect on what we believe and why we believe it. As the leader, is my true intention to build up the people in my team and help them become the absolute best that they can be? Or, are they there to serve me, to propel my rise through the corporate ranks, with them arrayed like worker bee slaves to me, the Queen bee. Just as in sales, these goals are not mutually exclusive. A famous sales trainer Zig Ziglar said, “you can have everything you want, if you just help other people get what they want”. Your Kokorogamae can create your own success wrapped up inside the success of your client. As a leader, you can rise through the ranks on the back of the results created by a highly engaged team, who feel you have their back and are focused on their success. The key point is where is the focus of your thoughts about the people in the business? How do you really see them, when we strip away all the psychobabble? To get better clarity on that, we can use the handy Japanese concept of tatemae and honne , meaning the superficial reality and the actual reality. Are you leading based on a tatemae version of what you are supposed to say and do or is the real you, the honne , the one your people see everyday? What is your true intention? What is your Kokorogamae as a leader regarding your team members and the organisation?…
Leaders are now leading invisible people. Their staff are no longer in sight or at best are only visible in person a couple of days a week. What are their people doing at home? How are they spending their time, how motivated are they, how engaged? Being in the office brings a certain level of discipline with it. You can see if people are goofing off. In an open office environment, you can hear the phone conversations with clients to gauge what is going on. When people are at home though, there is no way to be sure the team are using their time effectively. Time is life. Time management is life management. The key tool to controlling time is the schedule, daily, weekly, monthly and annually. The temptation is to just imagine that time management is only about work time management. We are holistic beings, multifaceted, with multiple responsibilities. We play different roles in our lives and the work role is only one of those. Concentrating all of our time on work throws our lives out of balance. The schedule is the key tool, so what goes into that schedule determines the life we lead. We have parents or children or siblings or partners or friends. Devoting all of our tine to work means that these key personal relationships are starved of the time needed to be allocated to them, in order for us to have a more rounded life. If we are late for lodging our personal taxes, unfocused about our finances because we are too busy working, then we will suffer both now and in the future. Getting our financial lives in order needs time and that time is in our schedule. We either allocate the time for that purpose or it gets allocated for something else. Our health is the same. If we just work all of the time and don’t schedule time for exercise or relaxation, then we will encounter health issues. It is like running the machines 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The production numbers are initially impressive until the whole enterprise has shut down to spend time repairing the broken machines. We start by nominating the key roles we play in life. Work is certainly one of them, but not the only thing. After we establish the roles we play, we can now attach some goals for each of those roles. This becomes important, because the schedule prioritisation process will be run off the achievement of these goals. When we consider the competing goals, we have to make a choice about which goals have a higher priority than others and then time is allocated for the attainment of each of those goals. It sounds so simple and it is. The surprising thing is that you realise you are a multifaceted person and not just someone who works all the time. You need to allocate time to call your mother, to see the kids sports fixture, to go to the dentist, to check your bank accounts, to go for a run, etc. As the leader, this is the concept of time usage we need to be teaching to our team members. If you are running in the wrong direction, going faster doesn’t help. If you rapidly climb the ladder and find it is on the wrong wall, that doesn’t help. What do we want to have, do and be? We need to think about these aspects first, then set the direction, the goals to support that effort and the scheduling, based on priorities, to make it all a reality. Teaching people how to get more done each day at work is fine, but the modern leader needs to see their people in holistic terms. If they become sick or experience family breakups or financial instability because they only concentrated on time allocation for work, then they will not be able to fully contribute to the organisation. What’s more they will be very unhappy and unmotivated and that doesn’t produce the culture that breeds the quality of professionalism we need. The machine will break and require extended downtime. Having a key person in the business experience illness, which takes them out of the picture, can be devastating to the firm. We want our clients served by happy, engaged, healthy, satisfied and motivated staff. The leader’s job is to educate the team about proper holistic time management. If we do that, we will have a much more successful and sustained business. We all spend a lot of our time working, so making that a happy, fulfilling experience rests on getting all these aspects of people’s lives to be in alignment. For that, they need time and we teach them how to allocate that time in their schedules. Are you doing it?…
Staffing is a subject that gets a lot of attention from those within and without the organisation. Those outside see staff movements as a bellwether of how the company is travelling. High turnover indicates disruption and uncertainty about the future. Rapid high turnover indicates real trouble within the ranks. When executives arrive in Japan, they often discover a lot of deadwood and they get about cleaning them out. They are wholly focused on internal issues. The outside perspective hasn’t been a consideration in their minds. They have forgotten about their competitors and how they will try to use this information to damage the firm. They think they can operate in a vacuum. Japan being such a risk averse culture, unscrupulous rivals have a field day playing up your instability and therefore heightened risk as a business partner. I remember running ads for sales staff when I was in Osaka. I merrily ran the ads looking to expand the sales team. Now I knew that, but interestingly our rivals took that as a sign of weakness not strength. Japan loves secrets and rumours. With everyone living on top of each other for centuries, keeping secrets is almost impossible and salacious talk and spreading rumours are up there with dining out and shopping as national sports. It was made to look as if we were in chaos and there was high turnover in the ranks. Our customers began to ask probing questions about our stability. No doubt they were doing this after they had been briefed by our competitors on what a mess we were and how we were not a suitable supplier anymore. That negative fallout from the ads never occurred to me in a million years because I was upbeat, focused on the positive, the expansion, the growth. After that near death experience with our customers, I made sure that every ad thereafter had the explanation that we were hiring because we were expanding. What was the additional costs of including those few vital words in the ads – nothing. It was only my ignorance and single focus that allowed our rivals to seek a way in. The same issues can arise from within. Whenever there is an organisational change, do people start high fiving each other, celebrating the new structure as a way to steal a march on the competitors? No, they are concerned about losing their jobs, or having someone invade their turf, lose face, or being dragged kicking and screaming out of their comfort zone. This is a great breeding ground for rumours. The formal explanation of what and why this is happening never seems to outpace the rumours. The top executives are all on board with the changes, because they thought of them, but for everyone else, this is new. In the vacuum, the rumour mill kicks into high gear. The impact is that everyone forgets about the customer, the competitors and concerns themselves with their own best interests and imagining all the bad things that are about to unfold. We have to make sure that every person is spoken to directly and so quash the rumours and misinformation before THEY can gain momentum. Yes, this takes time. But the focus on the customer and the competitor is where we want people concentrating, rather than on what is going on inside the firm. They need to get back to work and the sooner their fears and concerns can be addressed, the faster they can do that. When people quit, the assumption is there is something wrong in the company. Key people departing is especially unnerving for a lot of people, who immediately jump to all sorts of misconceptions about what this means for their own security or the stability of the enterprise. Sending out a blanket email heaping praise on the departing is guaranteed to set up the vacuum, allowing it to weave its magic spell of impending doom for the survivors. We need to tell each person, one by one, what is really going on and assure them that everything will be okay. We will find a great replacement, we can carry on in the departing person’s absence, it is not the end of the world. This is time consuming, but it is the best way to ensure that the official version is the only version floating around. Action Steps When you have turnover whether it is positive or negative, be aware of external perceptions about the change – that perception will always be a negative one, so prepare to counter it Whenever a vacuum in information appears, it will be filled with rumours and misinformation, so you have to grab hold of the narrative and control it Internally, make sure every single person is spoken to directly and don’t imagine for one second that a blanket email will do the trick –it won’t…
The usual advice is to get off the tools and concentrate on being the leader and focus your energies getting leverage from the team who work for you. This makes a lot of sense because as the leader we are supremely busy these days and the pace of business in only speeding up and growing more complex. It also depends on how big your company is. When you get large numbers of people working for you, then the chance of doing anything other than attending meetings basically dries up. And this is exactly the problem. Without noticing it we have been consumed by the beast and we now live in its belly. We are surrounded on all sides by our own team members. We might meet clients, but usually they are not our client and belong to one of the troops. We are there for ceremonial purposes and not to seal the deal. We live at the margins of the business and we are gradually separated from knowing what is really going on. Some leaders may protest and tell me they know what is going on because their Division Heads, their direct reports, tell them. I would answer that what your Division Heads are telling you is what they want you know and that may not necessarily be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It may be difficult, but where possible I would recommend keeping a couple of clients for yourself. That way you keep your hand in with the market, the issues, the problems, the ups and downs of the flow of business. You are getting this news unfiltered and your clients are telling you like it is, with no sugar coating. More than couple of clients will be logistically very hard. We can all probably manage a couple and the intelligence we hear from these sources will be very valuable. We can also evaluate more effectively what our own staff are telling us. There is no doubt that the boss hears the bad news last, because everyone is hell bent on covering it up for as long as possible. But as the boss we operate on a different plane. We know we have the power, money and resources to fix problems and the faster we find out about the issue the less costly it is for us to fix it. So we have staff motivations and our own going in different directions. There is nothing worse than thinking our systems are certainly correct, to only find out that is not the case. We assume things are being put in place as part of the overall ecosystem, but actually there can be gaps. We don’t discover these gaps fast enough when we rely on others to tell us about the gap. In fact, think back to the last time someone on the team told you about the gap compared to when you unearthed it yourself? I am struggling to remember when that happened because it is so rare. The snapper there is if no one is volunteering this information then how do we discover it? This is where keeping your hand in the game comes in handy. We are more likely to see problems or imperfections is we remain part of the process. I was reminded of this recently. I had been teaching our High Impact Presentations Course which has two days in the classroom, then a follow-up half day, a twenty eight week self-paced programme so that the class participants don’t forget what they learned and a monthly Professional Ongoing Education class. As I was talking about these things at the very end of the class, I saw some blank faces. That set off a warning siren in my head to check how we keep people informed about the follow-up programme. And not just for this programme, but for all of them. If I hadn't been teaching that class, I may not have found this gap at all or for many months. We try to really work on providing added value beyond the class content, but all of this effort is wasted if people don’t know about it. I think I have systems in place to make sure the communication is working smoothly, but sometimes it isn’t and I have to fix it. The scary part is I only ever fix the gaps I know about and what happens to all the gaps I don’t know about? There is a cost to being on the tools but also some clear benefits. So take a look at your work and see where you can keep a hand it without the work devouring you.…
Large organisations have many willing hands. Often, the quality of the people employed is very high, and the firm has the deep pockets sufficient to attract and retain them. Leading smaller firms is more challenging. There is a large degree of multi-tasking going on, as the workload gets spread across the troops. Everyone is busy, busy, busy and that especially applies to the boss. Time is in short supply, so corners are cut, elements are skipped and the quality of work produced can be an issue. The temptation is for the boss to concentrate on their meetings with their direct reports, as individual one-on-one get togethers. The time left over for regular meetings of the leadership team can be compromised quite easily. It is never blatant. The direct reports don’t rise up and storm the barricades chanting “death to more meetings”. Instead, the scheduling process becomes the enemy of progress, as trying to get a number of busy people together to coordinate availability can be the death knell of the meeting. The boss is usually the one with the worst schedule openings. You might have tried to circumvent the issue by not over scheduling the number or frequency of the meetings. Maybe they are held fortnightly, in the belief that getting everyone together will be easier. Often, though, this proves to be a false hope and something always comes up to ensure not everyone can make it. When you have a small leadership team, the point of the meeting becomes compromised. The purpose of the leadership team meeting all together is to make sure information is being shared and that alignment of purpose and execution of the business is going on in an effective manner. I belong to Tokyo Rotary Club and Rotary itself was founded to connect disparate industry representatives together, so that we wouldn’t be locked into our Guilds and become insular. The leadership team meeting has the same objective, to get people together to talk and share what is going on in their sections with everyone else. It is so easy to become wrapped up in what you are doing and to forget to let others know what is going on with your area of responsibility. The boss has to drive this process, and this is where we meet the first big hurdle. The boss is always the busiest person and the one who most often cancels the meeting because their schedule changes so frequently. In a small company, the boss will not only be liaising with the Mothership back home, leading the team locally, talking to their direct reports one-on-one, checking on the company finances, tracking the revenue achievement and keeping a close eye on HR issues, they will also be dealing directly with clients. As we all know, that meeting with the client will take priority over a meeting of the section heads. This is why the boss is the hardest one to pin down for the meeting. When the boss is also the scheduler and driver to hold the meeting, things drift very easily. Before you know it, the leadership team hasn’t met for weeks. Time flies at the best of times and unless this leadership team meeting is made a priority, then there will never be a regular cadence for the get together of the section heads. It is always a good practice to look for a day and a time when things are less frantic. I know that for many of us, that would be a very good question: “just precisely when is it not frantic around here?”. Everything is relative, so look for a fortnightly cadence which will give the meeting enough regularity to make it relevant, without the time drifting too much. Next pick a time of the day when it will work best. This might even be a bento lunch together, because lunch times are usually a less scheduled time during the day for most of us. Because of the morning rush hour phenomenon, breakfasts are a lot more complex to pull off. Getting the kids off to school, fighting for space on the train to get to work, exhausts everyone too, so early is rarely good. Evenings are difficult too because people want to get home and they are tired after a hard day at work, so the collective brainpower available is down. There is never an easy time to hold these meetings, but unless a strong will is enlisted, they just won’t happen. Make them over lunch, make them every fortnight, and make them a high priority. Will this work perfectly every month? I severely doubt it, but at least the strike rate will improve and better coordination and team building will occur compared to the usual chaos. .…
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.…
When I first got to Tokyo in 1979, there was a very well established corporate educational system in Japan. Unlike Universities in Australia where you studied a subject and expected to work in a closely related field, Japan was concentrating on producing generalists. It didn’t matter what you had studied at University, because the company would educate you on what you needed to know. I also discovered that the tertiary educational system was broken, so companies couldn’t rely on Universities to educate the young. I was so surprised to realise that except for those entering professions like law, medicine, architecture, etc., and needing to pass national exams, most students were living their best life (at their parents’ expense). Think a four-year sojourn at Club Med and you get the flavour of spending most of your time engaging in club activities and working part-time jobs, rather than studying. The principal education tool for companies wasn’t formal training. There were a few weeks at the start as new grads were onboarded, where you learnt about the firm, systems and the basic etiquette of business. After that, your sempai or seniors and your boss would teach you the ropes. As everyone joined the firm for life, there was a logic in the boss spending their valuable time grooming the next generation. In 1978, the first Japanese language word processor was developed, which allowed everyone to type in Japanese more easily. There were still secretarial pools in those days, so the boss didn’t have to get their hands dirty playing around with this tech. In November 1995 Windows 95 was launched in Japan, which made it easy for anyone to access the internet. With the take up of email, the boss was now required to write their own emails and gradually the secretarial pool went the way of the Dodo. The upshot is that this change meant the boss and the sempai were now much busier than before, doing their own emails and their own typing. The amount of time available to train the next generation on the job went down and has been down ever since. There was no supplementation with formal training, because the OJT system was so accepted as all that was needed. These changes are glacial, so they didn’t attract much attention on the way through, but things did change. Where are we today? During Covid, we found a not very amusing contradiction with Japanese corporate training. Those domestic Japanese companies who had already come to the realisation that corporate training was required just stopped in their tracks. They cancelled set classes because of Covid and were worried about the safety aspects of people gathering together. Dale Carnegie in the US had started online training delivery in 2010, so fortunately, we had specialized manuals for online delivery and certification systems in place for trainers and producers when Covid hit. We could teach them global best practice techniques accumulated over the previous decade. We ran our first online class in March 2020, free for our clients and covering Stress Management. We quickly found that WebEx at that time had a 100 person limit and we crashed the system. We regrouped and completed the training session. We proved to ourselves that using the Dale Carnegie approach of highly interactive training also in the online training environment was a viable option. Unfortunately, many domestic Japanese companies didn’t think so and refused the online option, believing that it couldn’t provide sufficient delivery quality compared to face-to-face. That actually wasn’t true, but nobody in Japan ever gets fired for foregoing opportunities to embrace change and do something new. They didn’t want to return to the classroom, and they didn’t want to do it online, so with this Catch 22, they did nothing. Some of these companies are slowly coming back to face-to-face training. What Covid revealed though, was that the Middle Manager level of capability wasn’t well developed, having relied only on OJT and they needed to fix this problem. We have been doing a lot of leadership training as a result. The gaps we notice are that the managers are totally undereducated on what is required to be a leader. They have spent time on the job so they can run the machine. They can see that it runs on time, to cost and at the required quality, but these managerial attributes do not make them a leader. The difference between a manager and a leader is that the leader does all of those things a manager does, plus sets the direction for the team, builds the culture and develops the people. The upshot is that those companies who invest in their people and give their Middle Managers leadership training will do better in the zero sum game for retaining staff. People leave bosses, not companies. With the declining population and permanent shortage of people, replacing staff can be extremely difficult and potentially fatal to companies. I believe the continued reliance on the broken OJT system for training leaders is a nonsense and a suicidal choice. Get your people trained if you want to survive this war for talent. Young people are much more mobile and one in three are departing their companies after three or four years and joining the competitors. This is very expensive after they have been trained and they are hard to replace. With properly educated Middle Managers, the retention rates will be much higher and will yield a competitive advantage against rivals who have only been trained through OJT. This is no joke and the consequences of getting the equation wrong are deadly serious. OJT is dead. Companies should stop relying on it and should instead get professional leadership training for their Middle Managers before it is too late.…
The blow torch has never been applied more ferociously to how leaders lead than what we see today. Once upon a time, there were resumes pilling up to consider who we would hire. We had the whip hand, and the applicants felt the lash. Now the roles have been reversed and the applicants are interviewing us, rather than the other way around. I have done my weekly podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews now for over five years, talking to CEOs here about one topic – leading in Japan. It was never intended for this when I started five years ago, but many of the leaders tell me it is having a positive impact on getting people they want to hire to join the company, in preference to another firm. The reason is that my style of interviewing allows the leader to be authentic and talk in their natural voice. There is no corporate propaganda being issued or false flags being flown. This is what employees want from their companies and, in particular, from their supervisors. It is easy to proclaim your superior values when times are good. When times get tough, that is when you discover if what you have been told by your boss is real or fake. I had this experience, and it was very disappointing. I heard all about the importance of our customer, but when the economy went off the rails, the customer was instantly propelled overboard and everything was about the sole interests of the firm. Short-termism took over, and many bridges were burnt to the ground. Promises were retracted and customer collateral damage was waved away as “unfortunate”. Any faith I had in the senior leadership and their commitment to the stated values of the firm evaporated. As the boss, we have to be very careful about the congruency between what we say and what we do. If we talk about wellness, but we expect people to drive themselves to ill health, then we are revealed for who we were really are. Our interests are the real priority. Over the years, when looking through people’s resumes, I would ask about some blank spaces. They would tell me they had to quit the company because the horrendous overtime had made them ill. As an Aussie, I always thought to myself “how ridiculous”, but that was the norm in Japan back in those dark days. If we talk about work/non-work balance, but we push people to work long hours, we are hypocrites and, even worse, obviously stupid hypocrites to boot. If we talk about work ethic, but we are cruising along as the boss, while whipping the troops along, it is clear to everyone that we are applying an indulgent, different set of rules to ourselves. We can be clever and come up with all sorts of justifications and corporate double speak, but nobody is fooled by our deceit. Treat others how you want to be treated is the most basic level required for boss-subordinate interactions. This is commonly called the “golden rule”. The actual true target level should be to treat subordinates how they want to be treated and is called the “platinum rule”. Let’s go for the platinum rule, shall we? This sounds easy enough, but there is no necessary uniform idea on this and every person can have quite different expectations. As the boss, we need to keep enquiring about what our people want. We may have had that conversation once before, but a lot can happen in the space of a few years, and these desires are not stagnant. Changes can include getting married, having children, taking care of aged parents, buying a home, paying for the kid’s education, etc. The list of changes are long and we need to appreciate that our subordinates’ needs change. Taking the view that it doesn’t matter because we pay them is an antiquated idea stuck back in the day when resumes were numerous and boss choices were many. Money is important, of course, but as life speeds up time becomes in short supply. Flexibility can create the time our people need and we can help them achieve things they need. If we are dogmatic about the rules and procedures, that may make us feel powerful, but it will be counterproductive inside the culture. Our research has clearly shown that the key to getting teams engaged is that they feel the boss cares about them. The way they know that is actually the case is through the way the boss communicates and the boss’s capacity to be flexible and supportive of the needs of the staff. As the boss, you can’t fake this stuff. You are either supportive or you are not. The basic posture has to be an inside out job, where the natural instinct is there to support our staff in every way we can. Prancing around as if you are supportive and using sweet words and pleasant smiles isn’t going to cut it if just fluff. When the decisions get attached to real money, this is when we all see if what the leader says and does is the same thing or not. People are not stupid. They can tell what is smoke and mirrors and what they can trust and rely upon, so let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence.…
We recently completed an in-house Leadership Training for Managers programme for a local Japanese firm. The President founded the firm as a spin-out from a well-established international accounting company many years ago and has successfully grown the organisation. He is now considering succession planning and aims to develop his senior leadership team. He had an internal survey conducted on the training programme, which he then shared with the trainer who delivered the course and myself. Survey results on training can sometimes be challenging, and this case was no different. Some participants felt the training was too long, while others thought it was too short. Some found the content very challenging, and others not challenging enough. As is often the case, the majority were neutral, while we mainly received strong feedback from the outliers. However, there were some particularly intriguing comments. A few participants mentioned that they found the training exhausting, claiming it impacted their ability to perform their work after the sessions. The core training involved weekly 3.5-hour sessions over seven weeks. Concentrating on new content, which differs from daily tasks, can certainly be demanding. Several participants also noted that the programme contained a lot of content, which is true – it is a course with substantial material. However, I wouldn’t describe any of the content as particularly complex. Dale Carnegie training is highly practical and addresses real-world needs rather than being theoretical. New concepts require the brain to engage, which some participants found challenging. We also employ the Socratic method, encouraging self-discovery through questioning. This approach differs from the standard Japanese educational method, which still leans on Confucian principles of memorisation and rote learning. Our approach often surprises new participants, who arrive prepared to take notes on whatever the instructor says. Instead, we plant seeds of information, prompting participants to reflect on their beliefs, experiences, and ideas. When they share their thoughts, we ask them to explain their reasoning. This is much more demanding than simply reproducing what the teacher says, so it’s no surprise it can be tiring. Some participants also mentioned fatigue from needing to speak up during the sessions. We incorporate extensive group discussions, often in small groups where there is nowhere to hide; everyone has to actively share their ideas and experiences. They can’t be passive, sitting silently – they need to think on their feet and articulate their ideas. This can be mentally taxing, as there is pressure to communicate clearly without appearing unprepared. Many also discover they are not naturally succinct, logical, or well-organised communicators, which can add a level of stress. They may observe peers expressing themselves well and feel a gap in their own skills, creating additional pressure. They also realise they haven’t engaged their minds this way in some time, so it can feel like dusting off mental cobwebs. When I go to the gym, I push my muscles to lift heavier weights and increase repetitions. This is tiring and sometimes even painful. Challenging the brain is similar – it can be tough if you’re not doing it regularly. Many leaders in this team have been performing routine tasks that they have already mastered, so they haven’t faced much challenge in their work so far. Their focus has been on managing their teams, and the broader aspects of leadership have been outside their experience. This training has been an eye-opener, revealing what leadership should entail. The idea that training should not be mentally taxing is interesting. Growth requires stepping out of your Comfort Zone and engaging with challenging content and new methodologies. This is how we grow. Expecting to progress without stepping beyond what’s familiar is a quaint notion. If we continue to do what we have always done, in the same way we have always done it, we will achieve the same results we have always achieved. Stepping up means trying new things or taking on different tasks – both of which are challenging and tiring. And that’s exactly how it should be.…
Are you sitting too much and for too long at your desk every day? Are you eating too much every meal because your mother told you when you were a kid to finish everything on your plate. Are you hitting the booze after work with your mates or at home to rid yourself of your stress? Are your kidneys and liver in good shape? Are you carrying around too much meat and making your muscles and organs work much harder than they should? Is your blood pressure elevated and too high every day? Are you constantly thinking about all of your troubles at work? Are you having trouble getting good quality consistent sleep? Are you promising yourself to get to the gym, but don’t make it as often as you need to in order to make any progress? Well, I have pretty much described myself here. Knowing about it and doing something to fix it are two universes separated by infinite space. Intellectually I know what I should do, but practically I struggle with a lifetime of negative habits which all need work. I do a lot of pontificating in my content about what to do and how to do it, so I can imagine I can come across as Mr. Goody Two Shoes pseudo perfect. This time I will use myself and my failings as the mirror for you to think about yourself and what you are doing if you share these same attributes. Ironically, as I sit here writing this, I have been sitting at my home desk writing my weekly blogs for the last three hours and haven’t once stood up. I know just sitting is bad, but I get into a concentration zone and I forget to stand up. Right, I am going to use a timer with an alarm and set it so that I stop what I am doing and stand up and walk around at set intervals, a bit like the pomodoro method of twenty-five minutes work, five-minute break and then after four pomodoros take fifteen minute break. Eating less is a choice. Leaving parts of the meal unconsumed is a choice. Another irony. I am sitting here in Tokyo writing this blog and we have the “hara hachibu” tradition here in Japan of only eating until 80% full. This idea originally came from Okinawa and they are one of the longest lived peoples in the world. I have to break that habit driven deep into my mind by my Mum and not feel compelled to eat everything on the plate. I had lunch the other day with my mate Tak and I noted he left most of his chicken uneaten, which was quite a feat, as the main meal was chicken. Growing up in Japan, maybe he didn’t have to break free of the gravitational pull of “finish everything on your plate”. Roughly once a week, over a meal with my wife, I like to drink Australian wine at home on Fridays after my hard toil at the Dale Carnegie Siberian Salt Mines. I used to finish a bottle between us, but actually I was drinking most of it. Today, I am down to a single glass to give my blood pressure, kidneys and liver a rest. This is extremely hard because I want to keep drinking. It is a weekly battle with myself to stop at one glass. At one point back in the 1990s, when I was working in Nagoya, after many months of wining and dining and being wined and dined, my weight blew up to 90kilos. I didn’t notice it, because it was gradual. After one event where we were having a meal sitting on tatami, some kind soul sent me a photo from the evening. It was taken from the side, so I got a full appraisal of the profile of my massive girth. I was so shocked. Today, my weight floats around 82-83 kilos at the moment and I need to get it floating around 80—81, and those last couple of kilos seem so hard to evaporate. For reference purposes, when I was competing in karate competitions, I was fighting in the 75-80 kilo weight division, so getting close to my fighting weight is a good goal for me to have. Switching off from work is a pain. I think about my problems at work all day and night, and that black monster is always sitting there in the darkened corner of my mind. Lately, I am also adding to my woes by not getting good quality sleep. I am not sure why that is, but I think part of it is not enough exercise. I need to be more tired at night so that I drift off to sleep quickly and smoothly. I was walking every morning, then I caught a cold with the change of the seasons, so I took a break. Then I tripped on the stairs at home, smashed my toe into the stair rise and it is a miracle I didn’t fracture it, but boy has it been sore. Consequently, no walking in the morning. I need to get back to that routine of awakening at 5.50am, get out the door, walk for an hour while listening to podcasts and then get off to work. Getting to the gym regularly is a difficulty because I am often at networking events at night, but I know I can do better. What about going to the gym on the weekends? I can do better. One item you may note that is prominent by its absence is smoking and the quitting thereof. Both my parents died of lung cancer and my father at age 51, so I have never smoked. If you are a smoker, then I haven’t got much to say from any personal experience. I have read that as soon as you quit, the body starts to rebuild and you can repair the damage you have been doing to your lungs and broader health. Apparently, after a year since you quit, your risk of heart disease is halved and after five years, your chances of a stroke and cervical cancer are the same as a nonsmoker. Worthwhile thinking about I would say. Everything I have talked about today is within my grasp, if I choose to grasp it. I don’t need a Life Coach, a Personal Trainer, Ozempic or anything else but will, determination, consistency and making some decisions and sticking to them. How about you?…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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We know that AI has gone from the domain of geeky people in white lab coats to the mainstream of business in a nanosecond. Such speed is difficult to keep up with and the roll out of new options continues unabated. As the leader how do we surf this tech wave and prepare our people for this AI enabled future/ Making data backed decisions is always preferred in leadership and AI has the power to crunch large amounts of data and provide answers very quickly. As long as it isn’t lying to us with so-called hallucinations about the results, then it is a big help. Direction on using AI in our businesses is not going to bubble up from down below and we leaders need to get to work to harness this beast. 1. Audit We can start with an audit of where we think AI can bring savings in terms of time, money, effort and quality. Doing this process with the team is required because we want them to own the process and the results. There may be fears that certain jobs will disappear because of AI and we need to face that reality head on. It doesn't necessarily mean the person leaves the firm because finding staff in Japan is at a premium, but it may mean their job content changes. There will be flow on effects about required retraining and thought has to be put into the feasibility of doing that with the resources we have available. 2. Strategy & Innovation Having completed the audit we now have some insight into the opportunities and difficulties working with AI will bring, rather than relying on our imaginings of the future. Where is the intersection of AI capabilities and the goals we have set for the firm? The goals are usually revenue related and these won’t change much, but the way we deliver the results could. People will have to work with AI, there is no escaping that fact, so what is the strategy to determine how this happens? We don’t want to leave everyone to their own devices to wander off and somehow work it out by themselves. Which AI platforms do we need, how much should we budget for them and who will take care of what, are leading questions we need to find answers for? For some staff, AI may never be an immediate part of their world at this point, although that may also change. We need to do an analysis of who needs it the most and who needs it first. Which jobs will benefit the most from applying AI’s capabilities to the work? That simple question may be difficult to answer because we have to explore the possibilities AI introduces. We may need to appoint champions to drive the usage of AI inside the company, so that we can break the task up into smaller pieces. The scale of AI can be overwhelming. How can we find ways of having AI help us with becoming more innovative or at least set out some frameworks for us to explore by ourselves? 3. Staff Training A lot of the training for the use of AI will be internal with people dedicating time to play with it. If we think of AI as external to our work, then we won’t nominate the time for people to experiment and learn on the job. The explosion of AI means that no one can keep up with the latest developments as functionalities are superseded by new alternatives. There is also the issue of the broad range of platform variations and upgrades which are emerging every month. How can we navigate this breadth and speed? We can’t but we shouldn’t be so overwhelmed we don’t start. We should select a few platforms which seem to have the greatest application for what we do and start there, realising we may need to jump on to the back of faster racehorse, once the gun has sounded and we are off barrelling down the track. We should block out a certain number of hours per week for our team members to play with AI and see where they can apply its power to the business. If the leader nominates 4 hours a week, for example, then that gives people permission and time from within their work day to experiment. 4. Reporting Naturally, we want to have reports and updates on the progress and learnings these hours experimenting are yielding. This requires some time scheduling changes for everyone and for the boss too. These ideas are all difficult in an already busy life, but we have to grant AI the priority or it will all just be hot air from the boss and there will be no follow through. We are all touching different parts of the machine, so getting together to share makes a lot of sense and the boss can nominate a couple hours in a month to make sure that happens. 5. Data We will unearth and collect a host of data, but what do we do with it? This seeking data for data’s sake is tremendous fun for some, but it all has to connect back to driving the firm forward. There will be financial data we can use to try and pick up trends or patterns which will aid us in trying to set budgets and allocations for spending. There will be customer data which can reveal aspects of our service we need to work on or areas where we need greater investment. There will be market and buyer data we can get access to which may not have been available before, which can better inform the strategies we develop and the decisions we take. Can we find data which will help us maximise our efficiencies and drive the effectiveness of the business? 6. Clients Can we get deeper insights into our client’s situation? Obviously clients don’t share everything with us and often we are working blind to the realities they are facing. How can AI help us to better understand the buyer’s sector of the industry, what is happening with their competitors, government regulations, currency fluctuations, etc. AI is here to stay and we are all riding the wave whether we like it or not. Have we decided yet to deal with it intelligently or are we going to keep doing things in a sporadic fashion? It is time for the leader to lead the firm’s AI revolution.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Recently, I was teaching a class of APAC executives on how to handle pushback to their ideas. Some participants were senior legal counsels, who frequently had to say "no" to their salespeople. As a salesperson myself, being told "no" is something that comes with the territory and is not intimidating at all. In fact, we often hear "no" most of the time. We're tough and have learned to persist until we achieve a "yes." These executives spoke about how challenging it was to get the other side to accept their advice or point of view, which made a lot of sense. Think back to your school days—was there ever a course, or even a fragment of one, that taught you how to argue with someone to get them to agree with you? Academic debating is different; it's an arbitrated intellectual exercise. But the dynamics within a company are entirely different, and most of us aren't trained for these real-world, practical needs, even through corporate education. Here are some key steps to successfully navigate resistance and disagreement, especially when you're battling over ideas, policies, direction, or decisions. 1. Truly Listen to the Other Side We often think we are listening, but when we hear the word "no," it looms large in our minds. We become preoccupied with crafting our counterargument and, as a result, stop fully listening to what’s being said. People often make a statement we dislike and then provide their reasoning. If we've already stopped listening after the part we didn’t like, we can’t fully appreciate their logic. 2. Pause Before Responding Before blurting out our disagreement, we need to pause and think. There are a few ways to do this. We can remain silent and think before speaking, although this can be tricky, as silence may prompt the other party to press harder and add more information. Another method is to use a "cushion"—a neutral, non-committal statement that neither agrees nor disagrees. This buys us valuable thinking time. Even a brief pause of five or six seconds can significantly improve the quality of what we say. Without that pause, we risk saying something we regret because we haven't had enough time to formulate a proper response. 3. Reflect Briefly Use this pause to have a brief internal conversation about the topic. Ask yourself: What do I believe? And why do I believe it? Usually, our opinions are formed based on some personal experience, or something we’ve read, heard, or seen. Recalling the origin of our belief helps us structure our response. 4. Share Your Story Once you've reflected, tell your story. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should clearly outline what happened, where, when, and who was involved. This method reminds me of Japanese grammar, where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, determining whether the action is positive, negative, past, present, or future. You can’t interrupt someone in Japanese until they finish their sentence because you don’t know where they’re going with it. In English, listeners often anticipate the conclusion and jump in or finish the sentence for the speaker. You can't do that in Japanese. By telling your story, you provide background and context. While the listener can disagree with your conclusions, they can’t argue with your background or experience. Given the same context, they might reach the same conclusion. If you tell your story well, they might even reach your conclusion before you do. By holding off on the "punch line" until the very end, you prevent interruptions and ensure they hear you out. Even if they still disagree, they’ll have a clear understanding of why you hold your views. By following these four steps, you can persuade others to consider your ideas and ensure you're heard and understood. In the worst-case scenario, even if they still disagree, at least they will fully understand your reasoning. This allows for a civil discussion without heightened emotions, preserving relationships and enabling you to agree to disagree.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Pulling rank on people is clearly the fastest and easiest way to get people to fly straight and do what we want. It is also a very dangerous choice in Japan in an era when the demand for people is so strong and the supply so limited. Mobility today means people have choices. If you are not interested in what they have to say or their ideas, they will jump ship to somewhere they think they will be better appreciated. The problem is their ideas are rarely much chop. They don’t have the experience, sufficient information, enough understanding of the context or the weight of responsibility on their shoulders if it doesn’t work. In a busy boss life, the simplest thing is to tell them “that won’t work” and just keep moving forward because there is so much to do. Here are some human relations principles we can employ to do a better job in our communication with our people. 1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. This sounds a bit counterintuitive. Does it mean I just fold and let them have their way? Not at all. However we know that people rarely yield once they get into an argument and graciously accept our viewpoint. Rather they have their ego wrapped up in what they are saying and they won’t let go, so they just keep arguing with us. Our best response is to not respond in kind and try a different track. 2. Show respect for the other person’s opinion – never say you are wrong. This is a red flag to a bull. One of my trigger words is to be told “no” and another is “you are wrong”, which is basically the same answer. We have to learn to disagree in a way which maintains the relationship. Telling people they are wrong isn’t going to help with that aim. Whenever the urge seizes you to tell others they are wrong resist the temptation. 3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. Leaders have ego, position power, pride and status and admitting we are not perfect is not easy for us. If we admit it won’t we be eroding our power? That fear is fair enough, but what we will find is that by giving up the God mantle and admitting we are human makes it easier for our team to emphasise with what we are trying to do. The secret is all in the communication of how we admit we are wrong. 4. Begin in a friendly way. This sounds easy except when we are busy, harassed, pressured and under the gun we forget this part. We bring our businesslike self to the conversation rather than stepping back and thinking about first impressions for this conversation. 5. Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately. Manipulation was the first thing which sprang into my mind when I heard this Principle. That obviously is a losing proposition. What is meant here is that our communication skill is operating at a very high level. We package up the idea and do it in such a way that the other person finds themselves in agreement. This is a high level of communication skill and takes a lot of practice, but it works well when done correctly. 6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. Leaders love to talk. They love to hog the limelight and dominate the conversation because they are such amazing individuals. Rather by giving the floor to others they in turn will feel appreciated and valued. We already know what we know, so this also invites the opportunity for us to learn things we actually don’t know and broaden our perspectives. 7. Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers. Sounds like more manipulation, but it isn’t. We remember that Socrates was famous for getting people to go deeper in their thinking by asking a series of questions which drove the quality of their understanding. This is the same idea. We communicate in such a way that the other person self-discovers the same thinking that we came up with and now we are in perfect agreement. As the leader we can always do better and usually, it is our poor communication ability which leads us into trouble. By changing our approach and how we express ourselves we will have much more impact on getting others to follow us. Brute force is not going to work in Japan anymore, so we need better tools.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Have you ever had the experience of leaving a job and seeing your successor screw it up? We spend so many hours at work and we are trying hard to lift the bar through our leadership. However, if we do well, we get promoted or we join another company seeking a bigger job. It is very disheartening to leave and see the place go backwards under your replacement. You wonder what all those weekends spent working and long hours were al about. We expect that we add to the cause and the firm progresses and moves forward, improving over time. We expect those who come after us to be doing the same thing. So it was very confronting to read some statistics recently about how short the term at the top is these days and thinking about what does that mean for the leader’s legacy? According to data analysis firm Equilar, the median term for a CEO in the 500 largest US companies, is now down to 4.7 years, having dropped twenty percent over the last ten years. Russell Reynolds says globally, for CFOs, the tenure is down to a five year low of 5.7 years. If you are sent from Headquarters to Japan to run the local operation you don’t have much time. If you realise this and decide to go gung-ho from Day One and drive change to get the results faster, then you will probably blow up the firm. On the other hand, if you wait to understand the market, customers, the staff and the culture, then years of study will be required. By the time you get it, it is time to pack for the next assignment or another job change. The analogy I like is leading in Japan is like swimming in warm lake. You land here from headquarters and you are immediately placed in a warm, nice lake, but the surface is covered in a heavy fog. You can hear voices and vaguely make out shapes. Over time, the fog lifts a little as you understand Japan better and you can make out the shoreline and some islands. After about three years the fog lifts and it is now time to leave for your next post. What did you get done, what legacy have you left? If we go too fast the Japanese team cannot keep up and we have new internal troubles. This might include staff writing to the Chairman anonymously informing headquarters that you are ruining the business in Japan and destroying the firm here. It might mean key staff conclude you are an idiot and they vote with their feet and join the opposition. In today’s society in Japan, job mobility has changed an enormous amount and shifting firms doesn’t have the same stigma it once had which used to ensure lifetime employment with the one company. It might mean you decide to become “efficient” with customer relationships and after overcoming stubborn staff resistance, you force you will on everyone only to see your buyers depart and not come back. On the other hand, headquarters are contacting you because they are not seeing the spike in revenue numbers they sent you out there for. The staff engagement survey results are a disaster. Your bosses are not happy with your performance as a leader. You try to explain the subtleties and nuances of the Japanese market and how business is done here, but it all falls on deaf ears. They are fully preoccupied with themselves and nobody cares about your problems. There are no simple answers unfortunately. Listening is a good idea at the initial six month stage, especially listening to customers. Finding allies within the staff of firm who can get behind your changes is going to be vital. You can pontificate and shoot out orders, to only find those below are sabotaging your efforts and are not doing anything to carry out your commands. This country has a lot of informal lobbying going on underground and the big meetings are there to rubber stamp what has already been negotiated prior with the relevant parties. That means we have to persuade, rather than order, to coalesce rather the remonstrate. Sadly, none of this is fast and your bosses want fast. We are fighting two fires on two fronts at the same time. We are pushing headquarters to get behind what we are trying to do and we are persuading the team to do the same thing, but at a faster pace than what they are used to. Staff are terrific at telling us what won’t work and why, if they are involved. They are less help in coming up with creative solutions to overcome problems. Often, we are the one to think differently and be prepared to try something new. Bite sized experimentation suits Japan, given the general fear of failure and risk aversion. Change takes time in Japan, lots of time and maybe it just isn’t possible in one rotation of your term here and you have to rely on your successor to pick up the gauntlet and keep pushing the strategy through the changes. If you don’t get headquarters to sign on for it and therefore get them to engage your successor to keep going, then there will be lots of effort exuded by you and none of your legacy to show for it in Japan. You leave the county feeling unfulfilled and ashamed you didn’t make a difference. Something you have been known for in your previous positions and one of the reason your were selected to go to Japan in the first place. Your mouth is full of the bitter ashes of years wasted, as you head for the boarding lounge to catch your flight out of Japan. Or you approach it differently and get a better outcome. Trust me, it won’t happen by itself, so you have to box smart while you are here.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed. Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients. Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk. A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level. Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise. Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”. At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains. They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality. There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand. When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice. When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available. The young lady checking me in, tells me she doesn’t know. I ask her for the name of the General Manager. This is where it gets very interesting. Her response - stone motherless silence. Not one word in reply. Nothing! So I asked again. More total silence. I elevated the volume of my request to try and illicit a response. More pure silence. This low level of client service has now morphed across to the ridiculous zone. Finally I get a whispered “Andrew Zou”. So what am I thinking now? Wow, this Andrew Zou character is a lousy General Manager, because his staff are so poorly trained. There is no room ready for me and no indication of when it will be ready, so in that great Aussie tradition, I head for the bar and wait. Any number of things can go wrong with the delivery of a product or service. We all understand that. The problems arise when our client facing team members are not properly trained in how to deal with these issues. Hotels have guest complaints all the time, so they should be absolute gold medal winning, total geniuses at dealing with them. This would have to be a key area of training in that industry. The poor training is a direct result of poor leadership. If the leaders are working well, then the staff service levels will be working well. The Westin brand is global and I have stayed in a number of their properties in Asia. The Taipei property was killing their global brand and that is an expensive thing in the world of cut-throat competition amongst leading Hotels. From this experience, I realized that I need to be very vigilant about the service levels in my own company. Are we fully geared up for trouble, should it arise? How do we protect the brand across 220 locations worldwide? Can people get to me easily if there is a problem? Are we doing enough training in client complaint handling? The Westin Taipei leadership did a poor job. We should go back a take a long hard look at our own operations. We may be incorrectly assuming things are working, when they may not be functioning properly. We have to protect the brand at every touch point with the clients. That is the job of the leadership team, starting with the boss.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Is change good or bad? When I was promoted or received a big bonus, I liked the change from my previous situation. When the big boss changed at the very top, the person who hired me got fired the negative ramifications ultimately cascaded down the line. Eventually I had to look for another job and I didn’t like that change much. Often organisations go through major internal changes and the middle level leaders are expected to rally the troops behind the change. How do you do that if you don’t agree with the change or don’t like the change yourself? If you buck the system and refuse to follow the changes, then you are automatically identifying yourself as someone who has to leave the organisation and the machine will crush you. Change is such a tricky area for everyone, but it is so common in business. Markets change, clients change, supply chains change, currency rates change – the list is long. You would think that with all of these “normal” changes in business, we would all be excellent in adjusting to change. However, that is not true, is it? The status quo is so attractive to most of us because it is known and safe. We have been doing the same thing for quite a while and we are good at it. We are doing skilled work in the current formation and suddenly we are being asked to change and are being pushed out of our Comfort Zone. Japan, in particular loves continuity and no change, because all the risk has been shaken out of the system and what we are left with is the lowest risk alternative. As leaders we have to make a decision. If we fundamentally disagree with the new approach then we should find another place to work, where we can be happy and in agreement with the direction. The chances of us doing our best work there dramatically improve, compared to if we stay and conduct an underground personal resistance to the changes. Ultimately, we will be outed by an ambitious rival or subordinate and probably fired. If we are not willing to move companies, then we have to be willing to go with the new direction. Here is the issue – a half-hearted compliance isn’t going to work well. Our team members will feel the lack of commitment and enthusiasm to the cause. They in turn, will not rally around us as the leader and charge into the fire together. How can we make this change work within our small cog in the machine? The big bosses set the direction back at headquarters, but they can never get their hands dirty with the daily minutiae at our section level. That application piece is within our control. We may be buffeted by the winds of macro change, but the micro where we deliver the change is within our grasp. We have almost total control over how we do it. What we are feeling about the changes is no doubt being felt by the team members as well. Turning up one Monday morning as some mealy mouthed, apparatchik mouthpiece of the machine isn’t going to go down well. Cynicism is already rampart in modern society and this will push some people over the edge, as we try to order them about what they need to do. All we can expect is resistance if we take this road. How can we approach this to get everyone behind us and the changes? Rather than being definitive about how to make the needed changes, we need to have the “change” discussion with the team. In Stage One we need people to be able to air their concerns and fears and be taken seriously. Stage Two is where we move on to how we as a team can implement the change in our world. Getting from Stage One to Stage Two is no easy feat, because many will remain unconvinced and unmoved. They will want to keep going with the old way of doing things. For the “never changers”, we need to have private one-on-one discussions and have them make a decision about stay or go. If it is “stay”, then they need to be part of the team decision-making process and contribute to practical solutions to make this work in a way we can all live with the changes. Just telling them to “suck it up and get back to work” is always a bad idea. It communicates you are not important. We are saying, “I have three stripes on my sleeve and so you have to do what I say, because I am pulling rank on you”. They may in fact stay, but they will join the underground guerrilla movement against the changes. We will wind up fighting each other internally when we need to form a united front against our competitors in the market. We need converts not resisters. So as the leader we need to get the discussion out in the open and get team ownership of the way forward. Maybe we all have to hold our noses against the stench of the changes, but we will hold them together and find a way through.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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This Japanese expression “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会), linked to Zen, focuses on transience and can be translated as “one time, one meeting” or “treasure an unrepeatable moment”. It is often closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, which is certainly never a hurried affair and the devil is definitely in the details of how the ceremony is conducted. Contrast that with our modern leader life in business. We are constantly in motion, always time poor and harassed for 24 hours a day by an avalanche of emails. We migrate from one meeting room to another, confronting an endless assortment of meeting details. We have many agendas in our minds when we meet people and our shrinking concentration spans make a lot of what we do a blur, bereft of reflection. This is a poor contextual background for dealing with people. Being so time challenged, we are constantly cutting corners and shaving off minutes to try and get it all done. Being “efficient” with people is a bad idea for leaders, but often once we are on a roll, that efficiency bug takes us over. The Ichi-Go, Ichi-E idea is that we treat each moment of interaction as special rather than just serial. If our team members felt that we were treating them individually as “special”, their engagement levels would be at very high levels, in what is increasingly becoming a tech driven, impersonal world. But often we are galloping too fast on horseback to smell the flowers, as we fly by. If we break each staff interaction down to a single defining unit, we will change the pace we interact with people from busy and tormented, to calm and caring. I remember a terrific example of Ichi-Go, Ichi-E by Ian Mackie, my old boss at Jones Lang Wootten In Brisbane. It was after 6.00pm one evening and I was sitting in his office having a discussion about a deal, when one of the secretaries was walking past on her way home and she popped her head in the door to say something to him. In those days Directors were like Gods compared to humble secretaries in that hierarchy. Yet Ian stopped what he was doing and he gave her his complete and entire attention for that one moment. He was showing his respect for her as a person, and it was a powerful experience for me to see how he handled that encounter. Often, as the boss, we don’t show enough respect because we are rushing, preoccupied with what we need to get done and our people can become cogs in the fly wheels of our business. Like Ian, we need to slow it down to a stop. Focus on the person to the exclusion of everything else, stop our brain for racing ahead and give that person our full attention. It sounds easy to say, but actually doing it is very difficult. We are usually caught up in the moment of what we want and what is important to us. We are perpetually rearranging things to suit what we need, when we need it. I am the first one to raise his hand as guilty of trying to do too much, in too short a time and just constantly cramming stuff into my day, such that my interactions are very “businesslike”. That is not a great idea when we are dealing with people. Ichi-Go, Ichi-E as a concept, reminds me to stop doing that and instead treat every staff interaction like a treasure. Once I switch my mindset to that “treasure” construct, then everything changes, especially around my time allocation. Just mentally slowing down while I am speaking to my team member, allows me to be more considerate, less selfish and self-centered. Instead of being “me focused”, I can switch to being “them focused”. I can ask about things that are important to them, rather than making sure that brief conversation is all about what is important to me at that moment. I have learnt to stand my keyboard up, so I can’t use it, when one of my team comes to me to talk and this helps me to focus my eye contact on them. I was reminded of how important this is when I visited a doctor here recently. The head of the clinic was sitting slumped in front of his screen and typing when I entered his office, he didn’t greet me, didn’t even look up at me and kept his face toward his computer keyboard and screen. Frankly, it was unbelievable, especially in this modern age. It made me feel unimportant and irrelevant. This is how we make our team members feel when we don’t stop what we are doing and don’t focus on that one moment with them. So, from now on, remember Ichi-Go, Ichi-E and practice treasuring every interaction with the team members and build their engagement and commitment one meeting at a time, one person at a time. Do this instead of rushing through life in an often meaningless and unfulfilling scramble. People do make the difference and how we treat them is what stands us apart as the leader and how successful we are in that role.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Recently, my social media has been full of short videos of various politicians and supporters giving talks at the Democratic National Convention. It always begs the question for me about what are we doing as leaders in business? We have the same goals. We want our message to be heard and to be convincing. The difference is, I am sure, all of these speakers have been well coached and have been practicing hard for their moment in the spotlight, given a global audience of massive proportions. In business, we have our own team at our Town Hall or perhaps an audience at a business conference or maybe a small Chamber of Commerce gathering. Actually, it doesn’t matter about the venue, because skill is skill, image is image and credibility is credibility. I was reminded of this when one of my son’s friends complained about the organisation’s leader, when he has just joined the firm after graduating from varsity. Being at the very bottom of the pile, young people are there to stay quiet and listen to their elders and betters. The issue though is, they are not stupid. In this case, the top person was a poor speaker and so the new entrants first thought is, “have I made a mistake?”. They worry that this company isn’t as good as they imagined it was. If the top dog, the “face” of the organisation is a dud, then maybe the whole artifice is a problem too. As business leaders, it would be rare that there is a lot of effort put into the talk preparation beforehand. Smart, successful, assured people are confident about winging it. The problem is we can become excessively confident over time and neglect the basics. Here are seven points to reflect on when giving your next business talk to ensure you do a much better and more credible job. 1. Rehearse. This step is always the victim of tight schedules, but the downside of neglecting it serious because our personal and professional brands suffer. Even if it is a minimalist approach on the prep front, at least do a run through before you launch forth in front of your listeners. Remember they are judging you and your firm, on what they see you do. 2. Eyes. Make eye contact with your audience. I don’t mean the usual fake eye contact, where the speaker dramatically scans the crowd but in fact doesn’t look at any one person. I mean hard core, full on, six seconds of riveting eye contact, with as many people as possible, but delivered one by one, maintained over the entire course of the talk. Our listeners need to feel we are speaking directly to them and that we want their 100% attention. Six seconds is enough to engage them without pulverising the audience into submission and coming across as being too intrusive. 3. Face. We make the mistake of thinking that our slides are the most powerful visual tool in our armoury. Not true. Our face shines through much more brilliantly and powerfully. Our facial expressions are absolute commanders of nuance, meaning and impression. Many business speakers remind me of Noh masks, which are frozen in carved wood with only a single countenance. Don’t be like that. We need to use our face to amplify the emotions – belief, sincerity, empathy, care, humanity - behind our message. 4. Voice. I noticed that many speakers at the Convention were loud, loud, loud all the way through in their speech. They were trying to speak powerfully, to inspire, to motivate. That is all very well but modulation is a critical piece for really being heard. It allows us to amplify certain words and phrases, such that they stand above the other words placed around them. Dropping to a whisper, after bellowing away in your talk, is the ultra power play in messaging. That contrast pinpoints everyone’s attention to what we say next during the whisper and that is what we want to have happen for the key points in our talk. 5. Gestures. They are another amplifier. Fifteen seconds is the maximum length for holding any gesture, before it becomes stale, dull and lifeless. Eye power combined with voice power, combined with a powerful gesture is an unbeatable combo when speaking. I see so many CEOs speaking with a vice like grip on the podium and thereby denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures to strengthen their key points. It is a big mistake. When I have a podium, I purposely stand back from it, so that my hands are not tempted to touch it. Be careful with podiums, because there seems to be a magnetic facility drawing our hands to grab it and hold on to it, so it won’t escape. 6. Pause. We saw many good examples at the Convention of the better speakers employing pauses. These allow us to differentiate between what we have just said and what we are about to say. We create a small break, before we say the next thing. That small gap allows the words to be heard clearly and gives the audience enough time to digest the previous content. Pauses also create anticipation of what we are about to say, which is a great way of drawing the audience into us and our message. 7. Posture. Stand up straight, don’t slouch, don’t kick one hip out and don’t look casual. A tall, straight back emanates authority and credibility. It shows confidence and commitment to what we are saying. These are subtle physical signals. We are all finely tuned into these signals, because that is how we have learnt to survive dangers over the centuries. Our eyes spot some physical action in front of us, we then anticipate what comes next, as well as making a judgement about what we are seeing. Slouching signals “unprofessional”, “casual”, “not serious”, “lazy”. By going in the other direction and thinking to carefully control our posture, we can determine the signal the audience receives and make it a winner for us. These seven elements are not difficult or beyond mastery. By the way, the bar for public speakers in Japan is super low. Just by mastering these simple elements, we can catapult ourselves into the top 5% of speakers.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Twelve Steps To A Win-Win Conflict Resolution Part Two We have looked at some of the steps in Part One, so let’s continue with the last six elements. 7. Deal with facts, not emotions In sports, as I have noted earlier, we say “play the ball, not the man” and in business we need to look at problems, not personalities. This sounds fair enough, but it is not easy to do. We may find we are attacking the person, their ideas and opinions rather than looking at solving the problem. Maybe we don’t like them, their manner, their attitude, their values, their style of speech, their rivalry. That situation is unlikely to change in a hurry. They won’t become our best buddy any time soon or ever. Nevertheless, we have to work with them and overcome this conflict. We need to switch over to “outcome focus” and logic. This will take the personalities component out of the equation and help us get to an agreed solution faster. We bite our tongue, swallow our bile, gird our loins and get on with it, regardless of how irritating they are. In these situations, I keep telling myself, “Greg - big picture, big picture”. 8. Be honest Politicking, game playing, one upping are all well known in business, but stay away from these pursuits. Focus on the reason everyone is working hard in the company. Remind yourself what we are we trying to achieve relative to our competitors. We need to come back to the basics of the vision, mission, and values. Dale Carnegie’s human relations Principle Number Seventeen is useful here: “Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view”. Strip out the emotion and be objective about their viewpoint. We also need to see our own perspective equally in an honest way. Why do we hold our view? What is really driving our position? 9. Present alternatives and provide evidence Compromise is the assembly of other means of solving an issue. Things that make sense and are workable are very hard to argue against. Concessions in non-core areas should be made to build trust and the cooperation muscle. Look at options in terms of the other side’s interests. When promoting your own ideas, make sure these are backed up with strong evidence, so that they are easy to agree with and hard to argue against. Opinion is terrific, but it is just an opinion. Data can contradict opinion in a way which is more acceptable than simply arguing the toss. Storytelling is the most effective way to introduce data. Wrap the numbers up in a story and you will be heard. 10. Be an expert communicator Communication skills are essential to finding resolution to points of difference and can be done in a way that the relationship is maintained. Really listen to the other side. We often think we are listening, but actually inside our brain, we are formulating what we will say next and so are not really taking in the other side’s points. If you find yourself jumping in, finishing their sentences, or cutting them off when they are speaking, stop doing that. Hear them out. Hold your points instead of being in a rush. We are rarely short of time for the discussion. Often our counterparty in the conflict feels they are not being listened to, treated fairly or taken seriously. We can do all of those things by just remaining silent and letting them talk. After they stop, feeding back that we have understood them is a good habit to develop. By letting them talk, we may find out some additional information or angle we didn’t have, which can change our perspective on the situation and lead to a resolution. Just bullying the other person with our opinion doesn’t lead to this type of win-win outcome. 11. End on a good note Win-win means feeling like we all did well. Shake on it, agree the next action steps and milestones. Nominate who is responsible for what and how progress and success will be measured. Also decide how further disputes which may arise during the execution phase will be handled. 12. Enjoy the process Companies benefit from having a range of views and diverse experiences when it comes to solving problems. The process of resolving disputes educates us on how to see things differently and to entertain other ways of doing things. We can often build stronger relationships having gone through this type of dispute resolution because we have come to know and understand each other much better than we would have otherwise. Resolving conflicts is not easy, but most people pour their energy into winning the conflict rather than trying to find the win-win. The latter is the better option every time if you want to win in the market. Fighting amongst ourselves makes no sense, and we can do better than that. These 12 steps will get us pointed in the right direction.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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“Remember that other people may be totally wrong, but they don’t think so”. This quote from Dale Carnegie sums up the problem. All those other people we have trouble with had better fly straight. All they need is a better understanding of why they are wrong and we are right. By force of will, strenuous, sustained argument and politicking, we will win the day. Or will we? Actually, getting a clear win in internal conflict situations is rarely the result. Battles may be won, but wars are lost. Energy that should be directed at the competitors is instead turned loose on our own team members, to no good outcome. We need to be able to deal with internal conflicts in a way that resolves the issues in a positive way. Not so easy! Conflict is with us everywhere, every day. That is the nature of the human condition. We have different desires and thinking. Some conflicts can be very low level and minor and we continue to cruise through the day. In other cases, however, it becomes a lot more problematic. In any organisation, when the machine is fighting against itself, progress becomes suspended. Instead of concentrating on beating the other guy, we have suddenly become locked into an internal battle against ourselves. In large firms, these can be driven by powerful personalities thrusting themselves forward to get to the top. They bring their divisions with them into the fight and a lot of energy and time is wasted dropping large rocks on our own feet! We need to see the bigger picture here and look for how we can marshal our strength, access the diversity in our ranks and maximise the creative possibilities rather than concentrating on the battling ourselves. People tend to gravitate toward extremes. They either fold and don’t stand up for what they feel is right or they try to bulldoze everyone else and make them bend to their will. If we want progress, we need a better way forward, achieved through compromise and collaboration. In Part One we are going to cover six fo the twelve Win-Win steps we can take to turn things around. 1. Have a positive attitude Our attitude is a big factor. If we shift our thinking to how this conflict situation can be converted into a learning and growth opportunity, we will have more success. Easy to say, but not so easy to do! We have to step back from the fray and think about the bigger picture. Our rivals are not dead, the market ignores our internecine feuds, and clients don’t care. How can we afford to be focused inwards when there is so much happening on the outside of the organisation? We have to become positive we can put the conflict into context and deal with it on that basis. 2. Meet on mutual ground Find a neutral location to remove all the residue of the past from the front of your mind. Meeting rooms are rarely the best choice for a meeting when we are in conflict with someone. There is a formality about the situation, which can hinder gaining the flexibility we need to resolve this disagreement. Go outside to a coffee shop or meet over lunch and try to “change the air”. Find a mutually agreeable time when you won’t have interruptions. Turn the phones off and give each other the time to be understood. Don’t try to deal with complex conflicts over the phone, online or by email warfare – always, where possible, do it face to face. 3. Clearly define and agree on the issue We might be arguing at cross purposes, so let’s clarify precisely what the real issue is and concentrate on that. If it has many facets and is complex, let’s break it up into component parts. Attach priorities and start with the most pressing core issues. Misunderstandings based on language usage happen all the time. We need to agree on the thing at stake in a way which both sides understand. You meet people who are hard to understand. Their way of expressing their thoughts is unclear to us and we struggle to get their point. We need to get clarity on what we both mean and what we are worried about. 4. Do your homework Think about the issue from the other side’s perspective, as well as from your own. Normally, we don’t do this because we are fully focused on ourselves, what we want and why we want it. Some points are must haves and some are nice to haves – let’s be very clear about which is which. Also, at the very start, define your BATNA or Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement – basically your walk away position. There may be no way to resolve the conflict and we have to push it up the hierarchy for resolution. This is usually not appreciated by the big bosses. They expect us to thrash it out amongst ourselves and let them concentrate on their own work. 5. Take an honest inventory of yourself You know yourself. You know your own “hot buttons” that need to be reined in. Are your feelings leading the charge or is your brain determining how this should progress? Being told “no” is usually a powerful trigger for the adrenaline to hit the bloodstream, as we go into fight mode. It always works with me! I know that, so I have to control myself and calm down before I say something on the spot which I will regret at leisure. 6. Look for shared interests Conflict pulls you to the extremes and compromise meets in the middle. To get agreement, we need to emphasise where we are similar, have shared interests and objectives. Move the discussion to the future, rather than raking over the coals of the past disputes, crimes and misdemeanors. Usually there is a small percentage of the issue which is the real sticking point. Rather than butting heads on that difference immediately, we can isolate out the areas where we agree or where we can compromise. This builds up a positive energy of cooperation and it is no longer an all-or-nothing conversation. We will continue with points Seven through Twelve in Part Two.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Business is more fast-paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained. Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely irritated. Twenty years ago, we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations! Imagine our forebears who, when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super slow snail mail ping-pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity. Not today. We want it all and we want it now baby and look out anyone who gets in our way. We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace. We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention. 1. Process Conflict. Is this what we are dealing with? Processes are required by managers to do their job and by Compliance to protect everyone. Sometimes the process can be very directive, constrained, and inflexible. When times get tough, a lot of processes get screwed down very hard. When things improve, they are still left like that even though they should be loosened off. They no longer fit the circumstances we are facing at the coal face. Let’s calculate how much process control we have in this particular case we are facing? We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner. They may not be aware this is causing problems for others down the food chain. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and to get their ownership, come up with a joint action plan to fix it. 2. Role Conflicts. These easily arise in flat organisations. Turf wars can be legendary, as ambitious individuals duke it out internally for promotions, power, and control. Where are the boundaries of authority, accountability, and responsibility? Besuited corporate pirates try to board us and have to be seen off. What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue? We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead. This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is. We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. Role clarity is critical and must be clarified, or confusion can reign. This fix may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!). 3. Interpersonal Conflicts. These are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actual actions, behaviours, words as well as the reported versions from others around us. There may be some prior negative history there clouding our vision. We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Also, are people around me telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason? Sycophants and corporate politicians see internal conflict as an opportunity and a ladder for themselves. They are keen to create trouble for us and a leg up for them. There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are, but actually we don’t want to do them. However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself. This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the issues. Before you do that, though, forget about what you want for the moment and put yourself in their shoes. Reflect on how you would see the issue from their perspective. This will make it easier to have a successful one-on-one conversation. 4. Direction Conflicts. These arise when the path forward is unclear. Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone, at the same time, about what needs to happen. Working at cross purposes is both expensive and damaging. Check that you are, in fact, clear yourself on the organisation’s current direction or vision. Bring up the discrepancy between you and the other party in respectful terms, in a neutral way. This is not about establishing blame (although we often like doing that!), but about getting joint clarity about what is the aim and how it should be delivered together. 5. External Conflicts. These are tough because, by definition, you lack power and control. Ask yourself whether you have a dog in this fight or not? Choose your battles carefully and concentrate on what you can do to improve things, rather than wasting energy and effort whining about what you cannot control. As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control, stop! Instead, re-set your mind around how the situation can be improved. Ask yourself, “in what way can we continue to move the organisation forward?”. In the words of the self-appointed “hardest working man in show business”, Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”! We need to move our psychology to positive mode. We should start making adjustments to cope with the degree of control we can bring to this external process or situation which is inhibiting us. Conflict is part and parcel of corporate life, but usually we are not strategic about how to deal with it. We get locked into a stimulus-response loop, which means a constant flow of tactical solutions rather than looking for strategic solutions. We are also rarely trained on how to deal with conflict, so we are usually making it up as we go along. Analyse the situation and decide which one of these factors is the main one at play and then start working on solutions from there. Sometimes there may be more than one factor we have to consider, so we have to prioritise where we should start, but we must start. Getting overwhelmed or paralysed doesn’t fix the problem. Focus on the key problem and get to work on that. Momentum will work in your favour.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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I saw a video recently from Rampley and Co in the UK featuring Caryn Franklin, a Fashion and Identity Commentator, talking about something called “enclothed cognition”. When I saw her work title - Fashion and Identity Commentator - and the reference to psychology, I was dubious. I was thinking, “here we go, more psychobabble”. She referenced a psychology study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky, published in the journal of Experimental Social Psychology in July 2012. They looked at the “diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors - the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them”. In short, the influence of clothes depends on wearing them and their symbolic meaning. For the leader, this means to me that what I choose to wear impacts how I feel about myself and how I am perceived by those around me. For men in business in Japan, if you are a white-collar worker, that means wearing a suit. If the choice of suit and all the other accoutrements like shirts, ties, pocket squares, cufflinks, watches, shoes, etc., are important, how much thought do we normally put into it? We all know old sayings like “dress for success” and intrinsically, we get it. Wearing a suit like a slob, with food stains on the tie and down at heel, scuffed shoes, is sending a message about our own self-worth and our professional brand to the public. On the other hand, if we wear a well-cut suit, with an overall smart appearance, we feel more confident and more capable and the research bears this out. If this is the case, then should we be better educated about what we are wearing? When I moved from being a Griffith University Modern Asian Studies Ph.D. candidate to graduating and getting my first real corporate job, I had no idea what to wear. I never saw my father wear a suit to work and I didn’t grow up with any concepts about men’s classic clothing. Brisbane is a hot and humid climate, so generally, everyone dressed for the weather and I did too. One small blessing was that I had the self-awareness to know I was clueless. I went to see Mitchell Ogilvie, who at that time, had his men’s clothing store in upper Edward Street in Brisbane and it had the dark wood panelling, leather chairs and was very swish. I explained that I was about the start work at Jones, Lang, Wootton, but had no appropriate clothing to suit the work. Mitch assured me he was dressing many of the Directors there, so he knew exactly what I needed to buy, to blend in. He did a good job (thanks Mitch) and I always felt I was one of the better dressed employees there and this helped my confidence and how I was regarded. Around that time, the Prime Minister of Australia became Paul Keating from the Labor Party. He, like me, grew up in modest circumstances and yet he managed to get the highest position in the land. I read somewhere that unlike his predecessors, he didn’t wear suits made in Australia, but wore Italian suits by Ermenegildo Zegna. When I would see him on television, in the Parliament, giving speeches, he always looked very sharp and better dressed than his Tory political opponents. I decided I would wear Zegna suits too and have been a client for thirty years and their size 52 fits me like it was designed for my body. It gave me confidence, even when I was out of my depth, that at least I looked like I knew what I was doing. Had I ever planned my wardrobe with my personal brand in mind? Not really. I had just accumulated suits over the years, especially when travelling to Italy on holiday. I would wear them out and simply buy a replacement. Over the last decade, I have started to add more custom suits and have started to think more about what I am wearing and why. I wish I had done this much earlier, given the psychology of how you feel based on what you are wearing and how people regard you professionally, regarding your public brand. I often get compliments about how well I am dressed and earlier this year I started a blog on social media called “Fare Bella Figura – Master First Impressions, Be A Sharp Dressed Man”. I was highly hesitant to launch it, because I had never seen a businessman like myself, completely unrelated to the clothing business, talking about what he was wearing and why. The premise was that people make snap judgments about us, based on how we look, before we even get a chance to open our mouths, so why not do more to control that first impression? At that time, I wasn’t aware of this research by Adam and Galinsky, but instinctively felt what I would choose to wear was impacting my confidence and my image with others before I had a chance to speak with them. If it makes a difference, as leaders, we need to make the most of this opportunity to increase our strength internally and externally, vis-à-vis our business rivals. It requires study and dough to do it, but if we take the long-term view, it is doable. Don’t be like me and work all of this out too lethargically. Instead, work on assembling your classic men’s clothing armour in Japan and wade into battle, duking it out with your competition and win!…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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I meet a lot of CEOs in Japan. I am always out there networking and looking for clients. If they cannot become a client, then I try to encourage them to be a guest on my podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews. I get two groups in particular who will refuse the offer – women and Scandinavians. They say that women are more reticent about putting themselves forward than men and my own unscientific survey would seem to bear that out. If a man only has 60% of the qualifications for a job, he will raise his hand whereas a woman will only do so, if she has 90%. This is what I guess is happening with my invitation to come on the podcast and talk about one topic - leading in Japan. The women are lacking in confidence to talk about the subject, because they are not feeling they are perfect enough. The Scandinavians I know here tell me that their culture is to not push yourself forward and to stay in the background. Their podcast guest refusal rate stands out, so I guess this is what is happening with their thinking. So far, 213 leaders have managed to spend an hour with me talking about leading in Japan for the weekly podcast, so I am finding enough of those in agreement. It isn’t as if I cannot get guests, because no one wants to join me on video and audio to talk about leadership. I think both groups reflect a misunderstanding of what their leader role is in Japan. The leader here is the face of the business and particularly in this social media age, we need to be masters of this new universe. I get it. Taking your photo or even worse – video – is not something we all welcome. We are very self-conscious about how lacking we are in terms of being photogenic or how awkward we look on video and when we hear our own voice, we shudder. In life, I have found I am particularly unable to be photogenic, so I totally sympathise. You know when you take that group shot and when you get it back you look for yourself – it is always a disappointment for me. In this modern world of work, however, we are all in a life and death struggle to attract a declining demographic of young people and mid-careers hires to join us. We must be competitive, and that means we need to be getting some clear messages out into the world about who we are and what are our values. We need to be good communicators and also add our image to go with the words. If we can speak the words on video and audio even better. I have been told by numerous guests on my podcast that they found that they were successful in attracting new staff who had checked them and seen the video interview. I can believe that, because the nature of the interview is very authentic and no one so far has succeeded in pushing forth a fake version of themselves to fool the masses. I don’t say much during the interview and just let the guests talk. Occasionally, I will dig down on a point to go a bit deeper, but the bulk of the time is theirs. People watching the interview get a very clear picture of the boss and then can decide if this is the type of place where they want to work. Clients also check us out and they are making decisions about us too in terms of do they want to have a relationship with our company. They want to know who we are and what we stand for. This is an important chance for the CEO to become active and provide the content the buyers are looking for. They want to know who the boss is and what they are like. Hiding in the background is not a clever option. It is much better to work on mastering the medium. Looking straight down the barrel of the camera lens is not that easy and for many people, it is a formidable obstacle. Video is difficult to come across naturally, I find. Using teleprompters is not easy either and getting the right rhythm is a challenge for me. I always have trouble with photo shoots because I manage to look like a dork more often than not. I was watching something on TikTok where a male model was demonstrating how to move and stand, to get the right shot and I realised I have no ability to do that. Fortunately, Tia Haygood, who is my local photographer here, manages to make me look presentable enough to squeak by. What I have found is that the more you do it, the better you become, and refusing to participate is a guarantee that you will never master the medium. The CEO shouldn’t be hiding. Instead, they should be pushing their message forward at every opportunity. So find Tia if you are in Tokyo and work on your official portrait shots to use on social media and on your website. Get a videographer like Rionne McAvoy, who I use from Japan Media Services, involved to help you with creating quality videos. I have been using Tia and Rionne for years and I trust their work, which is why I am mentioning them if you are looking for help locally here in Japan. The point is the leader has to lead from the front and be the face of the business. We need to break down any potential barriers to getting staff or clients. Get the photos, the video, the audio, go on podcasts, do the interviews – do every possible thing you can to control the image you are projecting. If you can’t speak confidently or coherently, then come and do some training with us and we will fix that for you. There are no excuses anymore because there are plenty of people around to help. Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader whose team gets results? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources.There is a perfect solution for you- To LEARN MORE click here ( https://bit.ly/43sQHxV ) To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj ) To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here ( https://bit.ly/43o5FVK ) If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. About The Author Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com Bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery". He has also written "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めましょう) and his brand new book is “Japan Leadership Mastery”. Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki. He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Has 6 weekly podcasts: 1. Mondays - The Leadership Japan Series, 2. Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え 3. Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series 4. Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト 5. Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show 6. Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube: 1. Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV 2. Fridays – Japan Business Mastery 3. Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo. Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Being an Aussie I don’t have the right to select the next US President or get involved in American politics. I will steer clear of this minefield and concentrate on what we can all learn from the Biden train wreck. One moment he is a contender and in an instant he is struggling to hold on to power. Why? Because he gave a rambling speech in his debate with Donald Trump, viewed by over 50 million Americans. He was prepped for this debate by his handlers and yet it was a debacle. What happens in business? If you are the CEO of a listed company, there is a lot of public scrutiny of what you say and how well you say it. If the company is not listed, then the internal team are studying the CEO to gauge how the firm is faring and if their jobs safe or what are the chances to do well within this company. One of the young people I know who has just finished university and has entered his company mentioned how shocked he was to hear the President speak in public for the first time. Usually new entrants are vetted by HR and their initial supervisor, so their opportunities to hear the big boss are few and far between, until they have joined up. His feedback was an instant concern that he had chosen the wrong firm. The President’s inability to make a competent professional speech was a coffee stain moment. We all know that old saw about if the tray you pull down on your flight has coffee stains left there from a previous flight, it means this airline can’t be trusted and they are probably not maintaining the engines properly. We judge firms by what we see. If the leader is a shambles on their feet speaking to the troops, then doubts light up immediately. What is remarkable, though, is how few CEOs are excellent speakers. I attend a lot of public speeches by corporate leaders here, covering a range of nationalities, and it is rare to hear a leader acquit themselves professionally. Recently, I was shocked to see a local leader of a major global firm have to read his self-introduction to convince the voting audience to elect him to the organisation’s committee. This gentleman wasn’t some fresh faced kid. I am guessing early fifties. That means he has been in business for around thirty years and yet he can’t even get up and promote himself for selection to a prestigious position on the committee. I doubt he is anymore effective in rallying the staff around his vision for the future of the organisation. He was bad, but the other contenders weren’t impressive either. All of us in Japan face a growing nightmare of Darwinian proportions as we compete for a diminishing resource of capable staff, in particular those who can speak English. Being able to rally the team is only going to become more critical as the recruiters start hitting our people like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They will be luring people way and picking up 40% placement fees of first year salaries on the way through. The substantial financial rewards for this very average group of individuals is way out of proportion to their actual business competencies and abilities. That doesn’t matter though, because all they have to do is be a better siren to your people than you are and lure them across to greener pastures. Most CEOs are in that position because they were technical people who made it to the top or they have been in management positions and have shown capabilities to get things done in their previous postings. Japan is different and a track record overseas is not a real currency here. The ability to adapt yourself to how things are done here and to be effective with a Japanese workforce are the critical make or break skills. Communication skills are at a premium and it is more difficult here because the number of people who can understand English at a high level is limited. Few of these foreign CEOs have sufficient Japanese skills to be effective. To get a combo of Japanese fluency and high level speaking skills is an even more demanding recipe for local success. I know plenty of foreigners here who are fluent in Japanese, but I don’t know so many who can carry a crowd, who can be persuasive and effective in Japanese. Nevertheless, as Joe Biden has demonstrated, if you can’t make it as an effective communicator, your whole claim to the crown is in doubt. What do I do about the unfortunate CEO who had to read his own self-introduction? I would like to suggest that he do High Impact Presentations with us and learn how to give a talk and be a success. This is a sensitive conversation, because I am saying he is a dud and we all have ego. The key for CEOs is to realise that there is no point in letting your ego restrain your ability to become better as a presenter. Communication skills are only going to get more important, particularly storytelling. None of us want to be on the wrong side of the demarcation line between competency and longevity and train wreck and removal.…
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THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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I am a maniac. A less charged descriptor might be an “enthusiast”. Now Japan is a country chock full of enthusiasts. They win best pizza maker, best sommelier, best hula dancer, best shoe maker awards, etc., out gunning the Westerners who supposedly should be winning these home town advantage awards. This is a country where work is taken very seriously. Growing up in laid back Brisbane, we didn’t live to work, we worked to live. At 5.30pm most people were in the pub, the gym, the ocean, or at home getting ready for dinner. Japan took a different track. Back in the day, working late wasn’t about productivity, because it was all about devotion, being part of the team, pulling your weight, in order to be taken seriously. In the late 1970s, I taught English at night while I was a student here at Jochi University, usually from 6.30pm – 9.30pm. I was always amazed to finish the classes and walking out see all of these people still there working. Many of them, though, I observed, were seemingly engrossed in reading the sports newspapers or magazines, rather than doing anything productive. But they were there, waiting for the boss to go home so that they could do the same thing, demonstrating their solidarity with the others, also in wait to depart. Thirteen years later, I was going through piles of resumes for salespeople here in Japan looking to join our organisation. This resume review process of mine has been going on for the last thirty-two years now. I noticed people would have blank periods in their employ. Job mobility today is better, but that is a fairly recent phenomenon after the collapse of Yamaichi Securities (1999), the Lehman Shock (2008) and the pandemic (2020) had all thrown people out on to the street and over time, allowed the mid-career hire to become acceptable. Back in the day, leaving a job meant a steady spiral down in socio-economic terms and so most people hung in there, no matter how bad it was. When I would ask about these blanks in their resumes, a surprising number of people, particularly women, said they got physically sick from working until the last train every night and had to quit to recover their health. These were not isolated cases and many of the blanks were for months at a time, which made me really wonder about the cost of getting a salary and holding down a job in Japan. We have made a lot of progress since then and I think that there is much higher awareness about getting the work done in less time and allowing people to have a life outside of work. Young people are now all the equivalent of baseball free agents and can sell their services to the highest bidder, including demanding and getting, better work/life balance. We should all be throwing rose petals in front of them and waving palm fronds above them, to thank them for allowing the rest of us to be more clever about how we work. The problem we face now is not externally induced pressure for working long hours, but the internally driven ambition to get ahead and in the process work like Trojans. Thanks to technology, there is now no longer a clear “work/non-work” break in the day, because we are checking our emails all day and night. We are addicted to being in constant contact with our work demands. I mentioned I am a maniac and this constant checking of emails is what I am doing, too. I could try to manufacture the justification that because we are a global organisation, email is arriving all the time and I need to be on top of what is happening in other time zones, but is that really true? Would a few hours delay really make that big a difference? Are there actually real fires occurring which require me to don my big coat and grab the fire hose? What is happening is habit formation and combined with screen addiction, creating a toxic cocktail for all of us. One of Dale Carnegie’s stress management principes is “rest before you get tired”. On first blush, it sounds ridiculous. What are we wimps? Do we lack ambition, the guts to pay the price for success? No, we have to push through the pain barrier and keep driving. Allow no indulgence, no mercy, no regrets, no stopping. If we hit the pause button though and consider how much more we know today about psychosomatic illnesses than he did back in his day, we can see the prescient wisdom of his advice. It doesn’t mean goofing off; it doesn’t mean delinquent behaviour and work avoidance. He was talking about monitoring our condition to always aim for maximum productivity, and that means sustained productivity. I think I have improved now, but I would work like crazy and drive myself hard, get sick, then be off work for days and once recovered, rinse and repeat. What if I had taken his advice and rested before I got tired? Now I have broken that cycle and placed myself in a better position to have sustained productivity, rather than manic bursts followed by zero. Japan keeps us busy, the tech is making us even busier and these issues won’t go away. We have to play the long game, not the blame game. If you are a fellow manic like me, then stop the noise for a moment and seriously contemplate what “rest before you get tired” actually means for your life.…
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