The Leadership Japan Series Dr. Greg Story

The leader has a different role to that of the manager.  The manager makes the business run on time, to quality and on budget.  The leader does all of those things, plus sets the strategic direction for the business, crafts the culture and builds the people.  If we want to control every aspect of the firm, then we have to micro-manage everything.  Obviously, that is a choice, but as the leader we need to develop our people too and so we need to delegate work to them so that they can grow.  In fact, as the leader, the ideal situation would be that we are only working on the most high-level things that only we can do.
If possible, we want to set the parameters of the business so that the team can self-manage themselves.  Those parameters come in the form of some very useful tools called Vision, Mission and Values.  Some people may think that Vision, Mission and Value are rather flowery, fluffy, flaky statements of little use, but they are denying themselves some important leverage points as the leader.
The Vision is a call out to what is the purpose of what we are doing.  This is a fundamental thing, but in many companies the staff have an unclear idea of the purpose.  We can recall the classic building the wall metaphor. Three stonemasons are asked what they are doing, and the first says, “building this wall”. The second one says, “I am building a new faculty building for the university”. The third one says, “I am building a facility to better educate future generation”.  The metaphor makes the point that the understanding of purpose is different, even though each person was laying stone blocks to build a wall.  We need to make sure that our team is clear on what is the purpose of why we are putting in all these long, hard hours.
The Mission is a clarification of what we do and, by definition, what we don’t do.  Making the main thing the main thing sounds simple, but there are so many bright shiny objects and fashionable trends which can divert us.  We need to make sure everyone understands what we need to concentrate on and not allow the business to be drawn off course.
The Values are the glue which bind us together. The leader’s job is to find out the common values of the team which will correspond with the values of the organisation and have everyone flying together in tight formation going in the same direction. The other important point is to make sure that the organisation lives the values and that the team lives the values.  When the organisation rhetoric strays from the stated values, the cynicism becomes a cancer which eats away at the morale and teamwork of the firm.
Once we have set the guide rails, we can set the strategy to achieve the Vision.  There will be a series of goals to be achieved to get us to where we want to be.  Obviously, revenue and profit goals are going to be critical to the health and longevity of the firm.  There will be quality considerations which relate to our brand and its positioning in the market.  Cost of customer acquisition and the success of our marketing to help grow the business will bring their own sets of goals.  Who we recruit and how we train them will have a major impact on the success of the company.  Business is a one team against another team head-to-head struggle and the best team wins in the long term.  Our sales team versus the opposition, our marketing prowess against that of so many rivals, our factory staff against the competition, our leadership bench strength against all comers in our industry sector.
We need to measure our progress and success in attaining our goals. There are activities and outcomes which we need to track.  We break these down for each financial year and for longer term considerations and they must add up to attaining the Vision we have set.  They must be objective and correct numbers, because incorrect data can hurt us and cause us to make poor decisions.  Getting correct data is not always that eas

As the boss, we are always super busy.  We have the management of the team and the results to work on.  Everything has to be progressing on cost, on time and on quality.  At the same time, we are setting the strategy, the direction for the team, communicating that so that everyone understands, establishing the values, and we are coaching and building the team members. Phew, I get tired just thinking about all of those boss roles. It is rare though that we can take a breath and reflect on the effectiveness of the teamwork.  When problems arise, we tend to work on those in isolation and never have a moment to see the team as a unit, as a whole.
Here are three things to look at in your team and reflect on if you are happy with the effectiveness of the team.
1.    Conflict
In a Western context, we might think we need to have constructive conflict which will help us to make better choices?  In Japan, disagreements are more likely to be ignored because if we surface them, we have to publicly deal with it and discretion is the better part of valor here.  Nevertheless, we cannot leave things fester and as the boss, we need to take action and sort things out. 
However, the Western idea of getting the two people in the room and thrashing it out will never work here. You might force people to get together, but no one will say anything in that meeting.  Conflict resolution is best done individually, privately, and quietly.  We have to take an entirely different approach to sorting out conflict in Japan.  We talk to each person many times and, like war time negotiators, we move them toward an armistice that can stick.  Hostilities will cease and the conflict will become muted, although never forgotten.
Japan is better at working together to come up with solutions when everyone is involved and has a sense of shared ownership.  We should concentrate on creating these occasions and the idea of creative conflict becomes replaced with creative cooperation, which suits the Japanese psyche much better.
2.    Cooperation
In teams, there can be contradictions where it can be difficult to square the circle.  Sales teams are being measured on sales results and the numbers tell everything.  There can be an issue though, depending on how the salespeople are paid. If they are on salary and bonus, then there is a natural preclusion to cooperate.  Japanese salespeople would love to have no individual responsibility. They always vote for salary and a group bonus, related to a group target. 
This is great for hiding and avoiding accountability and these are two aspects where the Japanese salesforce can operate at ninja levels of accomplishment. We don’t do this in our organisation because we know we will always underperform and no one will be accountable.  We want individuals to have specified numbers against their targets and for them to be held responsible for hitting those numbers. As you might imagine, this is not a popular idea here.
If they are on individual commissions with a base salary, then there is an inbuilt resistance to cooperating with anyone else.  It becomes “everyone for themselves” very easily. This is where values and culture need to play their part and glue the unglueable together.  The boss has to work hard at gluing the team together, even when there are these fundamental contradictions at play.  It can be done, but it takes a lot of consistency, brand building and communication.
3.    Communication
Working from home during covid definitely impacted the communication levels in our organisation.  We were all operating in our bunkers at home, and the level of clarity and common understanding went down in my observation.  Introverts like me loved it.  You didn’t have to see or talk to anyone.  For the organisation, though, it was not good. We have returned to the office and when we have people chatting in the office, it shows that what was missing before has been reclaimed.
Japan

Managers manage.  That means they make sure everything runs on time, to cost and to quality.  The leader does all of that, plus some additional important things. These include setting the strategic direction for the team and building the people’s capabilities.  Part of the leader’s role is to unite everyone behind the direction they are setting for the team.  There can be a lot of detail at the micro level about how to make the strategy a reality. One key component which needs to be set at the start is to re-clarify the purpose of the team.  You would think that was pretty obvious. However, if the leader doesn’t work on defining it, there could be 10 people in the team and eleven different purposes.
Here is a simple six-step guide to setting the purpose.
1.         What is meaningful about what your team does, from the perspective of the organisation as a whole (such as in relation to the stated purpose and vision)?
The team operates within the framework of the firm, but the leader must break that down to the team level and create a local version which matches the team’s reality in the field.  How does your team fit into the big picture?  Which colleagues from other departments are key partners and where is the coordination most required? There is often a firm wide Vision Statement which can be a good starting point and the task is to take that and create your own local version for the team.
2.        What is meaningful about what your team does from the perspective of your clients? 
We know what we sell, but sometimes we forget what the client is buying.  They are not always the same things. For example, we might think we are selling leadership training, but what the client is buying might be succession planning or greater productivity.  It is always important that every person in the team has a clear understanding of the client's needs.
Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” was an excellent guide to the importance of making sure the entire series of contact points with the client were aligned and operating at the same quality levels.  An example would be the person who answers the phone is pleasant and professional, but the person the client is then transferred to is rude or grumpy. The firm brand went from heavenly clouds to depths of hell in one second.
3.        How should your team members behave as they are delivering what matters?
This comes back to what are the team and organisational values?  The leader will always have a wide spread of values scattered across their team and their job is to unite everyone behind the core values of the team.  The value set defines how everyone thinks about the clients and that, in turn, defines how they interact with the clients.  There is also the issue of how the team members interact with each other? Is there a strong level of mutual respect or we are in a pit of vipers with corporate politics run amok?
 4.        What are the expected results for the team and what are we doing when we are acting according to our purpose?
We are establishing KPI, goals, targets etc., to make the outputs needed clear to everyone.  Does each individual have a target or are there team based goals?  In the latter case, do people within the team understand their role in delivering the team result?
5.        What actions do you, as the leader, need to do to help fulfill the purpose?
Taking care of the logistics, resources, permissions, interdepartmental cooperation are common leader roles.  There is also the key role of coach to the team members to bolster their motivation and skills.  Often though, as busy, busy leaders, we transition from coach to mad pirate captain barking out orders and making people walk the plank if they don’t perform.  We set the tone for the team and we set the role model of how we are going to operate in this team. 
6.        Who do you need to be as a leader to fulfill the purpose (ch

There is a debate about whether Japan is any different from anywhere else when it comes to leading the team.  Intellectually, I can appreciate there are many similarities because people are people, but I always feel there are important differences.  One of the biggest differences is how people are trained to become leaders in Japan.  I should really clarify that statement and say how they are not trained to become leaders. The main methodology for creating leaders in Japan is through On The Job Training (OJT). I can see there is a crisp logic to the idea of OJT back in the day, however it is now a flawed system in the modern world of Japan.  In the West, leadership training is a given, because the value is recognised and so the investment is made to better educate the leadership cohorts through each generation.
The first problem with Japan OJT is it presumes your boss knows about leading.  There is very little formal leadership training going on in Japan.  I don’t believe it just about investing the money.  There is no great tradition here for corporate leadership training.  Before we dive into this subject, I believe we should clarify what is a leader in Japan and what is a manager and what is different. 
Japan, in my observation, is full of managers, and there are few leaders. A manager runs the machine on budget, on quality, and on time. The leader does all of that and two very important additional tasks.  The leader persuades the team that the direction they are advocating is the correct one and, secondly, they build up the capabilities of their staff through one-on-one coaching.  By the way, barking out orders like a mad pirate captain doesn’t qualify as coaching.
OJT probably made a lot of sense up until about fifty years ago, when it started to be disrupted by technology.  By the 1980s, desktop computing became common in Japan and gradually the boss lost his (and they were mainly men) typist and had to start doing his own typing on the computer.  The advent of email in the mid-1990s was the real death blow to the boss’s time management.  Now the boss had become super busy and time availability for coaching staff became much diminished.
What this means is that we have had been through multiple generations of staff mainly educated through OJT and who have been short-changed on the leadership modelling by their “manager” boss.  Each corporate generation passes on how to be a manager to the next generation and unless there is some intervention through formal leadership training, there is no real progress.
 Of course, there will always be exceptions who prove the rule and some managers who make it out of that gravitational pull of OJT and become real leaders.  This is the lightning strike theory of leadership development and isn’t a great proposition to ensure that the firm’s leadership bench is stacked with professionals.
The key plank in leadership is no longer task experience.  The old model was the boss had done all the tasks of their subordinates and knew their jobs inside out.  Today, there is much more speciality and technology is making sure it isn’t experience alone which will carry the day for the boss.  Many companies in Japan are moving away from the old model of age and stage and instead promoting people based on ability.  Just rotating through various jobs in the machine won’t be enough anymore.
Leaders have to become expert communicators and masters of environment building, such that individuals can motivate themselves.  How many leaders receive any training to assist their communication and people skills?  Very, very few and everyone else had to work it all out through trial and error. That hit and miss approach is very expensive.
The younger staff want different things to their parents and the modern boss in Japan has to adjust.  The bishibishi or super strict model of leadership is now cast out on to the rubbish tip of leadership history in Japan.  Bosse

Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep adding more and more certainty to what they say is important, correct, valuable and needed to produce the best return on investment.
With an army of sycophants in the workforce, the leader can begin to believe their own press. There is also the generational imperative of “this is correct because this was my experience”, even when the world has well and truly moved on beyond that experience. If you came back from World War Two as an officer, you saw a certain type of leadership being employed and the chances are that was why there were so many “command and control” leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. The Woodstock generation questioned what had been accepted logic and wanted a different boss-employee relationship, where those below had more input into the direction of the company. Technology breakthroughs made hard skill warriors the gurus of leadership. Steve Jobs abusing and belittling his engineers was accepted, because he was so smart.
Technology has however democratized the workplace. The boss is no longer the only one with access to key information. Being smart and abusive isn’t acceptable anymore. The boss-employee relationship has changed. It is going to keep changing too, especially here in Japan where there are 1.5 jobs for every person working.
Recruiting and retaining people becomes a key boss skill. The degree of engagement of the team makes a big difference in maintaining existing customer loyalty and the needed brand building to attract new customers. Social media will kill any organisation providing sub-standard service, because the damage travels far, wide and fast. The role of the boss has changed, but have the bosses kept up?
Recent Dale Carnegie research on leaders found four blind spots, which were hindering leaders from fully engaging their teams. None of these were hard skill deficiencies. All four focused on people skills.
Leaders must give their employees sincere praise and appreciation We just aren’t doing it enough. With the stripping out of layers in organisations, leaders are doing much bigger jobs with fewer team members. Time is short and coaching has been replaced by barking out commands. Work must get done fast because there is so much more coming behind it. We are all hurtling along at a rapid clip. The boss can forget that the team are people, emotional beings, not revenue producing machines. Interestingly, 76% of the research respondents said they would work harder if they received praise and appreciation from their boss. Take a reality check on yourself. How often to do you recognise your people and give them sincere praise?
Leaders do well to admit when they are wrong The scramble up the greasy pole requires enormous self-belief and image building. Mistakes hinder rapid career climbs and have to be avoided. Often this is done by shifting the blame down to underlings. The credit for work well done, of course, flows up to the genius boss who hogs all the limelight. The team are not stupid. They see the selfishness and respond by being only partially engaged in their work. In 81% of the cases, the research found that bosses who can admit they made mistakes are more inspirational to their team members.
Effective leaders truly listen, respect and value their employees’ opinions Who knows the most? Often the boss assumes that is them, because they have been anointed “boss”. They have more experience, better in

Here is a handy success equation which is easy to remember: our mindset plus our skill set, will equal our results.  This is very straightforward and unremarkable, but we get so embroiled in our day to day world, we forget to helicopter above the melee and observe the lay of the land.  A great mindset coupled with lacklustre skills, won’t get us very far.  A poor mindset with great skills won’t do it either, so we need both.
What is our mindset composed of?  How we think is critical.  Are we operating with a positive mindset?  If we are deep in depression about the circumstances of the business, we are stuck in a hole from which it can be hard to emerge.  We are what we think, so control over what we think becomes so important. That also means being strict about what we put into our minds.  Stay away for fluff, endless scrolling on social media and negativity.  Find the useful, positive and valuable and make that the diet for our mind.
Our opinions influence how we see the world.  Where do these opinions come from?  They are usually the product of our access to quality, correct information.  There is a tricky balance here because a lot of the news we need to consume is laced with negativity and that can pollute our positive attitude.  So we need to curate the information we take in, to help us make informed decisions, based on correct data.
Our beliefs are similarly formed from data, personal experience and what we hear from people we trust.  Our degree of success can be impacted by our self-belief. It can be a drag on our progress if we are limiting how we see our potential.
We believe we are operating logically, except we often make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. Being in control of our emotion is a fundamental first step to getting ourselves into a position to be successful. Wild mood swings make us a difficult person to work with or get close to.  A short temper can have us explode in haste and repent at leisure, after we have created havoc all around us.
We are all drowning is a sea of information today as the internet propels constant updates and new content at us.  When I was at University we went to the stacks in the library to find the few books available there and if someone else had that textbook you needed you dipped out. Microfiche was the big innovation to access information in a non-paper format. For the younger generation out there, microfiche was an ancient method of taking microphotographs of physical pages and putting it on to film you could scroll through, using a special microfiche reader. I noticed with my son’s education, his problem is the constant assault of data and the difficulty of working out which information was valuable amongst the flotsam and jetsam battering his attention everyday. Getting insight becomes the game of success because we don’t lack for content anymore.
Once we have the mindset correct then we have to take action.  This is often easier said than done. We are so busy and translating insight into outcomes is not a given in this constant rabid struggle against the demands on our time. Behaviour determines outcomes and the formation of good habits is the key here. If we form the right habits then we take the right actions and we form the right default behaviour which adds to our success.
The way we communicate flows from these habits and behaviours and we should be seeking inclusivity.  Business is too complex for relying on the hero worker who can do it all by themselves – that ship has sailed.  We need to be persuasive and able to garner collaboration in the workplace today.  There is so much technology available today and it spews out endless choices.  How do we get others to follow our ideas and adopt our suggestions? Our degree of cooperation from others is a compilation of our interactivity.  If we have good people skills then we can interact with other in a constructive and positive way which adds to our success. Often