The Leadership Japan Series

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

They are not making as many Japanese as they used to.  Every year we get these headlines about the new lows in numbers of births in Japan.  The demographic trend is obvious to everyone.  What is not obvious is how this is going to force a change in the way we lead.  Until now, we have all applied the like it or lump philosophy to staff working for us.  They were infinitely replaceable – lose one and go get another one.  Not anymore. It is hard to understand, really.  The economy is not doing remarkably well.  The prospects for future growth are also not looking great, so why is it we are not seeing a parallel step down in business needs which translates into less need for staff?  I am not sure and I will let the economists duke that one out, but it is an interesting question to ponder. We are certainly seeing an uptick in demand for people and a corresponding downturn in their availability.  That translates into higher costs, which is only starting to happen now and increased competition for people.  This isn’t only related to the hiring, it also covers the retaining bit as well.  The recruiters are having a field day with the revenues being generated from us for hiring staff and there isn’t much we can do about that in a staff bull market.  What we can control is the retaining piece of the puzzle.  Delegating work to staff is a critical part of that effort.  Young people want to advance in their careers and they want to be given responsibility for their work.  Delegation serves both purposes well.  The issue with delegation is that when done poorly, it can lead to problems. The biggest failure is selling the delegation to the person receiving it.  This sounds simple, but so often this is not done at all or not done very professionally.  Usually, the delegation process is a series of orders – do this and do that type of thing.  The person on the receiving end already has a job and may be thinking, “wait a minute, I am already busy and why do I need to do your job as well?”.  That would be a legitimate and logical conclusion of having your boss dump their work on your desk. The selling component is making clear the benefit to the person receiving the delegation.  There is usually a selection process for internal promotions and the people making the decision want to know the new person can handle the tasks and are not going to blow anything up.  If we are changing companies, when we get to the interview stage, they will ask about our experience.  We are trying to step up and being able to reference completion of work at a level above where we are now is an advantage.  When it is put like this, people can understand how they can leverage these tasks at a future point and make it an advantage to themselves. The other negative aspect of delegation is boss abandonment.  You are handed a bunch of tasks by your superior and that is the last you hear about it until the completion deadline.  This is very dangerous because if the person takes the project off on an incorrect tangent and you hit the deadline, then there is little which can be done to salvage the wreckage.  Now there is a balance between the boss interfering and micro-managing the delegated project and keeping an eye on how things are going.  The latter is obviously the way to go, but where is the line between them?  One good idea is to discuss how they are going to approach the task.  Get them to tell us what they think about running this part of the work. We want their ideas because that is where the ownership is located.  We still need to monitor progress, though. Agreeing a regular check in is a good practice.  All the boss is looking for is whether the project is on track.  There are many ways to the top of the mountain and we have to let the delegated person find that out for themselves, as part of the learning process, rather than being proscriptive about how to get there. If we get both the sell the delegation part and the shepherding component right, then the delegation will be successful and help us to retain staff.  The team member will feel empowered, trusted, and valuable. These are all brilliant and required elements to keep people with us and not straying off to greener pastures.  We must deny the siren call of ravenous recruiters trying to lift our people out of our companies.  If we don’t start delegating, we will lose staff, find it hard to get new staff and gradually shrink in size. In turn, this will make us less attractive as a work destination, as we become too flat to be able to accommodate ambitious people.  It is a cycle which ultimately leads to oblivion.

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Tough Love Or Fake Praise To Motivate Staff In Japan This tough love or fake praise alternative is a dubious construct. Are these two alternatives really the only options?  For some leaders they may feel that the staff are getting paid to do a professional job and their corresponding need is to get on with it.  The boss doesn’t need to be pandering to their needs.  This is especially the case toward these self-indulgent, coddled, spoiled brats who are now entering the workforce.  Giving this lot praise is fake and not needed, is the view. I certainly grew up in the “tough love” era of business leadership.  Praise wasn’t heard, and all you got was a hard time about not doing things well enough or fast enough.  They weren’t singling me out for a hard time, because this is what we all got.  In that sense, it was very democratic.  When you are raised that way in business, you think that is normal and how things are done, because the most experienced leaders in the company all operated that way. Today, the problems arise thick and fast when you take this as your own operating standard and start handing out tough love to your own people.  Combining this mindset with youthful ambition is a powerful and potentially highly toxic cocktail which can end in disaster.  Today, Japanese young people are in short supply and they are not interested in tough love or fake praise. It sounds silly to raise the question about “how to praise people”, but if you are not raised that way in business, it is not natural to you.  The danger is you try too hard and it comes across as completely fake. Flattery is instantly dismissed.  Your standing goes down the drain too, as you are perceived to be an idiot. There are many opportunities where we can look to praise our staff.  One is “things” and although it looks easy, it is actually the most tricky.  Frankly, I would avoid this one altogether, even though it looks like the simplest thing to do. They may have in their possession something very impressive or nice.  Today, men commenting on how women are dressed or do their hair or whatever is bound to be seen the wrong way from what you intend. The next thing you know HR is involved concerned about your “sexual harassment” of the female staff. You might comment on your staff’s watch or pen or briefcase or some object they have chosen.  This is definitely on the cusp of fake praise, so it has to be handled very delicately.  For example, I am not particularly into watches, so me praising someone for their watch may easily be revealed for what it is – desperation to find something to be positive about.  Better to find something you are knowledgeable about and recognise they have done well with acquiring an object you can recognise. Praise it and be able to back it up with some insider knowledge. Recognising people’s achievements is safer ground and more relevant in the workplace.  The point is “good job” is highly dubious, as praise and reeks of flattery and insincerity.  You might think this passes muster, but believe me, it does not.  Every person has multiple projects underway, and their job content is incredibly various. “Good job” is by no means specific enough to get anyone excited about receiving that style of praise.  Exactly what was it they did that you want to recognise?   Call out the precise achievement, such as a report they prepared or a contribution in the meeting or anything solid and concrete. Personal strengths and characteristics are powerful fodder for praise, but again, be very careful about wandering into what sounds like flattery.  “You are very intelligent” will set off alarm bells immediately in the recipient.  It is like “good job” and so is broad and fuzzy.  No one has a clue regarding what you are talking about.  We have to link the praise to the action.  They may have come up with an insight in the meeting and it may have been a very intelligent observation.  When you connect the dots like that, then the praise will land. If you say, “you are resilient” that again is tremendously vague.  What did they do which demonstrated their resilience?  How did this come to your attention?  Why do you know they are resilient?  Bring the evidence and paste it to the praise. Otherwise, the whole effort will be tossed out as fake.  In fact, you wind up creating more problems for yourself than if you had just kept your head down and concentrated on doing your own work and praised no one. In all of these cases, we need to relate the recognition to something we have witnessed, describe it and then encourage them to keep doing it.  Tough love won’t fly anymore and trying to replace it with “praise light and fluffy” will be a train wreck.  We need to be very careful to make sure we do praise our people and be particularly careful about how we do that.