Managers manage. That means they make sure everything runs on time, to cost and to quality. The leader does all of that, plus some additional important things. These include setting the strategic direction for the team and building the people’s capabilities. Part of the leader’s role is to unite everyone behind the direction they are setting for th…

There is a debate about whether Japan is any different from anywhere else when it comes to leading the team. Intellectually, I can appreciate there are many similarities because people are people, but I always feel there are important differences. One of the biggest differences is how people are trained to become leaders in Japan. I should really c…

Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to…

Here is a handy success equation which is easy to remember: our mindset plus our skill set, will equal our results. This is very straightforward and unremarkable, but we get so embroiled in our day to day world, we forget to helicopter above the melee and observe the lay of the land. A great mindset coupled with lacklustre skills, won’t get us very…

It is very common to hear from expat leaders here about their frustrations with leading teams in Japan. They get all of their direct reports together in a meeting room to work through some issues and reach some decisions. All goes according to plan, just like at home. Weeks roll by and then the penny drops that things that were agreed to in the mee…

I was reading an article by Anjli Raval in the Financial Times about the transition for CFOs to the CEO job. She quoted a survey by Heidrick & Struggles which showed a third of CFOs in the FTSE 100 firms became the CEO. This is up from 21% in 2019. Raval makes an interesting observation, “research shows that CEOs promoted from the CFO job do not dr…

It sounds very obvious, doesn’t it, to remind the team what we are trying to achieve, but are we doing it? Yes, we had that team Town Hall a few months ago and as the leader we outlined where we need to be at the end of the financial year. After that session, we have all been head down and getting on with it. “They know right? I told them everythin…

Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment. Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer. That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect. Mid-career hires were frowned u…

Leaders now face a pivotal moment in business in Japan. Do they continue to cling to the past? Do they replay what they went through when they were younger and lead as they were taught by their seniors or do they change the angle of approach? Japan rebuilt itself after the devastation of the war. The workers slaved away, adding a notch to their col…

As leaders, we are busy bees. We are buzzing around, going from meeting to meeting. We are getting together with clients over lunch, touching base with HQ, handling the media, talking to HR about our people and a host of other important activities. Usually poor time managers, we are constantly hemmed in by the demands on our schedules. The upshot i…

There are many paths to the mountaintop in the leadership area. Today, let’s go back to the practical realities of getting others to listen to you and, even more importantly, to follow you. My favourite quote on leadership is from Yogi Berra, the American baseball coach rather infamous for murdering the English language. He said something profound …

You would think that organisations choose their leaders because they are skilled in communication. What is the job after all, but communicating with the team to make sure everyone is clear about what they have to do and to encourage them to do it? Well you would be wrong! Leaders are usually selected for promotion because they are very good, often …

Leaders may not even be aware that they are poor listeners. They are very focused on telling others what to do. Being time poor, they are very focused on their own messaging, rather than the messaging efforts of others. In the war for talent in Japan, that could be a fatal move. One of the biggest factors driving engagement in Japan is the feeling …

The S-Curve is a very simple concept. Over time, a newly promoted employee goes through distinct stages in their performance achievement. Initially, their performance declines as they grapple with the new set of responsibilities. Gradually they get the swing of things and start to do well at their new accountabilities. After a period of becoming co…

As leaders are we all perfect? Are we perfect all the time? Obviously, the answer is “no” to both counts, but that doesn’t mean we always face up to our own shortcomings. An important part of growing and improving as a leader is to be honest about who we really are. Let’s go through some common areas where leaders can improve. 1. Uninspiring This u…

Which is more important to us as the leader – what we choose to do or who we choose to be? Most of our careers on the way up will have been concentrated on doing, achieving, delivering results, making the numbers, getting projects delivered on time and on budget. Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. When we get into a position of leadership t…

Leadership is about creating environments that influence others to achieve group goals. This works because people support a world they help create. There are five success areas for leaders to focus on that make all the difference. Rate your performance by giving yourself a mark on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) for each area. Self-direction This i…

We have probably all been on the receiving end of it or have been a witness to it. The presentation is completed, after which come the questions; some are fact finding, some seek clarification, while some are just plain nasty. Perhaps the questioner is not trying to be mean, but the result is the same. All eyes in the room burn a hole into you as e…

Doing more, and doing it better, faster and with less is driving global business. A cadre of professional managers running organisations is going the same way as the typing pool. Organisations can no longer afford managers who only manage; instead, they also need them to be leaders. This begs the question: what is the difference between a manager a…

“Hey, it’s a jungle out there”. A brilliant meeting followed by a woeful meeting; the emotional roller-coaster world of sales.You’re up and down within minutes, depending on the client’s interest and reaction. You’re always too early or too late for the business chance. The client is never on your timetable, especially your schedule around meeting …

Success is usually thought to be built on a combination of personal attributes such as intelligence, technical knowledge, street smarts, hard won experience (built on failures from pushing too hard), guts and tenacity. Our varsity halls offer a vast array of academic knowledge, information, insights, concepts, theories, tomes, technology and debate…

Corporate learning isn’t working. Heroically, time and treasure are being spent by company leaders to improve staff performance. Inherent in that goal is that we as recipients learn something new or re-learn what we supposedly should know already. Talking to companies interested in increasing people performance, we have noted some common barriers t…

"I don’t understand!". Well in Nippon, particularly, what a pandora’s box or treasure trove that statement is, depending on your point of view. Employees who respond in this way may have a number of subterranean issues bubbling away. As managers, our ability to plumb the depths of what they are saying is integral for success. Here are 5 hidden mean…

I am putting this content together for me to remind myself that psychosomatic illness is a real thing and there are plenty of graveyards with ambitious thrusting leaders pushing up daisies, because the stress killed them. Being an Aussie male is a health hazard. We are taught from a young age to harden up, soldier on, keep going no matter what. “Sh…

I have a short fuse for idiocy. I know this about myself, so I have to work on me, to calm down and not just verbally unload both shotgun barrels into the idiot. Like everything, there is best practice about giving errant staff feedback. I find a useful ploy is to “time separate” my irritation with them from when I deliver the feedback. When I get …

Delegation is a perfect tool. It is always in pristine condition because it stays on the shelf and gathers dust there, rather than getting dinged and banged around through robust application by leaders. Why is that? Fear is the biggest driver, followed by poor time management. The accountability sits with the boss, no matter what delegation has bee…

Japan is a country where accountability and responsibility are avoided at all costs. This is most often seen in staff engagement surveys where Japan usually comes last in the world. One of the key questions western survey designers use for these global questionnaires is, “would you recommend our firm as a place to work for your relatives and friend…

There is no one way to lead, but there are different perspectives on how to lead. We might need a certain variety in one environment, but a different model in another ecosystem. Often the danger is dragging the same model around with us which worked well in one locale and trying to slam the square peg into the round hole at the new shop. I have tri…

What are the starting points, the basic requirements of leadership? There are actually many, which is why books on leadership are both numerous and thick. Today, let’s look at four of the basics we need to be effective as a leader. 1. Self-Aware In this category, we are living an intentional life, where we decide what happens to us, rather than bei…

If one of our goals as a leader is to align our team members goals, aspiration, dreams and desires with those of the firm, it implies we know what they are aiming for. How would we know that information? We would gather that detail slowly over time and we would check back in occasionally to find out if things have changed or not. This cannot be an …

Japan is excellent at being two faced. In the West, this has a pejorative air, but in Japan this is how harmony can be maintained and everyone plays their part in keeping the public and private faces far apart. This means that a typical western approach of getting the two warring individuals into a room and thrashing out a solution usually doesn’t …

Once upon a time in Japan there would be a thick pile of resumes sitting on your desk for you to go through and select the new potential hires for interview. You would conduct rounds of meetings, put them to the test in certain skill sets and then make a studied decision to bring onboard the best person. They were nervous and you had all the power …

Leaders are different from managers. Managers have to make sure everything is humming. The quality standards have to be met. The logistics have to flow smoothly, so that production is working well. The budget has to be met and there should be no over spending taking place. Leaders have to do all of this, plus two other key roles. One is setting the…

The Ongoing Nightmare Of Small Business Recruiting There are more jobs than candidates in Japan and this situation will only worsen from the boss’s viewpoint. Those halcyon days of wading through a big pile of resumes and tossing most away, have well and truly gone. If you get any resumes these days, you think you should go and buy a takurakuji (lo…

The boss is the light on the hill, radiating positive energy, belief, confidence and possibility. The moody boss can destroy the atmosphere in the office very quickly. We all know that, so we have to become expert thespians, masking our true feelings and putting on a fun face to the outside world. When things get tough, there are no people the boss…

I am always amused by rather youngish “life coaches” or “executive coaches”. It seems incongruent, because their experience of business life seems so thin. They haven’t risen inside their organisations, have never had massive responsibilty or a major P&L to worry about. They seem to be everywhere and astoundingly they find people willing to give th…

The contrast was striking. I went from one boss, who was super demanding, scary even, to a very easy going leader. I thought, “this is good”, well, at least for a while. When I realised that he would agree with whoever was last in his office, I realised there was no core here. He was being nice to all and that meant he wasn’t taking any hard decisi…

Japan has always been a country which has adapted to weather and seismic conditions. Traditional housing was built on the assumption that earthquakes would less easily destroy wooded houses with built in flex points. High-pitched roof angles allowed snow to fall more easily from the roof and prevent the snow’s weight from crushing those inside. Thi…

Japan is a unique country where underperformance is not considered a legitimate reason to terminate someone’s employ. Leaders new to the country will often run into this issue. They arrive with a mandate from HQ to “fix” Japan and get it up to a required performance standard. As soon as the new broom brings in changes to achieve the HQ revenue targ…

It is very frustrating at times, being a leader. Staff don’t hit their targets, forget things they need to do, complete tasks in a less than satisfactory manner and make stupid mistakes. Time poor leaders are the norm, so we are always operating on minimums to get it all done. We are usually in a rush, and this is when we get ourselves into trouble…

Some problems are relatively difficult and can be fixed, ignored or coped with. Others are more substantial and can place the entire enterprise at risk. Covid certainly struck some industries harder than others and we have seen many venerable establishments disappear. The Japanese government wisely made low-interest loans available to many companie…

Artificial intelligence is bringing a lot of speed to tasks and helping with mundane work. As we all become better at prompting the machine, we will uncover greater utility for it to propel our work. It will not be able to replace the human aspect of leadership though. One thing it won’t fix is watching 40% of new hires walk out the door within the…

Many of our clients have told us that Covid and especially remote working situations, revealed a lot about the leadership frailty of their organisations. When everyone was in the office, the inability of mid-level leaders to lead was effectively masked. However, once the big homeward bound migration took place, sizeable gaps suddenly became apparen…

Three candidates in a row with mental health problems and recruiting fees in the tens of thousands of dollars. Am I just unlucky or is this a trend? Our first instinct as leaders will be to not recruit people who are broken and to avoid those who are suffering with mental health issues. We will worry they will just disappear into a prolonged medica…

As a leader, try yelling “be inclusive, be inclusive, be inclusive” at your staff members. You are trying to move the organisation toward achieving greater creativity and innovation through the benefits of diversity. You know that becoming more inclusive is the catalyst for gaining diversity inside the firm. The President and the Executive Team hav…

“Does this candidate have a pulse? Yes? Then we need to hire them”. Does this sound ridiculous, a fantasy and dystopian snippet from the future? The Japanese Government says that if we don’t see a turnaround in the population decline before 2030, then the country will get tipped over the edge and into a decline from which it cannot easily recover. …

The big chiefs in the organisation have embraced the idea of Diversity, Equity and inclusion (DEI). Even more, they expect Middle Management to get on board with this push and make it happen. That means people who probably haven’t spent one second thinking about DEI now have to be the role models for the new cause. I always tell people that the suc…

The organisation gets religion about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). The senior management team, led by the President, decide this is a key path for moving forward. The upside in achieving greater innovation and creativity by embracing a more inclusive workplace is seen as the Holy Grail. The Middle Managers are told to get behind the push o…

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are the end goal for companies today, because there is a recognition that the value derived warrants the effort. The WHY part is certainly well understood and female manager ratios are often being set as company targets. Key triggers to achieving a diverse workforce are through gaining inclusion within the work envir…

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made the following comment on diversity in Japan, “My mission is to create a society where anyone regardless of age, gender and position would be able to play an active role and for people with various experiences and backgrounds to inspire each other”. Today, most companies in Japan would agree with that statement and …