If the client complains directly to your staff member about their poor service, should you go to bat for your team member? Should you publicly apologise and deal with the errant staff member privately? Should you make a public show of solidarity with the staff member and criticise the manner in which the complaint was made? Should you aggressively argue the point with the client? Should you just ignore it and get back to other pressing matters? The answers to these real life situations will diff...
Jul 23, 2025•12 min
Recruiting and developing the perfect team is an illusion, a Fool’s Gold hot pursuit for leaders. Even if you do manage to recruit great people, an increasingly difficult task in Japan where the population is in decline and the improvement of English skills is getting nowhere, they leave. They start a family, get poached for more dough, get sick, need to take care of aging parents or a myriad of other reasonable reasons and you have to start again. The reality is we are always going to be dealin...
Jul 16, 2025•11 min
Leaders are often poor listeners in the modern age. To listen to our team members requires the allocation of precious time. Advances in technology, especially hand held devices, was trumpeted as unfurling access to more time for contemplative pursuits and work-life balance. Is there anyone out there who feels they are now more ebullient, because of all the extra time the technology has thrown our way? Probably not. In fact, as the pace of life has sped up, we are more time poor than ever. The mo...
Jul 09, 2025•12 min
We have met them. Thrusters, mad with power and hungry to control others. Organisation insider politicians who spend all of their time sucking up to the powerful, while lobbying for themselves to be granted more and more status and authority. The absolute nobody, who controls approval processes and who milks it for all it is worth. The psychologically damaged and emotionally stunted intent on making our life hell, now that they have been promoted. The mixture of leaders and power can be a powerf...
Jul 02, 2025•11 min
To SER With Love In the movie “To Sir, With Love”, Sidney Poitier was brilliant in the role of a black teacher in a tough London East End high school. He was trying to make a difference for these young outcasts to better prepare them for the life they would face after graduating from school. A very uplifting story about what is possible when we encourage others to be their best. So what has this got to do with business, you may be asking? As leaders, we have four jobs. Run the machinery of the o...
Jun 25, 2025•11 min
We know the name Achilles because of Brad Pitt and Hollywood or we may have read the Iliad. He was a famous mythical Greek hero whose body was invulnerable, except for the back of his heel. His mother plunged him into the river Styx to protect his body, but her fingertips covered the heel, leaving it vulnerable. Research by Dr. Jack Zenger identified four common elements which comprise Achilles’ heels for leaders. Blind spots are a problem for all of us. We can’t see our foibles, issues and prob...
Jun 19, 2025•11 min
In today’s business world, leaders need to be “authentic” leaders. We have all come across this somewhere, endorsed by self-proclaimed gurus and prophets. I often ponder what does that actually mean? I am sure all of those Japanese leaders screaming abuse at their staff, when they make mistakes, are being authentic. They are authentically terrible, dictatorial, abusive leaders. Actually this worked like a charm for a very long time in postwar Japan. You joined a company for life and there was on...
Jun 11, 2025•11 min
Engaging your team as a leader is a relatively new idea. When I first started work in the early 70s, none of my bosses spent a nanosecond thinking about they could engage their staff as a leader. What they were thinking about was catching mistakes, incompetence, error and willful negligence, before these problems went nuclear. That meant micro managing everyone. “Management by walking around” meant checking up on people. The construct was that the team were problematic and the boss needed to hav...
Jun 04, 2025•10 min
Smirks emerge quite quickly when you mention “role model” and “leaders” in the same breath. Most peoples’ experiences with leaders as role models have been that they encompass the “what not do as a leader” variety. Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) or teacher by negative example, as we have noted in Japanese. What are some of the things we should be focused on in our quest to become a real role model for our teams? We can break the role model aspect into four major areas: Self-Aware; Accountability; Others-F...
May 28, 2025•12 min
We are recognised for our capabilities and potential and promoted into our first leadership role. We have been given charge over our colleagues and now have additional responsibilities. In many cases we don’t move into a pure “off the tools” leadership role. We are more likely to be a player/leader hybrid, because we have our own clients and also produce revenue outcomes. One of the biggest difficulties is knowing how to balance the roles of “doer” and “urger”. Jealousy, bruised egos, sabotage, ...
May 21, 2025•10 min
We have seen Hollywood pumping out comic heroes as movie franchises to get the money flowing into the studios. The premise is always the same. The super hero comes to the rescue and saves everyone. What about for leaders when coaching their team members? Fortunately, we have four super heroes we can rely on to help us do a better job as the leader. They are Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower. Encouraging our team sounds pretty unheralded and straightforward. But do we actually do it? Leaders ...
May 14, 2025•11 min
The chain of command is a well established military leadership given. I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else. In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers. This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback against the Vietnam War, when all authority began to be challenged. Modern leaders are currently enamoured with concepts like the “servant leader”. The leader serves the team as an enabler...
May 07, 2025•12 min
Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape. We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk. We have two types of people working for us. There are those who receive a salary of some dimension, be they full time or part-time and then there are those who get paid for their services. Some of these services are delivered regularly throughout the year...
Apr 30, 2025•11 min
I met the owner of a successful business recently. He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction. So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange. It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful. Why was that my expectation? Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are li...
Apr 23, 2025•11 min
The ad on social media said, “we are looking for sales A players”. I know the guy who put out the ad and he had recently moved to a new company, a new entrant into Japan and they were aggressively going after market share here. I was thinking I would love to be able to recruit A players for sales as well, but I can’t. The simple reason is that A players in Japan are seriously expensive. If you are a big company, with deep pockets in a highly profitable sector, then this is a no brainer. Why woul...
Apr 16, 2025•11 min
Years ago I inverted the pyramid and promoted the best salespeople to become the branch leaders. The existing branch leaders were shuffled around to new branches and they provided the grey hair and the credibility needed by the older rich clientele, but didn’t have responsibility for driving revenues anymore. They were moved because if they had stayed in the same branch, they would have undermined the authority of these “upstarts” recently promoted. The revenue generation responsibility was shif...
Apr 09, 2025•13 min
Time is the enemy of good leadership. It takes time to develop a team of individuals. A common metaphor is the orchestra conductor. Each instrument player has a specific role and it is the job of the leader to meld them together to work harmoniously and effectively. The conductor takes a significant amount of time to get this working correctly. That is their sole purpose. They make the best of the talent in the team, get them working well together and develop the individual talents of those invo...
Apr 02, 2025•12 min
I remember reading once about a President reflecting on the cost controls he had instituted inside his organisation. The industry had emerged from a recession and even though the economy and the company had recovered, he had forgotten to ease the strict controls he had instituted to protect the company. Covid-19 has forced many of us to institute strict controls in order to survive the business disruption caused by the virus. When should we release some of those stringent controls? This is a tri...
Mar 19, 2025•13 min
Giving people orders is fine and fun, when you are the leader. Not so great when you are on the receiving end though. Collaboration and innovation are two seismic shifts in workstyle that are fundamentally different from the way most leaders were educated. Command and control were more the order of business back in the day. Hierarchy was clear, bosses brooked no opposing ideas or opinions and everyone below knew their place. Things have moved on, but have the bosses moved on with it? Basically, ...
Mar 12, 2025•11 min
Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School and INSEAD Business School are all awesome institutions. My previous employer shelled our serious cash to send me there for Executive education courses. Classes of one hundred people from all around the world engaging in debate, idea and experience exchange. One of my Indian classmates even wrote and performed a song at the final team dinner at Stanford, which was amazing and amazingly funny, as it captured many of the experiences of the two week...
Mar 05, 2025•12 min
Tokusan the scholar visited Ryutan the Zen Master to learn about Zen. Tokusan was a very smart fellow and very confident in his knowledge and experience. He was good at impressing others with his capabilities and many people looked to him for guidance and advice. After about ten minutes of conversation, Ryutan invited Tokusan to enjoy some green tea. As the Zen master poured the hot tea into the cup, the tea began to flood over the brim, but Ryutan kept pouring the tea. Tokusan became agitated a...
Feb 26, 2025•14 min
In Part One we looked at two broad categories of leadership competences around being Self-Aware and having Accountability. In this next tranche, we will look at being Others-Focused and at being Strategic. Others-Focused has many sub-points, but today we will investigate five key aspects Inspiring Through role modelling and communication skills, leaders can and should inspire followers. The olde days of the boss having to know more than everyone else has gone. The focus has shifted to developing...
Feb 19, 2025•12 min
The President of a company is a very powerful force. They drive the direction, the strategy and the culture formation inside the enterprise. In Western corporations, there are big salaries and big incentives tied to the leader’s performance, especially around profit achievement and share price gains for shareholders. We project this idea on to Japanese companies and imagine they are basically built in the same way. This idea seems fine, until you ever have to get a decision from a Japanese compa...
Feb 16, 2025•14 min
Leading is super easy. You are given the title, the authority, the budget, the power and then you just tell people what they need to do. How hard can that be? As we know, leading is a snap, but getting others to follow you is the tricky bit. Our awesome power will certainly bludgeon compliance. Sadly, the troops turn off their commitment and engagement switch whenever they come into contact with kryptonite bosses. We get promoted because we personally did a rather good job on our individual task...
Feb 12, 2025•14 min
Japan has some set pieces around leadership. The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen. This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t. They can be observed every day, all day long. What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss. Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, w...
Feb 05, 2025•14 min
Clients sometimes ask us to help their Japanese executives have more “presence”. This is rather a vague concept with a broad range of applications. There is a relevant Japanese concept called zanshin ( 残心 ). A rather difficult term to translate into English, but when you see it, you will recognise it. In Karate we do the predetermined, specified forms called kata (型). When someone is performing one of these kata, there are different points of emphasis and after the physical action is completed, ...
Jan 29, 2025•14 min
In business we live in the world of shallow statements of opinion. Imagine there is a topic for discussion amongst the leadership team. People will let fly with their thoughts and this becomes the basis for decision making, based on people’s statements on the matter. Usually everyone is pretty busy, so the drill is to listen to what was said and then make the choice from amongst the various alternatives and move on. There is a problem with this. We are trapped in Phase One thinking if we continu...
Jan 22, 2025•14 min
Kokorogamae is one of those Japanese concepts which are a bit tricky to translate. Kokoro by itself as a word has a wide variety of meanings – mind, spirit, mentality, idea, thought, heart, feeling, sincerity, intention, will, true meaning, etc. It is a radical in the Japanese kanji ideographic script and so appears in a large number of compound words. Kamae comes from the verb kamaeru meaning take a posture, assume an attitude, be ready for, etc. In Japanese, when the two words are combined, th...
Jan 15, 2025•12 min
Leaders are now leading invisible people. Their staff are no longer in sight or at best are only visible in person a couple of days a week. What are their people doing at home? How are they spending their time, how motivated are they, how engaged? Being in the office brings a certain level of discipline with it. You can see if people are goofing off. In an open office environment, you can hear the phone conversations with clients to gauge what is going on. When people are at home though, there i...
Jan 08, 2025•11 min
Staffing is a subject that gets a lot of attention from those within and without the organisation. Those outside see staff movements as a bellwether of how the company is travelling. High turnover indicates disruption and uncertainty about the future. Rapid high turnover indicates real trouble within the ranks. When executives arrive in Japan, they often discover a lot of deadwood and they get about cleaning them out. They are wholly focused on internal issues. The outside perspective hasn’t bee...
Dec 25, 2024•11 min
