The Leadership Japan Series

Auteur(s): Dr. Greg Story
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  • Résumé

  • Leading in Japan is distinct and different from other countries. The language, culture and size of the economy make sure of that. We can learn by trial and error or we can draw on real world practical experience and save ourselves a lot of friction, wear and tear. This podcasts offers hundreds of episodes packed with value, insights and perspectives on leading here. The only other podcast on Japan which can match the depth and breadth of this Leadership Japan Series podcast is the Japan's Top Business interviews podcast.
    © 2022 Dale Carnegie Training. All Rights Reserved.
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Développement commercial et entrepreneuriat Gestion et leadership Économie
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Épisodes
  • The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune Running A Virtual Team

    The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune Running A Virtual Team
    Feb 5 2025
    Japan has some set pieces around leadership. The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen. This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t. They can be observed every day, all day long. What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss. Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, what is happening with that report?”. Now many of the team are at home, away from the constant surveillance of the boss. The boss has little idea how they spend their days and our clients tell us many Middle Managers are still struggling to supervise the diaspora. In many cases, the day would start with the chorei, the morning huddle, getting the team together to go through what is on for that day. These meetups can continue even when everyone is at home. During Covid, we moved it online. Everyone had to be on camera at 9.00am, dressed for business, rather than in a T-shirt. If they didn’t come on camera that was a red flag. There may have been some depression issues bubbling away in the background, as the isolation started to get to people. They began to withdraw. One of my team didn’t come on camera for three days in a row, saying there was an issue with the laptop webcam. Was there really an issue? How would I know that was the case, sitting in my study, at my home? I immediately started organising another laptop to be sent out. I need to see everyone’s face every day, to check how they are doing. In the end, it was a technical issue around the privacy settings in Teams. The point though is, I didn’t really know what was going on. I have to be continuously keeping an eye out for the emergence of any stress or depression in my team. At the chorei we would go through good news reports, the vision, mission, values, the Dale Carnegie Principle for that day, who we are visiting virtually or otherwise and who was visiting us, each person’s top three priorities for the day and a motivational quote. The whole thing took about ten minutes. I usually spent another ten minutes talking about things like taking care of your health, standing up regularly because we tend to sit for too long, issues around coordination which have arisen, the latest news in our business, the cash flow situation and recognising good work. We also had Coffee Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day for anyone who wants to just shoot the breeze and catch up with colleagues, they don’t physically meet anymore. It wasn’t that popular so we dropped it. The meeting cadence with direct reports continued online but it was easy for this to fade or drift. People’s new work from home schedules seem to make it harder to connect. Back in February 2020, when we started working from home, it had a temporary feel about it. On reflection, I didn’t immediately embed some processes I should have. These direct report meetings were a discipline I found I had to really enforce, because many of my staff seem to possess ninja level skills at avoiding talking with boss. I usually want stuff from them, I want it yesterday and I am very demanding. Talking with me is probably a pain, so some are quite creative in escaping the supervision. The biggest issue was coordination across the whole business, as we all descended into our little pockets of responsibility and started losing sight of the big picture. I had to spend a lot more time making sure that key information was being shared and that I was also sharing key information, rather than hogging it to myself. This was a time consuming activity, but we dropped the ball a couple of times because it wasn’t done properly. Before I knew it, timelines started to drift, activities dropped out of completion sequence and confusion was not far behind. This was when I discovered just how detail challenged some people in the team actually were. In the office it got covered off somehow. Being subterranean, it wasn’t noticeable. In isolation from each other however, wrong data inputs have a horrendous impact. They spark a lot of effort to clean up the mess created. It draws people away from what they should be doing, dragging them into the morass of re-work. We tried to get around these coordination and communication issues by creating one truth. There was a live document in Teams that everyone could access and all changes were noted there. As a training company, we had training events scheduled LIVE On Line or in the Super Safe Classroom, so we could see which ones were being executed, which were postponed, who was involved, etc. A limited number of people were allowed to feed into this document to enforce accountability and control. Today, with people at home, you may need a similar live document that tells everyone what is going on, ...
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    14 min
  • How To Have Executive Presence

    How To Have Executive Presence
    Jan 29 2025
    Clients sometimes ask us to help their Japanese executives have more “presence”. This is rather a vague concept with a broad range of applications. There is a relevant Japanese concept called zanshin ( 残心 ). A rather difficult term to translate into English, but when you see it, you will recognise it. In Karate we do the predetermined, specified forms called kata (型). When someone is performing one of these kata, there are different points of emphasis and after the physical action is completed, there is a residual energy and intensity of commitment that continues. It is the same in the kumite (組手) or free fighting. After a powerful punch or kick is completed, the karateka keeps driving their energy, intensity and focus into their opponent. In business, we call this intensity “executive presence” but usually without the concomitant violence. When the executive makes a comment, there is an energy that remains after they have stopped speaking and the audience feels that intensity. We also call this having gravitas. Emilio Bortin was the CEO of the Santander Bank, which was a shareholder in the Shinsei Bank, when I was an executive there. He was visiting Japan to check on his investment and we were assembled to give him a presentation on what was happening with the Retail Bank. He was a broad shouldered but not so tall man, but when he entered the meeting room, he was like a Spanish Bull entering the arena, looking for a matador to emasculate. He completely filled that large room with his presence. It was absolutely palpable. He hadn’t even said a word, yet you felt his energy, intensity, determination, passion, strength and confidence. He was radiating zanshin - “presence” big time. “When I am a billionaire like Emilio baby, I will have presence too”, you might be thinking. So, did he get presence when he became a billionaire or did he become a billionaire, because he had presence? We know it was the latter. Right, very good, but how do we aspirant billionaire punters get executive presence? The energy being pumped out is a big factor. Low energy, low intensity people have zero zanshin and so zero presence. Softly spoken people can have presence too I guess, but frankly, you just don’t meet too many of those. There is a vast difference though between being raucous and loud and having presence. Being loud is basically just annoying. To have presence, your vocal strength and your body language must both be engaged at a higher than normal level. In casual conversation we speak at a certain level of intensity, usually fairly mild. When we are in a meeting or presenting, we need to ramp that up by at least 20%. When I am teaching participants in our classes to increase their vocal strength and speak more loudly, they struggle. I say to them “double that energy” and they raise by 1%. They resist because they feel like they are screaming. However, when they see themselves on video, it just seems confident and credible, not loud. This is one element of having presence. Pauses, ma (間), are another critical element. This space between the phrases or sentences, allows the audience to actually distill what you are saying. When you rush the words together, each thought overwhelms the previous thought. Each successive idea canibalises its predecessor and so not much content is consumed in the end. Our messages, in effect, are competing with each other. We speak at a good pace, so that the energy button has been pushed, but we need to break the content down to smaller brackets, which people can more easily digest. We are not rushing, so it shows control and no pressure being felt. This emanates confidence. We hit key words for additional emphasis, rather than allotting equal importance to each word. This focuses the audience attention on what we want them to focus on, rather than trying to ask them to swallow the whole talk, in one gulp. This communicates “I am confident”. This level of control requires us to be very concise. Too many words and the message becomes less clear, drowning in surplus words. We need to trim the fluffy bits right back. Our eye contact is a powerful engagement tool. Spraying the eye contact around the room is fake eye contact and meaningless. We focus 100% of our attention on one person, look them in the eyes for 6 seconds and then repeat the same formula with each person, one by one. They feel they are the only person in the room and we are speaking directly to them. Previous American President Bill Clinton was famous for his ability to engage strangers in crowds, when he was mixing with the masses. He focused his eye contact completely on that person in front of him and engaged them at the highest level. Standing up straight or sitting up straight is super easy, but few can do it. They kick out one hip when standing or sway around all over the place, ...
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    14 min
  • Why We Need Phase Three Thinking

    Why We Need Phase Three Thinking
    Jan 22 2025

    In business we live in the world of shallow statements of opinion. Imagine there is a topic for discussion amongst the leadership team. People will let fly with their thoughts and this becomes the basis for decision making, based on people’s statements on the matter. Usually everyone is pretty busy, so the drill is to listen to what was said and then make the choice from amongst the various alternatives and move on. There is a problem with this. We are trapped in Phase One thinking if we continue in this way. Phase One thinking is that first reaction level of contemplation on what you have just heard. Instantly, you pour out your immediate thoughts on the issue. The problem with this is, although it is quick and saves time, there is pretty light contemplation going on here.

    The famous Greek philosopher Socrates lived from 470-399 BC and was famous for his questioning techniques. He used this method to help others dig deeper into their thinking. We have to take inspiration from him and develop our own questioning techniques. If we do, we will get to a deeper realm of understanding of the issues. This is the platform we need to make the best decisions.

    I notice this issue in our training classes. When we ask someone for their opinion on something, they will give us an immediate Phase One answer. Because Dale Carnegie was a devotee of the Socratic method of asking questions, our teaching methods rely on us digging in a bit deeper. We are trained to never take what someone says at the Phase One Level, but to always push further. This applies to leadership and to sales.

    In both disciplines, the students in the classes are encouraged to go further and question more deeply. In sales, for example, imagine we were talking to a customer. They tell us they need the widget in green. We train our students to ask why they want it in green, as opposed to accepting the green option at face value. This gets us to a Phase Two much deeper answer. That is good information, but it isn’t enough. We need the client to go to Phase Three thinking and we do that through further questions.

    If they said they wanted green, because of XYZ reason, we don’t stop there. In Phase Three we ask, “what would be the impact on your business if your were able to get XYZ?”. We have now elevated the discussion to the achievement of their strategic goals. We have taken them to a much richer source of information to help them clarify what they are doing. In sales, we have started to position ourselves as the customer’s trusted advisor.

    In leadership it is the same thing. Members of the executive team will give their opinions on an aspect of the business. Normally we collect all of these various opinions and then we make a decision based on that discussion. Often, we are influenced by the force of personality behind the opinion. This is only Phase One thinking though. If we ask them to explain why they think that, we have now driven deeper down to Phase Two. Once we hear everyone’s Phase Two level of thinking, we could make a decision at this point. We shouldn’t stop there however, instead we should keep going. Push them to go to Phase Three and tap into their ideas on how XYZ would strategically impact the business.

    This is a tremendously simple process. It does take slightly longer than just tapping Phase One thinking outcomes, but the harvest is so much richer. We have all had the experience of having had a discussion with someone, often an argument and a couple of hours later, we are having a conversation with ourselves. We are telling ourselves genius things such as, “I should have said this” and “I should have said that” etc. This is because in the interval, our thinking has moved way beyond the simple Phase One responses we were applying in the conversation. We have moved to Phase Two and Phase Three thinking, but we have missed the boat.

    Instead of having to wait a couple of hours to get a richer response in meetings, as the leader, we have to get our Socrates mojo working and go for Phase Two and Phase Three responses right there and then. We have to guide our people to start thinking more strategically about the business. You will be surprised by the improved quality of thinking that you trigger. This means the leadership group discussion and the decisions made will also be much better. Let’s all decamp to the Phase Three world and live there from now on.
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    14 min

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