The Leadership Japan Series Podcast Por Dr. Greg Story arte de portada

The Leadership Japan Series

The Leadership Japan Series

De: Dr. Greg Story
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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. Economía Gestión Gestión y Liderazgo
Episodios
  • Zones Of Staff Performance
    Jul 16 2025

    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 dealing with people in different stages of their career and ability build. It is useful to know which solutions are appropriate for particular situations.

    Japan loves the middle of the fence and sitting there is the most comfortable position. In fact, in a mistake, defect free work culture like Japan that makes a lot of sense. Building slack into your world means you never get strained to a point where you might make mistakes. On the other hand, there is a lot of underperformance associated with being in the Comfort Zone, relative to what is possible. In big companies, if promotion through the ranks is determined by age and stage, why would you care? Just sit tight, keep your head down, make no errors and you will rise, like cream, to the upper levels, although never to the very top. That might be good enough for many people.

    The flipside of this equation is you get bored. This particularly seems to occur with engineers. They often need something interesting to work on and if they don’t get it, they could be lured to greener, more interesting pastures. For the rest of us, the Comfort Zone saps our will to do our best work. What we do is enough, but not all we are capable of and the gentle hum of that equilibrium, where we face no stress, is like a lullaby, putting us into a state of stasis.

    At the other end of the scale are those working in smaller companies, where they have to do everything, because there are not enough specialists. Leaders place heavy burdens on them. They have high expectations of people who are underpowered for high levels of performance. This could be a gap in aptitude or insufficient experience and training. The work is overwhelming and they are very stressed. They run into the conundrum of needing to avoid errors, yet plough through the workload. They are stuck in the Frozen Zone. They are erring on the side of caution, because the no mistake culture is causing them to avoid risk and really going for it.

    The Breakthrough Zone is where we want people to live. They are performing at full expectations just within or slightly beyond their capability. They permanently live in stretch goal land. They are able to challenge new tasks, because they know errors are seen as education and mistakes are tolerated in the messy world of innovation.

    What is interesting is that our people could be in all three zones, depending on the tasks at hand. The movement between zones is also a constant, as work changes, colleagues change and the company direction changes. In the West, you get hired for a job, the senior leadership makes some decisions about the firm’s direction and next thing you find yourself out on the street. In Japan, you are expected to make the transition.

    Someone in the Breakthrough Zone can see their performance decline when given a new, challenging task. Like any new task, there is a learning curve and the initial track of that curve is down. After some period of adjustment their performance begins to track back up again and keeps going up.

    As leaders, do we know where our people are across their various tasks? Over time, can we identify the tell tale clues to understand where each person is right now relative to their tasks? Have we got too many people underperforming in the Comfort Zone for some tasks? Have we given so many tasks to others that they are overwhelmed and stuck in the Frozen Zone? How many would we identify as being in the Breakthrough Zone. Can we see mistakes as education? Are we prepared to accept errors during innovation? Can we anticipate temporary performance decline when new tasks are allocated? Are we giving people enough training and support? What is the culture we are creating?

    We need to know these things if we are going to see the best performance from our crew. Yep, we are busy like bees on speed, but we need to be watching carefully how people are doing, task by task. Have you ever done that or thought that way? If I asked you, could you plot your team in a matrix, zone by zone, across their tasks? Perhaps, it is time to do just that and keep doing it.

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    11 m
  • The Listening Leader
    Jul 9 2025
    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 mobile phone has become addictive and we are reaching for it almost every second of the day. We carry it around, we keep it close and we are plugged in 24/7. Leaders are probably the most time poor in society and so interactions with our team members becomes more and more transactional. We want something from them in exchange for salary. We want that report, that update, that meeting and then we rush to the next thing on our To Do list. If we clocked how much time we spend we each day coaching our people, the results would be preposterously bad. Developing our people is one of the key tasks of the leader. How can you develop people if you have little clue as to what is happening in their life? Japan is especially tricky, because staff don’t share much about their private lives with their colleagues or the boss. For example, if someone is getting married, they keep it a secret until it is a done deal, so there is no possibility of the marriage plans falling over and them losing face. This means as the boss, we need to make a bigger effort to engage our staff and understand what are the key things in their lives. We need to see where we can help them advance their careers. But time poor people struggle with this. I know myself, I have never been busier. When things are going well you are busy fulfilling client orders. When things are bad, you are busy trying to get client orders. There is no rest. Everyone working from home has made the whole communication piece more challenging as a leader. My time poor status has been elevated even more negatively by the pandemic and its impact on business. As bosses, we imagine we are listening to our staff, because we are too optimistic about our time allocations and priorities. In fact, we are giving orders, checking on details and coordinating efforts across the team. This is not listening, because the direction tends to be one way. “Aye, aye captain” as a response from our staff is not communication. It is a passive response to our barrage of demands. There are different levels of listening and if we are not careful we can get stuck down the bottom of the hierarchy, at pretend or selective listening. With ideas, thoughts, decisions buzzing around inside our brains, like a lot of bees on speed, we can miss what is going on around us. People are telling us things, but we have not been able to break away from the thoughts occupying our minds. Instead, we make sounds that appear to indicate we are listening, but actually we are in the pretend listening phase. Or we may be filleting the white noise emanating from our staff member and seeking only the most highly relevant bits, ignoring the rest. It as if instead of speed reading, we are speed listening, skimming through the conversation, picking out the plums and discarding the rest. We want to move up the scale to attentive listening and empathetic listening. I used to work with a younger colleague who would continue looking at his computer screen and keep typing, while you were talking to him. After suffering from that bizarre and unnerving experience, I made a commitment. Whenever people want to speak with me, I need to physically prop the keyboard up on my desk, turn my head to face them and look straight into their eyes, giving them my 100% attention. I need to be fully present for what they want to say to me and do no filtering. I need to relax and really listen to what they are saying and also think about what they are not saying. Empathetic listening is extremely difficult, if you don’t make the time to speak with the team members. We need to know what is going on in their life. The only way to do that is to leap off the leader rat treadmill and spend time with them. We need to take a leaf from the slow food movement. We need an equivalent slow leadership movement, if we want to really hear our staff. Slow down with people to understand their perspective, their emotions and their thinking. We are listening with our hearts, eyes and ears to hear their needs. They are not making as many Japanese as they used to, so we will all be locked in a struggle to the death to recruit and retain staff. It is a zero sum game. If you cannot keep the right people and your competitor can, then they can put you out of business. The boss ability to listen at the empathetic level is going to reflect the type of culture and environment, where people feel ...
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    12 m
  • The Awesome Power Of The Leader
    Jul 2 2025
    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 powerful tonic and it can also be a toxic cocktail. Let’s take a look at five power constructs for leaders. Have you worked for any of these bosses? Which amongst these are you? Authority power is the absolute refuge of scoundrels. They have nothing going for them individually, but they have three stripes on their sleeve and we have none, so they can control our lives. They flaunt their position power and try to suppress everyone under them. They often hate their job and take it out on everyone they can bully. There has to be hierarchy in organisations and there has to be compliance with policies. Leaders are there to make sure that happens but some take it way beyond the original intention. Coercive power is nuclear brute force unleashed on anyone who questions the leader’s position, direction, policies, actions or who they decide they don’t want or don’t like. When the status title or the three stripes doesn’t impress subordinates, or when they feel threatened, then the scoundrel morphs into the demon. This is often the leader parachuted into the organisation from outside, who starts looking around for people to disappear. They want to build their own crew of cut throats who will follow and support them. They use all the power of the machine against you and there is very little recourse. The infamous Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) is their favoured bludgeon of choice with which to eject you out of the organisation. Expert Power describes those with capability, knowledge, experience, intellect and expertise. They are very smart and accordingly can command genuine respect. We look up to them as a superior being in their field of speciality. They are completely confident within themselves and so have no need to belittle others or flaunt their big brains. They are magnets for attracting followers and fans. Reward power is the ability to garner followers by buying them off. Transactional relationships abound. “I do this for you, so you need to do this for me”. “If you don’t do what I say, you will miss out”. Flunkies, yes-men, sycophants, toadies and lickspittles flourish. They use the power of awarding promotions to favour nasties like themselves. As patrons they demand total loyalty and so they trail these minions with them ever upward through the hierarchy, in order to bolster their own positions. Role model power is the knight on the white charger. They have charisma, integrity, vision and attract support from followers who wish they could be like them. They have expertise like those with expert power and are respected because they can project their capacity beyond specialist knowledge. They have tremendous EQ, human relations skills and are excellent communicators. As leaders we are sometimes all of these types. We need authority to get things done, especially when our subordinates don’t agree with the policy or decision. Not everyone is engaged with the direction the organisation is going and sometimes we have to coerce them to toe the line, whether they agree with the direction or not. Hopefully we have real expertise in key areas, which justify the trust placed in us by the organization. We need to reward good performance and encourage others to do more and make even bigger efforts. We should be the role model for the team. We are doing our best to grow our bench strength, so we are coaching others and investing in their career trajectories. I am sure we have all seen megalomania gone mad in leaders. Equally, we have also met leaders who are truly impressive. How are you seen by your subordinates? The Johari Window talks about our leadership blindspots. We can’t see our own faults but they are visible to our staff. What can you do to investigate your blindspots? How open are you to painful feedback on your behaviour? What about all of those grossly unfair statements you read in the 360 degree feedback document? What are you going to do about them? As the American philosopher Yogi Berra famously noted, “Leading is easy. It is getting people to follow you which is the hard part”.
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    11 m
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