The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

A Wet or Dry Sayonara?   In most Western economies, a colleague’s farewell is no big deal, just a part of the tapestry of business.  If there is some turnover and the recently departed are being replaced, then that is considered the natural order and life moves on.  Darwin explained it all a long time ago.  Managers applying a typical Western business approach to departures in Japan however, may skip the need to communicate with those left behind.  Underestimating the emotional component of colleague separations here is a big mistake.   Most Western enterprises are “Dry” rather than “Wet” ecosystems.  Dry meaning logical, ordered, efficient, unemotional, competitive and oriented around the survival of the fittest.  Wet on the other hand is more emotional, nuanced, interdependent, harmonious, inefficient and more forgiving of human frailties.  After living here for nearly thirty years, carefully observing the differences with my native Australia, I would proffer the unremarkable conclusion that Japan much pref

BE, DO, GET   As professionals how do we grow in our business careers?  Academic studies usually form the platform to which we add: on the job experience; books, articles, blogs and websites; mentors showing us the short cuts; cleverer colleagues providing insights and continuing professional development through training.  One of the issues with the training component is the effectiveness of what is being offered.  The classic brand name University residencies for executives are limited to the chosen few.  What about the majority of our teams – how can we get liftoff across the whole organisation?   In-house training, either delivered internally or externally and attendance at publically offered training, as well as on-line training, are the main provenance of corporate skill building.  On-line training is relatively inexpensive, easily accessible and in most cases rather passive in its approach.  The completion rates for this format are also extremely low, at around 10%, for self-directed learning.   Classro

How To Give Praise That Resonates Cynical, skeptical, doubtful, cautious, suspicious, worried – yep, that is our usual reaction when we hear praise being directed toward us.  You're the boss, you have read about the power of praising staff, however it never quite seems to work the way it should.  You recognize and praise outstanding work by your Japanese staff to the whole work group, but nobody looks very happy about it, especially the praised. Why is this so hard?   Japan throws up a few additional challenges when it comes to praising people.  We all know about Japan’s strong group culture, the preference here for consensus decision-making and the submersion of individual preferences to the bias of the group.  One of the by-products of this groupthink, is that the boss singling out one person publically for praise, creates issues within the group dynamic.    The majority of the group are probably OK with the praise, but there are bound to be those who feel unhappy.  They think they should have been recogni

Mr Nakatani and the Gold Plated Room   The snow was heavy as the bus pulled out of the Yamashiro Hot Spring Hotel. Twenty minutes later we were deposited in front of a large store, designed to entice tourists to spend up big.  Our tour group obediently trotted in toward an area at the back, appointed with fold away chairs arranged schoolroom style. We were all facing an incredible reproduction of warrior leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s famous gold tea ceremony room.  Every single square millimeter of this room was covered in gold sheeting, including the fire alarm!   Mr. Nakatani, a young man in his thirties opened up the presentation.  About five minutes into the detail about how they make the gold sheets, how they apply them to make a whole wall, the time involved to complete one section, I started to notice something unusual about Mr. Nakatani.  He was speaking in Japanese, but he was doing something remarkable.    He sometimes spoke with passion, energy, enthusiasm and then he would switch and speak in more

How To Avoid The New Year Blues   The end of each year is a pain.  We are racing to get things completed in one year, so that they won’t spill over and mess up the next year.  We are usually rushing around before we head off on holidays, to get it all done.  Being so busy we have zero time to reflect on the year that was.  Presumably, we are learning from our mistakes. Normally we are encountering these errors of judgment one at a time and rarely can sit back and observe the lessons learnt with quiet reflection.  The change over of years could be a good time for reflection and study, but the rush to finish, to escape to somewhere else, all combine to reduce that scope.   Did your year finish with a weighty burden of emails, not deleted, delegated or decided upon.  That is a very depressing prospect with which to welcome in the next year.  Is there a minor Amazonian forest of paper riding high in your in-basket and supported by subsidiary piles on your desk, choking your work space.  Is there a bunch of fine d

Salespeople Should Be Principled   In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing and rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major publishing house.  That book became a classic in the pantheon of self-help books – “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.  Surprisingly, many people in sales have never read this work.  Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius etc., were all around substantially prior to 1936 and we still plumb their insights. Dale Carnegie has definitely joined that circle of established thinkers, offering wisdom and valuable ideas.  His aim was to help all of us be better with each other, particularly in a business context.  He did this by laying down some principles, which will make us more successful in dealing with others, especially those people not like us.   Salespeople should definitely be friendly.  Ancient Chinese wisdom noted, “ a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”.   Here are nine principles for helping us all to become friendlier w

How To Destroy Our Reputation In One Minute   It is a big crowd, yet the conversation suddenly dies and a hushed silence now sweeps through the room.  All eyes are fixed forward, as the MC tears at the envelope and announces the award winner.  Polite applause fills the air as the proud selectee stands up, glances around smiling and navigates between the maze of tables and chairs up to the podium.  Receiving the prize, obediently posing for the photographer, our winner turns and begins to move gingerly towards the mike.  Facing everyone, personal and organisational brands now begin to disintegrate.    They have that deer-in-the-headlights glazed look in the eye, as they contemplate a packed room full of searching, quizzical faces.  Their throat suddenly seems Sahara parched, words struggle to get out, both legs feel weak, and the mind is a whiteout.    What does come out of their mouths are pathetic Ums and Ahs.  There are particularly strained and embarrassing silences as they obviously struggle, thinking w

http://japan.dalecarnegie.com Your team’s introverts never fight for the brainstorming blue marker pen.  They leave it to the extroverts to occupy the white board, the ideas, the airwaves and the debate.  Consequently, we wind up with a shallower harvest of ideas for the organisation.  Voluminous and loud doesn’t mean most smart or insightful, but too often the same bolshie few dominate the proceedings. Over time this breeds a dangerous winnowing process entertaining a narrow band of ideas produced by the noisy minority.  How do we unleash the full power of these introvert types, who don’t bark and don’t bite?  This is especially important in Japan where the culture drives modesty, anonymity and a teishisei (低姿勢)or low profile.   “Think and Write” is a great tool to tone down the airwaves competition.  Instead of sponsoring a streetfight shoutfest of ideas, like the old style stock exchange floor brokers bellowing orders to chalkies, we start with stone silence.  On adhesive notes, have everyone write down on

Making Yourself Clear   http://japan.dalecarnegie.com Public speaking throws up many fears and challenges for all of us.  As part of High Impact Presentations, one of our public speaking courses, we have been surveying the various participants for the last four years about the types of things they most want to improve.  The most common request, from both Japanese and English speakers, is to “be clear when presenting”.  What do they mean by clear?  The speakers want their message to get across to the audience, to be easy to follow, to have some impact from their efforts to get up in front of others and speak. This is not easy, mainly because we keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!  There are some errors we make which kill our ability to communicate with the audience.  Here are some critical factors to make sure that situation never occurs. Firstly, we should decide what is the purpose of our talk?  Is it to Entertain people, so they leave feeling warm and fuzzy about us and our organization?  Is it

www.japan.dalecarnegie.com   Distress Less   It is no shock and awe surprise that most of us spend more time working than we do on any other activity.  As the pressure to do more, faster, better with less continues to mount the work day just dominates our lives.  Life is becoming more and more hectic, as we all switch to a 24/7 lifestyle, thanks to Blackberrys, i-Pads, smart phones, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  As a consequence stress levels seem to be constantly rising.  If we don’t want to have major health problems, we must find simple ways to reduce stress at our workplace.   Here are some working habits that we can adopt to minimize worry, fatigue and potential ill health:   1. Clear your desk of all papers except those relating to the immediate problem at hand. The reason we have all that paper around us is we are filing it on our desk.  TRAF it instead.   Toss it away.  Whenever I look in my physical files, I always notice that there is a lot of paper which I never look at and never need.  At th

Why, why, why isn’t common sense common?  We deal with people in our work lives who do dumb things.  They make stupid decisions which fly full in the face of common sense.  It is such a puzzle.  Why don’t they get it, why can’t they see the obvious logical answer?    Reflecting on this phenomenon, we have to draw a clear line between losing our sanity trying to anticipate these crazies and getting on with our work.  That is actually the really scary bit – we can never imagine what they would choose as (for them) a rational course of action, which is actually irrational.  How can we spend our entire day worrying about what someone else might do?  Well we can’t, so rather than go crazy ourselves trying to head off feckless behavior, let’s concentrate on what we can control.   The first decision is, are we the idiot who is the cause of the problem? Whoa!  What if we are one creating havoc and they are just pawns in our game.  That can’t be right can it?  We are smarter than them, we see better and further than

There is a tremendous amount of noise buzzing around in the world of business today.  The noisiest portion is the bit going on between our ears, inside our brains.  We are so busy, so immersed in what we are doing, we are forgetting some of the basics.  The blue screen addiction we have all become hooked on, means there is barely a minute of slow time anymore.  We are texting, reading, surfing, jumping around all over the place. We are running our lives as a meeting conveyor belt, moving from one topic to the next, multi-tasking like demons on speed.  The upshot is that we are no longer really concentrating on what is happening around us, as we totally self absorb.  The skill of communication has become a one dimensional activity, where we are getting out what we want to say, but not really listening to what our counterpart has to say.  We go through the motions of pretending to listen, but we are only involved in partial listening.  Even worse, we are mainly specializing in selective listening. Seeking the

http://japan.dalecarnegie.com Presentation Effectiveness For All   We are such a judgmental lot aren’t we!  We form opinions about people within seconds of seeing them, often even before we hear them speak.  We judge their dress, their body language, their style without knowing anything about them as a person.  We are slow to unwind our first impression as well, so those first seconds of any interaction are vital.    We are all critics too, when it comes to presentations. We want the best, we want to be educated, entertained, wowed in our seats and we are usually disappointed.  We carry that history of disappointment around with us like heavy baggage, to the next presentation.  We shamelessly hold others to a level of accountability, we never wish imposed upon us!   The cold, hard reality is that Presentation Effectiveness can be a make or break skill in the workplace. At some point in your career you will be asked to present information to a group. It doesn't have to be a formal occasion.  It might just mea

Dealing with Your Own Mistakes   We want people to fail!  That’s right, because we all know that we are the product today of all of our accumulated failures.  We have learnt what works and does not work by trying something, failing and then adjusting the way we do things.    American Basketball Coach John Wooden once said, "Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." The obvious point he was trying to convey is that everyone makes mistakes and fails. It is what you do after the mistake or failure that makes all the difference.   This attitude to mistakes is particularly relevant here in Japan.  Errors are viewed very dimly in Japan.  In fact, the fear of making an error is so strong, that people are very cautious about anything new or unfamiliar, as the mistake incidence is likely to be higher.   If you grow up in Japan, you will have had this idea drummed into your head from an early age.  I encountered this when I was working with a visiting Japanese film crew, doing a shoot for a magazine imag

Dale Carnegie Training Japan: http://japan.dalecarnegie.com/mainsite/ It's inevitable - at some point disagreements are going to come up in the workplace. Power struggles, political plays, sectionalism, siloism – the list goes on regarding sources of organizational conflict.  As we all know, disagreements can get heated quickly and it can be difficult to put aside our opinions and biases in order to handle the situation diplomatically.  Powerfully motivated people often have powerful egos and when conflicts arise, teamwork can be compromised. Positive collaboration is a product of the culture created in the organization and needs to be built and rebuilt all the time.  It doesn’t have to be a “winner takes all” and the losers are vanquished in a battle of wills and egos.  There are several tried and true methods to "disagree agreeably” with colleagues and get the issues out on the table, but still preserve the teamwork.  Read on to learn how to navigate a disagreement in an empathetic manner while presenting y

Dale Carnegie Training Japan: http://japan.dalecarnegie.com/mainsite/ In the war for talent, high potential employees are one of any organisation's most valuable resources. They have what it takes to succeed, tackle difficult projects, and eventually function as a leader within your organisation. However, if they are not engaged or properly motivated, they will oftentimes leave in search of more challenging or fulfilling opportunities. Needless to say, the loss of a high potential employee can be devastating and their replacement costly. In Japan, the population of 14-24 year olds has halved in the last 10 years.  So, we have to recognize we are going to have to do a lot better at retaining people.  What we don’t want to see are our highly trained people going across to our competitors.  The dainishinsotsu phenomenon, where new employees out of university are departing 3-4 years into the job, will potentially grow to epidemic proportions, as a bidding war erupts to secure a diminishing supply of young worker

japan.dalecarnegie.com   Credibility Is King in Sales Salespeople are carrying around a lot of baggage with them when they visit clients.  The smooth talking, dodgy sales person trying to con us, is the folkloric villain of the piece.  Reversing that doubt and hesitation is critical to gaining acceptance as a valuable business partner for the client.  This entire problem is magnified when we meet the client for the first time.  Because they don’t know us, their default position is one of caution and doubt.  We have all grown up being rewarded for being risk averse and so we are resistant to change.  The new salesperson represents “change” – asking the client to buy something new or to change suppliers.  We need to break through that mental protective wall erected by the client and establish trust and credibility, so we can properly serve them. Great – but how do we do that?  Try crafting a Credibility Statement.  This is a succinct summary that will grab the attention of the client and help to reduce their r

Dale Carnegie Training Japan: http://japan.dalecarnegie.com/mainsite/ How To Be Likeable and Trustworthy In Sales The first few seconds decides all   It has always been astonishing to me how hopeless some salespeople are in Japan.  Over the last 20 years, I have been through thousands of job interviews with salespeople.  We teach sales for our clients and so as a training company we see the good, the bad and the ugly - a very broad gamut of salespeople.  We also buy services and products ourselves and so are actively on the receiving end of the sales process.  Well actually that is a blatant exaggeration.  There are almost no salespeople operating in japan using a sales process.  But there are millions of them just winging it (badly).    Why?  On The Job Training (OJT) is the main training pedagogical system in Japan for training the new salesperson.  This works well if your boss has a clue and knows about selling.  Sadly, there are few sales leaders like that populating the Japan sales horizon.  So what you

Dale Carnegie Training Japan: http://japan.dalecarnegie.com/ Middle Management Madness Why 70/20/10 Doesn’t Work in Japan Senior leaders must work through people and the key leverage group are Middle Managers.  Doing more, faster, better with less, screams out for delegation.  Putting aside the issue of basic delegation nous on the part of the leaders, the capability of the delegatees to pick up the shield and spear, makes or breaks organisations.  Middle Managers are the corporate glue.  Market and system noise are filtered, sorted, nuanced and passed up to senior leaders.  They must also amplify the key direction and messages to everyone below.  Well, in theory this is the case - what about the practice?  Middle Managers in Japan are tutored by their sempai – their seniors.  The seniors themselves were similarly tutored.  Looking at the postwar period there are distinct periods of managerial mis-development.  The military officers returning from the war came back to a devastated economy and were placed in