Episode #588: Transform Your Team Leadership. Secrets For Building Cohesion and Performance In Japan

Teams don’t build themselves. They are delicate, fragile and unstable. They need constant care and attention from the leader. Despite the sexiness, a team of stars is not what we want either. They will always lose to a star team, a united front of uncompromising commitment to each other and to winning. Here are some things to think about when building and maintaining the team.

1. The Role Of the Leader

One of the better metaphors for leaders is the orchestra conductor. They are uniting and harmonising a group of stars to work together. Each person brings their specialist role, talent and commitment. The leader is the one to glue the team together. The leader creates the environment where the team can coalesce around the tone, direction, culture, values, vision and mission.

Central to achieving this cooperation is the leader’s communication and people skills. The trust won’t be created by a bumbling, disorganised, incoherent, selfish, small minded person claiming the glory for themselves and basing their leadership mantle on their received status power.

2. Identifying Strengths

One of the follies of leadership, and I speak from deep experience here, is trying to fix the gaps and weaknesses of the people in the team. We can easily find our time is tied up in resuscitation efforts for people who are struggling or underperforming. We are better to have a mix of people, with a variety of skills, talent and abilities and work across the sum of the whole, rather than trying to put band aids on their weaknesses. By definition, 80% of the team are producing 20% of the results. We need to get more out of the 20% producing 80% of the outputs. This is the true alchemy through informed division of labour.

3. Clarity Around Responsibilities

The worst part of being a leader is thinking people are clear on what they need to do. You have told them right? Then you find they are not doing what you expected or need. Part of this is the fact that a single communication is never sufficient. We cannot just bark out orders and then wander off. We need to manage the people and their work, without micro-managing and pulverising them into submission. We need to keep abreast of progress. If things are not working, then we need to know about it early and intervene to right the ship.

4. Encouraging Collaboration

Teams are usually small affairs, even in big corporations, because people are divided into sections. In this modern high-tech era, that invariably means people are doing a lot and are super busy. This doesn’t lend itself to having excess bandwidth to help others in the team or even more vitally, helping people in other sections.

We also have the danger of the leader trying to unite their tribe by making the other section’s tribes the enemy. This is a disaster. The true enemy are the opposition team in the rival company. We need to make them the bad guys, not our own colleagues. That doesn’t stop ambitious leaders from trying to gain advantage internally, by using their team as a weapon for supremacy, domination and relentless ladder climbing. The leader’s job is to contribute to the entire enterprise effort and make sure the firm wins in the marketplace.

5. Proactive Team Building

The leader has to create the opportunities for the team to get together. These could be Town Halls, brainstorming sessions, team lunches and dinners or any other excuse to get the group together. With work from home so prevalent, the team members don’t see each other every day, as they usually did before Covid.

Team projects are a good tool for getting people from different sections together who normally may not have a chance to work with each other. It introduces diversity into the creative process and creates the human bonds needed to keep everyone together.

I am such a business genius and guru. I hired four new people in January 2020, seconds before the pandemic wrecked the training industry. One of them drew her secure salary happily every month through the devastation and simply up and quit at the end of Covid. Ouch.

She was in her late twenties when she joined the firm and spent the pandemic working for us from her room in her parent’s house in Shinjuku. I realised later that she didn’t have any close friends inside the company and so it was easy for her to depart. Yes we had meetups online, but it wasn’t enough and not the same as being together in-person. This was my first pandemic, so I made a number of leader mistakes during Covid as a result.

This is not a comprehensive list of items on the subject of team building, but there is plenty of food for thought to get to work on. The leader is the driver here. We go for role clarity and keep reviewing what is working and not working. Retaining our talent is the name of the game for the modern leader in population declining Japan and if we make a mess of it, the penalties are potentially fatal.

Team building never goes out of fashion or relevance. The problem is we are never properly trained for this part of the role and we bumble along through trial and error. We all need to do a better job of educating ourselves in this regard. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is today.