Episode #222: Leadership Success Formula For Japan

In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks received and others are not. This extends into the world of work where the bell curve is used to decide who are the star players, who are in the middle and who at the bottom are going to be fired.

The modern world of work though demands different things from what we have had in the past. The sheer volume of information available is mind boggling. When I was at University, your world of knowledge was what was on the shelves of the stacks in the University library or other libraries in town. There was a physical card index system to help you find information, although browsing book spines was the fastest method of locating relevant tomes. Today, we have the entire holding of libraries digitized and available for discovery through advanced search tools. We have search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and YouTube to help us find what we need to know.

There are powerful publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram which floodlight information to us, using crowd sourcing of knowledge. We have email connecting us globally 24/7, we have video recordings, live streaming of events, podcasts etc., all drowning us in information. My 16 year old son’s generation will have to learn how to swim in the floodtide of data, how to analyse, synthesise, select only what is relevant, reliable and credible. Voice commands will replace keyboards and AI will speed up the process of access.

Even the single, most powerful, savant cannot withstand this data flood, cannot keep up with the publishing platforms, cannot do it all alone. Teamwork, the distribution of labour based on finite specialties, crowd sourcing of information and ideas becomes a must. Most leaders were not raised in this maelstrom of confusion and over reaching and struggle just to keep up. We were more or less able to have a superior grasp of subjects, better information than our followers, expert authority and greater specialisation to justify us being the boss. Today, we cannot know it all or do it all by ourselves.

In any boss/follower situation, as you climb the ranks you get further and further away from the coalface and have to live the market reality absorbed by osmosis from your people. The flood of information makes that imperative even more pressing. The problem is are you and the other leaders in your organisation, any good at coalescing the team’s total power? Are those at the top able to develop people further to make them highly valuable experts supporting the growth of the enterprise?

In Japan, the middle management echelon has been crushed by technology, too much data and the democratisation of data challenging their position power. Further, the speed of modern business is being propelled forward in asteroid catching slingshot mode, by instant communications and the widespread flattening of layers in organisations. In Japan, the gradual rise through the ranks, where you were coached by your bosses up the corporate rungs, until you got into a leadership position has been collapsed into only a few rungs today. Your erstwhile bosses had the time to develop their people. Today, be you expat or local, you as the boss in Japan, don’t have any time.

You keep adding spinning plates to be kept in motion, as you flit from meeting to meeting, interspersed by deluge email, relentless social media and phone calls on your mobile at any hour of the day. Your “coaching time” has been compressed into barking orders and giving direction to the team. You have no time for doing much brainstorming, because you just have no time. Anyway, the brainstorming method you are using is almost 100% ineffective anyway, so it probably makes no difference. You may as well do a few more emails instead.

Actually, it does make a difference though, compared to what needs to be done. The bosses can’t do it all by themselves anymore. They don’t have all the key data and insights. They are perilously time poor, distracted, stressed and busy, busy, busy. They need to have the support of the team to get all the work done and they need the team to be engaged to care about getting it all done.

People quality is an issue and only going to get worse as demographic decline means anyone with a pulse will be hired. People who just turn up to work in Japan, waiting for their turn to rise up through the ranks, based on when they entered the company, who are scared of their own shadow and can’t take risks are pretty much useless. These people by the way, are the majority of the workforce.

So the boss needs to be able to engage the team. This means being a great communicator, who flags the WHY all the time and makes the smallest task or simplest job seem relevant in the big scheme of things. Leaders have to be able to motivate the team through involving them in decision-making, through getting their ideas out using effective brainstorming methods, through excellent coaching of talent to help them rise.

Delegation is a powerful coaching tool hardly used for that purpose in Japan. It is corrupted by “seagull management” - the “fire orders, dump and flee” technique of the harassed boss in Japan. Because of this, it always underdelivers and underperforms. Excellent time management is a must, if bosses are to have the margin to develop their people. That activity requires good people skills and needs time, it can’t be short circuited or compressed. We have to know what is the motivator for each of our people, so we know how to align the tasks and the work to be a best fit to help them advance in their careers.

The days of the hero boss are dead in Japan. The new boss is sitting atop the amalgam of the talents of the team, orchestrating the teamwork, supporting the innovations, and inspiring greatness through the actual words being spoken into the ear of each single team member. Be honest, tellme, is this what you and the other leaders are doing down at your shop?