Episode #429: Let's Learn From Prime Minister's Leadership Failures

There is nothing like a good meltdown to throw up valuable lessons for the rest of us. So, a big thank you Suga san, for helping us on our leadership journey. His shock resignation finished off a year of disasters. To be fair, he joins a long line of failed Japanese leaders. Counterintuitively, the Liberal Democratic Party prefers to choose underperformers as their leaders. The backroom boys can more easily control what is really going on and the face to the nation is totally disposable, while the power brokers stay on, hidden in plain sight. Nevertheless, he has made a sterling effort to bring about his own political demise.

Covid didn’t come wrapped in a roadmap out of the pandemic. Every country has had to work it out as they go along and to be flexible to adapt to changing circumstances. Japan is in trouble then immediately. Effective adaption techniques during disasters are yet to be evidenced in Japan. The 1995 Kobe earthquake exposed a lot of leadership deficiencies in Japan. In 2011, with the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown those same deficiencies were still in evidence. In 2020, the pandemic reaches Japan and it is as if nothing has been learnt by Japanese leadership groups about dealing with VUCA events.

Is that a “get out of jail free” card for Suga? Is it a systemic problem that no political leader could ever hope to overcome? That may be the case for Japan, because we are showing consistent form over the last three major disasters hitting the country. Yet Suga is a actor who has some degree of control over his actions and decisions. In business, we seem to face something significant every ten years or so. Given we have to confront the strong possibility that something major is going to happen on our watch, how well prepared are we for that eventuality? How good are our organisations around adaption and flexibility?

Like Suga we all face limitations on our leadership bench strength. He has to deal with fellow politicians and bureaucrats. Some Ministers are enemies hoping he will stumble, so they can replace him. Others are useless age and stage journeymen and it is their turn to become a Minister. We have to deal with the inherited leadership cohort, some of whom thought they should have gotten our leader job. Depending on finances, we can recruit new people into the team and then expend a tremendous amount of energy to weld the whole thing together. Coaching people to be flexible in Japan is a challenge. The risk averse nature of the culture, particularly in companies, makes it very hard to convince people to do new things. There is always a lot of deep rooted resistance. The leader needs to be able to keep pushing, keep herding the cats, keep the whole imperfectly balanced apparatus moving forward.

One big element in all of this is our ability to communicate where we are going, what has to happen, who is going to do what and when we need it by. The second big element in this is coaching our direct reports to become excellent at communicating all of this to their people. Suga was not much good at either, from what we can understand. If his public utterances are any indictor of his persuasion power, then the Suga ship of state was doomed from the outset. We had better differentiate ourselves from Suga in this regard and make sure we are operating at the highest professional level possible as a communicator.

Of course, being a smooth talker but being useless or lazy is no help. I am sure we have worked with these types of people. Having them report to us is a danger, because we can only uncover their facility for talking at the start and it takes us longer to determine if they can actually produce outcomes.

Our coaching role also extends to helping direct reports with their communication skills. One of the mistakes we make is to imagine they must have worked that out by now, by themselves, otherwise they wouldn’t be direct reports in the first place. How optimistic we are at times!! We are busy though. We have delegated the task and we are busy working on our own stuff.

Don’t make hope your strategy. Attend their briefing sessions with their own next line of direct reports and in most cases you had better brace yourself for impact. It is often shocking how bad they actually are, in communicating the key messages in a way that motivates and engages people. Looking back, Suga himself was an obvious dud at both and now he is gone.

External events, internal events, rivals, direct reports, communication all get swept up into the mix. Adaption, flexibility, communication expertise, persuasion power are expensive and require the investment of the most precious resource in any company – leader time. Suga underinvested in these areas during his career and when the big job was his, he was left exposed, left high and dry. Hanmen Kyoshi means the “teacher by negative example” in Japanese. Suga has been superlative in that regard. What are we going to do about absorbing these lessons? Are we working on our persuasion skills? Or like Suga are we going to be too late to the party?