Episode #446: Rule By Fear Or By Motivation in 2022

For a big chunk of my working life, I have been ruled by fear by my bosses. With the value of hindsight and having run Dale Carnegie Training here in Tokyo now into my twelfth year, I wonder why it was like that or had to be like that. Not every boss was a tyrant, but most were. Today we are talking about psychological safety, diversity and inclusion, the end of power harassment, etc. I didn’t see any of that in my career as an employee. Sadly, I inherited some of these negative leadership traits myself and ran my teams hard. I was ignorant and thought that was how it was done, because that was how I was being managed. I am a slow learner, but I have subsequently learnt that leading through fear gets you compliance, but it doesn’t get you brilliance.

I wonder how many bosses out there in supremo land are still running their teams in this fear first mode? My way or the highway is a dead duck for a recruitment strategy today. Many big Japanese companies have recruitment staff from HR clinging to the “your lucky to get a job here sunshine” philosophy of hiring new staff. Young people today have so many choices. True, the pandemic has obliterated the tourism and hospitality industries, so there has been a major displacement of people working in those sectors. This has temporally brought previously unavailable staff into the workforce, to be picked up by survivor companies. If you’re hiring and retaining strategy is built on this lever, then you are in big trouble, because at some point the pandemic will ease and people will be looking to rebuild their careers.

Big companies take blank sheets of paper out of varsity and then twist, crease and shape them into the origami pattern they like. Young people are not that interested in being shaped in that way. They want to have careers which they can shape and they are not afraid to leave the mothership and strike out on a new path. Once upon a time, it would be unthinkable for people only three or four years into their careers with “Megacorp” to just up and quit and go somewhere smaller and less well known. Their parents and grandparents would have been saying go with size and safety, don’t step out into the unknown, avoid the risky world of mid-career change.

Young people are facing a different world where disruption can threaten any sized company. If “Megacorp’s” strong suite is incremental kaizen style innovation they can be wiped out by a nimble competitor, who just changes the game and the industry overnight. Weeping executives at Nokia spring to mind, gnashing their teeth and pulling their forelocks about they didn’t do anything wrong, as Steve Jobs drove a stake into the heart of their business and completely changed the industry.

In the old currency of driving all forward through fear, I drove my teams to get to world number two for two years in a row and then the next year to world number one in that business. The global scale is much bigger now at Dale Carnegie, but our team here in Tokyo has been continuously in the top 10 for sales results since 2016, getting to number 5 with a bullet in 2019, before the pandemic swept all before it. We finished number 6 last year in 2021. I make the point not to brag (well okay, a little bit of bragging), but to note that none of this was done off a platform of fear.

When I was younger, I didn’t have anything in my toolbox other than fear, because I didn’t know there were other ways of achieving results with my teams. I hadn’t seen any other models that worked and believed that was how you did it.

We know from the world of big money sports, that coaches who delve deep into the individual motivations of their team members and then align the heavens around achieving their goals, do extremely well in the rabid, winner takes all game of professional sports. In the same way, for leaders, if we can fathom the motivations held by our team members and then work toward helping them achieve their individual goals, then the team can win. But are we doing that?

The new year is a great time to re-think our beliefs, biases, habits, proclivities and preferences. If you haven’t read “How To Win Friends and Influence People” or haven’t read it for a while, then this is the time to read it. Probably like me when I first read it, you will find yourself on every page, but not in a good way, as a model leader, but more likely as the villain of the piece, leading through the wrong levers. Reading it changed me and for the better. Sadly, I am still not perfect, but I am a lot better than I used to be and I am striving to be better everyday. I am now on the path to discover how to help my team members self-motivate themselves. Is this harder than barking out orders like a crazed pirate captain? Yes, of course it is, but the lasting rewards make the case compelling. Which way will you swing this year – full tyrant or motivator of individuals?