Episode #474: Leaders, Not Just Managers Please

Over the last six months we have been getting a steady stream of enquiry for leadership training. Covid induced working from home situations has revealed the gaps in the leadership abilities of people who are managers. The two roles are actually different, but usually companies conflate them, to expect their managers to also be leading. Did they give them any training to make this leap? No. Yet they complain about their leaders are only managers and are not doing a good enough job. There have also been cases where people have been elevated into supervisory roles or leadership roles from the ranks. Not only no training, there has been little or no OJT, the On the Job Training, which has been the core of all corporate training in Japan since the start of the post war period. Onboarding and on the job training have been impacted by Covid because people are working from home.

Managers are focused on processes. There are various interlocking processes within modern work which require one piece of work to do be done on time in order for the related segment of the task to start. Managers are keeping an eye on deadlines, to make sure things are in tandem and working smoothly. There are also costs to be monitored and managers are closely watching the budget expenditure to make sure projects and work do not blow up the budget allocations. Quality of work too is an obvious one for managers to focus on. Rework is expensive in time terms and often in money terms too.

For many managers this is enough to keep them super busy already, without having to add on top additional leadership responsibilities. Japan is a no defect work culture, so managers are keen to be recognised as people who make sure there are no problems and no issues in their section. That means a forensic investigation of the processes under their supervision.

Leadership is really about two additional tasks – developing people and setting the strategy. In most cases the broader strategy will be set by the most senior leaders at the very top of the pyramid, but for each division and section, there is a need to interpret that strategy at the coal face level. This is the leader’s job for those further down the food chain. How can they adapt the broader corporate strategy to the piece of the machinery of the organisation which they control. How to get their people fully onboard with the broader strategy and then the micro strategy piece, whose implementation they control.

Often in organisations, there are framed versions of the Vision, Mission and Values protected behind glass and sitting there becoming dust catchers. Nobody can remember them, let alone live them. That is unless the leader makes them come alive. Ricco de Blanc opened the Ritz Carlton Hotels in Osaka and Tokyo. He passed away a few years ago, quite young, so a great loss. I remember I attended a talk he gave for a Chamber of Commerce in Osaka, about the Ritz Carlton’s twelve Principles of Customer Service. I was so impressed, that a few years later I had him come and give that talk to my colleagues at the Shinsei Retail Bank and convinced my boss to send to me to Washington DC to attend the Ritz’s training center.

When I returned I adapted those ideas to create a similar set of customer service principles for the retail banking business at Shinsei. The secret sauce from Ritz Carlton was that they made these principles the center piece of their culture and everyday, in every location around the world, each shift would start the day by reviewing the same principle of that day. In this way they made the ideas come alive and that is what we do every morning in our organisation. We have what we call the Daily Dale and we go through the Vision, Mission, Values and the principle of that day, from the Dale Carnegie human relations and stress management principles. We make these ideas come alive so that our team can remember them in order to be able to live them.

The other task of the leader is developing people. This means making the time to coach people. Busy managers and leaders are challenged in this regard. Technology has not given us more time, but it has given us more work to get done. One of the casualties is coaching of staff. If we look at the diaries of those in leadership positions and you extract the giving of commands to subordinates, the amount of time spent in real coaching will be captured in nanoseconds. The remote work environment just adds to the complexities such that there is very little actual coaching going on in Japan these days. Well, that is certainly what our clients are complaining to us about at least. Maybe your organisation is different, a veritable paragon of boss coaching of subordinates heaven, but somehow, I doubt it.

Boss communication skills are another challenge. Finding out what motivates subordinates and then communicating with them along those lines is not easy. It takes time to understand what their changing needs are and it requires excellent persuasion skills on the part of the boss to communicate that the organisation’s objectives and their objectives are in alignment. Motivating us others is a misnomer, because we cannot motivate anyone but ourselves. What we need to do though is build a culture and environment, where people are able to motivate themselves to do good work.

The leader has to manage the processes, set the strategy and build the people. If that is only happening in your rival’s shop and not in yours then long term your organisation will lose. The whole war for talent in Japan makes this people part even more important and urgent. Expect to see staff deserting middle managers and only staying with middle level leaders. There is a world of difference as we have seen between the two.