Engaging your team as a leader is a relatively new idea. When I first started work in the early 70s, none of my bosses spent a nanosecond thinking about they could engage their staff as a leader. What they were thinking about was catching mistakes, incompetence, error and willful negligence, before these problems went nuclear. That meant micro managing everyone. “Management by walking around” meant checking up on people. The construct was that the team were problematic and the boss needed to have forensic skills to stop problems escalating. That was the age of the hero boss, who was the best at everything, knew more than everyone else and could do it all. That won’t fly today because technology has made business so much more complex.

Back in 1971 Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon noted, “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention”. This is where we bosses are today, with hand held devices which keep us permanently connected through the flood release valves of the internet. We are time poor, handling trouble aplenty, struggling to keep up with market shifts and spending too much time on Clubhouse. What this translates into is bosses are too busy to engage their staff properly. Unlike the 70s when it wasn’t a “thing”, engagement is known today and expected. We are doing a poor job by design today rather than through brutal ignorance.

There are three useful foundation tools we can apply to spark the process of engaging our staff. Engagement levels are closely calibrated with how well the direction, values and culture of the organisation synchronise with those of the individuals in the team. Here is the tricky bit – how well informed is the busy, busy boss about the team members’ agreement with the firm’s direction, their value set and the culture they want for their workplaces?

This is where the “poverty of attention” kicks in and bosses don’t know much about their team, because they never ask. There is scant time for asking questions when you are busy raining orders down like missiles on the team. We can create connections with our team members by asking factual questions about where they were raised, how many in their family, where they went to university, etc. We may find commonalities of experience or gain insights into what has made this team member the person they are today.

We need to have this information as a base, but we need to go deeper to help us understand the way they think. That means using causative questions. These are enquiries such as, “why did you choose to study geography at university” or “why did you choose to join that company” or “why did you get involved with parachute jumping as a hobby?”. You get the idea. These questions reveal motives for decisions and inform about priorities.

The third tool is asking value-based questions. Our values drive our decisions and carve out our behaviour. For companies this is often where the wheels come off. The rhetoric about what the company stands for and the leadership behaviours don’t line up. There is nothing like tough times to reveal the firm and the boss’s true colours.

These are not immediate questions we would ask, because they can feel intrusive. Imagining you will engage someone by getting to know them better and leading off with a question such as “tell me about a turning point in your life” is not going to have the desired effect. We need to be building the trust over time and once we have gotten to know them reasonably well, we can then ask deeper questions. We can enquire, “thinking back to the way things have gone in your life, would you do things differently?” or “what have been the high points of your accomplishments so far?”, etc.

Things are in constant flux and a conversation held eighteen months ago may have been overtaken by a series of events in the meantime. So we have to have to make chances to keep engaging with our team to keep up to date on where they are in their thinking, what are their current primary values and recent experiences.

Less time on Clubhouse and more chatting with the team will do a lot more for the engagement of your people and will help to drive toward achieving the organisations goals.

We are recognised for our capabilities and potential and promoted into our first leadership role. We have been given charge over our colleagues and now have additional responsibilities. In many cases we don’t move into a pure “off the tools” leadership role. We are more likely to be a player/leader hybrid, because we have our own clients and also produce revenue outcomes. One of the biggest difficulties is knowing how to balance the roles of “doer” and “urger”.

Jealousy, bruised egos, sabotage, mild insurrection can be found amongst our former colleagues as we are now their new boss. There will be some who feel the organisation has made a massive error and they should have been the one promoted. Their enthusiasm for striving for the greater good has become diminished and results begin to suffer. The more Machiavellian may be thinking how they can unseat the new boss, by lowering outcomes enough, so that it damages the new boss’s credibility, without getting themselves fired. They are happy to spend long hours conspiring with others to calculate the nexus of those two points.

The danger here is we double down on our own production because we have more control over that and we actually don’t lead. We are busy with dealing with all the accoutrements of power, exciting stuff like approving leave applications, tracking sick leave, filling out reports and general paperwork which is the bane of a leader’s life.

Leaders have four main jobs. Set the strategy, create the culture, maintain the machine so it runs on time and on budget and we build our people. When we were team members we were given guidance and direction by the boss, now we are the boss. Are we sufficiently knowledgeable and talented enough to take the organisation in the right direction? Are we relying on what we knew before we became the boss? Are we studying, reading, listening to podcasts, watching TED talks and doing everything we can to better educate ourselves for the different demands of this leadership role? If we are busy, busy, busy working on our new leader tasks or servicing our own clients, we may not be devoting the time needed to grow.

The leader needs to have a long term perspective, but our subordinates tend to have a short term view and invariably so do our superiors. They expect results from us and in short order or they start wondering if they made the right choice about who should have stepped up and be the boss.

The boss has to challenge orthodoxy. If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will get the same results. How can we get better results? That is what the boss needs to be working on. We need to persuade others to follow us and to have influence. Often none of those factors were part of the selection process though. We got the job because we were the best salesperson, accountant, engineer, bookkeeper, architect, etc. Actually, many new leaders don’t even like people and much prefer numbers. Many are poor public speakers have big brains and no friends.

Do the new leaders get any training to build on their skill sets and give them the tools to succeed? Often they get nothing. They keep focused on what they can control which are their own clients, don’t build the people and they wind up carrying the team. That works as long as the outcome demands don’t go up. As the ask increases, the gap starts to form between how much one person can do to hit the targets and the total team contribution. Because we haven’t developed our people, they are not filling in the gap between where we are and where we need to be. After three years of this, the new leader gets fired and the cycle begins again with a new person sitting in the boss’s chair. New leaders relying on their companies for their security to remain in their elevated position are pretty optimistic. The tasks of the leader are different to those of the led, so either through personal study or company sponsored training, there must be the investment to grow their capabilities. The mindset element is important, as that is the trigger for changing the required behaviors in order to grow in the new position. So bosses, are you sufficiently investing in your newly promoted leaders. So newly promoted leaders, are you taking responsibility for your own career and investing in yourself. If the answer to either question is “no”, then whether you realise it or not, you have entered the dander zone. Don’t go there.

The chain of command is a well established military leadership given. I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else. In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers. This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback against the Vietnam War, when all authority began to be challenged. Modern leaders are currently enamoured with concepts like the “servant leader”. The leader serves the team as an enabler for staff success. Dominant authority is out and a vague negotiated power equilibrium has replaced it. Delegation, responsibility, accountability, mistake handling and punishment are all swirling around in this fog of the new order.

Japan makes the whole construct even more interesting by having built up a legal perspective on staff issues that favours the worker against the company. Judges, also do not see company staff non-performance of duties as necessarily career ending. Add into the mix the fact that in the last 20 years, the number of people aged between 15 and 34 has halved. The bad news is that it is going to halve again over the next forty years. Young people will be in high demand, regardless of how useless they are. We complain today about millennium entitlement. That will be nothing compared to what is coming. Smaller families means more single child households. The Boomer generation will be spoiling their grandchildren on an industrial scale. Scarce resource spoilt brats will be entering society and business. I can hardly wait.

The Universities here in Japan will be taking anyone with a pulse, because they are going to be bleeding red ink all over the place. Does anyone remember the Tandai system of two year colleges? They have all disappeared or morphed into four year schools to survive. Diabolical entrance exams will linger for the most elite schools in Japan, but for the rest it is a race to the bottom of academic standards to keep the doors open. Passing academic classes at a Japanese University has been a joke. If you turn up to class, the chances are pretty good you will be passed. A rather low bar compared to what is happening at varsity in the rest of the advanced world.

So dealing with undereducated, spoilt, entitled lay abouts are our collective future when hiring staff. Even now, between 30%-35% of staff into their third to fourth year of employ are bailing out and heading for the exists, seeking supposed greener pastures. Covid-19 may have put a temporary dampener on this exodus for the moment, but if that is your staff retention strategy, then the future looks bleak for you.

Business is so complex today. The hero boss who can do every part of the business process has become a distant memory. Even if we could do it, should we? The boss should be concentrating on those activities that only the boss can do and should be pushing everything else down to subordinates. Now that is the theory. The reality is most bosses in Japan are doing too much. They don’t trust the delegation system because they have been burnt before. Actually, that is not quite true – they don’t have a delegation system. A dumping of the work system yes, but an intelligent, best practice delegation system, well no. Probably a good time to revisit how that works for all the bosses out there, because they are going to need it.

If we can’t unleash hell as bosses and we have to gain willing cooperation to get the youth engaged, what do we need to do? Communication skills are going to be at a premium. The whole modern apparatus of leadership rests on persuasion power, rather than raw position power. Do bosses know what these young people want? That would be a good starting point. “What is in it for me” is a tried and true motivator across time and geography. Once upon a time that was focused on what the boss wanted but times have changed. Bosses need to spend time with young people, individually, to understand them better. Yes, they may be spoilt little brats, but these are the cards you are dealt, so learn how to play them.

Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape. We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk. We have two types of people working for us. There are those who receive a salary of some dimension, be they full time or part-time and then there are those who get paid for their services. Some of these services are delivered regularly throughout the year. Others are intermittent, on a needs basis. Regardless, we need to take a good look at these every year to make sure they are still fit for purpose.

As a training company, we have some regular suppliers. Our landlord charges us rent for the space we use and that lease pops up every two years. Regardless of the economy, the office space vacancy rate, the consumer price index or any other intergalactic factors, the numbers always go up at renewal time. It is no good finding ourselves at renewal time and thinking “maybe I should have investigated if there were more appropriately priced alternatives”.

Too late by that time, because it takes quite a while to find the size of space you need, in the location and configuration you require, at a number that makes sense. Better to engage a real estate broker early to start telling you what the alternatives are so that when the time comes you can have some choices available. That data is also a potential bargaining chip in the arm wrestle for the next two years of tenant penal servitude.

Another key player is your accountant. If you outsource your accounting to a firm, they will receive the data from your people and then get into a P&L and Balance Sheet format that you can come to terms with. It also enables someone externally to see what are the patterns of spending and spot any anomalies. Japanese staff are very honest. However, like staff in other countries, they can find themselves in the newspaper for embezzling vast sums from their employers, sustained over breathtaking amounts of time.

If you need an English speaking accountant, we are now fishing in a very small pond. This tends to mean that we lock someone in to do the books and we just keep them forever. We all seek an equilibrium comfort point. We get the service, we are happy with it and we are generally too busy to investigate if we can better it. Once a year, list up some accounting service delivery alternatives and have a conversation about what they offer. Existing suppliers can become robotic in their delivery of their services and they have pruned their services down to the minimum necessary to maximise their return. It might be a good time to see if you can maximise your return instead.

In our case, we need things designed and printed, because we distribute flyers to clients and training manuals to class participants. I am using the same printing company now which I have used for over ten years. I know there are other companies who are slightly cheaper, but I need high quality service, delivered at speed. Being able to get things designed very quickly is something I value highly and will pay more for that service. If that service was diminished then there would be a reason to change. The point here though is, I need to keep track of the size of the disparity between what I pay and what they deliver. I can’t just go to sleep at the wheel and keep using the same folk because I am too busy to know the relative price, quality and scope of the service I am receiving.

Labor lawyers do well here in Japan. The regulations are changing, there is government pressure to not have unpaid overtime and numerous arcane labor rules abound. Our labor lawyer is a pretty good businessman and signed my firm up on a monthly retainer. I took my COO’s advice on this retainer, though I had my doubts. I reviewed that service need and that retainer and guess what? After I cut it, there has been no difference in what we needed as a service. Instead, we are saving that money every month now.

Maybe at one point there was a point. My point though is, don’t let these things just drift along, without making a conscious decision to decide if the service is really what you still need or not. End of the year clean up time is a good time to survey new potential providers and clean up unneeded service expenses too.

I met the owner of a successful business recently. He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction. So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange. It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful. Why was that my expectation? Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are like, so I expected a Japanese equivalent. He was totally different to what I expected.

He had no personal power at all from what I could see. One reason may be that we were speaking in Japanese. It is a subtle, circular language that masks and obfuscates like few others. He had two senior staff members with him, his direct reports and they too were rather underwhelming. It got me thinking about what does it take in Japan to become a successful leader? Here were three of them in front of me and I wouldn’t have crossed the road to meet any of them.

Position rather than personal power counts for lot in Japan. You meet a lot of people here with big titles and pretty much no personal firepower. That is not to say there aren’t charismatic, powerful leaders here. Mr. Nambu who founded the massive Persona organisation is a very charismatic person, who has tons of personal power. He has nearly 20,000 employees spread across his 67 subsidiaries and 11 affiliates. I know him personally and he is very good at dealing with people, both high and low. He started the company while he was still at university, so he is a rare bird in Japan, to take a start-up to serious stardom and himself to billionaire status.

What is the difference between some of the successful Japanese I have met and the nobodies leading many firms. When we teach leadership, we make a point of differentiating it from management. Managers make sure the processes are running on time, cost and at the required quality. Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction and build the people. By this definition most Japanese leaders we meet in business would be classified as “managers”. Japan is a country of detail, long term planning, caution and perseverance. You can go a long way on the back of that line-up and many do.

My new acquaintance is a manager I would say. I am guessing that he fell into the business he is in, rather than it being the product of strategic planning. What a contrast with Jordan Wang. Jordan is the Dale Carnegie franchisee in Sydney and took the business over two years ago from basically nothing growing it very quickly to a substantial size. I was attending his talk to the Franchisee Association on how he runs his business.

His planning frameworks were very sophisticated. Because they started with basically nothing, he said, he had to come up with a road map. He spent some serious time studying the various frameworks out there and then adjusted them to his reality. Over the next two years he shaped and crafted those frameworks into a formidable machine, to help run his business. One of the very experienced and successful American franchisees commented that “I am feeing less smart” after listening to Jordan. I know exactly what he means, because I too was blown away by Jordan regarding his thinking, energy and that word – charisma.

In Japan, trust is a key requirement for retaining staff, gaining clients and remaining successful. This is the same everywhere, but somehow Japan just brings a much great intensity to the word. If you can gain trust with others, you can build a business here. Over time you can build it, if you happen to have chosen a niche or a sector that is growing and profitable. Being high on trust and low on charisma is no impediment to success here in Japan.

So when you meet a Japanese leader and they are a fizzer in the charisma stakes, don’t necessarily write them off. Look at their numbers, particularly staff numbers as an indicator of how much credence you should attach to them. In my experience, few Japanese excel individually, but put them together in a group and they are most formidable. To keep the group together, their leaders need to have been able to build the trust. The other question you need to ask is have they been able to sustain this over decades? If they have, then you may have a business partner in front of you, even if they seem grey, dull and boring.