The Leadership Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • Leading in Japan is distinct and different from other countries. The language, culture and size of the economy make sure of that. We can learn by trial and error or we can draw on real world practical experience and save ourselves a lot of friction, wear and tear. This podcasts offers hundreds of episodes packed with value, insights and perspectives on leading here. The only other podcast on Japan which can match the depth and breadth of this Leadership Japan Series podcast is the Japan's Top Business interviews podcast.
    © 2022 Dale Carnegie Training. All Rights Reserved.
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Management Economics
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Episodes
  • 222 Customer Service Is Your Brand

    222 Customer Service Is Your Brand
    Oct 3 2024

    You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed. Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients. Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk. A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level. Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise. Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”. At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains. They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality. There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand.

    When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice. When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available. The young lady checking me in, tells me she doesn’t know.

    I ask her for the name of the General Manager. This is where it gets very interesting. Her response - stone motherless silence. Not one word in reply. Nothing! So I asked again. More total silence. I elevated the volume of my request to try and illicit a response. More pure silence. This low level of client service has now morphed across to the ridiculous zone. Finally I get a whispered “Andrew Zou”.

    So what am I thinking now? Wow, this Andrew Zou character is a lousy General Manager, because his staff are so poorly trained. There is no room ready for me and no indication of when it will be ready, so in that great Aussie tradition, I head for the bar and wait.

    Any number of things can go wrong with the delivery of a product or service. We all understand that. The problems arise when our client facing team members are not properly trained in how to deal with these issues. Hotels have guest complaints all the time, so they should be absolute gold medal winning, total geniuses at dealing with them. This would have to be a key area of training in that industry. The poor training is a direct result of poor leadership. If the leaders are working well, then the staff service levels will be working well.

    The Westin brand is global and I have stayed in a number of their properties in Asia. The Taipei property was killing their global brand and that is an expensive thing in the world of cut-throat competition amongst leading Hotels.

    From this experience, I realized that I need to be very vigilant about the service levels in my own company. Are we fully geared up for trouble, should it arise? How do we protect the brand across 220 locations worldwide? Can people get to me easily if there is a problem? Are we doing enough training in client complaint handling? The Westin Taipei leadership did a poor job. We should go back a take a long hard look at our own operations. We may be incorrectly assuming things are working, when they may not be functioning properly. We have to protect the brand at every touch point with the clients. That is the job of the leadership team, starting with the boss.
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    9 mins
  • 579 Leaders Embracing Change In Japan

    579 Leaders Embracing Change In Japan
    Oct 2 2024
    Is change good or bad? When I was promoted or received a big bonus, I liked the change from my previous situation. When the big boss changed at the very top, the person who hired me got fired the negative ramifications ultimately cascaded down the line. Eventually I had to look for another job and I didn’t like that change much. Often organisations go through major internal changes and the middle level leaders are expected to rally the troops behind the change. How do you do that if you don’t agree with the change or don’t like the change yourself? If you buck the system and refuse to follow the changes, then you are automatically identifying yourself as someone who has to leave the organisation and the machine will crush you. Change is such a tricky area for everyone, but it is so common in business. Markets change, clients change, supply chains change, currency rates change – the list is long. You would think that with all of these “normal” changes in business, we would all be excellent in adjusting to change. However, that is not true, is it? The status quo is so attractive to most of us because it is known and safe. We have been doing the same thing for quite a while and we are good at it. We are doing skilled work in the current formation and suddenly we are being asked to change and are being pushed out of our Comfort Zone. Japan, in particular loves continuity and no change, because all the risk has been shaken out of the system and what we are left with is the lowest risk alternative. As leaders we have to make a decision. If we fundamentally disagree with the new approach then we should find another place to work, where we can be happy and in agreement with the direction. The chances of us doing our best work there dramatically improve, compared to if we stay and conduct an underground personal resistance to the changes. Ultimately, we will be outed by an ambitious rival or subordinate and probably fired. If we are not willing to move companies, then we have to be willing to go with the new direction. Here is the issue – a half-hearted compliance isn’t going to work well. Our team members will feel the lack of commitment and enthusiasm to the cause. They in turn, will not rally around us as the leader and charge into the fire together. How can we make this change work within our small cog in the machine? The big bosses set the direction back at headquarters, but they can never get their hands dirty with the daily minutiae at our section level. That application piece is within our control. We may be buffeted by the winds of macro change, but the micro where we deliver the change is within our grasp. We have almost total control over how we do it. What we are feeling about the changes is no doubt being felt by the team members as well. Turning up one Monday morning as some mealy mouthed, apparatchik mouthpiece of the machine isn’t going to go down well. Cynicism is already rampart in modern society and this will push some people over the edge, as we try to order them about what they need to do. All we can expect is resistance if we take this road. How can we approach this to get everyone behind us and the changes? Rather than being definitive about how to make the needed changes, we need to have the “change” discussion with the team. In Stage One we need people to be able to air their concerns and fears and be taken seriously. Stage Two is where we move on to how we as a team can implement the change in our world. Getting from Stage One to Stage Two is no easy feat, because many will remain unconvinced and unmoved. They will want to keep going with the old way of doing things. For the “never changers”, we need to have private one-on-one discussions and have them make a decision about stay or go. If it is “stay”, then they need to be part of the team decision-making process and contribute to practical solutions to make this work in a way we can all live with the changes. Just telling them to “suck it up and get back to work” is always a bad idea. It communicates you are not important. We are saying, “I have three stripes on my sleeve and so you have to do what I say, because I am pulling rank on you”. They may in fact stay, but they will join the underground guerrilla movement against the changes. We will wind up fighting each other internally when we need to form a united front against our competitors in the market. We need converts not resisters. So as the leader we need to get the discussion out in the open and get team ownership of the way forward. Maybe we all have to hold our noses against the stench of the changes, but we will hold them together and find a way through.
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    11 mins
  • 578 “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会) Cherish The Moment Leaders

    578 “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会) Cherish The Moment Leaders
    Sep 25 2024
    This Japanese expression “Ichi-Go, Ichi-E” (一期一会), linked to Zen, focuses on transience and can be translated as “one time, one meeting” or “treasure an unrepeatable moment”. It is often closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, which is certainly never a hurried affair and the devil is definitely in the details of how the ceremony is conducted. Contrast that with our modern leader life in business. We are constantly in motion, always time poor and harassed for 24 hours a day by an avalanche of emails. We migrate from one meeting room to another, confronting an endless assortment of meeting details. We have many agendas in our minds when we meet people and our shrinking concentration spans make a lot of what we do a blur, bereft of reflection. This is a poor contextual background for dealing with people. Being so time challenged, we are constantly cutting corners and shaving off minutes to try and get it all done. Being “efficient” with people is a bad idea for leaders, but often once we are on a roll, that efficiency bug takes us over. The Ichi-Go, Ichi-E idea is that we treat each moment of interaction as special rather than just serial. If our team members felt that we were treating them individually as “special”, their engagement levels would be at very high levels, in what is increasingly becoming a tech driven, impersonal world. But often we are galloping too fast on horseback to smell the flowers, as we fly by. If we break each staff interaction down to a single defining unit, we will change the pace we interact with people from busy and tormented, to calm and caring. I remember a terrific example of Ichi-Go, Ichi-E by Ian Mackie, my old boss at Jones Lang Wootten In Brisbane. It was after 6.00pm one evening and I was sitting in his office having a discussion about a deal, when one of the secretaries was walking past on her way home and she popped her head in the door to say something to him. In those days Directors were like Gods compared to humble secretaries in that hierarchy. Yet Ian stopped what he was doing and he gave her his complete and entire attention for that one moment. He was showing his respect for her as a person, and it was a powerful experience for me to see how he handled that encounter. Often, as the boss, we don’t show enough respect because we are rushing, preoccupied with what we need to get done and our people can become cogs in the fly wheels of our business. Like Ian, we need to slow it down to a stop. Focus on the person to the exclusion of everything else, stop our brain for racing ahead and give that person our full attention. It sounds easy to say, but actually doing it is very difficult. We are usually caught up in the moment of what we want and what is important to us. We are perpetually rearranging things to suit what we need, when we need it. I am the first one to raise his hand as guilty of trying to do too much, in too short a time and just constantly cramming stuff into my day, such that my interactions are very “businesslike”. That is not a great idea when we are dealing with people. Ichi-Go, Ichi-E as a concept, reminds me to stop doing that and instead treat every staff interaction like a treasure. Once I switch my mindset to that “treasure” construct, then everything changes, especially around my time allocation. Just mentally slowing down while I am speaking to my team member, allows me to be more considerate, less selfish and self-centered. Instead of being “me focused”, I can switch to being “them focused”. I can ask about things that are important to them, rather than making sure that brief conversation is all about what is important to me at that moment. I have learnt to stand my keyboard up, so I can’t use it, when one of my team comes to me to talk and this helps me to focus my eye contact on them. I was reminded of how important this is when I visited a doctor here recently. The head of the clinic was sitting slumped in front of his screen and typing when I entered his office, he didn’t greet me, didn’t even look up at me and kept his face toward his computer keyboard and screen. Frankly, it was unbelievable, especially in this modern age. It made me feel unimportant and irrelevant. This is how we make our team members feel when we don’t stop what we are doing and don’t focus on that one moment with them. So, from now on, remember Ichi-Go, Ichi-E and practice treasuring every interaction with the team members and build their engagement and commitment one meeting at a time, one person at a time. Do this instead of rushing through life in an often meaningless and unfulfilling scramble. People do make the difference and how we treat them is what stands us apart as the leader and how successful we are in that role.
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    11 mins

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