The Leadership Japan Series

When business is booming, leadership feels like a stroll in the park. When revenue stalls, cash tightens and the numbers refuse to cooperate, the leader suddenly becomes the organisation's emotional weather forecast. Everyone watches us. What we say, how we say it and even where our eyes wander can change how people respond to a crisis. How should leaders communicate bad news to their teams? Leade...

  Fairness is one of the most basic promises a leader makes to a team. People want a boss they can trust, whose decisions are predictable and whose treatment of colleagues is reliable. Yet maintaining fairness is not as straightforward as it sounds, particularly when corporate politics, resistance to change and personal favourites enter the picture. In Japanese organisations, where concerns may su...

I have talked before about the loneliness of the leader. You feel it most strongly when things are going badly. The entrepreneur, in particular, owns the company and carries the ultimate responsibility. I am reminded of ship captains in the age of sail. They were responsible for getting their passengers and cargo safely to the destination while dealing with terrible weather and even worse pirates....

In Part One, we looked at Dr Emily Anhalt's research with 100 leaders and 100 psychologists. She identified seven factors that help measure how emotionally "fit" we are. We covered the first three: learning our emotional triggers and biases, understanding the emotions of others and finding comfort in discomfort. Now we come to the remaining four. These move us from understanding ourselves toward s...

Dr Emily Anhalt is an American psychologist who developed the concept of a gym for mental health after researching 100 leaders and 100 psychologists who treated leaders. From that work, she identified seven factors for assessing how emotionally "fit" we are. That concept should get every leader's attention. Does anyone seriously believe leadership is going to become easier, slower and less stressf...

We are all exposed to leadership lessons throughout our lives, yet most of the time we don't even realise it. As children, adults were the authority figures and we simply accepted that they were in charge. In sport, perhaps we became team captain or perhaps we didn't, but we weren't analysing what successful leadership actually meant. At university, we may have taken responsibility for a club or a...

Covid changed the relationship between employees, offices and commuting, particularly in cities such as Tokyo. For many people, working from home eliminated hours spent standing in packed trains every day. That time could suddenly be spent sleeping, exercising, enjoying hobbies, being with the family or simply getting more work done. The bigger leadership question is what happens when working from...

  Leadership encompasses many required skills and mindsets, and it is always interesting to dissect the topic from fresh angles. One particularly important issue in Japan is the relationship between  strategy, organisational culture and brand . Japan has hordes of managers, but not so many leaders. Managers here are often brilliant at getting the operational side humming like a finely tuned engine...

A new leader can arrive looking and sounding like the organisation's long-awaited saviour. They are articulate, confident, well presented and comfortable in the media. They say all the right things, reflect the mood of the moment and promise a brighter future. Then a crisis arrives. That is when employees discover whether the leader's values are genuine principles or merely attractive public relat...

Leadership can be lonely, particularly when the organisation is under pressure. Employees expect confidence, clients expect stability and family members naturally worry when they hear that the business is struggling. So, who can the leader talk to? There is no perfect answer. Leaders need trusted advisers, but they also need the ability to process pressure independently, control their messaging an...

Many organisations say they need better leadership, but what they often have is a collection of very busy managers. Managers are expected to control costs, meet deadlines, maintain quality, solve problems and keep increasingly complex processes moving. Then, without providing much leadership training, companies complain that these same people are not developing their staff, communicating the strat...

There are tons of things leaders should be doing. The sheer volume of advice can become a mental blizzard—a complete leadership whiteout. That is why it helps to isolate a few essential leadership practices and remind ourselves why they matter. These are not complicated theories. They are practical leadership disciplines that determine whether teams produce results, understand expectations, cooper...

Leadership is not only about watching the P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, revenue and profit. Those numbers matter enormously, especially when conditions are difficult, but leaders can become so absorbed in survival that they neglect the people who must deliver the recovery. Effective leadership requires the agility to keep several priorities in motion at once: business performance, cooperation, cu...

Leadership principles are rarely complicated. The difficulty is remembering to practise them consistently when targets are missed, markets become unstable, staff disappoint us and the pressure keeps building. In Part One, we examined the first seven guiding principles of leadership. Here are principles eight to sixteen: practical reminders about respect, recognition, accountability, goal-setting,...

We collect leadership ideas from everywhere: books, training courses, articles, mentors, bosses, colleagues and the occasional painful lesson delivered by experience. The problem is that we rarely collect these ideas in one place. They arrive randomly over many years, and we forget more than we retain. We may recognise a useful principle when we hear it, nod wisely and then promptly return to doin...

Leadership success is usually measured through revenue, market share, promotions, productivity and team performance. Those indicators matter, but they do not tell us whether a leader is succeeding in life. A leader can deliver excellent corporate results while gradually damaging their marriage, weakening their relationship with their children, neglecting their health, mishandling their finances an...

Western and Japanese meetings often look similar on the calendar, but they operate on very different assumptions. Both may involve reporting, planning, problem-solving and innovation, yet the real work happens in different places. In many Western companies, the meeting room is where people debate, confront, push, defend and decide. In Japan, the meeting is often only one stage in a broader process...

Becoming a new leader is one of the most dangerous promotions in business. The person who was promoted for hard work, strong KPIs, early starts, late finishes and personal accountability suddenly becomes responsible for other people's performance. That sounds like career progress, but it can become a trap. Many new managers in Japan, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the US receive little or no formal lead...

Business meetings have become one of the great productivity sinkholes of modern organisations. Mention the word "meeting" and people's eyes often roll because they expect too many attendees, too much waffle and too little value. Not all meetings are the same. Some are simple information-sharing sessions that could have been an email, a short video or an audio message. Others are strategic, high-st...

Innovation may look obvious from the leader's chair, but it often looks like extra work from the team's chair. Leaders may say, "We need to keep innovating," but employees hear, "Here comes another initiative on top of everything else we are already doing." In Japan, this resistance can be even stronger because change often feels risky, disruptive and uncomfortable. People have routines. They know...

Most leaders think they are good communicators, but that confidence is often built on a dangerous assumption. They believe communication means telling people what they think, what they want, and what should happen next. Real leadership communication is more demanding. It requires self-awareness, context, listening, empathy, emotional control, cultural intelligence, and the ability to create shared...

Leadership communication is not just about giving instructions, sending emails, or making polished speeches. The real test is whether the message is received, understood, accepted, and acted upon correctly by the team. Many leaders assume that because they have said something, communication has happened. That is a dangerous assumption. In busy workplaces across Japan, Australia, the United States,...

Handling mistakes is one of the hardest leadership tests because everyone is watching. A missed deadline, poor-quality work, lost sale, compliance issue, or public error does not just affect the person involved; it reveals the leader's judgement, emotional control, fairness, and communication skill. Great leaders do not explode, humiliate, or destroy trust when mistakes happen. They investigate, l...

Developing people should be a constant leadership responsibility, not an occasional HR exercise. The real leverage of leadership comes from building the capability of the team so the leader is not trying to personally carry the entire organisation on their back. Managers often work longer hours, solve every problem themselves, and wonder why they are exhausted. Leaders take a different path. They...

Motivating people is not about shouting slogans, pushing harder, or demanding enthusiasm on command. Real leadership motivation comes from building relationships, shaping culture, and creating a work environment where people can motivate themselves. For leaders in Japan, Australia, the United States, Europe, and across Asia-Pacific, this is now a central management challenge. Post-pandemic teams e...