We are often leadership practitioners, rather than genteel philosophers, pontificating on leadership issues. Yet, we have probably developed a certain style of leadership nevertheless. We just haven’t focused on it as a methodology, because we are too busy doing it. We leave the books and articles to the academics, who study this stuff with intellectual rigour, complete vast research projects and then write about business from atop their ivory towers. Or we leave it to other successful business people to have ghost writers assemble their mad ramblings into a coherent form and get it published. Or we have that rare bird amongst businessmen, someone who can write their own tome on the subject.

If we think about the concept of kaizen, continuous improvement, it would make sense to apply this to ourselves, as leaders in our businesses. We should take a moment and examine just what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it. In this way, we can analyse where there are gaps, inadequacies and fluff. Maybe we received our business education in the University of Life or maybe at varsity, but we cannot rest on what went before, because business keeps changing.

Sometimes you will read a book on leadership and think to yourself, “I could have written that”. It is a bit like comparing your kids daubs at playschool with some modern art and see the results as basically the same. The big difference is you didn’t try and product that piece of art and you didn’t write a book.

The process of getting your random thoughts into a clear and coherent story is the discipline of the writer. We don’t have to publish a book on leadership. If we search “leadership” on Google we get one billion eight hundred and seventy million results. On the US Amazon site it lists over sixty thousand books on leadership, so do we really need another book on the subject? However that same discipline needed to write a book is useful to uncover why we do what we do and why we think what we think.

Start by breaking down what you do as a leader. This will be a bit of a shock, because you will quickly realise that you spend a lot of time managing and doing work, but it is not actually leading. That in itself is a good breakthrough to remind us that we need to work on the highest value items. One of those must be getting results through others and that means more time should be spent on leading the team.

We can take a look at strategy. Is this just some fluff we pump out each year to keep HQ happy and we really haven’t spent any significant time educating ourselves on strategies for growing our company? Have we noticed that a lot of what we do is down in the trenches and we are not spending any time standing on a sunny upland contemplating the bigger world and devising a strategy for the future direction of the business?

We might reflect on our communication. Another shocker. We notice that we are telling people what to do most of the time. We are not engaging them to see what they think, to plumb their experience and garner their ideas. We are shouting out orders like a pirate captain. We also notice that we don’t communicate much about the big issues facing the business. We don’t do many town halls or regular update emails to keep everyone abreast of what is going on. If we attended a meeting of the regional heads for APAC or a get together with the top brass back at HQ, we keep it all to ourselves and forget to share the findings with the team.

How much time do we spend on motivating the team? This is a trick question because we cannot motivate the team. We can only create the culture and environment where they motivate themselves. If you don’t believe me, try shouting “be motivated” ten times to any staff member and watch the results. Leaders get the culture they deserve, so what have you been doing on the culture build front as a leader. Nothing much?

It is a simple exercise to break down the various aspects of leadership in your business and then examine just what you are doing as opposed to what you should be doing. Yes, it is a bit scary, but better to be scared by yourself than a rival or the market. If it goes well, it might be time to reach for the search tool for that ghost writer or getting busy typing yourself.

Shareholders put up their future security in the hope of increasing their returns and adding further to their security. They take risk of losing some or all of their dough. CEO remuneration is often tied to how well they increase value for shareholders by driving the share price up and paying out regular fat dividends. Customers buy the product or service, so without them being enthusiastic, the scale of the revenues will fall and so will the share price and dividends. Without engaged employees, the customer won’t be satisfied with the quality of the solution or the service provision. If you don’t care about the company, then you are unlikely to care about the firm’s customers. These interests are not always aligned, so where does the leader need to assign attention?

There is no business without a customer and the reason you have customers is because your staff make sure you have repeater customers, rather than single transactions. CEO attention however is not always focused on the staff. They can see the staff as a tool for arbitrage in order to get more revenues. The “pay em low and charge em high” type of mantra. The USA has confused the world with its up to 300 times ratio between the CEO remuneration and the lowest paid employee. The fact that many failed leaders of big corporations get hundreds of millions of dollars when they are forced out is also astonishing.

I don’t see that as a sustainable model for Japan. As leaders here we need to be focused on recruiting and retaining the best team members we can afford. Recruiting them will only become more fraught in Japan and retaining them will be ever challenging. The way to attract people is by having very deep pockets and paying tons of dough to the staff. If that isn’t an option, then we need to build a culture where staff will trade money for the environment. Getting paid a lot of money to work in a toxic environment isn’t sustainable and eventually people crack and look for a better environment to work in.

How can we engage our staff so that they don’t want to leave and while they are with us, they want to work hard for the enterprise and want to support each other in that process? Gallup’s 2021 survey in the US found that 36% of staff were engaged, 50% were either indifferent or compliant and 14% were disengaged. Japan is hard to judge with these Western surveys. Japanese staff are conservative in their estimations because they are always thinking in absolute, rather than relative terms. Also, questions such as, ”would you recommend our company as a place to work for your friends or relatives?”, have a lot of cultural issues in Japan, that we don’t have in the West.

This is one of those key “engaged or disengaged” decider questions in these surveys. Japanese staff don’t want to take the responsibility in either direction. They don’t want their friends complaining to them about the company they have now joined. They also don’t want to have the company complaining to them about their friend they have just introduced. Better to give this question a low score. Overall Japanese surveys are always at the bottom globally but is that really an accurate reflection of the workforce?

What do staff want? Here is what we found from our surveys looking at the emotional drivers of engagement. Number One was they want the leaders to have a sincere interest in the employee’s well being. The key word here is “sincere”. This means taking a holistic view of the employee and not seeing them as an arbitrage opportunity or a tool to spoon up more revenues. Another key phrase is “well being”. In this modern age employees are taking responsibility for their kids, but also for their parents, as the latter age. That means they need a supportive work environment that puts health and family health above company health.

Sounds sensible, but is that the case down at your shop? As the leader, is that how you are talking and making decisions? Is this an approach that is sustained right throughout the enterprise from top to bottom? Are all the leaders walking the talk, starting with you? There is much more required beyond mere words and slogans to make these approaches the daily reality. Coaching and communication skills for leaders will rank at the top to encourage staff to believe what the company is saying. How would you rank these two skill sets across your leadership bench? If it isn’t where it needs to be, what are you doing about it? Everything is related to everything else, so it needs a complete solution rather than a fragmented result. How is that coming along?