Stop Making Yourself Invaluable
It is rather counterintuitive to suggest we leaders become less invaluable isn’t it. When you are climbing over the bodies on the corporate climb to grasp the top positions, you have to show you stand out. You have to show you are “the one”, better than the rest, the most talented candidate for the big job. To get the big job you have to keep repeating this self promotion process at every level, as you climb higher and higher. If it is your own business, you have so much knowledge and passion for the business, you automaticly become the one person holding all the complexity together. This is the Great Man or Woman theory of leadership, a bit like the same phenomenon in understanding history.
The story of kings and queens got a bit of a hiding in the modern histories, as scholars began searching for other factors to explain what has occurred in the past. In leadership terms, the era of the single powerful individual has yielded to a much more complex structure, better reflecting modern business. You just cannot know everything today and be the best at everything anymore, because the required specialist talents are no longer located in one person.
The modern leader has to become the orchestra conductor, rather than the virtuoso violinist. The demands from those being led have also made leadership change a necessity. Staff suffering from cancer and other illnesses need special handling. Aging and often ill parents of staff are a modern phenomenon, because in the past they passed much younger. As we get older ourselves we need to take care of our parents, so this challenges the idea of sacrificing all for the enterprise. Women play a much more prominent role in business than ever before. In modern Western societies the base population is decreasing, the cost of living is increasing and the need to for women to work has changed society’s thinking about how families are to be ordered.
The younger generation entering the workplace have different ideas about what constitutes success and the old model of self sacrifice, sucking up to bosses and seeking the top job at all costs. The leader cannot say they have more skill or knowledge than their staff anymore. When we remove personal narrow band expertise from the mix, we are left with status power. Being the boss gives us authority, but it doesn’t give us followers. We have to earn that follower trust and deference in a way that wasn’t required before.
The ability to have the orchestra play well together, in harmony, happily, each person wanting to do their absolute best is the leadership challenge. How do we get people to that stage? Obviously hard skills are always going to be important but actually are becoming a less important component of the leadership mix. We can employ people with much more specialized hard skills which are more current than our own. We have seen leadership requirements move from a hard skills base to a soft skills base over the last 30 years.
Communication, team building, motivation, recognition, coaching, delegation have supplanted pure technical skills as the formula for getting that orchestra of experts and specialists to play together in a winning way. Part of achieving this state is to let go. To not be the most knowledgeable person in the team, the most technical, the most expert is the key today. We need people with those attributes but we no longer have to be The One. We need to go from being leaders who in the past were forensic fault finders, honing in on weaknesses and mistakes of our staff to becoming good finders. Recognising people’s strengths and coaching them to bolster those abilities is what is needed now. This is extremely hard when you have been brought up under an entirely different value system.
Delegation of your authority and expertise to someone else, knowing full well you could do it better, is another hard nut to crack for the modern leader. The staff member will have certain skills but the objective of the delegation is to lift them up to attain higher level, more impact skills. In the old model, smart subordinates were a danger, because the big bosses might ship you out and move them into your job. So you had to hide stuff to keep control.
The opposite is the case today, because the machine needs more and better leaders and will promote bosses who are machine like at pumping out excellent new leaders. To help prepare these new leaders for the next level we need to give them more responsibility earlier. This means delegating higher level tasks and managing the transition, so that the project doesn’t blow up in our face, but also doesn’t have us micro managing the subordinates into submission.
So what are we seeing in Japan? Bosses are not delegating, coaching, or encouraging. They are maintaining their position through personal expertise, controlling and fault finding. Promotion is still based around age and when they entered the company, so do nothing is a perfect formula for not making mistakes. Success comes from keeping your head down and slowly moving up the rungs of the machine.
The revolution hasn’t quite made it to Japan just yet, but it will arrive. The shortage of younger workers will force the changes though. They are not signing on for what their parent’s generation went for. Trying to force them to bend to the boss’s will, simply because the boss has the position power, will fail. They will vote with their feet and go elsewhere in search of greener pastures.
They will find them too, because the labor shortages will show early adopter companies how to become more successful by becoming an attractive place to work. In typical fashion, once this path is proven, everyone will pile on in and copy the formula. Women are going to be needed in the workforce and they need more flexibility from the system, to raise kids while working and take care of aging parents. This will force companies run almost exclusively by men to change their thinking, rules and systems to survive. It will also force leaders to change. Choose: change or die.
Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com
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About The Author
Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan
In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.
A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.
Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.
