Do You Have To Be A Saint When Leading In Japan?   Leadership can be broken up into two main activities.  One is making sure that the processes of the operation are all delivering what they should, when they should and where they should.  This is relatively straightforward, because usually all the processes are known and the people doing them have done them before and know what to do.  There are clear measurements around quantity, quality, and timeliness, so we can keep track of how we are doing.    The other aspect of leadership is building our people.  This means constantly skilling up to meet the changing demands of business, to make sure they are highly engaged and producing both effectively and efficiently. We need innovation in business to move forward and the people reporting to us are usually great sources of innovative ideas - if we are able to get them to care.   How we make the operation run smoothly is a choice.  We can be a tyrant and brutalise our people, using fear, retribution, punishment and potential banishment to oblivion, as tools to get conformity to our will. This can even be physical.  I saw a snippet on Japanese television recently of a Korean company, K-Technology’s CEO Mr. Yang Jin Ho, beating his male ex-staff member by slapping him across the face, making him kneel on the floor and then belting him on the top of his head. Mr. Yang recorded the beating as a souvenir, which has now gotten out and gone viral on social media.  This is extreme and when you see the video, it seems incredible that this could be happening in this day and age.  Yet there are still versions of this floating around in Leadership Land, where the attacks may be more verbal, rather than physical.   In this type of environment where the fear factor is the main leadership card being played, you can guess that the “building the people” part has gone completely missing from any consideration.  The same for getting innovative ideas from the troops.  Everyone will have their head down, trying to be as small a target as possible and just doing their job and no more.   Now we may not be a tyrant or a demon like Mr. Yang, in the workplace, but we could be clinical, cold, outcome driven, extremely “business like” in the sense of no warmth for and no interest in our people.  We may be highly efficient, fully focused on getting the results and the people are just there to make sure that happens.  We are not there to mollycoddle them.  We are not there to be their friend.  If we want a friend, we will get a dog.    Everyone is an adult and they know what they need to do to make the numbers.  If they want to get ahead, they should take full responsibility for developing themselves and that has nothing to do with the boss.  We pay them, so we expect results type of philosophy. Is this bad?  Do we have to be a saint, to be indulging our people, rather than rigorously holding them accountable?   Yes, we have to be a saint or as close as we can get to it.  There are 1.64 jobs for every candidate looking for a position in Japan and it will only get worse from a boss’s difficulty of hiring perspective. Recruiting people is becoming more expensive in terms of the costs of finding a replacement and the disruption of someone leaving.  There are lots of hidden opportunity costs we must pay, when there is a break in the work production process.  Keeping our people becomes only more important, so the people and communication skills of bosses are paramount in a way they have not been in the past.  Hard skills aren’t enough and are not an excuse anymore for not doing what is needed in the 21stCentury workplace.   We need to take a greater interest in them as people.  This may be hard when you yourself are extremely independent, self-reliant, driven, mentally tough and need no positive feedback or support from anyone. You tend to see the world the way you are, as opposed to how your people are and how they see the world.  This gap can be pretty big.  If you