Over the last six months we have been getting a steady stream of enquiry for leadership training.  Covid induced working from home situations has revealed the gaps in the leadership abilities of people who are managers.  The two roles are actually different, but usually companies conflate them, to expect their managers to also be leading.  Did they give them any training to make this leap?  No. Yet they complain about their leaders are only managers and are not doing a good enough job.  There have also been cases where people have been elevated into supervisory roles or leadership roles from the ranks. Not only no training, there has been little or no OJT, the On the Job Training, which has been the core of all corporate training in Japan since the start of the post war period.  Onboarding and on the job training have been impacted by Covid because people are working from home.   Managers are focused on processes.  There are various interlocking processes within modern work which require one piece of work to do be done on time in order for the related segment of the task to start.  Managers are keeping an eye on deadlines, to make sure things are in tandem and working smoothly.  There are also costs to be monitored and managers are closely watching the budget expenditure to make sure projects and work do not blow up the budget allocations.  Quality of work too is an obvious one for managers to focus on.  Rework is expensive in time terms and often in money terms too.    For many managers this is enough to keep them super busy already, without having to add on top additional leadership responsibilities.  Japan is a no defect work culture, so managers are keen to be recognised as people who make sure there are no problems and no issues in their section.  That means a forensic investigation of the processes under their supervision.   Leadership is really about two additional tasks – developing people and setting the strategy.  In most cases the broader strategy will be set by the most senior leaders at the very top of the pyramid, but for each division and section, there is a need to interpret that strategy at the coal face level.  This is the leader’s job for those further down the food chain. How can they adapt the broader corporate strategy to the piece of the machinery of the organisation which they control.  How to get their people fully onboard with the broader strategy and then the micro strategy piece, whose implementation they control.   Often in organisations, there are framed versions of the Vision, Mission and Values protected behind glass and sitting there becoming dust catchers.  Nobody can remember them, let alone live them.  That is unless the leader makes them come alive.  Ricco de Blanc opened the Ritz Carlton Hotels in Osaka and Tokyo.  He passed away a few years ago, quite young, so a great loss.  I remember I attended a talk he gave for a Chamber of Commerce in Osaka, about the Ritz Carlton’s twelve Principles of Customer Service.  I was so impressed, that a few years later I had him come and give that talk to my colleagues at the Shinsei Retail Bank and convinced my boss to send to me to Washington DC to attend the Ritz’s training center.   When I returned I adapted those ideas to create a similar set of customer service principles for the retail banking business at Shinsei.  The secret sauce from Ritz Carlton was that they made these principles the center piece of their culture and everyday, in every location around the world, each shift would start the day by reviewing the same principle of that day.  In this way they made the ideas come alive and that is what we do every morning in our organisation.  We have what we call the Daily Dale and we go through the Vision, Mission, Values and the principle of that day, from the Dale Carnegie human relations and stress management principles.  We make these ideas come alive so that our team can remember them in order to be able to live them.   The other task of the