Sep 3, 2014
Episode 63: THE Leadership Japan Series - How to be a Leader Who Can Super Motivate Staff
Today we are going to listen to a presentation given to McGill University MBA class here in Tokyo on how to be a leader who can super motivate staff.
Staff Intro: Greg is a big supporter of this program. He’s been coming here to talk since about 2007, years and years ago. He actually gave the graduation speech in 2009. We really appreciate Greg coming back to speak with us. Today’s format is similar to before. We’ll have a presentation by Greg and then questions and answers, and then we’ll spend a little bit of time to give you a chance to network and exchange meishi if you like.
Greg: What I am going to talk about today is leadership and how to motivate people. One of the issues in successful business is it is very hard to be successful if you can’t take the people with you, unless you want to be doing everything yourself. Leading people is not such a straightforward thing. What are some of the issues that you have found so far in your businesses with people? What is difficult about people? Give me some feedback.
Participant: The people. (Laughter)
Greg: What’s another difficulty you found dealing with people?
Participant: Understanding their motivations.
Greg: Understanding their motivations, yes. What else?
Participant: Big egos.
Greg: Big egos. Trying to understand how to deal with people who are highly driven but are hard to handle. Yes.
Participant: People who compare themselves to other people and what other people are getting.
Greg: Yes, worried about their package, or their bonus or their conditions at work and whinging about it to you probably. What else do we have? What else do you see?
Participant: Emotions.
Greg: Emotions, yes. People are not inanimate objects. They are driven by emotion. We justify with logic, but actually it is a lot of emotional things going on for us. In the time we have left today, I am going to give you as much as I can to help you in becoming much more successful with people. At the end I’ll try to give you an opportunity to find where to get more help if you want it. Also, please remind me at the end too if you would like to get the video of this and my slides. I am more than happy to share them. At the end give your meishi to me and I will send it to you.
We start with Dale Carnegie, 24 years old. About the same age as some of the people in this room maybe. A young man starts a company. He starts a brand new business. A business in the self-help industry, which didn’t exist when he started his business. He created an industry. And maybe, like you, he’s facing many fears. How am I going to run this business? Where am I going with this? He was an overnight success. It just took 24 years to get there. Over those 24 years as he is conducting his classes, helping people get better with other people, it was like a living laboratory for him. He’s getting ideas and he’s getting examples and he’s getting problems and he’s making note of these. He’s working out solutions and he’s recording these solutions. He’s polishing and he’s polishing and he’s polishing. Finally in 1936 he gets Simon and Shuster, a massive book brand in the publishing world, to publish an unknown, unheard of author who runs a training company. In today’s parlance we’d say, “success, went viral with this book”. It didn’t only go viral, it went viral globally. Here’s a guy who went from being a well-known person in the training business to being a global guru. In Japan his books in translation have sold more than 9 million copies. You are in a living laboratory right now. Wherever you are working and whatever you are doing, you see stuff going well and stuff going not so well. Grab it. This could be your book. This could be your viral hit. And it may not be on Simon and Shuster, it may be on Kindle, it may be an eBook, but you have got the living laboratory right where you are to take a leaf out of a book like someone like Dale Carnegie, and become a global superstar.
Validation of what you are doing is very critical. How would you like to be able to say 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use my solution? That’s not bad, is it? Validation. That’s what he achieved. How would you like to have a testimonial from the most successful business man in world history? Warren Buffet is by far the most successful business person in world history, and he is a massive fan of Dale Carnegie. This is a screenshot of a CBC broadcast of an interview with him in his office in Omaha, Nebraska. He is pointing there to his Dale Carnegie certificate that he got in his early 20’s. He is a guy who had such a high intellect and such brilliant ideas, yet couldn’t get anybody to go with him, give him money to invest on their behalf. Don’t you wish you had given him some money back then? Imagine how much it would be worth now. But he wasn’t getting anywhere. One of his friends said, “Warren, do the Dale Carnegie course”. So he did the course, changed his life. How do we know it changed his life? Because we have a testimonial video with him on this program saying, “it changed my life”.
In your business or where you are now, where are the validations? Where are the testimonials? Where are the opinion leaders that you can draw on to make what you are doing more convincing, more credible to your business audience?
In Japan we have a good example. Previous chairman, now emeritus chairman of Google, Murakami-san, who again as young man, went to the Dale Carnegie course, became a convert, used the principles, went to the very top. He writes and speaks and he is a great advocate for what Dale Carnegie brought to his business career. We see this replicated time after time. 125th street in Harlem, New York at the YMCA, 1 man, 1 class, 1 product, to today, 91 countries around the world with offices. We cover more than 91 countries but we have 91 countries with offices around the world, and are teaching in more than 30 languages. If you think about it, if you’re like a Mikitani for example, he was one guy in Japan. I was just at his headquarters in Shinagawa yesterday, it’s like two huge towers, thousands of people. It’s phenomenal. These are the sorts of examples that we can encourage ourselves with, that we can actually also have that capacity.
Here’s the bad news. Sorry to bring up some bad news. Business is all messed up. It’s totally gone around the wrong way. We are all told hard skills, technical skills, expertise, and knowledge, all of these things are critical for your success. Well that’s baloney. That’s absolutely not enough. You can have hard core technical skills, that’s great. Then what happens? You do a good job. And then what happens? They promote you. This is where the trouble starts. As a technical person, as an expert in your area, you are fantastic in your world that you control for yourself. They recognize your potential and they promote you, but they don’t train you properly, they don’t transition you properly into a more difficulty level role. Suddenly you are dealing with all of these emotional people. People who’ve got big egos, people who are bitching about everything. (Laughter) You’re in charge. Suddenly you find that all the things that were brilliant for you doesn’t translate to other people and they are not on the same page as you. But you’ve got to lead them. So very quickly you find there’s a limit to what you can do with your technical skills. It requires another skill set. I am not going to make a guess, but I am very doubtful that there are many MBA courses which have people skills as a subject. They probably have organizational behavior or leadership and these sorts of things, but the practical on the ground people skills is what makes the job of a person who is promoted on their capability to a leader, successful. Now we might think, “There’s no problem, technology is going to be the answer. I’ll be saved. I’m a crap people leader but I’ll be ok because I have got technology backing me up. I’ll be great.” Well good luck with that one. We haven’t quite worked out yet how to automate leadership. (Laughter) They have been working on it, but they haven’t got there yet. In the meantime it’s you. If you think there is a 24-hour, 7 day a week environment, technologic advancement is going to make the difference for you, try it. It won’t work for you. You need people skills. You need to have that one-on-one.
Now, think global, learning leash, you’re told all these sorts of things. The trouble is if you’re rude in three languages, you’re still a dork, and the people who are working for you think you’re a dork. If you’re transferred overseas, the people there think you’re a dork too. Just because you speak the language doesn’t help; you speak your own language it doesn’t help. So all this thing about globalization – “we’re going to promote English in Japan, we’re going to be brilliant, Japan’s going to have a global empire, it’s all going to be good” - it’s not going to work unless the people themselves have that capability to work with other people.
People have got so many universal traits that when you go to another country, yes there are those cultural aspects, but this is very key, people often miss this point - we all have personality styles. The personality styles are often much more important than the cultural traits that are nationality and upbringing. If you’re a very micro-detailed person, and I’m am big picture person, we’re are going to have a terrifically hard job to have a conversation. If I’m a hard driving New Yorker and I’m standing right in front of your face and I talk aggressively and I’m direct and you are Japanese, well that’s going to go pretty badly. You are looking for something more consensual, not so aggressive, and I am wondering how people feel. Those sorts of things in business are overriding the culture. The fact that I might be German or Australian is irrelevant. These things override that. We’ve got to go beyond these sort of simple ideas to go a bit deeper.
We talk about people skills. What are these people skills? It’s the ability to understand people, get them with you on a journey. Leading people is basically pretty easy. It’s getting them to follow you that’s the tricky part. That’s where the people skills come in. So communication, empathy, getting people around a clear vision of where we are going, making sure the values of the organization are common. Making sure that people understand the why in your communication. Often we give the what and the how but we forget the why part. All of these things with people skills make a difference. Where do you think some of the challenges are for yourself around people skills? What do you think are some people skill challenges that you have?
Participant: Sometimes, I know I cannot control a 100% my emotions.
Greg: As a leader, that’s right. If you’ve had a very bad day, you might be a little grumpy and then you know what, every single person in this room is an absolute expert boss watcher. (Laughter) Every single one of you. The boss walks in the door, bingo, you’ve got him or her. They’re in a good mood today. “Can I present that project or idea?” Oh, they’re not in a good mood today - I’ll leave it until tomorrow. They look really busy - I shouldn’t interrupt them. We are all trying to read every tiny nuance of our boss. And guess what? When you become the boss that’s what happens to you. When you walk in the door and you look like a little dark cloud of rain pouring over your head, everyone’s going to avoid you like the plague and the communication, the whole thing is going to go down. As the boss, one of the people skills is to always be bright and upbeat because you are the mood maker. You are the mood maker for the entire organization and people are watching you so minutely. That’s one very good issue. What’s another issue about people skills?
Participant: Being assertive and not giving into external pressure.
Greg: External pressure from where?
Participant: From maybe the people around you. For example, if you are someone who tries to make people happy, it’s really easy to give in on what you believe is the right thing to do but is maybe getting resistance from those around you. So asserting yourself…
Greg: How do we be assertive without upsetting everybody? We have a course actually called, “How to Disagree, Agreeably”, for that very reason. How will we have a difference of opinion but not destroy the relationship? How can you have a different idea on things with somebody else and be persuasive enough to get them to say to you, “actually I didn’t think that but listening to you I see the logic of that. I am going to change my mind”. Or at the minimum, “I am going to disagree agreeably with you in a way that our relationship is not broken”. This is one of the critical things that we need to learn and the thing is we don’t get taught this in school or university. It’s a practical skill and we need to do better.
Who would like to be better in people skills? That can’t be right, only three people? I need to get my glasses. Ok, yes, many people. Of course we do. It’s a critical thing. The trick is though, how? How can we get people to come with us? How can we get people to sign on? How can we get people motivated to go with us? Well, we could pay them a lot more money. Who’d like to get more money? Why don’t we just pay everybody a truckload of money? They’re bound to be happier, they are bound to need more money. Is that reasonable? Well it is reasonable except if it’s your company. It is reasonable except if you’ve got a budget. It is reasonable except if you’ve had the budget cut, which is normally how it works, right? So if we can’t throw money at them, then what are some levers that we can pull? I own this business. One of the constant things you are struggling with in small business is your fixed cost relative to your variable cost. That maps out your cash flow, and cash flow affects the capacity for your business to grow. So paying a truckload of cash to people for someone like me in small business is not an option. I have to have other levers I can pull because that is certainly nothing I can go to. I don’t know that very many people are 100% motivated by money anyway. You are going to find a very small percentage of transactional people, often in trading industries, who are totally motivated by money and don’t care about anything else. In those businesses that probably works, but that is a very tiny microscopic amount of people. Most people want more than money. They want recognition. They want status - that ego thing. They want to feel that they are doing something worthwhile. They are working like crazy. Is this really worthwhile? Am I valued? Am I valued around my work environment for my professional effort? That’s very critical, it’s not always about money. Money is very important, but it’s not the only thing. You can’t afford to pay them a truckload of money anyway most of the time. How do you get people like this to be engaged? That’s what we are going to look at today.
One of the problems is engagement is a critical factor for innovation. If people don’t care, why would they innovate? If people haven’t signed on, what do they care if the process improves? If we are doing the same things in the same way, we will get the same result. If you wanted to have a better result, and I am absolutely certain that all of your bosses, and those of you running your own organization, you’ll all want year-to-year, an improved result. That represents a change. Same thing; same result - no. You want something different for a better result. The problem is all of us are pretty resistant to change. You’ll find that your team are pretty resistant to change too, because they are in their comfort zone. A change represents risk. Is Japan a country where people are prone to take risks? No. And you’re the leader. You are going to take people who are risk resistant, risk obverse, with you on a journey into something new and untried before. That’s not so easy. In some ways managing leading in Japan is quite a challenge for that reason. You’re probably like me - I catch the same train to work every day. I stand in front of the same carriage door because at the other end the escalator is right there. I take exactly the same route to work. I eat at the same 20 restaurants. I have a small group of friends I’m comfortable with. We are all like that. We’ve eliminated what’s dangerous, what’s costly, what’s time inefficient. We are effective around that. The problem is we are asking for you to do something new. So how do we get people to take a risk and take on the opportunity of something they haven’t got today that’s better? It’s not so easy.
This is another piece of bad news. The training in most companies doesn’t provide that. It just doesn’t work. So you think, “I’m the leader and I’ve got the HR department there, or the training department there or the whiz bang sent from training, they’ll take care of that for me”. Well good luck with that one. What you’ll find is that most training does not do much more beyond information transmission. But you are not interested in training as a mission, you are after transformation. You want people out of that comfort zone. Take on something new and going on to the future of something better and brighter. That’s not information download, that’s transformation. Now training for the most part challenges. If you’re the boss and they say they’ve got training for your people, really look at it and ask yourself, the way that this curriculum is structured and the way this training is delivered, is it going to be a comfort zone expansion, or is it going to be a bunch of people sitting around, bored out of their minds, writing down, particularly in Japan, Sensei who just talks and talks and talks and talks until you’re dead. (Laughter) Maybe that’s not the model for transformation. Maybe that’s not the model for expanding comfort zones.
As a leader, look very carefully at what is happening in the training environment. I meet senior leaders, a lot of them all day long because that’s my job, prospecting, meeting the leaders. I meet two types of leaders. I have the leader type who doesn’t care about the training, they only care about themselves. You know, how’s my bonus going? How am I looking with operation on my company? I’m not worried about anybody else so I don’t care about their training. That’s one type of boss. The other type of boss is they’re very innocent. Oh yeah, I want to know about the training, I want to make sure my people develop. I want to see my people grow. I know as they grow they’ve got to push me up the ladder to give me something bigger to run. They are looking for leaders who can help people grow.
Dale Carnegie found a secret source in that long maturation period of developing his business and his training methodology. He found how to get both information across to people and also transformation where he could span that comfort zone at the same time. I asked headquarters, the Dale Carnegie University in the States. I said, “Give me five years, all trainers, all training from the simplest module, two hours, to the most complicated product that we offer. What’s the average satisfaction rate?” This is what came back. When we look at this, think about your own environment. How can you make sure that the development of your people has got that improvement capacity around your comfort zone? If you don’t expand their comfort zone, the information will go straight in here and go straight out there. Who would like to have an opportunity to see your people grow?
If you have a good coach are you going to have bad people? Probably not. If the coach is very good, the coach is going to develop the people and you are going to get it improvement. You are going to get progress. The problem is, how do we get people to become good coaches? How do you as a leader become a good coach? What can you do to become better in your people skills, communication skills, and motivational skills with people to help them go forward? In their growth is your success. In their capacity to do more is your capacity to step up. Every organization, particularly in this country in the last five years was screaming out for leadership. They are screaming out for leadership for people who can take groups of people and make them more productive. They are looking for leverage, they are looking for that ability to drive things up. So trust me if you’ve got that capacity to help people grow, they will produce more and you will have a much bigger job, or a much bigger business or a much more successful organization. They are all linked. You might think, “My organization has got management systems, they’ve got an HR department. It’s all in place - I’m just painting my numbers. I go and do the performance review and then we work out the bonuses. It’s all going to be great. Well, good luck with that one. Most management systems are archaic. Basically it’s a very old model and most HR departments, particularly in Japan, are way behind. The concept in Japan HR is being a partner to the business, not be someone who is not ticking boxes, “We completed that. That’s done”, but actually growing the business, growing the people, is very remote in the HR industry in this country, today. So if you’re a leader and you’re relying on them, good luck. Maybe some information exchange, but there will be no transformation. People will not grow. The boxes will all be ticked. People will go to the training. They’ll come back and they’ll just be doing exactly what they’ve always been doing and that’s got to be very frustrating for you.
Now talk about engagement. This is Charlie Ergen, chairman of DISH Networks, the meanest company in America. It strikes fear into the employees. I love this bit - staff clock in with a fingerprint scanner so HR knows if you are late. How about we get that down at your shop? Scan everybody’s fingerprint when they come to work and see if they are late or not. He says, “I don’t hold myself up as a great manager”. In that type of environment it’s pretty harsh. What do you think the engagement level is going to be like in that company? Lower, right? Pretty bad. This is a bit closer home. This is Carnival. I read this in a newspaper. This lady in her 60’s wasn’t hitting her sales targets. For punishment they got her to dress up in a bunny outfit. She took them to court and she won. She won in court. The cost to Carnival wasn’t the big settlement they had to pay her as a result of the judgment. The cost to Carnival has been that type of environment, that type of mentality and what it does to motivation. What it does to engagement. And engagement leads directly to innovation. So if you’re not getting all of these things to line up, you’ve got a huge problem around taking your whole company forward.
This is a polling question we did. We did a survey, globally in 2012-13 looking at what drives engagement in people. They came up with three things. This is actually taken from a course we ran here a number of times in Japan, both with pure Japanese participants and sometimes Japanese and foreign mixed groups, asking these questions. You see the highest ones have come out there: satisfaction with immediate managers, belief in senior leadership and pride in the organization. Actually it completely validated and correlated with the result of the research. We did research all over Japan, 1000 people here as well. We found that these were the three things that actually triggered engagement. Now they are very obvious. Satisfaction with the immediate manager. Like I’ve said before, if the immediate manager is a complete dork and the immediate manager has got very poor people skills, very poor communication skills, is very very technical and very useful but useless as far as motivating people, then the engagement level is going to be low. If they are not communicating properly, the people are not going to have faith in where the senior management is taking the organization, and this becomes an issue. People don’t sign on for the journey if they don’t know why the journey is important. This often happens in organizations. The suite at the top of the building, the penthouse sort of the executive suite, the top floor with the gorgeous looking receptionist in the short skirts and the beautiful flower arrangement and the quiet - you can hear a pin drop. There’s plenty of executive suites like that in Japan and you’ve probably seen them - I’ve seen plenty. People at that level are all thinking our vision, our mission, our values are understood by everybody in the organization. And we are like a huge ship sailing together in the same direction and we’re all onboard and we’re all good. The reality though is that the belief in senior leadership is weak. Why is it weak? Maybe because of people like you. I look around here and a lot of you are probably middle managers. You are in some level of leadership position in your company. You are absorbing like rain all this information from above, but you’re like a concrete floor on a building - none of it goes through. You tell people the ‘what’ and you may tell people the ‘how’ but you forget to tell them the ‘why’. Or maybe you’re not even getting the why from the guys above. All you’re getting is ‘what’ and ‘how’ as well. It’s very hard to get people to believe in senior leadership if they don’t know why we are doing this - they’re not signed on. So don’t forget to tell people the why of what you’re doing. The last one there is pride in the organization.
Sometimes in organizations people try to use an ‘us and them’ technique. So it’s ‘us, our workgroup, against them, the rest of the organization'. “Oh those people in logistics my goodness gracious me they’re hopeless. Marketing, oh no, what are they doing down there? Nothing ever works, I never get any leads. Those sales people, they couldn’t sell anything. They are the most useless bunch of people I’ve ever seen in my life.” Everybody is whinging and bitching about everybody else. They are all blaming everybody else. And sometimes the leaders, some leaders, encourage this. We’re good - they’re bad. They are talking about their own organization. The bad should be the competitor. We’re all good, they’re bad. But no, they kill the pride in the organization because they have a very poor understanding of their communication or people skills, how to drive motivation in their organization, how to pull people there. Their role as an amplifier, as a conduit, is a microphone to broadcast what the top leadership is thinking and why they are thinking that. Don’t miss that opportunity in your current role to make that happen.
So this is a great quote from a Canadian. I got a Canadian quote here particularly because it’s McGill. I don’t know this guy. Do you know this guy? BanneckNezascrem? I don’t know about him, but he must be famous in Canada I presume. I’ll read this just quickly, “Fear doesn’t work - it shuts down the emotional level.” That is a very key piece. “Power of persuasion, be sincere, honest, prepared. Your power is psychological.” This is critical stuff. Now this is great insight from a conductor of an orchestra. When we did our research on what drives motivation and engagement, we found that a key trigger was an emotional reaction - “I feel valued. I feel valued by my team and my boss.” That simple emotional trigger was a starting point for people to feel more inspired about what they were doing, a bit more enthusiastic. Put a bit more effort into it. Empowered, feeling trusted that they can take a risk, they can try something new. They can take a suggestion, they can lead a project. Also related to their confidence, which comes back to that sense of empowerment so don’t miss that.
If you’re a cold, hard, technical skill person thinking technical skills is everything you are going to miss the fact that your people, that’s not enough. They may respect you as a technical expert or they still may think you’re a dork and they don’t want to work hard for you and they can’t wait until you get fired so they can get somebody else who is better. That’s what they are thinking. A trigger to engagement is that starting point of being valued. How do we feel valued? I’m going to go through a couple of the Dale Carnegie principles that he came up with on how to build people skills and build better relationships with each other. All of these things are very simple to understand. They are common sense but they are not common practice, which is the problem - to get even praise and honest appreciation.
Hands up. Last week who had a conversation with their boss where their boss began that conversation with praise to you and honest appreciation for your efforts? Please put your hand up. (Laughter) Two people. Started the conversation, not you. This is the point - in a time poor, busy life, we’re all truncating and shortening everything. We’ve got technology with us 24-hours a day now, so it’s go go go - there’s never a break. So often because we are time poor we forget the human part. It might be something like, “Phil where’s that report?” That’s how it starts, as opposed to, “Phil, thank you very much for your contribution in the meeting on Wednesday. I thought that was great. You brought up a point that we hadn’t considered. By the way, (laughter) how’s that report coming along?” Which conversation would you rather have? The first one or the second one? We’d all rather have the second one but we forget that to have the second one because we’re time poor. “Where’s your report? What happened to that project? Where are we in the budget? Where are the sales? Why are these numbers so low?” That’s what happens. We get this truncated conversation which forgets this bit. Think about your conversations with your colleagues and with your subordinates if you’ve got a team. Try and start from a different approach. That’s principle number 22.
Here’s another one. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing others. Often the people who are working for us are younger or less experienced then we are. That’s generally why we are the boss. We’ve done more, seen more, been there, different things. We forget that we were their age at their stage in their careers. We presume they should know what we know at our stage, when their stage is here. So we get straight into, “you made a mistake. That was wrong. Look, you left this out. This report is rubbish.” You’re straight into it. But think about when you were coming through. How did you learn, all of us, how did we learn? What did we do to learn? We made mistakes, didn’t we? We are all the sum product of every mistake we’ve ever made. Because that’s how we got knowledge, insight and how we learnt. But we suspend that generosity to ourselves when we deal with our peers and our subordinates and we criticize. You might want to say, “you know what, I remember when I was first in this department and I was given the task of writing the report, I struggled. It was really hard and my boss had to really help me a lot to make it ship-shape, make it correct.” Talk about how you weren’t perfect - that is a great emotion. If you’re like, “I’m mister or miss perfect. Be like me and you’ll be good”, that’s a hard act to maintain. If you are shy and you are a human being, you are not perfect. People find that easy to follow. If you’re like that, like that fist, and you cannot penetrate and be one with that fist-this is what you want, together, but you can’t be together like that, it doesn’t work. You’ve got to relax, open up, show some vulnerability. This is a good place to start.
Now this is very very critical - this is principle number 25 in Dale Carnegie’s principles. There are 30 of them, human relations principles. Don’t miss this one. Most of us have grown up in business, being a part of being told what to do. That’s how we learned. On the job training is the default training mechanism in Japan. So you’ve got some mediocre or crap senior sent by, teaching you. Then you do the same to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. It’s like pass the parcel type of thing. Ask questions. Why would we ask questions instead of just telling people what to do? We are time poor, why not just tell them what to do? Why should we ask questions? What do you think? Why should we ask questions? What’s in it for us? Yeah. What do you think?
Participant: New ideas?
Greg: Generates new ideas. What else?
Participant: It stimulates the memory because they have to come up with it on their own?
Greg: Yes, it stimulates their recall of that piece of memory because now they have ownership. That key word is ownership. When you tell them, you own it. When you invite them to self-discover it, they do. What we found in training is that when we invite people to self, discover they have permanent learning. It’s the same in learning - if you can get people to self-discover, you will have people sign on, own what they need to do and not forget what they need to do. So that’s a very critical phase. This is also important, praising the slightest improvement. When we ask people to step out of their comfort zone, it’s very scary. People worry, “I might make a mistake or I might get criticized, or I might feel scared.” Don’t wait until the end of the project or the end of the program to reward them. It’s like, “I’ll save it up for Christmas. I’ll put it all in the Christmas bag and I’ll bring all the presents out once a year.” Every time you see someone step-up, recognize them. That gives them confidence to try a little bit further, because they are hesitant. They are watching you. Before I make a mistake are you going to come down on me? I love this show, give me ideas, I can implement them. And then Bam! You whack them down when it doesn’t go perfectly. Don’t do that. Look for the opportunities to help them grow. Same thing here. When they’ve got a problem, often they are overwhelmed - “I can’t do this, it’s beyond me. I’m lost.” You’ve got to give them hope and use encouragement to make the fault seem like it is scalable. You can do this, this will work. Don’t forget to give that positive feedback to them and keep that motivation and keep trying. Often people will just go statistics, I don’t like statistics. I can’t do it. Then the lecturer will give you some encouragement that shows you can do it and then eventually you do it. Same thing in your business.
This is critical - if you own it, you’ve got to drive it. What you want is for them to own it. If they are happy to do the thing that you suggest, they will take it and run with it. Delegate things to people. I heard a great quote the other day. “Most people don’t delegate. They are in the boat and they are paddling like crazy. They are so busy paddling, they didn’t walk over and turn on the engine in the boat.” T322hat engine is your people. That engine is your subordinates who’ve got the capacity to drive the power to really make that boat go fast. But you’re too busy paddling, because you are doing it all yourself. So getting people happy to do the thing that you suggest is critical around delegation. But most delegation is dumping - “Phil, here’s the report. I want it tomorrow.” Walk away. Seagull management, right? Squawks a lot, plop and leaves. (Laughter) So what you want is to get them involved, explain the why, get them signed on, have the ownership and they will absorb the delegation and they will run with it.
Here’s a bonus point for you in addition to Dale Carnegie’s principles. This is in terms of giving some follow-up to people after they have done a project all the way through. We often call it feedback. And I’m calling it calling it “feed forward”. What we are looking for here is two streams of comment. Tell people what they are doing that was good and then tell them how to do it better. Often you hear, “You’ve got to critique them! We are here to critique you.” What do we do when we critique? We spend all that time in the past, talking about something that we cannot change. If you go in there going forward, “feed forward”, you’re talking about what’s working for them. Sometimes people won’t know what’s working, they aren’t aware of it. Tell them, “You know what, this is really good”. “Oh, I didn’t know that. Ok, I’ll keep doing that.” That’s good to reinforce the positive they have and then the better part is the future. We are not worried about what happened in the past now. We are on the front foot going forward. It’s all very positive and minimum. So “feed forward” is a very powerful mechanism for you to take people with you on a journey, using your people skills, using your communication.
We’ve only got a limited amount of time. We are about to go into Q&A shortly. Think about your technical skills versus your people skills. Think about what you can do to make things work for you. If you would like to get more information or you are looking for more help, go to japan.dalecarnegie.com - that’s the English site. There’s a mirror Japanese site. There’s lots of free stuff for you. The Dale Carnegie principles are all there, you can download them. You’ve got white papers, guidebooks, 250 videos, 60 odd podcasts, . numerous blogs - there’s a lot of practical stuff. This is not anything that you are going to get at McGill because McGill is operating at a much more academic and higher macro level. This is the nitty gritty practical, daily, immediate use stuff compiled into one place. If you get a chance, go and have a look at that. This isn’t the stuff that you are going to wait until after your MBA and say, “ok now I can use it, now I am in a power position”. You are going to use it now, wherever you are right now it will work for you.
Let me open it up for questions.
Participant: When, a lot of managers use these kind of things, engagement, being on the lower echelons what I tend to hear comes out almost negative and patronizing and the term double speak just kind of pops up. You know you’re not doing very well but the company is just like, “how can we give you a raise?” People don’t like that. A lot of this does work, I agree with it, but there are some people that hate that kind of speech. What would you do in these kind of situations?
Greg: The question was about congruency between the content of the message and the delivery of the message. When you are getting feedback from the boss, but your crap detector goes off because it doesn’t sound quite right to you, that’s because there is not a congruency between the two. The first part is kokoro gami in Japanese - your starting point of your intention. If your real intention is to snow people and tell them a bunch of words, you’ll get that reaction. If your real intention is to help people, you’ll speak from the heart and it will be congruent and they will follow. Reading a blog article or reading a book or TED lecture or something, taking the superficial and then parlaying that into a conversation is still superficial. We are not stupid - we spot crap so quickly. So my answer to that question is, speak from the heart and speak truly about how to help that person. When they receive that communication, they’ll realize it’s sincere. You see it there in the Dale Carnegie principles - it’s sincere, it’s honest. All those words are critical because fake praise or that type of fakery doesn’t work because we are just way too smart always. Don’t use it yourself. Speak from the heart. You might have to say something hard and something corrective. But if you say it in the right way with the right intention, with good communication, the person will receive it without resistance. That’s the skill. That’s the people skill, the communication skill. And that’s a trained skill. This is not something we are innately born with. That’s why you have organizations, which are 102 years old around the world and 51 years in Japan like Dale Carnegie. There is a never ending need for those sorts of skills, and we need to develop those. Who has the next question? Yes, please.
Participant: I think soft communication, all this stuff looks good to me. But what I see in day by day life, when one person or one leader tries to do it like that, he has to take charge with some harsh word or something. That’s what normally happens - that harsh person will become a leader. What I mean to say that, being softer will not move you up. The surrounding people will have the same level of knowledge.
Greg: So the question is, if I give truckloads of whip to people and no sweeties, I’m going straight to the top? Well, it doesn’t work in business because the person who is brutal with other people will only get a certain compliance. They won’t get the innovative ideas. They won’t get the extra mile. They won’t get people to back them and support them. Everyone is hoping they are going to self-destruct and disappear. Being a leader doesn’t mean being a pushover. It does mean holding people to account. If I’ve delegated a task to you, and you screw it up or you don’t do it, it doesn’t mean going, “Oh, you didn’t do the task. That’s all right, I’ll do it.” No, it means you hold them to account. You come back and you check. Has this been done properly? “How’s it going?” You actually get involved in the solution. Because you are recognizing that certain people need that kind of help. “How’s it going?” It’s not a matter of being a pushover - it’s a matter of communicating with people in a way that’s effective about getting the task done in a way which doesn’t kill their motivation. And again, this communication piece is not necessarily something that’s going to be there just because you speak the language you speak, whatever you’re native or mother tongue may be. This takes work, takes training. This takes skill, takes brainpower to think about how you are going to sculpt that conversation in a way that will help that person to overcome a mistake, not be totally discouraged. Give them hope, but still hold them accountable. That’s the balance. So it’s not such a simple black/white thing as be sweet or be mean. It’s actually be professional but have a good communication balance that helps people to feel encouraged to keep trying and also you keep them accountable, keep them on track. Who has the next question?
Participant: Thank you for the presentation. My question is, is there any way to use performance measurement?
Greg: The question is about performance measurement. It could be performance measurement for a training company or performance measurement for a team. Often we’ll use surveys for that. We’ll do a pre-survey - a temperature check on how that person is doing as a leader. We will then, from that, customize a program for that person or people, depending on who your organization is. Deliver it. And then take a temperature check again. One of the things that we notice, though, is quite unique I think about the system that Dale Carnegie came up with is the practicality and the immediacy of time space learning which is what you are doing, basically. Every week you are here, during the week you are practicing, developing and polishing. We do the same thing. Between the classes, people get a chance to practice these real world principles with others and see how they work. To get that feedback and then come back and report and then it’s that plan, do, act ‘kaizen’ type of idea. What we notice is, we have an 8-week course called the Dale Carnegie course. What we notice is by week 4, week 5, people really start to take off. At the initial part they are a bit skeptical - “This stuff looks pretty simplistic. I don’t think it’s really going to work.” Then they try it and this is what we hear - “I can never get my colleague to help me, he’s always too busy. I used this principle and this principle, I couldn’t believe it. My colleague changed. You can’t believe it! My boss took me to lunch! The boss never takes anybody to lunch! Oh I used this principle and we had this sort of conversation.” Like Warren Buffet - it changes lives because it is immediate and practical. And it’s got a no time-wait disadvantage to it.
I think we are just about at time for this. As I said before if you would like to have the slides, hopefully the video works or at least the audio will work, I am happy to give it to you. I brought lots of meishi today, so if you want to give me, hit me with a meishi. Or even receive my meishi and hit me with an email - I’ll send it out to you. Thank you very much for your attention… (Applause)