We are recognised for our capabilities and potential and promoted into our first leadership role. We have been given charge over our colleagues and now have additional responsibilities. In many cases we don’t move into a pure “off the tools” leadership role. We are more likely to be a player/leader hybrid, because we have our own clients and also produce revenue outcomes. One of the biggest difficulties is knowing how to balance the roles of “doer” and “urger”.

Jealousy, bruised egos, sabotage, mild insurrection can be found amongst our former colleagues as we are now their new boss. There will be some who feel the organisation has made a massive error and they should have been the one promoted. Their enthusiasm for striving for the greater good has become diminished and results begin to suffer. The more Machiavellian may be thinking how they can unseat the new boss, by lowering outcomes enough, so that it damages the new boss’s credibility, without getting themselves fired. They are happy to spend long hours conspiring with others to calculate the nexus of those two points.

The danger here is we double down on our own production because we have more control over that and we actually don’t lead. We are busy with dealing with all the accoutrements of power, exciting stuff like approving leave applications, tracking sick leave, filling out reports and general paperwork which is the bane of a leader’s life.

Leaders have four main jobs. Set the strategy, create the culture, maintain the machine so it runs on time and on budget and we build our people. When we were team members we were given guidance and direction by the boss, now we are the boss. Are we sufficiently knowledgeable and talented enough to take the organisation in the right direction? Are we relying on what we knew before we became the boss? Are we studying, reading, listening to podcasts, watching TED talks and doing everything we can to better educate ourselves for the different demands of this leadership role? If we are busy, busy, busy working on our new leader tasks or servicing our own clients, we may not be devoting the time needed to grow.

The leader needs to have a long term perspective, but our subordinates tend to have a short term view and invariably so do our superiors. They expect results from us and in short order or they start wondering if they made the right choice about who should have stepped up and be the boss.

The boss has to challenge orthodoxy. If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will get the same results. How can we get better results? That is what the boss needs to be working on. We need to persuade others to follow us and to have influence. Often none of those factors were part of the selection process though. We got the job because we were the best salesperson, accountant, engineer, bookkeeper, architect, etc. Actually, many new leaders don’t even like people and much prefer numbers. Many are poor public speakers have big brains and no friends.

Do the new leaders get any training to build on their skill sets and give them the tools to succeed? Often they get nothing. They keep focused on what they can control which are their own clients, don’t build the people and they wind up carrying the team. That works as long as the outcome demands don’t go up. As the ask increases, the gap starts to form between how much one person can do to hit the targets and the total team contribution. Because we haven’t developed our people, they are not filling in the gap between where we are and where we need to be. After three years of this, the new leader gets fired and the cycle begins again with a new person sitting in the boss’s chair. New leaders relying on their companies for their security to remain in their elevated position are pretty optimistic. The tasks of the leader are different to those of the led, so either through personal study or company sponsored training, there must be the investment to grow their capabilities. The mindset element is important, as that is the trigger for changing the required behaviors in order to grow in the new position. So bosses, are you sufficiently investing in your newly promoted leaders. So newly promoted leaders, are you taking responsibility for your own career and investing in yourself. If the answer to either question is “no”, then whether you realise it or not, you have entered the dander zone. Don’t go there.

The chain of command is a well established military leadership given. I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else. In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers. This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback against the Vietnam War, when all authority began to be challenged. Modern leaders are currently enamoured with concepts like the “servant leader”. The leader serves the team as an enabler for staff success. Dominant authority is out and a vague negotiated power equilibrium has replaced it. Delegation, responsibility, accountability, mistake handling and punishment are all swirling around in this fog of the new order.

Japan makes the whole construct even more interesting by having built up a legal perspective on staff issues that favours the worker against the company. Judges, also do not see company staff non-performance of duties as necessarily career ending. Add into the mix the fact that in the last 20 years, the number of people aged between 15 and 34 has halved. The bad news is that it is going to halve again over the next forty years. Young people will be in high demand, regardless of how useless they are. We complain today about millennium entitlement. That will be nothing compared to what is coming. Smaller families means more single child households. The Boomer generation will be spoiling their grandchildren on an industrial scale. Scarce resource spoilt brats will be entering society and business. I can hardly wait.

The Universities here in Japan will be taking anyone with a pulse, because they are going to be bleeding red ink all over the place. Does anyone remember the Tandai system of two year colleges? They have all disappeared or morphed into four year schools to survive. Diabolical entrance exams will linger for the most elite schools in Japan, but for the rest it is a race to the bottom of academic standards to keep the doors open. Passing academic classes at a Japanese University has been a joke. If you turn up to class, the chances are pretty good you will be passed. A rather low bar compared to what is happening at varsity in the rest of the advanced world.

So dealing with undereducated, spoilt, entitled lay abouts are our collective future when hiring staff. Even now, between 30%-35% of staff into their third to fourth year of employ are bailing out and heading for the exists, seeking supposed greener pastures. Covid-19 may have put a temporary dampener on this exodus for the moment, but if that is your staff retention strategy, then the future looks bleak for you.

Business is so complex today. The hero boss who can do every part of the business process has become a distant memory. Even if we could do it, should we? The boss should be concentrating on those activities that only the boss can do and should be pushing everything else down to subordinates. Now that is the theory. The reality is most bosses in Japan are doing too much. They don’t trust the delegation system because they have been burnt before. Actually, that is not quite true – they don’t have a delegation system. A dumping of the work system yes, but an intelligent, best practice delegation system, well no. Probably a good time to revisit how that works for all the bosses out there, because they are going to need it.

If we can’t unleash hell as bosses and we have to gain willing cooperation to get the youth engaged, what do we need to do? Communication skills are going to be at a premium. The whole modern apparatus of leadership rests on persuasion power, rather than raw position power. Do bosses know what these young people want? That would be a good starting point. “What is in it for me” is a tried and true motivator across time and geography. Once upon a time that was focused on what the boss wanted but times have changed. Bosses need to spend time with young people, individually, to understand them better. Yes, they may be spoilt little brats, but these are the cards you are dealt, so learn how to play them.