Episodi

  • As A Leader, Welcome Common Enemies

    As A Leader, Welcome Common Enemies
    Oct 14 2026
    I have talked before about the loneliness of the leader. You feel it most strongly when things are going badly. The entrepreneur, in particular, owns the company and carries the ultimate responsibility. I am reminded of ship captains in the age of sail. They were responsible for getting their passengers and cargo safely to the destination while dealing with terrible weather and even worse pirates. The modern company captain faces different dangers, but the responsibility is just as real. People's livelihoods depend on the decisions we make. Get things badly wrong and we can bankrupt the company or become vulnerable to a takeover that destroys what we have built. When a powerful competitor appears, though, there is another way to look at the situation. That rival may actually become one of the leader's most useful tools. Why can a strong competitor actually help a leader? A powerful external competitor can give the team a common enemy, creating greater unity, urgency and commitment around winning in the marketplace. Instead of allowing the rival to generate fear, the leader can use the competitive threat as a rallying cry. This becomes particularly important when industries are disrupted. The Covid years damaged long-established companies across sectors affected by lockdowns, government restrictions, declining customer demand and supply-chain problems. M&A activity followed and, in many cases, the strong devoured the weak. Perhaps your company survived. Great. But now you may be facing larger, better-funded competitors with greater resources. That can be terrifying. Or it can provide the team with a clear external challenge around which everyone can unite. The leader's job is to convert anxiety into purposeful action. Do now: When a powerful competitor appears, don't communicate only the danger. Frame the challenge around what the team can collectively do to win. Why are internal enemies so destructive to organisations? Competition should be directed outside the company rather than between divisions, departments or ambitious individuals inside it. Internal rivalry consumes energy that should be directed toward winning customers and beating genuine competitors. I have experienced this myself. In big organisations, ambitious people sometimes eye your patch and decide they should be running it instead of you. Before you know it, the elbows come out. Political alliances form. People start protecting territory. Information gets withheld. The other division gradually becomes "the enemy". This is madness. The customer doesn't care about your internal politics. Neither does your external competitor. While everyone inside the organisation is busy fighting over the main deck, the real pirates may be pulling alongside the ship. Well-run companies squash destructive internal rivalry before it develops momentum. Do now: Make it absolutely clear that the competitor is outside the organisation. Internal functions may disagree, but they should ultimately be fighting on the same side. How should smaller companies respond to powerful competitors? Smaller companies should resist trying to match larger rivals dollar-for-dollar or entering destructive price wars; they need to compete through differentiated value. When a powerful competitor starts flooding the market with advertising, smaller companies can feel helpless. Usually, we don't have unlimited financial reserves. Trying to match their advertising spend may simply burn through the cash we need elsewhere. Price wars are equally dangerous. They are a race to the bottom, and the bigger rival may have enough financial muscle to absorb the pain much longer than we can. So don't fight exclusively on their terms. Instead, ask how you can strengthen the value offering. Perhaps the product line-up needs changing. Maybe the packaging of the offer needs adjusting. Perhaps customers need a clearer reason to choose you rather than the larger competitor. Differentiation becomes the battlefield. Do now: Instead of asking how you can match a larger competitor's spending or pricing, identify where your value proposition can become meaningfully different and stronger. How can leaders persuade teams to accept competitive change? Leaders can use the external competitive threat to explain why change is necessary, but they must create urgency without generating panic. This is a delicate balancing act. As with many things in Japan, adjusting to change isn't necessarily the strongest suit of every team. People may prefer the familiar processes, products and methods that have worked until now. But tough times demand tough changes. The external competitor can help the leader make the case. "We aren't changing this because management suddenly became bored with the existing system. We are changing because the market has changed, our competitors have changed and we need to become stronger." People generally don't enjoy the idea of being beaten by a rival. Use that competitive pride. The ...
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    15 min
  • Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part Two)

    Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part Two)
    Oct 7 2026
    In Part One, we looked at Dr Emily Anhalt's research with 100 leaders and 100 psychologists. She identified seven factors that help measure how emotionally "fit" we are. We covered the first three: learning our emotional triggers and biases, understanding the emotions of others and finding comfort in discomfort. Now we come to the remaining four. These move us from understanding ourselves toward something even more challenging: building meaningful connections, recovering from setbacks, asking others for help and actually implementing what we learn. That last point may be the toughest of them all. Why do leaders need a psychologically safe space outside work? Leaders need relationships and environments where they can relax, lower their guard and simply be themselves.Constantly operating as "the boss" without somewhere psychologically safe to decompress can leave leaders increasingly isolated. "Psychological safety" has become a familiar term in business, but leaders need it too. Ideally, that safe space may come from family and close friends. Here is the rub: leaders are often so busy working that they don't invest enough time in developing those relationships. I put my hand up for this one. I am in permanent imbalance trying to get the balance right. Work projects continually compete with family, friendships, hobbies and interests. For those of us working in Japan, there can be an additional complication because we may be thousands of kilometres away from the friends and colleagues we grew up with. Isolation isn't a good long-term leadership strategy. Do now: Deliberately invest time in family, friendships, hobbies and interests where you can stop being "the boss" and simply be yourself. How can leaders bounce forward after failure and setbacks? Emotionally fit leaders don't erase failure; they acknowledge what happened, extract what they can learn and refuse to let the past control their future. The objective isn't merely to bounce back but to bounce forward. Being positive sounds easy. We tell ourselves that failures aren't really failures. They are opportunities to grow and learn. Except we often don't behave that way. Instead, we beat ourselves up and keep replaying the video of the disaster in our minds. We remember what we said, what we should have done and how badly things turned out. That mental replay starts interfering with the work sitting in front of us. Our confidence shrinks. We take fewer risks. Our world of possibilities becomes smaller. The memory may remain, but we don't have to continually feed it with worry. That was then. This is now. Do now: When an old failure returns to your mind, acknowledge it, capture the lesson and consciously return your attention to what you can influence today. How can leaders stop worrying about mistakes from the past? Being unhappy about something that happened is different from repeatedly worrying about it. We may not control when an unpleasant memory appears, but we can work on whether we allow it to dominate our thinking. This distinction is important. We cannot magically remove painful memories. They have an irritating habit of popping up whether invited or not. The question is what happens next. Instead of climbing aboard the mental train and travelling all the way back into the disaster, note what happened and move on. "Yes, that happened." "Yes, I wish I had handled it differently." "Yes, I learned something." And then stop. The circumstances have changed. You have changed. The world has moved on. Leadership requires enough emotional capacity to deal with today's problems without continually dragging yesterday's problems along behind us. Do now: Note the memory without feeding the worry. Extract the lesson, recognise that circumstances have changed and return your attention to the present. Why should leaders express their needs and ask for support? Modern leadership is too complex for the old heroic model in which the boss is expected to know everything, need nothing and solve every problem alone. Emotionally fit leaders recognise when they need support and are willing to ask for it. I grew up in macho Australia. The strong, silent type was the model. If you had needs, you sorted them out yourself. Feelings were kept safely out of sight. Asking for help? Forget it. The assumption was that rivals would despise you, bosses wouldn't trust you and your team wouldn't follow you if they detected vulnerability. Business today is different. Technology, speed and complexity have made the heroic boss a relic from another era. There is simply too much going on for one person to possess all the answers. I tell my son not to be like Dad. Ask people for support and help. Don't imagine you have to do everything yourself like I did. Do now: Identify one area where you are unnecessarily carrying the load alone and ask someone you trust for help, advice or support. Should leaders show vulnerability and share their feelings? Leaders can acknowledge that they...
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    14 min
  • Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part One)

    Emotional Fitness Of Leaders (Part One)
    Sep 30 2026
    Dr Emily Anhalt is an American psychologist who developed the concept of a gym for mental health after researching 100 leaders and 100 psychologists who treated leaders. From that work, she identified seven factors for assessing how emotionally "fit" we are. That concept should get every leader's attention. Does anyone seriously believe leadership is going to become easier, slower and less stressful? I certainly don't. Many of us grew up in the "harden up" era. Soldier on. Suck it up. Grit your teeth and bear it. That approach may have got us through previous decades, but today's leaders operate amid vastly greater technological change, business speed, global connectivity and organisational complexity. We spend considerable time thinking about physical fitness. Perhaps we need to start taking our emotional fitness just as seriously. In Part One, let's look at three areas: understanding our emotional triggers and biases, recognising the emotions of others, and finding comfort in discomfort. Why do leaders need emotional fitness? Leaders need emotional fitness because greater business complexity and pressure place constant demands on how they respond to stress, conflict and other people. Leadership isn't becoming less stressful, so relying purely on toughness and endurance is unlikely to be enough. Previous generations often celebrated the leader who simply pushed through every difficulty. There is certainly value in resilience, but emotional fitness requires more than enduring pressure. Leaders influence everyone around them. When the boss becomes angry, defensive or frustrated, the impact spreads through the team. When the leader remains composed, listens and responds thoughtfully, that behaviour also influences everyone. The objective isn't to eliminate emotion. That would be impossible and probably undesirable. The objective is to become more conscious of our emotional responses and more skilful in determining what happens next. Like physical fitness, this requires practice. Do now: Start treating your emotional responses as a leadership capability that can be deliberately strengthened rather than simply accepting, "That's just the way I am." How can leaders identify and manage their emotional triggers? Leaders need to recognise the "Hot Buttons" that trigger emotional reactions and learn to create a small gap between the trigger and their response. That gap can be enough to prevent an impulsive reaction becoming an unnecessary conflict. This is familiar territory for me because I teach a course called Disagree Agreeably. We examine the triggers that get the temper rising, blood pressure pulsing and body heat climbing rapidly. My wife assures me my temper is getting shorter as I get older. She is probably correct. There never seems to be any shortage of things capable of irritating us. The important point is that we may not be able to prevent the irritation. What we can work on is our response. Rather than allowing the emotional trigger to immediately produce an emotional reaction, insert what I call a cushion. That gives the brain a chance to catch up with the mouth. Do now: Identify your recurring Hot Buttons. Knowing what regularly sets you off gives you a better chance of controlling what happens when someone presses one. How can leaders stop themselves reacting emotionally in difficult conversations? A short, neutral "cushion" statement can act as a circuit breaker between an irritating comment and the leader's response. The purpose isn't to agree with the other person; it is to buy enough time to choose a considered response. Suppose somebody says something that immediately gets your blood boiling. Our natural tendency may be to fire straight back. Instead, try saying something like: "Thank you for raising this topic. It is an important one." That takes me about four or five seconds to say. Those few seconds can be enormously valuable. They give me time to overrule the impulse to launch forth with the first thing that pops into my head and instead find a more considered response to whatever nonsense my interlocutor has been sprouting. The cushion neither diminishes the issue nor inflames it. It simply creates space. Do now: Prepare one or two neutral cushion statements in advance so you don't have to invent them when somebody has already pushed your Hot Button. Why should leaders try harder to understand the emotions of others? Leaders should remember that people's behaviour may be influenced by pressures and problems we know absolutely nothing about. A little more empathy can help us respond with greater patience rather than immediately judging someone against our expectations. There is a saying I have always liked: "Remember everyone in life is carrying a heavy load." I was reminded of this while recovering in hospital from a near-death experience with pneumonia after spending six days in the Intensive Care Unit. It gave me plenty of time to reflect. One conclusion was that I ...
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    12 min
  • When The Leadership Student Is Ready, The Teacher Appears

    When The Leadership Student Is Ready, The Teacher Appears
    Sep 23 2026
    We are all exposed to leadership lessons throughout our lives, yet most of the time we don't even realise it. As children, adults were the authority figures and we simply accepted that they were in charge. In sport, perhaps we became team captain or perhaps we didn't, but we weren't analysing what successful leadership actually meant. At university, we may have taken responsibility for a club or activity without consciously thinking about the intricacies of leading people. Then we enter the workforce and everything changes. Suddenly there are hierarchies, different levels of responsibility and designated leadership positions. Eventually we may be promoted into one of them. The interesting question is: who actually taught us how to lead? For many leaders, the answer is nobody. Why are so many people promoted into leadership without being taught how to lead? Organisations frequently promote people because they are successful at their existing jobs, then expect them to work out leadership for themselves. The responsibilities change dramatically, but structured leadership development doesn't necessarily arrive with the promotion. We enter companies at junior levels and gradually accumulate experience and successes. Eventually we are trusted with a project, then perhaps a small team and later a whole section. Suddenly we are responsible for other people's performance. Yet we may never have received any leadership training. We are somehow expected to know how to motivate people, communicate expectations, delegate work, handle mistakes, make decisions and develop team members simply because somebody changed our job title. That is quite an assumption. Being technically good at your job and being good at leading other people are completely different skill sets. Do now: Before promoting someone into leadership, ask what specific preparation they have received for actually leading people. Where do new leaders learn their leadership behaviours? Most new leaders unconsciously assemble their leadership style from people they have observed throughout their lives. Parents, teachers, sports coaches, classmates and previous bosses all become part of an informal leadership education. The problem is that we probably weren't consciously studying these people. We simply absorbed their behaviour. A boss who micromanaged everything may have taught us that leaders should control people closely. Another boss may have demonstrated trust and delegation. A sports coach may have taught us about discipline, while a teacher showed us encouragement. Eventually we cobble these influences together into our own disparate, idiosyncratic form of leadership. There may be some excellent components in there. There may also be some terrible ones. Most importantly, there is no guarantee that our collection of inherited leadership behaviours contains everything we actually need. Do now: Examine where your assumptions about leadership came from and decide which behaviours deserve to be retained, changed or discarded. When does a manager become a serious student of leadership? The turning point comes when leaders realise that trial and error isn't enough and consciously decide to study leadership as a professional discipline. This creates a major dividing line between leaders. Some simply keep going. They rely on experience, instinct and whatever leadership behaviours they have accumulated. They make mistakes, adjust and try again. Their organisation may reinforce this approach by refusing to invest in leadership development and expecting managers to work everything out themselves. Others eventually realise there is much more to leadership than they originally imagined. They start searching. They read books. They watch videos. They listen to podcasts. They study successful leaders and begin looking for structured approaches to the challenges they encounter. That change in mindset is critical. The leader stops thinking, "I should already know this," and starts asking, "What do I still need to learn?" Do now: Treat leadership development as an ongoing professional responsibility rather than something you were supposed to magically acquire when you were promoted. Can leaders teach themselves using books, podcasts and online content? Today's leaders have extraordinary access to leadership knowledge, so there is little excuse for relying entirely on trial and error. Books, podcasts, videos, articles and online resources make leadership ideas more accessible than at any previous point. I am part of that content creator army myself. I produce podcasts, articles, social media content and books on business, selling and leading in Japan. The broader point is that aspiring leaders can now access enormous amounts of leadership information. The challenge is no longer finding information. It is selecting useful information and then actually applying it. Reading twenty books on delegation doesn't automatically make you good at delegating. Listening to a ...
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    12 min
  • Leaders Need to Have More Meals With The Team

    Leaders Need to Have More Meals With The Team
    Sep 16 2026
    Covid changed the relationship between employees, offices and commuting, particularly in cities such as Tokyo. For many people, working from home eliminated hours spent standing in packed trains every day. That time could suddenly be spent sleeping, exercising, enjoying hobbies, being with the family or simply getting more work done. The bigger leadership question is what happens when working from home stops being an emergency response and becomes a permanent part of working life. Hybrid work brings obvious benefits, but it also removes many of the informal interactions leaders once took for granted. That means leaders need to deliberately create opportunities to spend real, face-to-face time with their people. One surprisingly powerful answer may be very simple: have more meals with the team. Why do leaders need more face-to-face time in a hybrid workplace? Hybrid and remote work reduce the spontaneous personal interactions through which leaders often discover what is really happening with their people. Zoom, Teams and other online meetings are excellent for conducting business, but not every workplace issue fits comfortably into a scheduled video call. When everyone worked in the office, leaders had numerous opportunities to notice things. A brief corridor conversation, a chat after a meeting or a spontaneous discussion could reveal concerns that would never warrant someone scheduling a formal meeting with the boss. Hybrid work removes many of those moments. That matters because employees may be dealing with difficult clients, strained relationships with colleagues, concerns about their boss or other sensitive workplace issues. If there isn't an easy opportunity to raise them, people may simply keep quiet and let the problem fester. Do now: Don't assume that because nobody is raising problems on Zoom, there aren't any problems. Deliberately create opportunities for private face-to-face conversations. Why can sharing a meal improve communication between leaders and employees? A meal creates a more relaxed environment than a formal meeting and can make difficult conversations easier to begin. Lunch or dinner changes the atmosphere and gives the leader and employee time together without a computer screen dominating the interaction. The objective isn't fine dining. The important ingredient is communication. This is especially valuable when discussing tender subjects such as difficult customers, problems with colleagues or frustrations inside the organisation. Sitting opposite the boss in a meeting room and being expected to explain a sensitive issue can feel intimidating. A restaurant creates a different dynamic. The conversation can move naturally between work and other topics. Silence doesn't have to be immediately filled. The employee has time to decide whether there is something they want to discuss. The leader also gets something increasingly scarce in the hybrid workplace: uninterrupted one-to-one time. Do now: Use occasional lunches and dinners as leadership opportunities rather than treating every employee conversation as another formal meeting. Why don't important employee issues always surface on Zoom? Employees naturally filter what they discuss in formal online meetings, so leaders can mistakenly believe they know more about what is happening inside their organisation than they actually do. This is one of the troubling things about those chance encounters when someone suddenly tells you what has really been going on. You find yourself thinking, "I wonder what else I am not across, which I need to know about?" Online meetings generally have an agenda and a purpose. Everyone knows why they are there. Sensitive issues don't necessarily fit neatly between agenda items. There is also a psychological difference between clicking "Join Meeting" for a scheduled discussion with the boss and gradually raising an issue during a relaxed conversation over lunch. Leaders therefore need to think preventatively rather than reactively. Don't wait until the employee requests the meeting because the situation has become unbearable. Do now: Ask yourself what information your current communication system is unlikely to uncover, rather than assuming scheduled meetings are telling you everything. How often should leaders have meals with their team members? Meals with employees work best when they become a regular leadership cadence rather than occasional events triggered by problems. The objective is to systemise informal communication before issues become serious. Birthdays can provide one opportunity. Taking someone to lunch on their birthday is a nice recognition element within the team culture and creates natural one-to-one time. But once a year isn't enough. Leaders should consider regularly rotating through their direct reports. There may also be important people outside the direct reporting line who would benefit from occasional one-to-one time. This doesn't need to become an expensive corporate ...
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    13 min
  • Leadership's Necessary Cocktail Of Strategy, Culture and Brand

    Leadership's Necessary Cocktail Of Strategy, Culture and Brand
    Sep 9 2026
    Leadership encompasses many required skills and mindsets, and it is always interesting to dissect the topic from fresh angles. One particularly important issue in Japan is the relationship between strategy, organisational culture and brand. Japan has hordes of managers, but not so many leaders. Managers here are often brilliant at getting the operational side humming like a finely tuned engine. Errors are eliminated, defects avoided, deadlines met and processes followed. Leadership requires all of that — plus some important additions. Leaders build the people, set the direction and create the environment in which strategy, culture and brand reinforce each other. What is the difference between management and leadership in Japan? Management keeps the machine running; leadership decides where the machine is going and develops the people who will get it there. Japanese organisations are particularly strong at operational management, consistency, quality control and execution. The problem comes when excellent management is mistaken for leadership. Leaders need to explain not only what must be achieved and how to achieve it, but also why it matters. They develop people rather than merely supervising them. This becomes increasingly important when employees are expected to contribute ideas, solve problems and respond quickly to customers. A boss who simply issues orders may achieve compliance. A leader who gives direction, explains the purpose and develops the team can create commitment. Do now: Ask yourself whether your managers are merely controlling execution or whether they are also building people and setting direction. How should leaders translate corporate strategy into action? Corporate strategy should not stop at the Executive Floor. Each level of leadership needs to translate the overall strategy into a local strategy that makes sense to its own team and customers. The CEO and Division Heads may establish the broad organisational direction, but that cannot be the end of the process. Section and team leaders should take that umbrella strategy and ask their people: "What does this mean for us?" This is where many Japanese organisations leave considerable potential untapped. Those at the coal face are closest to customers. They detect the nuances, hints and shifts occurring in the marketplace every day. Senior executives may have decades of experience, but they can also be decades removed from direct customer interaction. Their market muscle memory may no longer reflect what customers are saying today. Do now: Break the corporate strategy down with your team and create a local version that directly connects their work and customer knowledge to the organisation's larger goals. Why should employees be involved in creating local strategy? The people closest to customers often possess information senior management simply cannot see, so involving them improves both strategy and execution. Strategy becomes stronger when frontline knowledge flows upward rather than instructions only flowing downward. Instead of section heads receiving a strategy and merely distributing orders, imagine them gathering the team and collectively breaking down what the corporate direction means for their part of the business. What are customers changing? What are competitors doing differently? Where are expectations moving? What opportunities are appearing? This approach does something else as well: it gives employees ownership. There is an enormous difference between being told to execute somebody else's plan and helping to determine how your team will achieve the desired result. The overall strategic direction remains intact, but the execution benefits from current market intelligence. Do now: Consult the people closest to the action before deciding exactly how your section will execute the corporate strategy. How does leadership behaviour shape organisational culture? Culture is created by what leaders repeatedly do, tolerate, reward and encourage — not by slogans distributed from headquarters. If the culture is based on "do what you are told", creativity will inevitably be sacrificed for orthodoxy and supposedly defect-free efficiency. Busy lower-level bosses often say they have no time to coach. Instead, they bark orders and micromanage results because they are determined to avoid mistakes appearing on their record. Internal politics can make things even worse. In large organisations, senior patrons gather supporters and loyalty becomes a tax employees pay in exchange for promotion and protection. Suddenly the enemy isn't the commercial rival outside the company. It is another division whose boss happens to be your boss's competitor for the next promotion. That turns enormous amounts of organisational energy inward. Do now: Create a culture where ideas are actively sought, people are thanked for contributing and the real competitive enemy remains outside the enterprise. What does leadership have to do with ...
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    18 min
  • The Leader Who Loses Their Integrity

    The Leader Who Loses Their Integrity
    Sep 2 2026
    A new leader can arrive looking and sounding like the organisation's long-awaited saviour. They are articulate, confident, well presented and comfortable in the media. They say all the right things, reflect the mood of the moment and promise a brighter future. Then a crisis arrives. That is when employees discover whether the leader's values are genuine principles or merely attractive public relations material. Leadership integrity is not established by speeches, slogans or podcast appearances. It is revealed when revenues fall, difficult decisions must be made and the leader has something personal to lose. How does a crisis reveal a leader's true character? A crisis exposes the distance between what a leader says and what they are genuinely prepared to do. During stable periods, almost anyone can sound positive, caring and principled. The organisation is performing, customers are buying and the leader can talk confidently about people, purpose and long-term growth. The COVID-19 pandemic changed that environment almost overnight. Workforces were disrupted, markets moved rapidly and revenue disappeared across industries. Similar pressures emerge during recessions, restructures, acquisitions and technological disruption. A leader facing these conditions has difficult choices to make. Cost reductions may be unavoidable. Roles may disappear. Services may need to change. The integrity test is not whether the leader can prevent every painful decision. It is whether they explain those decisions honestly, accept responsibility and treat people with dignity. Do now: Judge leadership character by behaviour under pressure, not by appearances during comfortable times. Why do unrealistic promises destroy leadership credibility? Employees stop trusting leaders when operational reality clearly contradicts executive promises. A familiar example is the leader who announces substantial staffing reductions while promising that service quality, response times and output levels will remain exactly the same. This may reassure customers or investors temporarily, but it insults the intelligence of the people doing the work. I witnessed this while working for the Australian Government. A Minister announced a major departmental budget reduction while assuring voters that services would continue normally. Staff immediately recognised the contradiction. His credibility collapsed and motivation inside the organisation dropped. The same dynamic applies in private companies, government departments, startups and multinational corporations. Most organisations already operate with limited spare capacity. When experienced people leave, something changes: workloads increase, delivery slows, quality suffers or priorities must be reduced. Leaders do not lose credibility because conditions become difficult. They lose it when they pretend that obvious consequences do not exist. Do now: Explain what will change, what will be protected and what the organisation can no longer realistically deliver. What happens when leadership rhetoric and reality diverge? When words and actions repeatedly conflict, employees begin treating every leadership message with scepticism. A leader may initially build trust through visibility, confident communication and appealing statements about organisational values. Under financial pressure, however, they may become highly legalistic, using contracts, policies and technical rules to justify behaviour that violates the spirit of earlier commitments. Compliance with a contract does not automatically equal ethical leadership. Something can be legally defensible and still feel misleading, unfair or inconsistent with the trust previously established. The problem becomes worse when leaders insist that nothing has changed. Employees compare announcements with their daily experience. They see colleagues disappearing, resources shrinking and expectations remaining untouched. When management attempts to disguise this reality, people feel both unhappy and insulted. This gap between rhetoric and reality creates cynicism. Employees begin interpreting every new announcement as spin, even when later messages are accurate. Do now: Before communicating, ask whether employees can see clear evidence that your actions match your stated principles. Can a leader control damaging information by speaking to people individually? Isolating employees and controlling conversations rarely contains a credibility crisis because people compare experiences. A leader may attempt to minimise organisational damage by dealing with affected employees separately. Each person receives a slightly different explanation, and management hopes no one will assemble the complete picture. That approach almost never works. People talk to colleagues, former employees, customers, suppliers and professional contacts. In Japan, Australia, the United States or Europe, informal communication networks often move faster than official corporate communication. Bad news ...
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    14 min
  • Who Do You Talk To When You Are The Leader?

    Who Do You Talk To When You Are The Leader?
    Aug 26 2026
    Leadership can be lonely, particularly when the organisation is under pressure. Employees expect confidence, clients expect stability and family members naturally worry when they hear that the business is struggling. So, who can the leader talk to? There is no perfect answer. Leaders need trusted advisers, but they also need the ability to process pressure independently, control their messaging and convert anxiety into practical action. Why Is Leadership So Lonely During A Business Crisis? Leadership becomes lonely because everyone looks to the leader for reassurance precisely when the leader may be experiencing the greatest uncertainty. During the COVID-19 pandemic, business leaders faced collapsing demand, government restrictions, staff anxiety, supply-chain problems and serious cash-flow pressures. Different industries were affected in different ways, but the leadership problem was universal: people wanted to know whether the organisation would survive. When sales decline, problems multiply quickly. Revenue drops, but rent, salaries, supplier payments and other fixed costs continue. Employees notice the warning signs and begin imagining the worst. The leader cannot ignore these concerns. At the same time, repeatedly broadcasting personal fear can weaken confidence throughout the organisation. Do now: Recognise that leadership pressure is real, but separate your need for emotional release from your responsibility to provide direction. Should Leaders Be Completely Transparent With Employees? Leaders should be honest about business conditions, but honesty does not require sharing every private fear, worst-case scenario or untested concern. When leaders conceal obvious problems, employees fill the information vacuum with rumours. They may assume the company's position is much worse than it actually is. Complete emotional disclosure creates a different risk. Employees may interpret the leader's uncertainty as evidence that there is no plan. The better approach is disciplined transparency. Explain what has happened, what the numbers show, which risks matter, what management is doing and what employees can control. For example, a leader might say, "Revenue is below target, so we are reducing discretionary spending and protecting our priority client relationships." That is more useful than either pretending nothing is wrong or declaring that the company may collapse. Employees need reality, direction and appropriate confidence. Do now: Communicate the facts, the response plan and the next review point. Keep personal panic out of company-wide messaging. Can A Leader Talk Openly With Clients? Clients can become trusted friends, but they are still clients and will protect their own organisations first. Strong commercial relationships are usually built on credibility, trust and personal connection. People prefer doing business with people they know and like. However, telling a client that your organisation may be unable to pay salaries or continue operating can trigger an immediate risk-management response. The client may start searching for an alternative supplier, even when the personal relationship is excellent. This is especially important in Japan, where reliability, continuity and long-term supplier relationships are highly valued. A buyer may sympathise with your difficulties while simultaneously concluding that depending on your company is too dangerous. Leaders should be truthful when an operational problem directly affects the client. They should not use clients as an audience for unrestricted emotional unloading. Do now: Tell clients what affects delivery, quality or continuity. Do not burden them with every internal fear behind the problem. Should Leaders Share Their Business Stress With Their Partner? A partner can provide emotional support, but unmanaged disclosure may transfer the leader's anxiety to the entire family. After carrying pressure all day, leaders naturally want to unload when they return home. The difficulty is that a partner may hear a business concern as a threat to the mortgage, school fees, retirement plans or the family's long-term security. This does not mean leaders should hide everything. Silence can damage trust and create emotional distance. The better approach is to explain the situation with context. Clarify what is known, what remains uncertain, what actions are being taken and whether the family is facing an immediate financial threat. There is an important difference between saying, "I am dealing with a difficult quarter," and spending every evening describing catastrophic possibilities with no structure or conclusion. Do now: Share enough to preserve trust, but avoid repeatedly bringing raw, unresolved panic into the home. Can Friends Or A Business Coach Help A Leader? Friends and coaches can help, but their usefulness depends on trust, commercial experience, local knowledge and their ability to understand the leader's real situation. Many senior leaders discover ...
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    12 min