In today’s business world, leaders need to be “authentic” leaders. We have all come across this somewhere, endorsed by self-proclaimed gurus and prophets. I often ponder what does that actually mean? I am sure all of those Japanese leaders screaming abuse at their staff, when they make mistakes, are being authentic. They are authentically terrible, dictatorial, abusive leaders. Actually this worked like a charm for a very long time in postwar Japan. You joined a company for life and there was only one route for those who changed jobs and that was down into a netherworld of strife, insecurity and lower salary. In the goode olde days you had to dodge the flying ashtrays thrown at you by your authentically enraged boss, endure their publicly delivered abuse and keep going. Yamaichi Securities going down in 1997, made changing jobs mid-career respectable for the first time for those who became unemployed through no fault of their own.

Can a boss be passive at the other end of the scale? No. Bosses have to lead the charge, set the direction, check on the milestones, monitor the performance and drive results. They have to praise those who are doing a fantastic job or have a difficult conversation with those who are failing. Where is the line between aggression and assertion though. One boss’s idea of assertion is aggressive power harassment from an employee’s perspective. In years past this didn’t matter much, because there were plenty of people to go around and it was “my way or the highway”. Today, we are rapidly running out of young people. There is a temporary pause in hostilities in the talent war here in Japan, which will shortly resume, once Covid is brought under control.

Aggressive bosses are self centered, concerned about their career and how they look to their bosses. Assertive bosses will stand up for their team and themselves vis-à-vis the big bosses and sharp elbowed thrusting rivals. They have a 360 degree view of what is going on and how actions affect the whole organisation, rather than focused on the needs of one aggressive individual.

Aggressive bosses are often lashing out because they cannot control the stress and pressure they are under. They play a toxic version of “pass the parcel” and take it out on their subordinates. Assertive leaders know how to keep calm. They have techniques for handling the stress. They realise that their dark, erratic, satanic moods can destroy the motivation and equilibrium of the team. They are the swan bosses paddling like crazy under the waterline but moving elegantly through the days no matter what is on.

Aggressive bosses believe their job is to tell errant staff “how it is” and be very blunt and direct in their speech. Assertive bosses can be honest and direct with subordinates but the language they choose doesn’t become inappropriate or demotivating. They know they need this person to recover and get back into the fray and try again, even though their self-confidence is shattered by their poor work output. When your young staff are useless you can’t easily replace them, so your job becomes to help them become useful.

Aggressive bosses often have deep underlying poor self esteem, which is why they lash out and whip people verbally. They need to establish their supreme dominance over the team and fear is their weapon of choice. Assertive leaders have a confident self-image and good awareness of their strengths and weakness. They are at home in their own skin and don’t feel the need to constantly prove themselves or beat up their staff. Rather they are looking for ways to further develop their team. They know they are stuck right where they are, until they can groom successors which will free them up for promotion to bigger jobs. Every firm needs leaders. The person who is the leadership factory is going to be given more accountability within the organisation.

I think words like “authentic” need to have more nuanced meanings. What we are really talking about is someone who is honest, transparent, confident, considerate and a builder of people, because they believe that is the best thing for everyone. Being an “authentic “bully in this era in Japan, will be a career ender once the top leadership work out this person is a sieve, rapidly leaking talent out of the organisation to rival firms.

Engaging your team as a leader is a relatively new idea. When I first started work in the early 70s, none of my bosses spent a nanosecond thinking about they could engage their staff as a leader. What they were thinking about was catching mistakes, incompetence, error and willful negligence, before these problems went nuclear. That meant micro managing everyone. “Management by walking around” meant checking up on people. The construct was that the team were problematic and the boss needed to have forensic skills to stop problems escalating. That was the age of the hero boss, who was the best at everything, knew more than everyone else and could do it all. That won’t fly today because technology has made business so much more complex.

Back in 1971 Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon noted, “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention”. This is where we bosses are today, with hand held devices which keep us permanently connected through the flood release valves of the internet. We are time poor, handling trouble aplenty, struggling to keep up with market shifts and spending too much time on Clubhouse. What this translates into is bosses are too busy to engage their staff properly. Unlike the 70s when it wasn’t a “thing”, engagement is known today and expected. We are doing a poor job by design today rather than through brutal ignorance.

There are three useful foundation tools we can apply to spark the process of engaging our staff. Engagement levels are closely calibrated with how well the direction, values and culture of the organisation synchronise with those of the individuals in the team. Here is the tricky bit – how well informed is the busy, busy boss about the team members’ agreement with the firm’s direction, their value set and the culture they want for their workplaces?

This is where the “poverty of attention” kicks in and bosses don’t know much about their team, because they never ask. There is scant time for asking questions when you are busy raining orders down like missiles on the team. We can create connections with our team members by asking factual questions about where they were raised, how many in their family, where they went to university, etc. We may find commonalities of experience or gain insights into what has made this team member the person they are today.

We need to have this information as a base, but we need to go deeper to help us understand the way they think. That means using causative questions. These are enquiries such as, “why did you choose to study geography at university” or “why did you choose to join that company” or “why did you get involved with parachute jumping as a hobby?”. You get the idea. These questions reveal motives for decisions and inform about priorities.

The third tool is asking value-based questions. Our values drive our decisions and carve out our behaviour. For companies this is often where the wheels come off. The rhetoric about what the company stands for and the leadership behaviours don’t line up. There is nothing like tough times to reveal the firm and the boss’s true colours.

These are not immediate questions we would ask, because they can feel intrusive. Imagining you will engage someone by getting to know them better and leading off with a question such as “tell me about a turning point in your life” is not going to have the desired effect. We need to be building the trust over time and once we have gotten to know them reasonably well, we can then ask deeper questions. We can enquire, “thinking back to the way things have gone in your life, would you do things differently?” or “what have been the high points of your accomplishments so far?”, etc.

Things are in constant flux and a conversation held eighteen months ago may have been overtaken by a series of events in the meantime. So we have to have to make chances to keep engaging with our team to keep up to date on where they are in their thinking, what are their current primary values and recent experiences.

Less time on Clubhouse and more chatting with the team will do a lot more for the engagement of your people and will help to drive toward achieving the organisations goals.