We know the name Achilles because of Brad Pitt and Hollywood or we may have read the Iliad. He was a famous mythical Greek hero whose body was invulnerable, except for the back of his heel. His mother plunged him into the river Styx to protect his body, but her fingertips covered the heel, leaving it vulnerable. Research by Dr. Jack Zenger identified four common elements which comprise Achilles’ heels for leaders. Blind spots are a problem for all of us. We can’t see our foibles, issues and problems, but they are blindingly obvious to everyone else working for us. Remember, subordinates are all expert “boss watchers”. They examine us in the greatest detail every day, in every interaction. Let’s examine what Zenger found and see what we can learn as leaders.

1. Lacking Integrity

Not too many leaders would be saying they lacked integrity about themselves but that may not be how they are seen by their subordinates. The organization may be zigging but we decide to zag. We don’t agree with the policy, so we decide to head off in another direction. There may be promulgated values developed in the senior executive suites and we are not modelling the correct behaviour. Maybe our big leader egos can’t admit mistakes or when we are wrong. We try to bend logic and justify our way out of the situation. Maybe we say one thing and do the precise opposite of what we are preaching. “Do what I say, not what I do” – does this sound familiar?

1. Not Accountable

“Of course, I am accountable – what nonsense”, may be our first reaction. We may be telling our boss that the poor results of our team are because we haven’t been issued with the sharpest tools in the toolbox. It is all their fault and we are pristine and perfect. The 360 survey results are a bloodbath, as our subordinates hoe into us for our various failings, but we dismiss the results. “Piffle. Don’t they know what I am facing here. The pressure, the stress. No one appreciates how hard I am working. They have no idea what they are talking about”. Perhaps our decisions are poor and instead of owning them, we push the blame off on to others, particularly other departments. “If only IT did their job properly. If only marketing were more professional. If only sales was pulling their weight”, ad nauseum.

1. Over-Focused On Self

It would be difficult to find leaders who don’t have this attribute to varying degrees. You don’t see too many wilting violets whisked up into leadership positions. Self-promotion is a fundamental aspect of getting ahead in business. The issues arise when it goes to extremes. Strong leaders can often believe they are in a zero sum game and another’s success lessens their own worth and promotion opportunities. Not cooperating with rivals or even attempting to sabotage them can be some fallout from this attitude. Subordinates too can be seen as future rivals who might replace the boss, so better to not delegate to, coach or provide experience for capable people in order to keep them down.

1. Uninspiring

It would be a rare bird of a leader who admitted they were uninspiring. We easily believe we are a role model for others, that we have credibility and are someone others would want to emulate. However, we might be a hopeless public speaker, barely able to string two words together without injecting a series of ums and ahs into proceedings. We might be morose, weighed down with the pressure of our position and responsibilities, permanently in a bad mood. We might be so busy, we are incapable of directing others and wind up dumping work on them minus the WHY and the how bits of the equation.

There is a bitter pill for leaders to swallow to overcome their blind spots. It is called “feedback” and it can often taste sour, jagged and unpleasant. We cannot see ourselves as our staff see us, so gird your loins and ask for help to be a better leader. This is never easy, but the alternative of blundering forward, repeating the same errors is not tenable. At some point the organization will have a reckoning with us and it might prove fatal to our careers. Better to take our medicine early, under our own direction, than hoping for the best and eventually getting the chop.

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.

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.