Happy National Career Coach Day! Career Coaching is one of my areas of specialty, and right now most of my clients are in the process of upleveling their careers to leadership positions.

I would like to share with you my leadership philosophy when my husband and I owned our restaurant. That’s where I took this photo, and that’s our restaurant’s logo on the upper left. The lady on the horse is the mom of one of my employees, she was riding her horse past our restaurant and stopped to say hi.

My philosophy comes from a Japanese historical drama that I watched on TV, I don’t speak Japanese but the show had English subtitles. I’m going to try to make a long story as short as I can.

The wife of a fairly low-ranked samurai spent her life’s savings to buy her husband an amazing horse. When their lord, Oda Nobunaga, learned about the horse he wanted to see it.

In that scene in the show, Lord Oda was riding the horse in a ring while praising the horse, saying it was the best horse in all of Japan. The couple watched with sullen, helpless expressions like they thought Oda was going to take the horse for himself.

Instead, Lord Oda said, “I am going to look so good with you on this horse.”

The couple, and even I, were like, “What?!”

Oda said, “When people see you, my vassal, riding this horse, they are going to think such great things about me.”

Wow!

I don’t know how historically accurate that incident was portrayed in the show, but what I learned from it was when you let your employees be greater than you are, they make you look good.

That’s how I ran my restaurant: when my employees outshined me, I polished their shine.

Indeed, it made me look confident.

Many times I said, “I’m going to defer to my manager on this because she’s better at this than I am.”

People would say, “You’re the owner, shouldn’t your judgement prevail?”

I replied, “My judgement is that I should trust her judgement on this.”

To which most people said something like, “Wow! You’re a great owner!”

A friend said, “That’s the difference between management and leadership. You’re a leader.”

Now I coach leaders.

#NationalCareerCoachDay