4 Things Managers Can Do to Bring Managing with Aloha to their Company Culture

How do I change my entire company’s culture?

This was a reader’s question that was answered by Marcus Buckingham in regards to putting his book into practice. His book is Go Put your Strengths to Work, and it offers a 6-step plan for identifying your strengths on the job, and capitalizing on them in a way that will improve your work performance.

Buckingham answered it by qualifying that he was addressing his answer to managers, and this is what he suggested, keying in on the word “change” in the question. (He first explained that his answer is the result of much study, and not just of his own opinion.)

He said, “There are four key levers to pull if you want to effect change in a culture;”

1. You can change the expressed values of that culture — “the stuff that’s up on the walls.”

2. You can change the heroes of that culture

3. You can change what gets talked about in the informal communications network — “around the water cooler, in the lunchroom, in the car on the way home”

4. You can change the metrics “with how performance gets measured”

I will share the link shortly for you to hear the transcript of Buckingham’s presentation for his complete context in regard to the strengths movement he is a champion of. As you might imagine, my ears instantly perked up when he mentioned values first; as I write of in Managing with Aloha,

MY MANA‘O (what I believe to be true) ~ ~ ~ A company’s values is like the software that runs that company, and the values of the leadership team in charge are those that are currently plugged in and operating. Taken to a more intimate level, every single manager in a workplace creates and establishes the culture in the area he or she is responsible for.

These would be my add-ons to those four levers, if the question were about bringing Managing with Aloha to an entire culture:

1. Value your expressed values — Take them off the walls and bring them into everything you do. Have a value of the month program similar to what we do here at MWAC, so that keeping actions in alignment with the why of your values applies constant, gentle pressure to the way work happens every single day. Name project campaigns with values; for instance participating in a community-based initiative may be a Mālama campaign.

2. Value your heroes — Celebrate the excellence of those who “walk the talk,” and when you recognize anyone for anything, make sure you highlight the value that was “lived and worked with aloha” in the story of that person becoming the hero of the day.

3. Get your “language of intention” to permeate the organization — a) Create your own vocabulary and language of the insider. Phrases like the one we are talking about this month, “the ‘Ohana in Business,” change directional movement. b) Encourage continuations within the workplace; don’t hold meetings that stretch to forever until some answer is agreed upon; reconnoiter — scout ideas and answers by assigning the homework of seek-and-find missions and then regroup later.

4. Get everyone comfortable with metrics by choosing the right ones — I have two favorite tools in getting MWA to work for organizations; a) ho‘ohana statements, using them to wrap job descriptions, goal setting and annual reviews up in the right performance metrics, and b) The Daily Five Minutes ®, making sure that everyone in the company is continually learning to comfortably and completely communicate with each other.

As for the metrics themselves, this conveniently brings us back to our current discussions here about the ‘Ohana in Business; when your values, business plan, and business model all match up and are in sync, the right metrics for you become very apparent.

Links which I have referenced here;

1. The book written by Marcus Buckingham is Go Put Your Strengths to Work. You can buy Managing with Aloha from Amazon.com.

2. Visit the Marcus Buckingham site for information on his Summer of Development Series. Even if you have not signed up for the calls, you can listen to them afterwards by downloading the files they offer. I previously spoke of this series in this posting: How Strengths and Performance Coaching Intersect with Managing with Aloha.

3. As I continue to populate them on this site, these MWAC categories will be the ones that relate most to this discussion: ‘Ohana in Business, Proactive Performance, Strengths Management, Value Alignment. This link will aggregate all my articles with mana‘o boxes on a single page.