Preface: November and December are holiday months, and we want them to be joyful and celebratory. Thus October is our time to prepare for them; to clear our decks so we may welcome winter in with open arms and not increasing stress levels. My nickname for October has been “sweet closure month,” for it is the time to bring the year’s big initiatives and major projects to a close; to finish early, and finish well. Kokua Kākou: To help, we are devoting our Sunday Mālama installments at MWAC to MWA3P, the Managing with Aloha study of best productivity practices.
By now you know how passionate I am about Managing with Aloha, and that as a work philosophy it is the heart and soul of all the coaching we do at Say Leadership Coaching.
We are always as anxious as our new clients are, to jump right into our coaching of concepts like Sense of Place and the MWA Language of Intention, and directly into the strengths management and value alignment connections of Aloha, offering tools like the Daily Five Minutes® and Mahalo Log®.
Everyone’s desire is that MWA sticks, and will not join the ranks of “another of those flavor of the month trainings.” Thus, our coaching reality is that we will normally tackle personal productivity early in bringing MWA to managers and leaders. In short, we need to ‘make room’ for practicing MWA in their workweek. We consider MWA a replacement to what managers are doing which can be improved upon, not an addition, however we cannot ignore the baggage managers are already carrying with them: We have to address it, and we certainly do not want to add to the pressures they may already be feeling. The practice of MWA has to make things better for them, not worse, — not even transitionally worse with a later pay-off. We go for better from the get-go.
That’s where what we call MWA3P comes in. MWA3P is our nickname for The 3 Parts to Personal Productivity connected to Managing with Aloha.
You have to think of professional productivity in connection to personal behavior, and we align our MWA3P coaching to the three components we feel must work in tandem in the pursuit of more effective organizational behavior. When values-aligned behavior is instilled in a company in all three areas, you can achieve an organizational culture managed with Aloha. You fall short when one of the three is neglected, and as a result you get thwarted in achieving your strategic initiatives. The concept is similar to driving a car: For maximum performance you use all gears and you learn to shift well between them. You don’t skip around and you don’t leave a gear or two out.
These are the 3 Parts of Personal Productivity we align with the concepts of Managing with Aloha:
1. The Individual’s Performance
When you seek improvement, you must change behaviors which aren’t working for you, replacing them with values-connected behaviors which will. The work itself must be meaningful and worthwhile for you. Work should engage your passions, for your day-to-day energies will come from those passion-fueled intentions which motivate you. As the pleasing result, your peers will value you and the performance you offer to the team, even when their own motivations may differ.
[In our coaching, this is largely where Ho‘ohana and the good habits connected to personal values come into play. We help managers create a trusted system of personal productivity they feel good about, so that their performance is something they and everyone else can count on and feel great about.]
2. Productivity in the Organization
This must happen cohesively, i.e. for everyone within your work team, and within your organization. If not, individuals feel they are going it alone no matter how good they get with their own personal habits. Fluctuating productivity levels frustrate people just as much as variations in core competencies do, because maintaining productive IS a core competency. Company-wide consistency, support and momentum is achieved by honoring important constants (i.e. values), simultaneous to the proactive adoption of visionary organizational change (positive change is largely the change we choose).
[This is where the MWA value alignment with mission and vision comes into play. We help managers create collaborative Lōkahi Teams, and understand how you steadily make progress with incremental shifts versus that status-quo feeling that you are a just a guinea pig turning a wheel going nowhere.]
3. The Blending of Organizational Culture and Operational Practice
No matter how wonderful a managerial work philosophy, (and MWA is pretty wonder-full!) it must ‘get real’ i.e. become pragmatic and realistic for real-time work, smoothly handling the demands the business reveals. Operational systems and industry processes are important considerations as the “givens” of whatever your business may be, however the question is if they are aligned with the values-centering and mission-direction you have deemed culturally important for parts 1 and 2, the Individual and the Organization (where motivational fuel is fed into your car’s engine).
[This is where specific MWA methodology in both operational and productivity practices comes into play, i.e. where our MWA Toolkit is integrated. For example, most organizations require annual performance appraisals, and they are not going away. Thus we offer a MWA technique for doing them in a greatly improved way, with aloha.]
With this as our introduction and overview, I’ll continue to share more of our coaching in the MWA3P curriculum as times goes by, folding it into our “Value your Month, Value your Life” program here on MWAC. In the three remaining weeks we have for Sunday Mālama in October, we’ll look at each one of these three parts individually, and how we use them in our “mountain climbing” up the four peaks of MWA;
- October 14: Part One — Individual Productivity and Peak One: Living with Aloha
- October 21: Part Two — Organizational Productivity and Peak Two: Working with Aloha
- October 28: Part Three — A MWA Culture and Peaks Three and Four: Managing and Leading with Aloha
Related Reading: How does Overwhelm get created for you? Don’t Just Add, Replace. Own the 100%
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