MWA3P: Part Three – How Organizational Culture Happens

Preface: This is Article 4 of a 4-article series on MWA3P, the productivity coaching offered within the Managing with Aloha workplace movement.

Article 1 was our Overview, and in Article 2 we covered how we help individuals create better personal systems for themselves. In Article 3, we addressed the productivity of the entire company, so synergistic work teams flourish, and project work gets tackled in the best possible way. Today, for our final article:

What is Organizational Culture?

When starting this series, I had written, “Because we will only have 4 Sundays to work with, we will not go through much detail with MWA3P, but you will learn of an overview that will give you a new lens through which to view your own system.”

We have done that in the first three articles of our series. Hopefully you have whittled away a good portion of what may have been busy-work for you, to focus on your keepers; those processes which work best for you in a substantial way, leaving you with the feeling that you have really accomplished something either individually, or with your entire work team (and often, you can get both at once!) When all is in place, Parts 1 and 2 of MWA3P should smoothly handle whatever day-to-day demands the business reveals.

In this fourth article, we’ll look at a slightly different but important distinction, a way that you can think of productivity as not only getting things done for you effectively, but as a creative process too. What gets created, is what we commonly call organizational culture, a culture which will help you attain the visionary goals you have set your mission-critical sights on beyond today, within the framework of a business.

I remind you if I may, about that caveat of sorts in the subtitle of Managing with Aloha; what I hope to impact, is the “Art of Business.”

The “Hawaiianess” of what we teach within the Managing with Aloha philosophy is our context, and a kind of “ethnic laboratory” from which we draw real examples. We use our Hawaiian words for values, to help teach a new Language of Intention. Ours is a model that can be duplicated in other ethnic laboratories, whether their heritage is Japanese, Swiss, Portuguese, Indian, or “deep in the heart of the yellow rose of Texas.”

However model will always somehow differ from execution.

Think about this; the resulting culture which emerges from a particular team’s practice can never exactly be duplicated. Over time, if their execution has proved to be consistently productive AND consistently rewarding (to both the business and the people associated with it), the culture which had resulted, is recognized as the sense of insider community which serves that team well. When new hires join the team, they may bring talent, skills, and knowledge with them initially, but the reason we always take them through a new-hire orientation is so that they can learn our organizational culture as soon as possible, get comfortable with it, and then participate in it as soon as possible, as how they now work TOO.

Organizational culture just takes this to a bigger picture level, where there may be more than one team, and there needs to be further integration for complete unity (Lōkahi). Teams also vary depending on the ‘Ohana in Business; for instance, at times they may involve contractors or customers.

When is Organizational Culture Healthy?

When we at SLC say that our mission is to reinvent the workplace, value by value, what we intend to deliver to you is a much healthier organizational culture. You already have one; the question is simply how healthy it currently is, and how much stronger it can be. Managing with Aloha is like that doctor’s bag of goodies we bring with us to offer you some elixirs you may not have considered elixirs for your base-metal values before.

From the dictionary: ELIXIR ~ noun,
3. an alchemic preparation formerly believed to be capable of transmuting base metals into gold.
4. the quintessence or absolute embodiment of anything.

Your values are like your bone structure in an organization; they hold everything together in a form that makes you instantly recognizable to the rest of the world. However you cannot discount the importance of these productivity practices; they are the actions which give you movement and life so that your bones start breathing; walking, talking, creating, and making differences and shaping new possibilities.

Leaders will ask me, “If I want to create a more vibrant organizational culture, where should I start?” and my short answer is, “With your habits.” Organizational culture is made healthier one habit at a time. The deliverable of good productivity practices, are great habits.

So in keeping with the format we have used before, here’s a brief look at this “third P” in the MWA3P Toolkit that we also refer to as, A MWA Culture and Peaks Three and Four: Managing and Leading with Aloha.

MWA3P Part Three: The Blending of Organizational Culture and Operational Practice

Tools and Strategies

Again, we are using the same bulleted headings as before, so you will see how they may align with those in Part One, and those in Part Two (go to the same Tools and Strategies heading in those articles).

• ‘Imi ola, and Best Possible Life

Remember “bigger picture.” In Part Three we talk about something we call the Ho‘ohana Compass® used by the ‘Ohana in Business. Think of those 4 directions on any compass; in the MWA model, ours define these four legs of a journey: Values, Mission, Customer, and Ho‘ohana. When the business “travels well” it is Values-Centered, Mission-Driven, Customer-Focused, and Ho‘ohana, the purpose-passion-intention of the work itself for all stakeholders involved (i.e. all Business Partners in the ‘Ohana in Business) is always our North Star.

• Kākou Communications

Within a healthy organizational culture, we “take our pulse” by monitoring the blood flow of communication. In this portion of our MWA3P model we take a complete, comprehensive audit of all communication systems in an organization, from the passive ones like bulletin boards, to the internal and external marketing missives on which a company’s ethics are judged. In our toolkit is a kind of alignment mapping with the ‘Ohana in Business model that gives us a “annual check-up” of our Kākou Communications (our Language of “We”).

• Lōkahi Teaming

There is substantial team evolution here. Earlier, I wrote, “Teams vary depending on the ‘Ohana in Business; for instance, at times they may involve contractors or customers” and so we take what we have learned in Parts One and Two to a wider circle of influence for a wider accomplishment of Lōkahi (collaborative unity). Within the company itself, growth of team now gets more sophisticated, particularly with financial literacy and the fostering of an entrepreneurial mindset. This is the exceptionally exciting stuff that I personally adore working on as the SLC head coach!

• Strengths Management

Oh, and I love this part too! In Part Three, this is the evolution from strengths optimization in teams to values-based Strengths Branding for a business. Currently, this is the area of my personal growth and learning as the leader of the MWA movement, for I want to deliver much more in this area to my customers via the coaching I do for them. My chosen mentor in much of this is Gallup University; I am a very willing student!

• Self-Discipline and Accountability

Businesses do not exist in a vacuum; they are not solitary affairs. Businesses of all shapes and sizes affect their neighborhood communities in some way. At a very basic level, they draw their employees and/or customers from those communities; at a supervisory level they affect the at-home quality of people’s lives in the way that at-work relationships happen. As we climb the third and fourth peaks here, our focus is the mālama (care and stewardship) of Sense of Place, Community Partnership, and Civic Responsibility.

• Mālama Measurements®

Again, remember “bigger picture.” You will recall that Part One was self-reckoning, and Part Two had to do with team-reckoning. In Part Three our “reckoning” is with owners, shareholders, and the board of directors who can so profoundly influence businesses —these are the people who make the person you feel is your big boss, feel like he or she is stuck in that powerless realm of mid-management too (yes, really). This is the landscape of much of the Executive Coaching we do, and the name is so appropriate: Measurements are crucial, but so is Mālama; the big bosses need Mālama too.

And there you have it. As I’d written early on in this series, this has been an overview of MWA3P, and a good view into my business as well, one I’ve never really given my web audience before. This is the “stuff” with which we make the Managing with Aloha movement real for our clients each and every day in the work we do. However...

I also end with an announcement for you:

More on the nitty-gritty of the MWA3P toolkit will be included in the inaugural courses of our completely virtual SLC coaching program. Behind the scenes (up to now!) we’ve been calling it SLC Uniwebversity. We have been working on our web-based curriculum for months now, and it looks like we’ll be ready to roll in late January or early February. So stay tuned!

A final editorial note: I have decided to break this series out of our Sunday Mālama indexing, and you will now find a separate MWAC category listed expressly for MWA3P Productivity Coaching.

Now that you have read through the entire series, I would truly love to hear from you. Feel free to comment here, or write to me privately if you prefer. Mahalo for reading.

Comments

[Dwayne Melancon]

I read this offline and am just getting the opportunity to reply. Each post just gets better, Rosa - the categories are very helpful to me and the resources are terrific. In particular, I like the theme of how our consistent actions - not simply desires and platitude - will create our reality, and the reality of our organizations.

Keep up the great work.

[Rosa Say]

Aloha Dwayne, thank you so much for your feedback. As I wrote this, I tried to be sensitive to not teasing with too broad an overview stroke, and choosing some complimentary resources within my past writings that would indeed highlight what everyone can do just in their own self-paced learning.

As with everything else though, and as you point out, it does take the focused intent to act, and the self-discipline to go the distance from learnING to learnED and in-USE.

Peer to peer coaching helps big-time too; another huge benefit to teaming up – and the reason I am devoting much more of my personal coaching laboratory to teaming dynamics.