MWA3P: Part Two – Productivity in the Organization

Preface: This is article 3 of a 4-article series on MWA3P, the productivity coaching offered within the Managing with Aloha workplace movement. Article 1 covered our Overview, and in Article 2 we covered how we help individuals create better personal systems for themselves.

Today we address the productivity of the entire company, so synergistic work teams flourish, and project work gets tackled in the best possible way.

Brevity was a difficult challenge for me in writing this installment for you, for every single one of the nineteen values in MWA comes into play here.

We refer to this second component of MWA3P as “Working with Aloha” the second mountain peak of the Managing with Aloha “mountain range.” The 4 Peaks are Living with Aloha, Working with Aloha, Managing with Aloha, and Leading with Aloha.

1. Living with Aloha, means starting with you. Thus, we talked about individual performance the last time.

2. In Working with Aloha, you seek to get others involved, for in organizational life, we rarely work alone; at some point, we engage with others, and they with us. We count on each other.

3. Having conquered these first two mountains, and with good air in our lungs, we begin to climb the next two peaks, Managing with Aloha, and Leading with Aloha — we’ll talk about that in the last part of this series.

Currently, we [here at MWAC] are just where I believe we need to be for the focus of Working with Aloha; having discussions about Great Lōkahi Teams and the Kākou Language of We, enhancing the communication we have within our teams. These are the overall themes of this second MWA3P component, and they are timely:

“Great teaming is and always will be a worthwhile discussion to have in the workplace, and I think it may be more important than ever right now: With the generational shift now occurring as more and more boomers retire, or think about their own ‘second acts,’ jobs and roles are getting reinvented daily. I strongly believe that creating a workplace of stronger, trusting teams may be the best means to the end results we are seeking.”

The above comment was one I left for Unfolding Leadership author and coach Dan Oestreich just yesterday, at an article he’d written about Team Trust. Dan responded that “relationships more than ever that carry the weight of our ability to get things done,” and he’s right, bringing us right back to this discussion of our productivity as one of the ways we get this trust in each other to happen.

Dan explains his vision this way: “In great teams, I believe members:

• can work out their performance issues together
• develop deep dialogues about personal growth and development
• meaningfully take on the leadership of the group
• fully collaborate with one another by pooling resources
• handle tough relationship issues openly

“I’ve found this often to be a very high standard, but not an unattainable one. And once people understand it, they can be intrigued with the profound possibilities for their own growth and for organizational change. They are often closer than they think to operating at a higher level.”

As you can tell, Dan and I both see this crucial work on the team dynamic as the bridge-builder to creating organizational culture, and laying stronger foundations for greater leadership initiatives.

Read Dan’s entire posting here: Team Trust Levels Survey (He offers a pdf there that you might want to check out.)

Tools and Strategies

So let’s get to our Coaching Toolkit for MWA3P Part Two. I am using the same bulleted headings as before, so you will see that they align with those in MWA3P Part One, and that we add Communication (Kākou) and Teaming (Lōkahi).

• ‘Imi ola, and Best Possible Life

In Part One we wrote Ho‘ohana Statements that create personal mission, one based on the personal values that excite and energize the individual, the ones they get passionate about and say are their deepest convictions. In Part Two a second draft is developed, so that the Ho‘ohana Statements are blended with professional mission. When work is such a big part of your life (and it is for all of us), both halves construct the whole.

• Kākou Communications

In short, we get everyone talking, and everyone listening and responding — Kākou, together and inclusively. If you know me at all, you get only one guess to the first tool … yep, The Daily 5 Minutes®. Here we also introduce our MWA Rules of Engagement®, and we work on Team Huddles — we’ll be talking about this here on MWAC before the month is over.

• Lōkahi Teaming

This was our course of study in September’s MWAC value of the month program, and so briefly, our tools here are The Lesson of the Six Seats®, found on page 119 of MWA, and the practice of Workplace Mahalo®, found on page 194, under the heading of Creating the habit of appreciation.

• Strengths Management

You will recall that we identified our personal strengths in Part One: Now we combine them in the team dynamic, where we value diversity. We learn how what makes us different individually, combines to make us incredibly strong together, so that our strengths can be leveraged in another way.

This is where we also inventory our non-human assets and resources in the organization: Do we have all the tools we need to make the most of the talent, skills, and knowledge that we possess, so that we can work toward our full potential? We call this our Mālama of workplace assets.

• Self-Discipline and Accountability

Teamwork means Project Work, and MWA3P seeks to make projects exciting and fun, so that any apathy, complacency, or the slightest hints of day-to-day boredom are discovered and banished. We create WOW! Projects, just as they all should be. In the process, we also do a systematic purging of any auto-pilot and sacred cows — they are moo’d out!

‘Ike loa, the Hawaiian value of learning, really shines brightly in project work. Think of projects as mini pilots, where you can try just about anything, testing, re-testing, tweaking and playing, putting things together and then blowing them up again. The messiness of “kaizen” and creativity are essential for innovation, and these are the kinds of projects that fuel a company with energy. Memories flood back, and I get excited about the ones we are now working on just as I write this!

• Mālama Measurements®

You can guess this part, can’t you? We move from self-reckoning to team-reckoning. We teach peer-to-peer coaching here too, so individuals ask each other for help at all levels of the organization without hesitation: They involve each other in decision-making and in the execution of those decisions through the team dynamic. We are setting a stage for professional development with some different measurements, including those that are intellectually honest about those crucial relationships Dan talked about.

That’s Part Two of MWA3P, and article 3 in our series. Next Sunday we’ll wrap this up.

On the slight chance you haven’t got your fill of this productivity stuff, I wrote an article for Joyful Jubilant Learning yesterday that you can add to your arsenal with Part One on Individual Performance. It was called Learn a 5-Step Weekly Review: You’ll love it.