Managing with Aloha Coaching

Are you up for a Love-minded Aloha Challenge today?

What better day is there than Valentine's Day to celebrate ALOHA, the universal value of unconditional love of others, and the unconditional love of self?

Yet as I thought about this, I wondered how I could help with a more concrete coaching suggestion on how to make this Valentine's Day more useful for us at work. What could we all do that was pretty simple, but could also be pretty effective?

This is what I came up with: We could reveal our strengths, and we could ask others we work with to reveal their strengths too.

Why? Pure and simple, strengths make us feel stronger, better, and more confident. More useful to others.

So, I'm sending this missive out as a Valentine's Day suggestion to all of you who have some kind of subscription with me, either for my newsletters or my feeds: Wear your heart, and your strengths on your sleeve today! It's not that hard to do; you just do what you love...

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Aloha Valentines Day Ho‘ohana Community!

Are you up for a Love-minded Aloha challenge today?

I've been having conversations with managers this month about their Kuleana, and what is and what is not their responsibility. We all seem to agree on this:

• Managers matter most when they work with people.
• Therefore, it is the manager's responsibility to help people thrive.
• People thrive at work when the vital work they do is an expression of their strengths.
• In other words, thriving work is vital work you are really good at.

Here's our challenge though: Strengths can be hard for managers to spot unless they look like tangible activities. Strengths can be hard for people to explain, even when the ones they are trying to describe are their own.

Well, I can tell you this. 99 times out of a 100, when someone is doing something at work that they LOVE to do, that "something" is somehow connected to one of their strengths. When we work within our strengths, we get positive jolts of energy, and feelings of satisfaction that make us feel great. We feel a part of our own aloha spirit.

So managers, look for, listen for, and put your feelers out for the LOVE. In fact, you don't have to be a manager for this challenge; everyone who cares about the other people they work with can take it up too. Today is Valentines Day, and it is the PERFECT opportunity for you to do this. Here's some help you can say you got from a workplace aloha coach: Me.

Copy and paste, or forward my message in an email: Send this message (a challenge for you) to the people you work with (an invitation for them)... Here's my Love-minded Aloha Challenge for you both today:

Don't wait until you go home to celebrate your Valentine's Day Aloha. For the last hour of your workday today, do only what you most LOVE to do at work. Do it before then if you can, but do it for the last hour for sure —we all will.

Trust yourself: Trust that if you LOVE it (LOVE it, not LIKE it, or are OKAY with it), it comes from within the aloha you feel when you're at work, and trust it is GOOD.

Have yourself an Aloha Valentines Day.

“Managing with Aloha” is not enough today: Live and work with Aloha.

Be a lot nicer, speak a lot kinder, feel a lot stronger. We all will!
~ Rosa

Valentine Card photo credit: a photoset on Flickr by valart2008.

The Manager’s Responsibility for Leadership

Is to create clarity where it may not yet exist.

“There's something unique and different that makes a leader, and it's not about creativity or courage or integrity. As important as they are, you can have those attributes and still fail to be a great leader. A leader's job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can't help but change the present, because the present isn't good enough. They succeed only when they find a way to make people excited by and confident in what comes next… The need for a talent for optimism is almost self-evident. As a leader, you must believe, deeply, instinctively, that things can get better.”
—Marcus Buckingham

Marcus Buckingham has written quite a bit about both management and leadership, and I’ve read most of it, for I’ve been a fan of his for quite a while now. I recommend his books to people often, and I think his current title (Go Put Your Strengths To Work) truly helps people apply strengths management theory with its aha! moment to connect your strengths to specifically defined activities. For most managers, the “soft stuff” of management is actually the hardest stuff they have to learn to apply and use.

In contrast, I felt the book Buckingham called The One Thing You Need to Know fell short in making the impact it quite possibly could have. I’m not sure that even his most devoted fans when thinking back on it, could tell you what that one thing about “great managing, great leading, and sustained individual success” were (there were actually three things, one for each). I have to look them up again every so often too. I also suspect that Buckingham may have changed his mind about his one thing on leadership, and published the book prematurely (just a thought).

However The One Thing You Need to Know did make a lasting impression on me; I’m just not sure it was the one he intended to make. This is the one thing I latched onto as what I would remember about the manager’s responsibility for leadership; the single word of ‘clarity.’

“Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear. Leaders can be wrong. They can't be confusing.”
—Marcus Buckingham

As I consider it through my lens of Kuleana (which you now know as the Hawaiian value of responsibility), I believe that the manager’s responsibility for leadership within his or her circle of influence, is indeed to constantly make everything clear.

When you are the manager;
You don’t have to know it all.
You don’t have to own it all.
You certainly don’t have to do it all.
However if it is necessary, you are responsible for making it clear,
whatever “it” happens to be.

In the Role of the Manager Reconstructed I stated it this way:

Managers get the work to make perfect sense.

Connect the work to be done with the meaning why.

The manager’s responsibility for leadership is the responsibility for providing clarity.

When people are wondering about work, the manager is there to help them find the answers they seek, and often, that answer is to be found within that picture of “a better future” Buckingham talks about, whether that future is tomorrow, in ten years, or just about an hour from now.

The manager doesn’t have all the answers, but the the manager’s kuleana (responsibility) is to be the person who takes ownership of getting the answers found — and frankly, not playing it safe and wimping out about it when those answers are not always pretty. Coaching comes in when the manager has an answer, or has discovered it, but may choose not give it to another person outright, choosing to coach them through the thinking process and toward making their own discovery.

What do you think? Am I making this sound too simple?

Photo on Flickr: Its Future is in our Hands - Live Earth by aussiegall.

Living Mahalo with my Dailies

Stephen’s Day

I have an annual ritual for November 28th. It is the birthday of someone now in heaven who was exceptionally special to me, and so in his honor I call this Stephen’s Day. When Stephen died, I decided that I needed to commemorate the day somehow, so I would keep remembering and working on some of the things he had taught me to be grateful for during all the time he blessed my days. Having his birthday fall at the end of November, a month I have always associated with the diligent, focused practice of Mahalo (appreciation, gratitude, and thankfulness) seemed to be an added affirmation.

That affirmation has now become gift. For remember, living within mahalo is living within thankfulness for each element which makes your life precious to you.

Kēia Manawa

Stephen was someone who could focus on the present moment clearly and with perceptive intensity, able to see the everything existing in the here and now. In Hawai‘i we call this kēia manawa, living in moments which seize the day with both hands, with heart, mind, gut and soul. Kēia la; today you own the day.

Stephen was someone who never looked behind him, easily letting things go and leaving the past behind. What was over was done. He was also someone who was never in a rush to have tomorrow come, fully knowing that a single day is never long enough for us mere humans to milk it fully of all its possibility. However have no hesitation or doubt: We were here to try. And try he did, Stephen lived his too-short life in a joyous way that made everyone else feel lucky to be on earth with him.

However Stephen was not obsessive about whatever he chose to do either; in fact, he had relaxing down to an art form. His was a life of contentment. When you live in Mahalo as Stephen did, you die with no regrets.

My Dailies

This is my annual ritual: On November 28 I rewrite my Dailies for the next year to come, starting from scratch and letting my self’s intention do any remembering. My Dailies fill a simple list on a single sheet of paper, and I print a dozen copies, putting them wherever I may need them to be readily accessible for me. The electronic copy goes on my calendar as a daily recurrence for 5am so I read it whenever I first switch online.

On my list of dailies is everything I would want to do each and every day if I could possibly fit them all in.

From year to year my list has gotten longer, though I do stick to my one-page-only rule, and frankly, I have never had a day where I did everything on it. If you add up all the minutes, it probably isn’t even possible.

But here’s the rub: Without my Dailies, I probably wouldn’t accomplish half the things I do each day; I would not manifest as many possibilities as I do, and I would miss opportunities I now see more clearly. Looking at the dailies I have just now written, I usually do achieve the first ten at minimum.

Mahalo for a brand new year to come

Here are the Stephen’s Day dailies I settled on today. Those of you who have read my writing regularly over the past year will recognize the influences :) I’ve added in some explanatory italics and links for you. Values are in bold, and you can find those links in the column to the right.

Hiring? Here’s a Better Classified Ad and a 5-Point Strategy

We need self-starters, problem-solvers, and go-getters.

When you call for an interview, be prepared to talk about how you will be that person in OUR company.

Hire with a better strategy: Use your values to drive all future behavior. When you hire, this is behavior you are paying for.

1. Pick the values that will be most important to you. Focus: Choose three to concentrate on, no more, no less.

2. Get to the gist of them. Write them in plain-English, direct and to the point just like that first sentence above. Want honesty? Say you want truth-tellers. Want unbridled enthusiasm? Say you want energy-creators (way better than momentum-builders). It may also help you to choose your phrasing based on if you are looking for someone who will primarily work as a team player, or independently.

3. Ask for them. Be direct. And ask at the time they sink in; times of choice, decision and agreement, not just response.

4. Expect more to get more. Remember, the person you hire will be your business partner. “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

5. Hire for the right answers. Trust me, you’ll get them from the right people (unless you discover they were lying).

Bonus Tip: Write one ad per person wanted, NOT per job classification. Think about it this way: All six watermen in a canoe can accurately be called paddlers, however one is the stroker, another sits in the power seat, another is the steersman, and so forth - they don’t all do the same thing, and you wouldn’t want them to!

How does this relate to the Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha?

a) value alignment,

b) strengths management,

c) proactive performance, and

d) employees as Business Partners in the ‘Ohana in Business.

No doubt about it: Hiring (or selecting the partners you out-source through) may be the single most important decision you make in business.

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Related articles:

• The ‘Ohana in Business is a Place for Business Partners.

• Lōkahi and Your Greatest Team, and Ho‘olōkahi and Rethinking our Agreements.

• The Eight Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha.

~ ~ ~Today’s Featured posting: It's my turn! My article is called Toot Sweetly: Create Your Distinction, and I talk about the value of Ho‘ohanohano.

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.

How Strengths and Performance Coaching Intersect with Managing with Aloha

I am participating in the call-in series that Marcus Buckingham has put together for his Summer of Development, a promotion connected to his current effort, Go Put Your Strengths to Work. Calls are scheduled each Thursday over a 6-week time period, one week for each of the 6 Steps he outlines in his book of that name. This morning’s call was week #4’s session about how we should be dealing with our weaknesses.

So far, I find I am coming away with one or two things from each 45-minute call. I have studied his book in detail throughout a Learning Project we’d put together for our Joyful Jubilant Learning community, and so my takeaways have usually been connected to the responses he gives to questions which have previously been sent to him by readers. My takeaways are either on

a) the WHAT of his response, for he is strategically choosing questions on things that are additions to the book, or on things he has found were commonly misunderstood and thus, he needs to better clarify them for us.

b) the HOW he responds. It is pretty fascinating to me that Buckingham says he is not a coach and thinks of himself as more of a presenter, however he coaches exceptionally well when he does so.

A bit more on b) in regard to the call itself, for those who choose to listen to the transcript later: Buckingham may be an example of what he spoke of today; a case where someone may have a talent and ability for an acitivity they have no appetite for (in his case, coaching). If I am right about this, it makes his calls seem very generous, however he told us about something else today that would better explain it; looking at what you yourself consider a weakness through the lens of a strength you have.

Really great learnings, and I will likely share more about these calls at Joyful Jubilant Learning to fully complement the project there, however two thoughts came to me for us here at Managing with Aloha Coaching, one a WHAT, and one a HOW.

Similar to strengths work, managing with aloha is about PERFORMANCE

Both last week and this morning, Buckingham stressed that [and I paraphrase based on the notes I took during the call];

The reason you do this program is performance, not happiness. The happiness may come as a fringe benefit, for working primarily within your strengths energizes you, but the point is performance. We focus on strengths because it is the most efficient way to get someone to perform.

When and if weaknesses get in the way, it is your responsibility to deal with them if you are a manager in business. The weakness part of the program is important because we don’t just stop doing them, we manage around them. Sometimes, those tasks which are weaknesses must get done, and you do have to just suck it up and do them.

I run into this with Managing with Aloha as well. Say “aloha” and the first thought most people have is that the philosophy must be all warm and fuzzy, for how can being “Mr. or Ms. Aloha with everyone,” i.e. just being a nicer and better person, be a completely viable and comprehensive strategy for business?

My answer is the same as Buckingham’s; I wrote Managing with Aloha to help managers perform better, addressing that responsibility they have with getting things done through other people in the best way possible, AND understanding that “getting things done” will likely have repercussions they (and you) need to understand and deal with. My hope for you is that in this dealing with those repercussions, you get more pro-active over time, and less re-active. I think of the MWA philosophy as one that drives proactivity, so that all the work you do is intentional (Ho‘ohana).

I am a fan of the work by the Gallup Organization and Marcus Buckingham because strengths management fits into MWA perfectly, and in fact, I teach strengths management as one of the 8 Key Concepts of our management programs. It is practically sound work practice. The philosophy of workplace aloha practices, is about adding values to the mix.

MY MANA‘O (what I believe to be true) ~ ~ ~ I believe that best SUCCESS in Business comes from your TALENT + your ALOHA expressed with VALUE alignment. Achieve this, and you CAN “walk your talk.” Achieve this, and you WILL also walk the emotional intelligence of your values, and walk the intention of your Ho‘ohana.

 

What we call COACHING is not the same for everyone 

When I participate in programs like this, I always ask myself how I could use the same or a similar coaching technique for my own clients, and I sit quietly to debrief and learn from any time I have witnessed another teacher, coach, trainer, expert or guru in action. In that debrief, I will always look at my present list of coaching clients, asking myself if WHAT I have just learned or HOW I have just learned it would help them in whatever we are currently working on.

The vast majority of you who read what I write online are not my current clients, however you are on my debrief checklist too, for you are equally important to me.

Therefore, I am wondering: Would a call-in program like Buckingham’s Summer Series help you with the concepts of Managing with Aloha? I am thinking it would, and that an idea for this, our newly revamped MWAC site, would be to begin our value of the month program with a single call where I present the value’s corresponding chapter to you verbally first. Not on Day One where I give you enough to read with my newsletter, but sometime near the end of week one. If you participated by then following up with any questions you still have, it could greatly enhance the quality of all I write for you in the rest of the month.

I’m liking the idea, but I will honestly have to fit it into my current workload (for I would present it as a free service to you.) Meanwhile, if you have thoughts about it, either encouragement so I will know there IS interest in my idea, or enhanced suggestions on the HOW, do add a comment here or send me an email. Any offers to help me with setting up the technology involved would be greatly appreciated!

Starting with this posting, I am going to be using a different posting style for MWAC, where my paragraphs are clean, in the writer’s style of an essay versus a blog post, and applicable links are added and explained at the end, similar to a book’s footnotes. Here we go;

1. 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. This whole technical part of it will be part of my own learning curve in putting something similar together for us here.

2. Visit Joyful Jubilant Learning for Learning Project #2, Learn to Lead With Your Strengths. I was the project leader, and it was essentially a different kind of book club which encouraged all participants to put what we were reading into concrete action steps. We included both Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath of the Gallup Organization. David Zinger helped me with some terrific profiles of Buckingham’s Trombone Player Wanted film series.

3. Lisa Haneberg had done a review for MWA she called, Two Managers in One – Managing with Aloha, in which she talked about her impressions of my book, and I loved it because she “got it” in regard to the need for tough-love performance driving at times. Great managers don’t shy from the complete job they must take responsibility for doing. Once again Lisa, mahalo for the write up you did!

4. I mentioned the newsletter I distribute each month, and here is the August edition if you currently are not a subscriber: It is called Ho‘ohana ‘Ōlelo; vol. 5 issue 8; August 2007. You can find all the subscription choices I offer on this page.