Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

The 20 Benefits of Peer to Peer Coaching (and the MWA Way of doing it)

Peer to Peer Coaching the Managing with Aloha way (P2PC for short) is a tool I bring to as many workplaces as I possibly can: As with The Daily Five Minutes® (D5M), I am always looking for a place to insert P2PC into the opportunities we have while working together, whatever their coaching or learning program with Say Leadership Coaching may be.

Here is the short form of Peer to Peer Coaching. 5 Steps you can count on one hand while practicing it:

The 5 Steps of Peer-to-Peer Coaching Ask a question about what you would like to be coached on. Be completely open-minded about the answers you get. Get whatever clarity you need, and then, Say thank you. Follow-up by creating some new habits aimed at improvement. Check back with the person you spoke with in about a month, and ask them how you are doing, and for more coaching if you still need it. P2PC becomes a dynamic feedback loop when you schedule the conversation consistently (different subject matter is bound to come up) and take turns starting at number 1. in mutually beneficial relationships invoking the Law of Reciprocity.

Writing this article for Talking Story came to mind for me while sharing an example of using P2PC on Managing with Aloha Coaching connected to the value of Ho‘ohanohano, delivering dignity and respect.

You can read it there at Are you a high maintenance manager?

What is the Managing with Aloha 'way" with Peer to Peer Coaching?

Others will build pretty elaborate processes or coaching programs around P2PC (here is an example offered online by Syracuse University with a form and all. Sheesh... wonder if anyone actually fills it out.)

The MWA Way is to think of it as a simple, straightforward conversation, resist specific rules (like with confidentiality and being politically-correct) and just talk story. Jump in as you would to any other conversation you look forward to with a positive expectancy about the outcome, and build better relationships at the same time.

Bridge the Learning it, Knowing it, Doing it Gap

Like the rest of our SLC-MWA Tools, I do encourage you to make P2PC part of the expectations of your organizational culture:

Learn to Finish Conversations Well Redux

re·dux (rē-dŭks') ~ adj.
Brought back; returned. Used postpositively

Learn to Finish Conversations Well was a posting I had done for Lifehack.org about a year ago. There are two reasons I am republishing it here with fresh updates:

Reason # 1: As a reference link for SLC Communications Coaching, and as a tool you can use today.

Shortly after its first appearance I rewrote my essay, customizing it as part of a 9-week virtual communications coaching program that I developed for those newly entering management positions. There is also a variation we use for more seasoned managers who are working in a different country or community culture that is foreign to what they have been accustomed to, something which is very common today.

This program has since been adopted by several companies with tremendous results, and in particular, the 6-steps I covered in Learn to Finish Conversations Well have vastly improved the reputation that managers in the program have achieved in regard to their follow-up: When they tell someone on their staff, “Thank you; I’ll take care of it” people know exactly what they mean, and they trust that they will take care of it for an agreement has been made.

Practicing the 6-steps of Learn to Finish Conversations Well is what we work with during week 4 of the program within specific measurable exercises, however these are 6 steps that all managers can begin using today as a stand-alone exercise in their self-coaching.

I encourage you to try it, and to make it your habit.

Reason #2: As a reference link for the most popular tool I offer online for free: The Daily Five Minutes® described in Managing with Aloha (which we call D5M for short).

So here we are: Back home on Talking Story where it belongs!

Learn to Finish Conversations Well

We managers can get ourselves into far too many situations where we unwittingly set others up for disappointment because we haven’t learned to finish our conversations well. Many times we will tell one of our employees we’ll look into something, and we’ll even thank them sincerely for bringing issues to our attention, but then we end our conversation in an open-ended way which places us squarely in the Land of Fuzzy Expectations.

Overdo Talking Story? Might be possible.

I can assure you this is not how The Daily Five Minutes® goes!

The drawn-out stuff happens when you don’t talk everyday and they are finally able to catch you, trapped and squirming...

Via Matt at Drawn - great site to add to your readers.

More from the artist at his site: Nathan Huang Illustration.

Sweeten your messages

Phil posted this picture at Make It Great! for Wordless Wednesday, and while I have not yet seen this particular one on our store shelves, it made me think about how candy has figured into some other wow campaigns we've done through the years. It got to the point that the mere appearance of a bowl of candy in the middle of the conference table we used for our daily huddles would have people asking, “What are we working on this time?”

True, they became known as the “candy bribes” but it was a phrase that recognized how easily and effectively the right candy bar could quickly convey a message once that message was known and connected to some kind of action.

When this candy bar was introduced it became my favorite for The Daily Five Minutes®: Handing one to the person I was asking to “Take 5 minutes with me?” was like asking, “Ready and willing?”

Hershey then mixed it up, offering Original, White Chocolate, Peanut Butter, and a limited edition Chocolate Cookie version. Thanks guys! The Daily Five Minutes® is never boring!

I can remember one of my employees in particular who would take such pleasure in silently opening the candy bar right there and then – his way of saying “Yes” and then slowly eat a bite or two while he made me wait for the rest of the conversation. He enjoyed the game, but I did too – the D5Ms he gave me were always gems.

“—Assault the senses. It is always very effective to choose a strong visual image which is associated with your idea or change concept. When it is seen, it instantly conveys a strong and clear message. Consider the other senses of hearing, touch, taste, and scent, and decide if there are complimentary connections which will reinforce the visual message: perhaps you will choose a song, or slogan which will attach sound to your image. Use these triggers as consistently and pervasively as you can.”
—read more at Run a WOW Campaign at lifehack.org

Read more on the The Daily Five Minutes® here.

This is also a good post to start with on www.managingwithaloha.com if you are just hearing about the D5M for the first time: The Daily 5 Minutes: 9 Questions. It contains the link for the D5M excerpt in my book, Managing with Aloha.

Trigger Those Conversations Waiting to Happen

There is an article in the October issue of Fast Company called Time to Get Trigger Happy, Creating an environment for your idea which will make it more successful. It’s written by brothers Dan and Chip Heath, authors of the best selling book Made To Stick.

Triggers are the modern day equivalent of what we used to simply call reminders; for many of us, tying a string around our finger or snapping a rubber band around our wrists are time-tested triggers.

The article that the brothers Heath have penned for Fast Company asks, “What if people planned their ideas, from the start, to take advantage of triggers in the environment?” promoting it as a smart marketing strategy. They explain how the ingenious “Got Milk?” campaign coached us to crave milk when eating an Oreo or spooning out peanut butter. Most of their other examples illustrate how beverage marketers have created idea triggers better than anyone, and in ending, they challenge us to try planting some triggers of our own.

What’s the Talking Story connection?

The Heath brothers got me thinking: How would you use triggers to initiate different conversations in your workplace?

Time and time again, if I ask an employee who wants me to commiserate with them, “have you tried talking to your boss about this?” the answer that comes back to me will be, “there never seems to be a good time.” There are two implications here:

a) The employee doesn’t recognize the signs of when it IS a good time; if there are indeed these conversation triggers which exist, they don’t know about them.

b) The boss doesn’t do a good job in making these conversation triggers common knowledge, or his/her actions are so inconsistent the triggers are less than reliable.

One of my suggestions for you is the Daily 5 Minutes®. The trigger is the simple question, “Can we take 5 right now?” which when the D5M is known, and universally practiced in the organizational culture, is just like saying, “Ready, set, go! If this is a good time for you, it’s a great time for me. I want to give you the gift of my attention.”

But that’s just the beginning; it’s about piloting all kinds of triggers, and then campaigning them until they are part of the workplace – because they work, and work well.

However it’s also about singularity and consistency: One trigger can’t stand for a bunch of different things, for if it does, the trigger signals only one thing — confusion. Like the ‘weekly staff meeting’ with an agenda that is always so hit and miss that people start arriving with their entire inbox tucked under their arm ‘just in case.’

Makes you think about triggering in a whole new light, doesn’t it.

Read the Fast Company article online here: Time to Get Trigger Happy

More you can read and then Talk Story about:

• A recent success story for the Daily 5 Minutes® can be found at MWA Coaching, and I also have the D5M Index for you right here.

• You might also want to take a look at MWA3P: Part Three – How Organizational Culture Happens.

• One of my more popular articles recently: Are you a Conversation Killer without realizing you are? Three Tips to help.

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Writing Elsewhere: Review 8 and The Daily Five Minutes

Like many bloggers, I blog as I live and work, and thus there’s a real-time reason I’m writing about the D5M (Daily 5 Minutes) quite a bit again. It just so happens I have a few customers who are currently within all-out campaigns to cement the Daily 5 Minutes® into their company operations as a habit which never goes away. There are two reasons this happens;

a) The results of the D5M speak for themselves. People will introduce it to their managers as a “good idea to try” without fully and formally adopting it as their consistent company practice, and then lo and behold, the managers who do it as their habit start to reap the benefits. These are benefits = to results in workplace harmony the “didn’t do it” managers aren’t getting at the same rate, if at all.

As you can imagine, I LOVE this reason; when done, the D5M works. These are people who become my SLC customers based on this result, for they’re wondering, “What else does she have within this MWA philosophy of hers that we should be doing?”

b) For me personally, I no longer bring MWA to an organizational consulting gig without the D5M mandated by, enthusiastically taught and supported by, and continually demonstrated by the CEO of the company as my D5M poster child within that company. I bring a number of tools to organizations within the MWA curriculum, and the D5M is always the first one.

I LOVE this reason too, moreso as a coach. Having the D5M do its’ magic in a company makes my job working with them a whole lot easier and smarter (for me), and much more effective for them. The D5M is a catalyst for me in giving MWA a stickiness factor as the new way of managing well a workplace never again strays from. First trigger and catalyst, the D5M becomes a glue readily reapplied daily by managers, holding the rest of our MWA integration systemically into value alignment for their best benefit.

Yes indeed, all from getting more conversations going at work.

As it is intended to do, the D5M brings stuff up in 5-minute coaching opportunities, and best of all, they aren’t academic, and they aren’t biz-speak. These opportnities come up in a real-time laboratory of your work, both hits and misses. Management is a situational art, and we’re artful when we’re engaged in the right effort at the right time. Through the D5M, your staff lets you know exactly when that “right time” is, because they are so much closer to it — you can’t be everywhere, and neither do you want to be!

So within my own real-time work with customers, a common new-manager pitfall has come back in my radar lately, the work-world myth that the moment you’re “in charge” you have magic powers and mystic answers that “the line staff” doesn’t have. (See more on this according to restaurateur Danny Meyer.) As mentors to new managers and supervisors, one of the most valuable things we can teach them is how to finish their conversations with staff well.

If you are a manager, this may be one of the most helpful articles I’ve written for Leon at Lifehack.org in recent months, and I encourage you to add to it in the comments there or here if you’ve got more to share.

On Lifehack.org: Learn to Finish Conversations Well

On ManagingwithAloha.com: The Daily 5 Minutes: 9 Questions

From the archives: More Work-World Myths

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Also today, A JJL Love Affair with Books continues:

Be sure you check out the first Trackback Sunday on Joyful Jubilant Learning. If you have not had the chance to participate in this community forum yet, today is your day to jump in and take the plunge!

These were the books reviewed in the past week, and as I happened to be traveling, they caused me to make a beeline for the Barnes & Noble near to one of my customer’s offices. I truly need to be more adventurous instead of only wearing down the carpet in front of the business book sections:

• Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value
  
• Two Weeks to a Breakthrough: How to Zoom Toward Your Goal in 14 Days or Less
• Do Less, Achieve More: Discover the Hidden Powers Giving In
• This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
• The Zen of Groups, A Handbook for People Meeting With a Purpose
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Are you a fan of The Daily 5 Minutes?

Actually, a better question is this;

If you are a manager, and you want to be a great manager, why wouldn’t you be a fan of the Daily 5 Minutes?

This month is the perfect time to start if you haven’t done so already, for to know well, you Mālama well.

Go to www.managingwithaloha.com today and grab your copy of a must-have pdf reference form on the D5M:  Know well, Mālama well.

From Managing with Aloha:

Mālama ka po‘e, care for one’s people, requires sensitivity.

Managers must learn when it’s best to take care of staff issues individually versus collectively at times, treating their staff how they expect to be treated, learning how they define their own personal dignity. This requires that they know their staff well. 

Thus Mālama was a value that would come up often in our discussion of ‘Ike loa and our Daily Five Minutes, for it was usually within this daily ritual that managers would learn about what concerns their staff had, and they were gifted with the timing within which their employees chose to share it.

“Listen with Mālama” meant to listen with caring, to listen for feelings and for kaona—hidden meanings within the words that were actually spoken.

When the Daily Five Minutes was diligently programmed employees did not get lost in the shuffle of the day or go unnoticed when they were troubled—the times they need to be cared for most.

Mālama also challenges us to explore the full range of our employee’s emotional needs so they are met and not minimized or neglected. For example, do you celebrate success and reward achievement? Understand the need for recognition. Do you have practices that make allowances for loss and grieving? Realize when your understanding is needed. Do you recognize the symptoms of stress and undue pressure? Give time when time is needed.

Our April Ho‘ohana is Mālama: What is Caring in business and at work?

D5M is our shortcut for The Daily Five Minutes.

360 Degree Review? How about 5 Minutes instead?

Have you ever given or received a 360 Degree Review?
What was your experience with it?

Interested in a better solution?

There is some interesting conversation going on in Blogsville today about the 360 Degree Review/Survey, which started with a story Don Blohowiak shares at Leadership Now. Reading this comment on Lisa Haneberg’s Management Craft caused me to think back to the one and only time I was part of the process:

360s are perfect in a perfect world. In a perfect world, candor and properly timed feedback would preclude the need for a 360, wouldn't it? Candor is not often found and timely feedback is rarely given. So, we use the 360 crutch hoping to get the results. Unfortunately, 360s are flawed for the same reason. Our culture of being in harmony (or of nailing an enemy) skews any useful results.

Earlier in my career, I asked for a 360 of me. We sent it out to 20 people or so. Shortly thereafter, our VP of HR received a phone call asking, "Should we be honest in filling this out?" Whether that question is asked or not, it is thought.
— Brad Respess

However this was another thought offered by Laurence Haughton.

I don't know that there is anything better than getting and giving 360 degree feedback.

That when they are poorly done they yield poor results only means they shouldn't be done poorly.

I interviewed a woman who had amazing results from her use of 360 degree feedback (and it wasn't expensive at all). And there's some very compelling research that says every leader better be looking at ideas like 360 feedback or something like it.

In our case, we had done them as a one-time deal while the willing victims of a consultant who unfortunately let our leadership get away with not following up on the results — we were left to our own devices to interpret them. The entire situation got a bit ugly; misinterpreted or radically interpreted results, hurt feelings, defiance … name the emotion and someone on our team experienced it.

In my own circle of influence, I relied on one thing to help with the rifts, and to discover the good stuff that might have been offered: I encouraged my staff to reinvest in their practice of the Daily 5 Minutes. In doing so, we worked on the “candor and properly timed feedback” creation of the perfect world Brad Respess mentioned. We worked on getting more clarity in those results, and building a trusting relationship with those most affected by our actions (or inactions) in our work circles.

With its roots in better listening, the Daily 5 Minutes is an aloha-filled process: It actively builds better relationships in an organization with personal, interactive, and frequent communication.

If you are hearing about my Daily 5 Minutes for the first time, start here with the excerpt from my book, Managing with Aloha. To read more, click this category link for the writing I’ve done since then, and to see the many trackbacks and comments from people everywhere who are finding out how well it works — all year long, and not just at review and survey time.

If you are pressed for time or want a more logical sequence on the D5M Lesson Plan, here’s the reading order I suggest: The Daily 5 Minutes can = your Worklife Reinvention.

Organizational Change and the Daily Five Minutes. Why do it?
The Daily Five Minutes. This is the book excerpt post, and the basic how-to post.
The water's fine: Take 5 and jump in! Getting started. (Good comment shared too.)
Hey boss, what do you want to know? - Part 1 - Tips for the employee.
Hey boss, what do you want to know? - Part 2 - Tips for the boss.
Logistics of the Daily Five Minutes. How do you fit this practice into your day?
It really does take only 5 minutes! A success story.
5 Minutes Daily = Worklife Reinvention. The evidence keeps building!

It really does take only 5 Minutes!

Mahalo to Stacy Brice for this find:

The Daily Five Minutes is mentioned in this article in The Globe and Mail within the line-up of tips given in their Monday Morning Manager column written by Harvey Schachter:

Alternative: Rosa Say, author of Managing With Aloha, recommends a daily, 10-minute, no agenda chat with one staff member to improve the manager's listening skills and build relationships. When supervising more than 350 employees, she held nine a day, concentrating on direct reports several times a week and others less frequently, but made sure that everyone got such chats.

Folks, it really does take only 5 minutes and not 10. I have to admit that as a VP (during that time Mr. Schachter refers to) even I in my efforts to set a good example would have been hard pressed to make it 10 minutes with 9 people per day!

Here’s another email that came to me about the same time as Stacy’s FYI this morning:

Logistics of the Daily 5 Minutes

Got a question about The Daily 5 Minutes that comes up with a fair amount of frequency, and so I thought it best to answer here with a post we can more easily reference when we may need to. Thank you Jamie for the opportunity!

Here was Jamie’s question:

What team sizes are we talking here? If I did a daily Five with my entire team, I'd only see everyone once every two months...(which might be better than none at all, I suppose)...but if I just do direct reports, then we're down to just a handful.

Aloha Jamie, the beauty of the Daily Five Minutes is that it can be adapted to pretty much any team size at all: remember that you needn’t go it alone. In fact, once the Daily Five Minutes is inculcated into your company culture, you’ll be surprised to see the day come that peers do it with each other, no matter where they may be on the organization chart.

You do want to start with and prioritize your direct reports, and then stair step it from there. For instance, this is how we worked it when I was a VP overseeing 350+ employees, assuming a 5-day workweek: