Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Coaching on Self-Leadership: Is your growth plan set?

We have wrapped up the month of August on Managing with Aloha Coaching: Here is a quick recap of our study on Alaka‘i, the Hawaiian value of leadership.

Leadership is a huge topic, and our focus was on where it all begins: Self-leadership. If we cannot effectively lead with the brilliant example of our own behavior, why should anyone think about following us?

Day One Essay for August 2008:
Alaka'i, Chiefs and Indians

Excerpt:

Opportunity for caring and courageous leadership is spreading like wildfire. I find that I am thinking about leadership an awful lot because to be perfectly blunt, I miss it terribly. Remarkable leadership would make me wildly jubilant (buzzwords are fascinating, aren't they?) however I must say I'd do cartwheels and sing out loud for more basically sound leadership too. I crave new heroes for our modern, right-now world, heroes who inspire the rest of us to be better than we now are. I crave for heroes everywhere, and I want lots of them.

Click to the full article: Alaka'i, Chiefs and Indians.

Tuesday Essay #1:
Why Self-Leadership?

Excerpt:

I see self-leadership as a necessary prerequisite to those "small groups of productive people [who] function together." In today's essay, I'll take a stab at defining self-leadership from the Alaka'i viewpoint. But first, I think it will be helpful to consider two value-drivers I think are very closely related to the leadership of Alaka'i: Kākou and Lōkahi, both of which we have studied here before.

Click to the full article: Why Self-Leadership?

Tuesday Essay #2:
Self-Leadership in 1 Sentence

Excerpt:

I can write at length; I know that. I have been told, "You do talking story in writing." This week, I am responding to a challenge put forth by a manager I am presently coaching. He had read last Tuesday's essay just prior to our weekly coaching call, and his challenge to me was:

"Rosa, I know you can write a whole book about it if you set your mind to it, but can you give me a definition for self-leadership in just one sentence?"

After giving it some thought, here it is.

Click to the full article: Self-Leadership in 1 Sentence

Tuesday Essay #3:
Your Alaka'i Connection to Worthwhile Work

Excerpt:

We have called self-leadership a growing process of arriving at one's own choice. What is this process, and why is this kind of growth so important to you?

It may be helpful to answer the second question first, for if it isn't important to you, why bother? In thinking this through, let's use something that is practical and of immediate use to you, something which is usually a staple on the manager's To Do List: HIRING.

Click to the full article: Your Self-Leadership Connection to Worthwhile Work

Tuesday Essay #4:
The Self-improvement Targets of Self-Leadership

Excerpt:

Tim Milburn, mentor extraordinaire for student leaders, thrilled me with this comment:

Rosa: One of my favorite posts that you've ever written is the 12 RULES FOR SELF-LEADERSHIP. I keep it on my cell phone and pull it out to read on occasion. It is some timeless advice. I hope that you will include a link to that for your readers this month.

Tim, your wish is my command! However I would like to do a bit better than that for you: Let's reformat those 12 Rules within our recent August study here. I have three reasons for doing so.

Click to the full article: The Self-improvement Targets of Self-Leadership

The objective is your objective

Our overall goal at MWAC during August was to create a personal growth plan for our own statement of self-leadership (and thus our learning within that plan going forward). If that is something you feel you need it is never too late to begin. Get into rhythm with Managing with Aloha Coaching and use the archives there to your full benefit within your self-paced coaching.

If you use this as a self-contained lesson plan (how I design all my monthly coaching modules on MWAC), read and work with each article sequentially: They are in order, and build upon each other.

If you need my help, let me know!

 

How Do Adults Grow?

I have long felt that the answer is connected to learning; stop learning and you stop growing. Our bodies may slow down their growth rate as far as outside appearances go, but that doesn’t mean we slow down on the inside, particularly in regard to how our brains work.

Learning is connected to thinking; and unlike our physical aging, that is a kind of growth that we cannot readily see, unless what we look for are the effects of it. What has changed, and has it gotten better?

This has turned out to be a very strong sub-theme for us in our study of Alaka‘i, the Hawaiian value of leadership, our value for the month of August over on Managing with Aloha Coaching. To look upon my more recent posts here you might think I have been too absorbed with photography and Flickr, but truth is that I have been absorbed with the discussions of self-leadership that have resulted with my managers as triggered by Alaka‘i.

What I assert within my Tuesday Essays this month centers around this definition of Self-Leadership:

“Self-leadership is the growing process of arriving at your own choice, an arrival you will stand up for and articulate exceptionally well, feeling you are prepared to both defend it and inspire with it.”

TO SELF-LEAD:
Think, learn, grow.
Arrive.
Articulate. Stand tall.

What is this growing process of arriving at one’s own choice, and why is it so important to you?

There is a certain calling within the value of Alaka‘i...

“Leadership is about getting things done with others and through others, and as such, aspiring to leadership is not a goal or quality reserved for those with title, position or power. Conversely, when you have been one to demonstrate your leadership, people take notice you have it, and those promotions of title, position and power will find you.”
~ from Managing with Aloha

I would encourage you to check in with MWAC this month if you have not yet done so. This is where we are:

• Day One Essay for August 2008: Alaka‘i, Chiefs and Indians

• Tuesday Essay #1 on Alaka‘i: Why Self-Leadership?

• Tuesday Essay #2 on Alaka‘i: Self-Leadership in 1 Sentence

• Today: The Self-Leadership of Alaka‘i and Your Connection to Worthwhile Work

Lead, Follow or Get out of the way

Ever felt like saying that to someone?

You can be honest; you won't have been the first to say it to me this week!

“I feel a bit cantankerous Rosa —if everyone leads who follows? I’m a great believer in self caring, self maintenance, self monitoring, self regulation, self satisfaction and a few other self stuffs but I have a problem with the concept of self leadership. I like the old mantra of ‘lead, follow or get out of the way’ as a visualization of how small groups of productive people function together. It may not fit into Kākou but it gets the job done.”

My response turned into today's Tuesday Coaching on MWAC:

Tuesday Essay #1 for August on Alaka‘i:
Why Self-Leadership? ...And, what are the value-drivers within self-leadership?

I love this photo for I think it really captures what I wanted to say on MWAC about the connections between team, self-leadership and followership: Flickr photographer maldita la hora called it Join the QuEuE:

The caption: "It's incredible the things you find walking around Madrid. They were shooting an advertisement."

What I like about it is the tight togetherness of the queue (yeah, I realize it's the photographer's perspective, but I still like it) and the pop-out individualism of each person: They are ready for their turn at star-power leadership when the moment presents itself.

Are you?

Being a “Leader” is what managers do too

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.

Let’s Talk Story:
What do YOU think? Comment for me and get into the conversation here:

The Manager’s Responsibility for Leadership

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

...and did you see “I am a leader” here???

Coach every new manager: The camera loves you baby.

For nearly three full years now, Hawaii's Heisman finalist Colt Brennan has been a media darling. Google his name, and 440,000 entries come up. 43,705 people have donated to his Wikipedia entry. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone in our islands who doesn't follow UH football here right now, but even they have had countless opportunities to see and hear Colt Brennan on our newscasts just about every night, every channel. I have often thought to myself, thank goodness Colt is majoring in communications; I hope he's doing well in class!

99.9% of the time, he's been the star and handled it well, but right now, just as every NFL scout in the nation is watching, he's painfully struggling with that other .1%.

Jaymes Song wrote for the Associated Press,

In his three years at Hawaii, Colt Brennan set 31 NCAA records. Chances are, the one people will remember most will be his 131 career touchdowns passing.

I surely do hope so! He has earned our understanding right now.

Your Day in the Life episodes may not make it to such a brutal stage, but if you are a manager, chances are you've felt that .1% struggle way more often than Brennan has. If not, I guarantee you, you will.

I have a list of trigger words that I periodically review in the coaching I do, and there is one in particular that I key on each time I'm called on for talks or training with new supervisors, when I'm coaching my execs and those newly promoted to leadership roles, and in any change management intervention I get an SOS for. The word is visibility. Your visibility instantly balloons the very moment you become a manager. You don't have Brennan's fame, and you likely can't afford to hire a publicist or executive coach (yet :) so you have to behave in the way that guarantees you'll never need one. You are now under constant scrutiny, and as a very human Colt Brennan lost track of this past Tuesday night within the swirl of his emotions, you often can't tell that the camera is still pointed in your direction capturing every single vulnerability you have.

"Can't tell" isn't the same as "not aware of."

Add this to your Talk Story Checklist:

Every boss needs to coach every new manager about visibility on their Day One on the job.

I love the way that restaurateur Danny Meyer does this, as described in his book, Setting the Table. There's nothing like a great metaphor to help your new supervisors and managers remember this.

The moment people become managers for the first time, it will be as if the following three things have happened:

• An imaginary megaphone has been stitched to their lips, so that everything they say can now be heard by twenty times more people than before.

• The other staff members have been provided with a pair of binoculars, which they keep trained on the new managers at all times, guaranteeing that everything a manager does will be watched and seen by more people than ever.

• The new managers have received the gift of “fire,” a kind of power that must be used responsibly, appropriately, and consistently.

Meyer’s full description on this alone (pages 195-198) is worth the price of the book.

The above excerpt is from the Talking Story archives: Waiting Tables and Work Ethic.

Why “management” has a bad rep

This is a true story; so true it hurts when you’re a management coach like me.

I stopped at the post office to buy Christmas stamps this morning, asking for eleven of their books of 20 stamps. I bought two different designs, and watched as the woman helping me fanned them out to scan them into her register one by one. Beep...beep...beep... eleven times.

I said to her, “too bad your system won’t allow you to just put in the quantity and scan them once” to which she replied, “oh it will, but we do it this way now because management says we need to show that we spend more time with our customers. We don’t want our hours cut back during the holidays.”

Huh?

She had an expression on her face of being so pleased with herself, not for a moment realizing she was freely admitting to me that her delay tactic was the best thing she could come up with. More service, actual service, was not her first choice, or apparently much of an option she’d thought about at all. Nor was she concerned with the line growing longer behind me. I was dumbfounded and didn’t know what to say.

No wonder the postage rates keep going up... and they are 41 cents; new image not in the budget either?

For a better way check out: Mea Ho‘okipa Live Their Aloha Every Day; a forum with the Ho‘ohana Community on hospitality and service.

Talk Story: Brand versus Reputation – 4 Questions to start with

Here’s a great subject for a talk story with your team:

• What are the perceived differences between your BRAND and your REPUTATION?
• Why is this important, and how can each person on your team affect each one?
• How does COMPANY brand affect PERSONAL brand? How about reputation?

If you are a manager, consider this:

• What is the role of the manager in regard to your responsibility shaping brand for BOTH the company and your staff’s personal reputation? Think about the gift you can give your staff!
  

If you are a leader, consider this:

• What clarity can you lend to this type of discussion in regard to company vision and mission? What explicit and implicit “permissions” can you give to make it easier for everyone to take action with building brand personally as well as professionally – it’s a win for everyone.

There is no doubt that you, and everyone you work with affects both brand and reputation, and both create an asset. This is a great talk story to have because you aren’t looking to debate the rightness of single answers to these questions; you are using them to talk about the behaviors that are specifically right for all of you in your own workplace.

A talk story on brand versus reputation is terrific for setting team expectations, and for creating possible crucibles with how people consider their individual responsibility.

This past week I wrote an article for Joyful Jubilant Learning called Learn to Build Your Personal Brand, and within it I shared part of my own story of switching from corporate life to entrepreneurship, explaining that at the time of my corporate career, I didn’t even think about the possibility that I could build my personal brand while working for an employer – one who had an exceptionally strong brand presence that I then felt was also mine by executive association.

My story caused David Sandusky, founder of Your Brand, LLC. to comment;

“I would suggest that a personal brand strategy is just as important for the corporate career as the self-employed or entrepreneur. These days more multi-career professionals (slash career) have a potential brand confusion. Fun stuff!”

He is right.

Today the workplace is dramatically different in a number of ways, particularly with how the internet has turned so many of us into citizen publishers. For instance, for most of my corporate career I thought you could only build a personal brand if you had your own business; now I can clearly see that you can have a compelling, strong personal brand just with a message. And you choose your message.

Have this talk story with your crew, and share some of what is talked about with the rest of us would you? As David says, “Fun stuff!”

Here are a couple of other reading resources to help you with facilitating the conversation:

• Start with my article at JJL: Learn to Build Your Personal Brand. Within the article you will find another link to an interview on personal branding with Relationship Geek Phil Gerbyshak.

• In While We’re Talking About Branding, Marci Alboher asked blogger Pamela Slim to guest post about the branding challenges of *slash careerists* at Marci's column for the New York Times

• There is a 2006 article at AllAboutBranding.com by Alan Bergstrom, chief brand strategy officer at The Brand Consultancy with some definitions you can start with called Brand vs. Reputation: Same or Different? but again, I would encourage you not to get stuck within them - just read as food for thought and talk this out with your team to see what they think.

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Read more of our Ho‘ohana Community Learning discussions at Joyful Jubilant Learning:

Kamehameha; Law, Legend and Leadership

June 11th is a very welcome holiday here in Hawai‘i; it is Kamehameha Day, celebrated to honor Kamehameha the Great.

And great he was! Study Alaka‘i, the Hawaiian value of leadership, to any degree, and the name of Kamehameha is sure to be mentioned. Kamehameha I ruled the islands from 1810 to 1819, and nearly 2 centuries later the repeated telling of his reign has made him legendary.

The stories about Kamehameha are colorful and plentiful. Perhaps the best known one is that which explains Māmalahoe Kānāwai, the Law of the Splintered Paddle, which appears in our state constitution even today. The following account is shared by Ramon Arjona:

In more modern times, the story of the Law of the Splintered Paddle gives us another example of the layering of myth on top of historical fact. The Law of the Splintered Paddle, or Kanawai Malamahoe, was one of the strictest laws promulgated by King Kamehameha I, making murder and robbery punishable by death. This law is significant in the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom that Kamehameha I created. It is so significant, in fact, that a version of it is included in the constitution of the state of Hawai'i.

In the state constitution, it appears in section 10 of Article IX:

Section 10. The law of the splintered paddle, mamala-hoe kanawai, decreed by Kamehameha I -- Let every elderly person, woman and child lie by the roadside in safety -- shall be a unique and living symbol of the State's concern for public safety. The State shall have the power to provide for the safety of the people from crimes against persons and property.

However, the oral histories do not agree on the exact incident that led to the creation of the law. In the version collected by Fornander, a young Kamehameha attacked the subjects of a rival chief on the Big Island while they were peacefully fishing on the reef near Kea'au. In the ensuing fight, Kamehameha's foot got caught in the reef, putting him off balance and allowing one of the fishermen to club him several times on the head with a paddle. As the story goes, Kamehameha's life was spared only because the fisherman did not know the identity of his assailant. The Kanawai Malamahoe was promulgated by the king later in his life in commemoration of this incident, when he nearly died because he foolishly chose to attack harmless noncombatants.

A version of the story collected by Pukui in Folktales of Hawai'i is different. In this version, the young Kamehameha I was building a heiau, or temple, and needed human sacrifices. He attempted to capture a pair of fisherman, but as he was pursuing them his foot got caught in a fissure of lava and he fell. One of the fishermen clubbed him over the head with his paddle so hard that the paddle splintered. As Kamehameha lay there stunned, he heard one of the men ask the other, "Why don't you kill him?" The second man replies, "Because life is sacred to [the god] Kane."

Kamehameha was so impressed by their reverence for life that he later promulgated the Kanawai Mamalahoe, which abolished human sacrifice and established the basic right to life in the Hawaiian culture.

There are still other versions of the story, collected by other historians, and it is not clear which version is the most accurate, if indeed any of them are. We have the law itself, but we can't say for certain what chain of events led Kamehameha I to promulgate it.

I’ve written more about our holiday, and the man that inspired it, on Managing with Aloha today: Kamehameha the Great; King of my Ancestors. As I started to write it, simply to celebrate the man and the day, it turned out to be a bit more sharing of how I grew up in Hawai‘i, very much an American child in the tolerant legacy of a monarchy.

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Brief dip into the archives; Manage with aloha, Lead with aloha

In part ...

“We can easily rationalize the importance of such qualities as intelligence, decisiveness, technical mastery, reputation, and goal setting, but [Hawaiian] leadership probably was more a response of the heart rather than of the mind. The leader’s enthusiasm, compassion, inspiration, energy, stamina and charisma all came from his heart. The art in leadership is not so much rational as it is emotional, or spiritual in its promptings.”

New to management: 2 Learning Hit Lists

After re-visiting 5 Things Employees Need to Learn—From You last week, this past Monday’s post got me thinking, how would this list be any different, if the new employee was a manager?

Initially, I thought, it won’t. New managers are employees too, and the job doesn’t really matter … managers need these basics spelled out for them just as much if not more. We make far too many assumptions at work, when we should be talking about them.

Thing is, like it or not, there are a lot more expectations of new managers, and not too much time is given to them to ease on down that yellow brick road where the light shines more brightly at the end of the tunnel (…couldn’t resist, fingers kept going…:)

So this next article came to mind for this week’s Thursday archive visit. Cool update to the posting is that Chris writes me every so often since this first time in August of last year. He’s at a different company now because his family moved to a new city, and so he’s used this twice now! And yes, he is a manager, discovering that management is his calling.

New to Management: A Learning Hit List
[I had originally written this article for Lifehack.org and published it there in August of 2006.]

As the author of Managing with Aloha, I get some great questions from managers and leaders via email. This one came a few days ago:

Dear Rosa,

I just got a job as an intern. I’m pretty excited about it, for this company is growing like crazy, and they are known to give their graduating interns terrific opportunities if they’ve done well within their program. I’m hoping this will segue into my first management job when the term is over.

The manager I report to, clued me in to the fact that learning is highly valued here. In your book, you’re pretty passionate about learning too: What kinds of things do you think I should include in my list of things to learn while in my internship?

I’d appreciate hearing of your thoughts.

Sincerely,
Chris

I sent Chris my two Short 7 Lists for New Managers, and I thought I’d share them with you too.

Some history: The first time I wrote these out I was a much younger manager, but after a few management gigs already logged in my work history, I knew I’d inevitably get a different position down the road. I wanted to have a check-list for myself that I could write out and stash somewhere instead of recreating the wheel all the time. Then the day came that I tweaked my lists to use in my training of new supervisors. Felt like I was going full circle again editing this for Chris to read as a self-coaching listing.

Here they are:

Management as a “second career.” Empathy needed please.

When I first learned about blogs, one I’d read somewhat regularly was John Porcaro’s. John is a manager in Microsoft’s online marketing communications division.

Back in October of 2004 I sent a trackback to his blog, writing As a manager, which metrics are your everyday reality? in response to a posting on his blog called We're Listening.... I noticed that someone arrived at Talking Story after clicking on it today, and so I wondered if John had kept his blog going. Clicking over, I found a post in which he talks about attending a 4-day “foundational” training event for Microsoft, explaining,

“I took a similar class several years ago, but since the company has changed so much, along with our culture, I assumed that the management principles have changed too.

Today we covered many basic principles of management, but I was impressed that a lot of the day was spent speaking about the culture, and the role managers play in the ongoing climate.”

These were his observations;

One thing that caught my attention was the struggle that still exists as new managers in the room transition from individual contributor to manager.  In many instances (especially in the past), managers were assigned because of their technical skill--not because they would be good managers.  Many terrible people managers were brilliant technically, and even had a broad background that allowed them to be good strategists.  But without the right mix of interpersonal and communications skills, they drove good employees down (or out).

Some new managers express the fear of "losing their technical edge," and not being able to set the direction for the team, or not being able to make decisions about technical issues.  They don't realize that they're moving into a "second career," where new skills are required, and older skills become less important (in fact, could even be a liability).  The old adage of "hiring people smarter than you" is not just a good idea, it's a necessity.  Your team will be taking on things that you won't have the skill to do yourself.  Your value will come from a other things you do.    

I'm glad to see the company bringing a lot more focus on bringing managers (with or without experience) together to build a common foundation of expectations.  I happen to work on a team with some great managers (especially my own), and I'm seeing the value of management skills being recognized and valued more and more. 

If you are someone who manages other managers, he gives a lot to think about, doesn’t he.

While it is true that workplace cultures change continuously, there are some basic needs that managers have, particularly newer managers, that remain constant. They may seem to be new challenges just because the present-day context is new, but they aren’t. The only question is if you still pay attention to them, or if you’ve become desensitized to them.

“Been there, done that” still means empathy is needed daily. Yet another reason for the Daily Five Minutes. Your managers need to be on the receiving end of the D5M too.