Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody?

Took a look at this earlier today after it was shared on Plurk (hat-tip to Amber Lovell), and I can't get it out of my head. I've mostly thought about it in the context of the workplace, and how it is far, far too easy for us to take people for granted when we see them day in and day out, and they aren't those we consider to be family, or our best friends... though as you will see, the video makes you wonder about those relationships too...

We inherit so many others in our workplaces, whether they are co-workers, customers, suppliers or in other partnerships. Can you imagine how dramatically the workplace would improve, if every single manager made it their goal to have every person working with them answer, "Oh yes, definitely." and, "Oh yeah, I know that's the top answer, and that's the way I feel."

This also reminds me of that Gallup Organization Q12 question on if we have a best friend at work or not, and why that question is so important. From the Talking Story archives: Vital Friends, The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without.

So I ask you; Are you the favorite person of anybody? Whose favorite person would you like to be? Love to be? What are you doing about that?

If you'd prefer to sit with those questions for a while, or privately, how about sharing your reactions to this video? There are a lot of messages packed into these 4 minutes... If you are a manager, would you share it in a daily huddle or a staff meeting?

How to Capture an Expert’s Value: 12 Tips

With Ho‘okipa as our focus for the month, it seemed like the perfect time to bring back this article, one I had written for Lifehack.org just short of two years ago.

Initially I felt a bit strange about writing this, not wanting my suggestions to sound like the personal laundry list of a presumptuous author, but it has since proved to be one that several of my customers and newsletter subscribers have told me they greatly appreciated, since booking speakers is not an everyday occurrence for them. So here it is again, just lightly edited without the holiday framing it first contained.

In one sentence, it describes what happens when someone hires me as a speaker, and they decide we’ll become friends with a professional relationship by the time the engagement is over.

Think about this for a moment. When you hire someone — to do anything for you, anything at all  — what lasting effect will they have on your life? What lasting effect will you have on theirs? What kind of opportunities might you be missing?

If you are going to spend some time with a new acquaintance, is that valuable time captured, or is it squandered away and wasted?

When you boil an engagement down to its essence, people want me to speak at an event because they are looking for some kind of inspiration or motivation. When they treat me as a vendor I do make sure they get that shot of inspiration they are expecting. However when they treat me as a prospective collaborator on their vision of greater possibility, that’s what they get.

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How to Capture an Expert’s Value: 12 Tips

In bringing Managing with Aloha to the world of business I speak a lot; everything from 20-minute keynotes to week-long seminars and retreats. I love it, and in this past week I’ve enjoyed some truly terrific speaking engagements. They were terrific because my clients were terrific, and I felt I wasn’t just a hired gun; we collaborated on the design of my presentation, and they gave me the opportunity to give more than just another speech.

With my very last presentation I had the pleasure of staying in a magnificent hotel, and part of my fee arrangement included an extra night’s stay so that I could end my time with them much more leisurely than I normally have the opportunity to do. Their offer was irresistible to me and I took advantage of it. Smartly, so did they; it was a win for both of us. They helped me create a defining moment for them and their company.

The entire experience caused me to reflect back on all my speaking over the last year, and I thought of all the clients associated with them — the good, the bad, and fortunately none I would call the ugly! With Ho‘okipa (the value of hospitality) so fresh in mind for us, I thought I’d share with you my best clients’ smarts.

There have been those clients who took full advantage of our engagement knowing how I am more coach than consultant by nature, and I think they were exceptionally clever. By the time our project was over they had received oodles of free coaching from me, and I didn’t mind one bit. In fact, they usually left me wishing that all my clients were just like them. This is how they did it.

On Ho‘ohiki: Keeping your promises

This is a short and sweet post folks, but it’s important.

You should consider your credibility and your reputation with keeping your word to be one of the defining hallmarks of your character.

However life happens. There will be times when you’ve fallen short of delivering on a commitment you made.

What is the best way to make up for it when this happens?

Own up to it, and let the person who had the expectation of you know that it didn’t happen (or won’t be happening when expected) if they haven’t discovered it on their own yet. Let them hear it from you and not someone else.

Apologize, and simply acknowledge that the present situation is not the best state of affairs. They don’t want to hear your excuses and justifications— even when they are valid. However if they do ask why, this is a time for the truth, and for humility. What they do want to hear from you next, is that you will still

Take care of it, and soon. Your apology doesn’t negate the fact that something still has to get done. Make a new agreement on when you’ll deliver, make sure it happens (i.e. be smart about that new agreement) and when you do deliver,

Add more value. You’ve now got to make your delivery exceptional somehow. Get your cues from the other person, and ask them if there is anything else you can do.

5 Things Employees Need to Learn—From You

I am fond of saying that we learn from people, for I fervently believe that we do.

If you are a manager you must both learn and teach, and here on Talking Story you can expect me to speak to you often about how you can be a great coach and mentor.

From day one, there are 5 things an employee needs to learn from you, setting the stage for all the higher-level learning you want them to reach for as your coaching relationship with them deepens:

1. Why you hired them. Not as a qualified candidate for a job vacancy, but because of the values you share, in your eyes making them perfectly suited to a great working partnership with you. Elevate both their self-esteem and their sense of belonging. Shared values are your common ground, and a business-partner mentality can be your base camp. When employees clearly understand what they were hired to do, all future job objectives become much more meaningful.

2. How to work with you. Employees can’t read your mind any better than you can read theirs: Tell them straight up what your working style is so they needn’t go through the trial-and-error of figuring it out. Tell them which freedoms they have—and do not have—in pushing the envelope of change and newness with you. There should be no eggshells to tiptoe through: Landmines should be in plain sight.

3. How to talk to you. Don’t expect they will communicate effectively or completely with you when they haven’t learned enough about you to feel they know you yet, nor have their own “water wings” in the company to feel safe about it. Too many employees feel “put up and shut up” is the wisest strategy, or worse, is expected of them when that’s just not true.

4. How you expect the customer to be treated, both external customers and internal ones. As far as you’re concerned, exactly what is great customer service? Is the customer always right? —really? Not only must they learn how to work with you (go back to number 2…) they must learn how to work with —and for—the guest and customer, their peers and associates, your suppliers and professional network of relationships. There are ground-rules in all civilized societies: What are yours?

5. Your vision for the company. Not the canned speech and company line, but what it personally means to YOU, and how you strive to put your personal signature on it. Model the behavior you want to see; set the expectation that you’ll soon ask them what their personal signature will be. Bring the vision into sharper focus. Yes, it’s the future picture, but the future needs to get closer every day, and they’ve got to know it’s in their hands.

—Rosa Say

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I had originally written this article for Lifehack.org, and published it there in September of 2005.

Book an Author and Make Their Day

I had a magnificent day yesterday.

I met Skip and Caroline Andrews of our Ho'ohana Community for the first time. They live on the mainland, and were here for a week, and Skip had sent me an email asking if the timing would be good for us to meet. They would be on the east side of the island (I live on the west side).

The short version of our day is this: We did meet, and we spent most of the day together. Conversation in a coffee place, then lunch, then shopping along Mamo Street and Kamehameha Avenue downtown, then a tour of a remote mountainside retreat that overlooks Hilo Bay. A beautiful, sunny day in normally-rainy Hilo became soul-warming sunshine in my life.

Skip bought my book, Managing with Aloha, while here in Hawaii two years ago. When he took the initiative to email me, and triggered off the correspondence between us that eventually led to yesterday, he started a relationship with me where I didn't even think twice about the fact that making it happen would require one of my rare Saturdays at home and about four hours of driving alone. In fact, it gave me another reason to stock up my iPod with a new audio book and pack a bag for a roadtrip.

This has happened to me before, and no matter how many times it continues to happen it will amaze and delight me. By ‘this’ I mean having the immense good fortune to meet someone who has read and enjoyed my book, studying it enough to feel it somehow speaks to them. It is an experience which is a profoundly moving gift.

I have been a book addict for as long as I can remember. I have fallen in love with certain authors, often thinking about the thrill it would be to meet them. Yet somehow my thinking about this has never been big enough, bold enough, or of-course-you-can! enough.

I've never been the one to send the email.

The closest I've come has been approaching authors after they've spoken at a conference I was at. That was how I'd met Marcus Buckingham and Tim Sanders, two of my favorite business authors. However that was too easy; and a case where easy just wasn't good enough. I didn't work hard enough at it to be satisfied by it, and I certainly didn't expect them to remember me ... I was one of many queued up to speak with them.

And I certainly never dreamed that the day would come, that I'd be author someone else would think about meeting.

Managing with Aloha has changed so much for me, and I couldn't be happier. If I do write another book, it won't be for the sales, for the acclaim, for the prestige or for the credibility. It will probably still be about an 'Imi ola mission, like the managing with aloha movement, and it will definitely be for more days like yesterday, sharing aloha with the Ho'ohana Community.

And since writing Managing with Aloha, I do now contact other authors (like Tom Ehrenfeld), wanting to give them these gifts too.

Thank you Skip and Caroline, and thank you to the many others I have met because you were brave enough, open enough, and confident enough. You have all become pure joy for me in being so lokomaika'i, (one with the generosity of good heart.)

The picture above is of downtown Hilo. This one below is a view through the trees of that mountainside retreat which ended our day's visit.

Shelf Life and Attention Span on the Web

They are both getting shorter every day.

Did my best this weekend to catch up with my inbox. Still a ways to go; if I haven’t answered a message from you yet, thank you thank you thank you for your patience and understanding. There’s this thing called work (which I still do love, can’t help it) which has this nagging way of interrupting me.

One of the things I noticed was this flurry of new LinkedIn connections and MyBlogLog connections that came in over my Ho‘omaha (my December-January hiatus). Since I’d been offline (and for sanity’s sake marked everything in BlogLines as already read) they were completely out of context for me; what was the hoopla I missed? A whole bunch of ‘em in the span of about nine days, and then they just stopped. Have they fallen out of favor already?

What’s really interesting to me, is that lurkers who will never leave a comment on any of my blog posts then show up with invitations to connect with them in LinkedIn and MyBlogLog (just two examples). They openly post their pictures too, but without the conversation I’m afraid it doesn’t help me much; I will meet and begin to recognize you in your comment conversation or via email, and when there’s a real name versus some cyber alias. I truly don’t mean to be rude by not answering you, but I’d like to get to know you first… but maybe you’re already on to something else.

Wonder what’s coming up next. The abundance of open source toys on the internet goes to prove that even free loses its shelf appeal at some point, and the time it takes to reach that point gets shorter and shorter.

But not conversation. Conversation lasts longer, both in memory and in heart. Conversation comes with aloha. What do you say; let’s talk story to make the toys more meaningful.

Introducing JJLN: the Joyful Jubilant Learning Network

Yes, it is October 1st, and yes, this is not my normal Ho‘ohana essay for the first day of the month. It will be posted tomorrow, for today, I have a very important announcement to share with you.

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Introducing JJLN:

the Joyful Jubilant Learning Network

We weren’t even a week into Joyful Jubilant Learning 2006 when I began to suspect that something was stirring.

JJL ‘06 has the distinction of being the 9th Forum we have done as the Ho‘ohana Community of Talking Story and Managing with Aloha, and we, both contributors and readers, have fallen in step in a certain pattern of mutual respect and support. Yet this time, something was different.

This time, when the forum drew to a close with September 2006, we wouldn’t be quite the same.

I wasn’t alone in sensing the air was charged with a new energy. To the contrary, several of us felt this stirring, and very quickly began to realize it would change us.

Yet even though they couldn’t see where they would land, the vast majority of The Several jumped in with both feet. They felt perfectly at ease with knowing that when they did land, they’d be hitting the ground running, they’d be in great company, and they could learn to navigate wherever the next road was leading. That was all they needed to know. Of that, they were sure.

They had arrived at a Place of Knowing and of Practiced Believing.

That Place of Knowing and of Practiced Believing now has a name, and a new place it will be calling home. It is called the Joyful Jubilant Learning Network, a place where the Ho‘ohana Community will now welcome others to jump in, land well and hit their own ground running in the arms of virtual collaborative learning.

JJLN will welcome you at midnight tonight (Hawaii time.)

Prepare to jump.

Ready, Set, Let’s go!

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Related History:
Joyful Jubilant Learning 2006: 120 Ways and Counting

Click here for more about the Ho‘ohana Community, and here for our 9 Forums.

Adding Synergy to ‘Imi ola

We’re thinking on, and talking about the best form for our lives this month, framed by the Hawaiian value of ‘Imi ola. Last night I spend a good amount of time catching up with the Ho‘ohana Community throughout Blog Land, and I became quite introspective about how knowing many of you only virtually has affected the form for my own life in such a positive and inspiring way.

There is no doubt that adding blogging to my writing repertoire has had this magnificently synergistic effect on the way in which I write, and the frequency in which I do so. There is no doubt that synergy has been created in my relationships, greatly enlarging my capacity for them, and turbo-boosting the energy I gain from investing in them.

For instance, we are ramping up for a fantastic forum in September (click to the announcement on the HC Bulletin Board), and a few of the contributing writers have asked me, “Where do you find the energy to put this together?” because of what is involved behind the scenes as we prepare. The answer, is that I find it in working with them. It IS more, but it is a really, really great more. Synergy has been created for me.

When you believe in the power of synergy, you have an abundance mentality, not one of scarcity or of overwhelm. And it is ‘Imi ola, the value we are studying this month, which helps you with balance.

The Relationship Quotient; what’s yours?

The Thursday article I’ve written for Lifehack.org today may be one of the longest ones I’ve ever done for him — mahalo nui Leon for the valuable chunk of your blog’s real estate! — yet it was also one of the quickest ones for me once I actually sat down at the keyboard to write it. Why? People leave definite impressions on me.

In one sentence; it describes what happens when someone hires me as a speaker, and they decide we’ll become friends with a professional relationship by the time the engagement is over.

How to Capture an Expert’s Value: 12 Tips.

Think about this for a moment. When you hire someone — to do anything for you, anything at all  — what lasting effect will they have on your life? What lasting effect will you have on theirs? What kind of opportunities might you be missing?

If you are going to spend some time with a new acquaintance, is that valuable time captured, or is it squandered away and wasted?

Mahalo and Giving

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone the Christmas bombardment has begun in full force. I’m sure you’ve noticed it too.

Holiday trimmings seemed to have sprung up overnight, and most radio stations have dusted off the jewel cases of their holiday CDs so we can all begin to sing along with the Christmas classics. Current talk on most television news channels has been about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and whether or not retailers have destroyed their previous sales records with the upturn in the economy.

My oh my. Thanksgiving passes much too quickly.

Before the calendar turns to a new month, I ask you to help me keep the spirit of Thanksgiving alive and well all year long. Keep thoughts of Mahalo close to you, and learn to live in thankfulness for all the gifts you have been given. Use your gifts to give to others in this holiday season and every day to come.

The gifts I am referring to don’t come off a store shelf. They aren’t bundled in tissue paper, candy-cane colored wrapping and velvet bows. You needn’t shop around for them, because you already have them in good supply. They are ...

- your Values
- your Strengths
- your Talents, Skills, and Knowledge
- your Mana‘o (your deeply held beliefs and convictions),
- your Source and your Truth (nānā i ke kumu)
- your Genius (mahalo nui Dick for helping us understand this)
- your Purpose (your ho‘ohana)
- your Love for others and the desire you have to share yourself with them (your aloha)
- your Capacity (physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual)
- your Intention. For good, for better, and for the best possible.

Mmmmm. I feel rich; don’t you?

When you wish to give a meaningful gift to others, these are the things unique to you which make up a much more valuable kind of currency. This is the currency of your personal wealth and wellbeing, your abundance.

You have an incredible amount to give.

Mahalo. Thank you, as a way of living.
Live in thankfulness for the richness within you which makes life so precious.
Celebrate your own gifts by giving of them to others.
- Managing with Aloha

Related posts:
Mahalo; We give thanks. Our November Ho‘ohana.
A Mahalo 3by3: Appreciation, Gratitude, Thankfulness.
What it means to “Look to Your Source.”
Strengths, Values, and that Pyramid.