Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Learning to Talk to Each Other

Once infancy is over, we talk as unconsciously as we breathe, yet silly as it sounds, we do have to continually learn to talk to each other, especially when it comes to challenging or more difficult conversations.

That's a snippet from a rather lengthy post I wrote over at Joyful Jubilant Learning this morning, and I would love to have you click over there and help me start a conversation about it if you have some time.

The JJL post is called Learning to Talk to Each Other too, because though it is part of the Learn to Lead With Your Strengths project, it's essentially about the talking to our managers, a subject that comes up here pretty frequently too.

In fact, three years of build-up worth. In writing it for JJL this morning, it became one of those articles that starts to have a life of its own; me and my keyboard just cooperate and keep up as we can as left brain/right brain takes over. If they are intent on breaking through with something, I'm not getting in the way.

The strengths movement is a key concept woven through much of Managing with Aloha: thus the strengths management index here.

So within my article at Joyful Jubilant Learning you will find;

• How I go about practicing empathy with the current challenges you may have ‘managing up’ now that I personally don't report to anyone but me. Coaches need to engage in real-time workplace laboratories if they are to be effective in helping you.

• More about Manifesting Possibility - expect to hear that phrase from me more often this month, I just love it. Lisa Haneberg is a rock-star coach and genius.

• Speaking of Lisa, the post also contains a link to a podcast she did with strengths movement rock star Marcus Buckingham.

• 3 options in a section called “More coaching.” Numbers 1. and 3. you will recognize if you've been a regular reader here, but number 2. may be new to you.

• Oooh, and a brand new e-book from David Zinger!

E ho‘omāka‘ika‘i kākou, let’s go visit Joyful Jubilant Learning together, shall we? There’s a talk story to be talked there… Learning to Talk to Each Other

“I feel strong when I talk to you.”

It would be pretty sweet to be a manager and have one of your employees say that to you, don’t you think? I do.

“I feel strong when I talk to you.”

Don’t read into it any way but this one: If they said that, aware of the language of the strengths movement, they would mean that as their manager, you bring out the best in them.

“I feel strong when I talk to you.”

It would mean you help them feel smart, savvy and successful whenever they have a conversation with you.

“I feel strong when I talk to you.”

It would mean that they would actively seek you out so they could talk things out with you. They would look for you often. Not warily, cautiously, and timidly, but enthusiastically, because talking with you would feel instinctively natural and right to them.

That’s right, it would mean that they’d actually initiate conversations with you.

“I feel strong when I talk to you.”

It would mean that they’d look forward to appointments you set with them, and that they’d always expect them to be about collaboration, and other good prospects that would leave them energized.

At Joyful Jubilant Learning, we’re on Step 5 of our read-learn-act project using Marcus Buckingham’s 6-week program, Go Put Your Strengths to Work. In this step he coaches us to have conversations with our managers on both our strengths and our weaknesses, and his chapter is peppered with cautions on the pitfalls of doing so. Apparently, having great conversations with their managers is pretty rare for most people.

Those parts of the chapter are kind of discouraging. It’s quite the case for more managing with aloha.

In other parts of his book, Buckingham says we have to have more faith in the intuitive rightness of the way we feel. When we feel we are successful at something, it is highly probable that we’ve been working within activities which make us feel strong; they are activities which have employed our strengths. Thus one of the earliest parts of his 6-Step program is about capturing our stronger moments; if we take notice of them, and realize we’re in them, we can then put ourselves in more of them more often.

Makes a whole lot of sense.

So try this: Start to journal those conversations you have with your manager at work. Just track ‘em with some short notes.

What did you talk about, and when? How did you feel leading up to it, during it, and afterwards?

Look over your notes, and see if you can figure out which kinds of conversations with your manager make you feel strong, and which make you feel weak. Then look for the common threads in those strong-feeling conversations, and see what you can do to have those more often.

Don’t just happen into them, start to plan for them. Inundate them with more meaty stuff, so you can talk about worthwhile matters when you’re feeling stronger - tap into the goodness, and milk ‘em for all their worth.

It should work. It’s certainly worth a try.

For more help, get your manager to read about my Daily Five Minutes! Learn it together.

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• Related posting by David Zinger: Trombone Player Wanted #5: Are you talking to me?

• About the photo: See the Talk to Me website. Love the stories of people who live life on their own great terms. See their page called, How to talk to strangers.

Think Strong, Be Strong

Strengths are where it’s at.

The world we’re living in is not for wimps, so reach inside yourself, figure out what it is you do best, and DO it!

Need some help? Maybe not help, but great company?

Join me for Learning Project #2 over at Joyful Jubilant Learning and read about what we’ve just kicked off. It’ll be fascinating, and it’ll give you turbo-charged energies for Spring.

To THINK Strong and BE Strong, come START Strong with me! I’d love your company, for I aim to have fun with this!

Dishing up the details here:

JJL Learning Project #2 – Learn to Lead with Your Strengths

Vital Friends, The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without

As I mentioned to John Richardson, Tom Rath took me by surprise with his book, Vital Friends. I’m not sure why I had underestimated it, for I’m a huge fan of the Gallup Organization and the research they’ve conducted in our workplaces, research which supports the strengths management revolution, and the mission to increase employee engagement.

I’d first learned about Gallup’s StrengthsFinder Q12 (twelve key dimensions that describe great workgroups) when I’d read their ground-breaking book First, Break All the Rules. I became an instant convert. The core concept of working on an employee’s strengths and innate talents is very much attuned with Managing with Aloha for Aloha is a value of authenticity and self-awareness. It was common sense to me that the goodness, and the very rightness, of our innate talents was perfectly aligned with the aloha spirit which resides in all of us – also innately.

Improving employee engagement aligns wonderfully with the MWA values of Lōkahi, Kākou, and Kuleana – just for starters.

“Key dimension number 10” of the Q12 was that engaged employees would state, “I have a best friend at work.” Of all 12 StrengthsFinder indicators, I’d always thought this was the oddest one, and it was the one easy to overlook as I would study and apply the other eleven, things like “Knowing what’s expected of me,” “Doing what I do best,” and “My company’s mission and purpose.”

In Vital Friends, Tom Rath has finally explained the importance of this measurement for me like no list of impressive statistics could ever have done.

Adding Value to Performance Reviews

Rick asked me a question a few days ago, and I promised him an answer. He asked,

Rosa - Question - It is annual performance review time again (our year ends March 31) so I thought I would ask you if you could share some quick wisdom on the matter?

Hmmm...

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One of the things I often say in my speeches and presentations to groups of managers, is that if I could wave a magic wand and instantly change something for them, I would eliminate two things from their work routine,

a) annual performance reviews and

b) job descriptions.

Every single time I say it, everyone in the room cheers.

Everyone looks at the CEO or COO with the same question in their expression, “Why can’t we?”

The CEO and COO look at the HR Director in turn, wondering, “Why can’t we?”

The HR Director looks at the CFO, wondering, “Why can’t we?”

Everyone in the room agrees they hate the process, and everyone wonders, “Why can’t we?”

And yet, I know they won’t do anything about it. When the next review period rolls around, they will obediently kowtow to the process once again.

So, why don’t they? Why don’t you?

Ho‘omau: Reveal Strengths and Talents

Our ho‘ohana on Ho‘omau; causing the good to last wouldn’t be complete this month without thinking about strengths, for there is so much vacuum-packed goodness in them.

You proactively and intentionally cause the good to last in your strengths,

• By being sure you are employing them, i.e. by picking the right work for you. If you agree with David Allen’s definition that work is “anything that is not done yet” you clearly understand that this is much bigger than being about your job.

You proactively and intentionally cause the good to last in your strengths,

• By capitalizing them and building on them, allowing them to work their magic in opening other doors for you. With the way this innately works for you, you can trust you will be stepping in the right doors.

When you are a manager, you proactively and intentionally cause the good to last in your strengths,

• By turning this strength-nurturing talent you have, into your management strength, doing the same thing for the people you manage, i.e. you employ their talent, putting them in the best work environment possible for building on their strengths.

Everyone has talent, a kind of internal wiring that naturally makes us more effective at certain kinds of things. When you harness your natural, born-in talents in a manner which is visible for others and tangible for you, those talents become what we think of as our strengths.

As a quick review, Ho‘omau is the value of persistence and perseverance. Now let’s review the language of your own intention: The deeper dynamic of ho‘omau, and the self-coaching within it is fairly simple.

Values, Principles, and now, Virtue

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
—The byline of Principle-Centered Leadership
by Stephen R. Covey

Some are of the opinion that Covey wrote Principle-Centered Leadership to finally quiet others of the opinion there was a basic flaw in his ground-breaking book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In their minds, within the book’s pages Covey hadn’t defined principles very well as opposed to values.

Covey certainly heard the naysayers, for in reading PCL the Leadership part of Principle-Centered Leadership can seem a convenient fringe benefit. I’m flipping through his book once again in a quick review. It was brought back to mind for me after I had a conversation with James Shewmaker of our Ho‘ohana Community via email. James has a brand new blog called Cohesive Integrity, and in yesterday’s post there he gives his definition between values and principles.

In our email conversation I openly admitted my own Covey brainwashing to James, and as I read the Preface to Principle-Centered Leadership again late last night (the book’s preface is titled A Principle-Centered Approach) it was pretty startling for me to realize just how profoundly Covey’s teaching has influenced me: I had repeated his definition to James almost verbatim.

This is in a section of the PCL Preface called Leadership by Compass:

Choose your values, honor your sense of self

Adrian Savage has posted a series on the Language of Values at his blog The Coyote Within, and in part 3 of his series, he suggests that we can effect change with our personal values.

You can choose. You don't have to stay with the values language you grew up with, or even the one you hold today. You can learn another one, one that better suits your life and dreams.

While I do agree with Adrian, in my view this is very advanced coaching, for I spend most of my time helping people understand the values they already have and their cultural connection to them as determined by their sense of place and their heritage. The “specialty” of my own coaching, is often to help in connecting someone’s deep-seated values with their innate strengths, so that they can nurture those strengths from good to great. Most of my clients don’t want to change their values; they want to better understand them, consciously apply them, share them in relationships with others, and in doing so celebrate them.

What I specifically want to call attention to in Adrian’s article is his suggestion that you consider your values choices when you embark on self-improvement programs. We don’t think about this often enough, getting swept away in the “feel better” “quick fix” promises that can be made to us, and I think that Adrian offers sage insight and advice.

Transforming yourself often means changing your values. If you don’t, little else will change about you. Learning, growing, developing all need some values changes. You can hope these will happen as a by-product of self-improvement, or you can take the time to explore your values and make changes consciously.

Either way, you should take a good a look at any values associated with the self-improvement group or teaching you have in mind to use. How do you feel about them? Do they profess values you want to make part of who you are? Try to read and listen between the lines. Go through any materials carefully, paying attention to what’s presented as important, what assumptions are being made, and what is immediately dismissed or condemned. Is that who you want to be? Are those assumptions yours? Do you share similar ideas about right and wrong?

Trust your instincts and listen to them, but do tread carefully. Ask questions, and honor how you feel about the answers you’re given. It may be that those innate values you have are talking to you, and you need to pay more careful attention.

I don’t mean to be a naysayer when it comes to self-improvement programs. I am adding my voice to Adrian’s in urging you to understand that there is always an undeniable values connection. Embark on the self-improvement you want, not on that which you are sold.

Related posts:
Identify the strengths of those you manage.
Strengths and Values.
Strengths, Values and Maslow’s Pyramid.

Tags: Values. Strengths. Coaching. Change.

MWA3P; my October Action Cycle

I am rereading Stephen Covey’s First Things First. This is one of the blurbs in the front matter of the book:

“I hate time management systems. Do lists, day planners, and breathing-by-objective systems give me the hives.

But I love First Things First — Covey and the Merrills’ approach to making your life meaningful and successful on purpose. The subtitle tells it all, ‘To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy.’ That’s making your life work instead of making work your life. Super!”
— Ron Zemke, coauthor of Service America and Sustaining Knock Your Socks Off Service

I agree and disagree with Mr. Zemke. I agree in that I too love First Things First, and reading it again has been a sort of homecoming for me. I disagree (slightly) in that I’ve never hated time management systems, I’ve been captivated by them.

Much as I like to explain that ‘time management’ is a kind of misnomer, I’ve always been fascinated with the organization and systems part of the concept, and I’ve sunk a small fortune (and BIG amounts of time) into playing and experimenting with every planner to catch my fancy. Paper, digital, cosmically star-aligned … you name it: I’ve probably tried it or at least checked it out enough to consider myself an unofficial, self-proclaimed expert on them (whatever ‘expert’ means.)

The reason my fascinated continued? I’m still looking for one that works.

Identify the strengths of those you manage

Over at Random Thoughts from a CTO, Skip has some great tips for identifying strengths.  In a post titled Strengths Hunting he includes,

• Listen for Yearnings
• Watch for Satisfactions
• Watch for Rapid Learning
• Glimpses of Excellence
• Total Performance of Excellence

I encourage you to click in and read the rest of what Skip has to say, for he explains each one.

I’ll offer another great way that you as a manager can discover the strengths in your people: Ask them.

Skip gives us some great clues, but sometimes these things are not as apparent as they may seem, for people are accustomed to putting themselves “on stage” while they are at work; They get their game face on.

So what are the questions you should ask? Personally I’ve found that those suggested by the Gallup team work great, and specifically this one that Marcus Buckingham repeats in his last book, The One Thing You Need To Know because it keeps things in the context of work:

What was the best day at work you’ve had in the last three months?

• What were you doing?
• Why did you enjoy it so much?

If you ask the question first, Skip’s listing then gives you a great way to read the answer you get, identifying those strengths that add the fire in their eyes, and bounce in their step.

Related posts:
Strengths and Values
Strengths, Values and Maslow’s Pyramid