Rosa Say's Blog: Managing with Aloha, page 13

To Manage with Aloha is to Hack Behavior

We talked about productivity hacking last time. What managers who adopt Managing with Aloha basically do, is behavior hacking: We hack to gain Aloha-informed behaviors.

For programmers who hack, the target is computer code, and unfortunately, some nefarious types within their ranks have brought sinister and illegal intentions to the practice.

However, hacking is simply to work on something in a highly focused way, knowing you can affect or control it, and usually for the better.

For instance, the popular Lifehacker site offers “Tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done.”

For organizational folk who hack, the target is productivity.

For minimalists who hack, the target is clutter.

For jet-setters who hack, the target is travel.

For Alaka‘i Managers, the target is behavior. We hack with values, value-centering, and value-driven habits.

Behavior hacking has a rough edge to it, and sounds borderline rude and intrusive; unwanted. So we call it value alignment instead, and there is nothing rude or intrusive about it! It’s good management.

As explained in our 9 Key Concepts:

Key 3. VALUE ALIGNMENT:

Work with integrity by working true to your values, for your values will drive your best, and most desirable behaviors. Focus all efforts on the right mission and the right vision (yours!) for it honors your sense of self and brings compelling pictures of the future within your reach, making them your probable legacy. Whether for a business partnership or specific team, deliberate value-alignment creates a healthy organizational culture for everyone involved: When we want to collaborate and co-create, shared values equip and energize us.

Related reading: Ethos: Be true to your values.

The core intention of Key 3 as one of the constructs of Managing with Aloha, is to have the manager deliberately choose their values, whether personally, professionally, or organizationally. Then, we fully explore those choices with the objective of making those values Practical; Useful; Relevant; and therefore, Instructional to our managerial style.

More specifically, we want our value choices to inform our decision-making.

We want our values to equip us, by driving our behaviors in intentional ways.

In short, we want our values to hack us, shaping us into better human beings.

To employ Value Alignment, Alaka‘i Managers question the probable outcome of every decision.

The 19 Values of Aloha are those I present to you as informed choices, rooted in Aloha yet universal in practicing the art of management. Which of those values do you choose, and when?

Understanding the outcomes of those values works in reverse as well: When you see a certain behavior in play, are you aware of which value has caused that behavior to happen?

Questioning values needs to be a constant thread in the decision-making of all Alaka‘i Managers. We question, to bring to alignment. We constantly ask ourselves,

— What is the follow-up behavior we want to see emerge?

— What value-driver does this relate to?

We ask ourselves those questions about virtually e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g.

Here’s the m.o:

Alaka‘i Managers remain engaged in a workplace to maintain best practices and question everything else. They question system, process, and behavior as a means of questioning best-possible value alignment. They make better informed decisions as a result, and will then intercept work to redirect it accordingly, so mission and vision are consistently guided by the values chosen to give that mission and vision their Pono integrity.

Alaka‘i Managers ramp it up. They seek better and best.

We might phrase our questioning this way:

— What value-driver do I want to switch existing behaviors to?

For instance, let’s explore the difference between Lōkahi (cooperation, harmony and unity) and Kākou (inclusiveness and the Language of We).

The harmony and unity of Lōkahi will value-equip teamwork, and we aim for a harmony of strength, not complacency. We never want harmony to degrade to auto-pilot or boredom, and we intercept work-in-progress before it ever gets the chance to venture down those slippery slopes —we are mountain climbers, remember?

If you want your team to dig deep into an existing system or process, and brainstorm again to refresh or reinvent it, you want to value-align with Kākou instead.

The behavior hacking is different: Within Kākou inclusiveness, you want to have your team entertain new ideas, discuss and debate them more, so to uncover new possibilities before continuing with their work.

As manager, you take that “pause that refreshes” before you intercept their work: You pause to consider the objectives of mission and vision, and the behaviors which will attain those objections.

You make your better decisions: You don’t want a repeat of the old way, as satisfactory as it might presently be, because you don’t feel “satisfactory” is good enough anymore. You want a new pilot project to emerge that’s the result of whole-team conversation and robust thinking. You want fresh energies and a higher level of engagement.

You want Kākou to help you refresh Lōkahi.

So, you intercept. You redirect your team to better coach them. You do so, by bringing Kākou back into every conversation connected to the task at hand. Speaking with Aloha becomes a Kākou kind of thing with you, and you Lead with Aloha until that redirection is completed via your team taking the ball and running with it.

Lōkahi never got bad for you, really, however you are assuring that it never will. You’re ramping it up, and in the process, the “cooperation, harmony, and unity” of Lōkahi gets elevated to a higher standard of your team’s strength.

As within our listing of Alaka‘i 24 Affirmations:

10. Champion change. As the saying goes, those who do what they’ve always done, will get what they’ve always gotten. The only things they do get more of are apathy, complacency, and boredom.

You gotta love value alignment.

To adopt Managing with Aloha as your managerial philosophy,

Is to adopt value-centering:

To place the convictions of the values you believe in,

At the very center of all you do, and

To purposely drive all subsequent behaviors from your conviction,

To tailor all new actions to the perfect fit

Of a value’s character and moral compass.

This is behavior hacking at its Aloha-intentioned finest, and if you’re an Alaka‘i Manager, it happens for you every.single.day. You see those happenings as your defining moments as a manager who matters.

I have inserted several links as definitions of phrases and for related reading. If you’ve time for just one more, I recommend this one: Management Style by Habit. You can hack your reputation.

Sunday Mālama: Ma‘alahi Mornings and Mahalo Nights

Productivity, habits, and hacking— oh my!

Today’s Sunday Mālama came from talking story with an Alaka‘i Manager who had followed my writing during I time when I was deeply into productivity hacking. It can get to be quite an addiction! This manager had also participated in a pilot project I led for the Ho‘ohana Community, which integrated GTD with Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Effective People, so we had quite a history to compare notes-since-then about. If you are unfamiliar with it, GTD stands for the Getting Things Done philosophy authored and coached by David Allen.

In our conversation, the manager shared what he felt our project had solidified for him in his productivity habits. He then asked what my core habits were now, and I told him about my daily routine with Ma‘alahi Mornings and Mahalo Nights, defining them briefly for him.

There is an innate drive to organize in every good manager, and there is never really an end in sight with the productivity hacking we do. We tweak constantly, and Alaka‘i Managers seek to Ho‘omau and Ho‘ohana their way through their hacking— they persist, and they passionately personalize for the intentional work they love. That’s part of the fun and games within any obsession, don’t you think?

Similar to what we covered earlier this month, in regard to self-managing before presuming to manage others, submitting management processes to productivity hacking will invariably key in on individual habits, daily routines and their effectiveness on whatever you seek to accomplish. This may also sound familiar to you: You are Your Habits, so Make ‘em Good!

I love order.

Without it, even a semblance of order will do.

Anaïs Nin said, “In chaos, there is fertility.”

I can see that, for I can visualize the creative potential when there is an abundance of just about anything. What I naturally start to look for in chaos, is some kind of pattern, or some kind of connection.

If chaos is fertility, order is birth.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

I was born with the gene of obsessive organizing, and my parents doggedly nurtured it in me. I’m their eldest of five, and they needed my help in corraling the behavior of my younger siblings.

With management my career path of choice, my obsessive need to organize everything turned its sights on whatever workplace culture I happened to be in, to the great relief of my brothers and sister, with habit-building and the value alignment of fostering healthy workplace culture my desirable, and hopefully more predictable deliverables.

As for the writing I do, Managing with Aloha is chock full of sorting and ordering evidence: 19 Values of Aloha, 9 Key Concepts, The Daily Five Minutes… need I go on?

My stint with productivity hacking occurred after Managing with Aloha was published and my entry into the world of blogging began. The web has memory, and to this day I still get traffic from a 2007 Zen Habits reference to MWA as one of “The Top 50 Productivity Blogs,” on which number 3 was awarded to Lifehack.org, a site I wrote eighty different ‘management hacking’ articles for, including I believe, the very first iterations of the self-management and self-leadership affirmations we are now calling our Alaka‘i Batch 24.

I love good habits for their predictable rhythm.

The rhythm of a productive working routine creates momentum. I also love good habits for their zooming effect. Once you decide to adopt new learning by specifically designing that learning into your chosen habits, you no longer need to deliberate or think much more about them, especially when your habit design has included value alignment. You just do them and move on — you zoom.

To ‘hack’ the zooming effect even further, you make it a daily habit, and not an occasional one. That’s where Ma‘alahi Mornings and Mahalo Nights come into play for me. They are habits which frame each and every day for me like bookends.

Sidebar: I think the greatest single lesson I took away from GTD was using @context to batch my ‘occasional’ habits with relevancy. If you’ve read Getting Things Done, you know what I’m talking about: Vocabulary and Language of Intention factor into all culture-building philosophies and not just Managing with Aloha.

The Ma‘alahi Morning is my version of what some people call “miracle mornings.” It value-aligns with my Pono preparations for each day.

The Mahalo Night is my version of what many people do as “gratitude journaling” each night. My practice is more of a Mahalo curation of my day before I thankfully and appreciatively succumb to a good night’s sleep.

Ma‘alahi Mornings

In our Glossary, Ma‘alahi is defined as, “A word we’ll often use to describe the feeling of contentment and personal well-being associated with the value of Pono. Ma‘alahi is a pervasive persuasion toward calm, peace, and serenity.”

I’m someone with lists upon lists of what I want to accomplish, and my Ma‘alahi Morning is designed to calm me down and point me in a timely direction with the right focus, resulting in the Pono alignment I want to zoom ahead with that day.

Classic morning person to the extreme, I wake up before sunrise. In comparison, I’m pretty much brain dead once late night arrives, even if it looks like I’m still awake. So the often-touted productivity advice, which claims the best thing a manager can do is organize her day the night before, is ineffective for me. Whenever I’ve tried it, I look at my plan the next morning, and invariably think, “What in the world was I thinking?” and stop to plan all over again in my much clearer morning frame of mind.

That, my friends, is the hack you need to apply to all productivity tips: Ask yourself, “Will this work for me?” It’s the only example I can think of, where the hesitant response of, “Yeah, but…” may actually work in your favor and not be a possibility robber — if you’re going to speak those words, speak them to yourself in self-coaching, and seek to fulfill your own wants and needs.

My Ma‘alahi Mornings employ habit-stacking, where one action moves into the next without my even thinking about it:

Wake about 5:30am with 5 minutes of stretching.
Brush teeth, wash face etc… dress for the day.
To the kitchen to prep my first cup of coffee. This isn’t about the caffeine for me, for I don’t need it. It’s about the routine of it all, which now includes pulling an affirmation from my Alaka‘i Batch 24 jar for the day’s inspiration. I’m usually looking out the window afterwards, having my coffee as I watch the sunrise with Ka lā hiki ola reverence.
Let the dog out, and take a nature break in the garden with more stretching exercises.
Sit to write my morning pages (the Julia Cameron practice).
Do at least an hour of what I think of as my “other writing” projects, such as these blog posts, and my writing for Ke Ola Magazine.
Work at least an hour on my most important task planned for the day.

Only when all that is done, will I check my email and answer phone calls, or resume with my first scheduled appointment for the day. For those of you who know I’ve long been a runner, that’s exercise I now prefer to do in the late afternoon or early evening, committing my mornings to writing more.

As for the business of Say Leadership Coaching, there is a lot of day left!

Mahalo Nights

James Altucher, the author of Choose Yourself, describes his daily practice this way:

“Every day, work on physical health (exercise), emotional health (strengthening your relationships), mental health (creativity), spiritual health (solving “difficult gratitude problems” and cultivating compassion).

If I just do this every day, I know I will bounce back very fast from any hardship.”

When I first read that, I immediately thought of Palena ‘ole (number 9 of our 9 Key Concepts) for we speak of those same ‘unlimited capacities’ while leaving them open to personal interpretation. Spiritual health for example, can simply mean before-bed reading for someone. The four-fold capacities frame a good consideration to reflect upon, with how you might want to complete each and every day with the measure of completion which feels good to you.

I for one, have always loved the thought behind ending one’s day with a gratitude journal, and I wish that were enough for me. It’s not. I need to wrap up the day with a bigger bow, and with this nagging need I have to curate well: Curate, and Be Curated. I find it adds to Mahalo for me in a wonderful way, helping me to relish whatever accomplishment I achieved each day in a notebook I have titled My Book of Days.

My Mahalo Nights practice is a simple journal entry made in that notebook, with a template I adopted from Todd Brison’s suggestion regarding ‘micro-journaling.’ I’ve told you I get brain dead at night, but this I can manage!

I write the day and date.
I write the one thing I am most grateful for in that moment.
I write a list of what I feel was good about my day. Simple list on what, and I don’t bother explaining why— I know why. It might be a list of 2 things, 5 things or 10 things, no matter and no forcing it; it’s whatever immediately comes to mind in fulfilling my need to capture it.
I close my journal, and wrap my day with a bow, so to speak, with a gratitude prayer. My prayer often turns out to be something different from what I initially wrote down, for my Mahalo has grown just within the short process.

Lights out. Another day comes to a good close.

Related Reading, for the productivity inclined with more of Managing with Aloha in mind:

You are Your Habits, so Make ‘em Good!
Managerial Batching: 1, 2, 5 and 7
Curate, and Be Curated
Curating Value Alignment
Banish Your Possibility Robbers

Postscript

Sunday Mālama has been when I will share my off-the-workplace-highway scenic route kind of posts. Not as a normal weekly feature, but whenever they seem to be writing themselves. You can access the Sunday Mālama archives via this category link, also residing on the right-hand sidebar.

New to Management: A Learn-the-Ropes Checklist

As the author of Managing with Aloha, I get thoughtful questions from people 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 will 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

Learning the Company Ropes

I sent Chris 2 short lists I’ve used in coaching new managers, and I thought I’d share them with you too. As preface in my email response, I called Chris’s attention back to the phrase reddened above: While I appreciate him reaching out to me, value alignment 101 for Chris, will be to completely understand what that learning expectation is as pertains to that company. He should;

1. Ask the manager to explain more about their expectations, and

2. Ask the manager for mentorship specific to those expectations.

3. Inquire about the best time to have check-in and follow-up conversations with them, i.e. establish how they prefer to communicate one-on-one going forward.

As for my general suggestions, these will help Chris learn the ropes there, and flesh out whatever his manager may share with him as specifics. When someone is hired as a management trainee, they are usually expected to learn about the business model first, and the workplace culture second and simultaneously.

Clicking on the links included will open a new page for relevant reading.

Just have time for 1 link for now? Cut to the chase here:

Managing with Aloha’s Learning Landscape: “Know well”

The Business List

Learn the company’s values, brand promise, vision, and mission.
Learn what the customer wants, and what all stakeholders expect. (Stakeholders includes the founders, owners, executive leadership, and shareholders of a business enterprise.)
Learn the business model as the how-to connection to numbers 1. and 2., i.e. learn the ‘financial literacy’ of the company.
Learn how the company communicates, by learning the vocabulary of the industry, and the ‘language’ of their relationships.
Learn to be optimistic and positive, with an attitude of abundance, not scarcity. You are there to help the company improve, and must add value in some way. Do not stop at analysis and critique, and learn how to make acceptable, welcomed iterations little by little.
Learn to shelve your ego, and always work on what’s good for the company as a whole. You will benefit as a result.
Learn that integrity and ethics are just fancy words for telling the truth and doing what is right.

The Managing People List

Learn that management is very visible, and your behavior shines like the brightest neon light.
Learn to listen well, and listen way more than you speak. Learn to ask great questions.
Learn to respect the dignity and intelligence of other people, no matter where they sit on the organizational chart. Everyone has something to teach you— everyone.
Learn to identify and employ strengths in others in ways that make their weaknesses irrelevant.
Learn that in working with others, managers must “do with,” not “do for.”
Learn to catch people doing things right, and give others credit where credit is due.
Learn that being a great manager is a calling, not a promotion.

Will Chris have more to learn? Sure. Lots more. But I believe that concentrating on these things first, in an internship sure to seem very short, will serve him well. He will learn more than he can now even imagine.

What were your most noteworthy lessons learned when you were a new manager? Do your lessons need a refresher course in your self-coaching?

Postscript:

This was originally written for Lifehack.org quite a while back, and is freshly edited (all the relevant linkage is new). I looked up the original when the question came up again, as it seems to do rather frequently, and as I greatly admire! Whatever the capacity they were hired for, every new employee must be more vocal with good questioning and asking for help (see those footnote tags below).

Pair this with: 5 Essentials Employees Need to Learn — From You at RosaSay.com

Better Person, Better Manager, Better Leader. Alaka‘i Batch 24.

Actually, there are two batches, 12 each, and self-coaching has never been easier.

Taken separately, we’ve called them The 12 Rules of Self-Management, and The 12 Rules of Self-Leadership, and they came back to mind for me after this:

Good person first, good manager as a consequence.

We self-manage our own behavior first, and manage the behaviors of others second.

We self-lead first, and step forward to lead others second, for “To be Alaka‘i is to lead and manage by merit of your own good example.”

~ Sunday Mālama: Better Managers are Better People

At any given time, in writing here on the blog, I’m all in with you and working on whatever I’ve asked you to consider, making it practical, useful, and relevant within my day-to-day living and working with Aloha as well. Our last Sunday Mālama, Better Managers are Better People, sent me back into the archives of TalkingStory.org, one of our earlier Ho‘ohana Community web places, to look for The 12 Rules of Self-Management, and The 12 Rules of Self-Leadership because together, they become a terrific primer on the value of Alaka‘i.

We had good success with them before, so why not repeat that goodness within our current striving to be better?

I like keeping it simple, and I’m using them in a repeating cycle of daily affirmations to boost my morning intentions. You can go streamlined-digital and bookmark these lists, or try the random yet pleasing serendipity of the Goodie Jar Method: Print the 2 lists, cut them in strips, and pick one daily as your intentional focus. When you empty the jar, mix them up and start over.

Trust me, you will want to start over! 24 days of affirmations delivers a whole lot of goodness!

Or do both: Bookmark for digital ease, and keep the prepped jar somewhere visible and near at hand so you can reach into it as your mood shifter whenever the impulse strikes you, calling out “Be Better!” As you steep yourself in to each day’s affirmation, you may want to ask yourself; which of the 19 Values of Aloha does this particular one speak into most for me?

12 Rules for Self-Management

Management is not just for managers, just as leadership is not just for leaders.

We all manage, and we all lead; these are not actions reserved for only those people who happen to hold these “positions” in a company by title. I personally think of management and leadership as callings, and we all get these callings to manage and lead at different times, and to different degrees.

Considered another way, I believe we can all learn to be more self-governing through the disciplines of great management and great leadership; these are concepts that can give us wonderful tenets to live and work by.

These are what I’ve come to think of as Twelve Rules for Self-Management. Show me a business where everyone lives and works by self-managing, and I’ll bet it’s a business destined for greatness.

1. Live by your values, whatever they are. You confuse people when you don’t, because they can’t predict how you’ll behave.

2. Speak up! No one can “hear” what you’re thinking without you be willing to stand up for it. Mind-reading is something most people can’t do.

3. Honor your own good word, and keep the promises you make. If not, people eventually stop believing most of what you say, and your words will no longer work for you.

4. When you ask for more responsibility, expect to be held fully accountable. This is what seizing ownership of something is all about; it’s usually an all or nothing kind of thing, and so you’ve got to treat it that way.

5. Don’t expect people to trust you if you aren’t willing to be trustworthy for them first and foremost. Trust is an outcome of fulfilled expectations.

6. Be more productive by creating good habits and rejecting bad ones. Good habits corral your energies into a momentum-building rhythm for you; bad habits sap your energies and drain you.

7. Have a good work ethic, for it seems to be getting rare today. Curious, for those “old-fashioned” values like dependability, timeliness, professionalism and diligence are prized more than ever before. Be action-oriented. Seek to make things work. Be willing to do what it takes.

8. Be interesting. Read voraciously, and listen to learn, then teach and share everything you know. No one owes you their attention; you have to earn it and keep attracting it.

9. Be nice. Be courteous, polite and respectful. Be considerate. Manners still count for an awful lot in life, and thank goodness they do.

10. Be self-disciplined. That’s what adults are supposed to “grow up” to be.

11. Don’t be a victim or a martyr. You always have a choice, so don’t shy from it: Choose and choose without regret. Look forward and be enthusiastic.

12. Keep healthy and take care of yourself. Exercise your mind, body and spirit so you can be someone people count on, and so you can live expansively and with abundance.

Managers will tell you that they don’t really need to manage people who live by these rules; instead, they can devote their attentions to managing the businesses in which they all thrive. Chances are it will also be a place where great leaders are found.

Reset Thyself: The Power of Affirmations

Here’s why I’m a believer in daily affirmations: 1. They’re an easy habit to adopt in your character building. 2. They work.

What they work with, is turning a person’s negative, self-depreciating self-talk into positive, self-coaching encouragement instead.

Daily affirmations are Aloha spirit-spillers. They reject scarcity-thinking, and embrace abundance-thinking. They give us the daily opportunity to reset ourselves in the spirit of Ka lā hiki ola. Reset thyself, and you give yourself the dawning of a new day.

12 Rules for Self-Leadership

Management and Leadership are not interchangeable words in Managing with Aloha. We need both as our disciplines. Management tends to be more internally focused (within a company, within an industry, within a person) whereas leadership is more externally focused on the future-forward actions you will take in the greater context of industry, community, or society. They have commonality to be sure, for instance, both are about capitalizing on human capacity, however they are defined by the differences we value in them: Management tends to be about systems and processes, whereas Leadership is more about ideas and experiments.

There is both art and discipline in each, and I think of these rules as the discipline which helps reveal the great capacity of the art. Thus above, twelve suggestions to help you self-manage, with a more disciplined you newly able to reveal your art. Now, twelve to help you self-lead, so a more disciplined you is newly able to reveal the art in others, those who choose you to lead them by merit of your own good example.

1. Set goals for your life; not just for your job. What we think of as “meaning of life” goals affect your lifestyle outside of work too, and you get whole-life context, not just work-life, each feeding off the other.

2. Practice discretion constantly, and lead with the example of how your own good behavior does get great results. Otherwise, why should anyone follow you when you lead?

3. Take initiative. Volunteer to be first. Be daring, bold, brave and fearless, willing to fall down, fail, and get up again for another round. Starting with vulnerability has this amazing way of making us stronger when all is done.

4. Be humble and give away the credit. Going before others is only part of leading; you have to go with them too. Therefore, they’ve got to want you around!

5. Learn to love ideas and experiments. Turn them into pilot programs that preface impulsive decisions. Everything was impossible until the first person did it.

6. Live in wonder. Wonder why, and prize “Why not?” as your favorite question. Be insatiably curious, and question everything.

7. There are some things you don’t take liberty with no matter how innovative you are when you lead. For instance, to have integrity means to tell the truth. To be ethical is to do the right thing. These are not fuzzy concepts.

8. Believe that beauty exists in everything and in everyone, and then go about finding it. You’ll be amazed how little you have to invent and much is waiting to be displayed.

9. Actively reject pessimism and be an optimist. Say you have zero tolerance for negativity and self-fulfilling prophecies of doubt, and mean it.

10. Champion change. As the saying goes, those who do what they’ve always done, will get what they’ve always gotten. The only things they do get more of are apathy, complacency, and boredom.

11. Be a lifelong learner, and be a fanatic about it. Surround yourself with mentors and people smarter than you. Seek to be continually inspired by something, learning what your triggers are.

12. Care for and about people. Compassion and empathy become you, and keep you ever-connected to your humanity. People will choose you to lead them.

Postscript

The Twelve Rules of Self-Management, and The Twelve Rules of Self-Leadership hark back to our early days as the Ho‘ohana Community, for I wrote them up soon after Managing with Aloha was initially published. I’ve resisted the urge to edit them, simply choosing to keep using them as is, with the self-coaching goal of getting better and better at our personal applications each time. Likewise, I resisted the urge to link them up in this, my most recent publishing of them, for many, if not all of them have been written up as individual postings. I may do that sometime in the future, but for now, be my co-author and “link them up” so to speak, with how you bring them to life.

Related Reading

Managerial Batching: 1, 2, 5 and 7
Accept Your Small Wisdoms with Grace
The Real Rules of Engagement (Redux)
Role Reconstruction: Design your Sweet Spot as Manager
On Ho‘ohiki: Keeping your promises

“Keep Moving Uphill”

The mountain-climbing analogy is one we’re fond of in the Ho‘ohana Community — it all started with Kūlia i ka nu‘u, Chapter 5 in Managing with Aloha:

Kūlia i ka nu‘u is the value of accomplishment and achievement. The literal translation for Kūlia i ka nu‘u is “strive to reach the summit.” Those who have this value continually pursue improvement and personal excellence. For them, the most satisfying competition is with their previous selves: They consider their life and everything within it to be a work in progress, and they enjoy the effort. ‘Hard work’ is good work when it employs the energies of striving and reaching higher. Index with more.

More recently, I’m apt to talk about our “Aloha Value-Verbing Intentions” as 5 progressive peaks we climb in our striving as managers:

Living with Aloha (as with the notion just Sunday Mālama’d that there is expertise to be learned in life)
Working with Aloha
Speaking with Aloha
Managing with Aloha
Leading with Aloha

So this interview with Sebastian Thrun got my attention, for it started with him talking about how he likes to use a mountain-climbing analogy when he thinks about products — if you’re not familiar with him, Thrun led the team that created Google Glass and the Google Self-Driving Car.

Here’s what he has to say:

You’ve developed a number of revolutionary products. How do you focus your energies at the beginning of a project?

When thinking about products, I like to use a mountain-climbing analogy. The first step is to pick a peak. Don’t pick a peak because it’s easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you’ll enjoy the process.

The second thing is to pick a team you trust and that’s willing to learn with you. Because the way mountain climbing really works is that you can’t climb the entire route perfectly. You have to know that you are going to make mistakes, that you’ll have to turn around, and that you’ll have to recover.

You also have to maintain your sense of purpose. For a long time, it may feel like you’re on the wrong path, but you must have the resilience to forge ahead. You just have to keep moving uphill.

How does iteration figure into your process? Do you think it’s best to create a functional prototype as soon as possible?

To return to the mountain idea, if you think about it, there’s no other way to get up the mountain than taking a hundred thousand steps. You could have all the meetings and all the documentation and work for weeks on end to make the perfect plan. But in my opinion, all you’ve done at that point is lost time. You’ve done nothing. You’ve learned nothing.

Sure, if this mountain has been climbed ten thousand times before, then you just get the book, and the maps, and you follow the same steps. But that’s not innovation. Innovation is about climbing a mountain that no one has climbed before. So there ought to be some unknowns along the way because no one has solved the problem yet.

And when you’re innovating, sheer thinking just won’t work. What gets you there is fast iteration, and fast failing. And when you fail, you’ve done something great: you’ve learned something. In hindsight, it might look a little embarrassing, and people will say, “You should’ve known that.” But the truth is you couldn’t have known because it’s unchartered territory. Almost every entrepreneur I know has failed massively many, many times along the way.

You can read the entire interview at: When You Fail, You’ve Done Something Great, published by Jocelyn K. Glei. Thrun also speaks of making mistakes, having a playful mindset with experimentation, and ends with this reminder on the value of humility:

I think that the ability to see how much more there is to know and be humble about it is actually a good thing. Returning to the mountain metaphor, every mountain climber I know of feels small in the mountains and enjoys the feeling of being small. No matter what you do, the mountain is always bigger than you are.

~ Sebastian Thrun

A related post for more thought provocation: Piloting Projects: Job One is You

Sunday Mālama: Better Managers are Better People

Let’s talk story. Let’s talk about expertise in Living with Aloha.

(Talking Story is Thriving. It’s What We Do)

When you write for a weblog, the rule you’re advised to keep top of mind is that you must write for your readers and not yourself, keeping your ‘this is mostly about me’ thoughts reserved for your journal, morning pages, or writing practice. So who are you dear readers, and what should I be writing about, for you?

I do make one assumption, that you are managers, or are someone thinking about taking a plunge into management (or staying, or leaving…), and that you read what I may publish for you here after having sampled enough of Managing with Aloha to know that values-centered work is my vision for noble, responsible managing.

That’s a pretty loaded assumption, I know, but we must have some kind of focus and purpose, and that be it— it’s the why I’ve dubbed you Alaka‘i Managers as individuals and refer to you as our Ho‘ohana Community as a group.

What if I’m not a manager?

I would still welcome you to stay, and be part of our Ho‘ohana Community by making it personal for you.

The “personal or professional?” distinction is not one I usually make, for one of the core beliefs woven into our Managing with Aloha philosophy, is that work is both personal and professional and always will be. They coexist. Life is personal, so work is personal. Everything within our existence as human beings is quite personal to us, yet ever-reaching human beings that we are, we want life and work to be professional too.

Yes, even life can be considered professional, in that we’ve elevated life with elements of expertise at living it. It’s expertise rooted in the personal, for it is expertise attained through learning and through gaining experience with testing that learning.

It can be useful to dissect managing with Aloha at times with personal and/or professional lenses I suppose, given the context relevant to whatever conversation we’re presently having, mostly to pursue more clarity, yet there’s always another baseline assumption in play for me: With Aloha as their guiding visionary value, better managers are better people.

Learning to become a better manager must entail the willingness and desire to become a better person as well.

That means there must be a limit on tough love, when compassion steps in. That means there must be humanity (via value alignment) in every single business plan, and the justification that “it’s just business” is never said, thought, or entertained in the least. That means that as business owners we compensate well (figuring out how to do so in our business plans for humans) so we never, ever, devalue the worth of human energy devoted to our cause— the most important asset we have, and the privilege of managing others with the Aloha, dignity and respect we are responsible for. It’s a profound responsibility, and a profound honor to be held with humility.

In learning and applying Managing with Aloha we will always aspire to be a good person first; becoming a good manager arrives second as natural progression and consequence.

Indeed, there is expertise in living as a good person, to then work as a good person and better professional, is there not? Let’s value-map it:

Attaining Managing with Aloha expertise is a progression toward the value of Alaka‘i, achieved through the value of Ho‘ohanohano, wherein we “conduct ourselves with Aloha distinction.” Kuleana kicks in, as this progression carries us through “working it” to taking full responsibility for working within the Kuleana we associate with becoming the professional we call an Alaka‘i Manager, one with the expertise of Aloha in all its expressions.

Good person first, good manager as a consequence.

We self-manage our own behavior first, and manage the behaviors of others second.

We self-lead first, and step forward to lead others second, for “To be Alaka‘i is to lead and manage by merit of your own good example.”

It’s time well spent, going back to the beginning of our last twelve years together as the Ho‘ohana Community, to review our basics don’t you think? To talk story about them in our own words and with our own good intention, without having to look anything up. To Ho‘omau— to continue in an intentional and clear way. We review basics like this to recommit to them, and to remember the value convictions associated with them, values we chose, and values which have made them our truths.

For let’s also remember how we have defined integrity:

Integrity is the living of our personal truths.

Those truths, whether personal or professional or both, are certainly what we want our expertise to focus on.

Related Reading:

What if I’m not a manager?
Managing: Learn how to ask “Why?”
Management Style by Habit

Postscript

Sunday Mālama has been when I will share my off-the-workplace-highway scenic route kind of posts. Not as a normal weekly feature, but whenever they seem to be writing themselves. You can access the Sunday Mālama archives via this category link, also residing on the right-hand sidebar.

Bone Structure and Muscle Mass

I am rereading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones for maybe the 7th or 9th time; I lose count. It’s always good, whether you read it from start to finish as written, or just dip in for a chapter a day, skimming those titles to see what calls to you.

One morning this past week, I found myself thinking about her title. Natalie Goldberg doesn’t say too much about it in her book’s Introduction, just that, “When I teach a writing class, I want the students to be ‘writing down the bones,’ the essential, awake speech of their minds.” Since reading this interview with her, I know Goldberg is a fan of practice and structure, two things I revere as well. Geeky productivity nerd that I can often be, I have come to hold these things in high regard:

values for basic goodness, for belief in morality, for predictability
structure in keeping oneself logical, organized, ordered, aligned most of all
batching for focused attention, and for concentration
habits for rhythm over routine, for energizing momentum
language of intention
rule-breaking for creativity, and as a receptacle for new learning… there’s beauty in the work
sensible business plans, where values weave in to strengthen them

I have always liked the word practitioners for describing ourselves as the Alaka‘i Managers we aspire to be.

The list above was quickly written in a stream of consciousness impulsiveness, when I realized something: taken altogether, they reminded me of our 9 Key Concepts, wherein we had also talked about bone structure and muscle mass. Do you remember what our bones are as Managing with Aloha practitioners? Do you remember what our muscle was?

So I did a fresh edit of that page, a kind of repeat session of “writing down the bones” too — ours. Read it again here, and ask yourself, as I am currently: If you took a bone density test, which us older folk get urged to be familiar with as we age, how healthy would the 9 Key Concepts within your business plan appear to be?

Bonus points: Here’s another MWA Check-up for you ~

I have this particular posting categorized with Key 2— Worthwhile Work, Key 3— Value Alignment, and Key 6— The ‘Ohana in Business Model.

Why those? What are the connections?

What are your connections? Decide on what your next action will be for each one, schedule it and get it done— you will be an intentioned practitioner, working smart.

Next-stepping and other Verbs

On Trend: Your Values, 2016

Sweet, sweet beginnings!

It’s that time of year when I’ve historically sent you missives that are fresh round-ups of, and new check-ins with, our 19 values of Managing with Aloha: e.g. 2015: Goals change, values are forever.

This year however, let’s talk bigger picture, reviewing some of our most delectable basics, and working on the what-when-and-why framing of them all, especially with what it can mean for you.

Some of us have been together for 12 years now, and I trust you’ll like returning to these basics of our philosophy with me – they’re comforting and keep us sure-footed. For those of you who have joined us in managing life with Aloha more recently, my goal in writing this was to bring you quickly and directly into the fold, ready to seize the new year with us and not feel you’ve any catching up to do first. Archive links are inserted if you wish to read more or reference something, but you don’t have to.

Ready? We Ho‘ohana together, kākou.

On Trend: Your Values, 2016

Values-based management is an “oldie but goodie” to those of us who aspire to be Alaka‘i Managers. Weaving value alignment into our business and workplace practices, keeping it as our primary S.O.P. (standard operating procedure and modus operandi) has truly stood the test of time, making us stronger and better as well – it’s a tool that sharpens us as we take care to hone it.

Why? …and why bother?

Being a human being is an extraordinary gift and profound privilege, and we want to be the best we can possibly be. Core to being a great manager, is being a good person.

We’ve come to know that values drive behavior, and they do so universally – they drive our behavior as personal values, and they drive our behavior in association with others as organizational values (in your workplace, and in businesses you’ll visit and patronize) or as societal values (shaping conventions and traditions wherever you choose to live, a significant part of your Sense of Place there).

Best of all, we consider values to be morally good drivers in what they will guide and compel us to do. We largely associate them with virtues, and with generational legacies. Future forward, we instinctively understand that there must be self-propelled actions which stem from our values to produce the kind of moral character we will be proud to call our own.

Should you choose Aloha as your core value, as I am known for asking all managers and leaders to do, you choose to self-manage with that value of self-love and mutual respect for other human beings that defines what Aloha is all about.

In other words…

Values come packaged with our good intentions: They drive us to be our best selves.

Knowing these things, we’ve next come to realize something quite useful and practical: When we’re focused on this regularity, predictability, and inherently good-natured intention of how values drive behavior, giving them our rapt attention, we can turn them into fantastic tools, tools that beyond useful and practical, are highly relevant to our work – they matter, and they make a difference:

Values equip us well, and they serve us nobly. Values lived and worked with, are culture builders.

For what is culture? Culture is simply our collective word for a group of people who share common values, and operate within those values. We think of culture as a result, which it most certainly is, and as “what they’ve become, and who they are – it’s how they operate.”

Now turn that “they” into your “we.”

At any given time, we might simply step into, inherit, and feel compelled to live with whatever cultural drivers are already in place somewhere – we do it all the time, and are much more adaptable than we realize. We seek our sense of belonging wherever we are.

Yet make no mistake about it: Culture is a living, breathing entity; it’s an ever-adjusting dynamic of value-driven behaviors stemming from whichever values are in-play. That means that once you’re in it, you’re part of it too, and your in-play behavior will add to those ever-adjusting dynamics. You can either go with the flow, or you can turn the tide. People are powerful, and as one of my favorite quotes seeks to remind us,

A rising tide will lift all boats.

This Why, What and When of values leads us to this How-to:

There are lots of values. For instance, when I wrote Managing with Aloha, I deliberately chose 19 out of 62 I had identified as in-play in my own cultural dynamic, a societal culture associated with Hawaii’s sense of place. I researched them, interviewed elders I respected, and then I made my deliberate choices for my business playground, and hence, for my own on-purpose culture building in the workplace.

Since then, we’ve named our Managing with Aloha practice of value alignment “Our with Aloha Intentions.” These Aloha Intentions are those -ing value verbs we constantly study and practice contextually: Living with Aloha, Working with Aloha, Speaking with Aloha (and the Language of We), Managing with Aloha, and Leading with Aloha. Each has a personal and professional complement to them, e.g. self-leadership and leading others.

[ A recent “value-verbing” reference can be found here: Curating Value Alignment ]

Similar to my authorship process with the Managing with Aloha philosophy, Value Statements, whether incorporated into your personal mission statement, or into the organizational expectations of your workplace or other associations, are authored as deliberate choices too.

Value of the Month programs reinforce and strengthen those choices. They grease the wheels of value alignment, and keep in-play practices alive and well: They keep a culture healthy with a values-based audit for those practices. Whether run monthly (for full immersion in one value) or quarterly (which I recommend to immerse in 2 or 3 values concurrently, also working with how they’re connected and intertwined), value programs will keep value choices well defined, editing those definitions when need be. Value-alignment programs will therefore shape, perpetuate, or shift prevailing behaviors, so they become your deliberately chosen behaviors and better habits.

Yes. Oh yes! You can shift your values, by changing your choices and actively working on those choices. Absolutely yes!

At this time of year, we normally refer to our desire for better habits, as resolutions.

And we make our choices:

Ethos: Be true to your Values, for Each New Year is a Gift.

So please, think of your choices as refreshing your values. And choose wisely.

Less is More

I do it too. This gentle coaching for you is self-coaching for me and my partnerships as well (my “we”).

I mentioned winnowing down 62 sense of place values identified in then-contemporary Hawaii, to 19 choices for Managing with Aloha, specific to culture building in our living, working, speaking, managing and leading how-to and with Aloha practice. We continue to run with it.

As pertains to Say Leadership Coaching, we constantly work on the 5 Values within our Value Statement, and immerse ourselves in a Values of Our Quarter program, where we add a 3rd new value to influence us, freshly defining and aligning 2 of our existing ones. Our 2016 looks like this: The 1st 2 values are our constants, and the 3rd is our fresher:

Q1 Aloha and Ho‘ohana, with Ho‘omau, the value of perseverance
Q2 Ho‘ohana and Hō‘imi, with Lokomaika‘i, the Hawaiian value of generosity
Q3 Hō‘imi and Alaka‘i, with Mālama particular to stewardship and sustainability
Q4 Alaka‘i and ‘Ike loa, with Ha‘aha‘a, the value of humility

Enough about me though, I simply share that as our team’s example.

Make this about you. I’ve published this when you may come to expect a Sunday Mālama from me, hoping you’ll take some me time in your own sacred Sunday.

Always On Trend: Your values are good for you.

1. Trust in your values. Choose them deliberately, articulating them for your own clarity, whether in Hawaiian, English, or another language, as long as they are stated in your own Language of Intention: Make them about behaviors you will commit to, and grow better within.

2. As the saying goes, “to err is human,” forgive and move on: If you find you start in a somewhat negative place of dissatisfaction with your current state of affairs, walk through understanding it, forgive with grace, and choose your values based on the good intentions and positive expectancy you want to move forward with, and set a good example for others with.

3. Understand that less is likely more in terms of focusing well and working both reasonably and realistically. With less, you can avoid being regimented in over-organization, and have open spaces for whatever the coming year will surely add to your plate without you even sensing it yet. You don’t want to settle for checking off some lengthy, all-inclusive list: You want to become accomplished with what really matters.

4. And again, why bother? So you can dwell in your Aloha Spirit, expressing it through your ever-optimistic and inherently good-natured values. Not only do values lived and worked help you feel morally on track, they equip you in ways which make you stronger.

5. Prepare to take action (we call it next-stepping in the MWA lexicon), and don’t stop at getting your clarity down on paper… specify what happens next, and get your good intentions done.

Be as good, and as powerful as I know you can be.

Be happy, being you and all you as said when I last stepped into your inbox.

Hau‘oli 2016!

~ Rosa Say

Each New Year a Gift

As I write this, we’re about to turn another yearly page in our lives, this time from 2015 to 2016, the true goodness of Ka lā hiki ola in all its glory: Hope and promise in the “dawning of a new day.”

Are you overwhelmed with the change, or eager for the clean, fresh start?

Be eager.

Build on your past, but don’t get hung up on it, or delayed by it, scrambling to tie up loose ends: The future is always bigger, and very likely better, with the promise of much more abundance.

Something I’ve learned, as benefit of surviving my own page-turnings of past years, is that the future tends to be much more forgiving of us than we are of ourselves. It doesn’t beat us up for not doing something, though it did bear witness to our endless procrastination; it will simply wait for us in a kindly, and very hospitable expectation, knowing possibility always awaits.

Then the future offers us a gift, one far better than anything we recently had tucked under the Christmas tree: It gives us a brand new year, one still connected to all the deep relationships and lessons-learned of our past, yet one we can eagerly fill up with the abundance of our Aloha Spirit come out to play.

We have our constants, and always will.

Now, we can change. We can grow. We can be somehow different if we choose to.

My New Year’s wish for you is simply this: Dwell within your Aloha Spirit, you (in-spirit with your ha) and all you (in-signature with your alo, shaped by your good intentions). Play within the guidance of your personal values, but do play.

2016 is going to be absolutely magnificent.

Ka lā hiki ola tells me so, and I choose to believe it, knowing I can have no better affirmation.

Hau’oli Makahiki Hou, Happy New Year!

~ Rosa

Issues, Actions, Opinion, and Self-Managing with Aloha

I tend to stay away from commenting on highly contentious, emotionally charged ‘news’ issues, for I’m fully aware that noisy opinions can make me way too reactive, and less reasonable as well. What we hear on broadcast television and/or social media is often skewed for ratings and sensationalism, whether founded in extreme personal experiences (albeit sad and unfortunate ones), or crowd-thinking which can cause us to quiet our voices of reason, or worse, get us to question our voices: Are they right, and am I wrong?

Human nature? Perhaps, but there is more to it than impulses we give in to — at first.

I for one will return to this certainty: Our values drive our behavior. Should you choose Aloha, as I am known for asking all of us to do, you choose to self-manage with that value of self-love and mutual respect for other human beings that defines what Aloha is all about.

Human nature is both reactive by impulse, and proactive by choice. To be human, is to be emotionally reactive, and it is sometimes very difficult to turn that off. However, we can turn it off. We can channel our impulses and reactions: To be human is also to have the ability to think before acting, to choose right from wrong, and to solve our ills rather than stopping at justifying one wrong with another one.

For example, one of my own values-driven beliefs irrevocably connected to Aloha, is that stone-throwing, rioting, burning and looting in the name of justice is wrong, no matter what the circumstances may be. There may be a need for peaceful protest, but never violence, and never destructive trespass; never. Ill-begotten personal gains for one person, does not translate into justice for someone else. There is absolutely nothing anyone can say to have me believe otherwise.

There is no reason to share our personal ugliness with another human being, no matter how much we hurt. Because it is connected to Aloha, this belief helps me turn off any impulsive, negative reactions much more quickly, helping me transition to reasonable, proactive, problem-solving behaviors instead.

I will think about ‘Ohana, the value of family and community, and never seek to hurt others whenever I may be hurting, and whenever I may have been wronged.
I will turn my attentions to solving the true root causes of the hurtful problem instead: I will think about Kuleana, and what my own responsibility is.
I will think about Ho‘ohana, and choose the corrective work I can choose to do within my own circle of influence.

None of that may be easy, they seldom are, but I will move myself in their direction because I choose to, and I self-manage with self-discipline and self-determination. Aloha is the best self-managing behavior you can possibly choose, and make no mistake about it: We choose our values, and thus, we choose our behavior.

Human beings are sensory, perceptive, and highly intelligent: We know right from wrong.

Human beings can choose courageous virtue and morality: We know when our actions do more damage than good, and that knowledge helps us face difficulty and adversity.

Holding hands, by Waithamai on Flickr

We also have opinions, and we choose when, and where, and in what context we will state share them, so that we speak with Aloha.

When we witness racial or class-specific issues, many will say that people who are outside that race or class have no right to an opinion about it, e.g. “Unless you walk in my shoes, shut the hell up.” I can, and I will respect that I lack personal experience with certain things (for instance, I am not black, and not white; I’m an Asian/Eurasian/Caucasian islander.) In my respect for you, I will assure your voice is heard, and that I listen, and that I ask the questions that will help me understand you better. However, I will not shut up if and when I feel I have something good, positive, right and compassionate to say (the values of Pono and Mālama), invoking those values for better behaviors taking us forward together.

We are in this together, Kākou: We need not have common experiences in order to explore them, and then solve them together. In fact, our diversity will make us stronger, and make us better as co-existing human beings in inclusively respectful communities. Diversity and inclusive thinking drive higher levels of compassion and understanding, and they contribute to the learning we need to experience when faced with complex issues. Effective problem solving has never required that we be of the same race, religion or faith, political persuasion or insiders’ group.

So please, let’s not seek to shut each other up demanding sameness in order to be heard. It takes much, much longer to achieve breakthroughs in situations of sanitized sameness, where we have flushed out any and all catalysts for possible change. The more voices we can hear about our issues, the better.

However, let’s all commit to self-managing our reactive voices and behaviors in positive ways.

Let’s be better, for we are human beings, and we can be better; a capability of our species. Let’s respect what others can offer in wanting to help us. Let’s never seek vigilante justice. Only good begets more good.

If you are visiting Managing with Aloha for the first time, you can learn more about the Hawaiian values I have mentioned via the grey navigational bars atop the site page. More related reading:

What is the Aloha Spirit? It’s you!
Ethos: Be true to your Values
Sunday Mālama: Gandhi’s 7 Dangers To Human Virtue