Rosa Say's Blog: Managing with Aloha, page 22

Tough Times are Rough Draft Times

He started our conversation over coffee saying, “This is such a tough time to be in business.”

Well, it could be said that it’s always a tough time in business, for there’s always something challenging about it, always some problem-solving to be tackled, isn’t there. It can also be said that the tough challenges are what intrigue us about our work, keeping us curious and creative, and keeping us learning.

Tough times are a manager’s rough draft times. Tough times are when we give ourselves more permission than we usually do, with all sorts of initiatives. We get crazy critical about our own To Do lists. We break more rules and conventions and buck history (or embrace it). We reconsider questions we’d thought we already had answers for. We take new risks because they suddenly don’t seem half as risky as doing nothing. We think, “Why not?” far more than “Certainly not!” and we try things. We dabble. We experiment. We try harder, try better, try smarter.

Healthy businesses, where everything seems to be going along swimmingly well, make this same case for periodic disruption: To disrupt in a positive way, is to the rock the boat of complacency and buckle in for a more exhilarating ride, and for a new adventure.

Cease the ‘attitude scolding.’

The quick and easy answer for the person bemoaning tough times, is commonly one urging them to stop whining and redirect their attitude: “Look on the bright side!” or “Count your blessings; the glass is half full.” Attitude does determine outcome, however these phrases are really scoldings that risk sulking; say these things, and people tend to get defensive with you, in their impulse to justify or gloss over whatever negativity they let slip out. You lengthen the conversation about the negative, when you really need to redirect to the positive. You help them commiserate in non-action, when you really want them to buck up, move on, and take action.

It’s better to ask a question that will lead you both toward contemplating the next rough draft to be tackled: “I wonder; times being the way they are, what could you [or ‘we’ whenever it’s possible to say it] tackle and achieve now that seemed hands-off before? What’s become more possible, because people are more willing to try something different?”

When I asked these questions of my coffee conversation companion, he took a sip of his coffee to think about it before speaking, looked over my shoulder at the barista, and suddenly brightened up, sitting up a little taller. “There has been something I’ve noticed about my staff. They seem more cooperative these days, just more open and less resistant. At first I thought they were just restless because business was down, but then I saw how they actually were refusing to be bored, and were challenging me for better direction.” he said, and our conversation took off on an entirely new direction too.

They refused to be bored. How great is that? [Related reading: People Who Do Good Work]

Sweat the small stuff, because now you can.

Though you can certainly go big, the rough drafts for difference I’m talking about here needn’t cover large-scale, sweeping change. I’m taking about drilling down, tackling the small stuff, and checking off items that have lingered on your Someday/Maybe List so they can finally be done! I’m talking about having conversations you’ve meant to start but haven’t, and about making tweaks and adjustments. I’m talking about giving your tiny, but smoldering hot ideas their day in the sun, and remembering that policy changes ache your foundational groundwork.

For example: Perhaps there’s a new way of doing your staff schedule, or revising how you handle their performance reviews (something every manager can constantly be working on). Work on the beginnings of a profit-sharing program, or revisit another facet of your business model. Do that long-overdue trimming of ‘office hours’ which would concentrate customer interactions, in favor of ‘work it without distraction, and ship it’ hours. Discontinue a sacred-cow product that is no longer profitable enough, because you have the time or opportunity to work on cutting those ties that have bound it to your day in, day out m.o. in producing it, along with any emotional ties (more on that in a moment.)

Perhaps you can do work on outside factors that have been affecting your business… Is there someone in your professional network who has the potential to be a stronger partner? Work on that relationship. Have you always wanted to clear up or challenge a government regulation that affects you? Is it time to entertain lobbying your elected representative about it? Is this the time to take advantage of lower interest rates, and relocate your commercial space? Should you clean out those off-site storage lockers you’re on some automatic payment schedule for?

Our emotional roller coaster goes both up and down.

Tough times tend to have this silver lining: Emotional ties to old stuff will lessen when that old stuff is really baggage. People will finally see it as the baggage it is (they are shouldering enough baggage of their own during tough times!) and they will be more open to seeing the benefit of the new as the relief it can be. They’ll participate when you propose creative differences and changes that look like new building blocks to them — these are the ‘rough drafts’ of difference and change our tough times illustrate for us. And as with any roller coaster, riders hold on.

So think about it: Is the tough time you may be in, reeking with the potential of a rough draft time? I bet it is.

For your dose of Managing with Aloha value alignment, review Ka lā hiki ola; it translates to “the dawning of a new day.” This is the value of optimism, hope and promise…

Postscript:

Tough times are made for PALENA ‘OLE, our MWA Key Concept no.9:

Palena ‘ole is the Hawaiian concept of unlimited capacity. This is your exponential growth stage, and about seeing your bigger and better leadership dreams come to fruition. Think “Legacy” and “Abundance” and welcome the coaching of PONO into your life as the value it is. We create our abundance by honoring human capacity; physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. When we seek inclusive, full engagement and optimal productivity, any scarcity will be banished. Growth is welcomed and change is never feared; enthusiasm flourishes. PALENA ‘OLE is an everyday attitude in an ‘Ohana in Business, assuming that growth and abundance is always present as an opportunity. Given voice, Palena ‘ole sounds like this: “Don’t limit yourself! Why settle for ‘either/or’ when we can go for the ‘and’ and be better?”

Site category for Key 9: Palena ‘ole

Read more: The 9 Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha and The 9 Key Concepts — Why these 9?

Read more in our MWA Archives on managing change:

Find your Doubting Thomases
The Workplace Mixology of ‘Ohana
The Bull in Your China Shop
Alaka‘i Managers are the new Energy Bunnies
The 3 Sins of Management — and the Cure for all 3

Validating Achievement with MWA Coaching

I will be writing about the achievement of Kūlia i ka nu‘u for the next issue of Ke Ola magazine (which will be published and distributed November/December 2013) and article done, I find I’m still thinking about it quite a bit — that is, about achievement in terms of what we strive for, and why. Kūlia i ka nu‘u is a value which gets defined contextually within a workplace; it gets defined through other value drivers.

Considered on its own, achievement is an inner battle for most of us, one between the Shouldings (what everyone else wants us to achieve, and feels we should strive for) and our own personal wants and desires. It can take an awful lot to defeat the Shouldings. We can’t just ignore them, because they’re embodied in other people — people whose opinions matter to us; people we care about, like parents, teachers, coaches, and bosses.

Help in this battle, is one of those ways Alaka‘i Managers serve others best: We help find those pockets of opportunity where no battle needs to be fought, because a personal want and desire is a match for a value-driven organizational shoulding, one which happens to be a community or societal shoulding as well — it’s a recognizable and admirable achievement for everyone, and an achievement borne of shared values. It’s a match that’s important, worthwhile work, and it’s a match we can coach our people to work within (through value-aligned behaviors).

This help is the constant of every manager’s work — or it should be. Is it the constant of your work?

Alaka‘i Managers get the work (of the workplace, and of the mission) to make sense, and let’s face it: Whatever you may want as an individual needs relevance to the community you choose to live within.

“For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that.”

~ Alice Munro, the newly announced [2013] winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in a November 2012 interview.

I’ve always preferred thinking about these value matches as ‘pockets of opportunity’ because they do tend to be workable parts of something, the facets of a bigger vision or comprehensive mission. We who are managers must find-and-define achievement in skill sets and in qualification mastery (the tangibles of performance metrics) rather than in end results: We work with what a profession actually does rather than what society says it is (e.g. the work of the verbs. Healing, rather than ‘doctor’ or ‘nurse,’ safe transport, rather than ‘pilot’ or ‘air traffic controller.’)

So Kūlia i ka nu‘u: In a workplace, the value of achievement is all about getting worthwhile work to make sense first, and be excellent second. Why be excellent in something that doesn’t matter?

Archive Aloha with related reading:

Banish your Possibility Robbers
Managing Basics: Study Their Work
Role Reconstruction: Design your Sweet Spot as Manager
Beauty in the Work: “Things Occur to You.”
Next-stepping and other Verbs

For more reading paths, go to New Here? or click on the tags found in the footer.

Alaka‘i Managers shine when they become workplace students. We study the work which is being done by our people, and we help them become power users, smart, confident, and happy about what they do. We want them to shine in what they achieve because they actually do it perceptively, and they do it well. We intercept work in progress so people don’t settle for shortcuts, or get overly frustrated with hit-or-miss fiddling as opposed to smarter learning. We make the right tools available, and we eliminate obstacles. We give our people opportunities to apply what they’ve learned and practiced, so they can reap true usefulness from devoting their best energies to work and workplace mission, and continuing to grow within that work.

~ Read more, at Managing Basics: Study Their Work

Huddles, Values and the Work Ethic we Value

Huddle up, and Talk Story.

I encourage Alaka‘i Managers to talk story often — to huddle with their team (and do call it a ‘huddle’ instead of a ‘meeting’) and simply talk about something and just about anything, where the manager has no issue or resolution in mind, and no agenda of any kind other than to get everyone in the team talking, encouraging their stories to be told and listened to.

It may be you talk about a current news story — including those supposed no-no’s of politics, sexuality, and religion when relevant and meaningful to your team. It may be you talk about your community habits (‘the market’ and ‘the network’) when a new business opens in town, so personal stories about dabbling in the new, experiencing novel service, being neighborly, or abundance can be told; “… so there is room for all of us to work for our community interests, don’t you think?”

To hear the story, listen to the values.

I remember a very lively talk story had over lunch within a coaching project I was doing when the U.S. Post Office released their very first Forever Stamp — anyone else still have one of those Liberty Bell strips in their wallet? We talked about business models at first, and about the highly calculated move USPS was taking, and then the really good stuff happened, where personal stories were told about the biggest risk everyone sitting around the table had ever taken. We learned a lot about each other that day. There was so much NĀNĀ I KE KUMU richness to admire!

Similar to our practice of the Daily 5 Minutes, talk story huddles benefit from letting someone else start, bringing up whatever they might have in mind, and most Alaka‘i Managers will simply take turns within their teams, getting everyone to participate. My own team doesn’t forget to give me a turn too (they don’t let me off the hook!) and my favorite talk story prompter has always been a good question — I think every manager can benefit from keeping a list of philosophical questions in their coaching arsenal, for questions are the best values-based prompters I know of; we look to our values in seeking to answer them.

One question in particular hits to the heart of values-based story-telling directly, and it’s always been a favorite for me:

VALUE is one of those words with multiple meanings for people, e.g. ‘good values’ versus ‘a good value‘ — is there a difference for you, between your personal values, and what you value?

It’s a question I get often in light of the work I have chosen to do with Managing with Aloha, and I hesitate to answer it in terms of what I think unless I’m in a one-on-one conversation with someone, and only if they offer their answer to me first — you can bet I have feelings about it, but I don’t want to influence them with my answer, because I much prefer to hear what they think about it. As a coach, this is an opportunity for me to learn, and to practice building on my MĀLAMA skills with empathy.

There’s me, and then there’s you.

What I most often hear from people, is that they think of values personally — values are about them and what they believe in; values are a part of them; they feel it, they know it. When they have the chance to talk about their values, that chance is about revealing their self-awareness, and how they feel about the person they are. They are talking about their ‘it factor’ though they’d never dare to call it that. Really, really good stuff, and I feel privileged and honored to listen to it.

On the other hand, talking about ‘what [they] value’ is largely a talk story about the behavior of others, and therefore, about the values that drive other people — values that will circle back and affect them with their ripple effects. A biggie which comes up in our conversation repeatedly? You guessed it: Work Ethic. Oh how we value it in other people!

We celebrate hard work as work ethic, equating it with discipline, diligence, and even with moral character or civic virtue. We recognize that there are extremes, such as workaholic behaviors, and nose-to-the-grindstone habits at the polar opposite of big-picture thinking and all-team awareness (LŌKAHI and KĀKOU). But overall, we seem to be in a day and age where we ache for work ethic’s highly desirable middle ground, where admirable, team-conducive and mission-reliable work habits dwell in workplace culture.

This is the kind of conversation in which foundational, return-to-our-core types of talk story huddles will happen. I strongly encourage you to broach them courageously, allowing your team to speak into what they want and what they value in each other. You will be opening a door to MAHALO, where teams begin to appreciate each other more deeply, and to HO‘OKIPA, where team members seek to serve each other better through demonstrated work ethic precisely in they way the entire team has defined it as valuable to them.

Postscript #1:

Another good question if your team’s mood is waxing philosophical, is “What is the difference between value and virtue?”

If you have not yet seen it, here is the Resource Page link to my Twelve Aloha Virtues: 1. Hope, 2. Freedom, 3. Humor, 4. Prayer, 5. Vitality, 6. Wonder, 7. Trust, 8. Faith, 9. Grace, 10. Gratitude, 11. Joy, 12. Peace.

Postscript #2:

If you have a copy of Managing with Aloha, review the MAHALO story of the Alaka‘i Nalu which starts on page 194 under the heading of “Creating the habit of appreciation.”

Aloha! Just joining us?

We are devoting the month of August to a value exploration of work ethic:

Start here: Today’s Work Ethic: Work for you 1st
Next, read: We Earn Our Keep, Integrated. It can be difficult to balance the personal with the professional; far better that we integrate them.
Human energy is the manager’s greatest resource: Managing Energies: Struggle & Ease. How does strengths versus weaknesses, and talent versus skills versus knowledge, relate to work ethic?
This article! Huddles, Values and the Work Ethic we Value.
Bonus Links: Related, and published a year ago: Anything and Everything to Talk About and All Conversations Are Not Created Equal.

Managing Energies: Struggle & Ease

We managers look for good results. When we get them, we’ll celebrate, so that’s a good thing — stop for the appreciation of MAHALO, and say, “Thank you!”� and “Well done!”� It’s the pause that refreshes before we continue with our next project, so celebrate wildly.

However know this: A lot of work process is either over or temporarily suspended at that point in time where you see results. Most of the work is over, and you’re within an in-between place, or at an ending.

How did those results happen?

What we work with best as Alaka‘i Managers (i.e. where we serve others best), is within the work that comes before we get results. We help people grow in their strengths, and we help them make their weaknesses irrelevant, compensating for those weaknesses in the best possible way. When we excel in these efforts, we’re managing well. The results everyone achieves will surely get easier, become better, and happen more frequently.

Strengths and weaknesses are big-bucket words though: They’re plural, with an assortment in each bucket. They’re a collection of our talents when hits or when misses, and we often don’t realize what they are, specifically, until we’ve done the coaching work involved in diagnosing them. Further complicating matters, is that not all strengths and weaknesses are created equal: A strength for one person can very naturally be a weakness for another.

So here’s a management hack that can help you. Instead of going crazy looking for specific strengths and weaknesses, or getting lost in the specificity of labeling them, look for struggle and/or ease in all the work which happens. To be realistic about this, you’ll usually be working with one person at a time anyway (as we spoke of a while back, in Managerial Batching: 1, 2, 5 and 7)

Human energy flows and surges when work is done with ease; there is a wonderful tendency where good begets more good. Conversely, our working energy stalls and sputters when there’s any kind of struggle in the process. Struggle is a sign of a person’s weakness, whereas ease is a sign of their strength. You may still have to do more diagnostics to wade through context, and discover root cause (such as when a process obstacle or relational barrier is the culprit), but you’ll be halfway there. You’ll know where to help them, and why — you’ll also have the work at hand to immediately work with them on gaining improvement, which is way better than having a theoretical airy-fairy discussion about it.

Start with process, then match it to your people.

There is often another bonus in this hack: We’ll circumvent our natural tendency to take strengths and weaknesses personally. Employees don’t always ask for help when they should, because they don’t like exposing their weaknesses — no one does. When we replace these words with struggle and ease, people make an easier connection to the work itself and can look at it more objectively as they actually perform it, keeping that work (task and process) at arm’s length from their vulnerability — they evaluate work for their own struggle or ease along with you, and can ask for very specific help, such as supplemental skills training, or access to additional knowledge.

In fact, you may even find they begin to bring processes up on their own. Begin to insert the struggle and/or ease vocabulary into your next team huddle: Look for your opportunity to ask how one of your workplace projects are going, by asking, “Where are we finding ease with this, hitting our stride, and where are we still struggling?”�

Start with a focus on team process instead of on individual people, and comfort will grow from there, as the vocabulary seeps into your work culture bit by valuable bit.

Coaching Tips:

As Alaka‘i Managers,

— We Hire/Select people for their TALENT. (Talent is innate; in-born and natural.)

— We Train people to develop their SKILLS. (Skills are learned activities.)

— We Give Access to the KNOWLEDGE our people need. (Knowledge is learned information.)

Strengths are TALENTS applied, and in use. We often think of talents as qualifications based on past experience (there was opportunity to use one’s talents, and they did). Our best growth and self-development will happen within our strengths.

Weaknesses are NON-TALENTS applied best a person can manage them, and we will always be forced to compensate for them in some way until we redesign the work in favor of strength-sourcing instead.

Alaka‘i Managers will accomplish this by applying their strength/weakness shifting strategies to work activities (i.e. performance), and not to a person’s character or personality. Do not diagnose weaknesses as bad attitude.

Aloha! Just joining us?

We are devoting the month of August to a value exploration of work ethic:

Today’s Work Ethic: Work for you 1st
We Earn Our Keep, Integrated
This article! Managing Energies: Struggle & Ease. How does this discussion in regard to strengths versus weaknesses, and talent versus skills versus knowledge, relate to work ethic?
Related Context: Alaka‘i Managers are the new Energy Bunnies.

Recommended Reading in our Archives on Strengths Management:

The instinctive, natural selection of Wanting
Life’s 3 Stops in Motivation: Happiness, Meaning, Service
The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Parts
Accept your Small Wisdoms with Grace
Managing: Be a Big Fan of the Small Win

We Earn Our Keep, Integrated

Preface: We are devoting the month of August to a value exploration of work ethic.

A Career Path’s Lessons Learned

Because of my own work history, I’m often asked about working in the hotel industry. The conversation which ensues can be a long and meaty one, particularly when I’m aware the person inquiring has several options he or she can explore, for my coaching instincts kick in, and I want them to make their best possible choice.

The Hawai‘i hotel industry was good to me overall, but there were several ups and downs, with many of those downers due to sacred cows in an archaic business model, downers I feel were completely uncalled for. Unfortunately, that model still exists today, entrenched in corporate power plays, and were I given a magical career rewind, I would very likely make a different career choice; as they say, hindsight is indeed 20/20. Thus, I hesitate to recommend a career path I would not make myself: The only position I would consider in the hotel business today, would be as the power player there to quickly, and drastically reinvent lodging’s business model from top to bottom.

To have any business without a feasible, and fully functioning business model was irresponsible to me. It was pretty dumb, but mostly, it was simply wrong.

Do you feel good about the business you work in, feeling it is sound?

— The Rub of the Business Model is Solved by your Values

Inevitably the subject of fair and equitable compensation comes up at some point of the conversation, for the hotel business is one in which you employ many at minimum wage or entry level pay scales, which in my opinion, is the most archaic and unethical business practice of them all. It can be a very explosive topic here in Hawai‘i, and those who know I often push the reinvention suggestion take delight in questioning me for all the answers.

Well, I don’t have all the answers, and I do understand that it becomes a complicated issue when you battle long-standing corporate structure, deal with unionized job classifications, etc. etc. Cry me a river; we can all chime in with more obstacles if that’s all we set our sights on.

I won’t do that with you. I refuse to believe that equity in compensation is impossible, and my tolerance of those who justify their industry positions by lamenting in helpless commiseration is low to nil. Answers are out there, simmering in someone’s brain, waiting to be discovered, experimented with, and tweaked in pilot programs until they begin to work.

We create our own destiny.

If you insist on pressing me for my answer to your “What should I do?/ Should I take the job?” questions, it’ll be this:

Focus on what can be done versus what can’t be.

Be part of any problem’s solution — solvers are the learners and innovators.

Earn your keep, get paid better.

And I’m talking to everyone right now, not just the ones in charge.

Now as honest as I’ll be with them when they screw up, it’s no secret that I am the manager’s advocate. You can’t blame everything on management, and this area of improving your lot in life is the perfect example of one in which employees need to get better at creating their own destiny as courageous, self-empowered individuals with a personal-1st/ professional-2nd/ integrated work ethic as their driving value.

This is the way I see Work Circa 2013 and Beyond working best:

1— Choose a job you will love to do AS IS right now because it suits your preferred lifestyle (without your best health, everything else is a moot point). Choose a mission-driven employer with practiced values which ALREADY ALIGN with your personal values. You should love that job and that employer so much that the pay — whatever it is — is the icing on the cake.

2— Visualize your desired growth, and invest in the work-based learning needed to get there (work-based in increasing your relevant skills, knowledge, and network), one new and highly concentrated lesson at a time. The way I see it, the biggest benefit to having an employer (as opposed to being a self-employed entrepreneur) is the workplace education they finance for you with its associated networks.

3— Inculcate: Incorporate those new lessons into your day-to-day job in a way that translates into added value for your employer: you work with Aloha in their house. Go for the win-win: Help them get better, and help them become more successful as you actively practice your new skills and personalize them.

THIS is the Personal-1st/ Professional-2nd/ Integrated work ethic formula in real workplace practice.

4— Voila! You have reinvented your job on your terms and based on your values, AND you have added to your own worth. It is in your employer’s best interest to have you continue to do so, because you earn your keep (i.e. your pay and total compensation) by sharing values-based worth and financial equity.

5— Deliver those values-based AND value-added results consistently so that you are thought of as indispensable, yet fresh and relevant — never rest on your laurels. Quantify your results for your employer (do your own performance review the way it should be done!) and ASK for the compensation you are now worth; don’t just wait for your boss to feel generous.

Said in a simpler way that cuts to the chase: Help find the money to pay you better, and then collect your fair share of it.

In my view, this is the new definition of work at that grassroots level. Grassroots growth is fertilized by that person who, as stated above, creates their own destiny as a courageous, self-empowered individual with a personal-1st/ professional-2nd/ integrated work ethic as their driving value.

The Possibilities are Endless

Some of the best workplace reinventions I am seeing right now are those in which job position titles are being eliminated (Case in point: Consider how few secretarial positions still exist, and think back to how they were transitioned). Even short-sighted downsizing and recession/budget-related layoffs can have their up sides. If archaic job descriptions remain for some reason they are simply ignored, or they are changed. When employees get stuck on job names and titles they only perform to those expectations and little more — a sticky trap no manager wants to get stuck in with them.

An old job description should not be something managers take advantage of either: As leaders and managers, we need to be better visionaries and imaginaries, drawing compelling pictures of the opportunities that are to be filled — those opportunities are the new-energy growth possibilities you want employees to see themselves in. Then we need to give them full freedom and creative license to make their growth happen.

I guarantee you: There IS some reinvention possible in the job you hold right now. Create your future.

From Managing with Aloha (Chapter 11 preamble):

‘Ike loa is the value of learning.

Seek knowledge, for new knowledge is the food for mind, heart and soul.

Learning inspires us, and with ‘Ike loa we constantly give birth to new creative possibilities.

‘Ike loa promotes learning in the ‘Ohana; we must incorporate the seeking of knowledge and wisdom into our business plan and into our daily practice.

‘Ike loa is to know well, and knowing others well enhances our relationships and broadens our prospects.

‘Ike loa. Pursue wisdom. Learn and know well.

‘IKE LOA (more here) is a value I ask Alaka‘i Managers to adopt whatever and wherever their workplace, so that together, we can all contribute to the omnipresence learning should attain. I believe that lifelong learning is essential in the life of ALOHA because it is spark to the PALENA ‘OLE fuse of unlimited human capacity:

Key 9. PALENA ‘OLE:

Palena ‘ole is the Hawaiian concept of unlimited capacity. This is your exponential growth stage, and about seeing your bigger and better leadership dreams come to fruition. Think “Legacy” and “Abundance” and welcome the coaching of PONO into your life as the value it is. We create our abundance by honoring human capacity; physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. When we seek inclusive, full engagement and optimal productivity, any scarcity will be banished. Growth is welcomed and change is never feared; enthusiasm flourishes. PALENA ‘OLE is an everyday attitude in an ‘Ohana in Business, assuming that growth and abundance is always present as an opportunity. Given voice, Palena ‘ole sounds like this: “Don’t limit yourself! Why settle for ‘either/or’ when we can go for the ‘and’ and be better?”

Read more: The 9 Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha

Today’s Work Ethic: Work for you 1st

“… because when you do, the 2nd priority you give to me is better.”

When I was a young manager, I was taught to give everything I had to my work, with the goal of creating a career for myself above all else. Professional 1st, personal 2nd (and separate).

My generation’s elders — my parents, my teachers, my sports coaches, my workplace mentors — valued work ethic above all else as their ethos: It had proved fruitful for them, and they sincerely believed it would prove fruitful for me too. I trusted in their good intentions, knowing they genuinely cared for me, and I believed that I’d be wise to learn from them and from their work history, seeking to duplicate their success within my own life.

I was taught that diligent work ethic led to character building, and that character building essentially amounted to “earning your keep” as how a person belonged to a civil society. A diligent work ethic would therefore result in shaping one’s functional personality as well; simply said, a good investment in work ethic would be a good investment in “growing up to be a responsible and productive adult.”

Whew.

I did what I was told, and there’s no denying that I did benefit from their wisdom. However that was then, and this is now, and today I give slightly different advice to the people who work with me: Work for you first, because when you do, the ‘second priority’ you give to me as your partner/ manager/ boss is far better.

I say it, and I believe in it heart and soul, because of what I have learned about ALOHA and its spirit-spilling capacities. Personal 1st, professional 2nd, integrated.

Do I still want you “to be a responsible and productive adult” today? You bet.

“I no longer remember who said it to me, but I can still hear the words. ‘Do what you love. Be a good person. Those are your only two jobs in life.’”

— Ryan Holiday

‘Old habits [may] die hard’ yet old values get better with age.

Work Ethic doesn’t show up on company value statements as much as it once did, yet it has never gone out of favor — everyone still wants it. My theory is, that it was once so pervasive as a societal value it became a universal assumption: If everyone knew it and everyone bought into it, we didn’t have to talk about it as much.

My message to you with this particular posting today is a passionate request: Talk about it.

Talk about work ethic again. Bring it into your workplace conversations, and say what you want it to be about.

Be clear, and be honest and truthful about what work ethic can, and will deliver in your workplace culture.

Hidden assumptions are rarely that useful (and they can be dangerous). Far better is talking story, managing with Aloha conversations, and creating a cultural Language of Intention for your workplace.

Our Values-Based Aloha for August 2013:

This month we’ll talk about work ethic here on the blog as well (Value Your Month to Value Your Life). My goal, is that what’s shared here will help you initiate your own conversations about it, in either your journal and self-coaching, or in your workplace, or both!

For today, spend a few moments to think about what the value of ‘work ethic’ means to you. Write it down as your ‘before’ and to compare it to what you may think about it by month’s end.

Second, we Ho‘ohana Kākou:

If you come up with a question about work ethic, or a comment you’d like to share about it, add it here in the comments so our Ho‘ohana Community can chew on it with you, or write to me privately about what may be on your mind — you just might trigger another blog post for me to include this month.

Here is some Archive Aloha I am choosing as related reading on some of the connected value-drivers I now have in mind:

Say YES to the Role you Choose. Say NO to the Role others impose on you: Be Brave in Setting Your Limits
Great Managers Start Great: An ALOHA Rite of Passage
Day 1 for Job 1: A Good Selfishness and People Who Do Good Work
Beauty in the Work: “Things Occur to You.”, and the story of my experience: Like it? Might love it? Run with it.
Your values are your forever: July 1= 6 Months of Value Immersion and Ethos: Be true to your Values

On Leaders, Leading, and Leadership: The How and Why

First, the vocab basics, to be clear about our MWA context:

LEADER – a person, not a title

LEADING – a verb, the actions taken by that person who aspires to lead

LEADERSHIP – the effective result, or overall persuasion of consistency in intentional leading

There is a ton written about leadership, and most of it is pretty bad. I’ve gotten to the point where I ignore all book titles and online link-teasers (with ‘leadership’ not more than a keyword for search engines), and will only bother reading the essays penned by writers I already know and admire, or because of someone’s strong recommendation for me.

This was one of those recommendations: “How and Why to Be a Leader (Not a Wannabe)” by Umair Haque for the Harvard Business Review.

The Why.

I do like this basic premise in the essay: Haque speaks to our WHY in Managing with Aloha — to ALOHA.

Leaders lead us not to a place — but to a different kind of destination: to our better, truer selves. It is an act of love in the face of an uncertain world.

Perhaps, then, that’s why there’s so little leadership around: because we’re afraid to even say the word love — let alone to feel it, weigh it, measure it, allow it, admit it, believe it, and so be transformed by it.

… and The How.

He continues with six suggestions that he believes can change our acts of LEADING, if we’re up for the challenge, describing them as recurring choices we’ll have:

Obey — or revolt?
Conform — or rebel?
Value — or values?
Vision — or truth?
Archery — or architecture?
love — or Love.

I too, recommend you read the article in full. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you.

Now, you.

Haque wrote his essay as a call to action (he previously framed the problem he wants to solve here: The Great Dereliction.)

I share it with you mostly because I like that he thought so deeply about the subject, and came to an actionable game plan — he is next-stepping. What he suggests focuses squarely on LEADING so your actions will turn you into the LEADER you want to be, and are convicted about being: You will act as you believe will be PONO for you.

At their essence, both MANAGING and LEADING are about constantly making situational choices. Opportunities will present themselves on a daily basis.

What we want to do — what we MUST do — is make each and every choice based on our values: Ethos: Be true to your Values.

I love what Haque ends with:

It’s often said that leaders “inspire”. But that’s only half the story. Leaders inspire us because they bring out the best in us. They evoke in us our fuller, better, truer, nobler selves. And that is why we love them — not merely because they paint portraits of a better lives, but because they impel us to be the creators of our own.

I give you the same encouragement: I don’t think you can be a LEADER until you are, as Haque phrases it, ‘the creator of your own better life.’ This is what we call the value of ‘IMI OLA.

But you can’t just say what you aspire to, and stop there. Your making-it-happen actions have to create the LEADER in you.

Do for you, then do for others, and you will be managing your life with ALOHA.

Postscript:

One of the questions I frequently get, is why I named my business Say Leadership Coaching instead of Say Management Coaching: I admit to being more manager than leader, and elevating management is such a large part of all we do.

Being a better leader has always been my goal, and at that moment of time when SLC was founded (2004), I’d felt this “I’m now managing with Aloha” sense of arrival as a currently-working sensibility to what I already did — it was a managing victory for me, and leading better had to be next. The SLC laboratory of experimentation, future partnerships, and new learning had to aspire to leadership, because it was the challenge ahead of us. As foundation, SLC’s baseline assumption was that great management must consistently be our line drawn in the sand; our Calling to Management would always be non-negotiable. The SLC name therefore, was a brass ring I could keep my sights on, never forgetting my next vision, and never neglecting to reach for it.

Will I ever write a book called Leading with Aloha is often the next question in the conversation. Perhaps, as in ‘never say never,’ but likely not, because in my complete framing of that phrase I’d require a larger organizational forum than exists in my desired business model for SLC; I’d want a return to ‘big business’ and the ability to foster that leadership pipeline Noel M. Tichy referred to as The Leadership Engine. Meanwhile, I’ll often draft my thoughts about leadership here, on this blog, and I consider my laboratory of experimentation to still be an in-progress exploration. That same ‘sense of arrival’ may still elude me, but I’ve learned to be more patient about it, enjoying the learning, and applying it in other ways.

As is the point of this post: Define what you are aiming for, then do it.

Great Managers Start Great: An ALOHA Rite of Passage

Do you remember what it was like when you got your very first supervisory assignment or in-management position?

Two words come to mind for me: Heady and scary.

Heady in that warm and fuzzy feeling of affirmation, that someone trusted me, and believed in me.

Scary in that I had no clue what to do next and how to ‘be’ from now on, despite all those times I’d evaluated my own bosses, thinking to myself, “That’s not what I’d do if I were in their shoes… I would_____, instead.”

All of a sudden, it’s a brand new day, but it doesn’t feel like KA LĀ HIKI OLA yet. Self-confidence drops to an all-time low. The scary gets bigger and bigger, and fear begins to cloud the common sense we were sure we’d once had.

What in the world did I get myself into?

Managerial rite of passage, examined.

All who are managers have gone through that heady-but-scary transition. You would think then, that empathizing with brand new managers would be easy for us: All we have to do, is remember what we went through ourselves, and make the experience better.

I consistently find that we do remember, but I also find a vast majority of managers who want their newbie counterparts to feel the pain, go through their own crucible of trial and error, learn from their mistakes, and pay their dues. I’ve never understood that belief: It’s a hit-and-miss rite of passage that goes more wrong than right.

And let’s be honest: Newbie managers should not have to go through unnecessary pain simply because we did too. They are not the ones who owe us. We are better than stooping to that expectation of payback a generation later.

Worse, others get hurt along the way, for the very premise of any supervisory assignment is that our newbie manager is now in charge of the performance of others. Why are we so willing to turn our people into guinea pigs?

In these scenarios, senior managers will often get pulled into the problem solving that results. It may occur where a problem never existed before, and all the new supervisor had to do was maintain the good dynamics already in place (which is never as easy as it sounds… ) As the saying goes, we’ve ‘cut off our nose to spite our face:’ Our expectation of a learn from your own mistakes entry into management has created many more problems than it’s worth.

Downright stupid when you think about it, isn’t it… we have created more work for ourselves, and it’s unpleasant work.

And to quote Taylor Swift, “Why you gotta be so mean?”

An ALOHA rite of passage, instead.

A promotion into management should feel heady because someone trusts us, believes in us, and will invest in us.

That investment need not be a formal training program, though I strongly believe that every workplace culture should have a management orientation program separate from, and in addition to, the normal employee orientation programs that will accompany a new hire’s first 90 days (widely considered the ‘at will’ period). In Managing with Aloha cultures, managers will repeat the managerial orientation (a 2-day workshop) every time they get a promotion; not just once. Each promotion equates to new context for the class, and as I will explain in a moment, a new partnering opportunity.

We don’t wait on this workshop, scheduling it quarterly or whenever we have a ‘decent’ class size. It is immediately done when someone is promoted as their day 1 and day 2 in that new position, even if that means there will only be 2 people in that workshop.

At the end of that 2-day managerial orientation, new managers are paired with older ones so they continue to learn from each other — they use each other, and count on each other, for counsel and advice in the day-to-day situational management each is now called upon to deliver to our workplace. No one goes it alone. For us, this is the peer-to-peer coaching foundation of what we consider our mentorship program to be.

I’m happy to tell you what’s included in our new manager’s orientation, but I don’t think I need to. Think back to your early days as a manager — what did you need to know? What support was most important to you? Then, bring that recollection into today’s context: What are your newly reliable sources of information? What values are most company decisions based on? What values are the primary drivers of the best performance indicators in your company? When there are problems, what is usually at root cause? What strategies have worked best in your teaming, and in project pilots?

Answer those questions, and others which determine healthy culture-building, and you’ll have your own curriculum. Cover the basic expectations of your cultural lexicon — your Language of Intention.

For example:

We now use this page in our Say Leadership Coaching orientations: Newer managers choose from the list in asking their questions. The older manager will furnish an answer based on their current experience in our company, and the workshop facilitator will add to it in a coaching conversation.

There is also a Day 3 to our managerial orientation that happens 30 days later, and focuses exclusively on The Daily 5 Minutes.

[Read more about MWA training expectations within this site tag.]

Start your supervisors, new managers, and new leaders in a better way, and the great way — with ALOHA. You’ll get the great results which affirm their choice to accept their new assignments, as an answer to A Manager’s Calling [The 10 Beliefs of Great Managers].

You’ll also be making an ALOHA investment in each other that is true MĀLAMA: Caring for, and stewardship of your greatest asset of human capital.

Postscript: If you are a new supervisor, or a newly promoted manager, and no such orientation exists in your company, ask for one. Have your first act be one of courageous leadership — lead the way by making the suggestion, and asking for what you know you will need to be successful.

The conversation continues…

Aloha,

If you are newly joining us here, this is part of a mini series on The Role of the Manager Reconstructed. You can catch up with this reading path:

Now boarding; the ROMR Tour of Duty
An ROMR Archive Review
Reckoning with Role [to Value it.]
Be Brave in Setting Your Limits
The Opportunity to Reset
then back to the top of this page!

The Role of the Manager Reconstructed is one of our 9 Key Concepts in the Managing with Aloha philosophy.

This article may also prove useful to you if you wondered about the vocabulary we use:

Managing with Aloha’s Lexicon Morphology

Mahalo nui, thank you for being here!

~ Rosa

July 1= 6 Months of Value Immersion

Six months ago, I spent most of New Years Eve revisiting our 19 Values of Aloha: Going Forward into 2013, with Aloha.

Now six months hence, it has become the single post I personally refer back to most often here at MWA Central, no other comes close. It listed my hunches for the year, and so it contains delicious affirmation for me when I see I was right to trust in my intuition.

I never turned that post into a plan, yet it did seep into my subconscious very effectively, causing me to follow up with several decisions in the months to come. Journaling can do that for you — it can turn into self-coaching on its own accord, because it represents your spirit spilling [NĀNĀ I KE KUMU]. In writing something down, you give your deepest self permission to go for it, and make it happen, willing it into being.

It’s that analog magic, ‘by means of hands’ — yours.

— Carry, and Use, Pen and Paper

Equally important, and just as good for me, rereading the post will tell me when I was wrong. It will point out how I’ve dropped the ball on something, or how something better happened instead. Life can be wonderfully kind; life brings gifts.

Sometimes, when rereading it, I narrow my eyes to scrunch through it — I ignore the paragraphs and just skim through the headings, thinking about each one in testing myself and measuring my own growth… would I write the same paragraph now for that heading, or write something completely different? It’s a game for me, and a game SO worth playing, because it’s a game of value alignment either realized, or still to be worked on in future immersion:

The Sub-heading Scrunch:

1. Aloha ~ In Grace and Kindness

2. Ho‘ohana ~ The Worthwhile Work of our Choosing

3. ‘Imi ola ~ Seeking New Life

4. Ho‘omau ~ Cause the Good to Last

5. Kūlia i ka nu‘u ~ Name your Peaks, and Camp for a while

6. Ho‘okipa ~ Decide to Serve

7. ‘Ohana ~ Rally your tribe

8. Lōkahi ~ In Harmony and Unity

9. Kākou ~ Speak with Aloha, and Receive with Aloha

10. Kuleana ~ Engage with the Bounty

11. ‘Ike loa ~ Student, be Ready

12. Ha‘aha‘a ~ Student, be Humble

13. Ho‘ohanohano ~ Demeanor is your Open Door

14. Alaka‘i ~ Answer your Calling

15. Mālama ~ Serve to Honor

16. Mahalo ~ Invest in Elemental Living

17. Nānā i ke kumu ~ At Source is one’s Place, and one’s Health

18. Pono ~ Get Real! Visceral is good.

19. Ka lā hiki ola ~ Back to the Beginning is Opportunity

Goals Change. Values are Forever.

I copied that… catchy and thought-provoking, don’t you think? It was the title of a post written by Matt Cheuvront: Goals Change. Values are Forever. Take a moment to read what he shares there.

Own this: Your Values are your Forever.

At the end of my own post, Going Forward into 2013, with Aloha, I had encouraged you to “Own this: Get Personal” and I suggested a 4-step process for doing so.

If you didn’t do it back then, please consider doing it now: You can gain 6 months of delicious affirmation for yourself, based on your values, whatever they are. For values are “Elemental, visceral, and all good.”

I share the link to Matt’s post this time too, because he gives good examples in seeing the difference between goals and values. The values you choose may be completely different from mine, and different from how we phrase them here. That’s perfectly okay because they are right for you: You cannot lay claim to values you are not willing to kūpono with (stand up for, feeling PONO).

Let your values affect you in the next 6 months to come. Feel their good. Feel your good.

On the title of this post:

…and within our Managing with Aloha Lexicon:

4. VALUE IMMERSION

IMMERSION means to go ‘all in.’ When you choose a value for your workplace culture, you align it completely — in everything you do. When confronting change, you realign and audit your value integrity in every strategic juncture.

5. VALUE STEERING

Refers to projects, pilot programs, and experimental initiatives. A value or pairing of values will be chosen to steer a project as primary value/conviction criteria: It is a value which encapsulates the over-riding WHY a project is taken on to begin with.

See 1. 2. and 3. on VALUE-ALIGNMENT, VALUE-MAPPING, and VALUE-VERBING here: Reckoning with Role [to Value it.]

The Opportunity to Reset

Aloha my friends,

I’m just back from experiencing my very favorite thing: ‘OHANA. I enjoyed a week unplugged from my work (and digital everything) to focus solely on summer vacation away with my family. We now call three different places home base, and we departed from each, coming together at Portland International Airport to embark on a stay in the wine country of Willamette Valley.

As a side note, Oregon wine country in June is a fabulous summer vacation spot if your family, like mine, is now all over 21 years of age and can partake of a few tasting stops. Oregon is beautiful this time of year, and you’ll find the Willamette Valley is quite agriculturally diverse (compared to Napa/ Sonoma, less touristy too).

Our own itinerary included short hikes, boating downriver, a small-plane flyover both valley and coast, and a Portland brewery and beer tasting tour. If you’re a foodie (and really, who isn’t?) there are delicious options galore — Oregon has some of my favorite coffee and breakfast places, and spring/summer means the food trucks abound!

The summer day is long, allowing you to fill in as much as your energy will allow between a 5am sunrise and 9pm sunset — we were there during this year’s summer solstice and largest supermoon, and believe me, we took advantage of that!

Time to shift, reset, and move on.

Now back to work, it’s another favorite time for me. It’s the opportune time for me to ask everyone I work with, “How was this handled while I was gone?”

‘This’ covers a lot of ground. Yet no matter what they say in response, I will usually follow up with, “Sounds great to me; would you like to continue to work it that way? Let’s reset!”

If they agree, we have a win-win: They get fresh, new and better, and I get fresh, new and better. Our job descriptions open up wider, and our work grows into the open space.

As long as we’re open to it, nothing is sacred. Whatever we’re open to changing, can achieve some stretch or get reinvented.

‘Tis true: Attitude determines outcome.

You know that adage, ‘when the cat’s away, the mouse will play’? When I was a much younger manager it was a sentiment that made me nervous and apprehensive. I’d imagine the worse, wondering, What mess will I have to deal with when I get back?

To be completely honest about it, I kind of welcomed a mess; I wanted to be missed, I wanted to be needed, and I wanted to be welcomed back into eager arms. But eventually I learned it was far better when I wasn’t welcomed back to fill a void as a problem-solver or access-granter: I was welcomed back to inspire a new shift, and to inject a new burst of energy into the old I’d left behind — even when that ‘old’ was pretty darn good.

It was better to be a ‘Why not?’ boat-rocker, rocking it in a good way, and in a fresh and newly exciting way.

Vacation is but one opportunity.

I have a geographical advantage. When you live in Hawai‘i, ‘away’ will definitely mean another time zone, meaning that people you leave at work don’t expect timely anything from you. Managers must learn to enable others so nothing stops while they’re gone. And why just maintain something, when you can grow it instead?

When you go on vacation, on sabbatical, or away on a fairly lengthy business trip you’ll have made significant deposits to your positive energy bank. To manage with Aloha when you return, is to figure out how you can best share those energies, making them exponential.

In other words, it’s time to seize the opportunity for leadership.

A quick review of our managing/leading verbal vocabulary:

Human energy is a manager’s greatest resource. Not time, not financial capital, not asset worth, not even idea generation, but human energy, for human energy is the resource which creates all the others.

Managing then, is the act of channeling the energies available to you in the best possible way, to serve your day-to-day mission.

Leading is the act of creating new sources of energy, so fresher resources are always available to you as well, fueling your vision.

Reset opportunity will evolve and grow.

Reset opportunity is something which starts or stalls with each individual manager: It is completely in your circle of influence — you decide if you’ll give the opportunity to your co-working partnerships or not. Are you ready to do so? And if not, why not? The fact of the matter is this: We managers should do WITH others (coaching, teaching, facilitating…) but not FOR others in nearly everything which happens within a workplace.

Over time, you learn to ‘turn off and tune out’ in the weeks before you leave for any time away, making sure everyone concerned has the all-access pass you’re willing to give them. They know that they have it, and they know how to start using it, even if only temporarily as an experiment in dabbling.

I won’t lie: It can be scary in the beginning, and you may be apprehensive. However, make it your habit, increasing co-working freedoms a little bit more each time, and everyone looks forward to it — “Let’s reset!” becomes highly anticipated and deliciously relished in that Language of We within your workplace culture. As an extra bonus, vacation guilt becomes a thing of the past, for reset opportunity has replaced it as the expected result of all time away.

I promise you: You’ll get to that golden day you think, ‘While the cat’s away, the mice will play… and bring it on, for I really love it when they do!’

Postscript:

I do my very best to associate each vacation I take with a work benefit (HO‘OHANA) and with a personal benefit (NĀNĀ I KE KUMU). This was my first posting back from the summer vacation we took as a family in 2012: Back to the Beginning.

…and this is what I was thinking about before I left: When it’s good, S-T-R-E-T-C-H it out!