Rosa Say's Blog: Managing with Aloha, page 25

‘Ohana as “those who love you”

Came across this quote today, so fitting for our Valentines Day week:

“Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.”

- African saying -

Isn’t that wonderful? It got me to think about the value of ‘OHANA, as we apply it to our workplace form, as an ‘Ohana in Business (Key Concept 6).

In Managing with Aloha, I spoke of the unconditional, and flexible support of ‘Ohana, and how strong a bond is created. I love the addition this African saying points out — that there is constant memory in that bond, where the best of a person is always remembered.

It would be fitting to add it to our 10 Beliefs of Great Managers, I think…

Great Managers are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.

Yet an ‘Ohana in Business is not just the presence of a Great Manager, or viable business model. It is a family of people, working together as a healthy team in pursuit of shared vision. ‘Ohana results, when every single person within that team sees every other person in this way — no matter what happens, they remember their beauty, their wholeness, their innocence, and their purpose: They remember their Aloha Spirit.

Always remember: As an Alaka‘i Manager, you’re the one who can make that happen, leading the way by setting an example in all you say, and all you do. You are the one courageous enough to love others at work, and make your love visible.

Archive Aloha with related reading on setting that example:

Alaka‘i Managers are the new Energy Bunnies
Would you write “Walk my talk” on your calendar?
Accept your Small Wisdoms with Grace
The Workplace Mixology of ‘Ohana
On Ho‘ohiki: Keeping your promises

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

The Rub of the Business Model is Solved by your Values

I stumbled across a short story recently which took me way, way back to the reasons for my earliest interest in values-based management. Those reasons, are why Managing with Aloha came to be two decades later.

Let me first send you over to The Story of Telling to read “Loved” by Bernadette Jiwa. It’s short, and I’ll wait here for you to come back…

“I finally fell out of love with my favourite little cafe. 18 months ago I went there almost every day, not just for the coffee but because of how it made me feel to be there in amongst the noise, the life and the friendly faces with the smell of the ocean wafting through the open windows. It was such a great place, everything was made right there on the premises and the owners were in the thick of it… caring, and that showed.

Last week I decided I’m never going back…” — Loved

As a subscriber to this blog, you know me, and can guess which lines seemed to leap off the page in my reading of the story, like this one: “It seems to me that their values shifted along with their metrics. They forgot what made them successful in the first place.…. perhaps they never really knew.”

Yet we need to go a bit deeper than this. Knowing what your values are is the strongest possible beginning, but knowing them isn’t enough.

In the story of my history in business (thus this memory tug), values alignment became the answer I was looking for.

The rub, the problem to be solved, was the integrity of a business model. 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?

Prior to studying values, and what they will actually do when we focus on them, I had worked in, and around businesses that struggled painfully or folded because they hadn’t had a sound business model.

I saw those failings hurt a lot of people, people you could not fault for not trying to make it work with every ounce of their being, and it changed me. I went from being a good worker bee, who accepted an awful lot from the people I admired, accepting it on little more than blind faith, to being more of a skeptic, a vocal questioner, and eventually, an analyst. It was something I didn’t particularly want to do at the time, having very little interest in data or in financial models, but I felt I had to learn more if I was going to remain in business at all.

Oddly enough, this was also the reason I stopped pursuing an MBA. The answer I was looking for didn’t seem to be found in academia at the time, and I had to look elsewhere.

This concern about broken business models became my thesis for the manifesto I was asked to write for ChangeThis.org in 2005. Click on the photo to download a free copy.

I wasn’t rejecting study, just the prevailing subject matter offered. I did return to a lot of what I had identified in college, but with the goal of reframing the business-speak or academic propositioning of those markers (like mission, vision, management and leadership) with a heightened sensibility for learning the responsible modeling that could tie them all together: Values in Healthy Work.

The way I saw it, businesses should take better care of people as all stakeholders pursued their objectives, for weren’t most missions and visions about bettering the future for people in the first place? Something was missing, and it became crystal clear to me, that the ‘something’ missing in sound, PONO business models was value alignment.

Mission and Vision aren’t VIABLE without Value Alignment.

Values are the driving force.

This is not to say that you can’t go from starting small to building a hugely profitable business. I’m not implying that you should not aim to turn a good profit. It’s perfectly okay to have a change in strategy as long as you don’t have a change in values.

— Bernadette Jiwa, Loved

It’s hard, looking forward in a business’s lifetime to imagine how your values survive and adapt when activity changes, whether increasing or decreasing.

It’s hard, but you have to do it if you’re to succeed at all.

Without value alignment, mission and vision are doomed to inevitable failure, no matter how good they may be.

And you know what? I usually find it’s hard because people aren’t used to actually doing it. (I had to learn to audit models elsewhere because my bosses hadn’t explained, or demonstrated employing ours.) Once we start, willing to unlearn past habits in favor of newer ones, value alignment gets easier and easier with each passing day.

Our definition of value alignment is stated in Key 3 of our MWA Model:

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… The 9 Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha

Once you start, I think that simply knowing you’re doing the right thing is what makes all the difference in the world, becoming a bit part of that ease: You work within the ethos of shared values.

My coaching for you is this:

If you work in a business, and you can’t explain the model that drives it, open your eyes, and mind, to more learning. Figure it out, or participate in redesigning it. (Become a business partner in attitude!)

Discard blind faith in business owners, no matter how senior they are to you: Seek to know more, being confident your search will ultimately mean you can support them better. Ask how their business values drive their mission and vision, and look for everyday examples of those values in action. Offer to help them.

A postscript on our Language of Intention

To be clear on my verbiage:

A business MODEL will illustrate the rudimentary way that a + b will = your c. When your formula is viable, it is feasible; capable of working successfully.

In the bare-bones basics of the Managing with Aloha model for example, the 19 Values of Aloha is our ‘a’ and the 9 Key Concepts is our ‘b’ so that A Manager’s Calling will always = our c.

In comparison, a business PLAN will add the financial overlay to your model, detailing your pro forma (customer profile, marketing, assets and liabilities etc.)

What I will discover in many of the businesses who approach me for help with culture-building, is that they have a detailed PLAN, but a very sketchy MODEL to assure that plan will work.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The 9 Key Concepts are the subject of my second book, Business Thinking with Aloha, a book which also differs in intended audience: I wrote it with my two children in mind, both then in college, and ready to enter the working world as young adults with career choices quite different from my own.

From the book’s synopsis: “Become a Business Thinker. Re-imagine work, and gain better control of your life as you do so, even if you never decide to go into business for yourself.”

You can buy BTWA on Kindle and on Smashwords.

Manager, Keep Thyself Together

Now into the throes of February, we, in a managers’ talking story huddle, were dishing on the lifespan of our various New Year’s resolutions.

Keala spoke up just in time, curbing what might otherwise have become a downslide into dropped resolution commiseration. She said, “I’m doing pretty well with mine, mostly because I made only one resolution this year: Keep yourself together girl.”

She explained to us that her goal was to “never lose it again.” She’d taken a good look at her management style, and “it wasn’t pretty, and I want pretty!” She’d figured out that she got stressed, and acted that way, where everyone around her knew she was stressed, when she tried to handle way more than she was capable of handling well. Their translation: “Keala’s in a bad mood again.”

She summed up her resolution by saying, “I don’t want ‘Less is More’ exactly, I want less to be LESS. Less stress, fewer bad moods, better finishing of whatever I start, and a happier me as a more attractive me.”

What a terrific resolution! As we all know, Keala’s “only one” resolution has immense ripple effect, yet I love the way she attached her goal-setting to it with personal specifics, including her naming it as her attractiveness.

I can imagine the nodding heads out there as other managers read this, for Keala isn’t alone: Manager Fluster is a common affliction. And Keala nailed it: Manager Fluster is NOT attractive.

We get agitated, nervous, unsettled, confused, ruffled, upset, bothered and short-tempered — flustered — when we no longer keep it all together. As Keala has figured out, the culprit is in that tiny 3-lettered word — all.

And keeping “it” all together isn’t really about the stuff, or about any task individually, but about our behavior in taking on that stuff and accepting it like some pack mule instead of as an intelligent and thoughtful manager.

The difference between

Who you Are, and

Who you Want to Be, is

What you Choose to Do

When we blame others for our lot in life (their assignments for us, their delegation to us, their expectations of us) we lose control of our self-determination — we lose it.

When we focus on ourselves, we focus on our own acceptance or rejection of those assignments, that delegation, and the accuracy of perceived expectations — we get back in control, and as Keala puts it, we keep it all together.

Then, we are able to reach that sweet spot, where we begin to attract the great work we were destined to do.

I have a feeling that 2013 will be Keala’s year!

Manager, keep thyself together, and make it yours as well.

By the way, happy Chinese New Year too — isn’t it great how the Chinese calendar gives us the chance to restart if we want to?

Archive Aloha with related reading:

Role Reconstruction: Design your Sweet Spot as Manager
Alaka‘i Managers are the new Energy Bunnies
Doing the Drill Down: Less is More
Managerial Batching: 1, 2, 5 and 7
Give Managers their Chance to Excel

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

… And here is some help from RosaSay.com:

5 Essentials Employees Need to Learn — From You

Key 4. THE ROLE OF THE MANAGER RECONSTRUCTED:

Managers must own workplace engagement and be comfortable with facilitating change, creative innovation, and development of the human asset. The “reconstruction” we require in Managing with Aloha is so this expectation of the Alaka‘i Manager is both reasonable and possible, and so they can channel human energies as our most important resource, they themselves having the time, energy, and support needed in doing so. Convention may work against us, where historically, people have become managers for reasons other than the right one: Managing is their calling. A new role for managers must be explicitly valued by the entire organization as critically important to their better success: Managers can then have ‘personal bandwidth’ for assuming a newly reinvented role, one which delivers better results both personally and professionally, and in their stewardship of the workplace culture.

Site category for Key 4: The Role of the Manager

Read more: The 9 Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha

Policy Changes Ache Groundwork

Writing a book, and founding a business based on the philosophy of that book, is not the All Access Pass you may think it is. I have encountered a variety of push back for the ideas and suggestions offered in Managing with Aloha over the years. Still do. Resistors will say things like, “Well, I’m sure those things worked for you in the hotel and hospitality business, but our work is different/ but we face other challenges/ but walk in my shoes for a day…”

I came to realize they were all “Yeah, but” hesitations. Not objections, hesitations. Shift was still possible: The ‘But’s Which Work to Favor:

…that’s where I find ‘but’ working in our favor as the better culture builders we managers aspire to be. We don’t care for ‘but’ as a form of resistance, but we can love it as a form of simply shifting toward better:

Resistance digs in, from negative to negative.
Contrast shifts, and can take us from negative to positive.

There are two values which illustrate this well in our value-mapping… The ‘But’s Which Work to Favor.

When people throw a “Yeah, but” down on your path, you have two options. You can focus on the objection of the ‘but’ or you can seize the possibility within the ‘yeah.’

This doesn’t mean that you start nagging and insisting, and you probably do need to step back and regroup instead. To ‘seize the possibility within the yeah’ means that you don’t take their resistance personally, even when softening your approach is in fact necessary. You recognize that the objection isn’t really about you, your lack of experience, or your status as an outsider; it’s about the other person’s lack of readiness: Readiness, Good Impatience, and Maintaining our Ignorance.

They recognize the possibility — hence the ‘yeah.’

They can’t embrace it fully yet — hence the ‘but.’

I share this with you, because I know you can get the yeah buts thrown at you too. Perhaps you’ll even get it when you forward one of my articles to your colleagues and peers. I’d bet the last one about considering everyone a partner is a prime example. Forward that one to your manager or boss, and they’ll probably jump all the way to assuming that you want an immediate change in policy, when we didn’t even make that leap at Say Leadership Coaching. As I wrote in my article, we arrived at the change via a pilot program to test it first, a pilot program which allowed us to have all the conversations we needed to have as a team.

So, when you hear of or read about a great idea, whether from me or someone else,

Consider it a conversation starter.
Think about how you can test it first, in your own practice. Lead by merit of your good example.
Then, think about how you can help others get ready, (like this, or this), just as ready as you are.

Most times, achieving a shift in vocabulary (for Language of Intention), or in current energy levels is huge in and of itself, because you’ve helped effect a shift in attitude.

We don’t seek policy changes in Say Leadership Coaching, not exactly, and never immediately. We seek the value-aligned, ALOHA-seeded groundwork of culture-building instead, so that each workplace culture will arrive at the readiness they require — readiness to then initiate their own pilot programs and policy changes, allowing that change to come from within, and from their own values: Ethos: Be true to your Values.

What we do seek in the work of Say Leadership Coaching, are behavioral changes: Let’s Define Values.

When you act differently than you did in the past, it’s likely you have altered your vocabulary and shifted your habits in some way so your walk matched your talk — your habits realigned with your current values. When your daily conversations shift, you’re speaking with, and starting to hear, the Language of We.

If you’ve read this far, I know we’re in this together, KĀKOU. Thank you for forwarding my articles and sharing them as you do, and please don’t think I ever want you to stop! Hopefully they work to initiate fuller conversations for you with whomever you’ve sent them to, and you’ll work on your partnering readiness together.

Key 5. LANGUAGE OF INTENTION:

Language, vocabulary, and conversation combine as our primary tools in business communications, just as they do in our lives: What we speak is fifty times more important than what we read or write. The need for CLEAR, intentional, reliable and responsive communication is critical in thriving businesses — and in learning cultures, for we learn an extraordinary amount from other people. Drive communication of the right cultural messages, and you drive mission momentum and worthwhile energies. Communication will factor into every single value in some way as its primary enabler. The Managing with Aloha language of intention is inclusive, and is therefore defined as the “Language of We” with the value of KĀKOU as guiding light.

Site category for Key 5: Language of Intention

Can everyone be a Partner?

Yes. In our Managing with Aloha Language of Intention they can. It’s core to our KĀKOU value alignment.

Our vocabulary drives our intention.

‘Employee’ is not a word I use much anymore, and never in my own business. I’ll use it in my keynote presentations and workshops because it’s common vocabulary for everyone else, but in our chosen business form, the working culture of an ‘Ohana in Business, we call each other partners instead.

It’s recognition that you’re way more than an employee-for-hire. You’re my partner in the followership we spoke of recently, where we join forces to champion an important and worthwhile mission. In our case (i.e. Say Leadership Coaching) we champion Managing with Aloha as a practical and useful philosophy.

We adopted our vocabulary in a Pilot Project.

We initially made the change to our vocabulary in working on our company-wide financial literacy: Our business plan is considered a guideline and a tool we all use, learning it for the full understanding we need — understanding of what makes us a ‘business’ and a self-sustaining one. Money is not inherently evil, for good money finances the worthwhile work of a very worthy cause. To be wise in using our money, fully aware of our possibilities, we need a good financial model. And what good would that model be, if everyone in our company wasn’t using it, constantly bettering it in actual practice?

This work on our financial literacy had all kinds of positive, healthy repercussions, such as with how profit sharing is woven into our model compared to the expectations of when profits are returned to the business through other investments, or tithed to charity. Can you imagine the conversations? (All Conversations Are Not Created Equal.)

It became crystal clear to us, how having the KĀKOU attitude that we are all partners saying, “we’re in this together” belonged in every other facet of our business, and not just in our approach to finance.

Is there a Project Pilot in partnering waiting for you?

Geoffrey James recently penned a good list for Inc. Magazine on what a better partnership involves. On his list:

1. Prepare to Relinquish Some Control

2. Understand Your Strengths and Weaknesses

3. Select the Right Partner

4. Build a Partnership Consensus

5. Adopt a Strict Code of Ethics

6. Go beyond Your Commitments

7. Be Patient With the Partnership

8. Monitor and Measure

9. Celebrate Frequently

His scope is more limited, for he seems to be talking about key partnerships versus the partner of our MWA vocabulary and Language of We, where everyone involved with us is either partner or customer/coaching client. But I do think it’s a good list to work with and aspire to in our own value-mapping.

A Journaling Exercise:

Write down the headings of James’ list, just as I have them above, and do some value-mapping: Flesh them out, with your Sweet Spot intentions instead of his, and Kūlia i ka nu‘u — strive for a higher summit!

If you were to assign one of our 19 Values of Aloha to each point on the list, which would you choose for your alignment guide?
How would you explain or qualify each one? Do our 9 Key Concepts help with your options? For instance, I immediately think about the Daily 5 Minutes in regard to number 8. Monitor and Measure.
Is there anything you would add (or delete in your personal Drill Down), knowing of our MWA culture-building as you do? For instance, where is the talking story trigger in conversing, or in speaking up?
Use your notes, by converting them into next-stepping action steps. Can you come up with a short list to pick from in daily effort? Where can more enjoyable face time replace email, voicemail or texting?
Commit to being a better partner yourself before you levy these expectations on everyone else. Model the good behaviors you would love to see repeated in others.

Read more about piloting projects here: Choose your next Project Kukupa‘u. There was some sweet serendipity for me, in seeing how the words “relinquish control” (James’ 1st list point) popped up there too!

You might also enjoy a review of this posting: The Workplace Mixology of ‘Ohana for the value alignment it offers with ‘OHANA.

Key 6. THE ‘OHANA IN BUSINESS MODEL:

The best form for your life CAN be the best form for your ‘Ohana in Business® as well, where the objectives of each will support the other — they need not be mutually exclusive. A business can be more than self-sustainable and profitable: It can thrive in perpetuity though key people will come and go. In Managing with Aloha we learn a values-based business model and organizational structure simultaneous to learning productivity practices which drive ROI (return on investment) and ROA (return on your attentions). There is art and science in business, and we love it all: Business modeling is never boring in an MWA culture, and we value financial literacy in the complete education of sustainable modeling.

Site category for Key 6: The ‘Ohana in Business Model

Role Reconstruction: Design your Sweet Spot as Manager

Key 4 in our MWA model for the ‘Ohana in Business, is, The Role of the Manager Reconstructed. (It appears at the end of this post, if you’d like to scroll down for a quick review, or you can take this link to review it in the context of all 9 Key Concepts.)

If you have read Managing with Aloha, you know that a core theme of my management philosophy is intention — managing for all the right reasons, and chiefly because you want to be a manager. Title (control, power, perks), positioning (advancement, influence, access) and compensation aren’t your underlying motivators; they’re fringe benefits to the happy fact that you get to do what you love to do: Pursue a worthy cause with a team of great partners — a team of people you will support and help grow.

Your role is that of coach and mentor.

If you agree with me, Managing with Aloha is your HO‘OHANA too, just as it is mine. You are willing to shout your PONO reasons from a hilltop (“I’m a manager!”) and you are eager to demonstrate your commitment to your calling in every action you take (A Manager’s Calling: The 10 Beliefs of Great Managers).

You know your sweet spot when this actually happens. The work you do feels deliciously nourishing and rewarding.

Is the picture still fuzzy?

A common challenge is that ‘coach and mentor’ is often considered the ‘soft stuff’ in a manager’s work, the broad brush stroke with very few specs to tangibly back it up, or the ideal people shoot for as a future goal. It remains an ideal forever, because we neglected to make it achievable. A manager’s day-to-day work gets littered with a lot of other system and process detail, and you can’t ignore those details. Not only do they take precedence, they stubbornly and persistently creep into everything else.

What you can do however, is reconstruct the expectations about how that stuff is handled, and reassess who should handle it. You serve others as you do this, and more importantly, you clear the way so you can work on those good intentions of your own calling.

Our conversation continues…

Last time, we spoke of Purposeful Following, where we follow cause, mission and vision, not another person. Leader or informal leader can be an apt description of the way you approach your purposeful following, so I followed up with this article as a kind of drill down of Less is More, where we filter those purposeful following objectives with the real, day-to-day work of your role as an Alaka‘i Manager. Starting 2013 with a clearer understanding of your role, and confident commitment to your role, is the fabulous readiness which will also serve as a constant source of energy for you. Dream it, design it, plan it, then Ho‘o — make it happen.

Sketch out a blueprint for your Role Reconstruction.

We call for a role reconstruction in Key 4 of our model, because many bosses and business owners will agree with me in theory, but we see the opposite in how day-to-day work actually happens in their workplace culture. See: Give Managers Their Chance to Excel.

It may go even further, to where living, working, managing, and leading with ALOHA isn’t just agreeable theory, but actually expected. This is where Key 4 of our culture-building model MUST kick in, with a reconstruction of the actual work those managers are expected to perform.

Connect the dots…

A Job Description

must match up with all Job Expectations,

so Work Execution can reasonably follow

within Purposeful Following of Mission and Vision.

As an Alaka‘i Manager, this matching up of what is expected and what actually gets done, is the essence of what you deliver for your team. You deliver it daily, ‘getting their work to make sense.’

If your boss isn’t doing the same thing for YOU, do it for yourself. Be the General Contractor of your own management job reconstruction. Build it as you want to be doing it, or you may never get to do it that way.

Make it your W-I-P: I say to “sketch out” your blueprint so you’ll think of it — and actually tackle it — as your work-in-progress. Your sketch will change constantly as your work changes; it’s not an artsy design you look at longingly.

I’m guessing that your first reaction will be, “I try, believe me, I try.” for that’s usually the response I get when starting one of my coaching programs for someone. Well, as Yoda would say, “No! Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”

Drill it down, focus in, and cut to the chase.

Turn your sketch into a plan for each day. Make it a plan of incremental action that will cut through the mire of day-to-day stuff, with one small win at a time.

This plan is not rocket science, and no market research is involved. This is a plan which comes from your gut feelings about it, tapping into your wants and trusting your intuition. You know how your work must shift to make room for your better intentions, I know you do: Write it down so your next-stepping is clear, and so you have a daily list to pick from and get done.

‘Managing’ and ‘management’ can cover an awful lot of stuff. Yet that also means you have choices. One of the best ways to see this is in the analysis of a common position: Not all construction site foremen approach their job in the same way, not even if they belong to an army of foremen tackling identical blueprints in developing a new neighborhood, with projects completed side by side. Which foreman will progress fastest, while still doing quality work without undue shortcuts?

Doing the drill down, and becoming a noteworthy specialist in your HO‘OHANA as an Alaka‘i Manager is expected — so do it.

I call it ‘doing the drill down’ for I see that I keep moving from being a generalist to a specialist, and from making lists of possibilities to eventually working on just one thing on that list — especially when I’m coaching others. If they’re to succeed, we have to choose our habit-changing battles or creative reinventions carefully, and then we have to go all in, and focus on very specific action.

No action, no change. 
No stickiness.

— Doing the Drill Down, Less is More

You move from trying to doing by having a plan of action. Your plan must have next-stepping detail in it, so you know what you’ll be doing this morning, this afternoon, and tomorrow, taking those incremental steps that result in definitive action. You take the concrete steps and DO what will move you forward progressively.

Do the Sweet Spot exercise: If you were to write your own job description, what would it say? What is managing all about in your HO‘OHANA? Do you remember how I asked the question in that chapter? What would you love to do in your day-to-day Ho‘ohana as a manager, often and intensely?

Conversely, what should you be delegating, or designing out of old-hat work so no one need do it any longer? Put those sacred cows out to pasture.

The key, will usually be lifting yourself out of the trenches. You do this for yourself first, so you can lift yourself out of the fray enough to see everything else, particularly your opportunities.

To use our Reconstruction analogy, you must constantly remind yourself, “I’m the General Contractor.” Not the carpenter, not the plumber, not the electrician. Those are all skilled and noble jobs, but they aren’t your job. Your job is designing the work and the pace of the work, to get it done through others, and get it done in the best possible way.

Beware of self-sabotage!

What most managers do instead of this next-stepping in progress, is plug away, and maintain their status quo. The work you actually perform each day, cannot be the work that keeps you stuck where you are, or worse, will sabotage any forward movement.

The biggest, and worst example of self-sabotage is this attitude, and the actions that usually follow it: “It’s faster if I just do it myself.” No one coached or mentored, not even you. You abandoned that role of coach and mentor. Do WITH others. Don’t do FOR others.

Another version happens when someone comes to you with a question or subtle plea for help or direction, and you respond with, “How did we handle it last time? Just do that again, or find out who did.” There is a difference between routine efficiency and careless stagnation. Once again, no one was trained, encouraged, coached or mentored. You didn’t even bother to engage. Bad impatience trumped good impatience, and you didn’t manage with ALOHA.

Yoda might say you didn’t even try.

Reconstruct in EVERY move you make.

In my most recent conversation connected to this topic, a manager had called me asking for my advice in moving from one management position to another. It would be a promotion from within, and so his fear — quite wisely anticipated — was that both he and his boss would make too many assumptions about how he would handle the newly offered role, for they already knew each other so well.

“I don’t want it to be same old, same old, in a new suit of clothes,” he said. “What must we be sure to talk about, so it will be different, and it will be better, and so our expectations are clear?”

Turns out, they had to talk about a lot. He wanted the work of that proposed position to change. His boss didn’t.

If you’re making any kind of management move whatsoever, seize your opportunity to construct and reconstruct that role: Approach it as your new sketch. Never accept any stock Job Description — as an Alaka‘i Manager, you’re in the big leagues now! Take the initiative of writing your own Job Description and presenting it as your offer of job acceptance, writing it for your sweet spot in Ho‘ohana work (Key Concepts 2 and 4) and Palena ‘ole growth (Key Concept 9).

It’ll be the same exercise. The only difference is that you’re teaming up with your boss in work design this time, and you’ll ask for agreement and support, just the way it should be in assuring you have his or her partnership.

Make it a conversation in which you create the best expectation of what you know you can deliver win-win success with. Paint that picture, and no prospective boss will be able to turn you down. They’ll be eager to get started, and so will you.

Key 4. THE ROLE OF THE MANAGER RECONSTRUCTED:

Managers must own workplace engagement and be comfortable with facilitating change, creative innovation, and development of the human asset. The “reconstruction” we require in Managing with Aloha is so this expectation of the Alaka‘i Manager is both reasonable and possible, and so they can channel human energies as our most important resource, they themselves having the time, energy, and support needed in doing so. Convention may work against us, where historically, people have become managers for reasons other than the right one: Managing is their calling. A new role for managers must be explicitly valued by the entire organization as critically important to their better success: Managers can then have ‘personal bandwidth’ for assuming a newly reinvented role, one which delivers better results both personally and professionally, and in their stewardship of the workplace culture.

Site category for Key 4: The Role of the Manager

Read more: The 9 Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha

Purposeful Following

I’d like to follow-up with a bit more on the concept of ‘stellar followership’ mentioned 2 postings before this one:

[If you got here via searching the keyword, this article is NOT about social media ‘following’ or ‘friending.’ Here on Managing with Aloha we talk story about good work and great workplaces.]

The service stop, is also where I think about stellar followership, something we don’t hold in high enough esteem. To be a stellar follower, is to support a good and noble cause in an exceptional way. You need not be a founding father to put your own signature on an initiative, and make an outstanding contribution to it. Think about that phrase, ‘standing on the shoulders of giants.’ There are so many examples where the second generation of an initiative has been far superior to the first one. Followers are more likely to have the analytical, unemotional distance a founder is unable to have; they can be more objective. Objectivity doesn’t necessarily put a damper on passion and enthusiasm though: Stellar followers will be among the most devoted people you’ll ever meet.

— About Service, in Life’s 3 Stops in Motivation: Happiness, Meaning, Service

Wanted: Great Followers. Please Apply Immediately.

Poster:

“Due to a shortage of devoted followers, the production of great leaders has been discontinued.”

I can’t remember where I first saw that poster, but I do recall posting it within one of my ‘Ohana Mālama newsletters once. ‘Ohana Mālama was the title of a weekly email I sent to my managers while working at the Hualalai Resort. The purpose of my newsletter was value alignment (our MWA Key 2); getting all of us on the same page during any given week.

I included the poster sentence for a touch of lighter humor; it was just meant to be a paragraph break between 2 other topics, neither of which I remember, for they burnt to a crisp as that poster quotation caught fire instead. Nearly every person receiving my email shot back a reply of some kind. As you might guess, the “Yeah! Too many chiefs, not enough indians” sentiment was there, but most of the replies were appreciative, in that they paid tribute to the blessing of devoted followers.

I’ve often wondered why we don’t elevate followership as much as we elevate leadership, for the evidence is quite clear that we want both, and we may want followership more. We understand that we need collective spirit in whatever initiative we pursue. We believe in the healthy sustenance that occurs when willingness, confidence and optimism collide and blend. We want to be followers when it feels right to us as the pure togetherness and camaraderie it can be, being in the company of a great team doing good work.

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Or as General Douglas MacArthur put it, “Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.”

In Graceful Devotion to Cause

I imagine the graceful, lost in the music movements of dance when I think about the beauty in devoted followership. Picture ballet, Broadway, or contemporary dance for a moment: Graceful isn’t a ‘soft concept’ in dance, for those dance moves strengthen muscles and give the dancer marvelous flexibility.

The type of following most managers and leaders hope for is very passionate and emotional; it is devout about the cause of a mission, yet open to learning so that mission can be advanced in a progressive or inventive way. Questions are never stifled. Like dance, it’s a followership that is smooth and fluid, and seemingly natural, yet muscle and character building. Like dance, it flows from pure human energy.

The distinction we often get lost within, is one where we lose sight of the cause, mission or vision, and focus on following another person instead. We march to the beat of their heart instead of dancing to the music in the beat of our own heart.

Following is intentional. Purposeful. Clear.

Devoted following cannot be a passive activity, not when action is required. It requires an intentional decision to take that action, and feel that action has the integrity of the freedom of personal choice.

Devoted following within a cause will also call for specific focus and clarification, though we allow more freedom of choice in execution. What exactly are you following along with? What are you expected to say and do as a good follower — an ambassador of workplace effort? What part do you play in the efforts requested, putting your signature on your own role? How would you support another leader, and conversely, how would you detract from their cause? When are you expected to act alone, with initiative and independence (still in alignment with the cause) and when are you expected to cooperate and collaborate in the spirit of LŌKAHI, so harmony and unity is achieved (also in alignment to the cause.)

Those decisions, borne of best clarity, and best-possible followership, actually call for a self-reckoning before any following can happen. Would you say that the decision-making of self-determination and commitment to definitive action are part of self-leadership? I would.

Admirable Following belongs in your Language of We.

Leaders may seem to be individual visionaries or cheerleaders (for that is what we often need from them), but at some point, they are looking to champion teamwork and entire movements. Yet they fully realize (at least the smart ones do) that they cannot personally manage the masses they are hoping to marshal together and mobilize: They need the self-led believers among the troops. They need those with the personal value-drivers of ALAKA‘I [leadership], KĀKOU [inclusiveness], and LŌKAHI [unity]. Core-to-cause messages are not diluted; they are fortified.

When you think about this, those who make the best followers have very distinctive value drivers, don’t they.

I named three of them. Can you think of others? What values do you feel will drive the best possible followers for your cause?

Let’s sum up: In our MA initiatives with Purposeful Following, we will:

Elevate following in the value-driven language of our own workplace culture.
Talk about followership as something desirable, and as something strong. Give it the respect and dignity normally given to leadership and other admirable character traits.
Make it clear, and purposeful. Followership should not be fractioned, muddled or confused, for that leads to misdirected efforts, or worse, a mutiny (just ask Captain William Bligh).
Associate following with mission and vision rather than with another person: There is always room in a cause for several great managers and leaders — so much can be done!
When we do personalize followership, we will talk about it as a form of SELF-leadership, so people will cease to see it as a lowly station behind another titular leader.

As you know from our discussion on motivation, you will likely deliver a Service path or a Meaning path when you elevate followership in this way.

And I again recall the grace of the dancer. Looks like the bliss of joy and happiness to me.

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9 in Managing with Aloha on the value of KĀKOU:

The Language of We

Kākou is the language of “we.” And the language of we stimulates ownership and personal responsibility in the all-encompassing initiatives of a company. If you hear your employees talk about “our company” versus “the company” you know you’re on the right track. They feel they have a stake in what you do, and they take actions they believe are important and worthwhile. They are your partners, and these words of inclusiveness imply that they feel their voices and opinions are considered carefully in the decisions you make. The language of we is one of collaboration and partnership, and it also implies agreement and support of your vision. These are the words, the empowering force, and the strength of mind of Kākou. All of us. Kākou serves to give an affirmative voice to the unity you were able to achieve in your efforts with Lōkahi (Chapter 8).

… Read more: The Language of We

The instinctive, natural selection of Wanting

The best advice I give in my new supervisors workshop is this: “Find a good listener you can tell your workplace stories to. Get them out, and talk story about them.”

It’s advice that goes with “We don’t manage by the book, we manage by the person.” and with “Accept your Small Wisdoms with Grace.”

“If you’re trying that hard, you’re trying too hard.”

When I was a younger manager, I would bring my workplace stories home and talk to my dad about them. He was a great help to me in that phase where I simply felt I was finding my way, and establishing some reliable markers. One of the things he would occasionally say to me was, “Stop complicating this. If you’re trying that hard, you’re trying too hard.”

Okay, not occasionally. Often.

I had a conversation with a manager over the weekend about Life’s 3 Stops in Motivation. He’d asked one of his team members, “You know I think you do a really good job for us here; what is it that motivates you every day?”

Her answer was, “I try to do whatever it is that makes everyone happy. We all got a lot of stuff going on at home or with our kids, and work can be a calmer place with less stress, y’ know? You earn your keep in a way you can feel good about, you make a decent living doing it, and everyone’s happy.”

Lucky manager, to have this person on his team. She simply, but beautifully, wants happiness.

I would think about those early conversations with my dad a lot, when it came to be my turn to mentor the supervisors and managers who reported to me. We often do try too hard, zooming past the simpler solutions most people want, particularly with underestimating happiness. Life’s 3 Motivators are also what a manager delivers: What we give to our workplaces are paths to happiness, meaning, and service which are smoother to travel. That more enjoyable stuff in “earning your keep” and “making a decent living doing it.” Scenic roadways instead of bumpy paths.

Bumpy paths are the subject of chapter 4 on HO‘OMAU:

“Obstacles can test you. They can also build and strengthen you. They build your conviction, your poise, your leadership, your tolerance, your persistence, your self-discipline. Obstacles will shrink when stacked up against the powerhouse of energy in Ho‘omau, and they magically become catalysts. They make you better.”

— Ho‘omau | Chapter 4 | Managing with Aloha

Strengths are our Happy Places.

“And you know what Rosa, this employee is really good at that. She makes people happy. Customers, co-workers, our suppliers, everybody. She’s the best problem solver we have.”

“Tell me more about her.”

I keep reminding myself to try better, not harder, and usually listening is a big part of it. When I first started hauling out my soapbox to preach to my managers about the “perfectly good sense”� of strengths management (our MWA Key 7 category here), i.e. doing what “great managers”� were supposed to do — select people well, and match their job roles up with their innate strengths — I looked back at mostly confused faces. Personally I don’t have too much trouble picking out the strengths of other people; I’m naturally drawn to strengths, and I had to cultivate more empathy for those managers who had a hard time with it.

However, that does not mean they aren’t meant to be managers. There are many great managers for whom initially diagnosing the strengths of others can be daunting, yet once an employee’s strengths reveal themselves, those same managers are indeed great coaches and mentors to have supporting you. They pave smooth scenic roads: They’ve learned to create safe, trust-filled work environments where they need not excel in picking out strengths themselves because their employees will freely tell them, or demonstrate them. While it is also true that many employees don’t quite know their own strengths and can’t verbalize them, these same managers have learned to employ other methods to help with their eventual diagnosis.

We WANT to use our Strengths!

For some managers, it was easier to spot what was wrong than what was right. This does not mean they are being negative. To them, culture-building in “Right strengths, right role”� simply meant they needed to focus on getting problems to go away. I had one manager who’d explain to me that he could always tell when he had a “fish out of water; the more they flap around, the longer their pond’s been dry.”�

It became part of our Language of We. He would ask me to let him “get my fish back in the water”� whenever he felt his team could come up with a better approach for some new company initiative. He usually did, gaining our expected results in his own way, because I learned to honor his instincts, and let him employ the methods he instinctively wanted to use instead. The beauty of his approach was that his wants came directly from those of his staff; he wanted them to be happy. They were aligned in their expectations of, and definitions of, stress-free work which was still the productive work of our company mission and vision.

People feel thwarted or drained when they are called upon to do things that they simply have no desire to do, or can’t imagine deriving any joy from: At these times, visionary cause doesn’t really matter, no matter how noble the mission. There seems to be this instinctive natural selection process we are born with, which looks out for our best health and sense of well-being — it’s called wanting. Call it wise, source-fed, self-preserving intuition we can trust in (NĀNĀ I KE KUMU).

— on Happiness, in Life’s 3 Stops in Motivation: Happiness, Meaning, Service

Strengths are best defined as predictable patterns of behavior you gravitate toward because doing so feels natural for you.

It’s kind of nice to know that one of the best things you can do for yourself is listen to that inner voice telling you what you want to do, for no other intellectual, logical, pragmatic, or perfectly sensible reason other than that you WANT to be doing it. Emotional, gut level instincts are rich sources of water, and you can trust in them. It is highly likely that you are being driven by your values.

Problem is, we’re continually trained by others — our parents, our teachers, our bosses — to stifle those feelings, buck up, and be an adult — to try harder. Try harder at something you just don’t want to do, and you can bet you’ll feel drained.

If others are confusing you about what you should want for yourself, don’t listen to them. (Is your team stuck in the ‘shoulds’? Banish those Possibility Robbers.) Trust yourself. Let your instincts guide you: succumb to those emotional feelings about what you want to do. Believe that your wants are your natural selection process aligned with your innate strengths.

Wanting is a good thing.

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.”�

Postscript: I am so grateful that I have learned to listen for wanting in others as my deliberate practice in empathy (MĀLAMA).

Wanting has had a place of honor in my MWA vocabulary ever since I first read this quote from George Bernard Shaw: I find that I keep getting drawn back to it, and I read it over and over again. It’s connected to ‘IMI OLA, and seeking one’s best possible life by living to leave a legacy, and living for a purpose higher than self. There is also the undercurrent of KULEANA, and accepting responsibility for creating your own destiny, while aware of ‘OHANA, community.

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing on to future generations.”�

If only we all thought this way all the time. It blends those 3 motivators of happiness, meaning, and service in a very pleasing whole of well-being.

Learn more about George Bernard Shaw in Wikipedia. For instance, did you know he remains the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938)?

Archive Aloha with related reading:

What should you do with your life? Find out!
People Who Do Good Work
Trusting Your Intuition
Day 1 for Job 1: A Good Selfishness
Managing: Be a Big Fan of the Small Win

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

Life’s 3 Stops in Motivation: Happiness, Meaning, Service

Preface:

This posting is follow-up to a conversation started here:

They seem happy enough. — Goal! (published January 2, 2013)

… and then commented on here — (same page; scroll to the comments) triggered by an article written for The Atlantic by Emily Esfahani Smith:

There’s More to Life Than Being Happy

The links above will open new tabs for you if you’d like to read them first for best context: I’ll wait.

This post is also longer than most, and at the end of it I encourage you to pull out your manager’s journal for self-reflection, thus I’ve queued this up for the coming weekend, and will give you breathing room before I post again.

There’s More to Life Than Being Happy

Maybe. But let’s not discount happiness. In my comment, I wrote:

Sometimes a person is motivated by the pursuit of happiness, and sometimes the same person can be motivated by the pursuit of meaning: A manager is tasked with knowing which playing field they are currently on, and helping [their staff] achieve their goals there, so they can move forward. A great manager is versed in responding to both motivations — and honoring them.

We will often question people and may even argue with them, imposing our own shoulds, “But don’t you want this to be more meaningful?” when the better approach is to meet them where they are first, and tackle change later when they want it, or feel they newly need it — often we’ll find they’ll initiate that change when they’re ready.

Managers aren’t exactly ‘motivators.’ They’re Facilitators.

Motivation is primarily an inside job: It’s a relevant truth I’ve encountered over and over again in both managing, and in coaching other managers seeking to solve root cause riddles concerning their employees. So I’ve trained myself to stop whenever I say ‘motivation’ and be sure my words are clear in whatever the conversation: Are we actually talking about self-motivation? (i.e whether mine or someone else’s).

It’s frustrating and fruitless when a manager insists on molding someone’s behavior to a wrongly-perceived motivator, and to the expectations they have connected to that motivator. The frustration occurs because the conversation will usually zoom ahead to how-to concerns when ‘why’ is riddled with doubt.

In the workplace, saying “well, I guess we agree to disagree” is rarely good enough: Alaka‘i Managers will press on, looking for agreement until they find it, or can at least focus the work at hand on part of it.

If those feelings of frustration crop up, where you start to think, “This is futile; this conversation is going nowhere fast,” stop and ask the other person directly, “What is your motivation with this? Can you help me understand it better than I do?” Listen so they feel heard.

Life’s 3 Stops in Motivation

Well done. Now do you know when to shift gears?

We managers can be maddening in the way we hold on to our assumptions about our people. Here’s the newsflash: People change, and they’ll change under your watch, whether because of you, or in spite of you.

In Managing with Aloha I encourage managers to “interview your people on an annual basis” because the person you hired (or met when you inherited them) doesn’t remain the same over the course of your working together. They change because their self-motivators may change, and so do you: Your partnership has to evolve with each growth spurt — you both have to adjust as needed, and constantly work on how you work together: 5 Essentials Employees Need to Learn — From You.

Interviewing your people on an annual basis need not be formal or complicated: It’s often a matter of just listening for “where they’re at” clues in other conversations, e.g. within annual performance appraisals, goal-setting conversations, and the Daily 5 Minutes.

In his book The One Thing You Need to Know (which actually covers several things About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success), strengths management guru Marcus Buckingham coaches managers to learn 3 levers as “what you need to know about a person in order to manage him or her effectively.” They are: Strengths and Weaknesses (our MWA Key 7), Triggers (which work by keeping strengths turned on and in use), and Style of Learning (whether analyzing, doing, or watching). He considers these 3 levers to be rather constant for people, akin to innate talents, which means they are pretty reliable indicators for a manager. In other words, these ‘levers’ are a person’s approaches with handling change and growth.

Life gives all of this context. As life presses on, we can ‘get off the bus’ to spend some time at what I think of as 3 different HO‘OHANA stops… we purposely interrupt our bus ride and delay the journey so we can stop and smell the roses we see along the way. Sometimes there’s no pressing timetable at all: We’ll catch the bus again when we feel like it.

In my managing and coaching experience, there are 3 main stops:

1. The Pursuit of Personal Happiness

2. The Pursuit of Meaning (Legacy Building)

3. The Desire to Give or Give Back (Service)

Let’s take a short bus ride viewing their highlights… this is our ticket for the Motivation Express. Grab a window seat.

Happiness

As you can guess, I don’t necessarily agree with Victor Frankl or Emily Esfahani Smith in concluding that “It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness,” or with the researchers who pronounced, “Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others.” — we’ll get to that on the Service stop.

If happiness is the self-motivator, it’s something that person needs before they can move on to anything else. Where is the common sense in denying or belittling what someone else feels they need? A manager can be of great help with fulfilling the need for happiness — it’s no secret how much our work affects everything else in our lives.

People feel thwarted or drained when they are called upon to do things that they simply have no desire to do, or can’t imagine deriving any joy from: At these times, visionary cause doesn’t really matter, no matter how noble the mission. There seems to be this instinctive natural selection process we are born with, which looks out for our best health and sense of well-being — it’s called wanting. Call it wise, source-fed, self-preserving intuition we can trust in (NĀNĀ I KE KUMU).

A manager will help their people be comfortably present in current reality, dealing with things completely and honestly instead of avoiding them. They don’t push for work/life balance, but for work/life integration. We’ll often see the happiness that was there all along:

As Anneliese puts it,

“If everyone were to throw her problems out into the street for a swap you would look at all the others’ and run as fast as you could to collect yours again.”

— FYI: The Grass is Green

Please don’t underestimate this. Happiness is a great thing as a perspective-shaper, giving us optimism and positive-expectancy: To be happy is to feel somewhat secure. To be happy is to be confident, and to have more courage in seeking experimentation, creativity and innovation. As I’ve already said on this blog, happiness is readiness.

What I did concur with in the article though, is that happiness can be fleeting. At some point people will get back on the bus because they feel a restlessness; they sense that happiness wasn’t quite enough for them anymore.

Their readiness has shifted.

According to Gallup, the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high — as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word “happiness” in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression.

— the research cited by Emily Esfahani Smith writing for The Atlantic

Meaning

As a manager and leader, I do think of meaning in professional and aspirational terms, associating it with business vision and workplace mission (the MWA value of ‘IMI OLA). Happiness tends to be a more personal and individual pursuit in the workplace, whereas meaning opens us up to partnership potential, even if we initially pursued it for our individual purpose or learning. Workplace culture is conducive to our joining forces with others to gang up on a bigger objective. Teamwork after all, is a rallying-the-troops pursuit, where we march toward meaning together, KĀKOU and LŌKAHI.

Countless authors and philosophers have waxed eloquent on meaning. We often read (in several philosophical quotations from the older and supposedly wiser) that the answer to that quintessential question on the meaning of life, is simply to live the life you are given, living it as fully as possible.

Not that satisfying, is it. Such a swooping generality tends to evoke another question: And what, pray tell, does “fully” encompass? Yet no wise person will answer that question definitively, except to press back with, “What would it mean to you?”

We managers are much more pragmatic, and thankfully so! We search for a connection to meaning we can hold in our hands. We are hoping to help our people find it, so they can latch on to it for the exhilarating ride. As we just spoke of in an earlier posting, we harness our good impatience and get it to work for us with setting priorities, shaping new goals, and honing laser-like focus on either mission or vision, or both. We capitalize on workplace energies by directing them well.

Hurray for managerial impatience!

Get out of those cloudy intangibles and pursue clarity when the conversation turns toward meaning. Sharpen those edges of fuzziness so people can connect to definitive action steps — when ready for the pursuit of meaning, they crave worthy calls to action. They want to seize KULEANA and take a stand. They want to champion a cause and be its vocal ambassadors. They want to perform and be part of worthwhile work that makes sense, and is important.

It’s as simple as that. Let’s not overly complicate it. Let’s just make the magic happen, and get it done.

Service

This is a stop you take, when compelled by a cause that might not be your own.

In Managing with Aloha I speak of service in the chapter on HO‘OKIPA, the value of hospitality, and I describe the person I think of as Mea Ho‘okipa, or service provider:

“I have been taught that if your were called Mea Ho‘okipa in old Hawai‘i, it was a compliment of the highest possible order. It meant that the person who accorded you that recognition [of character] felt that you embodied a nature of absolute unselfishness. With the compliment they were also saying MAHALO (thank you), appreciative of the hospitality you extended to them with complete and unconditional ALOHA (the outpouring of your spirit)… The Mea Ho‘okipa were those who already seemed to radiate well-being, with an inner peace and joy that came from the total satisfaction they received from their acts of giving.”

— Managing with Aloha, chapter 6

As the person writing this posting for us to reflect on, I must admit that I have never thought of myself as Mea Ho‘okipa by nature, but as aspiration, truly wanting to “get a lot of joy from giving to others.” I’ve spent a great deal of time at my service stops, but I can’t say I’ve settled at any of them yet, for I constantly look for the bus to amble down my road again, wanting to learn more about happiness or about meaning. In my case, I believe the other two work with fleshing out my third.

I honestly don’t know that I’d understand people in pursuit of service at all if not for seeing them through my learning about the value of hospitality: It has been my handle on the empathy required by my Managing with Aloha viewpoint. I’ve come to see hospitality as a higher calling rooted in Lokomaika‘i — that value which is ‘generosity of good heart.’ Yes, I’m stuck on seeing goodness, and I’m very, very glad I am.

Others have told me they see age or tenure connections to the pursuit of being of service, and that this is a stop we grow toward. I don’t think so, for there are many cases where our youth will serve, setting magnificent examples for all of us. To serve is simply another calling, one more pressing to a person than others currently are.

I think we come closest to seeing service potential as Mea Ho‘okipa (both in ourselves and in others) when we think about this question: “What will I joyfully volunteer for?” In the managerial view of this, compensation, leverage, positional power and advancement get eliminated as motivators or as the means to other ends, and we are reminded that our Mea Ho‘okipa give for the pure joy and delight of the giving.

So if “the Mea Ho‘okipa [are] those who already seemed to radiate well-being,” where does the manager step in to support and serve them? By giving them ample opportunity to be the givers they thrive in being. There is an abundance of possibility, whether with customers or co-workers.

The service stop, is also where I think about stellar followership, something we don’t hold in high enough esteem. To be a stellar follower, is to support a good and noble cause in an exceptional way. You need not be a founding father to put your own signature on an initiative, and make an outstanding contribution to it. Think about that phrase, ‘standing on the shoulders of giants.’ There are so many examples where the ‘second generation’ of an initiative has been far superior to the first one. Followers are more likely to have the analytical, unemotional distance a founder is unable to have; they can be more objective. Objectivity doesn’t necessarily put a damper on passion and enthusiasm though: Stellar followers will be among the most devoted people you’ll ever meet.

As for those bus routes, direction may not matter.

These 3 stops aren’t necessarily progressive or sequential. I’ve worked with people who start with meaning or service, and then return to happiness later — it’s pretty common. Truth be told, that’s been my own journey too; I was your classic early achiever. In any given mission, I’ve ricocheted between all 3 like a ping-pong ball!

Seen as pursuits, these 3 stops aren’t right or wrong per se; I caution managers about levying those judgements on them: Consider them timely for the person pursuing them, and you’ll have more success in being accepting and supportive unconditionally, only seeking to align your efforts so you can work on the same ‘why’ at the same time.

And so my dear Alaka‘i Manager, pull out your journal and list the names of your team: Where’s their self-motivated, smell-the-roses stop right now; happiness, meaning, or service? How can you help support them while they’re there?

If you have any doubt about the stop you picture them on, banish that doubt as soon as you can. There are no complicated or messy diagnostics involved, just ask them. I’m sure it will be an enlightening conversation for both of you. As we learned about HO‘OKIPA in Managing with Aloha:

“One of life’s greatest laws is that you cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening your own as well.”

Readiness, Good Impatience, and Maintaining our Ignorance

You may have seen this if you follow me on Twitter:

The signs are all pointing in the same direction… my 2013 word seems to be READINESS. The rub, of course, is in what I’ll be getting ready FOR.

These have been my signposts (a sampling already shared here on the blog, for there have been many more, all seeming to conspire with each other!):

A D5M practice requires readiness: Revisiting the Daily 5 Minutes: Lessons Learned
We managers need to ready ourselves, by aligning our energies with those of our team, and key partnerships: Getting the Old to Become New Again
I have no doubt that happiness is readiness: They seem happy enough. — Goal!

This focus I have, which requires that I work on my own readiness, gave me quite the weekend of self-reflection, and two threads of thought emerged. May I share them with you? Rarely will I ask you to work on something I’m not tackling myself, so these thoughts may resonate if you have taken my January articles here to heart.

One thread of thought was about “good impatience.”

The other harks back to something Slow Leadership author Adrian Savage taught us back in 2006 within a Talking Story conversation. He called it “maintaining your ignorance.”

Good Impatience

My parents would both tell me I was somehow born impatient; ‘somehow’ alluding to the fact that it wasn’t a trait I shared with any of my siblings. As the eldest, I got it all, and thankfully, it ran out!

Well, I’ve turned that into a kind of affirmation over the years, telling myself that impatience is good! If they were right, and I got all of it in my family, I should be the one to do something grand with it.

Since I’m a firm believer that good begets more good, I set about redefining the word in a more favorable light. As a result, impatience has never had negative connotations for me.

Good impatience is one’s sense of urgency.

Good impatience is an unwillingness to wait for something you can have in short order, if only you put your mind to it, so you do.

Good impatience is what can get you to prioritize with the determined zeal of better focus.

Good impatience seeks an outlet; it will get you talking about whatever you are thinking about obsessively (or it will get you to blog about it :) and that means you’ll have to walk your talk.

Good impatience pushes you toward the immediacy of great work ethic. Work becomes purposeful because it is of your choice, of your desire, and of your commitment: It is not assigned or imposed on you, it’s chosen.

Therefore, good impatience is grand possibility. Good impatience is the visible, tangible presence of Aloha Energy.

Readiness, Circa 2013

READINESS, the way I am currently thinking about it, is when you combine good impatience with maintaining your ignorance, for as Adrian had explained,

Learning does not exist to replace ignorance. It is there to add to it.

Maintaining our Ignorance

Adrian Savage had described his HO‘OHANA to us this way: “[I want] to build a civilized place to work and bring back the taste, zest and satisfaction to leadership.” I was so fascinated with the way he described ignorance as learning (‘IKE LOA) that I invited him to write a guest posting about it for us. I have never forgotten it. This is what he wrote:

“There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner. In ignorance is hope. If we had known the difficulty, we would not have learned even so little.

Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to.

They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.”�

— Wendell Berry, 1977

Ignorance is the only fit state for anyone who is committed to learning. Socrates was often asked whether he thought himself a wise man. His inevitable reply was that the only thing he know for certain was that he knew nothing. His recognition of his own limitless ignorance allowed him to spend a lifetime seeking the truth. Once you believe you know the answer, what use is there in looking further?

Our organizations and institutions today do not suffer, as many people claim, from too little knowledge; they suffer from far too much, at least in the minds of those in charge. Corporate leaders believe they know how to run their businesses, how to approach the marketplace, how to sell, how to manufacture, and how to invest the profits they make, so they have stopped questioning their assumptions on any of these issues.

It is often said that all generals fight according to the principles of the last battle, not the one they are engaged in today. I would amend this to read that they follow the actions they believe accounted for the last successful battle, for success in war is rapidly analyzed and its assumed lessons copied by every other general. Military commanders (and management writers) quickly inflate the specific activities of successful leaders to the status of fundamental principles of warfare (or business management). Even if the prevailing view of what lead to past success were correct (which is seldom the case, since chance is the most common cause of success or failure, and its role is rarely even acknowledged), there is nothing to say that what happened then was not a unique occurrence tied to the specific circumstances.

Only the leader who acknowledges his or her ignorance is free to consider all options, research as many possibilities as can be found, and approach every problem with an open mind, for when we know that we do not know, our minds are receptive to new ideas and unexpected insights. Minds, like windows, can admit fresh air only when they are open. The mind of someone who is sure he or she knows the answer already is tight shut against any form of mental ventilation.

Learning does not exist to replace ignorance. It is there to add to it. Once you find a possible answer to one thing you do not know, that answer will raise new questions in other areas, reducing your ignorance in one particular only to add to it in many more. That is the joy of ignorance: it is never totally removed, so it allows for learning to continue without end.

The wisest of people are those who constantly acknowledge their own ignorance. They know that they do not know, so they keep searching for greater understanding. It is those who are most proud of their current state of knowledge who are, in reality, the most ignorant among us. They not only fail to realize how much they still do not know, they stop even attempting to find out. What they do know becomes almost useless to them, encouraging rigid orthodoxy and unthinking reliance on existing ideas to cope with a constantly changing world. As the old saw says: “It ain’t what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”

Always acknowledge your ignorance. Never allow yourself to presume to knowledge, even the little you think you have. So long as you grasp how little real understanding you possess today, you will be prompted to go on learning with your mind wide open to every passing breeze of potential insight. The wisest people are those most acutely aware of their own ignorance, and therefore most ready to question everything around them—including whatever they imagine they might know today.

— Adrian Savage, 2006