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

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

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

Good person first, good manager as a consequence.

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

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

~ Sunday Mālama: Better Managers are Better People

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

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

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

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

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

12 Rules for Self-Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reset Thyself: The Power of Affirmations

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

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

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

12 Rules for Self-Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

Related Reading

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