The Alaka‘i Manager as Job Maker

by Rosa Say

My Aloha to all of you on this beautiful Malaki (March) Monday.

I’m ready for our next value theme on Talking Story: How about you?

I don’t want to bury the lead in the transitional paragraphs which follow, so here it is: The value we next explore in our 2010 context will be Ho‘ohana, the value of worthwhile work.

Here’s why:

We need Ho‘ohana help for the “job stimulus”

“To Ho‘ohana is to work with intent, and with purpose. Managers do this for themselves, and they do this for those they manage: When managers pair employees with meaningful and worthwhile work that is satisfying for them, they will find these employees work with true intentions in sync with the goals of the business. Be one of those managers.”
 —Managing with Aloha, page 30

Say “job stimulus” and smiles disappear. You’re likely to hear a lot of groaning, or see people shake their heads despondently. We know we need jobs, and we’re sensing that public sector efforts with stimulating jobs isn’t quite cutting it. The job stimulus we’re now financing as taxpayers (who are steadily sinking deeper in debt), feels like a flimsy bandage on a painful wound needing sutures.

We’ve got to go farther than “stimulating” jobs: We’ve got to create new ones, and better ones. We’ve got to reshape many others which now barely escape the chopping block with furlough day trimming. We know of jobs which may have all their days numbered soon, for they’re next in the downsizing queue if revenue streams don’t somehow start raining from heaven.

Jobs in 2010 must be Ho‘ohana jobs. Ho‘ohana jobs must be gainful employment.

This is NOT too big for us to tackle

Know that as an Alaka‘i Manager you have several advantages. If anyone is equipped to handle our job problem, it’s you. As the Managing with Aloha quote above reminds us, the Alaka‘i Manager isn’t just any “job maker” but a Ho‘ohana shaper too!

Here’s a quick review of what we’ve already done these past few weeks.

We’ve spent some time with the value of Aloha, and we’ll keep it close by, for we’d said, “Let’s make 2010 the Year of Aloha” knowing that “the only way you get Aloha, is by being obsessive about being the first one to give it.”
(Post reference: For 2010, with Aloha)

It felt great blending in Hō‘imi as our idea-mover, and The 3 Secrets of Being Positive as our Aloha strengthener to equip ourselves with a positive expectancy early in the year. We even fit in some work on our trusted systems, replacing “productivity” with “stress-free performance” in our deliberate, talk-it-to-walk-it Language of Intention [MWA Key 5].

So I’m feeling confident enough to forge ahead with what I knew would be the toughie in our Take 5 strategy for 2010: Jobs.

I honestly have no idea where this will take us over the next few weeks, but I know that we, as Alaka‘i Managers in our own Ho‘ohana intention, have to tackle it. And you know what else? The more I think about it, the more I’m getting pretty excited about the challenge, for just think of what we can deliver!

Why us? Because we care, and because we want to lead the effort

We’re Alaka‘i Managers, and we deliver better health to workplace cultures. Jobs are our puzzle pieces; they’re the artful brush strokes in the picture we frame. Jobs are also the way we grow people, helping them make room in their lives to explore more of their Palena ‘ole capacity [MWA Key 9].

Manage x 70: Remember too, that Alaka‘i Managers also have a powerful ally in their Ha‘aha‘a humility: We see with our ears. We realize that we don’t have all the answers. We don’t need to, and besides, it’s often better when we don’t, for we allow for the collaboration of creative synergy. Our job is to find the best possible answers within the people we manage and lead. We explore, we prod, we question. We encourage, we support, we facilitate. We coach, we mentor, and we grow people into better jobs.

Lead x 30: In doing this, if you have a great idea, one you know will add to our collective energies, give voice to your idea —share it with us, knowing of all the fertile ground represented in the eager listening of our Ho‘ohana Community.

If I’m tracking days correctly, we’re jumping into our new theme 5 days before the official start of Spring. Yesterday, my daughter sent me photos of the cherry blossoms bursting into bloom near her Nevada home, and it felt like perfect timing, being able to share them with you too!

Spring as our Starting Block

We’re at our starting block: Today is Ho‘ohana theme day 1 for us here on Talking Story, and our overall goal is collaborative, creative conversation: How we can affect Ho‘ohana job creation for gainful employment?

We’ll talk about how we define “gainful employment” soon. For now, here’s what we’d said in our Take 5 Strategy for the year (it was number 3):

Jobs Reinvented and Delivered for Best Livelihood

Alaka‘i Managers must serve those who may never choose Ho‘ohana just as much as they must serve those who do.

It has become brutally clear that we need jobs created if we are to have a healthy economy (and in turn, a healthy humanity.) Alaka‘i Managers then, must expand their reach into two critical products of their managing/leading work:

  1. People who work to Ho‘ohana, eventually choosing some kind of entrepreneurship for an ‘Imi ola degree of self-employment/self-sustenance on their own terms, and
  2. People who work for the best livelihood of a forever-necessary or recession-proof job, or at minimum, a job which is lucrative enough to deliver long-term financial security

We need Alaka‘i Managers to be those game-changers who enable these choices as feasible for our current society. In their new game-changing role, managers must be the bridge connecting the workforce with business owners who normally have blinders on where this fact reigns supreme in existing business models: The most efficient and profitable businesses are those with as few employees as possible.

That assumption is not very conducive to job creation, and managers must be our New Economy Saviors: They must illuminate the possibilities where human beings at work are exponentially necessary, not just costly.

Excerpted from our 2010 strategy post: Take 5 in 2010: A Game-Changing Ho‘ohana

Our Constant: A values-based approach

In the United States, the $862 billion stimulus package is formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: That’s an immense amount of money representing the cost of our ineffectiveness! I really think a big reason the job stimulus isn’t working as we’d hoped, is because we can’t just throw money after the problem: We’re ignoring that lesson-learned about throwing good money after bad. We’ve also learned that wealth is a value, and we’d best keep money, and business revenues, framed in that context.

Thus our approach here will be with the Healthy Workplace Compass which has served us well, and served us better, where we will:
—Be Mission-driven, knowing what we seek to achieve (‘Imi ola)
—Be Values-centered, knowing why it is important to us (Nānā i ke kumu)
—Be Customer-focused, knowing who we serve (Mālama)
—Strive for the “North Star” and guiding light of Ho‘ohana, knowing that is how we grow in our learning

I’m so looking forward to our conversations to come!

Any initial thoughts?
Where do you anticipate our conversation on Ho‘ohana Job Creation can take us?
What connection would you like to explore, feeling it will be helpful to the community, and highly relevant and useful to you?

Thank you for reading today, and please share the news of our theme challenge and Ho‘ohana undertaking. This is vitally important, and we can always make room for others, welcoming new voices to help us in the effort: Invite someone you work with to join our Ho‘ohana Community today.

We Ho‘ohana Kākou, together. Let’s talk story!

Rosa Say

Footnote:

If you’re a fairly new subscriber to Talking Story, here’s a bit more on what’s happening. I made some substantial shifts in my own Ho‘ohana for 2010, shifts which opened up room for us to have a strategic plan here on Talking Story this year: We call it our Take 5, and we “work on it” by way of our conversations, both on and off the blog.

My blogging is somewhat flexible in its content within the value themes I’m setting for us, as we’ll nalu it (go with the flow) but it’s not random, and I’m not publishing on a set schedule simply to publish, but when we’re ready to move on. Everything is connected in some way to what binds us as a Ho‘ohana Community, and that is our learning to be practitioners of Managing with Aloha, keeping it relevant and useful for today, with the book as a resource. Talking Story presents the self-study course I have promised to give you here: Are you a manager or a leader?

Tagged as: Ho‘ohana, job creation, learning themes

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Learning Managing with Aloha: 9 Key Concepts

by Rosa Say

If we used our insider’s Ho‘ohana Community language of intention for this posting, I would list this post title as:

Our MWA ‘Ike loa SCL Learning m.o: 9 Key Concepts for 9 TS Categories

  • Ours. Definitely.
  • MWA = Managing with Aloha
  • ‘Ike loa SCL = the Sequential and Consequential Learning of ‘Ike loa, the Hawaiian value of learning (covered on page 136 in the book, and covered in this Talking Story tag: ‘Ike loa SCL. I’ll save you the click and reprint it below.)
  • Our Learning m.o. = m.o. is Modus operandi, operating method. In this case, our method of continuing with our MWA learning after book publication. We ho‘omau; persist.
  • 9 Key Concepts = A second way we learn about Managing with Aloha, to fortify and better retain the first time we learned it, while we simultaneous reframe MWA within our workplace context. We adapt MWA to our present work using these 9 key concepts, to make the philosophy timely and optimally useful.
    (The first framing we’d used for MWA was values-based management, and the 19 chapters and values listed in the book’s Table of Contents, giving the MWA “sensibility for worthwhile work” its bone structure.)
  • 9 TS Categories = A duplication of the MWA 9 Key Concepts here on Talking Story as a selection of post categories. They are our buckets for the continual learning we explore about Managing with Aloha here within this blog’s format.

All to say… I am bringing a MWA page we use all the time here to its own home on Talking Story, so I need not link you off this blog and to another site anymore… Here it is:

Learning Managing with Aloha on Talking Story:
The 9 Key Concept Categories

Call it the goodness of the grid

I do hope that you are taking advantage of the 9-Key framework we use in our learning. If you’re a new reader, you cannot take advantage of something you’ve not yet noticed here on the blog, and thus my prompting for you: Please take a look!

Learning Managing with Aloha on Talking Story:
The 9 Key Concept Categories

Knowing how I categorize posts beyond (and within) our current Take 5 strategies can prove to be very useful. Besides telling you a bit more about how I organize things here, you’ll quickly become the Alaka‘i Manager who is a Managing with Aloha guru :-)

And here you thought Talking Story was all fun and games, huh.

Learn what we mean by “the MWA value alignment of the 9 Key grid” this weekend. You’ll be glad you did.

Learning Managing with Aloha on Talking Story:
The 9 Key Concept Categories

I promised you an excerpt…

“…someone who calls themselves a manager of people must be a learner, and they must dedicate themselves to non-stop, sequential and consequential learning.

Sequential in that it builds upon previous lessons learned, and it takes you through a process where you question instruction and do not always accept what you are taught at face value; you polish it like a gem in your mind until something about it rings true for you.

Consequential in that it is worthwhile stuff; it makes a difference for you, and you aren’t simply collecting lessons on some scorecard. There’s some personal take-away in it for you. Now that you know it, you’re going to use it.”

—‘Ike loa; to seek knowledge and wisdom.
Managing with Aloha (page 136)

Now go check out the new page, pretty please?

Learning Managing with Aloha on Talking Story:
The 9 Key Concept Categories

Photo Credit: Back on the Grid by NatalieJ on Flickr

Tagged as: 9 Key Concepts, ‘Ike loa SCL, blog categories, business strategy, MWA quotes

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Spring Cleaning at Work: Junk is not the Stuff of Legacy

by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

How much junk is costing you money, and worse, cluttering up those spaces where good work, important and creative work, should be getting done instead?

True legacy isn’t in your physical stuff.

Take another look around you

Within the work I do I have the opportunity to visit a lot of different workplaces. I’m getting braver about pulling out my camera and asking permission to take photos, and not to publish them, but because my photos help me remember details about my visits with you: It’s quicker digital note-taking.

Weeks after a visit, I can look at the photos again and they give me different impressions: I see things I missed the first time around because I wasn’t looking for them. On a recent romp through my iPhoto albums, this is what I saw: A LOT of office junk.

On the other hand, I rarely see comfortable PLUS useful places for people to sit, and work together. In most cases, we don’t bring our team members home with us! (to work… more about that in a moment).

Have you stopped to consider just how much your office or workshop junk gets in your way these days, or takes up space? Can you imagine how much collaborative, synergistic huddle space you could open up if you got rid of it?

Make room for real work to happen

We managers need to give our people the room they need to work clean, to make creative messes, and to work co-operatively as they do so.

By “junk” I mean space squatters. I’m not talking about the cubicle warm-ups and dress-ups like family photos and other collectibles, but the stuff that was long part of conventional business practices and we don’t use any more. (That said, be professional: If you don’t want it around at home, don’t bring it to the workplace!) Here’s a small example:

Here’s a bigger one:

Both of these aren’t used as much anymore (or shouldn’t be) as we’ve gone digital: We simply print and keep way less paper than before. How many of you have a filing cabinet drawer in your office that has never, ever had a hanging file folder in it because it’s filled with snacks for break time? And these two are just small, common examples —at least that filing cabinet is used for something. I see tool belts collecting grime in workshop rafters because mechanics are now working with computer chips, and conference rooms with too-small tables and too-few chairs because a healthy chunk of the room is “dressed up” with overhead projectors, clunky chalkboards on rollers, or given to storage space (for more junk).

How much are you paying to continually straighten, dust, and clean around all that stuff?

Worse, how much are you still using it, because it’s “still too good to throw away.” The problem with your frugality and pack-rat habits, is that you allow the old process connected to that junk to proliferate, keeping you archaic in your thinking as well.

Think old, act old, produce old. On the other hand, leading encourages making your newness. Those people you call your “greatest asset” huddle in corridors or alleys to exchange their ideas, or sadly, not at all.

[From the archives: An idea is a fragile thing... Don’t get New Ideas caught in the ASA Trap!]

We work better at home: Why?

Here’s something else which happens: I hear it constantly, with people feeling it’s okay.

It’s not.

“Oh, that’s the stuff I’ll take home to do. It’s easier and faster with my mac”

or… “where I’ve got xyz software and our internet firewall doesn’t slow me down”

or… “where I have more space to lay everything out and take a good look at it.”

I dare you: In your next staff meeting or team huddle, ask your people how much work they are still doing at home because it’s tougher, or takes longer to do it in the workplace itself and on the clock. Ouch.

Then ask them how often they eat at their desks, or while at the fast food place parking lot, or skip lunch altogether because you don’t have a lunch room for healthy brown-bagging, where they can dish with each other about their ideas instead, feeding body and mind, AND spirit, and talking about how they Live with Aloha.

Our 2010 Stuff Probation is over

It’s March 11th. Kick out the weekends, and we’ve had about fifty work days this year. We’ve had enough probationary time for some quick decisions.

Start your spring cleaning early, and get more aggressive about it than you’ve ever been before. Have your rule of thumb be: “If we haven’t used it in 2010, we’re not gonna, and it’s outta here.” including holiday stuff —buy it new this year, and help our economy: Set a new revenue goal for the better work you’ll be doing so you can afford it. Donate what others can use, and throw out the rest, and stop thumbing your nose at occasional items you’re better off renting those rare times you need them.

Give your people new tools, and better software.

Give them room to talk to each other, huddle, and create.

Do vibrant, dynamic, remarkably exciting legacy work!

Create space for energy to build, and it will. Remember our energy mantra?
From 3 Ways Managers Create Energetic Workplaces:

  1. Be Contagious, for Energy begets more Energy
  2. Avoid the Middle and Work on the Edges
  3. There can be no Basic Standards, only Extraordinary ones

Most office environments aren’t designed for that right now: They are proliferating maintenance-type busywork instead of the work which is connected to accomplished behaviors.

Twenty, thirty, fifty or a hundred years from now, your collection of office and workshop antiques will not be your legacy. Or will it?

Photo Credits: What do you call it? by Ulla Hennig
Tu Filing and Storage by Eric Acevedo and Chefs by Barto on Flickr

sayalakai_rosasay My mana‘o [The Backstory of this posting]
Each Thursday I write a management posting for Say “Alaka‘i” at Hawai‘i’s newspaper The Honolulu Advertiser. If this is the first you have caught sight of my Say “Alaka‘i” tagline, you can learn more on this Talking Story page: About Say “Alaka‘i”.

Tagged as: atmosphere, creativity, Sense of Workplace, workplace huddles, workplace readiness, workplace tools

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When Learning Gets Overwhelming

by Rosa Say

I’ll be the first one to admit that I get a bit over-zealous about the virtues of ‘Ike loa (the Hawaiian value of learning), believing that learning is all peaches and cream. This isn’t the first time I’ve been wrong, and it won’t be the last.

Our conversation started with wanting Focus

A manager said to me in his coaching call (shared with his gracious permission):

“It’s so hard for me to focus on learning the right things about my job. I know my boss wants me to learn more about this financial stuff, but I keep getting distracted by wanting to teach it, and not by wanting to learn more of it.”

Me: “I’m not sure I got that. Can you say it again?”

Manager: “My boss and I agree on the value of learning. I don’t think we agree on what I should be learning right now, or if I should be learning more about this at all. Our priorities are different. She wants me to learn more about our financial picture than I know now, but I’m still working on what I already know, and I want to teach it to the rest of my staff before I jump into new learning.”

Me: “Have you explained that to your boss yet?”

Manager: “Yeah. Um, well, I think so. Maybe not exactly in that way. I don’t think she’ll want to hear it.”

Me: “We can’t know that. We might need to give her the benefit of the doubt on what she wants, or doesn’t want to hear. We’ll get back to that… Tell me more about what you want to teach your staff first.”

It was an interesting conversation. We continued to talk a bit about needing to bring his boss back into the conversation to better understand this subject of learning relevance, and to be sure they each understood each other clearly. We also started to talk about how learning and teaching differ, and how learning can be pretty stressful for him. When you learn more, that comfortable place where “ignorance is still bliss” slips away. Suddenly, you have to handle what you have newly learned about!

However here is the tough thing about saying “No, not now” to new learning: You don’t know what you don’t know yet. It didn’t dawn on him that his boss may want him to learn more to help him and not overwhelm him. There was the very real possibility that he was refusing to learn something which would lessen his stress and not add to it.

That said, it became increasingly clear to me, that he may really need to say, “No, not now” and have his boss be okay with that. Turns out he was “getting distracted” by one of his strengths!

Are we talking about the same thing?

It got a little more complicated… and interesting! This might turn out to be more than one conversation he will have with his boss, and should.

For this manager, learning more than he was ready to deal with wasn’t just overwhelming him, he thought it was pure mission creep, and not at all conducive to him helping his team better their performance. Before we spoke, he had decided he needed to talk to his boss about that instead: That mission creep was the real issue he grappled with in his day-to-day juggling act, and that “more learning on mission creep” wasn’t going to help anyone. Not her, not him, not his team.

I agreed that he needed to speak with her again for true clarity, and to unload some of his stress about it, for he feared (but he wasn’t quite sure) that she would still expect him to handle his existing learning and new learning simultaneously, and sort them out afterwards.

My response was, “Well, if she does feel that way, you’ll discover that you don’t agree on what mission creep is.”

We had to separate the two issues, and not call overwhelming learning ‘mission creep’ or “different priorities” when it was simply learning that he couldn’t handle yet. However for him, fessing up to not being able to handle it was a little risky: His boss preached about the merit of continual learning all the time. (Sound familiar?) As he blurted out in his coaching call,

“Aw come on Rosa, who in their right mind is gonna tell their boss they just can’t handle learning?”

There are times we ALL can’t handle learning

To be okay with that, you need to define when you love it (or when it helps you feel strong) and when you hate it. Put a name and a description on your distaste for learning when it begins to happen, so you can correctly identify your resistance.

Then once you define it, sharing that knowledge of self-awareness with your own boss is a really great idea! For that’s what it actually is: Resistance you can identify and work with as your own self-awareness of when work (or learning) is working for you, and when it’s not. It’s not a refusal (a won’t disguised as a can’t —and yeah, bosses hate those. Don’t we all?)

‘Learning’ is as cool and sexy a buzz word as ‘leadership’ is, yet similar to leadership, learning fits in a very BIG bucket: A lot of different learning efforts can be in that bucket, coming in a multitude of colors and stripes —some of it highly relevant and mission-critical, some of it distracting, and possibly mission-creep.

In this particular case, I think there is a fascinating, and mutually beneficial conversation which needs to happen between my manager client and his boss, where he explains to her how teaching his staff

We named his resistance this way: For him, learning is an input which simply needs teaching someone else as his learning output, and when you’re a manager, that is actually a great thing. Not all managers love to teach, and not as much as he does! I bet his boss would love to know more about his love of teaching if she isn’t fully aware of it, especially given the way his teaching aligns with workplace need: It is highly relevant.

He happens to be a teacher who needs a workplace to receive his teaching, not a classroom.

Let’s talk story

Interesting discussion, don’t you think?

When else can learning be overwhelming?

Can you separate whatever is within your learning bucket, so it is more manageable for you?

How would you name your own learning resistance when it appears?

Photo Credits: 236/365 doing the sums by obo-bobolina
and The Joys of Homework by Cayusa, both found on FlickrCC.

Tagged as: ‘Ike loa, coaching conversations, context, learning retention, resistance, self-awareness

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2010 Mālama for Say Leadership Coaching

The Mālama of my post title, refers to stewardship.
I will often talk story with you about having a Strong Week Plan as the calendar-aligned construct of your work week. We’ve also reminded ourselves recently, of how having a “trusted system” can help you attain stress-free performance.
Over the past week, the project I had inserted into [...]

Tagged as: Alaka‘i, compass points, giving, Mālama, projects, quotations, Say Leadership Coaching, trusted system, weekends

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Be the Best Communicator

My favorite coaching assignment for Alaka‘i Managers (second to the Daily Five Minutes, and much easier to learn) is this one, reserved for the last 15 minutes of their workday.

Answer this question: Who is waiting to hear from me?
Make that call, preferably in person or on the phone. Give them whatever update you have.

Cultivate this [...]

Tagged as: communication, follow-up, reputation

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Are you a Linchpin, a Genius, or an Alaka‘i Manager?

First off, this posting isn’t going to qualify as a book review for Linchpin, Are you Indispensable? because I haven’t finished reading it. I barely got 12 or so Kindle-short pages into it when the business of day-to-day living interfered in a couple of different ways, and these thoughts started to tumble out.
This is one [...]

Tagged as: Alaka‘i, Aloha, ‘Imi ola, creativity, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dick Richards, energy, genius, Hō‘imi, Ho‘ohana, John Temple, Linchpin, Mark McGuinness, Seth Godin

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Tsunami Scare February 27, 2010

Today was to be about Rapid Fire Learning ~ and that it was!
Saturday, February 27, 2010 became the ‘host’ of an unexpected event: A Tsunami advisory, then watch, then warning for us in Hawai‘i nei, sent by an 8.8 earthquake about 6,000 miles away in Chile. Here’s a sampling of my play-by-play tweets to remember [...]

Tagged as: Chile earthquake, Howard Dicus, Jennifer Chandler, Roxanne Darling, technology, tsunami, Twitter

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Rapid Fire Learning Returns to Talking Story

Preface: If “Rapid Fire Learning” isn’t ringing a bell of quick recognition with you, I ask that you learn all about it by reading this duet of postings:

This is the FAQ sheet for RFL which is in residence on Joyful Jubilant Learning, a site now archived as an online resource for our Ho‘ohana Community:
About Rapid [...]

Tagged as: Alaka‘i, ‘Ike loa, Ho‘ohana, Rapid Fire Learning, RFL, Take 5 in 2010, weekends

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Failure isn’t cool. Neither is weakness

“Failure is not a great well of lessons. 
Don’t think it’s a prerequisite for success.”
—Jason Fried
I listened to a short riff by Jason Fried of 37signals recently (the podcast is available here) in which he says, “Failure is not cool. Don’t get into it.”
He asks why we will insist on thinking of failure as character-building, [...]

Tagged as: Alaka‘i, annual appraisals, ‘Ike loa, context, expectations, failure, Jason Fried, learning, management, mistakes, performance, relevance, strengths, usefulness, weaknesses

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