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 my own Strong Week Plan in between my business commitments, was doing a comprehensive rewrite of my primary business website, Say Leadership Coaching. SLC is now six years old, and I had fallen behind in keeping my website in sync with the growth and evolution of how my business actually happens day by day. I newly realized how much I had been taking the site for granted and had not properly cared for it, when this happened: What if your business got sick?

I am also planning a complete reinvention of www.ManagingWithAloha.com and I found that working on SLC first gave me some better clarity about those plans. It certainly got me much more excited about them, and impatient to start! (That one requires some professional help I’ll need to hire.)

If you have some time this weekend, I would greatly appreciate your help in looking it over, and proofreading what I have done for SLC. When you first click over it will look the same, for I did not work on a new design (I hope to have that done this summer). I concentrated on content, and on navigation, and the nine pages now there on the sitemap have been completely redone or newly created.

We writers have a tendency to be overly enamored of our own stuff, and that’s why I ask your help. SLC is not for me, it’s for you. More than ever before, I’ve written it with the same Ho‘ohana intention I have always had for Managing with Aloha: As a freely published resource the Alaka‘i Manager can turn to, whether or not that manager ever decides to hire me personally, or for his or her business.

I think of what I have on both SLC and MWA as “jumpstart writing” which can get an interested manager started, as opposed to business advertising, ‘brochureware’ and sales copy. It may not be the smartest way to sell myself, but it does work for me, and I feel both authentic and comfortable in the way I’ve published my sites.

People will frequently ask me why I give away so much information on both websites, and the answer is because I genuinely want the manager with an Alaka‘i calling to find what’s there, free for the taking, and use it. I do understand that the internet has become a free copy machine: My site stats illustrate that the pages are copied almost daily, or linked to on company intranets, and in password-protected forums I cannot get into. That doesn’t bother me: It encourages me, and gives me hope, for Hō‘imi: It means that people are seeking better and best. KÅ«lia i ka nu‘u: They strive for the summit!

“Never underestimate the power of giving.
It shines like a beacon throughout humanity.
It cuts through the oceans that divide us and
brightens the lives of all it touches.
One of life’s greatest laws is that you cannot hold a torch to light
another’s path without brightening your own as well.”
—Managing with Aloha page 81

There are six more SLC pages I have turned off for now, or dropped from readily apparent navigation, because I might love them, but I don’t think they are necessary there anymore. If you really do miss them, let me know.

You can start at my home page, and click around from there: www.SayLeadershipCoaching.com

There are two pages in particular that I think will be a win-win for us: Me in asking your help with a site look-over, and you as an Alaka‘i Manager:

1. Are you a manager or leader? Snippet:

My services are for hire, and I have products you can purchase, however I will also tell you about a self-study option which is completely free and without any strings attached to it.

If you are a manager, and you want to be a great manager, there is a reason you found this page, and believe me, your time is now.

2. The Healthy Workplace Compass. A little more about this one:

One of the workshops I have always offered has been called ‘Imi ola Coaching in the past, to help businesses define these compass points when they tackle a reinvention of their business model. This is a new page, where I am publishing the SLC Workplace Compass as an illustrative example: We’ve given this to our clients, but it hasn’t been on the site before.

When customers want to fast-track another program, we ask them to do this on their own first, as a way they can prepare in earnest for the work we will then tackle together.

This page is why I decided to post this on Talking Story this weekend, because I want all of you, my wonderful, faithful Talking Story readers and Ho‘ohana Community, to have it.

Okay, I better wrap this up: You’ll have enough to read there for your weekend!

I’m eager to hear what you think: Email me privately if you prefer.

And mahalo nui loa, thank you so, so much. It’s hard to write this kind of content and be objective about it!

By the way, if you have never noticed it before, the link to Say Leadership Coaching when you are here, reading Talking Story, is always up within the navigation contained in the site banner, under “SLC.COM” for short.

Photo Credit: Street Art Compass by KayVee.INC on Flickr