Columns: Say “Alaka‘i”

The Real Problem with Leadership

May 25, 2010 by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

One problem with leadership, is simply that we don’t have enough of it.

The bigger problem with leadership is that it isn’t attractive to us. We, as individuals, aren’t accepting it as our Kuleana, and personal responsibility. We keep looking for someone else to lead, for the truth of the matter is that we prefer being followers (and sadly, armchair quarterbacks ready to complain.)

Here’s the catch: The best leaders are the ones who expect more leadership from you, not ‘good’ following.

Jacob LOST — In Lost, Jacob was on a quest to find another leader, and someone who could do what he could not. Photo courtesy ABC.

Are we looking in all the wrong places?

If you do a search on Amazon.com for leadership books, over 61,306 results come up, and those are only the ones with the word ‘leadership’ in the product description’s keywords. (If you’re curious about the comparison, as I was, 603,208 results come up for ‘management.’)

My theory is that so many people write about leadership because we’re still yearning for it: We seek it by trying to articulate it better, so we’ll know exactly what we’re looking for, especially in a world which is anything but static and stable. As with most things, we can better grab onto something we can tangibly identify.

I’ll often remind myself of this longstanding leadership quest so that I focus better in my own writing about it. What I’m trying to do, is to help you see leadership as the visible evidence of self-leadership behaviors: Leading is for you, and not just “the other guy.” If you look for leadership in someone else, you will always be looking, and you’ll always feel frustrated.

So there’s three ways I’ll break leadership down when writing about it:

I’ll connect it to the creation of energy as our most important resource (my way of defining leadership), for hopefully, that’s very desireable to you: Gathering your own energy is where you must start. You fuel up.
I’ll write about the opportunities we have to lead, and state them as your calls to action (recent examples have been Sense of Workplace and Job Creation).
I’ll write about that action as activities that are not larger than your life, but highly possible: They are tangible bits which squarely sit in your own circle of influence.

However what’s very frustrating for me, is that I constantly hear back: “It needs to start at the top, right?” and the finger-pointing at the boss will begin immediately. Maybe so; maybe improvement does need to happen with your boss too, but what if it never happens? Will you really be content with playing the victim forever? Why not start any necessary improvement with you?

We have to stop this blame game where we constantly look at someone else as the reason we do not take action and behave better, or with greater bravery. Please stop focusing on what the other guy is doing about it, and look within. Leadership is scarce when there’s a scarcity of initiative — yours.

Be honest: We’re looking for saviors

Leadership is open to everyone, and opportunity abounds, but we don’t see it that way. We refuse to, and shield ourselves in self-righteousness instead. Pure yuck. It’s a cop-out to say that the problem with leadership is the way someone else does it (or doesn’t).

This is something that really bugs me about election seasons, such as we’re in right now: They proliferate the misconception that leadership is about title, position and placement. We get stuck in believing that “winner takes all” and he or she will now be the only one who is “the leader” when that simply isn’t true. The smartest thing the so-called winner can do is tap into the leadership desires of his or her previous opponents to channel them, such as President Obama did when he asked Hillary Rodham Clinton to work with him as our U.S. Secretary of State.

However if he hadn’t done so, would Clinton have stopped her practice of self-leadership, neglecting to renew her initiative? I sincerely doubt it. She would have looked for another opportunity, and so can you.

Be your own savior. Solve the leadership problem by always asking, “What about me? What can I do?” or if it’s more comfortable for you, ask, “How can I help?” and “Where can I start?”

The way we solve “the problem with leadership” is to solve our problem with self-leadership being missing from our personal practice. Your small wins can create big domino effects.

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Archive Aloha: Here’s a Take 5 of related postings:

Initiative, Humility and the Local Way
Who leads? You do. In the Sweet Spot Quote: “The trouble with all or nothing is that it is often too intimidating to choose all, making it much too easy to choose nothing.”
Guilt-Free Self-Leadership: 12 Possibilities
“What’s in it for me?” is a Self-Leadership Question
Leadership is Why and When and Management is What and How

Check out the post tags for more.

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My mana‘o [The Backstory of this posting]
Each Tuesday I write a leadership posting for Say “Alaka‘i” at Hawai‘i’s newspaper The Honolulu Advertiser and will add copies to Talking Story when they blend nicely with our conversations here. 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”. There are some differences in this Talking Story version, most notably that most of my hyperlinks will keep you here on this blog.

How do you define a great meeting?

May 20, 2010 by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

Andy Stanley said, “The best thing a leader can bring to his team is his energy.” (quoting Bill Hybels)… another reason that I’d encouraged you to Ho‘ohui: Huddle up, and Bring back the staff meeting:

Having regularly scheduled staff meetings has become a no-no, something we avoid like the plague in workplaces. Why?

Boycotting staff meetings is absurd. Meetings are not a problem dear manager; bad meetings are. And make no mistake; you need them.

The solution is simple: Have good meetings!

I left that last statement as is, so how so? How do you have a good meeting?

Photo credit: “God, I hope we get to perform this sometime” by Nosha on Flickr

To have the noun, define the verb

I think you have to very simply define that word ‘meeting’ by thinking about why you have them at all. Fact of the matter is that meetings exist in organizational structures like some brick or pillar which has been in the building forever, but is no longer foundational or even functional. It’s just there as part of the cultural auto-pilot.

I talked about this a little bit with David Zinger, the employee engagement guru, and he said that if he was chairing a meeting, he’d be sure to “Sit at the same level, be part of the circle, listen to all voices, care about relationships and results.”

That tells me David wants to really hear from the people there with him: He is starting with his why. Starting that way takes him directly to his action verbs as a leader.

From a contextual standpoint, a good meeting is a great conversation involving more people. I like to keep it simple, and define meetings that way because it reminds me to honor the conversation part and make sure it is ever-present in my meeting agendas. It helps me treat each meeting as a brand new event — who is coming? i.e. Who are my guests? — so that I focus on individuals versus audience.

But those are my whys, and it’s okay if your energy-creating (leading) or energy-channeling (managing) why is different: Just be sure it is intentional.

So this posting is not going to offer you a listing of all the elements that go into constructing a great meeting agenda: that would be condescending I think. As an Alaka‘i Manager you can take care of content. My advice is to define your why.

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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”. There are some differences in this Talking Story version, most notably that all links will keep you here on this blog.

Bring Back the Staff Meeting

May 18, 2010 by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

Having regularly scheduled staff meetings has become a no-no, something we avoid like the plague in workplaces. Why?

Boycotting staff meetings is absurd. Meetings are not a problem dear manager; bad meetings are. And make no mistake; you need them.

The solution is simple: Have good meetings!

Before we jump to any how-to (something you can probably figure out on your own anyway) let’s talk story today about why you should have them.

How this is jumped on my radar

A feature I’ve loved with using Google Calendar is that you can have several calendars, each for their own specific purpose, merged together on one weekly view in a pleasing color-coded rainbow of productivity. Very useful.

One of my favorites has been a ‘green light’ calendar I call “Personal Intersection.” I’ve used it for logging the recurring staff meetings of my Say Leadership Coaching customers, and workplaces I’m aware of which actively use and practice Managing with Aloha. These are the people of the “in real life” Aloha and Ho‘ohana movements I want to actively support as much as is personally possible for me — and here’s the key, when it’s also rhythmically useful for them.

This is how I use it: When I’m in town (which in Hawai‘i often translates to “on their island”) and happen to have a morning or afternoon block free, I check who might have a staff meeting then, pick up the phone and ask to be invited, asking if I can stop by and sit in to support them, or if they like, to give a short 10-minute whiteboard lesson on whatever MWA value-alignment they wish to revisit. I do this for free. They don’t have to ask, because I offer, knowing that I will love being there with them in their working with Aloha laboratory. It’s been a great way to optimize my travel schedule.

This has been getting harder to do. Imagine that: Hard to give away free presentations or responsiveness coaching because I’ve been hearing that, “We don’t have staff meetings anymore.”

A recurrence is predictable scheduling convenience

Now I have terrific customers. Because they embody Aloha they always welcome my visits and do whatever they can to get their team together. But I tend to call them less often than before if I feel I’m intruding, precisely because I don’t want them going out of their way for me. I want to intersect and blend in, not interrupt and disrupt.

People are so polite, and they don’t say no, even when they should. And I certainly don’t want to call attention to something which is now glaringly missing for you. Okay, maybe I do, but I’m writing this to be more proactive than reactionary about it!

Those recurrences, where everyone in an organization knows that you meet for a sacred hour or so every week are human touchpoints; they are huddles which add invaluable ‘social currency’ to the emotional bank account of workplace teams.

If you honor that as the ‘Why?’ you have meetings, how you have them, and what they’re about will follow, form for function. People will not dread attending each week if your staff meetings become a time they go to the well and recharge, because you’ve made them a source of energy, inspiration, and their opportunity to connect on a regular basis without having to schedule something special.

Instead of boycotting workplace meetings, improve them

Bring back your staff meetings, and make them interesting and useful.

I’m purposely excluding the word ‘creative’ here too: Creative approaches to meeting reinvention can totally miss the mark, because we get distracted and off-point with silly surface fixes that are cosmetic and meaningless. You know what I mean: ‘manufactured play’ can insult the value people place on the time they give you by merit of their attention.

I get that recessionary times have caused you to look for efficiencies, I really do. But consider the price of omission. And by all means, say “No, can we try again next time?” to visitors like me when you need to own your agendas, or if my version of ‘given for free’ will actually cost you in some way.

So huddle up: Bring back your staff meetings and have them be a place your people plug in and get charged up. You cannot sacrifice getting your team together on a regular basis to converse and collaborate in person socially, and without added production: Staff meetings are part of that intangible worth within Sense of Workplace belonging.

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Archive Aloha: Here’s a Take 5 of related postings:

Check out the post tags for more.

Update: My stats tell me that someone has been coming back to this post due to a search for “rules of engagement.” So Arlington, Virginia, this is for you, just in case you happen to return: What you’re looking for might be found here: The Real Rules of Engagement at my Tumblr.

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Helping Without Hurting

May 13, 2010 by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

There are so many management lessons to be learned from parenting, and I think that helping without hurting is one of them.

Loving your children, and loving the people you manage, will cause you to help them unconditionally. You want to do so much for them, and so you’ll give an awful lot; your generosity knows no bounds.

Yet we do have to step back at times (at many, many times), and stop ourselves.

We need to stop giving when we make it way too easy, and those we give to lose their own natural hunger. They don’t try hard enough, nor reach far enough, because we’ve robbed them of the experience of striving, and wanting more badly than they do.

We intended to help, and to love, but we’ve hurt them because we’ve robbed them of the joy which can come from expended effort. We’ve prolonged their path to achieving their self-reliance (if they ever do).

It is one thing to have your child tell himself

“It’s hard; I’ve tried several times and keep coming up short — why?”

It’s quite another to have your child tell himself

“Why bother? I’ll get it one day if I just wait long enough.”

In the first instance, he will keep questioning, and keep looking for new methods, options or alternatives. “Hard” is a temporary state of affairs. In the second, we’ve chipped away at his once-innate bravado and can-do spirit and only complacency remains. Even wanting something has gotten shallow.

We can keep caring

I’ve found that the value of Mālama can help me make better decisions when I weigh my options between giving that help I so want to give, yet holding back my first impulses to do so. Thinking about Mālama gives me pause, at least long enough to listen to that small voice which affirms yet asks, “I know you have good intentions, but are you sure you should do this for them?”

Mālama” the value of caring and compassion.
Stewardship.
Mālamalama” the light of knowledge, and clarity of thinking.
Enlightenment.

I admit to you that I continue to fail miserably at holding back as a parent. I’m weak. I know that I do way too much for my children, and I need to stop, so they do for themselves. I’m better at this as a manager, where there’s a bit less intimacy in our relationships (we have useful boundaries) but I can mess up a lot there too.

However I’m getting better by remembering to call on Mālama as my self-coaching mantra. Mālama is also the value of empathy, and putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes as the way we care for them. We weigh in with tough love precisely because we are compassionate, and we do care, but we need to pause for a bit more enlightenment: We’ll then be able to give our care in the best way versus the impulsive way.

Show me the signs

I find I’m looking for recognizable markers now. They are very individual though, shifting from person to person. I ask myself, “When is that concept of ‘tough love’ better?” and the most reliable answer is “Usually. Try to see it more. Allow it to show up.”

It gets increasingly better. The joy is that I can accept my strength and deny my weakness. The irony of tough love, is that it is often tougher on us, than on those we give it to, and as such, it’s one of the greatest kinds of love which exist.

When we’ve stopped giving too much, without holding back an iota on the goal we strive for or the gift we want to give, and our children or our people become successful on their own in achieving it, we are also successful in becoming stronger — we’ve both become stronger. Our weakness was another temporary state of affairs.

What about you? How do you achieve this balance? How do you help your children, and your people, become hungry, tenacious, resilient and persistent? Do you go so far as to introduce adversity into the workplace, or at least illuminate it? Then what kind of support do you continue to give, without giving too much, so that they welcome your tough love for them?

Photo Credit: Reach by Cayusa on Flickr

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