job descriptions

You need not be a webmaster or blogger to have an About Page: Write one which is just for you.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and of how it’s such a fabulous exercise of self-attuned and value-aligned thinking, because of three reasons:

My online reading habits. Whenever I click somewhere new to me, an About Page is the first thing I look for. I want to know what people believe in, and what they happen to be working on currently as their Ho‘ohana. That information can be tough to find, and it shouldn’t be if the site or platform is the work of genuinely authentic people.
It was time to update my own About Page here on Talking Story, and writing as a physical activity always delivers in some way. Thinking about something, and forcing yourself to write it down as you flesh it out, even if just to explain it to yourself, are two distinctly different activities, and they build on each other quite well.
Writing my D5M Playbook has reminded me of how small jobs are, and how abundant ‘work’ is in comparison.

To sum it all up, you can write an About Page too (or elevator speech, or Ho‘ohana Statement), to grab hold of your own abundance, and get it into more focus — “it” being the work you find you gravitate toward most of all. That physical activity of writing about it, will often turn on another tap, releasing very attractive thoughts about what you GET to do, and still WANT to do, and probably can. The work you enjoy is what bubbles to the top, just like buttercream does in milk — and like spirit-spilling does, when we treat Aloha as a value.

Write a simple page about your Ho‘ohana work that’s more like a letter to your Aloha Spirit, saying “I know you’re there, and I still hear you guide me!” in wonderful self-affirmation.

Writing about the work you love doing is value-mapping Nānā i ke kumu (Managing with Aloha chapter/value 17): You “look to your source” to thereby know your own truth — that whole, beautiful truth about who you really are… sense of place, sense of work, sense of liberating life design for best well-being.

There’s never been a better time to reinvent ourselves.

We all know that the recessionary economy we’re still in has made earning a living a whole new ballgame. There are several struggles to overcome still, but let’s hō‘imi, and focus on the good ways we’ve been forced to make a change. We get to creatively reinvent ourselves in more liberating and individually-customized ways as we work within our means.

People are too big for jobs and always have been. We don’t fit into them completely enough, especially people like you, who have decided to explore being an Alaka‘i Manager.

‘Job’ will often pigeonhole us into somebody else’s preconceived notion about it, as documented on a ‘job description,’ a construct written for a business objective, and not for you individually as the unique packaging of the Aloha Spirit you are. So ignore the word, and any title you may have which is attached to it, because job is a too-small container for the wealth of working capacity you have — ignore the thought if you can, and focus on all the work activity you do instead.

Job is scarcity thinking — it’s a restrictive definition of sameness and uniformity.
Work is abundance thinking — it’s an activity-packed definition of individuality and possibility.

In my case for example, jobs like author, coach, business owner just don’t cut it; they’re far too general. I’m always trying to laser in to greater detail, and the marvelous result is that being more specific and descriptive doesn’t restrict me. My quirky qualifications actually help me see more possibility that I might have missed before, and I better understand my own niche and place in the world.

We can’t be the life of every party, but we sure can rock the party we’re at.

I’ll be tweaking my Ho‘ohana descriptions forever, always exploring and experimenting, always revising and refining. I fall in and out of love with the words I choose to describe myself, and I love that talk story opportunity I get when people say, “You do what? Tell me what that means.” It’s part of the fun of it all. Work can lighten up, that’s for sure, and be more playful and inventive.

Wikipedia is a great place to discover how some of the people you may admire most had actually defied the conventions of traditional jobs and forged their own destiny. Here are a couple of examples:

Martin Luther King Jr. “was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King is often presented as a heroic leader in the history of modern American liberalism.”

George Bernard Shaw “was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.

Shaw was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. ”

So tell us, what are you all about today?

Always remember that motivation is an inside job. When we honestly reflect on it, we often realize that self-motivation is the only kind that counts in the best work we do. That’s great news when you think of all that energetic, pure-talent possibility inside you, just waiting to come out to play.

I’d be honored to be your Reader #2 if you draft an About Page for the first time” I know many of you reading this, and you’re a very interesting bunch. If I wrote your About Page, it would be absolutely impossible for me to describe you in a single job title, or even in a single paragraph! So for heavens sake, don’t do that to yourself.

Stand tall, and stake your claim with what you believe in, and thus, what you work on (another way to describe Ho‘ohana in English :) In fact, do feel free to use the comment boxes to have others in our Ho‘ohana Community meet you. How would you describe your Ho‘ohana these days, your intention with the worthwhile work which makes your heart sing?

Here is the “About the Author” write-up now in the latest draft of my D5M Playbook in progress:

Rosa Say is a workplace culture coach who is determined to reinvent our workplaces value by value, and conversation by conversation, making our working communities healthier and more rewarding for us all. As founder of Say Leadership Coaching, Ho‘ohana Publishing, and Writing with Aloha, Rosa is hired as a speaker, teacher, and coach for her expertise in values-based business management, and as a change agent leading organizational culture design.

Rosa is known for her work leading the Managing with Aloha movement within Hawai‘i and internationally, a philosophy which draws from her 30-year career in the resort hospitality industry and her current business laboratories in writing and coaching for a variety of fields, including education, medicine, governance, and land development due to her specialty of Sense of Place acculturation. Her ‘Ohana in Business modeling initiatives are focused on enabling people to achieve self-sustenance as the shared Kuleana of thriving communities — in her most passionate vision, ‘public welfare systems’ become relics of the past because people no longer need the crutches.

Published in 2004 as the first of her books, Managing with Aloha is considered a classic values essay which describes how Hawaii’s Language of Intention and Sense of Place perception delivers a sensibility in work ethic which can be brought to the art of business universally. The book is widely used as an indispensable resource for managers, for Rosa is their most vocal advocate and champion when management is courageously redefined for developing people and their human-powered energies. Rosa publishes the popular Talking Story blog, and the ebooks she writes “on managing and leading as accessible verbs” are published to encourage the constant curiosity, questioning, and creative energies of her Ho‘ohana Community’s learning conversations there — please join us!

Rosa lives on the Big Island of Hawai‘i and travels frequently in her passion for speaking with audiences of managers seeking to bring the values of Aloha into their work practice. Learn more about her current projects at www.RosaSay.com.

I hate job descriptions. What we need instead, are strength descriptions.

Here’s what I mean, using my own story as an example.

One way I’ll surprise people, is with my honest self-assessment in regard to customer service; I’m strong as a customer service trainer, particularly in Ho‘okipa (the value of generous hospitality), but I’m not skilled in serving customers myself. I can teach those skills, and even coach people in using them, far, far better than I can do them myself. Yet I was able to forge a very successful career in the ‘Hawai‘i hospitality business’ where the expectation is that “first and foremost: we serve customers.”

That’s not to say I have a different philosophy personally, or that I’m being hypocritical or duplicitous in any other way. I knew the actual delivery of good customer service was a personal weakness for me, so I compensated for that, by working in other areas of service where my strengths were actively in play.

My strengths were in working with employees, peers, and other managers, and not in serving customers. The personal service I excel with as Mea Ho‘okipa, a customer service provider, is given to others in contextual relationships specific to co-working — to internal customers rather than external ones. I will never, ever be a sales person, unless I’m ‘selling’ someone on the fit of a good job for them within my Ho‘ohana coaching.

My story is not an unusual one. In his book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, Marcus Buckingham tells us about Christine, a trainer in southern California:

“Like each of us, Christine has a number of distinct strengths. One of them is that she is invigorated by training trainers to be better. She loves nearly every aspect of the teaching process. She loves seeing the satisfaction a trainer feels when his students excel and the growth in his own confidence as he becomes more comfortable with his material. She has a third eye for fine distinctions, for the subtleties in how a trainer presents information and why those nuances make a big difference in turning students’ confusion into understanding.”

“Interestingly, she’s not particularly adept at doing what she’s training her trainers to do. Sit her down in a room with five senior trainers who want to dive into the details of program design, and she excels. But increase those numbers to twenty-five, turn the trainers into students, and tell Christine to hold their attention for a full day’s training, and she’s mediocre.”

“She’s not invariably a great teacher, yet she’s a great teacher of teachers. It may seem a bit strange, but most of us, when you look closely, have a combination of strengths and weaknesses that is not entirely predictable.”

“Strange or not, the challenge for Christine and her manager, is to figure out how to exploit this great strength for the benefit of the company. They have a lot to talk about.”

Those are the kinds of conversations we don’t have often enough in the workplace. One problem is the on-going challenge of making time for them — it’s the problem we try to solve in part, with the Daily Five Minutes, converting found opportunities into more productive ones.

However there’s a deeper problem in play; and that’s the expectation of managers. It’s an expectation which puts blinders on us. We’ll often expect employees to conform to standardized expectations (i.e. Job Descriptions) instead of personalized ones — the Ho‘ohana work which suits their spirit, innate talents, and strengths.

The expectation of conformity is as foolish as watering a seed and expecting it to bloom into an animal or piece of machinery.

We fail to have conversations about what people are strong at, and about the proficiencies they’ll truly shine at when we figure out how to stage them, because we spend way too much time talking about OUR standards for their performance instead. We work at fitting employees into our molds for them, and into our preconceived views of what the world of work should look like — even when we’ve begun to realize how dysfunctional that picture has become.

I was far happier, and far more productive for my employer, when my manager didn’t force me into the customer service roles I wasn’t suited for, whether to pay my dues, prove to the rest of the team that I could do it, or some other misguided reason. It wasn’t that I didn’t like customers, or felt that the work was below me. I wasn’t intimidated by it, and didn’t need to learn more. It just didn’t motivate me or reward me as much as other work did. I could go through the motions, choosing the all the right motions, but calling upon deeper passions with them was like trying to squeeze water from a sponge that is completely dry.

Customers could tell too. They never had a complaint about my customer service, but I didn’t routinely knock their socks off with it either. Not good enough for them, and not good enough for me.

However here is where I was extremely lucky: My bosses were not stubborn and unreasonable. When I showed them what I could do, doing it better, and in a way that filled another need of the business, they turned me loose and let me go for it.

And this is an important point: They did not have to create a new gig for me. All they had to do was not hold me back, and support me in figuring it out for myself, so I could find my own answers.

So, Mr. and Ms. Manager, what are the expectations you honestly have of your own staff? How can you honor their strengths, and share your savvy with workplace design by compensating for their weaknesses in smarter, and more respectful ways?

Here’s more from the story in Buckingham’s book: As he explains, Christine actually IS director of program development at a training company. Her job is to design the training programs, and then, once they have been sold to a company, to deliver them:

“They have a lot to talk about. Together, Christine and her manager have to figure out how to design a train-the-trainer product based on her strengths, how to market it, price it, and select a specific group of clients on which to focus it. They have to decide what kinds of materials are necessary and whether Christine is the right person to create them. They have to decide the optimal number of trainees Christine is capable of working with and how frequently she should check back in with them to assess their competence.”

“These are the kind of details that will determine just how productive Christine’s strengths are at work. Given how critical her performance is to the entire company, she and her manager should be talking about them all the time.”

You have heard my story, and Christine’s. Now think of someone you are managing. What are the strengths they bring to the job, and what are the specific details your conversations can address? What are their needs, in having you coach and support them?

Do this assessment for each and every one of the direct reports you have, and do it consistently. Don’t you dare give them a performance appraisal on the wrong expectations.

These are not difficult questions. Managers know the answers in the context of their workplace. The bigger question is if they are focused on them, and on the right expectations to begin with.

~ Some Archive Aloha which might help ~
But please; do answer the question before you move on to more reading.
Make this coaching relevant to you!

Write an About Page, even if for a Readership of 1

There’s never been a better time to reinvent ourselves.

We can’t be the life of every party, but we sure can rock the party we’re at.

So tell us, what are you all about today?

Managing Strengths and not Standards