values

Back to the Basics of Managing with Aloha

March 25, 2012 by Rosa Say

I recently sat with a college counselor who wanted “the 411” on Managing with Aloha from my perspective as the book’s author. She’s new in her role with a local college which has used my book in their MBA program for several years now, and she called me for an interview when she began to read it. Our conversation was wonderful in taking me back to the basics, so much so that I re-wrote a FAQ page for www.ManagingWithAloha.com recalling her questions, and the highlights of our conversation.

We’ve been at this — our Talking Story conversation surrounding MWA — for nearly eight years now, a long time as the world of online conversation goes, and I thought you might like to review this with me: Is there any way that you’d like to return to the basics of your MWA foundation?

What if I’m not a manager?

You are welcome to join us in the Managing with Aloha movement regardless of your role in the workplace, and I hope you will. Think about managing as a verb rather than as that noun of position or title: you manage more than you may be aware of.

At the heart of it all, Managing with Aloha is about learning to honor your personal values. The best way to learn about the MWA philosophy is as a person of Aloha first (which you are), and a person who’ll get called upon to manage and lead second. Managing others is a calling you may or may not have, and if you aren’t sure, MWA will help you discover the answer.

As for my book, I did write Managing with Aloha with the manager in mind, for my goal was to create a practical and useful workplace resource for those who have made that career choice. Managing others is a profound responsibility, and I feel managers must approach it with that understanding. However a manager is a person too, one who must reckon with their personal values first and foremost, just as we all must do. That reckoning is what you will learn about in Managing with Aloha, whether you answer the calling for managing others as well, or decide on a different career direction.

Can I use Managing with Aloha on my own, or must my entire workplace organization buy-in?

On your own is the best way to start. We’ve found that those who get the very most out of Managing with Aloha have done just that: They learn and practice the philosophy within their immediate work teams first, so they can concentrate on strengthening those vitally important partnerships and get quick results in their everyday work. Workplace teams greatly underestimate what they are capable of when they collaborate in value-alignment. Employing one’s values, and doing so in the company of those you work with most, is the reason Managing with Aloha has often been called a “sensibility for worthwhile work.”

The MWA practice strengthens you. Once your values are working for you, your newly examined work gives you greater confidence, better focus, and a positive expectancy going forward. Managing with Aloha becomes contagious; it will eventually attract and welcome in the people who surround you in your extended networks. Co-working is often a better way to share all ideas and initiatives compared to top-down mandated adoption. People like proof: they have to see you “walk the talk” before they jump in and join you. That’s becomes the best buy-in of all. Not only has your own practice of Aloha has grounded you in valuable experience, it has given you credibility and a good reputation with self-management.

You’ve said that MWA is a Hawaiian story in regard to Sense of Place, but it’s about universal values at work: How much Hawaiian must I learn to understand your book and this philosophy?

You will learn some, but as word associations for universal values you start to see in a brand new light — for that work reexamination we just spoke of. Managing with Aloha is written in English, and it uses Hawaiian labels to teach value concepts. You will not learn to speak Hawaiian (which ironically, is a western word), and you will not need to have a Hawaiian dictionary handy.

One of the key concepts woven into the MWA philosophy is something we call “language of intention.” Language is critical in our communication with each other as human beings, and we do more than speak it: we author it as we employ it. We choose our words carefully, or try to, knowing that doing so helps us be more effective in sharing our beliefs with others, and our intentions connected to those beliefs. We need to understand each other, and we want to. The vocabulary we choose, and use regularly, begins to label that shared, and desired understanding. This is how we use Hawaiian in MWA: to label our shared learning, and keep talking about it with an insiders’ language of intention. It becomes our “Language of We.”

By the way, I didn’t invent the values in Managing with Aloha and neither did the ancient Hawaiians: The 19 values my book covers all stem from timeless laws and principles which have become our universal values across the globe. What I did, was group them as a philosophy for self-reliant and worthwhile work.

So what’s the connection with Sense of Place?

Every workplace has Sense of Place as a kind of cultural rooting, and place gives the parent business of that workplace its sense of community. Sense of Place becomes a sense of belonging, something which is a very basic need we share as human beings. Culture can be complex, but every culture is driven by a value system, and place will often sort our values out in a relatable, highly relevant way. When we talk about the good health of a workplace culture, Sense of Place figures into that health in a critically important manner, and people feel it tangibly.

My book shares my own story as a manager as a way of illustrating the Managing with Aloha philosophy, and Hawai‘i gave me my primary Sense of Place. It would have been impossible for me to separate the two, and I wouldn’t have tried to do so, any more than I’d ask you to put aside your work history: like it or not, your Sense of Place defined you in your past experience too. To like it, and to better appreciate it as the influence it has been, and continues to be, is a wise approach. This was another goal of my book — to help the reader map out their own Sense of Place sources, using their own values.

You write prolifically, and publish coaching essays online very generously: Do I still have to read the book too?

I must say I love the honesty of this question! I’m sincerely happy about whatever way people arrive at Managing with Aloha so we can start the conversation — I noodle around author’s websites first too! But like any actively useful philosophy, to know MWA, is to more fully explore and adopt it. I do think that everything is much clearer when you read the book, for I’m a coach: my book was written with a specific learning progression in mind, and as a comprehensive work, whereas people find my writing on the web in a much more random and serendipitous way. In the world of public domain and today’s digital ease with cut-and-paste, backstory and context isn’t always clear. I believe the book format will always survive as a form conducive to independent, self-directed learning, no matter what our reading preferences will be, electronic and otherwise. This is certainly the case with Managing with Aloha: Readers come to clarity about their values-driven work faster when they’ve read the book — that’s what it was designed to do.

Each chapter in Managing with Aloha was constructed as a self-contained primer per value, 19 in all, so that the book can continue to serve you well once you make the choice to manage with Aloha for yourself. While reading you’ll discover that the values build upon each other: what you have read in previous chapters will frame the concepts you are learning in each new one. The book presents as a story-illustrated source of inspiration, but my intention was to have it be more long-lasting, serving as the reader’s ongoing reference, resource and learning record. If you’re a manager, my hope is that the book becomes your filing cabinet.

Then what? How does Managing with Aloha stick with me, and not end up with the rest of the books I have read, then left behind to collect dust on my bookshelf?

No book is a magic pill. We humans have decisions to make about the life we want, and then we have to do the work required in making things happen the way we want them to. No book, no philosophy, can live our lives for us. Coaches like me will keep publishing books and websites to encourage you, to share current highlights, and to introduce you to a community of like-minded practitioners, but taking personally effective action is all on you.

This is why I stress active verbs in my values coaching: live, work, manage and lead with Aloha. You’re extraordinary: Human-propelled energy is our most valuable resource, for it creates all our other resources, such as physical, intellectual, and financial assets. Human energy is the result of self-motivation — that’s the only kind of motivation that truly counts.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and lose sight of your personal values, and what they do for you: Your values are what you believe in, and what you trust. They give you your character and your personality. As they play out, your values will define you for the rest of the world. Your values will give you your confidence, your courage and your tenacity, and as such, they’re the best place to begin.

Even if Managing with Aloha doesn’t gel for you as a comprehensive workplace philosophy, my hope is that it positively affects your lifestyle, by giving you the conviction, comfort and strength of your values.

Aloha! Just joining us?

Talking Story is the blog home of those who are learning to be Alaka‘i Managers — those committed to managing and leading with Aloha. Read a preview of the book which inspired this movement, and visit our About Page. Purchase Managing with Aloha at Amazon.com in hardcover, or in the Kindle Store.

Q&A: Leading up, and Changing Culture

January 28, 2012 by Rosa Say

Received these questions from a friend of mine, a professor teaching a college course on the “Emotional Health in Organizations” and thought I’d share my answer with all of you who read Talking Story as well:

How does one effectively “lead up” in their organization, if it is still managed like the Industrial Revolution? How does one BEST change the culture from within? Is it REALLY possible”since the key leader always defines the culture of the organization????

Yes, it’s possible, if you are willing to do what it takes.

Life is short, and we all have more options in the best possible living of our lives, options we may not readily see at first glance. This is why great managers are needed, and why the coaching industry thrives: Everyone can use help with seeing all their options.

I don’t care how ‘flat’ a company is, management isn’t going away, and we don’t want it to!

One question at a time. Order is important, for Cause and Values are the keys.

First of all, keep your eye on your ultimate reward, and not just on the temporary obstacles. Be sure you see that reward clearly, by getting people out of your cross hairs.

When managers ask me variations of these questions, I’ll always ask them to step back far enough to see the big picture view with more clarity first — i.e. See the organization and not the people within it. Step back so you can reassess the values of the organization as Managing with Aloha teaches, and still know you commit to that organization’s cause (mission and vision): Can you fully make the decision to press on because you are sure that’s where you want to be?

Said another way, are you sure you work for the best organization for you, best deserving of your Ho‘ohana service? If so, let’s talk about “what it takes” to effectively “lead up” (more on that in a moment.)

Green Light: When your personal values are a match for the values of the organization, everything is easier (and more fun). Everything becomes more realistic — more probable.

Red Light: Conversely, the greater the mis-match in values, the harder work will become because win-win agreements are increasingly difficult to achieve, and

Yellow Light: Productivity and Progress require working agreements.

The people we work with — the “key leader” and many others — will always loom larger than the organization itself in our day-to-day work. However the truth of the matter, is that worthy organizations, deserving of our own worthwhile efforts to support them, are longer lasting and have more endurance, outliving the people who populate them, no matter their individual stamina or tenacity as a team. For example, Steve Job’s personal influence essentially ended with his death last year, while Apple’s lives on.

If you say, “yes, this is where I have a values match with our organizational cause, and I am determined to stay and work my way through this” let’s move forward and talk story about “leading up.” For then, and only then, we have what’s ‘best’ and what’s ‘really possible.’ We can have positive expectancy, for that’s what value alignment delivers (see Key 3).

The Golden Rule comes to work with us. Always has, always will.

No matter where you sit in an organizational hierarchy, both leading up (inspiring the creation of new energies), and managing up (channeling existing energies and all available resources toward mission and vision) really amount to one thing, and that’s doing your part to make work flow productively for everyone involved, so you can continue to do the best possible version of your own work.

In other words, after you turn the keys above (Value alignment, the Cause of organizational mission and vision), the next key you need brings other people back into the picture with Relationship-building (for teamwork, network partnerships, customer sales etc.) You work to be a great partner, so you have best-functioning partnerships, for life is not a solo proposition.

In our Managing with Aloha vocabulary:

By ‘Managing up’ you make crucial work easy for your boss, for you need to partner with each other. (Managing-as-verb channels existing energies, existing resources in the adjacent possible)

By ‘Leading up’ you inspire your boss and others with your work-relevant and/or cause-relevant ideas, and you ramp things up. (Leading-as-verb creates new energies, and new resources)

When you make work easy for others, they will reciprocate and make it easier for you as they’re able to. Often you’ll have to be the one to help them see how they can help you, for they aren’t living in your shoes, and so a good relationship between you is required, and always will be (thus The Daily 5 Minutes to help). There are centuries of past workplace experience which is testament to the Golden Rule and its ethic of reciprocity, including my own experience in a number of different companies. I’m confident that your work experience illustrates this too.

The Golden Rule works outside the organization as well, in all its connective networks.

“The Law of Reciprocity must be respected to build a sustainable business of any kind. This law postulates that in almost every case people reciprocate, especially when it comes to energy or generosity.”
—Tim Sanders, author of Love is the Killer App and The Likeability Factor

So to be practical, and address your first step in “leading up,” return to your own workplace relationships and improve them in mutually beneficial ways. You don’t have to break rules and make new deals — in fact, you shouldn’t have to if you’re right about that organization being best for you. You just have to work within your present scope of influence in a way that serves others well.

It requires a win-win attitude. Start with what you can do well, and your scope of influence will grow by leaps and bounds. Best of all, it will grow in a way that’s Pono, and in alignment with your integrity, ethics, and personal values. That’s all integrity is, really, taking the actions which ‘tell the truth’ of your values.

Can anyone change a culture from within?

I say yes, IF you act as the Leader with Integrity as just described, for I believe that leadership isn’t a position or title. Leadership is a degree of effectiveness in spreading your ideas, and anyone in an organization can lead; the word is a verb.

Culture isn’t static either: I write Talking Story today in support of the tenets of Managing with Aloha, because I so fervently believe that managers create culture, and that Alaka‘i Managers have the best shot with creating healthy workplace cultures in our society today, because Aloha is always part of the agreements reached within their partnerships.

I would agree that to actually “change a culture,” at least in the shorter term, the leaders of an organization must embody the integrity of the values they claim the company holds dear. And by the way, values can, and do change over time” ask anyone at Apple what’s starting to happen now with Tim Cook.

If leaders don’t embody the values which match up with company mission and vision they won’t last that long. There will be no blooming until another leader takes their place, or they are otherwise overruled by the greater influences within the culture, and one of those things will eventually happen. The next leader to take their place can come from anywhere within an organization. When we look outside the organization instead, there is usually widespread awareness that we have a void internally.

And again, that’s where I think Managing with Aloha comes into play: To help Alaka‘i Managers mentor those leaders of tomorrow, or grow to become those Leaders of Value Integrity themselves.

A Current Case Study:
On January 1st, Jim Sinegal, co-founder and long-time CEO of Costco, turned over the reins to new CEO Craig Jelinek (an internal promotion). Jim Sinegal has been called one of the world’s top retailers, but when asked what is proudest achievement is, this is what he said:

“I think the thing we’re most proud of is the fact that [co-founder] Jeff Brotman and I built a team that’s capable of running a business this size. There’s a management team in place that is very, very good and that has enabled us to sustain the business for a long time.”

Read more: The Empire Built on Values.
As of this writing, Costco has grown to be the 3rd-largest retailer in the U.S. and the 7th-largest retailer in the world, with more than 161,000 employees, 595 warehouses in 8 countries, and more than 64 million cardholders.

“Jim Sinegal has done an amazing job of keeping the company focused on their core values to create one of the strongest consumer franchises in the world.” — Ed Weller, senior research analyst at ThinkEquity in San Francisco, quoted in The Seattle Times

“Jim built Costco based upon the highest standards of ethics and integrity. He has always believed that if you hire good people and pay good wages and benefits, good things will happen. He also frequently reminds us that we must spend 90 percent of our jobs teaching our employees. Those principles define our corporate culture and make Costco a great place to work and shop.” — Ginnie Roeglin, Senior VP, E-Commerce and Publishing, and Publisher of The Costo Connection.

Ho‘omau, as nature teaches us to do

January 21, 2012 by Rosa Say

The value which gets highlighted the most in Managing with Aloha (by Kindle readers, enabling me to notice it) isn’t Aloha or Ho‘ohana: It’s Ho‘omau, the value of persistence, perseverance, tenacity and resilience.

“Renew. Anything worth having is worth working for. Persistence is often the defining quality between those who fail and those who succeed” There is never much satisfaction in giving up, and Ho‘omau is the value that will cause you to continue, to persevere in your efforts, and to perpetuate those that have worked.”
— Managing with Aloha, Chapter 4

Ultimately, the quality of life is what’s “worth having” and “worth working for” and these days I’m seeing fabulous examples of that thanks to Mother Nature.

Our story…

We took a 10-day holiday this past Christmas, and we shut off the irrigation system we have for our garden when we left. We expected rain while we were gone, and to leave it on during Hawai‘i’s December would be far too wasteful and irresponsible.

Well, it didn’t rain. Not at all.

We came back home to find that much of our garden was dead.

Or was it?

Sometimes, it’s good to strip away the pain quickly, and start over.
[Like when there’s fire: Your Edge comes from your Inconvenience]

At other times, you pray a lot, and you figure out what else you can do, especially when precious trees are involved, trees which have fruited for you abundantly, and faithfully marked your seasons in a number of life-inspiring ways.

You figure out how to Ho‘omau.

The happy part of my story, is that all most of my garden needed was my hand watering just before sunrise each morning to moisten without rotting, coupled with as much patience as I could muster.

To be outside each morning now (still hand watering) is such an exquisite pleasure, for there are more flowers now than usual for January: My garden’s survivors are making their own season. Even the mango tree is going for a second blooming, as if to tell me, “Okay, I’ll try again too. I don’t want to be left out of this party!”

Did anything die? Yes, most notably one of my puakenikeni trees, but there’s another one, the one which had always been the healthier of the two, even when sharing its root space with the plumeria.

Now that the trees are back, it’s time to learn by their example. It’s my turn to Ho‘omau in the human way.

How about you? How will you Ho‘omau in your season, and not let go?

On Other Days: Creative Structure

January 15, 2012 by Rosa Say

If you’ve read Talking Story for any longer-than-recently length of time, you know that I’m a big fan of creative structure. I like to test new habits and shift my routines, to explore and experiment with variation, but I also do so with the hope that I’ll nalu it, and fall into a cool, unexpected, and pleasing rhythm of some new sort.

Structure is comforting, and I like structure. But nobody said it had to be stagnant, stodgy and boring. So I willingly devote whole weekends to designing trusted systems. I especially love values-based structure (no surprise there, huh), for it serves as a kind of good-habit filtering of all that life can throw at you.

However I like change too. That is, I like it the way most people will discover they actually like it: When they’ve been the ones to choose the change, being more proactive about it versus being swept away in the tide because someone else decided to “make waves” and rock the boat.

If you can become a person who chooses change, you begin to dabble, and play with it. You reveal creativity you hadn’t thought you had, but do! What others choose to do doesn’t bother you as much, because you’re too busy with your own thing. The boat might be rocking, but you’re standing in the best place — next to the life preservers — and you already have a plan.

Frank Merriwell's Discovery Yale Story — Vintage poster courtesy of The Happy Rower on Flickr

Time is finite. Content isn’t.

We all get 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 52 weeks in a year. What we choose to fill those time frames with, represents an abundance of choice — sky’s the limit. The question I have for you is this: Do you make all the choices you get to make?

Note the distinction: Not choices you have to make, but choices you get to make.

One consequence of the conventional 40-hour work week, is that most of us have created our ‘weekday’ and ‘weekend’ paradigms, even if our schedules dictate when the weekend will actually be (mine will happen this coming Tuesday and Wednesday this particular week).

Well, what if you got more than that?

If you are successful at designing a 20-hour work week for yourself like we talked about last time, a supremely wonderful get-to moment the world is paying serious attention to now, this is what you’ll get:

Work days
Weekends
Other days

The creative structure of your ‘Other Days’ is completely up to you. How would you design them?

Making life different, and doing it on purpose.

For instance, my Work Days typically go like this:
Wake up, brush my teeth, wash my face, fit in my run or workout as possible. Shower, dress the part in store for the day, have a light breakfast. Go to work in the way I’d planned to ‘hit the ground running’ the night before, and by merit of my Weekly Review (told ya, I like structure: Deliberate Inputs).

In comparison, my Other Days go like this:
Wake up at 5am. Brush and floss my teeth, as I make faces at myself in the mirror and read whatever affirmations I stuck up there on post-its. Capture whatever they make me think about in the Voice Memos app on my phone. Get dressed in the most comfortable, clean clothes I have in reach; no match, no matter (to be truthful, I usually go for more color, and the purposely unprofessional). Start the fixings of a good breakfast, including firing up my Krups cappuccino maker and grinding some good Kona beans. Sit on our porch with my coffee, and find something to take at least one photo of as the sun comes up. Decide how to use the photo as I finish my breakfast. Read whatever is on my Kindle for at least an hour, and for as long as I want to. Write something, and see if I can illustrate it (I want to learn to draw in some distinctive-to-me way). Use the rest of the day being unencumbered, and however my spirit moves me.

In the values-speak of Managing with Aloha:
…Work Days are for Ho‘ohana, Kuleana and KÅ«lia i ka nu‘u
…Weekends are for ‘Ohana, Mālama and Mahalo
…Other Days are for ‘Imi ola, ‘Ike loa and Nānā i ke kumu

I never check my email on Other Days, and I force myself to ignore my computer’s Work Day bookmarks. If I open my laptop I’ll go straight to my G-Reader and follow links for the 5,6, or 7 degrees of separation my inspiring stable of blogging accomplices and instigators send me toward, and I merrily wander away the time, stopping occasionally to curate my Commonplace Book in Evernote. I seek to remember the good by dipping into the older archives of Ho‘ohana Aloha (my Tumblr) so I can Ho‘omau with it (stretch it out, and make it last). I read a lot on Other Days; deep reading, resisting all urges to scan or skim.

Other Days are for discovering how much of a weather-wise person you are (different from weather-lucky). I get outside as much as possible and take a lot of walks on my Other Days, and I call people just to talk story on the phone for a while, or I write letters and thank you notes. Sometimes I simply stay inside the entire day long, and savor the spots of refuge and rejuvenation of my home – absolutely heavenly when it rains! (Home is different on the weekends, for then I share it with family …I’m cleaning and catching up with chores.)

I’m an obsessive planner with my Work Days, necessary by merit of the travel and island-hopping I do, yet I am very diligent about fitting in my Daily 5 Minutes and having other conversations. On Other Days I plan nothing but creative pursuits I want to try (handwork, crafty things mostly), and just fall into the environmental structure I have described. My Other Days aren’t exactly hobby days though, for my goal is more variety. More random life-immersion. More other-ness.

I write a a lot, for that’s how I tend to think, and reason things out. As you might guess, most of what I publish on Talking Story got written on my Other Days, at least in draft form.

Here’s something I just read on my Kindle that was pretty reaffirming:

“What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible (defined in this post’s footnote), because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.”
— Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

These days, managers are pretty good at thinking about the environmental creativity fostered in the workplace. But what about in those places where everything else happens?

I propose that you can have Other Days right now, even if you start with just one day a week, and no matter what the rest of the world is doing in battling or keeping with their existing conventions.

Try it.
Your dentist will be very happy about the flossing thing.

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