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Archives for May 2010

The Real Problem with Leadership

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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.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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:

  1. Initiative, Humility and the Local Way
  2. 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.”
  3. Guilt-Free Self-Leadership: 12 Possibilities
  4. “What’s in it for me?” is a Self-Leadership Question
  5. Leadership is Why and When and Management is What and How

Check out the post tags for more.

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sayalakai_rosasayMy 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.

Your Aloha Spirit, Tightly Curled and Regal

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It’s been years since I had written the first edition of Managing with Aloha, and I’m not the same person. Neither are you. Yet I sincerely feel what the book proposes remains relevant, and working with it is rewarding.

Our continued practice can help us both, keeping us grounded in universal values as we continue to grow, learning more together in other shared experiences. These have been six years of working with MWA intensely in one type of coaching that has proved very fruitful, yet is changing for me in response to the way the workplace is changing. Exploring those possibilities (and others) is what Talking Story is all about.

There’s another way of tackling change that I call the judo approach: absorbing the force of the blow and flipping it to your advantage.
—Sara Davidson, Leap! What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives?

So you’ve read the book” Now what?

It’s a question you should ask yourself about every book you read, and not just Managing with Aloha. Even the answer, “Now nothing. This one entertained, but I choose to not have it influence me” is self-expressive; the decision was made for a reason you have validated.

When you read a book, you open yourself up. You take stuff in. Thing is, your reading will either flow straight through you and not matter much as you return to the real world of your life, or it will stick, lining the walls of your insides with a new kind of self-captured texturing you can continue to draw from.

I love that you can drink of such an emotional connection to what you read in a way that comes from inside you. Think about it: someone else wrote the words, and they aren’t reading them to you. You can’t hear the emotion in their voice, or see it in their expression. You have only the words to draw it from: their words, but your meaning for them regardless of the writer’s intent. The emotional connection comes from inside you, and your own personal truth (Nānā I ke kumu: You look to your source.) , not from whoever wrote them.

It’s the same thing that your Aloha Spirit does for you. Perhaps that’s a good way to start our Managing with Aloha Mondays, reviewing Aloha, our foundational value in MWA. Over the years, this has remained the single most reprinted quote from the book, something I am very grateful for, as it should be our focus:

“Every single day, somewhere in the world, Aloha comes to life. As it lives and breathes within us, it defines the epitome of sincere, gracious, and intuitively perfect customer service given from one person to another.”

The Breath of A Life

Aloha is the combination of two smaller Hawaiian words, ‘alo’ and ‘ha.’

Like your Aloha Spirit, Tightly Curled and Regal— and ready to uncoil its promise.

Ha is the breath of your life, a concept which is like DNA to the Hawaiian way of thinking.

When you breathe in, and collect your breath, you are collecting a type of human intelligence from three centers of being, which is DNA-like in that it is unique to you. It comes from your gut, where your ancestral wisdom resides, your genitals, as your intention for continuing all life in future generations, and your head as mindfulness which is as close as you can come to being graced with divine intervention. Those three things (ancestral wisdom, forward-looking intention, and divinity), combine in each and every breath you take, the breath which will propel you toward living the rest of the following moments. This propulsion is what we mean by someone’s Aloha spirit. It is fueled by ha, the breath of your life, and the engine of your body.

Whereas ha is inside you, ‘alo’ is on the outside. Your ‘alo’ is the face you present to the rest of the world, and much different from DNA, your alo is of your choosing. Your demeanor, your presence, your blending into the world and opening up to what each and every day offers up to you —and to what each and every person you encounter offers up to you —you choose to make those encounters happen well, or you don’t. Alo is sort of like personality and mood, whereas ha is more like the character you have when no one is looking, character you will always have, and only borne of ancestral good.

Unconditional Acceptance, and the Expectation of Good

One of the most beautifully compelling beliefs about the Hawaiian culture, is that there is no such thing as a bad person from the standpoint of ha: People are born good. There is only bad behavior, chosen in the manipulation of your alo for some mis-directed reason, but a reason which can always be redirected toward good when you manage to purposely connect to your ha.

This is a belief a person can choose to have: You need not be of Hawaiian blood or ancestry to believe in the goodness inherent in humanity.
(…and you do choose to be the company you keep!)

So put them together, your alo and ha, and Aloha is living your life from the inside out, where both inside and outside are a harmonious and healthy match, perfectly aligned, and willingly shared with the rest of the world.

Thus Aloha is referred to by most in Hawai‘i as the value of unconditional love. Love for self and others. Loving yourself enough to share who you are in complete authenticity and vulnerability. “What you see is what you get, and it’s me, and it’s good!” It is a greeting hello, as in “I offer myself to you completely.” It is the Aloha of goodbye, as in “when we part our Aloha remains ever shared between us, helping us remain healthy and connected” for life is not meant to be a solo proposition.

What stayed inside?

So I ask you again. You’ve read the book” Now what?

What stayed inside as part of that emotional connection you made to keep it close? What has “lined the walls of your insides with a new kind of self-captured texturing you can continue to draw from” so it will be a part of your ha forevermore?

Savor it. Imagine it there, within every breath you take in the week to come. You decision to knowingly identify it (as your given ha) or choose it in some way (as your chosen alo) is a great way to start this every-Monday MWA journey with me.

Footnote: There is more backstory to MWA Mondays here if you are interested, including an index of relevant resource pages: Monday is for Managing with Aloha. My Book Page is here.

Beautiful Confidence

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A thought to keep close for the weekend: “Confidence is good’s natural extension.”

As Liz Danzico writes:

“People should be so fiercely passionate about good ideas that self-promotion is a natural extension. Otherwise, why is it worth doing in the first place? It’s when confidence and self-promotion are obfuscated from passion that the claims become flimsy and empty. Confidence can bridge the gap between desire and outcome as long as the integrity for what we believe and the authenticity of what we create remain in place. We have the ability to both do good work and to recognize it — the choice is ours to make. Confidence is good’s natural extension.”

How do you define a great meeting?

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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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sayalakai_rosasayMy 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.