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When Learning gets Systemic

June 10, 2010 by Rosa Say

Okay, I did the open-minded thing a couple of days ago in asking you: What is the Learning we managers will Curate? (and if you have more to share, bring it on). I was also honest about the assumptions I carry with me as my baggage when I talk about learning, and it was good to spell them out that way, and be more aware of them. They are assumptions I like having for Managing with Aloha and I make no apology for them; now we can move on.

You see I’m no Jason Fried: In the organizations I’ve been part of, learning is not left to chance, and that was a big reason I wanted to be associated with them in the first place. My own answer to the question I asked you — “When would you curate learning as a value, and when would you curate learning as a strategic initiative?” — would be constantly, and as BOTH.

As for the second question — When might learning be systemic, and when might it be irrelevant? — I struggle to come up with any examples of when learning is irrelevant. I know it is too predominant a value for me, and thus it was (and still is) the biggest question I will have to answer — I have to learn about that one!

What we want in a  Managing with Aloha work culture, is for learning to be systemic, i.e. a natural approach for us in the way we get our work done. (Our “Why?” was spelled out in those five assumptions.)

How does that happen?

Learning gets systemic when it has become the prevailing attitude of your work culture; it’s become the means to your ends: project ends, strategy ends, even service ends. Even an expert will learn more in the process of delivering his or her expertise to a customer, for learners seek out feedback loops. Those feedback loops serve them as affirmation that their past learning has become useful and meaningful.

Once an attitude is systemic, we embrace its repetition in a pretty great way; learning options and of continual improvements becomes challenging.

Sitting, Staring, Appreciating, Wondering…
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City

Achieving that learner’s attitude is one of the constant goals we who are Alaka‘i Managers have. We willingly own our responsibility to promote learning, and we sharpen learning focus within the curation we do. We don’t control the ways that people learn, in fact we seek out that diversity so we can facilitate it better, and so we can help individuals strengthen their methods.

There are essentially two ways that learning gets systemic in any work culture, and they work together in that your efforts on one will never be lost on the other:

1. You select it where it already exists.  You place a premium on it, by making it one of your high-quality filters. For instance, you seek self-motivated learners in the hiring you do, and in the partnerships you develop.

2. You initiate and coach it where it may not exist. This is where learning curation becomes most necessary and strategic, for you make learning more attractive where there’s a lack of it: You make it highly relevant and desirable.

And so dear Alaka‘i Managers, look around you within your own work culture. Where do you sense there is a learning void you need to fill?

Akamai  Bonus points:

Akamai means smart and savvy; clever. We have spent some time talking about trusted systems: Weekend Project: Hō‘imi your Trusted System.  How would you get the learning m.o. in your work culture to be both systemic and trusted?

Purchase Managing with Aloha at Amazon.com in hardcover, or in the Kindle Store.

Have you caught the curve ball?

June 3, 2010 by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

I threw it to you this past Tuesday: The State of our Learning and the Demand for Curation

In throwing that curve ball, I did it to you just as your boss does. I did it to you just as many who lead will do, to many who manage with them: I threw a new initiative at you, launching into a new theme whether or not you’re ready for it, and now, you just have to deal with it.

Dealing with Decisions

Such is life, isn’t it. Some of us catch well, and some of us don’t. There are some who will just walk off the field, hoping that the coach or a teammate will notice and call them back: They haven’t the resilience, tenacity and fortitude to keep trying on their own.

So am I back-pedaling to give you a breather, and let you catch up in your own way? Not a chance. (Does your boss?) You may recall that I recently wrote of a new tough-love resolve I have (it was called “Helping Without Hurting”).

Let’s just talk about catching curve balls today, on this, our “managing Thursday.” A new initiative has come down from the top: What do you do now?

First, you Catch Well

Catching well (‘well’ meaning that the next play you make is the best possible one) is a hard thing to learn for all managers. You think —you hope —that it will get easier the higher up the ranks you move, but take it from me (been there) it doesn’t. It gets harder, because you have fewer places to hide: The higher up you go, the more visibility you have, and the more people throw their ‘should-ing’ expectations at you. Others assume you have more information at your fingertips and you’re in-the-know of some inner circle.

What you know to be the raw truth of the matter, is that unless you reach that pinnacle of being Numero Uno, you answer to someone — ask any CEO how it goes with his shareholders or Board of Directors. In fact even then, up there in godlike status you’ll answer to someone: You’ve begun to understand that everyone in your organization is a volunteer no matter what you pay them. Org charts are, and always have been, irrelevant.

I don’t write this to depress you, but to save you from an unrealistic expectation. In the same way we speak of Alaka‘i, the value of managing and leading well, “catching well” has nothing to do with title or position of perceived influence. Catching well has everything to do with you, and how you decide you’ll react. And as with much in life, practice helps make perfect — or at least easier, and progressive, in that mistakes don’t get repeated. Your objective is not rank, it’s effectiveness. Or better, mastery.

Within organizational politics, you’re advised to react with ownership, and with the “buck stops with me” attitude, and it’s good advice. The more of something you own, the more you can control or better influence all the variables associated with it. The trick to ownership is not to be a victim about it, and truly catch the ball and run with it.

That last one is a loaded sentence, I know, and some will look for coaching, to get the help they need in navigating the political landscape peculiar to their own organizational variables. Indeed, it is one of the things I get hired for. Here on Talking Story, let’s bring the focus back to our work here as a “for example” we can apply to the balls thrown your way, for the strategies are very similiar to what you need to do in your own workplace as well.

So first you catch well…

Then, you make your Next Play

Your ownership starts the moment that ball is in your hands.

One sec, I take that back: Your reaction starts the moment that ball is in your hands. Every coach will tell you that your best ownership prospects happen before that: You’re one of those players who is watching the earlier plays thinking, “I’m ready: Bat that ball this way.” or “Come on! Throw it to me!” or you’re one of those players feeling you’re not ready, and hoping that the coming play doesn’t happen on your patch of grass in the field.

One is leaping ahead to the future, creating their best destiny in true ‘Imi ola fashion (they are visionary). The other is content right where they are, and a bit too comfortable, maybe even scared (they are complacent).

(Big clue there Alaka‘i Managers-who-coach, about your players: Which are thinking, for they already feel strong, and which are still feeling out the different emotions of their play/no play options?)

So which are you? It’s something you need to understand before you make your next play, because the next play causes the next outcome. In those two scenarios there are different outcomes, aren’t there.

There’s a third and fourth scenario too. They are happening with the players who are currently bench-warming. In the third scenario they are watching the game intently, imagining they are on the field in a certain position, and the ball is definitely coming their way. They’re ready to catch well and they aren’t even on the field yet!

Fourth scenario they’ve been on that bench a while, and they became the ones who bring all those sunflower seeds to the dugout. All that spit… yuck.

At this point, you may be thinking, “I thought we were talking about how I catch well here at Talking Story?”

We are.

An added word about our Value Themes

I touched on this when introducing our “learning curation” theme this past Tuesday, but it’s worth tying into this discussion again, for I packed a lot into that posting.

Let’s use our metaphor. Think of themes this way: Are you playing the game in full sun or in rain? Is it a home game, or are you on the road?

We managers, and managers-who-coach love themes because they help us focus on a certain set of options instead of all of them. You don’t apply most rainy day playbooks to anything but a rainy day. When you’re on the road, you know that your team will require more from you than they do when you play at home, and that they’ll also have to rely on each other more (or differently).

So Managing with Aloha, the game I ask you to play with me, is like a collection of playbooks for our Ho‘ohana Community. I like to think of the current theme we work with as our sunny day. Talking Story is when we play at home. Definitely.

Let’s Ho‘ohana, and play ball.

Postscript: I had this post in mind as a necessary follow-up back when I was drafting The State of our Learning and the Demand for Curation as the theme which would take us into this mid-year period. This “curve ball” metaphor was then inspired by what Sports Columnist Ferd Lewis called a “Sparkling day on diamonds for UH.” In part, he wrote:

For the University of Hawai’i, [May 30, 2010] will be remembered as the day that Cinderella danced twice. Some 1,500 remarkable miles apart.

First, in dramatic fashion before a stunned-to-silence overflow crowd in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where the Rainbow Wahine softball team punched its historic ticket to the Women’s College World Series with Jenna Rodriguez’s two-run, seventh-inning, walk-off home run that beat Alabama, 5-4.

And, then, hours later, when the Rainbow baseball team tenaciously held on in Mesa, Ariz., to beat nemesis Fresno State, 9-6, for the Western Athletic Conference Tournament title and an NCAA Regional berth.

In one pinch-me day of hope, persistence and triumph, the Rainbow Wahine earned the school’s inaugural trip to Oklahoma City, site of the World Series, and the Rainbows got their first WAC tourney title in 18 years and first regional spot since 2006.

As an Alaka‘i Manager, you can coach your own team to this kind of feeling: I know you have it in you, and that they have it in them. (Another suggested read from the archives, if you have the reading time: Feeling Good Isn’t the Same as Feeling Strong.)

Hawai‘i’s Jenna Rodriguez, right, is greeted at home plate after her second homer of the game beat Alabama.

Photo Credits, in the order in which they appear: Vintage Baseball by AdWriter and Softball by Dave Elmore, both on Flickr, and Jenna Rodriguez by Marion R. Walding, Special to The Honolulu Advertiser

Start a WOW! Project at Work

January 14, 2008 by Rosa Say

Before you start groaning, “No way, not another project!” (…“No way” is a “Yeah But”) understand that a WOW! project is a FUN project, and if you can get everyone you work with to approach ALL projects in the WOW! project way, life where you work will be all the sweeter.

Here is how Tom Peters described The Wow! Project in an article for Fast Company:

After decades of wholesale neglect, companies are finally facing the fact of pathetic white-collar productivity and realizing that they need to organize work in a fundamentally new way. The old ways of working are too slow, too convoluted, too hard to grab hold of — and the value is too hard to capture. At the same time, white-collar workers themselves are catching on: They need to rethink the very nature of work. If they’re going to have work in the future, they must be able to demonstrate clearly, precisely, and convincingly how they can add value. The answer — the only answer — is the project. And not just any project, no matter how droning, boring, and dull, but rather what my colleagues and I have come to call “Wow Projects”: projects that add value, projects that matter, projects that make a difference, projects that leave a legacy — and, yes, projects that make you a star.

You choose the project, (and I’ll continue to make suggestions such as Leadership Needs a Numbers Breakthrough and Leading encourages Making. Embrace the Mess). This is the first of two articles about how to approach it.

Update: This article was newly updated (most embedded links now go forward to newer articles) in conjunction with our October 2009 Ho‘ohana: Our annual Sweet Closure project. The Tom Peters quote above is a decade old, and it rings newly relevant in the frame of our recessionary economy, one within a generational shift in workplace demographics. Our motivations for it may change, however the workplace reinvention driven by great project work will never go away.

Start a WOW! Project at Work

  1. First, Learn to Love Projects for what they can be.
  2. And second, ratchet your talk story up a notch or two: Turn your projects into campaigns that get everyone on board with you and your team. Spread the aloha energy around with 10 Ways to Run a WOW! Campaign at Work. So first…

Learn to Love Projects

Project work is a fact of life for most of us. Within our Managing with Aloha coaching curriculum, we have a course with which we coach managers to look at project work in a way they may not have considered it before. We turn need-to-be-done-anyway projects into fun campaigns, assigning them to groups or teams, and pulling them out of the realm of strictly-individual work as much as possible.

To get an MWA preview of our approach, review The Lōkahi Challenge for Managers on page 107 of Managing with Aloha.

Project work is how you get others to collaborate with you on the BIG stuff.

We use projects to create workplace synergy, and synergy doesn’t happen when people work alone. Ignore the buzz-wordiness of synergy for a moment, embrace the abundance mentality it can generate, and imagine the possibilities when 1+1=3.

And you certainly don’t want to work alone on the BIG stuff if you want it to end up as the BEST stuff, do you?

Project work is the vehicle by which the powerless gain power. Forget about “empowerment programs” — Project work is the future of the company waiting to be discovered. Somewhere, in the belly of every company, someone is working away in obscurity on the project that 10 years from now everyone will acknowledge as the company’s proudest moment. Someone is creating Java, designing the iMac, reviving the VW Beetle, engineering the Mach3. Why isn’t that someone you?

~ Tom Peters

Like so much else in life, it’s all in your attitude.

In business, we need to consider projects the action-packed catalytic converters which make things happen for us. As the adage goes, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re gonna get what you’ve always got— and nothing more. Nothing extraordinary.

Anything less than extraordinary doesn’t get you work that lights your fire, or work which leads you to believe you can take on the whole world.

Outstanding project work does. This is your Time to Seize Control. Be Commanding!

You start by choosing the right projects to begin with, and as a first step you create a vision worth drooling over, an “ooh, we want that bad” kind of picture of the results the project can deliver for you.

Great managers don’t open themselves up to getting assigned a boring project by someone else; they’re already busy super-charging the workplace with the ones they decided on because they were way more exciting and attractive to them, and they were way more fun to engage with and devote their attentions to. They were worth all the time and effort because they were so enjoyable.

When we are proactive about choosing great projects and initiating worthwhile work through them, we spice up activity in our workplaces so that they are vibrant, dynamic places to be. We kill routine, boredom, complacency and mediocrity by changing things up, and introducing newness in a way that is exciting and energizing.

You can do the same thing.

For starters, be willing to change your point of view. Think about the wins you could be experiencing if all those pending projects were reshaped and reconfigured like colorful canisters of Play Doh or Silly Putty in the hands of staff you have mentored to be creatively enthusiastic about them. Imagine that you never procrastinate about starting a project again, because with your new attitude and no-holds-barred approach, project work means you get;

  • Work that is fun, while it achieves something grand and significant. Wins feel good, and people love to be on triumphant teams.
  • Camaraderie and better rapport among an entire team, because they have achieved those wins together, and while cheering each other on in admiration of great work done.
  • Better retention, for no one who is experiencing how work can be exceptionally enjoyable can imagine leaving your company and finding the same thing elsewhere.
  • No sacred cows, no automatic pilot, no settling for mediocrity. Instead, you get learning and creativity, innovation and reinvention, because a “project” means something new, and “new” is always chosen on purpose.
  • Pervasive optimism and enthusiasm in the workplace, because you have created an atmosphere where no one ever need settle for the way things are, and positive energy begets more energy and excitement. People smile and laugh all the time, and everyone notices, even your customers and suppliers.

All of this from project work?

Why not?

Great managers elevate the ways in which we work together. They know a sure-fire way to do that, is to champion power-packed projects which achieve meaningful results while introducing elements of enjoyment and fun.

Don’t accept another routinely-chosen assignment again: If you must accept it from your higher ups, don’t allow it to be boring and common. Even Following is NOT a Passive Activity. Pick your project attitude, intend to deliver a result that wins big-time, and reinvent your team’s passion for worthwhile work in the process.

Action step:

Before you launch into a new one, reconsider the projects you are working on right now. [An example of this reconsideration is our annual October’s Ho‘ohana: Sweet Closure.]

If they bore you, why? How can you switch them from something you have to do, to something you want to do? Are you struggling alone more than you should be? Have a conversation with someone you choose to help you. Ask them to help you see the positive possibilities you might be missing.

Coming Up Next: 10 Ways to Run a WOW! Campaign at Work

An Aloha Attitude of Love

February 13, 2006 by Rosa Say

Are you ready for tomorrow? Today! February 14 comes but once a year.

What I love about Valentine’s Day is that love does not lend itself to easy purchases. I’m sorry to burst the bubble of all you retailers out there, but speaking as a woman for the moment, gifts of chocolate, flowers, lingerie and jewelry are perceived as the easy way out. They’re nice extras, but they don’t really count. I’d venture to say that guys feel the same about their favorite brew, leis (well, leis in Hawai‘i) ties and tools.

I have been known to say that the best gifts don’t come wrapped in boxes. I do believe that.


The best gifts are the simple ones
that take much more thought and intention. They take much more love.

And the good news? With the best gifts, there is no cost involved. Not only that, you get back just as much as you give, sort of like when you hear a story of a community acting like a community…

So for tomorrow, dish up your aloha, and prepare something like this for the ones you love:

Authenticity

The 100% honest to goodness real you. Who you are is good enough. Know the aloha spirit that lives within you only comes from good: You were born with it.

Love

There is no other word for it. You have it to give, and it can never run out in its abundance. It is palena ‘ole, without limits, so give it away freely.

Optimism

Be positive, be brave, and be confident that the future will only get better. After all, you can create your own future, we all can.

Humility

Be humble, be modest, be open-minded. Humility helps us understand that no on individual can satisfy every need on their own; we need each other.

Acceptance

Accept those you care most for with completely unconditional love. All their quirks, all their faults, all their baggage. Love them for who they are in this very moment.

Call this your Aloha attitude of love. Hold it in your heart, and you’ll be able to come up with the right gift you wish to give. We never Aloha alone.

Referenced Posts:

February 14 comes but once a year.

The very best gifts never come wrapped in boxes.

Gifts, by Don Blohowiak

The Best Gifts Are The Simple Ones, by Christopher Bailey

Never Aloha Alone, by Stacy Brice

A Story of a Community” Acting Like Community, by Tim Milburn

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