management

Matchmaker, matchmaker, find me some Skills

February 20, 2012 by Rosa Say

Something we often hear in these challenging times, is that jobs are becoming available, but they’re ‘new’ jobs, out of reach for the unemployed who possess skill sets that have lost their previous worth.

Sounds to me like a presumption riddled with faulty wiring.

One values-based solution seems pretty obvious: “Matchmaker, matchmaker find me a match.”

And who will be the matchmaker?

In my mind, it must be you, who are the Alaka‘i Managers who live, work, manage and lead with Aloha.

Let’s revisit the foundational, belief-fed basics of what this means.

Aloha is the value of unconditional love and acceptance. Aloha elevates the human condition, exploring and celebrating every nook and cranny of a person’s knowledge, strength, talent, capacity and intentions, and thus, their human worth.

‘Unconditional’ means that if this is the value you possess as a manager, you cannot accept that there are conditions to the love and acceptance you give; you are a steward, advocate, and mentor of the unconditional workplace.

Now this doesn’t mean you have blinders on to the challenges you must work with. It means you do whatever you can to overcome those challenges. It means you create a workplace culture which is both healthy and productive.

More often than not, it means you groom people and help them grow, and not that you pick and choose among them, laying down your conditions. (You know this: Conditions and expectations are NOT the same thing.)

Do you recall the epigraph of Managing with Aloha?

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German writer, scientist and philosopher

The mismatch of job and skillset is a challenge, but it’s a temporary one. It’s fixable. It has fixes that are completely within the realm of possibility for you — if you doubt that, we have to revisit your calling as a manager, for again, managers are supposed to elevate the human condition.

People who want to work, and who hear that their skills have become irrelevant, are being deeply hurt hearing this, for no one — no one! — wants to feel irrelevant. We managers are the people who can help them identify their own gifts.

To make a good match, identify your best ingredients: What are you matching?

What I’m discovering in my coaching, and in several deeper conversations about this topic of “skills relevancy” is this:

What we often need BEFORE new skills training, is better vocabulary. We need a for-today language that surrounds the skill sets we value most in our current business environment. We need to articulate what we want, doing so more clearly and more consistently, and in the way that is strength-relevant over skills-conditional.

“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.”
— Managing Strengths and not Standards

Our requirements may not be that ‘new’ after all… because “the times, they are a-changing,” our requirements have gotten freshened up in some way. Thus our “Language of We” needs freshening up as well. This always happens when we grow!

When we speak with the Language of We, we often find that people do have the skills, or at least an at-the-ready foundation for cultivating them quickly, and all they needed was this aha moment, one you, their manager, have arrived at too: “Ah! We are a match, aren’t we!”

Let’s work together, in the way of Aloha.

Let’s expect that we will be unconditionally matched up, and we simply need to Ho‘o, and make it happen.

Alaka‘i Managers, we need you; get busy as the matchmakers, advocates, and mentors of the human condition that I know you are.

**From the Managing with Aloha Archives:**

What do the truly great managers of our world believe in? (See the whole list of 10 Beliefs)

1. Great managers believe that people are innately good; they must. Without this core belief and faith in people, great management is not possible.
For more: Unconditional Acceptance, Nature and Nurture

4. Great managers believe that all people have strengths which can be made stronger, and that their weaknesses can be compensated for, so they become unimportant to the work at hand.
For more: Job Creation Employs Strengths, Then People

9. Great managers believe it is their job to remove barriers and obstacles so people can attain the level of greatness they are destined for. They believe that “can’t” is a temporary state of affairs, and that everything is only impossible until the first person does it.
For more: When Learning Gets Overwhelming

What’s the meant in Management?

December 9, 2011 by Rosa Say

When I look around me I notice: Management is everywhere.

It’s in a President deciding if he should go on vacation as scheduled, or keep working.
It’s in a European country deciding if it can handle bailing out another country.
It’s in a father and mother thinking about becoming car-less and walking more, moving their family where jobs may pay more (or be found at all).
It’s in a shopper wanting to celebrate the holidays with gift-giving, yet hesitating with the realization that ever-deepening debt is the real price paid… She’ll try to make something instead, using her own two hands.
And it’s in a high-school graduate who wonders how society can declare he is now an ‘adult’ when he should know better than anyone else if that’s true or not.

Management is something we all do, for we all need to.
We get drawn to it in spite of ourselves.
Sometimes we’ll plunge into it, sometimes we’ll fall into it, but we always find ourselves there, a place where we ask ourselves, “Now what?”

We manage by thinking, by weighing our options, and by making a myriad of daily decisions, big and small.
We manage by looking outside, by feeling inside, and then mixing the two, whether they mix like oil and water, like red blood cells and white ones, or in layers — like paint and primer.

The whole process can get fairly messy, but the time will come where we decide, and we do something (or we don’t, a “nope” word which isn’t really a “stop” word, for it has its own results as well).

Funny word, ‘management’ in the starchy formality of it.
You’d think we’d personalize it more than we do, as steeped into it as we are, and as pervasive as it is.
We talk about a whole plethora of what we manage: Work, budgets, resources, causes, values, ideas, and yes, others, when fact is, all those things are grouped under one umbrella — the one we know as our own life. All that other stuff make up a life and its moving parts.
It’s a case where the smaller moving parts constantly seem bigger than the whole because they are seen as more tangible. Weird.

Which is why we have to find (or figure out) those last four letters of management, the ‘ment’ part, somehow getting them to stop dangling there as an after thought, and get in front for a change.

I think, the ‘ment’ part has to do with intention — with our why, and the journey we each take to discover it, or to magnify it.
Our why is the part which ultimately, will make everything else (what, where, how and who) make sense, make worth, make good, make right.

Our why is what makes us feel everything else matters. When we feel our why is good and right for us, plugged into our spirit, we feel like decent human beings.
Our humanity is something we need.

Far as everyone else is concerned, they believe our why makes us more trustworthy: They want our why to get trumpeted louder, for they like when it’s clear — shiny and more transparent.

So I have a small fix to help: It can help in a big way.

Forget management in the old starchy formality of it, and begin to think of it as managemeant; managing meant that something connected to your why.

Give all those decisions you’ll be making your white magic.
Make managing meaning-full, and get self-managing to be self-managing meant something personally wonderful.
You can even plug managemeant into the auto-correct of your word processing, and have today’s digital wizardry help you, keeping you on track.

Turning management into managemeant will help you keep your managing intentional.

We’ll always just do the manage part, whether deliberately or instinctively.
We kinda have to, in the way we keep going with life.
However, it’s the meant part which will keep us human, and make us happier.

If you feel you’re ready to do even more, tackle this with me.

“My parents don’t know that I know”

October 7, 2011 by Rosa Say

This is what scares me about current struggles in our world today:
It was posted on We are the 99%:

“My name is Allison, I’m a 13 year old 8th grader. I only get a few hours of sleep at night, but I don’t tell my parents because they don’t need to know that I need sleeping pills. I’ve been showing symptoms of Schizophrenia but we can’t afford for me to go see a doctor about it. My parents get really scared when they have to pay the morage because it really cuts down on our money. I’ve stopped eating alot so there’s more food for everyone else. My parents don’t know that I know we’re the 99%.”

The up side, is that when I get scared I just work harder, but with better focus on why I bother in the first place.

The Managers’ Kuleana

Those who have heard me speak know I make this point as often as I can about Kuleana, our profound responsibility as managers:

If the children of your employees believe that working imprisons their parents and makes them grumpy people, it’s your fault. Hold yourself accountable for that, and fix it. Those children are going to grow up, and be our workforce one day: What attitude do we want them to bring to the workplace with them?

I do what I do, and with the passion I have for it, because I was an exception to the rule and I know it. I was one of the truly lucky ones, not just lucky in the way Allison describes it above. What my parents illustrated for me, was that work was what they made it, and making it great was entirely possible. They did this in spite of the bosses they had, and they partnered with my teachers in demonstrating it for me.

Well, I wanted to be a boss; I wanted to be a manager. I knew we could do better, and be better, and support parents like mine. This, is essentially how Managing with Aloha came to be: My dream, is that all managers become the teaching boss my dad never had, but taught me was possible.

Here’s the drill in life:

Everyone has to work.
We work our way up what Maslow called our hierarchy of needs: We work for our basic sustenance to start, but hopefully we will progress, reach higher, and work our way through the other levels; through a sense of belonging, through self-esteem, and toward the stuff of self-actualization which makes legacy possible.

Jobs are what we have to do in the economic machine of society.
Work can be what we get to do in an inspired life (what we call the value of Ho‘ohana).

We managers shape working culture.
Managing with Aloha is a way we do that, and do it well. I believe it’s the best way, because to manage with the values rooted in Aloha, is to manage with your own humanity.
For what’s a culture? It’s a group of people with a common set of values and beliefs.

To “shape working culture” is to create an environment in the workplace which is ‘good’ in every definition of the word.
Good is healthy, and good begets more good.

The workplace environment is a contagion. It infects and thereby affects everything connected to it through the people within it: It affects their homes and their families, it affects the quality of their play and the rest in their sleep. It affects people individually and on a very personal level, and it thereby affects entire communities and their attitudes, whether that be their despair, or their sense of hope.

Understand “the drill” and understand it well.
Then, understand this:

Alaka‘i Managers help the human race

You don’t get to be a manager, and a truly great person, unless that is who you choose to be.
You don’t get to be a manager, and a truly great person, unless you work on it intentionally every single day.
You don’t get to be a manager, and a truly great person, unless you accept personal accountability for The Manager’s Kuleana, and can look into a child’s face and feel Pono, your rightness in our world.

On that pyramid, that hierarchy of human needs, I see rightness above Sense of Belonging and before you get to Self-Actualization: Rightness is personal, and it’s right there where Maslow put Self-Esteem.

We may have a long way to go before we get to Sense of Belonging for everyone.
We continue to work our way there, knowing we have to: Quitting, or opting out, are not included in our viable options.

However Sense of Belonging doesn’t cut it; it’s not enough.
Just ask Allison.

Calling all Managers: We need you

October 6, 2011 by Rosa Say

We hear a lot about the jobs we need, and guess what? Management of those jobs, and of the quality of work they involve, the future they shape, and the people they grow, isn’t going away. If anything, we need thoughtful, intentional and purposeful management more than ever.

Steve Jobs for instance. (1955-2011) Jobs had vision, to be sure (I’ve been clipping a few tributes on my Tumblr, and commenting on them there), but he was also a manager. Current counts have the number of Apple employees at nearly fifty thousand. Add to their work-in-progress the success stories of their alumni who have graduated; grown to now Ho‘ohana on their own.

You may not be an innovator of marvels as things, but you can be an innovator of marvels in people. Managers create culture.

We need managers who can passionately speak into their certainty and confidence that “people are our greatest asset” — managers who will then go about proving it. That means we need more Alaka‘i managers — those who manage with Aloha, because they believe in people as much as they do; they love seeing others thrive.

Trending: In jobs, and in skills

I have mentioned economist Richard Florida a few times lately, and have recommended his book to you. Here is an excerpt from The Great Reset connected to jobs: His chapter 16 is titled, “Good Job Machine” and it was my favorite one, for while he doesn’t say so directly, he makes a clear cut case for why managers are needed today, and of how ripe the opportunity for evolution in the role of the manager.

“There are two kinds of jobs that are growing: higher-paying knowledge, professional, and creative jobs (everything from high-tech engineers and software developers to managers and doctors to graphic designers and entertainment lawyers) and lower-paying routine jobs in the service economy (food service workers, nurses’ aides, janitors, home health care workers, and the like). Over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has added 28 million routine service jobs and 23 million knowledge, professional, and creative jobs, compared to just 1 million in manufacturing. Routine service jobs now compose the single biggest area of employment: 45 percent of jobs, 60 million in all. Creative jobs account for 31 percent, and working-class jobs for 23 percent.”

Florida wrote those words early in 2010, but he goes on to explain why “these trends will only become more pronounced over the coming decade or so” because “both service and creative jobs have been much more resilient in the face of the economic crisis.”

Update: Florida has just published his current findings in this article for Atlantic Cities:
The Creative Class is Alive, written in response to others who fear otherwise.

“Much more resilient” does not necessarily mean of optimal quality, and we’ve much work to do in the job evolution ahead of us. Employers constantly complain that the basic skills they now look for are largely MIA in our workforce. We managers know that much of what people need to learn for their best productivity will be learned on the job; not in school, and not at home (I was lucky). What that means of course, is that managers are, and will always be the teachers of the work skills needed. As Florida writes;

“The old manufacturing economy honed physical skills such as lifting and manual dexterity. But two sets of skills matter more now: analytical skills, such as pattern recognition and problem solving, and social intelligence skills, such as the situational sensitivity and persuasiveness required for team building and mobilization.”

He concludes that, “we need to spend less time and effort bailing out and stimulating the old economy, and a lot more building on the new.” That recognition, that proof, that we can build on the new, and create a future we see, may be Steve Job’s greatest legacy, for it required imagination and raw guts.

However you phrase and illustrate the trends of our working future, basic human needs remain clear to me: no one thrives in mindless or mind-numbing work. Whether they be analytical, socially intelligent, or even physically focused, skills-mastery depends on the emotional health of the learner, and learners need visions they can aspire to. We all need to know, “If I learn these skills, how will I apply them so they’re most relevant?” We human beings are dynamos: We all want to improve and innovate, tapping into our full capacity, and growing in ways we haven’t fully imagined yet, but inherently know are possible.

Where will these job skills come from? Who will teach them? Who will encourage us as we further innovate? We need more Alaka‘i managers today because we need their coaching and support.

The current Occupy Wall Street movement? It is part of the trending in us: In me, in you, in all of us.

As I see it, managerial jobs of worth are the jobs of merit which must grow most of all. As we have called it before, it is The Reconstructed, Rejuvenated, Newly Respected, and Never Underestimated Role of the Manager.

Are you up to the challenge?

Postscript: This was posting #5 in a conversation about jobs this month:

Soundbite of the day (October 07, 2011 at 06:28am):
The message of #OWS [Occupy Wall Street] is not “Here’s is our 9-point plan.” The message of #OWS is “This is not a livable compromise.” — Clay Shirky