Talking Story

Starting new conversations in the workplace!

What is the Learning we managers will Curate?

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When would it be learning as a value, and when would it be learning as a strategic initiative?
When might learning be systemic, and when might it be irrelevant?

That last question makes me gasp for air in posing it at all, it really does, but I am trying to be open-minded about this” I am trying to learn something by gathering all the humility I can, and dismissing any assumptions I should dismiss in being a better coach for managers as I aspire to be. I’m hoping to get your help with this, fervently believing as I do, that we learn best from other people.

When I introduced our current theme of learning curation on June 1st, one of the things I wrote was this:

We all know of the benefits to learning, and I don’t intend for this theme to be one where we repeat them and preach to the choir: Let’s actually get learning done in a much more satisfying and useful way: Let’s become LEARNING CURATORS.

Now I am wondering if I was wrong, and if we do need to talk about our what and why before going any further. Shall we get a bit more specific?

The backstory

Here’s how these questions came up. I listened to a podcast which featured Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, answering questions collected from readers of his company blog, Signal vs. Noise. He thoroughly surprised me with his answer to a reader who asked what his team does to learn. His response was,

“Um I don’t know what everyone does. Some people go to conferences, other people just pay attention and observe things. I think that’s the best way to learn, to just stay focused on your industry and see what everyone else is doing, and pay attention to the right news sources, and learn stuff that way and just try it out. That’s the best way to learn anything, just try it. Experiment with stuff.”

(Here is the link to the full podcast: The quote about is just after the 15-minute mark.)

Now 37signals is no small-time company (you can learn more about them here), and so his answer really floored me, so much so that one of the first questions to pop into my head was, “Whoa” am I some kind of learning snob?”

So many assumptions, and so few facts

Our theme of learning curation makes some notable assumptions, and I admit to the bias that they are more than assumptions; I think of them as givens fully aware that they stem from my personal value system. They include our Managing with Aloha beliefs that

  1. Learning is essential to any work culture for a vast array of reasons. Learning is a response to very healthy curiosities and fascinations, and it strengthens us as a method of coming up with answers or options.
  2. Paramount within those reasons that learning is essential, is the self-development of everyone within any work culture, for if people grow, the capacity and abilities of the business will grow with them, so that all goals and objectives can be better achieved.
  3. By “grow” we really mean continually improve within a constant striving for excellence. Innovation gives businesses an edge, for successful businesses cannot afford complacency or mediocrity.
  4. If managers are charged with fostering the self-development of their people (and to the MWA way of thinking, they are) they have a very basic responsibility (Kuleana) with promoting learning.
  5. Learning curation becomes a thoughtful strategy, aimed at optimal, well-timed selection from a myriad of possibilities. We choose as will best suit the individual learner, we choose as will best suit our team dynamic, and we choose as will best suit our organization’s mission and vision.

But again, I fully admit that these are my assumptions as the person who authored “Managing with Aloha” as an operational workplace system. So what do you think?

I’ll state the questions one more time. Our context: You are the Alaka‘i Manager accepting the MWA charge to curate best-possible learning for your team.

When would you curate learning as a value, and when would you curate learning as a strategic initiative?

When might learning be systemic, and when might it be irrelevant?

And perhaps a third question: Would you be inclined to leave it up to the individual, as Jason Fried does?

Read the story behind the book: Imagine having a Thought Kit
Get your copy from the Kindle Store, or on Smashwords.com

Failure isn’t cool. Neither is weakness

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“Failure is not a great well of lessons. ”¨Don’t think it’s a prerequisite for success.”
—Jason Fried

I listened to a short riff by Jason Fried of 37signals recently (the podcast is available here) in which he says, “Failure is not cool. Don’t get into it.”

He asks why we will insist on thinking of failure as character-building, when what we really aim to build up are our successes, not our failures. If you make failure out to be “cool” and you concentrate on learning from your mistakes, you’re only learning what not to do next time. Isn’t it way better, he asks, to learn from your successes instead, and continue to parlay on what went right?

Makes sense to me. It’s not a good idea to keep catch-phrases like “fail early and often” in the language of your work culture when failure isn’t what you actually want. In Managing with Aloha we will say that “mistakes are cool” to recognize that mistakes are part of the learning process, but we do stop short of being okay with repeated mistakes, and with failure, because truth is, we’re not!

Fried later wrote, in a follow-up article on Signal vs. Noise:

“I don’t understand the cultural fascination with failure being the source of great lessons to be learned. What did you learn? You learned what didn’t work. Now you won’t make the same mistake twice, but you’re just as likely to make a different mistake next time. You might know what won’t work, but you still don’t know what will work. That’s not much of a lesson.”

“There’s a significant difference between ‘now I know what to do again’ and ‘don’t do that again’” It’s true: Everything is a learning experience. Good and bad, there’s something to be learned. But all learning isn’t equal.”

I think this reasoning applies to strengths and weaknesses as well.

When doing performance assessments, managers continue to operate within a misplaced focus on weaknesses, when strength-building is what will get them far better results.

Relevance, and setting expectations

I will never, ever forget something an employee once said to me in an annual performance review, as we both sat in that dreaded annual appraisal meeting mandated by our employer, with the company’s check-off-the-standard-box form on the table between us. Thankfully this happened pretty early in my management career, and I did catch my mistake before repeating it into a dismal failure.

We had been talking about something the employee had screwed up, and he reached out both his hands to lie them flat on the review form and cover it up as a way to make me look up at him, stop talking, and listen.

“Got it already Rosa, can we change the subject and get through this faster? Believe me, when I make a mistake, I know it, and I don’t need you to remind me about it. What I need you to help me with, is seeing when I do something right, and I haven’t yet figured out that you like it, and it’s something I need to keep doing.”

“My screw-up sucked. But you know what really sucks? I’m still not sure I know exactly what I should do next time. Tell me what you want, and let’s  move on.”

What a lightbulb moment! He was telling me that he dreaded another mistake happening way more than I did, my harping on the mistake was like rubbing salt into his wound, and I wasn’t doing a damn thing to help him make sure the mistake didn’t happen again as failure just waiting to happen.

That conversation became a lesson we’ve now woven into our Managing with Aloha coaching for managers as,

“People catch their own weaknesses.
Your job, is to catch and encourage their strengths,
and those strengths aren’t usually clear.”

See here’s the thing: RELEVANCE. Contextual relevance, with the context being your workplace. Similar to failure and success, weakness and strength is either relevant to what you need, or irrelevant. Just as Fried says, “all learning isn’t equal,” neither are strengths, for honestly? Nobody cares about a strength you have unless it is useful to them too.

This creates a perfect opportunity for managers to manage better. Managers help their staff best, when they clearly define the workplace relevance where strength-associated activities matter, and count in better performance results. What we normally refer to this as, is “setting expectations” but we stop short of making the expectations crystal clear.

For instance, an employee can feel they are good with numbers, and they will call it a strength in analytical thinking, but “numbers” and the mathematical application of numerology is a pretty huge arena of possibility: Are you looking for strength with measurement? With statistics? With numerical classification of asset inventory? With pattern and sequence? With rounding-off calculation out in the field? Or with macro wizardry in an Excel spreadsheet?

Here’s another common strength self-assessment you will usually hear in a job interview, one which really doesn’t tell you very much at all: “I’m good with people.” Which people? Customers and comfort with the welcoming process and art of the sale, or co-workers where you rely on an insider’s language and peer-to-peer coaching?

Let’s connect our Alaka‘i lessons-learned:

Here’s a self-coaching plan for you, the Alaka‘i manager, using the free resources this blog offers:

Step 1— M/L 70-30: Reduce your Leadership to a Part-time Gig in 2010. Use The 30-70 Rule in Leading and Managing, for reviewing it can help you think about this in both a practical and intentional way. Besides the productivity slant of it, the articles cover the intentions we bring to leading (and creating workplace energies) and managing (to channel those newly available energies).

Step 2— Leading in 30: Post before this one, we spoke of the difference between acceptable behavior and accomplished behavior in moving performance forward in a better, stronger way. Accomplished behavior is the way you can better identify the strengths you need in your own workplace: Feeling good isn’t the same as feeling strong. Define your contextual differences.

Step 3— Managing in 70: Is the 70% you must devote to your day-to-day efforts, and it is what today’s article is all about. Kick “failure is cool” out of your language of intention, for success is what’s cool. Then get this to be real in your managing: “People catch their own weaknesses. Your job, is to catch and encourage their strengths, and those strengths aren’t usually clear.” Help them get clear, and be successful.

Photo Credit: Pipe Cleaner Muscle Man by Bob.Fornal on Flickr

Values are the Bedrock of Hard Reality

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“Soft and fuzzy” has taken a severe hit with our recent economic tumbles. You know what I mean; those workplace humanity concepts which fall beyond the bottom line. We were doing fairly well working on them for a while, and our very rational, genuine selves will speak up and say, “Oh, don’t worry, we haven’t given up on that stuff. But you do understand we have to get the basics back first””

Just great. A “yeah, but” from our emotional intelligence.

As a Talking Story reader, you are aware of my answer. In the financial literacy which is as real as it gets, hard, soft, and everything inbetween, wealth is a value. No matter what goes on in our world, and no matter what factors are at play at any given time, our values are “hard concepts” in my mind: They will always be foundational to why we care, why we bother when we keep trying, and how we go about surviving.

I gave a 20-minute talk about this to an audience of association executives in New York City last week, and I was asked if I would share the transcript of my speech for their future reference. Here it is, for I thought you might enjoy it too, as a good summary of many of the conversations we have had here. My hope, is that you will have it be a mirror image of the business model you give your attentions to today, for you and I both know this to be true: We humans, at our rock-hard, real-as-it-gets core, are “soft and fuzzy” in the true intelligence which matters to us. Task at hand, is getting that to match up to the way we work — from now on.

~ ~ ~

Aloha mai kakou— a hau‘oli makahiki hou— e mahalo keia lā
My Aloha to all of you, and a very happy New Year. Thank you for allowing me to share this time with you.

As you might guess, a luncheon speaker who wrote a book called Managing with Aloha has a mission in mind for these next 20 minutes we spend together, and I’m not going to lie to you, I do! My mission however, may not be exactly what you think it is, and so I’ll start by stating it, for Aloha has no hidden agenda, and neither do I:

By the time you get out of your chair and walk toward the rest of your life, I want you to feel that Aloha is much more relevant to you than you previously may have thought. Once something is relevant, you answer that question we all get in our heads about everything we decide we’ll award our attentions to, “What’s in it for me?” And despite the negative connotation that question can have at first-take, I think it is a very useful question from a perspective of self-leadership, just as useful as Aloha.

Relevance, and usefulness are two of my favorite management concepts. Because, well, they are relevant and useful, and probably never as much as now, in this aftermath of a “great recession” we find ourselves in. We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, and we all need to know “What’s in it for me?” and also, “Why should I bother?”

So let’s get to it:

Condensed into its shortest, and most relevant version, my story as a manager who loves being one, is simply this: Managing, with Aloha as a value, worked wonderfully for my business success and my own well-being at work, it worked brilliantly for the employees I had the good fortune of learning from. So now I offer Aloha as something which I am certain can work for you, even if you never set foot in our Hawai‘i nei, though we hope you will one day.

My mission of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawai‘i’s Universal Values to the Art of Business, has gotten to be an everyday and every thing kind of presence for me, precisely because it is so relevant and useful. Managing and leading are verbs, actions all managers take regardless of their titles or positions on an org chart. To not talk about the managing we can do, with Aloha, has gotten close to trying not to think, or not to breathe for me. It is a mission which had come to be, because it helped me make sense of my life, and my working history, as someone born and raised in the Hawaiian islands deeply affected by sense of place. Very cool to have a mission you feel is all you, fitting you as snugly as a second skin. We call it “having Ho‘ohana,” an on-purpose intention within worthwhile work which is all-in us, whatever we define the mechanics of our work to be.

My mission started as a way to help me make my roots healthier, and to help me understand my sense of place in a more tangible way, a way more ethical, pragmatic and sensible in the work I was doing while in the hotel business. My approach, was gaining a better understanding of Hawai‘i’s ancestral values, and it led to my discovering many of the answers I needed for my questions about a better future. I was involved in hard work, but I wasn’t that sure why I even bothered. I didn’t want my work to be a job and nothing more.

I am a local girl, 4th-generation native by birth in Hawai‘i, but without a single drop of Hawaiian blood in me. As you might imagine, that gave me some explaining to do with other native Hawaiians who felt I had too short a native-born only ancestry to write authoritatively about Hawaiian values, or emotionally enough, and they were quite bold in their indignation at first, looking me directly in the eye, and saying, “How dare you!” You see, the big deal about values, is that they explain our behavior, and that’s what I was daring to do. And yes, I dared, for the payoff was too big to ignore.

When we, as managers, equip ourselves with a values vocabulary in the context of a work environment, using them as the building blocks of a workplace culture, we make that culture relevant to a community, healthier for our employees, and much more useful to us as the ambassadors of a company’s mission. It takes diligent focus at first, but in the process, we do make our job as managers easier.

I was careful to study with the kÅ«puna, our indigenous elders, before publishing anything, but quite honestly, that was happenstance initially, a stroke of good luck as I just jumped in and did it, and the result of my getting very fascinated with our Hawaiian values simply as someone who is a lifelong learner through and through: I’m kind of a learning nerd, and study of a subject I am highly curious about is an energetic high for me. Applying what I learn, and having it work its magic at work is the icing on the cake.

I was within year 17 of a 30 year hotel career when Managing with Aloha became my sensibility for healthy workplace culture: 17 years of learning to approach my work the hard way with all the bruises to show for it. I had plenty of passion for my work up to then, but as odd as it might sound to you, I never completely understood why I did, and I just did it. It was work at a passionate level high above going through the motions, but it wasn’t high enough, in that it wasn’t intentional for me —so believe me, I completely get it when people say “passion isn’t enough.” My work was what I was supposed to be doing according to my parents, my teachers, my bosses and employers, and even my fairly well-educated brain” By most standards I was an exceptional employee and a highly successful manager, fulfilling smart standards —all but my own.

So in this study of values, I eventually got to the point where the history of it all was fascinating —it continues to be fascinating the more I delve into Hawaiian history —but my goal was not to explain the past: I was more interested in its relevance to the work I was doing every single day —no matter what that day threw at us, and for our industry’s business prospects in the future. And simply said, the work I was doing every day, was about managing people, and specifically, people in a hotel business which sells Aloha like some charm bracelet draped around every conceivable business model you can imagine connected to the travel and hospitality industry, models intent on making healthier profits.

That’s what we business people are supposed to do, right?

Does that sound like self-justifying, commiserating marketing yuck to you? Greedy green monsters hidden in Aloha service clothing? Sounded that way to all my employees too, no matter how prettily I tried to dress it up in any business-speak. They did not want Aloha to mean revenue, and if that was what I wanted as their manager, you can bet I’d have undercover sabotage or a full-blown mutiny on my hands. They would serve my customers, and serve them well, but they would not sell if any resulting wealth defined Aloha as revenue.

Fact is, we managers cannot define wealth simply in financial terms because our employees don’t, and that is a reality you will never, ever change or escape. Money is part of everyone’s reality, and our unemployment in this global recession is the evidence plain as the nose on your face, but wealth is a value —not a result. Wealth may be better financial health at a base level, but once you are earning it, wealth is also defined by family, connection to our ancestry, and our best vision of our future. All of these find their inner spirit, their constancy, and their strength in the values which shape our thinking, and our actions. And when the needs of our spirit are met, we find that any additional wealth we gain is most satisfying when shared in service to the community which had been there for us, and lifted us toward our greater good.

Wealth, as a value, is the reason ‘social entrepreneurship’ flourishes despite all odds, and even when non-profit business models flounder.

Wealth as a universal value, is the reason countries all around the world have flocked to help Haiti even though they have costly problems to address in their own back yards at home.

So if Aloha is a value too, one which does not mean revenue, what is it?

When you are born and raised with a Hawai‘i sense of place, this is what Aloha is, as briefly as I can possibly describe it to you with the etymology of the word:

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

Ha is the breath of your life, a concept which is like DNA to the Hawaiian people. When you breathe in, and collect your breath, you are collecting a type of 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 is what we mean by someone’s Aloha spirit. That is 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.

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.

So put them together, 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.

We have mostly spoken of managing employees with Aloha, but imagine your customers getting that feeling from you!

At first Aloha sounds really woo-woo, soft stuff intangible and unmeasurable doesn’t it. However make no mistake about it; to the people of Hawai‘i it is REAL, and it is sacred. Imagine how my employees felt trying to script it, and then sell it.

To be clear, I have never, ever been down on business: On the contrary, business is my playground, and as a deliverable beyond the book, Managing with Aloha is an operating system in a healthy organizational culture where we focus on Aloha-woven management practices, including having a healthier attitude and reality check on economics. You are looking at a manager’s advocate who is quite a champion of financial literacy.

Money is not evil; it is a means to an end, and when you have it, business life is pretty sweet. Simply because you can do way more good than you can without having it. I believe that businesses have a responsibility to offer thorough, and completely transparent financial literacy training to all their employees; it’s one of the smartest financial strategies which I know of, because it answers that “what’s in this for me?” question I mentioned earlier, but on several levels: Your employees learn financial lessons in a harsh new great-recession world as they co-author better business models with you. They are close to so much, and chances are, they have a clue to the answer of some financial riddle which presently evades you.

Everyone needs and wants money today. A co-authored, value-aligned business model is one employees support, never dreaming of sabotage or mutiny, and never succumbing to far bigger evils: the mediocrity of going through the motions and not caring, or the hopeless feeling of there being no other option in sight.

On the contrary, when people work in an environment managed with Aloha, they arrive at their own Aloha authenticity. It is a profound gift, one your work culture has given them. Then, they pursue the Ho‘ohana intention of deliberate work, where they understand why they bother, and they want what’s in it for them. They work incredibly hard for it. When your values are aligned, they want what’s in it for you, what’s in it for your vision and mission, and what’s in that cool and sexy future which better financial health will bring you.

So where do you start? You start with you.

Whatever you learn here today, make it relevant, and make it useful. Answer your “Why bother?” and “What’s in it for you” questions from that fertile place of your own Aloha. Live from your inside out. Say what your values are, stand up for them, and live by them. Then having done that for you, do it for your team, and welcome Aloha authenticity from everyone connected to the work you do.

I commend you for being here today, and for learning. If you are here, you are open to being better tomorrow than you were yesterday. Learn well enough to go back to your workplace and teach financial strategy as financial literacy. Be open to finding your relevance, and the usefulness lifting you to your greater good. Some call it ‘legacy.’ You will find the definition of wealth you can pursue with honor, with dignity, and with respect for the person you are meant to be. Wealth will have become your Aloha value too.

5 Twitter Tips for Managing

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I will be brief with today’s intro: This is the 2nd of a 2-parter, and if you are newly joining me (perhaps because you’ve followed a tweet referral?) I highly recommend you take this first link below, start reading there, and come back.
[Isn’t blog linking from Twitter and blog-to-blog the grandest thing? I think so.]

Two days ago: Leadership Tuesday and 5 Twitter Tips for Leading
Today: Management Thursday and 5 Twitter Tips for Managing

For ultra-great context if you are new to my writing, you might also want to visit these posts before or after you read what follows. They will help you frame why I write of leading and managing as VERBS all managers employ for best usefulness. Title alone of the first one can be a possible extension to both my articles this week ”“ can you develop a 30/70 rhythm tweeting as a true Alaka‘i Twitter ninja?

  1. The 30-70 Rule in Leading and Managing [same post, TS link]
  2. Leadership is Why and When [same post, TS link]
  3. Management is What and How [same post, TS link]

Because I have clear definitions for management and leadership (as my Alaka‘i Language of Intention), I can measure the specific activities I associate with each one.

Here are the tips:

To make Twitter more useful to you as someone who manages:

1. Think of Twitter as a useful management tool

This first tip should be thought of as number 6 to my 5 Twitter Tips for Leading. We are shifting from idea generation to idea capture and implementation: Leading put you in collection mode. Managing helps you process what you collected.

To those who have said “I don’t have time for Twitter” I think you are partially right. None of us has time to waste on something that is a distraction versus a highly useful tool. Now that you are using Twitter for the research and development of more ideas, you have to capture those ideas and put them to good use. Fantastic news! Twitter can help you do that too.

A big advantage to Twitter is that once you consider it a management tool it’s way more fun than most work tools are. For our purposes with managing, we need to have Twitter help us channel energies which have now become available to us specifically when we have used it for more visionary progression (as we talked about in Part 1).

2. Capture. Give your new ideas context relevant to your work

In other words, figure out how you will process the stuff that Twitter now delivers to you. Design your system for capturing your ideas (Calendar? Notebook or Word doc? Excel spreadsheet? Sent to Gmail and labeled, tagged for Delicious or lifestream Tumbled?) How do you keep your project buckets organized? Capture your new Twitter ideas within your most effective productivity habits.

In Twitter itself, how do you use Favorites?

  • I use those in @rosasay to capture reading I need to finish, and ideas I have not yet processed into my personal work system using my Strong Week Plan and Weekly Review.
  • In contrast, I use the Favorites associated with my Twitter feed accounts as new follower tutorials (take a look at @talkingstory or @sayalakai and you will immediately see what I mean). I’ve tried both, and I have found that people who use the Twitter web client really prefer skimming Favorites-as-tutorials versus taking a bio link to a Twitter landing page, especially if they use your Twitter feed instead of RSS (they want a direct clink to your current blog post, and not to a Twitter landing page they have already read.)

Once you get intentional about the 5 Twitter Tips for Leading you will find that new ideas are flowing like a dam has burst somewhere in Idea Heaven, and they are coming at you like crazy. I advise you to be ruthless about purging and discarding anything which does not fit into the reasonableness of the coming week: Invoke the Pareto Principle. Things happen fast on Twitter, and you will continually get new inputs: If a current input doesn’t create a burning desire in you to act on it almost immediately, consider it clutter.

Don’t over-organize or get into analysis-paralysis: Go for simplicity and speed, and once you design your system for capture-with-context-relevance practice it consistently so you instill a new habit, for great habits put you on automatic pilot in a good way: You Are Your Habits, so Make ‘em Good!

3. Execute. Give your adaptive efforts boundaries. Tie to specificity

Number 2. should get you into a better Twitter rhythm. Now you must balance that: Know when to walk away and into the real world. Twitter isn’t going anywhere. Get your stuff done.

If you skim through the tweets on my conversational account and you will see that I use Twitter simply to play and have fun too, but I do that within the other boundaries I have set for myself there as defined by these 10 tips. My biggest self-imposed boundary is that I don’t tweet from a device like a cellphone or blackberry at all, and I will rarely tweet when I travel ”“ when I have downtime traveling I am working on the 5 Twitter Tips for Leading, and not these (as defined in those tips, I ‘read’ and will rarely ‘converse’ when I travel).

“Tie to specificity” is about finishing well: In your intentional leading with Twitter (Part 1) you set some goals. Now, within your intentional managing, you assess where you are with those goals and complete the idea-project you’d set your sights on.

This is where you also get real about just how much you can handle at any given time, handling it well or not at all. Better to completely ace one project than get mediocre results with several of them. At any given time I am only handling one goal with each of my Twitter accounts.

4. Change it up, but stick within your niche, project context or goal intention

It’s become cliché but it’s also true: Embracing change must be the new normal for managers today to succeed and survive. Well guess what; Twitter can help you with this too. Change it up there, but get the next shift for your change from how you are deciding to Lead on Twitter to begin with.

It may take you some time to get to this one, and understand how it differs from Tip number 1 in 5 Twitter Tips for Leading, “Think of Twitter as a Learning Resource and Idea Generator.” I have been on Twitter for about 18 months now, and the app is still evolving; thus my use of it does too: We change and shift together.

Some examples:
Within these tips I have focused on idea generation and capture, however you may choose to “change it up” in a number of ways. You can use Twitter for problem-solving. You can use Twitter for networking. You can use Twitter for job-hunting and mentorship. You can use Twitter for marketing, or as a Customer Feedback Loop. If you blog, you can use Twitter as a feed publisher and to build community. I am now experimenting with tweeting my book there, 140 characters at a time, and mixed in with some other value-alignment coaching (visit @MwAloha to check it out). Twitter is a tremendous resource when you travel to a place you’ve never been to before and want recommendations, or want to convert virtual connections into those invaluable face to face ones.

5. Follow others who walk in your shoes. Ask good questions. Give as well as you receive, and give more

Similar to blogs, gaining success on Twitter demands an abundance mentality: I love the way that competitiveness can melt away there because competitors become your “tweeple.” The web-based sense of place everyone shares is so vast we quickly come to realize there is enough business for everyone, and “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Follow wisely, and over time you will find you have built a very like-minded community of managers who will probably have challenges and opportunities similar to yours. These tips have been progressive: You now share recommendations and networks with your Twitter neighborhoods and communities — and you share day-to-day workplace and market experiences. This is the pay-off you have been working toward, for now you can ask good questions and receive an abundance of helpful, highly relevant answers. I really would love to see more hard-working managers on Twitter who are asking questions like these:

  • “I am looking for a great staff meeting exercise with elements of play conducive to creativity: Any ideas?”
  • “I have a new employee who is extremely talented, well-qualified, but struggling with a language barrier. How can I help him?”
  • “I’ve no choice but to lay-off an exceptional customer-service agent, and she is a star! Dm me if you are looking for someone, and let’s talk.”

I tweet because it gives me access to people and information that I wouldn’t normally have access to through other channels of communication” I tweet because it’s a great place to get questions answered and research information in REAL TIME.
—Tim Milburn, Why Do I Tweet?

I really believe we’ve just skimmed the surface with how Twitter, and other web-based apps like it, will help our communications evolve. Hang on for the ride, for I think it will continue to be pretty great.

As you tweet, say thank you as much as you can, and mean it, because Twitter has now become a management tool for you in practice and not just theory.

That makes 10: 5 Tips for Leading, 5 Tips for Managing

These two posts have talked you through the 10 Tips with being an Alaka‘i Twitter ninja. Let’s look at them one more time in a short form you can jot down on an index card kept close until they become habit:

5 Twitter Tips for Leading (Your Twitter SELF-LEADERSHIP)

1. Use Twitter for IDEA generation and to LEARN
2. Get specific to create a FERTILE Twitter ENVIRONMENT
3. Always LEAD as you READ and CONVERSE
4. Follow on Twitter to GOAL-FILTER
5. Capitalize on Twitter VISIBILITY. Lead with your VALUES

5 Twitter Tips for Managing (Your Twitter SELF-MANAGEMENT)

6. Use Twitter as a management TOOL
7. CAPTURE the best ideas and make them RELEVANT to your work
8. CHANGE IT UP to optimize, and stay fresh
9. Know when to walk away from Twitter to GET STUFF DONE
10. Network with other managers. BE MORE OF WHO YOU ARE

Now what?

Get these 10 Tips to work for you, and like so many others (including me) you will think of Twitter this way: “Twitter is an opportunity for you to lead in a way that was not possible until now.”

I will end with a link to a terrific (and short!) post done by Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. Here’s a snippet:

“You and I both know that people today crave leadership. They are dying for role models. They want to see what good leadership looks like—as it is lived out in the challenges of everyday life.”

“If you are living your life on-purpose, like I know you are, then by Twittering, you are modeling something worth emulating. This is unquestionably the most powerful way to lead.”

Let’s talk story.
Any thoughts to share?

For those who prefer them, here are the Talking Story copies of the links embedded in the beginning of this posting with a great 5th on habits. Visit the Archive Page for more:

Article originally published on Say “Alaka‘i” August 2009
5 Twitter Tips for Managing