Talking Story

Starting new conversations in the workplace!

Culture-Building: First, understand what Management can be

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When are you expected to work with your manager?

Where does individual ownership give way to partnership, and to the team dynamic?

Over and above the day-to-day focus within the work which is done, what are the visionary, mission-driven possibilities elevated in the near future?

How do mavericks grow in your company? How do your best ideas gain support, and then attain traction and velocity there?

These are the kinds of questions which every healthy workplace culture should have definitive answers for, answers which are aligned with the values that company stands for.

Management can then be managemeant.

Culture building needs a solid foundation that serves as fertile ground. We know values are critical. So are their champions.

Those champions should be your managers.

When organizations choose to adopt Managing with Aloha as part of their culture, they’ve done their homework; they usually know about the Core 21, the 19 Values listed on the blog sidebar, the 10 Beliefs, and the 9 Key Concepts. It’s a lot to take in at first, and it’s highly weaveable, but usually 1 Question trumps them all in the eager minds of those anxious to begin:

Where do we start?

My answer is always the same: Reconstruct the role of your managers.
(article, and coaching category) Understand the true cultural work your managers can perform for you when they are liberated and motivated to do so.

Work With Your GiftsThe evidence is clear: Managers create culture. Ignore them (i.e. devalue them), and they can destroy it. My core purpose in writing MWA was to help prevent that sad, damaging downslide from happening, because I know what a positive force great managemeant can be.

In most of the organizations I visit, there is quite a distance to bridge between managers and their staff; they’re operating in totally separate orbits and worse, they’re content to “leave well enough alone.”

Problem is, “well enough” for them isn’t delivering much well being to the workplace culture.

To Do: Today

Help your people understand what a partnership with an Alaka‘i Manager can be about. Help them see why that partnership is so useful, and how enjoyable it can be.

If you do nothing else, get your own perspective in check, and create a healthier relationship with your own manager; set a good example as you flourish in that new partnership.

Go back to the questions at the beginning of my posting: Answering them, and engineering the change which is necessary (with value-alignment) will get you much closer to the well being which will vastly improve the health of your culture.

Comfort Station, Hughes Company 1915, via Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, Maryland Historical Society

Postscript/Weaving: Role versus Practice

If you are a long-time Talking Story reader, you know that I am very insistent on having Alaka‘i Managers adopt and practice D5M, the Daily 5 Minutes, writing things like this:

“I need to be crystal clear about something:
If you’re not giving your staff the gift of the Daily Five Minutes ®
you’re not Managing with Aloha „¢”

~ So you want a MWA jumpstart. Do the Daily Five Minutes.

Adopting D5M gives Alaka‘i Managers a great tool for making everything else happen (‘everything’ being the full spirit-spilling, work-sensible philosophy of Managing with Aloha).

What the D5M does, is collect timely inputs (the talk story) from an ongoing partnership, so the two people involved will always agree on what they should be working on next, working on it Kākou, together.

Before that actually happens, D5M concentrates on the foundational stuff of getting a good partnership in place, so it can be a functioning partnership. There must be comfort between people first: Then, and only then, can they work together to achieve greater things.

This is why there must be Managing with Aloha champions within a culture; they are the braver, more vocal ones who foster better health, and push through any obstacles, just like Ricky does in her workplace culture as a teacher.

Bottom line here, is that I write Talking Story to help you make your way toward being one of those champions. Write me when you have questions; you’re not alone.

D5MBetterMgr

Book Review: The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People

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Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People by Carol Eikleberry

My Goodreads rating: 5 of 5 stars
Buy it on Amazon.com (affiliate link)

What is your present paradigm of work? Is there any chance you see it as a duty in life, or as it ‘should’ be, rather than as all it can be?

Don’t settle for so little! This is a book which can shift your thinking, and broaden your horizons significantly, revealing the gift of your own creativity within a personal reinvention.

I stumbled across this career guide while trolling for deals in a Borders Bookstore about to close its doors, and it turned out to be a great find. That small print on the cover includes this ringing endorsement from Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute? who also wrote the book’s foreword:

“Many books come across my reading table each year, but it has been a long time since one of them impressed me so much as this one has.”

As someone who studies the work we choose to do — and consistently advocates better, I have to agree. The author promises to focus on change and taking action, and she delivers: “You’ll find practical strategies for turning your dreams into reality and a process perspective on developing yourself through creative work.”

Author Carol Eikleberry is a psychologist and vocational counselor, and her book’s work represents substantial reading and professional curation done for the reader’s benefit: She’s deeply studied books like Bolles’, Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, and Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, and applied her learning to her own career practice, to then gift readers with the takeaway themes which will lead us to better success on the job hunt. She lists 55 references in her guide’s Notes section altogether, their commonality being the quest to understand how work can be more meaningful to us personally, in that it satisfies the artistic urges every human being has to some degree — in short, a directed creativity immersion in what we in Hawai‘i (and in Managing with Aloha) call Ho‘ohana.

This is the 3rd edition released since Carol Eickleberry initially published her career guide in 2007, and her website has been designed as a more detailed reference companion of exercises and Career Notebook resources. She clearly intends to have this book be her personal signature, and it’s a needed one today, as so many people are questioning conventional career choices and looking for viable alternatives. There’s no better time to discard those ‘shoulds’ others have weighed you down with in favor of exploring your innate artistic creativity, and this book can help. The good news? “Employers have more reason than ever to value your creativity.”

As her book’s title clearly states, Eikleberry wrote her career guide for “creative and unconventional people,” defining her audience of creatives via the John Holland theory:

“According to Holland’s theory, derived from the psychologist’s life’s work, there are six basic personality types in the world of work, and six corresponding work environments. You are advised to go into a work environment that most closely fits your personality.” Those who are “creative and unconventional” are just one of the six, that which Holland calls “the Artistic Type” and who are people who “prefer unstructured work environments in which there is opportunity for self-expression.”

(If you’re wondering, the other Holland types are Social, Enterprising, Investigative, Realistic and Conventional: Here’s a link to the Wikipedia page.)

We first think of painters, sculptors, photographers, crafters and others attracted to jobs in the fine arts as being in this personality type, but Eikleberry is more encouraging, and she is effective in expanding the definition to other applied fields. I would encourage an even greater readership, and will not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone wondering about possible vocations, or making a fresh shift toward more expansive or self-attuned work. There will be few readers who don’t question themselves as to the true degree of their own creativity — I certainly did! And I believe it’s healthy pushing ourselves to want more.

A list of situation statements on the author’s website asks, “Is this book for you?”

Let’s all be “creative and unconventional”

The book offers pragmatic advice on how you can better choose among your options once you have decided on the self-affirming change required. Eikleberry is straightforward and realistic with the help she offers, and in chapter 5, intended to trigger the start of the reader’s personal action plan, she does a great job in outlining the difference between “using your head” and “asking for help.”

Eikleberry’s thorough generosity in revealing more options than you’d think of on your own is probably the greatest service her book provides. The 74 pages which end her book are devoted to a Career Reference Section wherein a short paragraph describes each of 270 occupations for creative and unconventional people to broaden their choices with. As she explains, “There is a great range along the Artistic spectrum, from the person with great talent to those people who appreciate the arts but don’t believe they have any talent at all.”

I’ve read a lot of non-fiction books, and was very impressed with Eikleberry’s organization of the book as a whole, and with how much she has packed into this guide. She starts with a model for problem-solving (also used in the overall design of the book itself), solving the ‘problem’ of creative people not fitting into the average work environment. Within her options for us, she includes “eight different ways to employ your creativity, then four different paths for employment, then just two different roles [as generalist or specialist]” so we remain focused and not overwhelmed. She covers the differences between having a job, an occupation, a career, and a vocation, but only after helping us arrive at more clarity and confidence with our skills and abilities, and helping us identify our work-related values.

Be forewarned however, that The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People may still frustrate anyone hoping for a quick fix. Eikleberry’s book is not the packaging of easy answers within a step-by-step program; it’s a guide for a suggested personal quest. To reap its benefits, be prepared to do the work she outlines, with patience and perseverance your constant companions on the journey. She states it very clearly: “No one will offer you the unique career you can create for yourself, but that’s okay, because you can learn how to make it happen on your own.” What Eikleberry offers, is her substantial learning and vocational counseling experience so you can trust in the process, and take the adventure, thrilling to your own learning along the way.

As Émile Zola said so well, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.”

“Submitting yourself to the creative process is like falling in love. You feel shaky and uncertain on the inside, especially at the beginning. Joy and transformation await, but first you must take a risk, make yourself vulnerable — and that’s scary. There is a natural desire to stay safe and secure, to not face the unknown. But if you play it safe, you miss out on the romance of your life’s own adventure. So, come on! Let yourself fall in love with something!”
— Carol Eikleberry

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Why Goodreads? They have become an App Smart choice for me in 2011 for I want to return to more book reading, and have set a goal to read at least 36 books this year (this was book 12 for me). Read more about the Goodreads mission here, and let’s connect there if you decide to try it too! You can also follow them on Twitter.

Previous review: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami (link to Tumblr)

Revisiting Value Immersion: Where are your hot spots?

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Immersion has recently taken center stage in our Managing with Aloha vocabulary and Language of Intention by way of our value alignment conversations here on Talking Story, which in turn led to my newest ebook: Value your Month to Value your Life.

So as you can imagine, the concept of Consumer Immersion leapt off the pages of a book I’ve recently read by Ron Rentel (with Joe Zellnik) called Karma Queens, Geek Gods & Innerpreneurs. The book’s subtitle is “Meet the 9 Consumer Types Shaping Today’s Marketplace” and if that intrigues you, I’ll be posting a full book review before the week is over.

Here’s what we’ve said about Value Immersion here on the blog:

The most effective ‘Value Your Month to Value Your Life’ programs I’ve seen in workplaces, succeed because they go for value immersion. For example, if Kuleana is the value for the month, they look at everything happening during that month through the lens of Kuleana-colored glasses, with the intention of tweaking processes for more value alignment. People put their hand up to work on what comes up. Bosses give the green light to stretch inter-departmentally, encouraging those conversations, and knowing a welcome mat will be in place because the value has been adopted everywhere, even if temporarily.

“Everything happening” means you’re nalu-ing it: You’re going with the flow as events and activities naturally happen because of past habit or current developments, and what you’re “tweaking” is largely your responses to all those things inclusively. As you do so, you tackle everything that Kuleana affects (returning to our example) as the value of responsibility and accountability. For instance Kuleana is a tremendous help as criteria, filter, and priority-sorter when selected during times of company change, because responsibility is very much like motivation: it’s personal and self-driven.

What Value Immersion tackles best is apathy and complacency, for it uncovers the three workplace sins of auto-pilot, lies of omission, and tacit approval.

Compare this with the Consumer Eyes process of Consumer Immersion:

“Consumer Immersion involves tours of category-related hot spots, expert interviews, hands-on experiential visits, and a multitude of real-world consumer interactions. During our Immersions we break bread with consumers in cutting-edge restaurants, sip cocktails with them in their favorite bars, and query them on the street, at the gym, and in the supermarket. Together with our clients [Consumer Eyes is a brand and innovation consultancy] we see how life looks from the consumer’s perspective and let that learning inform all the brainstorming and insight building that follows.”

“Our view of Consumer Immersion is that the best place to investigate consumers’ lives is to speak to consumers where they live, to follow them as they go through daily chores and errands, and to interact with them in a variety of real-world settings. Informally stopping a consumer in the supermarket as she ponders your category on the shelf is amazingly enlightening. Hanging out with 21-year-olds in their favorite club will enable you to examine both their emotional lives and drinking habits at once. Drinking rituals are highly communal, and watching patrons order drinks in a bar can shed a lot of light on how drink choices change over the course of the evening.”

Let’s take the liberty of changing one of those sentences a bit, shifting it to workplace context:

Our view of Value Immersion is that the best place to investigate workplace culture is to speak to business partners (i.e. our preferred name for ‘employees’) where they work, to follow them as they go through daily job tasks and business initiatives, and to interact with them in a variety of their sense of place real-work settings.

Essentially, Rentel is talking about catching people in their natural element, and with their guard down:

“In these situations [of Consumer Immersion], there’s no lapse between what consumers say they do and what really goes on. No matter what a consumer might say about her condiment usage, there’s no substitute for opening up her fridge and seeing a crusty bottle of hot sauce on the back of the shelf and a well-used bottle of mayonnaise up front.”

“So that’s what we do — together with our clients we interview, observe, and join consumers in their activities everywhere from a kitchen table in Boston to behind the counter of a juice bar in Malibu.”

Return to thinking about how you use Value Immersion in your workplace:

Metaphorically speaking, where in your operation are the ‘kitchen tables’ and ‘juice bars’ where more Aloha-based values can deliciously, and nutritiously be served?

The art of managing well is a situational art in so many ways. We seek to catch people doing something right so we can applaud it, appreciate it, and yes, clone and strengthen it. We want to reward the behavior we that we want to have more of, and with value-mapping we are becoming more specific: We are appreciating and celebrating value-aligned behavior.

But so much rides on seizing those opportunities where we “catch people doing something right,” doesn’t it.

Wishing and hoping is not a reliable strategy, for all it delivers is happenstance.

So think of your value immersion design — that simple, yet strategic decision to have a Value of the Month in your workplace as the way you start — as deliberately creating the hot spot you will benefit from.

Create your fertile ground of ‘kitchen tables’ and ‘juice bars’ by choosing your values. You have to take that first step.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The easiest way? Grab the ebook.
Just 18 pages as a printable PDF you can openly share with your team.
Read it together, so everyone is literally on the same page.

Performance Reviews: There’s a much better way

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Sat to talk story with a few managers who are currently facing their annual deadline with completing performance appraisals.

If you’re in corporate life you probably know the drill:
Performance reviews are conducted annually in one-on-one manager/employee appraisal meetings (and mandated), and managers are required to use a format designed by an HR office or some consultant, so consistent performance ratings can be used throughout the company for supposed equity in compensation levels — a poor reason for a bad process.

Employees hate it, and managers hate it, and yet scores of companies continue to uphold the practice. Pure yuck.

As you might guess from my tone so far, we don’t use that system in any of my Managing with Aloha-modeled businesses (we don’t have Job Position Descriptions either; we co-write individual Ho‘ohana Statements).

Do we review performance? Of course! The difference is that we do it constantly, coaching and mentoring on the job as the best possible context for having those conversations: Working on our Ho‘ohana is an everyday thing (and compensation is handled in another way as well). Thanks to opportunities furnished by The Daily 5 Minutes and our value-mapping practices, business partners (i.e. employees) are often the ones to initiate conversations on their performance with managers.

However I know that many managers have no choice but to comply with mandates, and like those I just coached, they have to work within the system they have until they are able to change it. Well, you CAN make improvements, making them work for you right now. Embrace your Systems Thinker: As we have learned, people can fix broken processes. Processes cannot fix broken-in-spirit people.

Here is what I advise.

Keep the good, get rid of the bad

In short: Turn your mandates into a positive and highly useful process.

  • Start with the basics of what you are required to do,
  • Improve the quality of those basics when done by your hand, and then
  • Build new improvements from there.

Here’s how.

1. Learn everything there is to know about your mandate. Good managers never wing it or fake it when it comes to putting anything in writing in regard to the performance of another human being. If you’re feeling somewhat powerless at this point in changing anything about the system as it now stands, imagine how your employees feel! They are counting on you: Hold yourself accountable for what is a profound responsibility.

Put your own manager or HR department to work for you, and get their coaching. Ask all your questions, and be crystal clear on the domino effect created by any appraisal form you complete: forms largely exist to expedite other processes.

2. Do your homework. If you’re working within a mandated system, you’re not alone. Chances are the employees in your charge have been reviewed before, and by others: Learn their history. I don’t necessarily recommend you use it (each situation is likely to have different variables requiring your judgment), but you should definitely be aware of it: you can’t build a new house (and culture of Aloha) without a solid foundation.

Second, put your feelers out for other managers who have a good reputation in your company (managing and leading with Aloha), and ask them to share any of their lessons learned with you: You may be pleasantly surprised in discovering great workarounds (legal ones) which already exist in your company culture.

3. Add some heart to add good energy. I cannot emphasize this enough: In “starting with the basics of what you are required to do” make the ‘official’ annual appraisal meeting a positive experience, helping without hurting. Do what you have to (more on this in the next section on timing) but be absolutely sure the annual appraisal itself ends on a high note: Positive and useful.

How can it be useful? Do have the appraisal focus on Ho‘ohana goal-setting, with action-specific goals that are achievable week to week (not year to year). Hō‘imi: Lay the groundwork for a near future flush with positive expectancy. Always remember that the energy of your people will fuel their capacity to perform magnificently going forward, and thus, it’s your greatest resource too: All other business assets flow from the performance energy of human beings. Your job as manager is to light those fires, not put them out.

4. Ace your timing. Until you can change the system itself, do whatever is required of you, by doing what you have to at the best possible time. If you have to deal with some negativity and have a conversation about poor performance, do so and do not avoid it. Be a good boss: Never shy from your opportunities to teach, facilitate, coach and mentor.

Corrective conversations do NOT have to occur during an annual appraisal: They should happen before then, and in their best context on the job. Alaka‘i managers will create a coaching m.o. where they deal with any messes first, and then use the annual appraisal as yet another time to celebrate a sweet victory with having done so. Give that victory to the employee whose performance you are coaching and mentoring as a win you can log during the ‘official’ review.

5. Keep conversation as the construct of each working relationship. Annual appraisals are a pain when you only do them annually. What I’m suggesting to you is that whatever is required becomes the culmination of better practices you’ve adopted day in, and day out. We talk about conversation so much here because it’s easy, enjoyable, and effective.

Work with Ho‘ohana initiatives to fuel performance energies in your workplace group huddles. Do the Daily 5 Minutes ® and you will have a wealth of one on one conversations:

I need to be crystal clear about something:
If you’re not giving your staff the gift of the Daily Five Minutes ®
you’re not Managing with Aloha „¢

Turn up the Volume, and Manage Loudly:
Don’t give up too soon. Enjoy the music of managing well.

This need not be overwhelming:
Don’t Just Add, Replace. Own the 100%
Scroll down to the footnote tags and see how much this relates to!

Bonus Idea: One of the practices we incorporate in the ‘Ohana in Business Model ® is the Annual Nānā i ke kumu Interview: We literally re-interview all our business partners (including our vendors and suppliers) to strengthen our relationships with the knowledge of any life shifts which have occurred over the past year. It’s a time we revisit innate talents, strength activities, and sense of place well-being as we purposely catch up with each other. Why do so many managers only do this when they first hire people?

Will this be enough for you?

Finally, please do question your own influence: Stretch and grow it, and do not underestimate what you are capable of. What can you do to effect change in the larger system? How can you be a change agent where you work so a bad system goes away forever?

I think of what I’ve just outlined for you in this post as managing well: As I love to say, managing and leading are verbs. Will you be satisfied with this, or will you now lead? One problem with leadership, is simply that we don’t have enough of it.

As I mentioned before, the obstacle faced is usually your company’s compensation structure if that’s what ratings are tied to: Break the ties which bind by offering to help them create a much better solution.

D5Mdiscover