Managing with Aloha

Managing with Aloha: We Reinvent Work Value by Value

Aloha and Welcome! ~ If you have arrived here on the recommendation that Managing with Aloha is a top productivity blog, please click through to this page for the information you are looking for: MWA3P: Productivity and Working with Aloha ~ If you are here for Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawai‘i’s Universal Values to the Art of Business in its entirety, keep reading this page! Mahalo nui loa, ~ Rosa Say

Managing with Aloha explores nineteen different Hawaiian values, and how to bring these very universal values to businesses today of every endeavor.

The Hawaiian words may seem foreign at first, but our universal, all-embracing discussions will be familiar to you, and those we coach quickly discover that using these “new words for old values” helps them reinvent old assumptions into better usefulness. We explore common sense, everyday approaches to blending the social and economic goals of business enterprise in ways that permeate our organizations and our community, defining a more meaningful sensibility for the way we work. We learn to become great managers and leaders. And in the process, we as managers learn to love our work too.

Managers get their work done through others —it’s as simple as that. As a manager you have the potential to affect the lives of people in profound ways, something you need to understand and take responsibility for. The best way to manage someone well is to honor their values as you remain true to your own, and given their universal nature it is highly probable many of your values are shared. Our values define our behavior, and in business, consciously working on values becomes synonymous with writing the software that drives effective work processes.

And we know that it isn’t “as simple as that.” That is why Managing with Aloha was written to help you.

Incorporating the language of values into a company’s culture demands meaningful communication, win-win agreements and a long term commitment to excellence: It becomes a language of intention which helps us “walk our talk” with integrity. When this is in place, work is conducted strategically, consistently, and successfully. Managing with Aloha helps us see this, and it explains how the arms of Aloha embrace the capacity every manager, and every employee has, to make a positive difference in the work they do.

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Sitemap: More about this website.

Managing with Aloha was created as an on-going resource for readers of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal values to the Art of Business. You’ve read the book, and you’re excited about the possibilities it presents for you; now how do you make it your reality?

As a general lay-out, you will find

— This site is designed for first-time visitors here, who probably have not yet read Managing with Aloha, and are looking to start with information on the book itself. Under the HAWAIIAN VALUES heading, take the hyperlink for each value to its individual page, with definition, pronunciation guide, and an index to noteworthy articles written since MWA was first published.

— Managing with Aloha Coaching is a sister site we have designed for those who  HAVE read or ordered Managing with Aloha, and are ready to take action, putting the book’s coaching into their every day practice. We say they are ready to Climb the 4 Peaks, living, working, managing, and then leading with aloha.

Are YOU ready? Visit Managing with Aloha Coaching today, to get started.

The Ho‘ohana Community

Manage with aloha and you are in great company! 

Managing with Aloha has become a movement, with managers and leaders across the globe devoted to accepting full responsibility for the effect they have on our workplaces. They are continual learners, equally dedicated to their own growth —and joy! —as great managers in day-to-day practice.

Are you ready to jump in with full intention? These are the links I’d recommend you visit to get involved: We are waiting to share our aloha with you!

>> Our monthly e-letter, Ho‘ohana ‘Ōlelo™ Subscribe today!

>> Who, or what, is the Ho‘ohana Community? Meet your neighbors and friends.

>> Joyful Jubilant Learning: Where the writers within our community continue to explore the values of Managing with Aloha globally using the new media tools of today, with particular emphasis on LEARNING.

Are you looking for Managing with Aloha Jumpstart?

In 2006 we launched an experiment to bring the MWA start-up program of Say Leadership Coaching to our readers outside of Hawai‘i virtually. We aligned the program, one of self-paced coaching, with Ho‘ohana, then our value of the month program on the Talking Story weblog.   

MWA Jumpstart ® proved to be a wonderful pilot, and we currently are developing our next generation of the program. Old links are systematically being removed, and we will post a notice here when MWA Jumpstart ® returns. Meanwhile, the place to be is Managing with Aloha Coaching, and we encourage you to join our community there.

Visit the Services page of Say Leadership Coaching if you would like to have in-person coaching on MWA brought to your company, or learn about the Executive Coaching program that Rosa delivers personally.

The Hospitality Cancer? Routine.

This is about curing a kind of workplace cancer

I am in week two of a ten-week sprint for my company, in which we are bringing the one-two punch of Aloha and Ho‘okipa to a collection of Hawai‘i businesses in two-hour sessions. The goal of the class is to define the true art of exceptional customer service through the lens of these two Hawaiian values, in a way that will get all participants charged up and feeling good about being Mea Ho‘okipa and delivering on their companies’ promise.

Up to now, we have largely concentrated on coaching managers and leaders at Say Leadership Coaching, and this has been one of only two classes we have done in which we teach a whole work team together, regardless of where they may sit on their firm’s org chart (the second one is on Kākou and Lōkahi, the values of teamwork.)

Why the classes work

Both classes are very popular with the participants involved, and both have very high re-booking rates, and the reason has become pretty clear to me: The managers in attendance get to watch us coach their staff, and their staff get to watch us coach their managers. We keep it safe, and we keep it positive and charged with learning, and they love it.

You can probably tell that I am quite proud of these classes, because I feel good about the value we deliver with them. They are great fun to do.

“New” might just mean “different”

Most of the service and hospitality ideas we collectively come up with for them in our Aloha and Ho‘okipa class, are not new and they are not complicated. They do not require resources they don’t have, and for the most part they don’t cost a dime. What their new ideas have in common most of all, is that they are different— for them.

Before each class I devote about an hour of telephone time with my client, to get clear on their reasons for hiring us, and for wanting the class. I have long lost count of the conversations that have some iteration of this symptomatic phrase; “Well, there are several people in the group who’ve been with us a long time now, and they don’t like change.”

During the class, what we discover is that they are in fact starving for change. They are starving for fresh and for different. The cancer that is sickening their spirit is routine. They have become complacent and apathetic (and thus their service levels are mediocre) because they don’t have permission to be original, and to try different (or they think they don’t).

Your first instinct is probably to say, “hey, I’m not stopping them!” and maybe not intentionally.

Never, EVER say “Yeah, but ...”

If you have ever told your staff, “well, we’ve tried that before, BUT …” you are killing their spirit, and you are the complacency cancer’s lackey.

Our Aloha and Ho‘okipa class works for us because of a simple and effective coaching technique. When someone in the class volunteers, “well, how about if we … ?” no matter what the idea is, we say something like, “that sounds like a terrific idea, tell me more!” If a doubting-Thomas look crosses the face of any manager in the room we walk somewhere to divert attentions so that manager will not be in anyone else’s line of sight.

We prod, we encourage, we seed the idea with a some kind of twist, and no wet blankets are allowed.

Ideas are catalysts --- ALL of them

In asking people to “tell me more” they begin to cook up and create, challenging themselves to tell us something pretty fabulous as they keep talking. Their peers start to chime in because they want to help them please us, and long-suppressed ideas which WERE in their heads before we ever showed up, start to get remembered. Hands start shooting up for a turn to speak, and we get really good at calling on the arm raisers based on the rest of their body language; we keep the positive ideas flowing.

Bring your empathy to work

If you feel your staff has become complacent, put yourself in their shoes. If you’d be bored doing their job, chances are they are too! Routine work days are a cancer. They snuff out the warm spirit so necessary in giving hospitality to others, for your staff cannot light that candle if they have no fire of their own.

I sincerely believe that Mea Ho‘okipa are not that rare. They can be found in virtually every company (or they won’t be in business very long). It is entirely possible you can’t “see” them because they are bored.

However this is one cancer every manager can cure.