One thing is for certain, teaching is not just for teachers.
I am now three years into the executive and organizational consulting I do in bringing Managing with Aloha to the workplace. That makes it four years that I have been self-employed and out of corporate life, however my coaching work creates a real-time, living laboratory for me that is far more expansive, for it keeps me part of several different working venues with a host of fascinating people exploring their ho‘ohana; the joy they bring to their work. I love it.
In doing what I do in this living laboratory, I am becoming more and more convinced every day, that managing well is more about teaching well than anything else.
People need to learn to manage themselves, and managers need to be educators, teachers, coaches and mentors.
To teach, is to help another understand the full possibility that may be sleeping within them. To manage within the world of work, is to give them a brand new classroom in which this awakening can happen. To manage with aloha, is to design that classroom in the most dynamic, vibrant, and rewarding way we can— for everyone involved. ... It is impossible to hold a torch over another’s path without brightening your own as well.
The joy in the work of teaching is in seeing what happens to someone when we respect their intelligence and their boundless capacity for learning new things. When a teacher enables learning in another it’s all about the student; you are not just passing out information: You are teaching people how to think.
It may sound like this is a new revelation for me, however if you go to page 32 in Managing with Aloha, I share my ho‘ohana with you in the last paragraph on that page. The very first sentence of my ho‘ohana is this; I love to teach, and in particular I love coaching managers. This is my joy in work.
Our ho‘ohana is something that is a continual work in progress for us, and so is mine. Now, three years since MWA was published, I wouldn’t change what I wrote in the rest of that paragraph, but I continue to delve deeper into each part of it. One way I am doing that recently is to truly work on teaching as a coaching skill for managers, and nānā i ke kumu, in “looking to the source” I am spending more time with those in what we traditionally think of as the “teaching profession.”
I hope you will join me.
It is my pleasure to introduce Dean Boyer to you, and the Teaching with Aloha Blog, a place where we will explore how his world of education and mine in business can feast at the same table of learning.
We have just quietly begun there in the last month’s time with a few postings, so I invite you to be part of our new beginnings too. Visit with us, and blend Teaching with Aloha into your practice of Managing with Aloha. They go together in the very best ways possible.
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Related postings:
- Go here to see the rest of that page 32 paragraph on my ho‘ohana:
Ho‘ohana: Joy in the Work of Teaching
- Ho‘ohana! It is our value for the month of March, 2007:
Ho‘ohana: Love Your Work
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