Managing with Aloha

5 Requirements in Learning to Lead

At Joyful Jubilant Learning we are just now between our two-book study on learning to lead within the strengths revolution, as proposed by two different men, Marcus Buckingham of Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and Tom Rath of StrengthsFinder 2.0.

I’ve written a post there that may interest you from the standpoint of studying leadership, even if you are not yet riding the wave of the strengths movement. Yes, I do believe the word ‘yet’ in that last sentence fits.

Flickr photo credit.

Identifying your strengths and using them as well as you possibly can is part of nānā i ke kumu, looking to your inner source of power and well-being. Strengths management is a gift you give yourself first. Then, if management is your calling, you give it to others, offering yourself transparently as an example. Which gourd are you? I think I may be that third one in the back row, stretching to see everyone else!

At JJL, I write of these five requirements for those who feel they are destined for leadership:

Decisions in waiting

I was listening to Seth Godin’s Survival is Not Enough while driving enroute to a coaching class today, and this stuck with me: (I may have missed transcribing a word or three or four … but this is the gist of it)

“The speed at which we make decisions is now the factor that limits the speed of business. It’s our decisions that are on the critical path for getting things done.

...everything in the company waits – not for a shipment or a process, but for a decision.”

So true. I see it nearly every single day in the workplaces I visit. Decisions waiting to be made at ALL levels of a company, not just in the big-wigs office.

Who is waiting for YOU to make a decision, and what are you waiting for?

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About the book: Survival is Not Enough talks about change, and embracing it for the competitive advantages it can give you. There is a reason entrepreneurs love change, “where all the pieces on the gameboard get scrambled,” and others who are on the path of mediocrity while playing it safe in their comfort zones do not. Great book. Makes you think. Hard.

About decision-making: Be more nimble and make things happen. To drive decision-making down through all levels of the company, I highly recommend Dennis Bakke's Joy at Work. I reviewed it on Talking Story. I am pretty sure it holds the record for the most books I have purchased and given away to managers and leaders alike.

Next time, ask the ‘Imi ola question instead

There is this question that most managers have learned to ask. They ask it of the candidates they are interviewing for jobs trying to get to the “will this be a job, role, or career for you?” answer (they should just ask that question).

They also ask it a lot when they are doing annual performance reviews for the people they manage, because the normal (and broken) process is that at the end of the excruciating appraisal on how strengths versus weaknesses play out in performance, they want to then talk about goal-setting for the coming year so they’ll know what to beat you up on next time.

It’s a question that drives people crazy, just like it did for Pete Aldin. His boss asked him,

“What do you want to be doing in five years time?”

Pete says that back then (1997) “I was stumped. The only thing I knew for sure was I didn’t want to be working for him doing what I was doing at that time.”

Pete’s story came out great, however if you read it, you’ll see that was because of Pete and not his boss. Most people are not like Pete (though we’d love them to be!); they don’t use the question as a personal trigger.

In an interview, your candidate is probably thinking, “Oh no, don’t tell me you’re gonna be one of those kinds of bosses.”

Why? Beyond asking the question, most managers have little clue as to why it’s important, and nine times out of ten, they have NO clue how to respond  to the answers they get. They stop short, and they are not responsive going forward with a coaching plan within which to help. So the people they ask groan inside, thinking, “oh for goodness sake, what’s the use?”

As you know by now, Managing with Aloha is about me wanting you to be the best boss ever!

So managers, stop asking that question! I've made it red so you start to think of it as a red flag! Ask the ‘Imi ola question instead, and ask about an outcome that will be a win-win for both of you, and for your entire ‘Ohana in Business:

What is the best possible life the work you do here could create for you?

Two reasons:

1. You are better off looking for their ho‘ohana versus their dream career (which is usually about their wanting someone else’s life.) Ho‘ohana is the intentional work that has cause and effect; meaningful for them, coachable for you, and worthwhile for everyone, people and business alike.
2. THEIR best possible life, is YOUR best possible context for them working with you. Do you prefer managing a happy, whole-life kind of person, or someone sleep-walking through the workday, waking occasionally to watch the clock?

Kind of a no brainer, don’t you think?

Today, Pete Aldin is a terrific coach; it’s his ho‘ohana. Click over to his blog, Great Circle, and read his story about this in these two posts:

• The Question That Changed It All
• Being, Doing …

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Related postings here;

• Ho‘ohana: Our Value for April is ‘Imi ola
• ‘Imi ola and Efficiency

How to Better Honor Past Histories

We’ve all heard the advice; when you’re an exec or senior leader newly arriving at an organization, you’d best take the time to learn the “lay of the land,” getting to know the organizational culture well before you start making changes. Take the temperature before you get the cold shoulder, or find you’ve gone from the frying pan into the fire.

Sounds like good, logical, savvy advice, right?

Yet far too often I continue to hear from mid-level managers about the struggle they go through when new bosses start to let their impatience show, and get “unreasonably” assertive about their new initiatives.

“Why are we moving so fast!” the managers moan, “We need more time!”

“Good grief, it’s been over six months!” the bosses say, “How much more time do you need?”

It’s not the amount of time folks, it’s what’s done, or not done in that time. The sooner you get the right things done, the less transitional time you need.

The new boss might be a wonderful guy (or gal!) with a pretty exciting vision, one that everyone in the company wants just as much as he does. However managers currently in the trenches have to trust that good-guy new boss can pull it off with them and not in spite of them. They usually won’t award that trust to an initiative for the future until their new leader has demonstrated that he can also help them fix some of their old problems first.

The mistaken expectation that I see many new execs or senior managers hold, is that past history with existing problems and challenges is old news that deserves little more than archiving for memory’s sake. To say, “Okay, I’m aware of it, now let’s just forget about it and move on” is totally unrealistic.

I advise two things;

• Solve an old problem or opportunity before you tackle a brand new one. In other words, log an early win on a battle your staff is currently waging. Be the hero they haven’t had yet and you’ll win their trust earlier, trust you’ll need for your next battle. Be their champion before you even think about being a change agent.

• Second, honor their past histories by collecting their stories and culling them for the values they’ll clue you into— the real values held; not the ones in the gold frame on the CEO’s wall. Learn to identify the difference between stories and myths.

I wrote about this second piece of my advice in more detail on Lifehack.org today. I’ll reprint it here in full for you, for I’d love to get some Ho‘ohana Community comment conversation going on this.

Can we talk story?

The Daily 5 Minutes: 9 Questions

Thank you for your visit.

This article has been newly updated, and now appears on Rosa’s blog Talking Story

NEW LINK: 5 Minutes/ 3 Values/ 9 MWA Questions Redux

Great Managers Teach Well

This morning I posted an article at Lifehack.org to continue my series there on What Great Managers Do. Great Managers are great teachers, however they are selective in what they choose to teach, understanding that offering their staff a variety of teachers and teaching styles presents a better work package.

A snippet:

Great Managers Teach (When They Should)

Great Managers cultivate a work environment where lifelong learners thrive. Everyone simply learns for the sake of learning, thrilling to its personal reward. In these workplaces, curiosity is admired and all ideas are prized, and the Great Managers are those who facilitate the learning process in which those ideas incubate until innovation breaks through. People grow magnificently in the process.

Among studies of their own, managers will learn how to be a great teacher and coach, and with teaching in the workplace, their “how to be a great teacher” starts with knowing when to be one.

All managers must be able to coach, however sometimes their best tactic in the beginning of the learning process is having someone else do the initial teaching.

Full article.

My article there barely nudges open the door to what we can discuss on the topic of teaching in management, and on how vital a skill it is for the Great Manager to cultivate. We will talk about it much more here on www.managingwithaloha.com in future installments.

Teaching is crucial if you are to manage and lead with aloha; it may surprise you how much your staff will begin to hunger for it.

What Great Managers Do

The mission of Managing with Aloha involves mentoring a certain kind of manager, one I simply refer to as the ‘Great Manager.’ I first make mention of this calling to greatness in the Introduction of my book;

What should managers be?

At some time or another, every child is asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’ve never heard one answer, “I’d like to be a manager.” I didn’t. 

Yet I now believe heart and soul that it is a calling to be a great manager. Unfortunately, greatness is rarely achieved, and thus examples are rarely talked about. Children don’t hear inspiring stories of managers often enough to want to be one.

Therefore, ‘What Great Managers Do’ has long been my favorite topic, whether I’m coaching, training, speaking or writing. I’ve added to my collection of essays about it today with a new article for Lifehack.org. It’s called Great Managers End Censorship.

An excerpt:

The freedom of self-expression is one we say we cherish most of all, for we are sensitive, intelligent, and thoughtful human beings. We know stuff. We represent. We define. We influence. We stand up to be heard, and we should, for we have important opinions which should count. People need to hear us, and we need to hear them, so that the blending of our voices can clarify intentions, and thus smooth out all the rough edges of our challenging world.

Great Managers are fully aware that each of the people they manage embody a voice which needs to be heard in the world’s neighborhood we call At Work. Full, open expression enables the ‘everything else’ of essential communication, and it’s no different on the job if the work which is done is to count for something great too.

Having this awareness, Great Managers ensure that they end any hint of censorship, and that when people have something to say they feel they have every freedom to say it.

Censorship at work takes the form of self-censorship. For some reason, people feel inhibited and they don’t speak up.

Read the full article at Lifehack.org, then come back and tell me what you think.

Ho‘olālā: The Business Planning Process

Within Managing with Aloha we have a name for the Business Planning process familiar to many companies with the ending of one year and beginning of the next: We call it Ho‘olālā. This is the process we recently used in our Volcano Retreat for SLC.

Ho‘olālā means to ‘make plans.’ To make plans is to prepare for moving forward in the best possible way.

Business Planning is when you actually use things like Vision, Values, and Mission – they aren’t things which someone made pretty sentences for in framed art on the walls. In Ho‘olālā they line up and are used like this:

1. First we recommit to a very specific Vision, so everyone is clear on the ultimate objective we are planning FOR. In Ho‘olālā we are only aiming for the immediacy of the coming year, however you still need to ask big and brave questions, and the questions we ask are;

• What will be the best possible outcome of 2007? What is the Vision which will cause us to be at our best and our bravest?
• What EXACTLY will we have accomplished by this time next year? Is it an outrageously beautiful sight to behold? What does it look like, feel like, sound like, taste like?
• Why is it so important to us? Why will it be meaningful to the rest of the world? How will it be BIG?
• Why are we the best people destined to make this Vision happen? What is our responsibility for leadership?

2. Second we revisit our Values. We talk about those values which center our company, serving as our very reliable constancy no matter how much change swirls around us. We re-evaluate the Vision we spoke of previously, asking if it is specific enough and focused enough when filtered through our Values, for if it isn’t we will not have 100% commitment and belief in it.

It is in this part of the process that we reckon with our ethics, our intellectual honesty, and our emotional integrity. Yes, values are that critical.

The Workplace is Changing; Are You?

I made a beeline for the management career track as soon as I entered the world of the working. I was only 15 years old and still in school, so part of it may have been oldest child syndrome; there were five of us, and I was used to being in charge.

As a result, I was “the boss” through the vast majority of my career. I had a lot of practice at it, and I developed several habits of the as-the-boss variety. However I can assure you without a moment’s hesitation, that there is absolutely no question whatsoever my management style today would be much, much different than it was in even my most recent corporate position held in 2003.

Why? The world of today is different, and thus, it demands it. From my perception of it, there have been fairly radical changes over as little as the last four to six years, and when I consider the environment of most of the workplaces I visit, I have to wonder, Why haven’t they noticed it too?

The biggest answer, and the most common one, is usually tree-hugging. Work has a way of consuming us with its self-proclaimed importance, and with its high concentration of detail, detail, detail —especially when you are a manager. Thus we spend most of our time looking inward versus outward, and even when we do notice world-changing factors at play, we put up this self-protective shield in convincing ourselves that those factors don’t really affect us, and thank goodness, for we already have enough to deal with.

However usually, they most certainly do affect you, and the slower you are in responding to them, the more they will dump into your lap to be dealt with eventually. Frankly, playing offense is much more fun than playing defense. Being pro-active is much more effective than being re-active.

About the Daily Five Minutes

Tim Draayer of Live Your Best Life gets it.

The name of your blog translates to ‘Imi ola in Hawaiian Tim!

Do visit Tim and read, Who else wants to bridge the gap between employee and manager?

Then, if you haven’t  already, read more about the Daily Five Minutes here, and then bookmark this index. Just as Tim did, please email me if I can help you develop the practice for yourself.

Related post: Know well, Mālama well.