Our Value Immersion for September, 2017: Lōkahi

Lōkahi

Harmony and unity
Cooperation and collaborative work
People who work together can achieve more

From the preamble of Chapter 8 in Managing with Aloha;

Lōkahi is the value of harmony and unity.

Lōkahi seeks harmony in bringing people to win-win agreements. It is working with cooperation and collaboration, so all who contribute feel valued and unified.

Lōkahi brings these endeavors to teamwork, defining how those who work within an ‘Ohana in business can be most effective in their collaborative efforts.

Lōkahi gives us a receptive demeanor to strive for in working with our peers in the most productive way. We want their help and ask for it. Many hands, laulima, make the work more pleasant, ‘olu‘olu, and they move it along faster.

With Lōkahi we achieve more by working together in harmony with others, for Lōkahi strives for synergy as what’s best in creating possibilities.

Four hands on the #4train, by @EamonDolan on Instagram

I have immersed myself into some form of a value-of-the-month program (or two months, as we do now) since starting my Hawaiian value studies with Dr. George Kanahele back in 1988. I might call on certain values at seminal times, knowing the value I call upon will rescue me with sharpened focus, but for the most part, I’ve been pretty pragmatic about it since my book was published in 2004, cycling through the 19 Values of Aloha to seek out any adjacent possibility to them I may not have worked on yet.

Therefore, I’ve cycled from ‘Ohana to an immersion with Lōkahi roughly 15 times now, and while I might meander with its’ different components as I’ve described them in Chapter 8 of Managing with Aloha, I find I will always start off in the same place —a self-coaching question.

I ask myself, “How can I be working well with others, better than I am now?”

We seek to Be Lōkahi

This month, I would like to suggest that you start there as well, and answer the question for yourself:
How can you work well with others, better than you are now?

From there, our September value immersion will be fairly straightforward:

1—Answer the question honestly. Write your answer down with as many specifics as you can. (Past examples noted in the margin, where memorable people interactions come back to mind, will really help you in this exercise.)

2— As Stephen R. Covey would have said, we’re doing this to “begin with the end in mind.” Consider your answer to be the short term future you’d like to arrive at come the end of this month. Yep…just 30 days will be allotted for this; we’re going to work on another exercise in October.

3—Fill up your September value immersion with getting it done, with Lōkahi to guide you.

Need ideas?
The Call To Action steps you come up with, might include versions of these:

• Improve my relationship with _____ (who?) by _____ —How? Be specific!
• Try the debriefing Rosa just talked about, to curate my take-aways, and improve my follow-up with every meeting I attend.
• Support _____ (who?) in the _____ project more actively, by _____ —How? Be specific!
• Work on my listening skills with _____, for I know I am more impatient with him/her than I am with others. — Figure out why.
• _____ (who?) and I are rarely in sync with the pace of our work, and it slows down the rest of the team. — Figure out how to solve your disconnect.
• Ask _____ (who?) if they will mentor me with ______ (what learning, or coaching?), and set up times we can get together on a weekly basis this month to start.
• Recharge the dinner conversation I have with the family every night by _____, ______, and _____. —Your personal life needs Lōkahi too!

Read Chapter 8 on Lōkahi in your Managing with Aloha book to see what else may be triggered for you as a worthy self-improvement goal. Think about your Ho‘ohana to help with your specifics—work on your difference makers.

As within our listing of Alaka‘i 24 Affirmations:

10. Champion change. As the saying goes, those who do what they’ve always done, will get what they’ve always gotten. The only things they do get more of are apathy, complacency, and boredom.

Invoke Lōkahi for Harmony and Unity

I take a more global and universal view of Lōkahi in the essay I have written for Ke Ola Magazine this go round. Here is a preview;

Find a Way by Thomas Hawk on Flickr

Ninth in Series Two on Managing with Aloha | By Rosa Say

If ever there was a time for Lōkahi, it is now. As the Roman historian Sallust avowed, “Harmony makes small things grow, whereas the lack of it makes great things decay.”

Look for the print edition of this article in the September/October edition of Ke Ola magazine at Hawaii Island newsstands.

I’ve heard it said that we feel discord more deeply when we are older, for we can look back on the varied events of our years and compare their temperature by merit of more experience. This sounds valid to me, for even in a lifetime which spans Hawai‘i’s Statehood, the Vietnam War, and a Great Recession, I don’t recall feeling America was at such odds as I do now, with our domestic disagreements testing us so severely. We’ve had disagreements before—many of them—yet we have always managed to be more understanding and civil, even as we’ve allowed our passions to flare.

However, this I know to be sure: Our discord started with us, and we can be the ones to solve it and heal as we must. This is especially true, when we evoke our Aloha Spirit and invoke Lōkahi, the Hawaiian value of harmony and unity.

…Read the essay in full, on RosaSay.com:
Invoke Lōkahi for Harmony and Unity.

Let’s do this!

We are the Ho‘ohana Community of Managing with Aloha.
We are Alaka‘i Managers and Leaders.
We are culture makers, and we are legacy builders.
We are Alaka‘i Benefactors, and our Aloha Spirit knows no bounds.

Aloha to September, 2017 and Aloha to us!
We Ho‘ohana Kākou,
Rosa

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Preview the updates in Managing with Aloha, Second Edition, just released Summer, 2016
Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawai‘i’s Universal Values to the Art of Business