Aloha Readers of Lifehack.org! Leon has graciously invited me to be a guest author here, and I am most appreciative of this wonderful opportunity to share the ideas which add richness yet more simplicity to our lives. As a management coach, and the author Managing with Aloha, you’ll find that what I’ll most often offer you will deal with management, leadership and the reinvention of the workplace at the hands of managers who “get it.” That said, there are nineteen universal business values in the MWA philosophy I am best known for, and they give us the opportunity for a whole-life/best-life approach to the lifehacks we can share. Ultimately, everything is personal, and that includes work.
Reminiscent of my own schooldays, the month of September has long meant one thing for me: Engage the brain in something new and LEARN it. You must be a lifelong learner if you are going to do well in today’s world. Why just survive it, when instead you can make it your own, capturing every fabulous moment of it?
If you are a manager you must both learn and teach, and you can expect me to speak to you often about how you can be a great coach and mentor. From day one, there are 5 things an employee needs to learn from you, setting the stage for all the higher-level learning you want them to reach for as your coaching relationship with them deepens:
- Why you hired them. Not as a qualified candidate for a job vacancy, but because of the values you share, in your eyes making them perfectly suited to a great working partnership with you. Elevate both their self-esteem and their sense of belonging. Shared values are your common ground, and a business-partner mentality can be your base camp. When employees clearly understand what they were hired to do, all future job objectives become much more meaningful.
- How to work with you. Employees can’t read your mind any better than you can read theirs: Tell them straight up what your working style is so they needn’t go through the trial-and-error of figuring it out. Tell them which freedoms they have—and do not have—in pushing the envelope of change and newness with you. There should be no eggshells to tiptoe through: Landmines should be in plain sight.
- How to talk to you. Don’t expect they will communicate effectively or completely with you when they haven’t learned enough about you to feel they know you yet, nor have their own “water wings” in the company to feel safe about it. Too many employees feel “put up and shut up” is the wisest strategy, or worse, is expected of them when that’s just not true. (Hot tip: The Daily 5 Minutes is the single best communication tool I can offer you.)
- How you expect the customer to be treated, both external customers and internal ones. As far as you’re concerned, exactly what is great customer service? Is the customer always right? —really? Not only must they learn how to work with you (go back to number 2…) they must learn how to work with —and for—the guest and customer, their peers and associates, your suppliers and professional network of relationships. There are ground-rules in all civilized societies: What are yours?
- Your vision for the company. Not the canned speech and company line, but what it personally means to YOU, and how you strive to put your personal signature on it. Model the behavior you want to see; set the expectation that you’ll soon ask them what their personal signature will be. Bring the vision into sharper focus. Yes, it’s the future picture, but the future needs to get closer every day, and they’ve got to know it’s in their hands.
More on September Learning right here on Lifehack.org with me, every coming Thursday of this month. On every other day, you can visit me on www.ManagingWithAloha.com. Aloha!
Rosa Say
Related posts / references:
The Daily 5 Minutes
The Customer is NOT Always Right
Managing with Aloha
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[...] It is our pleasure to have Rosa Say, author of Managing with Aloha, as our regular guest author at lifehack.org. Her management skills and knowledge will help all of us at work force and also to reflect on how we manage our own life. Make sure you have read her post, if you still haven’t. [...]
Carnival of the Capitalists – Hosted by Evelyn Rodriguez
Rethink(IP) did such a fine job of presenting the Carnival of Capitalists last week that it’s a tough act to follow. Thanks – I think – for setting such a high bar. It’s always an overwhelming task to compile the
While I wish it didn’t need to be said, all of those things need to be done as honestly as humanly possible. #3 is useless if you say “My door is always open”, but then require a formal meeting notice 3 weeks in advance to have a discussion. Your mention of “Not the canned speech and company line” gets at this point. And, this often means that the manager in question will have to do some self-evaluation before implementing. After all, you can’t tell people what you expect if you don’t even know yourself.
Aloha J, I do join you in having high expectations of managers, that is the very premise of managing with aloha: working right, leading better, and managing well. We cannot do any of these things effectively without starting from a good place — managers have to do their homework, and also act with authenticity and credibility: they have to be real.
The reason I am so high on the practice of the Daily 5 Minutes is that it’s a tool to nurture the circle of comfort that exists between managers and employees: it can reinvent the way they communicate, and the result is partnership and a high level of trust.
Thank you for your comment!
It occurs to me that some of this can be flipped around as “What my manager needs to learn from me” – especially in the cases where I (the employee) have been moved to a new manager.
I have found, too many times over two decades, that a reorganization of my position under a new manager is often the Kiss of Death tp that position. This manager didn’t hire me. He may not want me. He often has no idea what I do, what I can bring to his team, or why I’m there. I try to explain but somehow, I seem to fail… and the manager tries to make me into someone else, the person he would have hired if he’d been given the option.
Rosa – I am fascinated by your comment about nurturing “circle of comfort that exists between managers and employees”. In twenty years I have only felt “comfortable” with three managers – and two of those were not, technically, “manager” but rather “project leads” or co-worker “clients”. Where can I read more about your Daily 5 minutes? (although to be honest, I cringe at the thought of a bi-weekly half hour!)
J. Wynia – I agree with you completely. How do we get from where we are to where we want to be?
Aloha Vicki, thank you very much for your comment, for you have hit on exactly why a circle of comfort must be nurtured between manager and employee:
The Daily 5 Minutes is taught in the Managing with Aloha philosophy of ‘ike loa – seeking knowledge and wisdom, and to know well, because most of what we need to know on a day to day basis is about each other. You are right, it does go both ways, however the D5M was specifically designed so a manager would learn to listen better to whatever is on the employee’s agenda.
You can find more on the Daily Five Minutes in this index:
http://www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/talkingstory/daily_5_minutes/index.html
In particular, this is the post which is the excerpt on the Daily Five Minutes from my book, Managing with Aloha:
http://www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/talkingstory/2004/12/the_daily_five_.html
[...] 5 Things Employees Need to Learn—From You. [...]
[...] Sept. 8: 5 Things Employees Need to Learn—from You [...]
[...] 5 Things Employees Need to Learn – From You [...]
[...] more on setting up your team for success (and thus avoiding a lot of unnecessary conflict) in this post from [...]
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