We have all heard the conventional wisdom attached to smart goal-setting: Although they should stretch you, make your goals realistic, and make them achievable. I included an expanded checklist in my book, Managing with Aloha:
“…you cannot choose a goal on the merit of the goal alone; it must be judged in the context of the employee who sets the goal and the mission that drove it. The relationship you initiated with Ho‘ohana is already paying you dividends here. The more you have learned about the employee you coach, the better you’ll be equipped to help him or her set goals that are:
Realistic for them, and realistic within their job environment
Achievable, while challenging them to stretch
Meaningful, leading them toward worthwhile work
Exciting and fun, keeping them enthusiastic while they work on them
Satisfying and rewarding for them, and conducive to your business success.”
Yep, I used the word too. Achievable.
Though it was never intended to have one, conventional wisdom has had a major loophole: “Achievable” is usually up for too much misinterpretation.
Enter the Alaka‘i manager, and just in time. If you’ve been following along in recent weeks, this will not surprise you…
The new Achievable has got to be About Change
If I were to rewrite that section of Managing with Aloha today, and publish one of those “newly revised” editions, I’d definitely spice it up.
It’s an okay checklist, and there isn’t anything about it which is wrong; good Alaka‘i managers will coach Ho‘ohana and ‘Imi ola this way (If you have Managing with Aloha, it came from page 46 and the chapter on ‘Imi ola in regard to mission statements).
In my coaching today, achievable gets defined this way:
Make it cool and sexy ( because energy doesn’t come from boring goals)
Get a double whammy
The “double whammy” is Goal + Shift: Achieve the goal, and achieve a shift into a re-energized day-to-day beyond everyone else’s ‘normal.’ The goal you choose should be a goal which gets YOU to change versus getting everything/anything else to change (or anyone else to change —that’s a no go in which you set yourself up for failure.)
A quote attributed to organizational change pioneer Richard Beckhard is insightfully accurate:
“People do not resist change; people resist being changed.”
No one can coerce or convince you to accept significant and lasting change: That’s something you have to do for yourself. You’ve got to submit. Submit yourself to an effort that will be hard for you.
Now this is tough, and Alaka‘i managers know this, so they make sure you don’t have to achieve your double whammy goal feeling you’re all alone and without a shoulder to lean on.
Enter the Alaka‘i manager, and just in time
There is one thing about that section I’d written in Managing with Aloha which would not get edited even today —especially today. It is written about the way managers work with their people. Alaka‘i managers set their own double whammy goals in self-management first, and then they coach others with doing the same thing for themselves too.
People who achieve great goals (as opposed to boring, mediocre ones) are not normal in our society today, and they like it that way.
Thus the first truly achievable goal I recommend you reach for, and stretch yourself to achieving, is getting to be okay with the you who is no longer normal.
No energy, no action. No action, no business life to speak of.
And in my view, business, whether the business of work, or the business sensibility of life, is a great playground to Ho‘ohana within.
Let’s dig into this a bit more. I’ll share one of my favorite mantras with you from an Alaka‘i leadership perspective today: Make it easy, and make it hard.
Make it easy for your Customers
Here’s a quote for the day:
“I’m so tired of watching us lose our customers. Just because we work for the government doesn’t mean we shouldn’t run the operation like a business.”
--- Joan Capinia
The reputation that government and much of the public sector is saddled with has to with something that is an even bigger sin than mediocrity, for it equates to chronic mediocrity which is now regulated and institutionalized: It’s Bureaucracy.
Rules. Antiquated, or just plain stupid rules.
Red tape. Loop holes. Both are negatives: Loop holes are normally thought of as idiotic, as cheating, or as the tacit approval of stupid rules. Both red tape and loop holes have to do with jumping through hoops versus acting like a dignified professional (or an honored customer.)
Inconvenience no one seems to care about, saying/thinking “Just put up and shut up and deal with it; that’s the way it is.” can be a sneaky part of bureaucracy too.
Perception, reality and your reputation
Yeah, I’m starting to squirm uncomfortably and get irritated thinking about this too. Every business needs to figure out how to make it easier for their customers, and how to make processes streamlined and just plain common sense (and in business it’s all a buying process when you think about it).
Though the private sector can be just as bad, the public sector is a very easy target with this; think about the last time you might have visited a City & County office of any kind on any island. Personally we all feel for those affected by the current furlough discussions; we empathize with them as human beings in similar tough spots. However we all have heard (or said) the whispers between friends along the theme of “Could be a real good thing… maybe now they’ll be forced to improve and strip away all the red tape. I’ve never been happy paying taxes to support such thick-as-thieves bureaucracy.”
Perception is reality, and reputation is about that combination of what your customer experiences, and what they think they experience, especially if they feel they have been greatly inconvenienced, taken for granted, or abused or wronged in some way.
Great Alaka‘i leadership creates visionary pictures of how the future will be easier for the customer, an easy which delivers great experiences (and for both internal and external customers.)
Make it hard for your Business Partners
By ‘business partners’ I mean your employees, staff, co-working peers and your vendor partners; anyone and everyone who is responsible for delighting the customers who create cash flow. Hard ups the game, and fires up the energy.
Hopefully there isn’t anything which is unreasonably hard for anyone, but if push comes to shove, the hard stuff should get taken care of by those associated with the business, not the customer.
Remember this? Fulfill the biggest need:
There are two things business owners are focused on right now, and they go together:
a) Boosting cash flow quickly
b) Making customers deliriously happy
Said another way, cash is King and a paying customer’s loyalty is Queen.
We talked about it before in terms of creating job worth (Job-hunting? Don’t apply and fill, create and pitch) as the advice given to job-seekers: Position yourself to fulfill the biggest need of the employer.
Same goes for this discussion: Those associated with the workings of a business – any business, no exceptions —must position themselves to fulfill the biggest need of the customer.
And customers want you to dazzle them, and exceed their expectations. Today, they expect you to Lead the Slow Charge, and they are happier when they do not have to share your limited attentions with other customers!
What that means, is that of course it will always be harder for you! Hard is a good thing in this context, for it is not normal —and we had said that excellence is not normal. (Review the section called “2. Avoid the Middle and Work on the Edges” within our last talk story here: 3 Ways Managers Create Energetic Workplaces).
Bring ‘hard’ into your Language of Intention
What Alaka‘i leaders will do, is reinvent the internal vocabulary of what ‘hard’ for your business partners means. In this mantra, “Make it easy, make it hard,” hard is pure excellence.
However we use the word ‘hard’ instead of excellent because we want that association with energetic effort too: Hard means with vigor, with strength, and with force to be reckoned with. Hard resists cracking under pressure because it is sure, it is intently confident. It is virtually flawless and exceptional.
In work cultures managed and led with Aloha by Alaka‘i managers, hard is about constantly learning to improve so everyone can live better, work better, be better. Hard has good kaona: Small word, big meaning.
Get hard to be about an exciting challenge, one which requires —what? That’s right: Increased energies. Mediocrity-banishing energies.
On Thursday we’ll get into the management side of the “Make it easy, make it hard” leadership initiative. Hope to see you back for, What the heck do you mean by ‘Achievable?’
This past Tuesday I stated that the biggest sin in business today is mediocrity. Today’s post is about what I feel the answer is with correcting that sin, so if you missed it, click over to: The Biggest Sin in Business Today and then come back. We’ll wait.
Ready?
How do you, the Alaka‘i manager, banish mediocrity in your workplace? I believe your best possible strategy is this:You replace mediocrity with energy.
My favorite Hawaiian coaching word is a very short one: Ho‘o. We hear it more as a prefix to other Hawaiian words, as it turns nouns into verbs. By itself, ho‘o means to make something happen. Ho‘ohana: Work on purpose, and with intention. Ho‘ohanohano: Bring dignity and respect to your actions. Ho‘okipa: Give unconditional hospitality, and serve. Ho‘oponopono: Make things right, bring them to balance.
Workplace energy functions the same way batteries do for your favorite electronics: You can have the most high tech camera in the world, and it will do absolutely nothing if its battery is dead. It no can Ho‘o.
LEADERSHIP is the workplace discipline of creating energy connected to a meaningful vision.
MANAGEMENT is the workplace discipline of channeling that mission-critical energy into optimal production and usefulness.
Great managers cannot channel good energies they are unaware of, or energy which doesn’t exist. And remember – you can’t shift this responsibility to someone else within our discussions here: Alaka‘i managers are those who both manage and lead. We refer to management and leadership as disciplines, not as separate roles, titles, or positions on an org. chart. If a designated leader is not creating energy, then the buck stops with you.
Alaka‘i managers are Energy Creators
If you are a manager (and all business owners are managers too) assume the role of energy creator in your company. Change the title on your business card to Energy Creator; come on, I dare you. Whatever you have there now is probably more normal, and normal is boring.
Your greatest resource in any workplace is NOT time (or financing), it IS the energy required to make the time and other resources you have available count for something worthwhile and meaningful.
Your greatest asset in the workplace is NOT your people, it IS those people with the most consistent energy levels; energy to dream, create, evangelize, and perform magnificently.
Energy powers your production capacity.
Energy powers your service capacity.
Energy is what will dazzle and delight your customer.
Energy is what sustains a vital business, and a lack of energy is what will kill it.
Mediocrity is your red flag that energy is missing, however that’s never a situation that a great manager can’t fix, and fix pretty quickly.
To Start, Be Kūlia Contagious
Great management takes great work and there are no magic pills: You aren’t going to get a complete how-to in this one blog post. The over-arching goal of Say “Alaka‘i” is to trigger possibility, help you reach higher, and break things down into week-to-week actions you can work on, continuously recharging your own battery cells of self-motivation.
However what we can do today is remind ourselves of the big picture view, while making that big picture embraceable and achievable: We can set the stage for positive energies to grow and flourish more than they presently are.
Here are three ways you can begin to be the Energy Creator you need to be, starting TODAY.
1. Be Contagious, for Energy begets more Energy
Ho‘ohana: Work on you first, and produce the best work you possibly can. As far as your staff and partnerships will be concerned, self-management must be in residence within the person in charge before they’ll allow any management or leadership technique to step foot in the door. Your reputation for being a self-managed individual will be key to the privilege you earn in your calling for managing and leading others.
Then, get excited: Tap into company vision by remembering why you are in business in the first place, and set your sights on making magic happen. Yep, magic. When you really think about it, the Ho‘okipa I still crave will be great, but you want more than deliriously happy employees and customers don’t you. Of course you do! You want magic in your own life, so go for it. Magic for you doesn’t happen in boring work. Amp it up, take some risks and have some fun while you work, and set the best possible example for others to follow. Make room for them so they can join you, and co-lead with you. There will always be enough followers, but there are never enough leaders.
2. Avoid the Middle and Work on the Edges
Commit to the value of Kūlia i ka nu‘u: Excellence generates enthusiasm and is contagious; everyone loves it and everyone wants it. However excellence isn’t ordinary or normal – when something enters the realm of the normal it’s no longer viewed as excellent. The more something is thought of as normal, the more ho-hum boring, commonplace and mediocre it gets. Even if you copy the best practice of something, it’s still a copy and is no longer as compelling, exclusive, cool or sexy.
Therefore, if you want excellence (and really, why bother with anything else), you’ve got to be willing to push at the edges of virtually everything, and nothing can be sacred – absolutely nothing. In fact, the more unexpected your targets and projects the better. Constantly ask your team “Why not?” about every wild idea which comes up, and be enthusiastic in recognizing and rewarding their creativity. You have to pursue what others think of as impossible, and you must repeatedly insist: Everything we know of was impossible until the first person did it. Let’s be first. “First” is found on the fringes and way up in front. “First” leads and never follows.
3. There can be no Basic Standards, only Extraordinary ones
At this point I can guarantee some of you are getting an attack of the “yeah, but”s and are thinking, “Well Rosa, reality bites. I can’t work on cool, sexy and edgy until I can clear my decks of all the existing normal stuff.” You know what? You’re right.
However it’s also true that the minute you clear your desk something else lands on it – also in that category of the “normal day to day stuff” and you feel like you’re caught in a vortex or vicious circle. While there is a good case for the importance of standards, they really can hold you back and weigh you down unless you are more intentional and deliberate about them.
There is really only one answer: As the saying goes, you have to kill two birds with one stone. As you “clear your decks” you need to tackle them with the first two approaches we’ve spoken of: Ho‘o and Kūlia: Be relentless about being the best, and excel. Eliminate or reinvent any process which drains energy instead of generating it.
And don’t you dare wimp out and stop at systems and processes!Be the Best Boss with the highest value standards and develop your people: Not only do people love and want excellence for themselves, they want to be surrounded by it, finding it in their peers. No one wants to be associated with a mediocre workplace which is populated by mediocre people.
Ready to Roll?
If I am missing anything here I would love to hear from you: Let’s make Ho‘okipa energy happen. Is there anything else you feel is critically important in the big picture view of creating energy in your workplace?
We interrupt our normal programming of Tuesdays’ leadership topics to talk about Ho‘okipa:Aloha inspired customer service. But then again, everything is about leadership —or the tragic absence of it.
I need your help
I recently set a goal to write about exceptional customer service in our Hawai‘i nei, for we are the land of Aloha, right? I love spreading the good word about how our values play out every day the way they do. So I went in search of a new story I could share with you and also build a presentation around (my Ho‘okipa class schedule resumes in September), one which would inspire and motivate us anew as we Ho‘ohana together.
Unfortunately I failed. In fact, I ended up with a rant I had to sleep on and tone down. I hate when my writing slips into any negativity at all, however I also seek to write about what’s current and about the way things are; I have learned that it’s best to tell the truth, even when it is less than pleasant. So I need your help in creating a new truth I can write about.
Here’s the story the way it played out.
It’s not because of the recession
Last week was one of assorted errand-running for me; it happened to be one of those times I could batch the things I had to get done into workdays which were scheduled close to home. So I lined up those appointments which fall into the category I’ve come to call, “the business of life” —servicing my car, going to the dentist, picking up a printer I’d taken in to repair; those sorts of things. I was sure I would have lots of opportunities to work on my Ho‘okipa writing goal.
The businesses I happened to visit would all qualify as those who are more recession-proof than most; competitive pricing and discretionary patronage isn’t really part of the picture. Consider the dentist: Skipping your semi-annual appointment with the hygienist can really come back to haunt you. When you (the customer) seek out these basic-need, business of life companies, you just need them, period, and you’re counting on them performing well for you. Chances are you’ll need them again one day in the future, and so you have this vested interest in them; you truly are pulling for them, wanting them to succeed and do well, remaining in business for the long haul. You know they support you, and you are willing to support them.
Customers want to feel smart
A good part of this wanting them to do well, is that you ARE going to pay for their products and services because you do need them; due to different variables, you feel that your choices are limited. So you want to pat yourself on the back for being an intelligent, rational and choosy consumer, making a smart choice even if reality bites and you don’t really have that much of a choice at all.
Sometimes you’ll feel this way on O‘ahu, but when you live on a neighbor island “slim-pickings” can be quite the understatement, and you learn to live with scarcity and the so-called “price of paradise” at the extreme ends of the scale. When I took my run yesterday morning they were changing the price at my neighborhood gas station to $3.27 for regular unleaded – and the cars were patiently lined up, waiting their turn to obligingly swipe in their plastic charge cards for a full tank.
Sadly, the businesses I visited over the last week were a bitter disappointment. They made me feel like a dummy customer and a victim of their complacency – pure yuck.
I didn’t have much choice with certain things – for instance, where I live, my spare tire had to make a 45-mile drive for me to get a new one from the only place which had it in stock (which doesn’t necessarily mean the new tire would match my other ones; it doesn’t). I waited over an hour past the time they committed to having it done, two hours altogether for a 15-minute tire change, and then just as I gratefully approached my ‘finished’ car to leave, I noticed that the tire pressure was so off balance the car looked visibly crooked.
The mechanic didn’t disagree when I pointed it out to him and asked him to recalibrate the tire pressure for all four tires; he did so. However I felt so deflated and disappointed; how dare they make me feel like a fool for choosing them? How dare they make me feel grateful to finally leave them and their stifling hot waiting room, where no one bothered to let me know the job would take longer? How could I be so foolishly accepting of a new tire which cost me $131.73 (yep, one tire) and so much aggravation, a price tag I paid without a second thought or complaint? How dare they make me now feel that it wasn’t a good choice to have been there at all, and I was the one who was wrong, dumb enough not to chance driving another twenty miles on my spare tire to give my business to someone else?
Is there a pulse here?
This is just one example of what I think of as the biggest sin committed in business today: complete mediocrity. By the time the week was over I’d collected a few more unfortunate stories which gave me a very severe case of Ho‘okipa withdrawal. I was craving some exceptional service somewhere, or even uneventful service, but from lively and engaged people! My expectations were getting so low, that surely the warmth of Aloha alone would trump product and service quality, wouldn’t it?
I am sure that no one working at the businesses I visited wanted to do a bad job, or deliberately set out to get me (believe me, I know that being a nice customer works much better than being a complaining one).
No one intentionally lied to me, and no one was rude to me. They did something worse: Either they ignored me or took me for granted.
No one abused me or flagrantly ripped me off (I don’t think… please let my ignorance be bliss, and don’t tell me what you paid for the tire you last bought for what is one of the most common cars found on our roads today).
It seemed that no one had enough energy to intentionally be awful; they just kinda slumped their way into a downslide, and then they stayed there.
No one seemed to have a pulse. Everyone was just so blah and uninspired. So going through the motions unremarkable. In fact, they weren’t even passably good. They skipped steps and didn’t even notice that they did.
The biggest sin in business is mediocrity
Customers today expect more, even if you are the only game in town. If anything, we the customers who feel forced to patronize you for basic needs feel that you’ve been assured of our continuing business, and thus are able to do better – you’re the one with a palpable revenue stream right now! We can clearly see your veins; an example is the monthly bill we get for your ‘utility,’ but your pulse with not taking us for granted is getting alarmingly weak and hard to find.
I didn’t wait two hours for that new tire because they had too little business, but because they had too much business and couldn’t keep up. And it wasn’t an unexpected jump in business – they’re always like that. The only customers who actually wait in their establishment are those like me who live the coastline drive away. When they got behind, they didn’t seem to care; when a customer sitting in your waiting room for hours doesn’t make you or your staff uncomfortable, something is very, very wrong.
I don’t blame any of this on the recession.
I blame it on a lack of energy, the absence of imagination, and the death of creativity and vitality that results from poor leadership and poor management.
Your employees and partners blame it on you too, even if they are the ones doing a rotten job or uninspired and mediocre work. You’re not around or engaged enough as their leader, managing and leading enough to improve things. You are settling for less than is possible, no matter how horrible the economy might get – attentive energy isn’t totally dependent on your bank account. There is always something to be improved and reinvigorated; there is always someone to be coached into achieving their full potential.
Your customers blame it on you too. As is the local way, they will generally be very forgiving of your employees – I was, and I’m a coach who has a very hard time keeping her mouth shut when I’ve got a living laboratory right before my eyes! Customers will blame anything hinting of monopoly behavior, an arrogant resting on laurels, or a recession cop-out attitude on you the owner, you the boss, you the manager. They will blame it on your poor leadership and management, and in my opinion, they’re right, for you’re better than that.
If you are committing the sin of mediocrity, allowing energy to drain out of your company, your business will die. Your customers may not have a choice now, but the day they do, it will be all over for you.
If you have customers right now, dazzle them
Please: Be Alaka‘i great. [From the archives:Can you define your Leadership Greatness?] Help your employees and every one of your business partners be great every single day, and with every single customer. Banish mediocrity by proactively choosing to lead and manage exceptionally well.
It is not that difficult knowing how to begin: Look at your business the way a customer does. Start where you can visibly see you need an infusion of fresh energy. We will talk more about this in my next posting on Thursday.
Turn your customers into raving fans who feel smugly smart for choosing you and giving you their money. When you do that, this negative, “oh woe is me” recessionary thinking will end for all of us. The raving fans you want talking about you (and writing about you) are those customers who feel savvy and in-the-know brilliant that they chose you: When someone recommends you to their family and their friends, the quality of their opinion is on the line, and they know it.
I am not giving up on my goal.
No way. If anything, I am more determined than ever to talk about Aloha-inspired Ho‘okipa customer service.
Has mediocrity been banished from your business? If you think your workplace has service levels which will dazzle me, please write and let me know about you.
And don’t waste your time telling me about your product features: Even a great product never reaches true excellence without a human service component attached to it.
On the other hand, if you are Aloha and Ho‘okipa exceptional, our Say “Alaka‘i” readers deserve to know about you, and I want to help them choose you and give you the patronage which will help you thrive.
Some of the best management advice I got over the years came from my dad. When he heard my news of an early-in-my-career promotion, one of the things he said to me was, “Now you can find your decisions instead of making them all by yourself.”
He was very aware of my natural tendency with on-the-spot decision-making based on my own sense of logic and common sense. In fact, he’d counted on me honing in on confident decision-making as one of my strengths: I was the oldest of five children, and my siblings were often left in my care as both my parents worked to make our family living. But wise man that my dad was, he knew that once I got into management, I had to get better at finding the right decision about a whole wealth of different things. Another secondary strength with explaining my own intuitive, from-my-gut-feeling decision already made, would serve me much better as a contingency and back-up option when my hunt-and-seek missions came up empty.
Finding versus Making would serve my workplace better too; it would deliver more Lōkahi [unity and harmony]. Now to find the really good stuff, I had to learn facilitation and coaching.
Coaching has become a big management expectation
‘Coaching’ is an example of an old word which has exploded into management overwhelm because it became a new profession. Yes, it’s a profession which includes me, influencing my decision to name my business Say Leadership Coaching six years ago, so no small wonder that I believe the coaching profession to be helpful and worthwhile. It provides a great service to many, and it is personally fulfilling for me. However the downside to coaching having gone professional and certifiable, is that coaching as the verb has become intimidating to many managers, and they will say, “But I am not really qualified to coach my staff.” Big, big “yeah, but” and I say, you are – once you choose to be, and start working on developing your coaching skills within your management calling.
Your Alaka‘i Kuleana [responsibility] is this: If you choose not to develop your own people, at the very least you’d best claim your responsibility with helping them find someone who will, and whom they choose to. The alternative is to settle for a stagnant, mediocre working environment of non-learners likely to resist change. [From the archives:How do you Learn? Really, how?]
Susan Mazza, author of the Random Acts of Leadership blog, has written an excellent article that delves into this question of manager and/or coach, and I highly recommend it: 3 Ways to be a Manager AND a Coach. She writes:
Of course a manager CAN be a coach to someone who reports to them. But the assumption that once I am your manager I am also your coach is seriously flawed.
I continue to see this assumption at play in organizations of all sizes. It can cause a lot of mischief in the relationships between managers and the people who report to them.
Don’t get me wrong. I am an advocate of managers developing strong coaching skills. Yet when we fail to establish the foundation for a successful coaching relationship, we end up with far more failures than successes and a whole lot of unnecessary frustration and disappointment.
Susan has crafted a terrific article, and you’ll learn much from the comments she’s attracted as well - do take the time to read them. As you make your own decision about this — “will I be a manager who coaches to develop people?” — I’d like to suggest learning facilitation skills as a good place to start.
Alaka‘i Managers must facilitate
Must. This is not an “if” or “when you choose to” for me: I believe that facilitation comes with the management job, harking back to when you first earn any supervisory stripes at all.
Supervision implies other people in the mix, and the assumption I’m making here is the same basic assumption made in Managing with Aloha:
“I have come to realize that yes, good managers do work with good processes, however the great managers are the ones who concentrate on how they manage people.”
Let’s not allow facilitation to intimidate us the way that coaching might. Let’s keep this simple.
To facilitate is to find a decision, just as my dad had taught me. That decision is the best-in-time result of the input of those people involved with, or influenced by the scenario that decision will seek to improve.
When we had that early conversation, and it came up repeatedly, my dad was coaching me to be absolutely sure that I asked versus told, and that I learn the humility [Ha‘aha‘a] of open-minded and inclusive [Kākou] thinking. It had usually been okay that my younger siblings were not included in my decisions while I alone was responsible for their well being in my home care; it was definitely NOT okay that I leave out my employees in our workplace, not to mention that big fact that they knew way more about the work situations they were much closer to than I was. To leave them out of my decision-making process was downright foolish.
Don’t make your next decision; find it.
Learning facilitation skills requires two things as prerequisites to the actual skill-learning: Curbing your impatience for quick decision-making, and the willingness to have many more conversations than you are presently having, both one-on-one and in the meetings, team, and group environments we are more accustomed to associating facilitation with.
You may prove your initial gut feeling to be right, but chances are that you will learn much in that affirmation, and better yet, you will earn a higher degree of respect and appreciation from those you’ve asked for input.
Facilitate first, then learn to coach. If you aspire to be an Alaka‘i manager and feel you have that calling, I’ll bet you can do it — and I’m sure you will discover you are developing your own strengths in the process. When you are ready to coach for people development, I’ll bet the people you manage will choose you to, for you have shown them you possess a very necessary qualification: You listen.
Rosa Say is a workplace Aloha coach, founder of Say Leadership Coaching and the author of "Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawai'i's Universal Values to the Art of Business."
Manage and Lead: Learn to do both, and you can say and be Alaka'i (a leader), living and working within the Hawaiian value of management and leadership.
