Learning to Talk to Each Other

I hope you will read this, even though you have decided not to participate in JJL LP2, for I would love to talk story with all of you about this particular learning. I suspect that the struggle some of us encountered with this step is one you might encounter with some other projects of your own choosing. When I chose the TypePad categories for this particular post, so many of them were appropriate (as you can see in the footer.)

My Step 5 Results? Relationship First

Learn to Lead with your Strengths has been an online and offline project for me. When we started it here on JJL, I also bought a half-dozen books for a few managers I know (two each in three different companies, also as a 70+ contribution) and asked them to do the project along with us.

Lot of reasons for me, the primal one being my ho‘ohana (mission) as a workplace coach, and these;

• As you’d expect from someone who started blogging with one called “Talking Story,” talking to my own managers about my strengths and weaknesses would never have been a challenge for me, and I know I’m “not normal” in that respect. I needed a task force of sorts with this project so I’d have more empathy and a real-time project laboratory.

• Before reading the book, I had already heard from our JJL community that Step 5 was where they met challenges, and this was coming from people I know are already high up the dial on their SET scores. Their cautions were not to be ignored.

• Because my personal blog is called Talking Story, and has three years of posts for the search spiders to gobble up, my stats reveal that someone searches for “how do I talk to my manager about _______” nearly every day. Once infancy is over, we talk as unconsciously as we breathe, yet silly as it sounds, we do have to continually learn to talk to each other, especially when it comes to challenging or more difficult conversations.

I’ll share more from my six managers’ results in total later, but in regard to Step 5 I’ve come to this conclusion;

As Marcus Buckingham says, Speak Up

If you have pushed through Step 5 of Go Put Your Strengths to Work in these past two weeks, there is a really good chance that despite your best intentions, you didn’t exactly get around to talking to your manager about your strengths and weaknesses. That’s an awful lot to ask of you when there is normally so much to talk about in the workplace that’s safer ground, particularly if you don’t already have a relationship with your manager wherein you can talk to him or her about just about anything —and you can rely on the frequency of that happening.

If you have a lot of pending issues that have been conveniently ignored and swept under the rug, going for the jugular in talking about your own strengths and weaknesses is just too much me, me, me, —even for the person who is “me” to stomach! You’ve got to work on your relationship with your boss first, for Step 5 works best in two scenarios:

• Your boss is doing the 6 Steps too or is a strengths movement groupie, and knows exactly where you’re coming from. That was the case for Heidi and her manager, Georgia, whose story we follow in MB’s book.

• The two of you can already talk about anything, so adding strengths and weaknesses to the conversation is really not a big deal. If you are that lucky person (and we all should be, that’s what managing with aloha is all about), you probably skipped right over MB’s conversation scripts and just jumped into it the first chance you got.

Such was the case for two of my six managers; the other four struggled. All six work for managers who had never heard of MB or the strengths movement. With the four who struggled, our last two weeks has been about striving to accomplish at least two things in keeping up with the project:

1. I coached them to try talking to their manager more often about something, and we talked about what that ‘something’ should be that would function as baby steps to the strengths/weaknesses conversations that are in store for them down the road. They all did well with their Strong Week Plans, so they know these 6 Steps are intended to be habit-forming, and will continue when the project is over.

2. Within these conversations, they are tweaking MB’s suggested Step 5 conversation scripts into their own voice, and into a going-forward plan in which they can manifest future possibility.

Manifest Possibility

Manifesting Possibility is chapter one in another book we’d heard about here on JJL within A Love Affair With Books this past March, and these days, it’s one of my favorite phrases. So much so that it became part of my June Ho‘ohana to all Ho‘ohana Community eLetter subscribers. Author Lisa Haneberg writes in her book, Two Weeks to a Breakthrough, (reviewed for us here by Dwayne Melancon)

Each decision and action nudges you forward, and presents a unique set of possibilities that you can manifest. You can shape your experience and results through recognizing the myriad possibilities in play and making choices that seem directionally aligned with your goals. Each day you manifest possibilities — none purely right or wrong, but some will better serve your goals and catalyze breakthroughs.

The italics are mine.

Fascinating degrees of separation: Lisa Haneberg interviewed Marcus Buckingham in one of her podcasts not too long ago; I had written an intro for MWA readers here. I bet she was manifesting her own possibilities! Within the podcast they share more about the Trombone Player Wanted series David has been reviewing for us.

Ho‘omau: Make this happen for you!

While I recognize that it may have been tough, I hope that you did not give up within Step 5, and that you were strong in your conviction to make it happen for you eventually, even if it didn’t in the last two weeks. Anything worth having is worth working for. Persistence is often the defining quality between those who fail, and those who succeed. Those last two sentences come from Managing with Aloha.

Break through your relationship with your Boss! It can be one unlike any other in your life.

Tomorrow, we move forward with Step 6.

David Zinger has given you a preview in his last review of the Trombone Player Wanted series, so be sure you’ve caught up with that posting too (there’s a manifesting possibility kind of subscription offered there :).

David has another wonderful gift for you too, just unveiled this morning! I’m already thinking about how my six-manager task force can use it... more possibility. Mahalo Ikaika!

See One Final Note from the Trombone...

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More coaching:

1. I simply cannot let this opportunity go by without encouraging you to introduce your manager to the Daily Five Minutes. It was designed to reinvent workplace communications with the power of listening to know well.

2. Consider the four parts of study in The Process-Driven Learner. If you’ve already started to rework your relationship with your boss, turn your attentions to everyone else on your team. Apply Step 5 to the four part process described and see how you can further personalize MB’s chapter at work with the other people you work with, to forge strong partnerships.

Looking back on the project, (and for those of you who now have this option, or are following this as an archived project) I would have added a third and even fourth week so that we could break Step 5 into a) your manager, and b) your team and added partnerships.

3. “I feel strong when I talk to you.” It would be pretty sweet to be a manager and have one of your employees say that to you, don’t you think? I do. More here.

Whew. Thank you for reading, and sharing in my passion for this. I do hope I have added some value to your day.
~ Rosa

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Post author Rosa Say believes we can all change the world with learning as our way to backpack the journey. Learn more about her lesson plans at Managing with Aloha and at Talking Story. Two recent postings there you might consider:

• At MWA: Our Ho‘ohana for June 2007: Kūlia! Break thrū!
• At Talking Story: 5 Things Employees Need to Learn—From You