The Core 21 Beliefs of Managing with Aloha

In honor of the day, 07~07~07, and as part of the inspired effort with 7 Wonders of Joyful, Jubilant Learning, these are the twenty-one sentences or phrases within my book, Managing with Aloha, that I most wish my readers take to heart. In doing so, I believe they can make management the noble profession it has the capacity to be.

1. The epigraph; “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German writer, scientist and philosopher

2. Within the Foreword; “Wealth is also defined by family, connection to our ancestry, and our best vision of the future. All of these find their inner spirit, their constancy, and their strength in the values that shape our thinking and our actions.” ~ Nainoa Thompson, navigator and kupuna

Starting with this next one, the quotes are my own.

3. I now believe heart and soul that it is a calling to be a great manager … Sam [Ainslie, my mentor then at Hualalai] did not know it at the time, but he gave me a new mission. I would define what it meant to be a great manager. Being one would be my new calling.

4. It may often require a charismatic leader to create excitement, and lead the way with new and innovative thinking. However it will require a great manager of people to actually inspire employees to get the job done.

5. First one learns. For the learning to stick, be fulfilling and become meaningful, one must apply what they have learned to what they do. They must allow their learning to evolve to personal belief — it becomes their mana‘o, the deep and certain belief that drives one’s instinctual actions.

6. We learn best from other people. I will forever be grateful to the employees who were the bountiful gifts of my management assignments, awakening within me my passion for the art of management … Management is about getting things done through other people; it doesn’t get any more basic than that.

7. You will best get things done through others by incorporating the values you share with them, values that embrace collaboration, and values that also are fundamental good practices … and Aloha is the most universally held value of them all.

8. The Aloha Spirit does not sit streamlined and variation-free within your bulletproof processes; it swims around within your people, surfing the low and high tides of their disposition each day they report to work.

9. To execute their jobs well, employees need teachers, coaches, cheerleaders and mentors, and that’s what managers need to be for them. Great managers relish the opportunity.

10. Employees don’t really want you to be a father figure, second mother, best friend, soul mate, or even confidant. They want you to be their boss! A strategy-mapping, consistent, objective, organized and predictable boss with an inspiring vision, and a boss who has the same high expectations for everyone they manage — including themselves.

11. To manage with Aloha is to draw out the best performance of your own management practice from the values that are inherent in your nature and a match for the demands of your business.

12. “Soft concepts” are exceptionally good for business. They work better for those hard, gut-wrenching decisions than the exclusionary brutality of the numbers game, because they carry people through the long haul and help you achieve long-term success that can be perpetuated.

13. Numbers can be healthy when your success has grown infused with Aloha, and perhaps more important, you can feel good about achieving them.

14. We must overcome fear; [the value-based management of] managing with aloha is the polar opposite of the fear-based management that can weaken and destroy the ethical and humanitarian hopes we have for business today.

15. Acts of caring drive us to high performance levels in our work with others. We give and become unselfish. We accept responsibility unconditionally. We become better.

16. Aloha is within all of us, it is something we were born with. Each of us has this choice to make: Do we release our Aloha and share it? Do we live it, and do we celebrate it?

17. In my way of thinking, the work someone did defined them — and the work I did defined me. Even the barest hint of hypocrisy was unacceptable.

18. I wanted to teach them how to think. If there was anything my management career had done for me up to this point, it was grooming the importance I placed in people developing intellectual honesty with themselves.

19. I would learn that the search for meaningful work starts within you. I would learn that sense of place is a very powerful and personal thing, and ‘culture’ is defined in one’s values, one’s attitude, and one’s own choices, not in circumstance.

20. There is so much hope. “This time, I’ll be able to say I work for the ‘hospitality industry’ and hold my head up with pride and dignity. We will manage with a respect for [this] culture and for our employee’s sense of place. We will engender an ‘Ohana in Business.”

21. To be a manager is to touch the lives of others in profound ways. As a manager, you must accept this responsibility. With care. With Aloha.

Just one more thing: Remember that

“One of life’s greatest laws is that you cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening your own as well.”

~ Rosa