Slacker Manager

Write Your Management Manifesto

by Phil Gerbyshak on April 9th, 2008

Guest post by Rosa Say, author of Managing with Aloha Coaching

We live in a time of information overload and knowledge gluttony: What do you zoom in and focus on, and apply open-minded listening to retain, and what becomes nothing but more noise, cluttering up your hearing and your view planes?

If you are a great manager, and feel that being a manager is an intuitive strength or calling for you, this question of worthwhile focus is one you want to help people answer. You certainly don’t want to be part of the problem, adding to what they feel falls in the “noise” category.

You can serve yourself well by having a Manager’s Manifesto (MM), one defining which of the messages you send out to the world are most important to you. When you put a MM together and review it regularly, you will find that your messages become more consistent and get continually groomed with more clarity. You cull your own communication clutter, and thus, you serve others well too.

A manifesto is best described as a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, principles or motives. That word “public” can double as manifesto definition and a goal: Whatever you publish should be thought of as the good word you are willing to attach your name and credibility to. In an MM you are stating your intentions, and you are making it known that you intend to stand up for them: You are saying, “This is the talk I will walk!”

Here are two samples of MM’s I have become known for:

1. This first one is the Ho’ohana (intention) of my business, combined with my Ho’ohiki, the promises I make to my customers: I use it as a Mission Page.
2. This second one is something I call The Calling of Management: The 10 Beliefs of Great Managers. When I coach, speak and write about management, my messages are somehow aligned with one of these ten beliefs.

Both of these are several years old for me, and I have long lost count of the number of times I have revised them. Though grounded in the core values that are my constants, I consider them to be works in progress. The great managers of our world are open-minded learners, and they have an optimistic and positive expectancy that what they now think about and believe in WILL change. They expect their belief systems to evolve constantly. Writing a Management Manifesto for themselves is a way to track their core beliefs and actively work on them.

Again: The best benefit to a MM is how it helps you achieve consistency and clarity in the messages you wish to communicate and not just broadcast wishing and hoping they stick. Your MM is a terrific tool for spaced repetition (behavioral conditioning and internal reinforcement).

So what say we start a draft here for you in the comments, and in doing so, we share with Phil and David, our hosts here at Slacker Manager, what we as a group of readers believe in most when it comes to management?

What would be the first one or two phrases or sentences that would be on your MM? Write them as those manager’s messages you want to be heard through the clutter; heard and associated with you.

~ Rosa Say

Post author Rosa Say coaches, speaks and writes; she is the author of Managing with Aloha Coaching, where you can “Put Managing with Aloha in practice in our value of the month program: Live, Work, Manage and Lead with Aloha!” She is the founder of Say Leadership Coaching and managing editor of Joyful Jubilant Learning, home of the Ho’ohana Community, where collaborative learning thrives in a dynamic community founded by shared Aloha.

Point of trivia: Rosa was the very first Guest Author ever to write for Slacker Manager back in May of 2005 when then-Slacker Bren Connelly unexpectedly (but joyously) found he needed a pitch-hitter in hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists here.

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POSTED IN: Great Manager Series, guest posts