Everyone wants to feel fulfilled by their jobs – but can fulfillment be achieved through an employer’s leadership style?Chris Meroff, the author and creator of Alignment Leadership believes it can, and this week on ProjectHR, he shares with us his secrets to communicating value to employees, eliminating uncertainty in the workplace and helping everyone find their pathways to success. In this episode of ProjectHR, we’ll talk about:
- Identifying the “moving target” of value
- What Alignment Leadership is, and how you can put it to work in your organization
- Why finding fulfillment at work is so important
- Alignment Leadership’s Four Step Process!
Chris Meroff Leadership “I will always reward excellent failures and punish mediocre success.”
If you prefer to read along while you listen, we’ve done all the hard work for you! We listened back to this episode and took notes below, and access is free! Identifying the Moving Target * Mr. Meroff worked with his parents early in his career, which was a great workplace experience, but one that forced him to consider the question of value – of course his parents valued him as their son, but did they value him as an employee, and what did that even mean? * He discovered that value can be a sort of “moving target”, changing day to day, and he wished to remove this moving target of value, both for himself and his employees.
What is Alignment Leadership (The Concept)? * The ability for a team – on or off the job – to be on the same page, and in agreement about where they are going. * It’s about unity, partnering with your team to allow for conversation to be free-flowing. * Experiencing the workplace in a way that allows everyone to win, all the time. It’s about creating win-wins for both employers and employees!
The Importance of Finding Fulfillment at Work * A central part of this concept is leaders helping employees find personal fulfillment in their work. * Fulfillment comes from understanding and agreeing with where your company is going and understanding where your effort plays into it. * This can be difficult to articulate at work – and that’s something we’re trying to solve by creating this concept about leadership that is all about unity. * This plays into the idea of servant leadership. * Alignment leadership defines leadership as “loving and serving people toward fulfillment”. * “Love” is not often talked about at work, but incorporating the use of that word in the workplace allows people to feel that they have intrinsic value, that they’re not just a cog in a wheel, that they’re not just valuable because of what they can do but because of who they are.
Align To Eliminate Uncertainty * Uncertainty is the elephant in the room. * When you don’t know where you stand with someone, it creates anxiety (both personally and professionally). * The framework of the book Align is to help create conversation points to eliminate that uncertainty, to force conversation around the things that we want to avoid, but we do it in a way that makes it a fair playing field for everyone.
Alignment Leadership’s Four Step Process 1. CULTURE: Define and understand the culture of your organization or your team. 2. TASKS: Understand how to leverage your culture and your purpose to prioritize your time. 3. RESOURCES: How to take those prioritized tasks and projects and assign them to the resources (the people) that you have in your organization based on they value that they bring and not just what they know or what they can do, but who they are, their passions. 4. EMPLOYEE SUCCESS PLANNING: More than just a performance review!
Step One: Culture * Alignment Leadership’s definition of culture: Culture is the sum of the world views of the people in the room. * World view = your experiences, traditions, hopes, preferences and beliefs. * There is no one right world view – we celebrate the diversity of world views. There’s power, innovation and collaboration through diversity of world views! * We don’t just want to define our culture, we want to shape it. * Shaping it begins with defining the organization’s purpose, which allows people to buy-in to the organization’s journey. * Shaping also happens through defining principles (core values) – soft skills that we agree we’re going to hold each other accountable to.
Step Two: Tasks * Now that the journey has been decided upon, we have to identify what we’re going to do next — what’s the first thing we’re going to do to accomplish this goal? * Prioritizing tasks eliminates uncertainty for both employee and employer. * The team develops the task list together because you want employees to step up in ownership, and then leaders follow up with individual employees to confirm they are comfortable with their tasks.
Step Three: Resources * People are your greatest resources! * Open tasks to employees to volunteer/opt-in for tasks * Assign tasks, as needed, with an understanding of who employees are and what they’re passionate about as individuals.
Step Four: Employee Success Planning * Once employees and the leader are aligned (steps 1-3), leaders can begin to imagine the future for each employee and communicating those thoughts with their employees. * This can be so impactful for employees and leaders alike! When you can start to see people for who they are, and appreciate their value, you can get very specific and very personal about the value they bring to the organization. * This can deeply and positively impact productivity!
Alignment Leadership (The Company) * Workshops, Webinars, Video Series & One-on-One Consulting sessions are available * Can be completely customized to what a company needs.
Excellent Failures Podcast * Mr. Meroff’s podcast, dedicated to his failures as a leader and as a man, because failure ALWAYS leads to learning! * “I will always reward excellent failures and punish mediocre success.”
Chris Meroff: Backstory * Former Executive Director/Owner of MSB Consulting * Mr. Meroff’s current roles are as Executive Director and Owner of MSB Ventures and as the Author and Creator of Alignment Leadership * Author of Align: Four Simple Steps for Leaders to Create Employee Fulfillment Through Alignment Leadership
Contact * Chris Meroff: chris@msb-ventures.com * Alignment Leadership
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