It’s common knowledge that the days of lifetime employment (i.e. working for the same company for your career) have passed. But an interesting shift has accompanied that change. Employees are taking more ownership over their own career development. On one hand, this sounds like a really good thing. But self-driven career management may correlate to talent mobility, which can be bad if the organization isn’t prepared. As an employer, what can you do to prepare? I have 5 simple steps to help aid you in better handling this dilemma, as well as tips for those that feel they have become a training ground for their competitors.
Continuing on the topic of organizational alignment… In organizations, alignment has three dimensions. Vertical, Horizontal, and Contextual. It is this third dimension is about sustainability and congruence and the softer side of leadership. Read more about all three in this week’s article, and consider how you would you rank your organization’s alignment across the three dimensions. Is your focus on the dimension that will produce the highest payback?
I admit it… I confess… I have a few favorite words and I tend to overuse them. Some of these favorite words come and go, but some stay for a long time. One of my all-time favorite words is ‘alignment’. I’ve had it for a while and I plan to keep it forever. If you show me a problem, any problem, then I’ll explain why it is caused by a lack of alignment.
In considering alignment as it relates to organizations, two questions arise – what does alignment mean and why is it important?
We’ve all been there. The speaker has just finished. Maybe we were listening to the economist at the annual meeting or the expert who knows more than we do about how to achieve success. Everyone in the audience is looking out the corners of their eyes, without moving their heads, to see if anyone else understood what was just said. The speaker’s liberal use of buzzwords and otherwise uncommon language helped him clearly establish why he was the speaker and others were only the audience.
Buzzwords can be awesome. They can be fun to use. They can make us feel current, connected, and (if we are totally honest) maybe even a little smarter than the average colleague. However, in the wrong situation, they can have a negative effect.
I can’t help but compare the rigor that major league sports teams use to decide who to employ to how companies handle their selection process. Data-driven decision making has become all the rage in sports. I heard one General Manager state that there is no room in the process for their gut feelings. He said they have quantified the evaluation of every aspect of draftees’ profiles and that they will draft exclusively based on that. Which takes this article to the story of George…
When it comes to performance, the employee and manager are almost always both aware when performance is on a downward slide. It is the proverbial “elephant in the room.” If there is no open communication, this can snowball into an unpleasant situation. This does not have to be the case. The ugly outcome can be averted if managers and employees are in constant, genuine dialog about performance and development.
Sometimes we can become obsessed with the things we can measure and forget that a significant part of leadership is to make decisions when the data points are ambiguous. Consider this example to drive home this point…
Leadership – complexity or simplified? If you are like most leaders, you are asked to do more with less, you are expected to roll with the punches as agendas change; you wrestle with the security of your own job as the whole loyalty aspect of the employer/employee relationship is redefined. Seems complex, for sure.