Align: Four Simple Steps for Leaders to Create Employee Fulfillment Through Alignment Leadership

By Chris Meroff

Being a leader is not easy. Learning to juggle new responsibilities is one thing, but nothing can prepare you for the anxiety you'll feel over how you're perceived, or the ever-present fear that you might disappoint your team or your boss.

You want to improve, but here's the dilemma: most leadership books totally miss the mark. They either focus too much on theory or they're aimed at leaders whose top concern is what leadership can get them. As a servant leader who's looking for results, you need practical advice and a clear path forward—not hollow talking points.

In his first book on Alignment Leadership, Align, Chris Meroff shares four simple steps that will transform the way you lead and renew your self-confidence. Through this process, you'll develop the courage to connect with your team in a meaningful way and start winning together. If you want to create alignment within your organization and develop a culture built on employee fulfillment, this book shows you exactly how to get there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781544502700

Book preview

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Copyright © 2019 Chris Meroff

All rights reserved.

Illustrations by Hillary Brooks and Ben Meroff.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0270-0

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For my kids: May your workplace experiences be shaped by the principles in this book and may they help you use your God-given gifts and talents to their fullest.

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Contents

Why Are You Here?

Step One: Create a Culture

1. Developing a Culture

2. Your Purpose

3. Guiding Principles

4. Cultivating Culture Within Your Company

The Align Roadmap

Step Two: Prioritize Your Tasks

5. Preparing to Get Practical

6. Prioritize Tasks

7. Remain Steadfast

The Align Roadmap

Step Three: Align Tasks with Resources

8. The Importance of Soft Skills Over Hard Skills

9. Discover Your Resources

10. Task Alignment and Assignment

The Align Roadmap

Step Four: Create Personal Success Plans

11. Invest in Your Employees

12. Invest to Influence

The Align Roadmap

What’s Next?

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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Why Are You Here?

You’ve probably heard the saying, Leaders are born, not made. You might even believe it.

I spent twenty years running my business with this belief, so I understand why you might feel this way. It’s what many business owners and leaders believe. It’s what I was taught to believe.

In this book, I’m going to show you why nothing could be further from the truth.

Leadership isn’t born out of a person’s natural gifts—anyone can learn it. I learned it and so can you. If you’re worried that you might fail, I get it. That’s what I thought. But if you commit to learning how to lead, you will succeed.

By leveraging your own natural gifts, you can learn how to become an effective leader. The key is finding alignment in leadership.

Alignment between a company and its people—specifically, the purpose of your company and your people—provides the structure and the path to leadership. In this book, I’ll provide you with four steps to Alignment Leadership.

Four steps—just four. They have to do with Culture, Tasks, Resources, and Employee Success. These things are all familiar to you, but what I have to tell you about them isn’t. It’s a new way of taking these steps toward a new way to lead.

First, let’s talk about Alignment Leadership, so you understand where we’re going with these four steps.

Put simply, Alignment Leadership allows everyone to feel like they’re winning—like they’ve never worked a day in their lives. It requires full comprehension, and then (and only then) full commitment to a purpose that allows every individual within a company, a department, or a team to feel fulfilled.

How does that sound? Wouldn’t you like your people to feel like that?

Like I said, Alignment Leadership requires comprehension and commitment. Comprehension comes from having conversations—sometimes difficult conversations—with your people about topics you’re already familiar with such as projects, tasks, and roles, but discussed in a different way. It also comes from having conversations about topics you’re probably not used to discussing with your people, such as culture, purpose, and their own hopes and dreams. Your full comprehension and theirs is the only pathway to the second half of alignment: the full commitment to get there.

I’ll take you through these steps, but first, let’s make sure this is the right book for you.

Who This Book Is For—and Who It’s Not For

If your intention in becoming a better leader is to get promoted, this may not be the book for you. If promoting culture and employee fulfillment doesn’t matter to you—even though they may be your company’s official core values or guiding principles—this book won’t help you. If you don’t care about the culture and the people in your company, this book is definitely not for you.

If you’re reading this book to confirm that you’re already doing everything right, you should think about spending your time reading a different book.

On the other hand, if you’re open to learning how to do better, lead better, and create a company where everyone feels like they’re winning, you’ve got the right book. If your goal is to learn how to serve the success of other people in a complete way, then Alignment Leadership is ideal. Alignment Leadership will appeal most to people who are prepared to go through a personal transformation to serve something bigger than themselves.

If you can see beyond the potential promotions, personal gain, and the dollars and cents of your role, prepare to learn how Alignment Leadership empowers you to become a leader who serves the purpose of your company and the people who work there. If this is your goal, keep reading. In four steps, I’ll show you how to create perfect alignment for your business, your people, and yourself.

That’s not to say you won’t get promoted. In fact, I know many individuals who were promoted once they learned how to lead. For example, an individual in my company, Kyle, followed these steps and rose through the ranks to executive leadership. I’ll share his story with you throughout these chapters.

The Value of Vulnerability

If you’re wondering why I’m qualified to talk about this, it’s because I’ve failed time and time again. I raised my kids in a typical household where the command and control style of parenting was how things got done. I didn’t understand the importance of things like purpose, conversations, culture, or alignment.

Years later, and after working with many, many employees with varying degrees of success, I’ve learned that applying healthy tension and addressing those things that no one wants to talk about are integral to employee fulfillment, and employee fulfillment is key to effective leadership.

Work isn’t just about responsibilities, tasks, and projects. There are people involved. People typically do not like being dictated to, but they love having a say in the work they do. They love doing work that aligns with their hopes and dreams, knowing they’re working for a greater purpose. They love knowing their coworkers and their leaders believe in them, support them, and want them to succeed.

Communicating clear expectations and following up on them may feel weird to you at first. You might think you’re ill-equipped to handle it. These conversations may feel awkward or uncomfortable, but you can learn how to have them.

My hope is that you’ll be brave enough to take these steps forward. You don’t have to be great at it. You don’t even have to be good at it. You just have to be willing to ask questions and listen to the answers because without these conversations, you and your people will never be aligned, and you will never enjoy the incredible benefits of Alignment Leadership.

Let me tell you a story about my friend, Kyle, and his journey from discontentment to true employee fulfillment.

Kyle’s Story

Kyle grew up in a home deeply rooted in the value of service to others. His mother, a math teacher by trade, taught Kyle how to gracefully lead people and adapt his level of support to fit each individual’s unique journey. Through her tireless personal investment into those she felt called to care for, she consistently demonstrated how to best serve each person by simply seeing them for who they are. Regardless of whether this happened through her work in teaching, Kyle learned that she found value and fulfillment in serving others.

Kyle’s father, a pastor, showed him how to serve his community as a whole by pursuing people in their times of need, even when they weren’t aware that they needed help. The relationships he cultivated with his community fostered the idea that giving back really served everyone. Visiting the sick in the hospital or chatting with the elderly in their homes or even just getting on a first name basis with local store employees illustrated the importance of connections to all, not just those with whom we share things in common. Although his father’s role as a pastor called on him to connect with those in his church, Kyle recognized that his father found fulfillment through his relationships to the wider community.

Both of their skill sets complemented one another, and through their partnership, they led all their children, including Kyle, through both actions and words. Every morning before school, Kyle’s dad would tell him and his siblings that they must lead by example. You don’t have to be the loudest, you don’t have to be perfect, but people will see what you do. His powerful words coupled with their family’s solid foundations and principles led Kyle to understand that fulfillment was not just possible—it was attainable and a necessary component to life.

Once Kyle began working in a field similar to his father’s, he expected to find that same sense of fulfillment he saw in his family life. He came to realize that his upbringing and personal purpose didn’t align with his purpose at work. The organization he worked for claimed one purpose but, in reality, seemed to tout another. Kyle felt a disconnect and couldn’t understand why his choices, though aligned with his background and values, didn’t match up to what he was getting from work. He felt lost and went home feeling unfulfilled every day. He didn’t yet understand that what he was seeking was alignment.

Kyle’s situation isn’t unusual. In fact, over 70% of people in America don’t feel fulfilled by their work.*

Think about that for a moment. That means at least two out of every three people you see at work are unfulfilled. Like Kyle, they come into a job with high hopes for a fulfilling career, but somewhere along the line they become disconnected from the purpose of the company or their role. Or maybe they never felt that connection at all.

I don’t blame Kyle. Like many people, he wanted to win but there was no structure and no path in place to allow him to. The leadership never created that structure or