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    You are here Home » employee engagement

    What a Success Plan Is (and Isn’t)

    Last updated on Sep 5, 2019 by Dan McCarthy · This post may contain affiliate links

    Guest
    post from Chris Meroff:
    Investing in your people
    should be the end game for you as a leader. They come to the workplace every
    day and invest their significant gifts and talents in an effort to help you and
    your organization reach an agree upon goal. Their success is your success. 
    So, it makes sense that
    we as leaders would want to create a success plan for our people. But first, we
    have to define success. And that can be a moving target.
    A success plan is much
    more than an annual performance review. Though they are sometimes lumped
    into the same category they are quite different. Annual performance reviews
    focus only on what’s born out of hard skills and tend to boil your people down
    to metrics around what they’ve done for your company. The general goal of these
    meetings is to determine a number that your company thinks your employee is
    worth. This (not so subtly) communicates that their value is based only on how
    much they can do for the company.  
    What Is a Success Plan?
    I tried the typical
    annual performance review in my company for several years, and it left both me
    and my employees feeling unfulfilled. In those meetings everyone was primarily
    concerned with their compensation, which is to be expected. Many were not
    interested in having a meaningful conversation about their passions and goals
    at work, let alone their passions and goals outside of work.
    It became clear that I
    needed to revisit these get-togethers and figure out a different agenda, one
    that would serve the company and the team member. I realized that if these
    great people who were bringing their bests selves to my company every day were
    having to ask for my time and space to talk about their fulfillment, then I
    probably wasn’t doing it right. Why should they have to wait for their next
    performance review to have a dialogue with me about their dreams, their success
    plans, or their jobs?
    When I realized that a
    change was needed, I started at the beginning. I redefined the whole notion of
    a success plan. Here’s my new definition: A success plan is dedicated space
    to focus on the success of your people, both personally and professionally, to
    move your employee to fulfillment
    . The success plan focuses on fulfillment
    through their soft skills and requires you as the leader to practice more
    intentionality and engagement on who they are personally, not just
    professionally. It’s a daily engagement toward ultimate fulfillment. Not
    that I said daily and not annually. Dialogue can and should happen anytime. Not
    just when I schedule it.
    To be successful at
    success planning you have to know the full person. You have to know what makes
    them tick and what might influence their idea of success. This is where the
    pursuit happens. This is where you show your people their value beyond what
    they bring to work. Pursue your people and do it on purpose. Yes, it takes a
    great deal of time and effort to pull this off. But the benefits for everyone
    involved-the company, the employee and yourself- are worth it.
    Meaningful Investment
    Creating a personalized
    success plan for each of your employees requires that you really
    understand your people. You have to understand how they define success
    personally and professionally. This takes time and sustained effort; you can’t
    rush through it. 
    Throwing pizza parties
    and happy hours doesn’t necessarily create these opportunities for meaningful
    investment and relationship building. If you care about your people and serving
    them toward fulfillment, be genuine and authentic in your pursuit. Talk to them
    about their families and home lives. Ask them how they spend their free time
    and what their interests are. Find out what really motivates them and how they
    define what’s commonly known as work-life balance. 
    In my organization, we
    no longer use the term ‘work-life balance’. Emphasizing work-life as a balance
    is a win-lose proposition. So, we use the phrase work-life integration.
    This is meant to create more alignment between our personal and professional
    lives. In a work-life balance model, something gets cheated; it communicates
    that you need to be all things to all people at all times, which is impossible.
    But by working toward work-life integration, the gap between the two is
    bridged and we communicate that the two should complement each other instead of
    competing.
    Figure these things out
    on an individual basis for each person in your organization and you will find
    that success becomes clear. It will be different for each person, but you can
    help them attain it, whatever it looks like. In exploring your people’s
    definitions of work-life integration, you’ll find some people who want more
    structure at work and others who would prefer to have more flexibility. Neither
    one is wrong—it’s just who they are. 
     
    You can do all this
    through informal conversations that can and should happen anytime that they are
    needed.  
      
    Chris Meroff has spent more than 25 years
    supporting leaders in education at both the campus and district levels. Through
    his work in 17 states and across thousands of school districts, he’s seen
    firsthand the frustration administrators feel when their efforts don’t produce
    the alignment they desire. He’s made a career of testing new leadership ideas
    to see what works—and what doesn’t—in service-oriented leadership. His
    business, Alignment Leadership Consulting, exists to teach leaders how they can
    boldly pursue a workplace culture that prioritizes employee fulfillment. You
    can learn more at
    www.AlignLeadThrive.com .
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