Learning the employee's core values

- The Alliance is all about fit, and one of the important things you need to fit in are employees' core values and aspirations. What does that employee want to do with their life? Who do they want to be when they grow up? If you don't understand these things, it's very difficult to craft a job that's gonna meet them. Now, one of the issues here is that your employees may not necessarily know their core values and aspirations. As a manager, you have to be prepared to help them figure those out. There is a key difference between the values and aspirations of a company and the values and aspirations of an employee. For a company, those core values and aspirations may be permanent. For example, Google is always gonna be about capturing and organizing the world's information. But for an individual, you may discover as you grow older, as you progress in your career, that things need to change. Perhaps you become a parent. Perhaps that becomes a part of it. And so you have to expect that a person's core values and aspirations may shift as they mature in their career. But that being said, that just provides you with another opportunity to go back and reset the Alliance according to those new core values and aspirations. Before you can help your employees understand their core values and aspirations, you have to understand your own. One of the ways you can do this is with an exercise from Anne Fulton of The Career Engagement Group. The way this exercise works is you pick three people that you greatly admire, anyone from history. Could even be a fictional character, and for each of these three people, you explain the three reasons why you so admire them. Let me give you an example from my own life. When I did this exercise, the three people I picked were Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, and Mr. Rogers, the children's television host. The reason I chose Lincoln was for his Compassion, his Egolessness, and his abilities as a Master storyteller. The reason I chose David Packard was for his Initiative as an entrepreneur, the Trust he placed in his Employees, and the Generosity he showed to everyone around him, including the community. And finally, for Mr. Rogers, what I found so appealing was the way he Accepted everyone for who they were, the Authenticity he brought to all his performances and all the things he did, and the fundamental Kindness he showed to everyone around him. Now when you take those three figures, and you add those characteristics up, you get a big picture of the key things that are most important to me, Chris Yeh. You can do the same thing for yourself. Take those nine different virtues, rank them, and that'll give you a clear picture of your own core values and aspirations, which you can then share with your employees and encourage them to do so on their own.