Leadership Transitions and Team Building: Leadership Collection (2 Books)

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Building Alignment in a Tour of Duty

Aligning Employee Goals and Values with the Company’s

In the Industrial Age, the company subsumed an employee’s individual identity. The company offered lifetime employment and defined benefit pensions. In exchange, the employee put his head down, worked hard, and subordinated any personal aspirations and values to those of the company. In his classic book The Organization Man, first published in 1956, journalist William Whyte described the fundamental principle of this age: “What’s good for the group is good for the individual.” Of course, Whyte was a critic of this approach, calling it “the soft-minded denial that there is a conflict between the individual and society.”¹ Sure enough, this “organization ...