I’ve resigned from the “Great Resignation” to join the “Great Realignment”

All this buzz using the term ‘resignation’ to characterize the climate of today’s workforce drives me crazy. First off, it’s so negative…to resign is “to surrender” according to m-w.com, which also means “to give up completely” and yield the essence of power to another person or influence. Secondly, resignation only emphasizes the actions of the employee and not the employer, who is equally as responsible for the climate today. So great resignation is akin to saying, “the current climate is the great employee surrender”?

On the contrary, for many employees, this period of time represents their choice to begin a new career or enter the next phase of their career, but is nowhere close to a time where people are just giving up. And what about employers? Are they passive victims during this time? Of course not, there isn’t a viable or successful company in the world right now that isn’t making changes to their organization’s strategy, structure, initiatives, products or talent. Even if a company has always had a successful platform and doesn’t see the need to change, most are constantly connecting to their teams to be sure employees are still engaged and delivering on the common goals.

Merriam-Webster defines alignment as the arrangement of groups or forces in relation to one another. Now that sounds much better to me… We can choose to take action to arrange (or rearrange) people and management structures, processes, products/services and so on to nurture cooperation and collaboration amongst the forces to achieve the common goal. In other words, we can bring the forces together instead of yielding or surrendering them to one another. For employees as well, now is a time where one is able to align (or realign) skills, experiences, work-life balance to their passion, productivity, family and financial goals; all forces that should function in relation to one another.

Those who have worked with me in the past have likely heard me say, “If you don’t like what you see, change the way you look at it.” I’m less a part of surrendering to the “Great Resignation”, but actively joining forces with the “Great Realignment” by arranging my purpose and passion to my productivity!