In July 2021, I joined the iAlign.Work team as their Online Presence Manager. I had just finished two years working for a non-profit college campus ministry and thought it was time to try going corporate. Having majored in Business Management with a specialization in Entrepreneurship, I was fascinated with the idea of working at a startup.
I grew up in Silicon Valley and my plan was to move back and look for a job there, but after seeing the potential of iAlign and the fun company culture, I decided to take the job and stay in San Diego.
For my first three days of “work” they took me to the Ritz Carlton in Palm Springs for their rockstar themed “Coach This!” retreat with TCW Global. It was wild.
I know. I couldn’t believe it either. An all expenses paid trip to the Ritz flippin Carlton with poolside hangouts, open bars, breakfast with the CEO, and a fancy kobe-beef shabu shabu dinner?
I felt a little out of my element living so lavishly at one of the fanciest hotels around. I never imagined I would ever stay at a place like the Ritz Carlton with the hotel staff being so attentive to my needs and calling 23-year-old me “sir.” Definitely not your usual onboarding experience…
TCW Global does a Coach This! retreat every year to provide ongoing training and support to the major influencers at TCW. It’s one of the ways TCW helps their people grow in leadership and coaching skills. This year’s events and sessions were designed to launch iAlign.Work to TCW as their performance management system. The intention was to introduce the coaching language to TCW and show them how to use the iAlign system for the roll-out to the rest of the company.
I was blown away at how kind the iAlign team and the people of TCW were. Everyone genuinely wanted to get to know me and made the effort to make sure I felt welcomed. The co-founder of iAlign, Jered Lish, even prepared a little care package for me: Coach This! t-shirts, a notebook, stickers, pens, pop rocks (yes the popping candy to go along with the ROCK-star theme) and other goodies for the weekend all tied together with a post-it note with my name on it. How thoughtful!
Within the first few hours of being there, I could tell that people really loved working at iAlign.Work and TCW Global.
Being the new guy, I asked almost everyone I met how they liked working at iAlign and at TCW. People were quick to give praise to their workplace. They told me about the great people, good work-life balance, and fun life experiences they’ve shared. There was a sense of true friendships and real community beyond work obligations. People actually shared life together outside of work! That’s something I don’t hear very often. I think it’s a sign of a healthy workplace, and something I was personally looking for after leaving my last job which felt like a second family. I heard story after story of people opening their homes to each other for dinner, going on vacations together, and traveling to places like Tokyo, Cabo, and Europe for work. I was blown away!
One of the biggest things that stood out to me was how down to earth, friendly, and open the CEO of TCW, Samer Khouli, was. Even as CEO he seemed to know what was going on in the lives of his employees, and made the effort to stop and check in with me and see how I was doing in the midst of the hectic weekend.
Throughout the retreat, the iAlign team lead sessions on:
The sessions were helpful for me to better understand how the product worked and the vision of iAlign.Work. We got to dive into the issues of existing performance management systems and walked step by step through how iAlign solves them. Here is some feedback from a few TCW attendees at the retreat:
“I am excited to have a consolidated & organized way/place to set goals, updates, and overall progression for my team. It is really hard managing so many people without a tool to properly track & communicate with my employees. Reviews are going to be much easier, and the overall progression of employee's performance being housed in iAlign is going to be amazing!”
- Natalie Dugger (Director of Account Management)
“...The importance of giving constant feedback to your coachees. Not just one time a year. This means all kinds of feedback for corrections to positive reinforcement. Even though you may be a leader who does these things already, iAlign will help organize and help leaders focus and save time in the end. Pretty powerful stuff.”
- Sean Simkins (Business Development Trainer)
“I believe in the ability to use iAlign in our everyday lives to keep employees engaged and excited about the future of TCW GLobal . Right now, our mechanism for performance reviews sucks so adding this will help.”
- Jaime Nguyen (HR People Manager)
1. iAlign takes a visual approach to performance management
The system allows people to tell their performance journeys through media like files, pictures, and videos! This is a huge draw for me. I wish I had this at my previous job where I could document what I was doing through pictures, videos, and files; a way to organize my work and what I have accomplished in a centralized location to show my supervisor. There’s a sense of making performance management satisfying - where I can look back at what I’ve been working on in the past few months, organize my work to make a case for a promotion, or just to be celebrated for the work I’m doing by my coworkers because I can easily share it! iAlign allows me to become the author of my performance story.
2. Performance management is in desperate need of a revamp
Most people hate doing performance reviews (me included). How is a word document supposed to accurately capture all the work I’ve been doing for the past 6 months/year? It can’t. On top of that, if it slips my mind to add something in the time I sit down to write my self-assessment it won’t be reflected on my performance review!
The iAlign system provides a robust way to organize and display my work so come performance review season I can just click print and already have my success story, an organized view of the work I’m proud of for the last performance cycle. Talk about streamlined performance management!
3. iAlign doesn’t just manage people, they seek to develop people!
People need to be able to show up to work and live out their values and callings in the workplace. It’s a necessity in thriving and productive workplaces, and a necessity for the health and well-being of people. I believe we are the best versions of ourselves when our work is aligned with our core values, and callings in life.
Knowing this, the iAlign team created something called the MyPurpose assessment. An assessment that helps identify people’s main drivers of purpose at work so that people can better empower themselves and their coworkers to do meaningful work. So that we can better understand each other in the workplace and set each other up to thrive in the workplace.
The iAlign system also utilizes a strengths-based approach towards performance management. Strengths are integrated throughout the system to encourage people to use their strengths to their advantage and work towards developing their weaker strengths and skills.
The first night of the retreat we had a rockstar themed costume cocktail hour. It was a BLAST! The costumes were so great, some people went ALL OUT! It was fun to see everyone dress up and let their hair down.
Overall, I had a blast! It was an amazing time meeting the iAlign team and people of TCW Global. I love the vision of what we are doing! To simplify performance management in a way that celebrates and develops people, so that people can find fulfillment in the workplace. We’re seeking to empower people to thrive at work!
I’m STOKED to keep ROCKing on with the iAlign Team. I can’t wait to see what we can do!
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