Mérito Mindset Framework
The Mérito Mindset is a new career coaching framework explicitly developed for the professional environment. It is a holistic mindset that connects the dots for professional career growth and success. It focuses on four professional development pillars that merge leadership and human resource concepts and practices.
What is the Mérito Mindset Framework?
A Mérito Mindset is when you try to be the best you can be in your professional career because your work has merit.
The framework can be viewed as a cycle in which achieving is the start and end point. For example, when you land a new job, you have achieved the goal of acquiring that new job. Your next step would be to develop within that role by enhancing your skills, growing organizational awareness, maturing your behavioral competencies (soft skills), and achieving a high-performance evaluation rating. The cycle starts again yearly because your performance evaluation will restart with new performance objectives.
Applying the Mérito Mindset:
Achieve high marks in your performance evaluation. The Achieve pillar focuses on performance management, which is often considered complex and challenging. One main reason is that we rely on supervisors to track and remember our yearly performance. To maintain a high-level performance rating each performance cycle, you have to demonstrate your abilities, accomplishments, and contributions. Stop relying on your supervisor to remember and recognize your accomplishments.
Instead, keep a journal to track your accomplishments. This will help you advocate for yourself during performance reviews, promotions, or interviews.
Develop your career trajectory. The development pillar focuses on creating a plan for your professional development. Development doesn’t end when you move into a professional environment. You’ll be faced with a new type of mental development that requires you to sharpen your professional knowledge, such as understanding organizational processes and procedures, enhancing your technical and behavioral skills, and keeping up with industry standards.
Creating a professional development plan alone is difficult, but it’s not impossible. Start by creating a career trajectory for the professional role you would like to obtain within 3-5 years. A Development Plan will focus on developing, acquiring, or enhancing the skill sets required for the job you have or want.
Build organizational awareness. Researching an organization is the best way to prepare for an interview, but research is still required once hired. The growth pillar focuses on Organizational awareness (institutional knowledge), which is about understanding the organization inside and out.
Organizational awareness is having a firm understanding of the organization's processes, procedures, key personnel, and culture. Eventually, you want to focus on almost every factor that impacts the organization, including partners and competitors. Acquiring organizational awareness can often take 5-10 years, but if you go beyond the organization’s mission, goals, values, and beliefs statements, listen intently, and build relationships, you may be able to shorten that time to 5 years alone.
Maturing as a professional. Professional maturity is more than being courteous and tactful. It involves an honest conversation with yourself about gauging your behavioral competencies (known as soft skills), such as “How well do I collaborate?" or "How is my time management?" It's an opportunity to assess your strengths or areas of improvement through behavioral competencies.
Self-assessments and reflections are the next level of professional maturity. Instead of simply guessing your level of behavioral competency, it’s best to truly understand the definition and how it applies to your level of expertise. Professional maturity involves opening one's mind to self-awareness
Recap
That’s the Mérito Mindset Framework for professional growth and success!
Achieving high ratings by managing your performance management
Developing as a professional by creating a career trajectory and professional development plan
Growing within the organization by building organizational awareness and
Maturing as a professional by developing self-awareness
While it may seem overwhelming, you do much of this almost daily as a professional. The only difference now is to organize your mind through a Mérito Mindset planner/notebook/journal so you can take…
“Professional growth in your hands!”
Ish & Raquel
