The Illusion Of ‘Alignment’ In Teams
Have you ever been in the following scenarios?
- Your team or external stakeholders decided on a new process or a new approach. Everyone signed off on it, and validated the process or approach calling it as an improvement over the old one. You get back to work the next week, and everything is back as usual — no sign of anyone following the new process.
- Your stakeholders call out something that’s not working for them. You co-create the new envisaged scenario over multiple iterations of feedback from them. Excited, you roll it out, only to realise no one wants to use it. Everyone’s back to doing what they complained about.
I can write down multiple such scenarios that have hit me out of the blue since the day I started working. If you are in a client facing or requirement gathering role, this is a daily problem to solve — more so in the product marketing and development space. I come from the education management/consulting space, and trust me, alignment/shared goals/shared purpose is the buzz word in this side of the world, and quite a pertinent one too.
In the social development space, the problems are complex, often porous, and require a variety of stakeholders to come together and solve for it. Let me give you a basic example — it’s generally observed that children from lower socio-economic backgrounds don’t get adequate nutrition to power through their days at school. A lot of these children also go back from school and work till late night to financially support the family — this results in them coming to school tired and exhausted the next day. Now, if we look at this from an education lens only, what we observe is children not achieving the learning objectives set by their teachers. An impulsive response to this is to do remediation/improve the quality of teacher’s planning, etc. But as you can see it, a purposeful approach to this issue is to work beyond the education department to ensure adequate nutrition, and financially secure environment. This would require alignment and partnership across stakeholders. I’m might be oversimplifying things in this example, but the broader idea is that collaboration, alignment, and shared purpose is almost second nature in this space.
Coming back to our problem at hand — how do we solve for ‘alignment’ issues when you have a multi-stakeholder setting, especially when everyone agreed on a code of conduct. In my experience, here’s why it doesn’t happen:
- Alignment doesn’t end with signing papers or agreeing over email — it is a fundamental behaviour shift. You’ll now be doing something slightly or very different than what you were doing yesterday. Your rational side might agree to the idea of changing processes for more efficiency, but the other side of your but there’s a side of you which is now attached to the older process and has been hardwired to it. The one way I have found around this is that someone has to be the bad cop, consistently calling out inconsistencies with the new process. Constant reinforcement with the awareness that it’s essential to changing behaviour is critical — else you’ll get frustrated with this soon enough. Also, setup some time during the week to compile inconsistencies and call out people who’ve adopted the new way. Creating constant awareness in people is a workaround.
- A lot of times there can be one or two stakeholders/teammates in the alignment group who aren’t fully bought in to the idea, but don’t put up a fight because of peer pressure. It’s very important to sense that and create a space which is open for dissent during the co-creation of the new process. Another way is to show evidences to get complete buy in.
- At times the decided new course of action can be too vague or unclear in terms of day to day operations. So while everyone’s aligned to the larger vision, everyone mightn’t have clarity on what it looks like to make it happen. Or once you start charting out the daily operations, it might bring out discomfort in the group even though everyone’s aligned to the larger vision. It’s important to walk till the last mile of the new vision with the entire group. There’s generally pushback when you unpeel the details- devil lies in the details
- Also, never do this — always is evident to people and it backfires.
These are some of the more evident reasons of alignment leading to non-action, but there could be more nuanced undercurrents to this issue. It’s very important as a project owner to have a very good sense of the energy in the room to identify the issues above at the right moment. If not dealt with at the right time, it could lead to complicated lockups of the project.
Have you ever been in any such situation before? Yes? How have you dealt with it?
