Increasing Alignment
Ideas and approaches to increase alignment across the whole organisation
A great team needs a high degree of alignment. In an ideal world, everybody has their role and plays within it. Strengths and weaknesses are known. And most importantly, there is a clear focus on a shared goal.
In short: a team feels like a TEAM. Not a group of loosely affiliated people that happen to work together.
Sounds great, right? And I am sure most of you will have to admit that alignment in their teams could be better. Even if it is only by a little. But where to start?
A little while ago, I proposed to begin the journey by trying to measure alignment. To have a repeatable and semi-quantifiable approach, we should ask four questions:
- What does success look like for you personally (in your role)?
- What does success look like for the team?
- (What does success look like for the department?)
- What does success look like for the company?
Once collected, the answers can be analysed across two dimensions:
- Misalignment — in case a group is not working together well.
- Misdirected — in case a person or group is heading in the wrong direction.
Great! We have a way to get a rough sense how well aligned we are. Now to the interesting bit: How to fix it. This is what the rest of this article is about, so… Let’s dive in!
I have categorised the tools into Misalignment and Misdirection.
When applicable, I will also mention which of the four questions are best suitable. However, most of the approaches work across levels. For example, having shared values is as important on a team as on the company level.
Misalignment
Misalignment happens when a group (or a group of groups) is not working well together. The combined output is far from ideal because group members are not working together well.
Shared Values
Best Applicable To: All Levels
Not having a common understanding of how to behave at work is one of the most common causes of misalignment. Is it more important to make money or look out for the customer? More important to deliver or learn?
Values are a way to define those guiding principles. They explicitly tell us how we expect each other to show up at work. In most cases, values are useful at the company level, but they can also be effective when applied to teams.
Explicit Roles & Responsibilities
Best Applicable To: Team
Plenty of uncertainty surfaces when it is not clear who does what. The impact surfaces in two ways. Firstly, we waste effort when people double up on a piece of work. Secondly, we put projects into jeopardy because no one is looking at a super important task.
Assigning explicit roles and their related responsibilities onto members of the team can help. It is a form of social contracting, which ensures everybody knows what to do and that there is minimal guesswork. A popular framework for this is RACI.
Transparency
Best Applicable To: All Levels
Transparency is one of those buzzwords that gets overloaded a lot. But the way I understand it, it is one of the most important tools to increase alignment.
Everything is communicated in the open. Discussions are accessible, decisions are shared, and ideas are published early.
A high degree of transparency gives everybody the same context, which makes close collaboration a lot easier.
Misdirection
A group is misdirected when their output is not in line with what the next level up expects. For example, if company success is getting more people on the website, but the team’s success is to cut marketing spend.
Goals
Best Applicable To: Team, Company
Goals, targets, KPI’s. Whatever the flavour, they do one thing very well: Make it clear what is expected of you and your team. There is no guessing after the fact. No turning around and saying ‘But we didn’t know that we had to do X’.
Two popular frameworks I have used are SMART and OKRs. The former is super straightforward but has its limitations. The latter is more scalable and can be used across the whole company.
Vision
Best Applicable To: Department, Company
I recently read The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge and found it to be one of the most inspiring books in quite a while. Among 4 other disciplines, building a shared vision is one of the cornerstones of an effective organisation.
And it really is. If there is no clear bigger picture — no answer to the question ‘What do we want to create together?’ — getting misdirected is quite easy. And as a bonus, it works great with a well-defined goal setting process.
Repetition
Best Applicable To: All Levels
This might sound like the odd one out. How can repetition help with alignment? Well, all the tools we talked about so far require buy-in from others. Unless you work in a company running on fear — and I really, really hope you are not — no one can stand up in front of a group and say ‘We’ll do it this way, suck it up!’
It takes a lot of determination and grit to see something through, and one major aspect is to repeat, repeat, repeat. Without, any new process, tool or approach will fail. If people are not hearing the message over and over again, they will eventually divert from the path.
