The Problem
Do you know the signs that your car is out of alignment? The feeling you get when holding the steering wheel and there’s vibration. You let go briefly and you sense the discomfort of your car drifting left or right instead of moving towards your destination.
Alignment keeps the wheels on your car pointed in the same direction. Proper alignment requires adjusting the angles of each tire, so they all move the car towards a destination sought by the driver.
Organizations aren’t much different. The driver is the leadership. Leadership drives the organization, like a car, towards a destination to achieve a vision or purpose. The members of that organization are the wheels, each one affecting whether the car goes towards the destination leadership seeks.How come so many organizations are out of alignment, taking tortured and twisted routes to achieve their purpose, often accomplishing far less than originally sought?
The Solution
While you can’t drive your organization to a mechanic for an alignment, you can take stock of your enterprise’s purpose, examine the purpose of each individual within your organization, and determine how to develop a common understanding that meets each other’s needs. That’s a tall order, but the time and cost of creating organizational alignment is worth it. For example, organization alignment focuses time, money, and people on optimal work performance. This means the work environment includes clear roles and responsibilities, resulting in fast decision-making, few delays, and minimal confusion about whether we’re all doing the right thing and achieving the greatest value.
Alignment requires establishing a vision or purpose defined by enterprise-wide collaboration. Storytelling is a great way to start and foster this collaborative definition because it offers a compelling tool that influences, teaches, and inspires people. Senior leadership starts by telling their personal stories about the organization and its purpose to middle management, encouraging their team to do the same. Middle management leadership then engages frontline leadership and their direct reports to repeat this process. The distilled results create the basis for a collective understanding of the organization’s purpose.
On an individual level, alignment requires a chain of leadership. This includes two types of leaders. The first is the top leader, who has the power to approve, fund, and allocate resources that achieve endeavors supporting the organization’s purpose. The second, is reinforcing leadership, who uphold, strengthen, and execute these endeavors on behalf of the authorizing leader.
Day-to-day, reinforcing leadership helps align their direct reports beliefs and abilities with the organization’s purpose. Individuals with abilities that are not in alignment receive training. The reinforcing leader ensures that these direct reports have the time, away from their regular duties, to receive and learn new skills required to achieve the organization’s purpose.
It is also the responsibility of reinforcing leaders to foster connection between direct reports’ beliefs and the organization’s purpose. This involves, for example, assigning employees work that they are most passionate about, reinforcing both their individual value and organizational contribution.
In another example, reinforcing leaders assign employees to mentors and teams, who challenge, strengthen, and recognize those individuals’ personal growth while increasing involvement in and enhancement of the organization’s purpose.
This is not a one-and-done event, but an ongoing process. Look for misalignment or the vibrations in your organization, like high turnover, as an indicator that you’re not keeping all the wheels of your organization pointed in the same direction. Once identified, it’s time to take your organization to the mechanic for an alignment.
Source
Harrison, Don. Introducing the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) A Practical Guide to Change Project Management. Lakewood, CO: Implementation Management Associates, 2017.
