3 Steps to Master Alignment
What do marching bands, wheels of a car, and leadership teams all have in common?
The need for alignment.
Strategic leaders are able to Anticipate the needs of their people and the business, Challenge the status quo to surface all options, Interpret all available information, Decide what should be done, Align their stakeholders, and Learn from both successful and unsuccessful outcomes.
Of these, Alignment can be the most nuanced and can have the greatest impact on a leader’s effectiveness and the organization’s success.
Alignment and the tools and strategies to gain alignment grow in sophistication and necessity as you progress in your leadership.
What are two areas/projects in your work or life you’re feeling super aligned and connected?
What are two areas where folks are not seeing eye to eye?
What do you notice is the impact of misalignment?
How does this feeling compare to what you notice when you think about where you’re firing on all cylinders?
Misalignment impacts business and personal outcomes - reduces efficiency, creates stress, can prompt conflict, introduces confusion, etc.
Let’s take a look at 3 tools to develop, refine, and begin to master alignment.
#1 Identify Misalignment
To get things back on track, you gotta start in a place of knowing where you’re off track.
Try these on for size:
Friction - where do you see it?
The Founder’s Trap - is it tough to scale beyond your founder?
Shiny Object Syndrome - do you pivot with every good idea and can’t seem to say no to the next shiny object?
Poor Performance - does performance struggle and people are disconnected from their impact?
Nearsightedness - is it challenging to see beyond the next 3-6 months?
What else points to an opportunity for alignment?
As a leader, your first step is to identify the challenge and where you want to see greater alignment.
#2 - Hedgehog Concept
Step 2 is about asking the right questions.
Jim Collins of Good to Great fame created the Hedgehog Concept. It’s the notion that true organizational alignment, and a shift from being a good company to a great company, comes at the intersection of 3 important questions:
How does this play out with Organizational, Team, and Project alignment? Put another way, if you asked the following to the leaders of your organization how similar/dissimilar would the responses be?
What can we be the best in the world at? (And equally important—what can we not be the best at?)
What is the economic denominator that best drives our economic engine (profit or cash flow per “x”)?
And what are our core people deeply passionate about?
How about the team you lead? If you posed the following in a team meeting, what alignment would you see?
What can our team be best in the organization at?
What is the metric that drives us daily?
What are our team members passionate about?
Pause here for a moment, what’s coming up for you? What opportunities do you see? What actions could you take to ask these questions with greater confidence the responses will be aligned?
If you were to apply this concept to alignment on a particular project, what would those important questions be? I’d love to challenge you to draft those questions and bring them to your next meeting. Can you model for your stakeholders the questions that need to be asked and the collaborative communication that needs to follow?
#3 - Shopping Buy In vs Selling Buy-In
This last step is pulling together the challenge, the questions, and now your proposed solution.
Every leader knows Buy-In is critical to change management and moving people, products, and organizations forward.
I’d like to make the case that most leaders go about Selling Buy In vs Shopping Buy-In.
What the heck do I mean?
Selling Buy-In sounds like this….
Hello stake holder. I’d like to get your buy-in to make change X. What this will entail will be Y. What do you think?
You know what happens at this moment? The person seeking buy-in now goes on the defensive. They go back on their heels to receive questions/push back etc.
What if you Shopped Buy-In? Here’s what it sounds like…
Hello stake holder. We have challenge A on our hands. I have a few ideas on how I think we can solve A and I’d like your involvement. I believe if we were to do B our result would be C. What gaps do you see or what might I be missing?
You start with the challenge, you present your intended solution, and you’re involving them so it shifts from selling them to a collaborative effort. The result? Stronger and more immediate buy-in because their input was valued and they are now part of solving a challenge.
What’s something you’re needing to gain buy-in? What would shift in your interaction if you began Shopping Buy-In vs Selling Buy-In?
There you have it - 3 tools to develop, refine, and begin to master alignment.
What’s the biggest take away you’re having? What would it require of you to take action today?
