In some of my previous blogs, I have written about the importance of strategy, framework, and having the right people in the right roles for your company in order for your company to thrive. However, another important ingredient to success is ensuring that your staff’s goals and values are aligned with those of your company, and that they are committed to following through on the strategy you have set.
According to Jim Collins, author of the must-read Good to Great as well as other best-selling books on business management, alignment is a matter of employing staff who are:
“Disciplined people who engage with disciplined thought and who take disciplined action (operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities)”.
When I look at the successful mid-market clients that I have worked with, as well as the other high-performance companies, I see compound growth each year of between 15% – 25%, and a strong net profit of 18% – 25%+.
One of the things that these successful companies have in common is that they work hard to ensure that their staff know what the company values and goals are; that they believe in what the company wants to achieve, and that they are focused on what they need to do in order to achieve those results.
In short, when everyone has been clear on the aims of the company and has worked in alignment, achieving success has been much easier to do.
Why is alignment important?
As a business leader, you are the architect of your company’s future. Your strategy is in effect a blueprint of how the company should be built and perform. When blueprints are clear, visible to all employees and communicated regularly, then all employees also have a clear vision of what needs to be built, how their individual pieces fit together and what a successful build looks like.
If your company is not performing as well as you have communicated it should, then it is worth taking some time to check that your staff and their roles are working to the ‘blueprint’ you have set and are working in alignment.
Symptoms of misalignment between your company’s strategy and staff expectations and performance include:
- Employees not being on the same page about what needs to be achieved.
- People going in different directions, often around in circles.
- ‘People fires’ in the company which can cause internal politics, arguments and execution of parts of the plan at the wrong time.
When these symptoms are present, the result will be that you and your management team will waste a lot of time and energy trying to ‘fix things’. Staff will become unhappy in their work because they are not sure what to do; have to cover for other people’s work; do not know who is accountable for what, or do not receive adequate recognition for their performance.
Having no or poor alignment between your staff and the company’s goals and values will also result in poor productivity with low growth and in a worst-case scenario, your company stalling altogether or achieving negative results.
How to achieve alignment within your company
The building blocks to achieving alignment within your company include:
- Having a strategy that is simple, clear and defines the why, how, who and what the company is in business for. Often the overall strategy can be distilled down to one phrase.
- The strategy is accessible to all staff, is clearly visible and talked about often.
- As part of the induction process all staff learn about company strategy, and how their role fits in with achieving the goals set. They are also given defined responsibilities and know what part of the process they are accountable for.
- Employees are hired not only on the skills that they will bring to the company but also how well they will fit in with the values of the business.
Installing a business framework that works for your company will also help you achieve alignment within your company. I have helped many business use frameworks such as The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth and Outthinker to improve their business’s profitability, growth, and alignment. A recent example is my work with NZ mid-market growth company Touchpoint.
If you think that your company is suffering from a misalignment, give me a call today and we can have a chat about how I can help you and your business.
