The Importance of Alignment & Why it Matters to Businesses
This is page is an interview with our Director of Innovation, Samantha Burgess. In tandem with the release of our standalone Identity Assessment, we sat down to discuss how to define alignment, identify misalignment internally, and how to transition out of it.
Samantha walks you through the process she uses for today's most successful small-business owners.
She covers the categories that influence alignment, how to map your team’s current alignment, and what leaders can do to create clarity for teams prior to strategy. It’s everything you’d want to know.
We help business leaders make more informed decisions. If you’re interested in removing blindspots within your business, learn about what we’re doing here.
NO: How do you define alignment?
Sam: Alignment is the confluence of diverse personalities in shared vision. You can, and should, have people who think differently, but share a common approach.
NO: Talk to me about the ability to separate personal worth from professional outcomes and how this impacts alignment.
Sam: If you are operating on instinct in your position, then your vision of the company is limited by what your personality tells you to see or do. The inevitable result is that you are going to take the results of your work as a direct reflection of who you are.
Naturally, that becomes difficult when teams, especially leadership teams, have individuals who may be less confident in their skills, abilities, or experiences, mixed with people who are more ambitious or driven. As you mix these diverse people, insecurities start to block out the most important question we should all best asking ourselves as leaders:
“What’s the difference between how I instinctually approach my position and how my team needs me to approach my position?”
This instinctual tendency is why we have a section in the Capacity Assessment that focuses on the ability of individuals to separate personal worth from professional outcomes as a major predictor of a team’s ability to collaborate.
Individuals who struggle with the distinction between instinct and intentionality can be dangerous to the strategy and long-term vision of a company. It can also be a major cultural corrupter - which sounds harsh - but if you’ve got an influential person on a leadership team who is unable to put distance between their instincts and the way they approach their jobs, they could unintentionally be holding the rest of the team, and the business as a whole, hostage.
So, alignment is lot about getting distance between my instinct as a person and an understanding of what my team needs me to be in my role at this time. But making that happen is actually not all on me. I need a clear and decisive vision for the business and clear and decisive strategy for how we are going to get there. When I have that I can (if I’m willing to) step into the space between and ask, “How do I get myself from where I am comfortable to where my company needs me to be?
“The risk of not being aligned is that you are going to stall. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”
If you prefer Slideshare, here are a few slides to support the interview
NO: You created the Team Alignment report for the assessment. Can you elaborate on why as the head of Innovation, this is the tool you focused on?
Sam: One of the reasons the team alignment report is so powerful is because it allows people to cut through the nuance of business and all the distractions of our day-to-day assumptions. “I do this and he does that, so he can never understand what it’s like to be in my role.” Instead, the report allows us to break down each person’s perspective on the business to its absolute core elements and gives people a common language to articulate what they believe to be true.
The Business Identity assessment runs on our four categories are Strategy, Implementation, Resource Allocation, and People and that runs the gamut of everything that happens inside of a business. By looking at the two poles of behavior in each category and simply saying, “Are we going to be this or that?” - the complex business decision we’ve been waffling around on for month becomes simplified. Now, as a leader, I can say, “We’ve decided we’re going to be investing heavy this quarter, but my instinct is to risk-averse. This means I may sit in an uncomfortable tension for a while. Am I willing to do that?”
The resulting accountability is clear. Every leader has to answer that question for themselves. And every business has to respond with its own decision – is this the right resource or not? Can we, as a team, forge alignment by putting distance instinctual behavior and intentional pursuit of strategy or do we simply not have the right people on board? The Team Alignment report will help teams make real strides towards the answers to these questions.
NO: What is the risk of not fixing misalignment?
Sam: The risk of not being aligned is that you are going to stall. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. It’s not always obvious why, though. A lot of businesses are unable to recognize misalignment when it happens.
The side effects, however, are pretty obvious.
Typical side effects of misalignment are:
Same conversations over and over again
Working in silos
Major conflict between people in your leadership team
If you find your team meetings tend to return to the same conversation over and over again, or if you have significant tension between two or more members of your leadership team, the odds are there’s something deeper at play here. We tend to think we can fix misalignment by fixing the one or few things we disagree on or agreeing to disagree. But the real tension is not in the specifics and it’s not going to go away, either. Its most likely in what we believe to be true about this company we share and how it should do business. Someone somewhere is operating from instinct, not shared vision. It may be because there is no clarified vision, which is the responsibility of leadership. It may be because someone can’t or isn’t willing to move from instinctual behavior to intentional behavior. Regardless of the reason, the business is stuck until the tension is addressed.
It’s a lot easier to hold people accountable if you have a shared, well-articulated vision and strategy for the company and a way that every role is supposed to approach that vision and strategy.
When you don’t have these things clearly laid out and you’re allowing everyone to kind of feel out that space for themselves, that’s when it becomes really difficult to say who is or who is not approaching the direction of the company appropriately for their position.
High producers will grow weary of the never-ending obstacles. Politics abound. Everyone ends up entrenched and unwilling to compromise. People stay in silos and begin going in circles over and over again.
“So that, if I’m willing to, I can step into the space between and ask, ‘How do I get myself from here to where my company needs me to be?’”
NO: How does a team grow out of misalignment?
Sam: Awareness and courage. Leaders have to agree to put personality tendencies second and be open to being held accountable. Very few people are actually willing to do this when the rubber meets the road. Change makers need to set their expectations accordingly.
We actually stumbled across the need for what would eventually become our Change Capacity assessment by following the natural flow of this reconciliation process. Because the obvious next question is: “Well how capable is my leadership team of stepping outside of their own tendencies?” Some people are simply more capable or more willing than others. That’s why the Capacity tool includes that facet - ability to separate personal worth from professional outcomes – as a major indicator of change capability. If you can’t do that, then you’re not going to be able to leave your instincts behind. If you can’t leave your instincts behind, you will struggle to be a contributing member of a team. It is, unfortunately, that simple.
NO: Why do we allow misalignment in the workplace even after we notice it? Is it that difficult to change?
Sam: It’s hard work and we convince ourselves it isn’t necessary. Despite having every good intention to foster a great team, it’s very common for leadership to see money coming in the door and feel the freedom to push off pains if they can be immediately correlated with revenue loss. When misalignment is expressing itself in conflict in the leadership team, it’s also a lot easier to see it as personality differences and tell people to work it out between themselves. But, as we’ve already stated, misalignment at the leadership level is almost always the result of differing perspectives on the business, not differing personalities. Executive leaders are just as responsible for resolving that conflict as the parties themselves, especially when it stems from the lack of a clarified vision and strategy.
More than anything, fixing bad cases of misalignment takes a tremendous amount of courage, more than most people think it does, because it requires vulnerability and accountability, starting with the executive leader. Many people aren’t ready to be this open with their livelihoods on the line. If they can’t separate personal worth from professional outcomes, then they have even more to lose. It’s risky. It’s scary. It may not work. For many leaders, that’s a good enough reason to struggle on as we are.