Achieving Alignment

Many studies have shown the importance of empowering people and giving employees high levels of autonomy to really unlock their individual and collective potential. Distributed and delegated decision making is essential. But... a well informed decision is preferable to an ill-informed one. And a timely decision is often vital.

In order to support this, we need to align the efforts of everyone. Considered communication is essential.

So, there is a need for alignment, but whenever mechanisms for alignment are put in place, the autonomy of individuals and of teams will be constrained to some extent. The risk is that traditional alignment mechanisms easily degenerate into a form of coercion.

There are numerous methods of achieving alignment such as:

inspiring purpose or mission-based (ideally meaningful and relevant)
from within as a culture-based or community-based mechanism
unhealthy coercion....which, in traditionally hierarchical organisations is still reasonably common.

When aligning large groups of people, there will be a coordinator – the person (or a group of people) appointed to coordinate a certain topic across the organisation. The degree to which this person is policing or coaching affects the level of reduced empowerment of the teams, from significantly to only a little respectively.

The key here is to ensure that alignment is based on a common context and understanding, reducing ambiguities and eliminating people pulling in opposing directions (which at best simply nullifies their efforts, but is more likely to cause, tension, frustration, even anger). Considered, effective and impactful communication is essential.

Align with a common purpose:

Ensure that...

Everyone understands why this direction is important and at a business level, what success looks like.