One of the
primary responsibilities of business leaders is to ensure that their
organisations are more successful tomorrow than they are today. They have access
to various business tools to help them achieve this goal, including strategy
development and implementation; talent management; leadership development;
communication strategies; risk analysis; etc.
And for each of
these key business tools there are a multitude of potential solutions offered
by a mass of consultancy companies of all shapes and sizes; as well as a host
of research findings from competing academic institutions, all offering a
solution that might be right for your organisation – if you could only understand
what they were actually trying to say and how you should implement it
effectively in your organisation. To the extent that many business leaders,
especially at the sme level, are rightly skeptical of many of the solutions currently
on the table and the price tags they often come with.
Yet it seems the
biggest problem – and possibly the missing link – in optimising business
performance is ‘alignment’.
It might sound
obvious that business processes and systems need to be aligned to the
organisations vision and goals to ensure they not only optimise performance;
but that they also have a real-time ‘aligned’ information flow throughout the
company and beyond. Yet some of the largest companies in the world have
experienced times when they have invested in the ‘best’ systems and processes
in the market only to find that these ‘best’ systems simply didn’t talk to each
other – leading to sub-optimal information transfer throughout the company.
Alignment should
be one of the core criteria in strategic thinking; risk analysis thinking; organizational
design; process flow; and information technology. Yet surprisingly it is a word
that is seldom used outside of the ‘classroom’ and is why organisations of all
sizes struggle with optimizing their performance.
Part of the
problem is that alignment of information technology and process flow costs
money – and with many organisations still struggling to rebuild and reinvent
themselves in the aftermath of the financial crisis – alignment can be viewed
as a low priority at this point in time. The ‘internal dialogue’ being that we
have managed to survive with these systems or processes not talking to each
other up to now – and we’ll just have to ‘make do’ until we can afford to
‘invest in aligning the systems’. Also because there is often a lack of knowledge
about ‘aligned’ systems anyway, there is distrust about whether alignment of IT
systems specifically is even possible.
But alignment
goes beyond systems and actually starts with people. If your people aren’t
aligned to your vision – whether it’s a team’s vision; a department’s vision; a
branches vision; or the organisations vision – you will not be performing at
your optimum and could in fact have different teams ‘pulling’ in different
directions – simply because they are not aligned to the organizational vision
and goals.
Alignment goes
beyond communication, involvement and even understanding of an organisations
vision, strategy and goals – as alignment ensures that everyone in every
position is aligned with everyone else to work together to achieve certain
aims.
It’s a simple
concept and unfortunately too often taken for granted after the strategic plan
has been rolled out across the organizational structure. But it needs the CEO
or a dedicated representative to follow up to ensure the employees at all
levels are fully aligned with each other. Otherwise all that happens is one
department goes off faster than another – fully understanding their role in the
strategic vision (at least within their team) and driving on feeling positive
about their involvement – but without realising that their lack of alignment
with other departments or individuals is in fact having a negating effect on
the organisations optimal performance.
This lack of
alignment can have serious consequences on the organisation as it doesn’t only
impact performance but more often than not has a significant impact on
motivation and morale – whereby even in those rare organisations that the
organisation has full buy-in to their strategy and an understanding from all
the staff of what has to be done – the lack of alignment can quite quickly
derail the process leading to real confusion and a lack of motivation
throughout the organisation – to the extent that the original strategy and
exciting future for the organisation doesn’t look so exciting anymore.
All this because
alignment hasn’t been sort and/or monitored on a regular basis – as the
original exciting future is still there – the only thing that has changed is
the organisations morale.
So it’s worth
spending time to check alignment between people and departments on a regular
basis to keep performance and motivation high and in sync with the original
strategic vision. And then ensure all the systems and processes are also
aligned to give the organisation the right ‘tools’ to meet their objectives.