Alignment for Autonomy

For the last two days I’ve been writing about the benefits of granting autonomy to employees. On Tuesday, we talked about the increases that autonomous employee generate in customer satisfaction when they have the freedom to rise to what the moment demands.

Yesterday I shared some of the ways that companies have used radically autonomous organizational structures to grant freedom to their employees, and they ways it has fostered remarkable innovation.

I am even more enthusiastic about the ability employees have to to execute strategy when given enough autonomy. But, there is clearly attention implicit in this one. While it’s critical for individuals to have the decision making power, when faced with a choice of what to do in any given moment, it’s also important to the organization that everyone remain aligned.

It is that very alignment, which is at the heart of strategic focus, and in creating the conditions that allow granting true autonomy to a team of individuals.

Strategically Unaligned

What does it even mean to be aligned? We hear the term all the time, but it is rarely unpacked in a meaningful way. I can’t do that project justice here.

But, right now I am seeing the challenge of aligning an organization —even a comparatively small one— around an ambitious strategy. One of my clients is a 50 person technology start-up. They have been around for a while, but remain in start-up mode. By that I mean that they are still within the capital raising elevator of growth, and attempting to accelerate that growth so as to earn a next round of funding.

A new CEO has been hired and he has ambitious plans for every aspect of the organization. That includes New Partnerships, a new, organizational structure, and most critically, massive transformation of the product, which is a data analytics platform.

But, because the company is fully remote, aligning everybody around this very big pivot in messaging, technology, customer value proposition, and the relative prioritization the many initiatives that go into that has been daunting.

It has sharply highlighted the relationship between strategic alignment and autonomy. Because in the absence of that alignment, the employees feel confused, and hesitant to make any decisions on their own. They are not sure what is consistent with the strategy and what is not.

Strategy As Guide to Action

Alignment is, at heart, a simple concept. It implies some key features for an organization:

The organization has a cleary articulated strategy that includes

1. A specific vision or endpoint for the organization
2. A description of the unique selling or value proposition or differentiator
3. The specific way that the organization will go about delivering on that value proposition. (That is clear enough to rule OUT many other ways of doing so).
4. A select number of over-arching initiatives that will lead to the next milestone.

If all of those elements are in place, then the real job is to share it all in such a way that everyone understand it. But understanding is also a complicated concept. Because it’s not enough to understand the strategy conceptually. In order to make decisions in the moment. Everyone needs to understand their specific piece of the puzzle, and how their decisions, actions, outcomes and results affect others in the organization, and the progress of the strategy.

That’s the goal: Every team member understands the rationale behind the company’s plans and can translate them to her own work.

Spotify’s Success

At Spotify, they have embraced the cause of working hard on alignment and then granting the autonomy to teams to innovate. Although they have an unusual organizational structure, at its core, everything drives toward individuals and teams deeply understanding the strategy – and having accountability that’s tied to it. With that in place, autonomy is possible. In Spotify, “[a] leader’s job is to figure out the right problem and communicate it, so that squads can collaborate to find the best solution.”

The Alignment Autonomy Link

We already know that the data show that the more empowered employees are, the better the results they produce. But getting that result always takes us back to the strategy and aligning everyone to it,

But, when there is sufficient communication, education and engagement, employees have a rich context with which to make decisions and take action. They are genuinely empowered by knowledge and understanding. Then the moment is ripe for empowering them with authority and autonomy.

In that setting, metrics can emerge from the strategy itself. And they too have a context. So, as individuals work within their function to forward the aims of the strategy, they are not gaming the system. But fulfilling the strategic goals —and hitting their numbers as a natural expression of the alignment.

With that context, everyone makes decisions that are guided by the reasoning underpinning the strategy. It’s doctrinal. Since, as humans, we crave internal consistency and avoid cognitive dissonance, the stage is set for making the right decisions and taking the right actions—without instructions.

The instructions live in the strategy and its principles.

The greater the alignment between the strategy and the people and functions of the organization, the greater the amount of autonomy you can grant. And that autonomy generates a virtuous cycle of strategic decision-making, strategic actions, and results; plus the benefits of innovation and delighted customers.

The project of building alignment starts with a clear and future-based strategy, and a way of expressing it that everyone can understand. Beyond Better and I have over 30 years of experience in working with leaders to do exactly that. Schedule a call to chat about your organization’s future and aligning your whole organization to deliver it.