Alignment; Key to Successful Management and Leadership in a Complex Market

Finally, I got a bit of Focused-Time in today's holiday and could reflect a bit on my recent activities, observations, and learnings, as also reflections from the organizations I have been involved in.

This note basically intends to communicate to organizational leaders and managers "the importance of ALIGNEMNETS on ALL LEVELS". I hope you enjoy reading it, and more importantly, start applying some of the concepts and learnings of them.

Introducing a Problem:

Speed of change, resulting in feeling alone or feeling left out

I believe that the speed of change has increased. The world around us is full of disruptions, to the extent that even the unknown can sometimes outweigh the knowns. In such context, as a business organization, if you are trying to maintain the status quo, you are likely to going to experience more failure than success.

In other words, the worst thing a company can do in a dynamic marketplace is to adopt Status Quoe as a Strategy. The Status quo is a losing strategy. Now, if you are trying to distance yourself from the status quo or abandon things and the way a company has been doing this so far, there is an element of risk right away next to you.

Meaning, “Anything that is new or different is risky, but necessary”.

So, more than before, we are to change the "What" we do and "How" we do, perhaps not so much the "Why", but for the "What & How"; and this is a risky game. Not all involved can understand both 1) the necessity of this change and 2) the magnitude of the risk. Therefore, if you are the main leader probably you will end up feeling alone, and if you are one of the following leaders you probably will feel left out.?

Is there anything we can do about it?

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Introducing a Framework:

Alignment on all Levels of Organizational Design Levers:

Leaders have two fundamental Organizational Design Levers at their disposal to build an organization that creates value:

1) The conditions?that leaders must foster —competence, motivation, and collaboration— to ensure that the organization is working productively to deliver value.

2) The components?—people, formal organization, and culture— that support and drive the conditions that help to create value.?

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1) Organisational Conditions

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to address and manage these three?organizational conditions—motivation, competence, and coordination—so your team can complete their tasks and deliver value to the customers.

But, a leader cannot single-handedly make sure that the entire company’s motivation, coordination, and competence are where they need to be to deliver value. On a small team, a leader may be able to personally motivate, teach, and coordinate team members one-on-one, but in a company of 100 or 1,000, the leader must become the Architect, creating the blueprint of organizational design. It is that design, the architecture, that does the working day-to-day of fostering motivation, competence, and coordination.

??Competence?is equipping people with the skills and know-how to get the work done;

??Coordination?or collaboration is enabling every person, every function, and every unit to work in concert to deliver value;

??Motivation?is fueling the personal desire and commitment of your people to get the work done.

Since leaders cannot personally make those conditions happen for each person every day across a big organization, they don the hat of the Architect, and their work is to use a set of organizational components to create and sustain motivation, competence, and coordination.

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2) Organisational Components

To create the conditions of motivation, competence, and coordination, leaders rely upon a number of?organizational components:

? The?people?they hire represent their organization and deliver value to the customer. As a leader, you can think about the people in an organization in two ways: the individual qualities of each team member and the overall composition of the workforce. At the individual level, what are the fundamentals essential for each person you hire, and how do you prioritize experience, skills, values, and attitude relative to one another? Thinking about the overall composition of who works at the organization, what is the mix of backgrounds, talents, experiences, and perspectives your organization will need?

? The?culture?they foster—the unwritten rules about how people conduct themselves in the organization, especially when solving problems. o Culture represents an internalized set of values and beliefs that get expressed in how employees interact and behave. These are patterns of behavior or assumptions about “how things work around here” and how people work together.

The culture is hard to put your finger on as a leader, but it is perhaps most important in shaping the capacity of the organization to motivate, equip, and coordinate its people to ensure value creation.

Culture can often be unearthed by watching how tradeoffs get made (that is, which values and priorities take precedence?); how people behave when they encounter mistakes, shifts in the external context, new challenges, and opportunities; and interactions internally as people combine efforts and work.

? The?formal organization?they put in place—the structures, systems and processes needed to support the people and culture, so that as a whole, the organization delivers value.

These can include systems for innovation, product development, budgeting, resource allocation, information-sharing, and talent management (recruiting, training, compensation, retention, and promoting people).

When it comes to organizational architecture, there is no single solution. Lots of different versions of each component can lead to success, but the components do need to be aligned.

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Suggesting a Solution:

Alignment on all Levels of Organisational Design Levers

?Alignment?means that the components are mutually reinforcing so that together they foster the competence, motivation, and coordination necessary for the company to pursue its shared vision, execute its strategy, and generate value. Alignment is the way leaders ensure the direction they set is transmitted to team members and internalized in the team’s behavior every day, even when they have no direct contact with the leader.

Basically, the health of an organization hinges on mutually reinforcing components or congruence. This congruence, or what we refer to as alignment, has five dimensions in three levels:

Self Alignment:

Being clear with yourself on what you want and why, and how much are you willing to commit to it. If you are not aligned with yourself, it is nearly impossible that you can be part of any sort of alignment, and will almost definitely cause issues within your team.

Internal Alignment:

Each organizational component must be consistent with and reinforce the other, including People, Culture, and Formal Organisation. If you are lacking one of them in your organization or if any of them does not consistently support each other, there is an urgent issue you as manager or leader must address. Not having Internal Alignment increases unclarity, hiccups, and political behaviors among the teams

Alignment with the Direction:

Each organizational component must facilitate the pursuit of the organization’s direction, including Vision, purpose, and Identity. You as the leader and manager must be very clear with the direction and be able to articulate it extremely well to others, to the extent that all team members should be able to understand and communicate it

Team Alignment:

Besides the Self Alignment that is a necessity, Internal and Direction ALignment, Team alignment can reduce the cost, and increase the speed and the end quality of the value-creating activities an organization delivers. Team alignment also increases the joy and growth along the way, making the journey full of excitement. Clear and to-the-point organizational Rythems can be a good tool for Team Alignment.

Alignment with the External Context:

Each organizational component must reflect the changing context —the opportunities and challenges in the marketplace. And when that context shifts, the Leader and Manager must translate that shift into the components of the organization. This must be articulated to the whole team that Context changes and therefore we as the Organisation also need to adapt to those changes, to survive and grow.

Key Take-Away:

You as Organisational Leader or Manager are responsible and accountable for Aligning the Organisation. If the Organisation is not Aligned on any level, you should attend to it. Strong Alignment seems to be a key ingredient for the success of companies.

Alignment does not happen randomly, but it comes with hard work and concourse choices.

Both A) Organisational Meeting Rythems, and also B) Organisational Governing Documents, are two strong tools that can bring alignment and make its implementation smoother.

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End.

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About the Author:

S. Hossien Nabavi, is the Founding Partner & Chair of ILIA, as well as the Founder & Chair of Jibit. He is passionate about Management Science, and besides being awarded MBA from Webster University, has recently graduated from Financial Times Boardship Program, and also gained a Leadership & Management Specialization Certification from Harvard OBS.

This note was inspired by my latest Harvard Class, on Organisational Leadership: Managing through Scale and Scope.