Alignment Matters

"We're all going in different directions, yet each of us thinks we're on the right track," she said to me as we discussed the agenda for a planned retreat. She was the newly minted president of a tech firm with an accelerated growth rate and an emerging quality problem. Julia had been recruited by the board of directors to improve quality and customer service and stabilize the growth rate to a more sustainable level. "Just like an airplane landing is a controlled crash, we need controlled growth so we don't touch down before we're ready," Julia said over, and over, and over again to her executive team and staff.

I asked Julia how frequently the executive team met to discuss how their areas of responsibility contributed to the mission and vision of the organization. She told me that they met every week and while they all agreed that their mission was compelling and their vision statement was clear, she could tell they each had a different perspective on what it meant and how to get there. Julia paused, sighed, and said, "It's not that they're not talking, it's that they're not listening to each other. They all use the same words, but even though they've worked together for years they have not developed shared meaning of those words."

Julia continued on. "Our CFO thinks growth means revenue and profitability. Our head of HR thinks growth means increasing headcount. Our sales team sees growth as the number of new customers on our platform, and our development team sees growth as the number of new products and services we push to the market." I replied that those are all valid ways to measure growth, but agree that the disparate focus is hurting the company. Together, the team was pushing new products and services to market before they were ready, in an attempt to attract and retain customers and increase sales. The result was reduced quality which was beginning to lead to revenue and profitability losses and layoffs were looming. If they didn't get aligned soon, none of them would achieve their definition of growth. The barrier to alignment was that they thought they were aligned!

"I had a similar problem with my car last month," Julia joked, "my husband didn't believe it was out of alignment and I couldn't get him to drop it off for repair while I was traveling." Chuckling, I asked her how she resolved that. "I made him experience it!" she roared. We laughed and in that laughter an aha moment occurred for both of us.

Borrowing an activity of unknown origin, the first morning of the retreat we asked each team member to stand. "We're not going to have to hug, are we?" asked Tanji, the development guru, and everyone snickered. Julia assured him that hugging was not part of the task and we continued.

Each team member was asked to face north. After a bit of discussion about which direction was north, the team deferred to Natalia, the CFO who was ex-military. They were now all facing north. We made sure they were standing an arm's length from each other and instructed them to close their eyes. Then we took them through a series of turns until we felt they were somewhat disoriented. We asked them to pause a moment and then point in the direction they thought was north.

When they opened their eyes, they were shocked to see that each one of them was pointing in a different direction! They all started in the same place and had the same instructions, but each of them ended up in a different place. Just like Julia's husband, they had to experience misalignment to admit they had a problem. What followed was a robust discussion about how that activity related to what they experience every day and what would happen to the company if they continued in the direction they were pointing.

Prior to the retreat, we had captured information from multiple sources and consolidated the answers without divulging the source. Since it was a small team, they found it easy to tell who said what, and that drove even deeper discussions about how out of alignment they were with each other, with Julia, and with the board. The action plan they developed that day included key metrics for staying in alignment and warning signs that alignment was slipping.

As they were packing up at the end of the day, the sales leader approached Julia. She apologized for not getting the message earlier and explained that she had thought the only people she needed to listen to were her external customers, but she now understood the importance of listening to her internal team. The HR leader was almost out the door when she popped her head back in and said, "I'll be in late in the morning. I think my car is also out of alignment, and while it's probably been that way for a while, I've learned that Alignment Matters!"