Building Better Teams: How to Keep Your Team Aligned for Organisational Success

Organisations typically approach building team alignment by setting and sharing a company vision. However, their efforts often fall flat because they fail to resonate with team members on the ground. Additionally, leaders overlook the importance of communicating to the individuals how they personally contribute to the bigger picture.

From the top-level managers down to the entry-level employees, everyone needs to share a mission and set of values to stay on the rails.

Here are some techniques to help align your team around what you need to do and get everyone on the same page.

Align Your Goals and Share Status

As a business leader, you must be quite familiar to the exercise of annual goal planning. Setting and aligning goals tremendously impacts the overall team performance as well as boosts employee engagement. Plus, everyone understands what the prize is and what they are working towards. 

While it may be a daunting task to define company, department, and team level objectives at the start of each year, with a disciplined approach your team will have a crystal clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish. Even better, when your employees understand how their individual work contributes to the organisational strategy – and to the society as a whole, their individual performance and employee experience is likely to receive a boost.  

So collaborate as a team, determine your priorities and then break them down into individual objectives. But of course, this process doesn’t just end with setting and forgetting goals. Driving alignment entails that you constantly update the status, celebrate even small successes, and reorient the challenges along the way.

In case you’re thinking this is too obvious, let me share an MIT Sloan report with you, according to which only 28% of executives and middle managers tasked with strategy execution could list three of their company's priorities. Yes, only 28%. The alignment only gets worse as you move further away from the decision makers. So start with the basics and measure your goals.

Schedule One-On-Ones

As much as it is crucial to focus on your team as a collective whole and ensure your team members feel connected to their coworkers, the importance of one-on-one meetings cannot be disregarded. 

Managers, especially executives, have the luxury of seeing the forest for the trees. One-on-ones serve as good venues to identify opportunities and problems, allowing you to see across your team to create alignment. They give you a chance to understand their motivations, fear, challenges and concerns.

In times of crisis, it is extremely important to leverage the power of one-on-one meetings to keep the employees reassured and aligned on the new and often shifting priorities. As workday pressures and time constraints may get the better of us, it is a good idea to jot down a list of bullet points that you’d like to discuss and ask your direct report to do the same.

Cut Through the Clutter

A research by Deloitte indicates that 72% of employees don’t have access to the information they need from their company systems. What’s surprising is, this is the information they need to perform their tasks efficiently. Alignment comes afterwards.

Employees are not only overwhelmed with the crises affecting the world today, they are also staggered by the state of work. To crown it all, at least 85% of employees are already disengaged.

Leaders wanting to drive team alignment must help their teams stride across the noise and clutter of the workplace. You need to ensure your team members find purpose in their work and understand how they are a part of something bigger. Your employees shouldn’t have to struggle to obtain basic information like customer case studies or the product roadmap if you want to make them feel valued for their contributions. 

An important part of your alignment strategy, therefore, has to be easy access to the basics. Make sure you team resources are readily available. Also, perform an information audit to get rid of the distraction and clutter caused by outdated information. Doing so will save your team from spending time working through useless content.

Learn how you can take your leadership teams through a growth model which will help them mature on a personal and professional level by following me on LinkedIn and subscribing to the Keijzer Community.

Paul Keijzer is the CEO and Founder of Engage Consulting and the co-Founder of The Talent Games, which aims to transform HR by digitising talent processes and creating more engaging and productive workplaces through gamification and mobile technology. As a global HR and Leadership Management expert, Paul knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.