Closing Alignment Gaps

In a business world where competition is intense, pace is relentless and opportunities are easily missed, many business leaders are seeing the advantages of getting better at alignment. More specifically, closing and eliminating alignment gaps between stated ambitions and actual performance is increasingly seen as a driver of better commercial, operational and organizational performance.

Or as Philippe Guenet puts in his e-Book Leading Alignment,

“In business, it seems like alignment is quickly becoming “the new black.”

Current conditions - namely the pandemic - have accelerated the drive for alignment.

Philippe explains: “Organisations have been exploring new forms of leadership in the age of digital/agile. The pandemic has exacerbated the difficulties of keeping teams on the same page and revealed the challenges of misaligned organisations. With people working almost exclusively on a remote basis in many enterprises, it is necessary to be much more intentional about alignment.” 

This intentionality was an underlying demand of working better with digital and with more agility. The pandemic is exacerbating the challenges and allows us to take stock and refocus on alignment on three levels: 

• Strategic alignment
• Organisation and leadership alignment
• Alignment to operational excellence

We explore these alignment gaps in detail in the ebook. 

Strategic alignment

One reflection of that intentionality is a conscious focus on Strategic Alignment, as one key dimension of the alignment picture.

With a view to develop better autonomy among the teams, it is necessary to consider distributing the leadership and with it the effort of shaping the strategy. When people are involved in setting the direction, they are much more aligned to deliver on it. In work systems that have been governed in traditional ways (i.e.: where strategy is set from the top and the rest execute), it is an activity that feels unnatural to the employees. It takes time and coaching to help them develop the belief, skills and connections to play their role in it. Philippe adds: “In practice, all parts of the system should engage in defining its strategy. The strategies would be interrelated from the structural relationships across the system of work. The Product strategy or the system level strategy would provide the overarching umbrella and create the ultimate coherence from the parts to the whole. An element of the strategy will cascade top down, i.e. from the whole to the parts; this is the model that we have traditionally aligned to, and it is needed to align broader systemic changes. It is equally crucial to implement a bottom-up flow that will work from the parts and contribute to the whole. This flow contributes to: 

• Validation of understanding
• Feasibility
• Experimentation
• Emergence
• Execution
• Coherence and alignment

In distributed systems of work (i.e. systems of work where teams have more autonomy over their decisions), the strategy becomes an essential alignment tool. In traditional organisations, the strategy was ‘done centrally’ and rolled out into execution in a planning cycle. The planning held the coherence of the system. 

In more distributed systems, we cannot rely as much on the planning because the pace of change is higher. When the conditions change, the system should adapt accordingly without having to go through a whole cycle. The drive comes bottom-up, guided by the overarching coherence of the strategy. 

It is essential, therefore that people fully understand how strategy relates to their unique team context and how they will collaborate to deliver the strategy together.  This is what alignment is all about today. 

The strategy then becomes two-way, which enables the emergence of new practices and ideas in support of excellence or experimentation and growth.

 “

Although businesses have always been about organizing alignment, new ways to achieve alignment in the modern enterprise bring together multiple dimensions:

• Structural alignment of the organization with flow.
• Operational excellence and alignment of solutions, practices, competencies, and leadership – with incremental updates on an ongoing basis
• Strategic alignment through the distribution and translation of the strategy as it applies across the system.
• Distribution of the leadership across the system-of-work, bringing the decisions as close as possible to where the work happens—encouraging all to take leadership. 

Revealing the alignment gaps 

Here, Guenet goes into depth on how the focus on alignment gaps works, and how to make it happen.”

He says: “With any systemic work, the first step is to reveal the system to itself - in this instance, the alignment gaps. Unless the system recognises a misalignment, the people will not invest in the effort to start solving it. Some alignment gaps may be visible to the trained eye when exploring the system of work but because misalignment is essentially between people, many are unconscious, unknown, or unspoken. 

Often people in the system would have grown to accept misalignment as simply part of ‘life in business’ or as part of the organizational culture. And because people and contexts are unique, we should not approach the situation with a ‘recipe’ or an advisory / consulting eye, but with a coaching stance, helping people identify their alignment challenges and assist them with fixing those. In the process, they will build the skills and "muscles" to sustain progress. We are not bringing a fix to the situation but allowing the people to take a step-up and learn to have proper alignment conversations. It is human and personal, even at a systemic level, and it is more of a coaching journey than an expert solution. Coaching journeys start with helping the leadership or the team system take a reflective view of the situation: revealing the system to itself. 

This revealing can take the form of facilitated systemic conversations. These are coached-sessions that put the people of the system in conversation, revealing the diversity of views and work with what emerges. 

There are specialist tools such as Mirror Mirror that help structure the approach to the "system-entry." (i.e. the initial reveal in the system). Mirror Mirror’s Full Picture and Quick Scan products are well-suited to work with teams, teams of teams and leadership teams. It usefully combines a set format that offers structure for emergence. It visualises the range of answers, not just an average score, which is excellent input for gauging alignment opportunities. It also offers an organization-wide product called Panorama that maps the extent to which teams are aligned with the organization’s priorities. This shows which teams need alignment attention.

Once the alignment gaps are revealed to the systems of the teams and leadership, organisations can be coached to make the necessary alignment improvements. Because alignment is by definition a matter of multiple people, the coaching is better done from a systemic perspective, i.e. Partnerships, teams, leadership teams, etc. rather than aiming to coach the individuals in isolation. 

Systemic coaching - also known as Organisation and System Relationship Coaching (ORSC)- offers many possibilities to work with teams, explore conflict and all voices (rather than shy away from them) and build alignment from it. Systemic coaching mixed with organisation design, leadership development, strategy and operational excellence are very powerful combinations to upskill organisations and leadership to perform in the digital age. 

Download the ebook, Leading Alignment, which reflects on Leading Alignment, which reflects on the now obsolete alignment approach based on traditional planning and control; what alignment looks like in modern digital and agile organisations; and how to work with alignment today.

Leading Alignment was written by Phillippe Guenet of Henko and edited by Mirror Mirror.

Download the ebook: Leading Alignment

Join the Leading Alignment public webinar here- https://www.meetup.com/DigitalLeadership/events/275165402/

Philippe Guenet is an Executive and Team Coach centred around digital leadership and agility.  He has a systemic coaching background and focuses on alignment in the work system by developing relationships, flow, strategic coherence and operational excellence. Philippe founded Henko with the view that clients in digital change need a new breed of support services that effectively mix coaching in the context of a better flow, operational excellence, digital strategy and better people engagement and teamwork. 

Mirror Mirror supports teams with cognitive and behavioural alignment so they can become more effective. It adds clarity, engagement, and ownership. And it takes out conflict, cost, and risk.