How to Align Your Operations with Your Vision
Chad Glasscock
Fractional COO helping small business leaders focus and achieve their desired future state.
Even on your best day, it’s likely you’ll always see a gap between where your business is and where you want it to be. That’s why you set goals , track your metrics , and take an agile approach to project management. But there’s another gap that business owners don’t often see: the distance between your entrepreneurial ideas and your ability to operationalize those ideas to achieve five, ten, 50-year success and beyond. That’s called the Longevity Gap , and when ignored, it can dramatically shorten your company’s potential lifespan.
The Impact of the Longevity Gap
Failing to properly operationalize your ideas can cause multiple product- and personnel-related problems that lead to decreased profitability, diminished customer satisfaction, and severely stunted professional development within your organization.?
Symptoms of a longevity gap may include:
What’s the root cause of the longevity gap? Each of these symptoms is typically a result of nonalignment in the organization's operations. A misaligned or unaligned organizational structure leads to an inability to take on the learning and improvement that are necessary for long-term success. Employees and leadership both struggle to manage change. Decisions are reactive, not proactive, and innovation falls short.
Conversely, alignment comes from a well-planned organizational structure, culture, and operations system that is harmonious with financial and strategic objectives. Said another way: your organization's structural design should be in alignment with your vision, goals, and strategies in order to effectively build toward your ideal future state. To close the gap and support expansion, you must consider your business an ecosystem of multiple congruent systems, including structure, culture, and operations, and give special attention to creating alignment within each system.
Aligning Organizational Structure
The process of aligning your organization’s structure with your vision and goals requires you to answer this question: What does it take for my business to function?
Consider the roles or positions that need to exist in order for your business to operate at optimum efficiency. Then, you must clearly define what success looks like at an individual level for each role, or “seat,” in your organization.
In a well-functioning structure, each seat knows:
Properly configuring your business structure makes it infinitely easier to get the right people into the right roles (what Gino Wickman called “right people, right seat” in Traction and Jim Collins called “getting the right people on the bus” in Good to Great). Building an aligned structure requires you to know what the bus is supposed to look like, in addition to where it’s going and why it’s going there.?
Many entrepreneurs and small businesses make the mistake of starting with the people, then trying to design the seats to fit them. However, hiring starts with defining functionality (i.e., seats), not sifting through resumes. You must resist the temptation to create a structure around the people you already have on board, or the friends and family you know will help, or a subpar talent pool because that’s all you can afford. Alignment requires you to focus on function and structure first, then people.
For example, you may feel you need a logistics technician. Great! Before you start the hiring process, define the tasks and duties for which your technician will be responsible. What will they do all day? Who will they be accountable to? How will they do what they do? Then you can start looking for the right person to sit in that seat.
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Aligning Organizational Culture
Now that you know what your bus should look like, it’s time to start filling those seats. How you fill them is the key to creating and maintaining an organizational culture that is aligned with your vision and goals.
An aligned culture creates the ability to attract, acquire, and retain talent, then provides support and opportunity for growth and development. A deeply aligned culture, when nurtured, creates an environment for organizational learning and continuous improvement, enabling innovation.
The strategy is simple: Hire from your core values and your vision.?
While talent and skills are important, alignment is even more essential to avoiding the longevity gap. To fill your organization with the right talent, you must clearly define what’s most important to you and hire the candidates that are aligned with your values, vision, and non-negotiables.
Aligning Your Operations
Just as with structure, aligning your operations begins with function. Outlining the key functions of your business, how each person interacts with your core product, and each level of your product will dictate where your operations must begin.
Once your operations are defined based on the function and product you provide, you can begin asking and answering how you will deliver that function. Create a transition plan and timeline to prioritize which roles to fill, and how.
In order to scale, you’ll also need a clear operation and organizational chart which enables company-wide focus on your strategic objectives. Emphasize accountability ; if two people are responsible for something, then no one person is accountable, and that task is likely to fall through the cracks. Of course, as your company grows, you may have duplicated roles such as sales or customer service, but the leadership and operations teams must have those clearly defined roles and responsibilities you established before the hiring process even began.
Proper structural and cultural alignment enables effective, efficient, and scalable operations that facilitate growth. A proper organizational structure also removes the ambiguity and complexity that prevents focus, an essential element of creating optimized, sustainable workflows. Everyone knows what they are accountable for and to whom. When everyone is on the same page, and when people across functions are all aiming for the same targets derived directly from your vision, they are operating in concert to make it happen. That’s alignment.
Transition Planning
Now that you know what your fully aligned organization should look like, you need a thorough transition plan and timeline to move from misalignment to alignment. You must prioritize which operations to adjust and which roles to fill first. While the urge may exist to flip a switch and urgently fill all the roles within the structure you just meticulously designed, to do so would mean sacrificing agility and culture for the sake of urgency. Applying the tenets of an agile project management timeline during this phase of structure and growth ensures that every person in every position is the best fit for the future of your organization.
As your company scales, avoid the dangers of the longevity gap by structuring your teams, operations, and culture in conjunction with what is most important to you. If that means you take a little bit longer to hire the right people, find the right software, or put the right strategies in place, know that the efforts you make to do things the right way the first time around may be the very reason you see exponential growth in the future.
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