The Magic of Aligning Teams to the Company’s Vision and Strategy

Your individual team should have a vision. However, it’s equally important that the vision for your team aligns to some greater strategic goal of your company. Does your department or division have goals? What portion of the company’s strategic goals are you involved in? Do you know where your team fits in the overall strategy of the company? If you do not, these are great questions to ask of the people to whom you report.

Usually, when there are high level strategic goals, there will be a very visible vision statement, or named strategy, communicated broadly. A public company, for example, will provide annual forecasts and strategic intentions. Or your company may define a strategy that paints a picture of a three-year horizon. Whatever form they take, high level strategic goals are meant to be inspirational and not directive. In other words, it’s up to the divisions or departments of the company to come up with their own tactical plans that align to the high-level vision.

Jeff Gothelf has published a lot of work about Objectives and Key Results. His keynotes and books are a great place to learn more about OKRs. (And I’m personally looking forward to his upcoming book.) In a larger company, I would expect the divisions or departments to have their own set of OKRs that align to the company vision. As Jeff Gothelf says, however, keep in mind that OKRs are not meant to be a replacement for a vision. The vision and strategy need to come first. Then and only then can you decide which objectives and measurable key results make sense to accomplish or contribute to achieving the desired outcomes of the vision and strategy.

So, assume your division has its own OKRs and your team is in one of multiple teams of teams inside that division. Your team of teams should be able to describe your purpose and the vision that represents your portion of the products and services that you support, build, and/or deliver. That team of teams’ vision and purpose should inspire your team of teams to come up with their own OKRs, the objectives and key results that will drive the work you do over the next three months (or whatever time span your OKRs represent.)

There’s something magical that happens when this alignment is created the way I’ve described. A company with a clear vision and purpose inspires the parts of the company that drive the products and services to define their own short term goals to achieve the big picture. The teams of teams know how they fit into the overarching strategy. And, most importantly, every single person on every single team knows why they are there and how they contribute to the same big picture. In this way, a company can drastically improve their culture through this transparency of purpose. Individuals no longer feel like an unappreciated cog in the machine. When individual team members know how they are connected to the purpose of the company, they are naturally more loyal and do better work in order to be prideful and know that their work they do makes a difference to the specific customers they serve.

[Excerpt taken from my upcoming book The Practical Agilist Guidebook, Chapter 16: “Is the team value-driven and do they understand the vision and how it relates to strategy?”]

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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense.

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