Set the foundation of your transformational change with Strategic Alignment!

“Establishing strategic alignment in place to propel a well-defined strategy, is the foundation for?any transformational change”.

Often, organisations are faced with the challenges of ensuring strategic alignment across levels of the organisation that impacts its overall performance. Establishing strategic alignment in place to propel a well-defined strategy is the foundation for?any transformational change

However any strategy has little value until implemented. Strategic alignment is?a process that ensures that each element of the business i.e. an organisation's structure, use of resources and the process and systems support execution of its strategy efficiently within the realm of its culture!? For example, if your car wobbles, you need to align all the four wheels of the car so that it runs smoothly.?

To maintain strategic alignment, a company’s people, culture, structure and processes have to flex and change as the strategy itself shifts. The symptoms of poor alignment are often obvious, especially to those who work in the company, but also to customers who do not experience the service they expect from a company’s branding and advertising.

Strategic alignment is misconceived and misunderstood to a larger extent and though it is time and again emphasised at different levels and different forums in an organisation, it is not prioritised.

Let’s look at some of the symptoms of lack of alignment:

• Teams compete for resources, rather than focusing on what they could achieve together, efficiently without thinking about how this might impact others or the business as a whole
• There is little, no, or reluctant sharing of information between the groups and their relationships are sour
• There are unhealthy conflicts between departments, divisions or business units
• Teams and team leaders frequently argue about responsibilities or ‘pass the buck’
• There is little trust in the company’s leadership and between the leaders
• Leadership is reluctant to drive the change agenda of the organization that is necessary for the organisation to thrive in the competitive business environment

As if that weren’t tough enough, another?challenge for corporate leaders is how to make sense of strategic alignment at?both?the team / business unit level/department level and?at the enterprise level.

Consider this, multiple different individuals and groups are responsible for different components of the value chain that makes up your company’s design, and they are often not as joined up as they should be.

All too often, individual leaders seek — indeed are incentivised — to protect and optimise their own domains, and find themselves locked in energy-sapping internal turf wars, rather than working with peers to align and improve across the entire enterprise.

Therefore strategic alignment happens by design and is often the missing ingredient for your success.

The high performing companies are often better aligned, engaged, prepared, and are change-ready.

So how do you get it right ?. To answer that, evaluate your answers to some of the key questions as mentioned below..

Who in your company is paying attention to how well aligned your strategy is with your organisation’s purpose and capabilities??

The job of aligning the modern corporation is too complex to be added on to the slate of someone whose job it is to consider hundreds of other things, no matter how talented or powerful they are. So not the CEO or Managing Director or Chairman.

In that case,?who?at the enterprise level in your company is responsible for ensuring it’s as strategically aligned as possible?

Is it the responsibility of your company’s most senior leaders, or should it be a more distributed responsibility or an individual responsibility?

For your senior leader’s, Is their focus and behaviour consistent with this responsibility, or is it merely an addition to their overriding day job? How much and how often is time devoted in your company to revisiting its core organising principles and discussing how to build capability for tomorrow’s customer, versus focusing on today’s business?

How?is your company’s leadership making informed decisions about the arrangement of your company as a complex system of many moving and interconnected parts — including organisational capabilities, resources, and management systems — all aimed at fulfilling one overarching purpose? What frameworks and information do your leaders require to ask good questions, have better conversations, and make robust strategic and organisational choices?

What?capabilities do your business leaders require to be effective at aligning your company to ensure it is fit for its purpose?

If you lack clarity in answering to these questions, then there is a good chance that nobody is paying enough attention to strategic alignment in your company. If that’s the case, you urgently need to address this gap in leadership focus and capability.

Achieving sustainable competitive advantage through superior strategic alignment does not happen by accident – it happens by design, or not at all, and it requires a special breed of leadership

Now, let’s answer how do you get it right?

Develop your strategic alignment model

So how does your organisation measure up? Check your alignment with a strategic alignment model to find out. An alignment model is a tool that helps determine the degree to which the organisation is aligning its longer-term plans with its resources and capabilities, and with opportunities, vulnerabilities, and risks that have to be managed.

A simple test could be to answer how well does your organisation support the achievement of your business strategy??

For instance, if your company seeks to beat competitors through superior customer service, is this reflected in the day-to-day behaviour of staff and their interactions with customers?

You can consider measuring the strategic alignment at certain levels. For instance evaluate how your strategy is supporting your long term purpose? Followed by how well your organisational capabilities is delivering to your strategy. And similarly you can evaluate for other levels sequentially.

Develop a visual guide of how priorities are linked and aligned vertically and horizontally through your organisation. Having developed your strategic alignment model, you are now ready to improving the alignment outcomes in your company.

Step 1: Create Accountability for generating Alignment

Without leaders who actively build alignment beyond pockets within their groups, an organisation is simply a collection of individuals working toward their self-interest.

And let’s not forget the need to unite the frozen middle management who need to be the agents of any transformational change. Often, to change an organisation, people need to change their behaviour, and they don’t like to do that. Yet, engaged in the right way, they’ll be the catalyst for delivering outstanding results.

Bring your leadership groups together to have one coherent framework to discuss the company as a whole, addressing current and future states.

Alternatively generate a leadership role that is responsible for creating alignment. The purpose of this role is to make strategic interventions to ensure the most important components of the company’s fundamental design align seamlessly.

These components include the company’s business strategy (how the company is trying to win at fulfilling its long-term purpose), its organisational capabilities (what it needs to be good at to win), its resources (what makes it good enough to win, including its structures, cultures, people and processes) and its management systems (what delivers the day to day performance it needs to win).?

Step 2: Develop your Alignment playbook

The cornerstone for meeting the strategic demands is to change the way we are working. As we navigate a new way of working in the corporate world, the need for a clear vision, values, and goals is more important than ever. These drive alignment and can be a powerful playbook for your organization when appropriately communicated and supported with actions.

And remember, you can’t assume that every member of your strategic planning team can articulate your mission, vision, and values.

Step 3- Create Clarity & Buy-in

Commitment is a function of?clarity and buy-in. Gaining commitment from team members is not the same as getting consensus. When you reach a consensus, you reach a compromise, which may not get the best result. Commitment comes with clarity of purpose along with trust and appropriate conflict.

Even if only one idea is pursued, every team member understands why and supports it—both inside the team and when communicated beyond. Everyone needs to feel included and motivated to work towards the intended goal.

But there is caveat, while a company’s purpose generally doesn’t change, strategies and organisational structures do,?which?can make chasing “alignment” between strategy and the organisation feel like a chasing and balancing act !

At Strategea, our recommendations include spotting areas of misalignments, selectively solving synchronisation issues at respective levels & addressing insecurities, establishing a process of periodic evaluation to improve synchronisation and collaboration among business units/departments/teams.

Call us to know more about how at Strategea can help you to develop a more congruent organisation structure that delivers to your strategic needs.

About Strategea:

Strategea is your trusted partner on the journey of transforming your business into a thriving and scalable enterprise. Our mission is simple yet profound: to guide business leaders like you to realise your growth ambitions, embrace transformation, and accelerate your path to success. We work with our clients to provide holistic and customised solutions in the areas of Organisation Strategy, Operations, People and Digital Transformation in order to enhance organisational performance and achieve their aspiration!

Business leaders in India face a favourable growth opportunity both in domestic market & globally. To be able to grow to the next level, business leaders need to find a way to replicate their success in new product categories which they need to enter to grow to next level, reduce their learning curve to develop profitable revenue streams in newer markets, achieve efficiencies while they scale their operations and rally their people around the growth vision & business initiatives.

Strategea brings in the required expertise to guide business leaders on solving the complexities that come their way while scaling and expanding their operations to realise their growth aspiration.

Playing the Business Game : Running a successful business is a high-stakes game. Your business journey has routes, detours, and all sorts of obstacles you have to work through. So you need a map. In this book “Playing the Business Game” we are addressing the construct & thinking i.e. what could be direction that you want to take, what model suits you etc. to put your business on a high growth trajectory.

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