Strategy and Leadership Alignment: Common Roadblocks and How to Course Correct
Centric Consulting
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No matter the industry, CIOs and business leaders across banking, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, software, and others face organizational leadership challenges. Chief among them is leadership alignment, as ensuring the organization’s strategic vision and goals are consistently communicated, understood, and acted upon by all levels of leadership is critical.
Without alignment across your company’s leadership team, organizations risk falling into silos, misaligned priorities, and an inefficient decision-making process that ultimately leads to wasted resources, missed opportunities, and other impacts on the company’s ability to thrive in a competitive market.
Today’s reads all focus on strategy and leadership alignment.
1. Choose Your Words Carefully: When we work with clients, we often discover the leadership team fully agrees on their strategy — but not their interpretation of how to execute it. People develop unique thinking and vocabulary based on their experiences and communication styles, and how you communicate is often different than your audience. That’s why your intended meaning may differ from the message your audience hears, which can have far-reaching consequences.
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2. Implement Steps for Success: When solving execution challenges, we often find the elephant in the room is an unintentional chasm between organizational silos, especially IT and their business partners. What is the root cause of this problem? They don’t speak a common language. Besides communication, leadership often doesn’t understand cross-functional priorities. One analysis found that only 28 percent of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company’s strategic priorities. To address this, organizations must strive to create a common language across different functional areas.
3. Identify and Address Misalignment: To successfully implement your strategy, you must align objectives and rewards to the desired behavior. Aligning your strategy to your reward structure is an essential and often overlooked aspect of successful organizational leadership. Misaligned objectives and rewards lead to many challenges within an organization, undermining the success and effectiveness of your leadership, strategy, and the organization as a whole.