Improving Organizational Alignment - What? and Why?

This is the first in a series of posts on "Organizational Alignment" I've put together to share lessons and observations from my 20+ year career across multiple products, industries and companies. I share this in hopes of helping others better understand the dynamics in their organizations and what can be done to improve them.

Every time a group of people look to accomplish something together, there's the possibility, if not likelihood, that they might not be trying to accomplish the same thing. That might sound paradoxical, but consider:

• The group school project where some people want to get an A, but other just want to pass with as little effort as possible.
• The sports team where some players are focused on winning, while others are focused on their stats or how much they play.
• The volunteer group where some people want to make a difference in their community, some want to feel better about themselves, and others just want to log community service hours.

While all of these groups have the same general goals, the specific outcomes they desire can vary wildly, and can potentially cause friction within the group, or even failure of the group. And the examples we're referring to are for relatively small groups, and the problem only becomes greater at scale.

"Organizational Alignment" is the process of creating a more common understanding of what the groups collective goals. This doesn't mean everyone is doing the same thing, or even has the same individual objectives, but helping make sure the collective succeeds along with the individuals.

In these smaller groups, it usually comes down to one or a few individuals to help set expectations among individuals that have different goals. In a company, you may have teams or entire departments dedicated to certain functions with their own goals and directives.

And this is where Organizational Alignment becomes critical. With each group having their own goals and directives, it's easy for them to be in conflict or detrimental to one another, often inadvertently.

For example, if your company is focused on "growth", your Engineering team may be focused on optimizing their application to make it scale better for future growth, but your Sales team may be agreeing to new features to close sales and drive growth. While both are focused on growth, new customers may come in disappointed when the new features they were promised are not yet there, or application performance is lackluster because the Engineering team had to build new unplanned features instead of optimizing the application. Neither situation here being an organization killer, but compound this a few dozen times, and suddenly the company is in a resource tug-o-war.

Better Organizational Alignment helps address these problems, so it's more clear what the desired outcomes are, what tradeoffs have to be made, and how those impact the larger organization.

Next time, we'll start getting into how to develop and implement Organizational Alignment, starting with goals.