Integrated Project Management’s exclusive research looked at how executive teams become misaligned and how they can prevent it.
IPM Managing Director Andrew Dolvig serves up some hard truths for executives, as well as some practical ideas.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
We saw it in the research, actually. People are afraid to call out each other, even from peer to peer at the executive team level. So I think you have to build that safety space to do that and call people out to say, I disagree. And how do you do that in a healthy and constructive way where there’s no ill intent, where everyone’s talking about what’s best for the organization overall?
Internally, in our strategic planning process—we mentioned it in the paper—we started this thing called “healthy debates.” And healthy debates were around a safe space to challenge ideas that other people may have. And so through our business planning process, we forced people to take sides on a topic. And that way, we could have a very good debate about what was right or wrong without making it personal, without making it about “it was my idea or someone else’s idea” and challenging each other. But it really was a place to debate the topic and what we were trying to do and how it would move the company forward.
So I think by this idea of creating the space to do this in way that people aren’t afraid to speak their mind allows you to then hear broader perspectives from the whole organization.
Team members are very hesitant to report bad news up. And whenever team members are hesitant to report bad news up, then leadership becomes misaligned. And it sounds kind of simple. But if the leaders don’t have accurate information, then they may think things are going well and they’re not really going well. And that usually is a sign that somewhere there’s a misalignment about why.
Why aren’t we communicating that there’s bad news? Sometimes it’s around we don’t want to share, signs that there’s fear of consequences. But a lot of times it’s just that you can’t get the resources to do the work or that the direction that was provided isn’t correct any longer. But if people don’t share that across the entire executive team, then the executives will slowly become misaligned as information leaks out and is understood in bits and pieces. But it’s not in like one collective message. Then the executives can figure out how to realign.
So back to the idea we talked a bit about, of aligning initially and then staying aligned are very different. Getting aligned initially is easy. Staying aligned throughout the length of a project is what’s really hard. And that idea of you have to have good information, you have to have true and accurate information, allows you to then make decisions to get realigned if things are starting to drift.
That initial alignment is the easiest part. The later-on part makes it more difficult.
In the paper, we listed 10 or 15 different reasons why there’s not alignment. If you really kind of analyze each of those. A lot of them are just really poor excuses from leaders about why they’re not aligned.
There was things in there about like, I haven’t worked with the person long enough. That’s kind of an excuse for why there’s not alignment. Like that’s not a good reason. Or I didn’t get updates from my team. Also not a real reason for being misaligned. These things all sound like excuses for someone trying to justify why they weren’t aligned.
So I think as a leadership team, get rid of the excuses. Get down to what really is causing the misalignment. And then how do you address those things and try to wipe out all of the excuses that can be there?
But, yeah, I went back through the research in the paper, that part just caught me off guard little bit. It sounds like a lot of people justifying why they’re not aligned and not really taking ownership for the reasons they’re not aligned.
And so I think this kind of ties back to why you have to do so many things to stay aligned; you’ve got to get rid of all of the excuses and not let people fall back into one simple excuse of why they didn’t do something. So as a leader, that’s what your job is, is to keep the organization aligned, keep each other aligned, and you can’t make excuses for it.
The way we did this risk assessment was to go around all the leaders and ask them their top two priorities, and to see how aligned each of those leaders were and what they were saying. So it became a quick way to do a risk assessment of alignment or not alignment once you hear everyone’s answers.
What I saw in both cases, which was interesting, is people didn’t talk about the ultimate reason they were aligned. They talked about the work they were doing, tied to a strategic goal. So if it was growth, everyone talked about how they were going about doing stuff to drive growth. But they didn’t talk about where their alignment was, was growth itself.
And it also highlighted the differences, because everyone was going about it slightly different ways, whether it was different office leaders or industry leaders or service line leaders internally or in this client example, it was different functional heads. They all knew they had to grow, but they were all going about it their own way. And it was actually a sign of misalignment. Although they thought they were all really well aligned, they were aligned that they had to grow, which was the easiest part. But their method to do it was all different depending on every leader’s impression of how they could help drive growth. And what they hadn’t taken into account was all the functional teams that they needed to share. So the collaboration side of it was lost and they were trying to solve the corporate problem themselves in their own way, not as a unified front to drive growth, in this case, collectively.
And as a result, it then just got muddied and muddied the waters as it got further down, because now people had multiple priorities that they were chasing.
For more insights about how leadership teams can get and stay aligned, download You’re Not as Aligned as You Think You Are.
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