Senior leaders who Integrated Project Management interviewed and surveyed for its exclusive research said being aligned as an executive team helps a company execute strategies with greater precision.
Change management expert and IPM Director Amber Monaghan talks frankly about how leadership teams can tell when they’re out of alignment, why they need someone to protect the strategic alignment, and how these are crucial when organizations are undergoing large transformations.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
There’s a lot of ways that it’ll start to show. One of the key parts to me is the trust. I think alignment and trust go hand in hand because in order to truly all be aligned, we also have to trust each other. We have to trust that as these projects kick off, as the year continues, we’re going to do what we said we were going to do in the beginning.
And so when you start seeing people being more secretive, being more siloed, not being collaborative across the groups, that’s when that trust starts to break down. And that’s when I also think the alignment starts to break down.
So to me, that was the biggest signal of OK, we agreed to something, but now people aren’t doing what they said they were going to do. Trust starts to erode. That was a key indicator. That’s like, OK, I think there is an issue here.
So I’m thinking of a group where we did all of the planning, great strategy for the year. Everyone was super excited about it. And then as we got a couple months in, you started to hear things that seemed like they weren’t aligned to what we’d originally agreed to. Some projects that had been delayed now were re on the table again. Things that we had thought we made a decision on, now you’d see people kind of questioning those decisions and opening it back up again. That’s the piece of it where it’s, OK, these are indicators that something isn’t right.
And we had to go back in and really get to the crux of, why is this? I thought we made a decision on this. Why is this being opened up again? And the responses made sense. It was people saying, oh well, yeah, we have extra budget now. I hired three more people that I wasn’t thinking that I was going to have at the beginning of the year. So really, I thought we could go after this project that we had talked about.
And so having those proactive conversations around, why did we identify this as a particular strategy, why did we all align that this was the direction that we’re going, and does this side thing that we’re now going after go back to that initial vision?
We kind of had to pull people along kicking and screaming, right? They had the authority to make these decisions within their function, which is why they felt empowered to do it. But then once you take it back to the group and really look at that bigger picture, people came around to realize, like, OK, I understand now why I can’t do this.
And what we learned out of that was really that need to have someone that proactively looks at the strategy throughout the entire year and makes sure that you keep bringing it back to what did we all align on and are we following those agreements that we made?
Any time that you’re really going to make big moves within an organization—you’re changing how people work or you’re changing day-to-day operations or reporting structures or anything of that magnitude—you really have to keep in mind that end vision of what we were trying to accomplish.
Because you’re going to hit roadblocks. You’re going to hit things that are going to make you question, was this the right strategy? Was this the right approach? Yes. We aligned on this six months ago. But look at everything that’s changed in the marketplace. Should we really still be pursuing this?
And it’s very easy during that downward trend, when things are getting challenging, to start to go back on, oh, I wasn’t 100 percent bought in on this strategy in the beginning anyway. So is this a good place to kind of abandon it?
So having that person that has the sole focus on strategy, on making sure that everyone is staying aligned to the commitments, that is immensely important when you’re talking about large-scale change, transformation types of projects.
It’s very easy to see when your leadership team isn’t aligned. And I think they sit in a room and they argue things out and they walk out of it and they believe that, oh, they’re putting on a brave face and that the organization won’t know. It is very easy to see when your leadership is not bought in on a change, if they’re doing something purely because they were told to do it, and they’re not really seeing the value in it for the organization.
This is why alignment, particularly when you’re dealing with change, is so important. Because most people don’t like change. It’s just a natural reaction we have. That’s why we manage resistance and look at it. Change is scary. So there’s already going to be all of these things that are challenging you as you progress along this transformation.
So if your leadership team isn’t aligned, it’s going to show. They’re going to see the cracks and people then are going to start to question, well, wait, if my leadership isn’t brought in on this change, is there something going on here that I should be skeptical of?
It’s a lot easier to get behind something if you see the value, see the benefit, you see your leadership team is rah-rah, really excited about this. And when you can tell they’re not, then you start to look behind the curtains to say, are there problems here? Are there things that I should be skeptical about?
It comes back to the why, right? Why are we doing this? Is it to benefit the company? That’s something that we can all get behind, right. So let’s figure out really what it is that we’re trying to achieve that we all can get behind.
And then once we have that, we can start tying back to, OK, there’s maybe some individual tactics that aren’t as exciting, or this isn’t a project that I think is going to be something that I want to personally get involved in.
But if you can tie it back to the thing that I want, which is maybe for the company to be successful or it’s some type of revenue growth, if you can tie it back, it becomes a lot easier then to get on board with it.
For more insights about how leadership teams can get and stay aligned, download You’re Not as Aligned as You Think You Are.