Integrated Project Management’s exclusive research found executive team alignment is key to organizational alignment.
IPM Managing Director Harry Georgiades discussed what happens throughout the company when executives aren’t aligned and who is best positioned to keep the leadership team accountable.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
The first one is when they start missing deadlines. There’s a lot of finger-pointing as to who’s not doing what or who’s doing what. There’s a lot of conflict.
But then further down the organization, people don’t know what they’re working on, why they’re working on things, why they’ve been told certain things. I think those are the quick, telltale signs that companies are not working well. And they’re not achieving the results. KPIs are not proving that they’re on the right track.
I’ll tell you an interesting story. I was working with a client; we were brought in by the chief technical officer to support a division that was developing a technology. And at the senior level, executive level, they’d made a decision for this division to work with another division who had a certain technology that they could partner with what they were working on. The program was the highest sort of budgeted line item on this company’s portfolio in terms of what they were going to be spending on. And we were brought in by the CTO to work with the divisions to plan out what they were going to be doing.
When we got into the workshop to plan things out, we very quickly realized that there were some undercurrents going on. Soon realized that the original division had been asked to work with was trying to undermine the other division.
When I looked into it, I sat down with the head of the group that was part of the group and tried to understand what was going on. I soon realized that what they were trying to do was undermine the other group, because they wanted the project to themselves. They wanted the budget that went with it.
So I had to realign that person to say, I understand what you’re doing, but for right now, we need to get through the next two days. We need to plan out what needs to be done. Long term what happens, that’s not part of this conversation. And then went back, had a conversation with the CTO. She then went back to the executive team and had to drive alignment with the two divisional bosses to ensure that alignment.
The way I see it is the CEO ultimately owns everything, but they cannot be doing the work. So they have to appoint someone to oversee it, someone or a team. But there still needs to be a figurehead of it who drives this alignment. Just like when you’re thinking of the most basic project, you cannot do a basic project until someone is leading that project.
This is a big program and there may be multiple tentacles that go up into the organization. Having someone ultimately responsible for that is key.
Now, some people may view that as being overly complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. You have to understand what the organization is trying to do. You have to communicate it further down the chain of command. Everyone needs to understand that. And you need to have some basic processes in place in terms of feedback loops.
Communication is going to be the key going forward. And someone whose role is to make sure that things are going well. So someone who’s in a leadership position, someone who has the authority, but someone is also suited enough to be able to push back on the executives when, say, they start seeing things going out of whack.
It could be both. But ideally it’s someone separate, someone who is not part of the original decision-making process, someone who’s impartial that can really, on the outside, look in and say, hey, something’s going wrong. Yeah, we need to realign what’s going on at the highest levels. We need to realign what’s going on at a at the lower levels as well.
I think for me, maybe the one point that we I think we spoke about that wasn’t really emphasized a lot was really the communication and really driving that communication from the very top down.
We have seen in companies that are undertaking a major change where everyone needs to be aligned, the executives do townhall meetings quarterly, every six months to ensure that the organization further down understands what they are doing, how that ties into the very top and keeping everyone motivated and focused to the goals. but that they’re also seeing the progress that is being communicated as well.
We worked with a client a number of years ago, they were making a huge change to one of their internal processes. And this included about 120 people were involved in the project and multiple functions were going to be impacted by this change that we’re going to make.
One of the cool things they did was every so often they would make a video of the progress and the changes that were coming, and that would then be sent to everyone. Within each building that you would walk into, it would be posters about the changes that were coming and about what people could expect over the next month, xix months, whatever the case is.
Again, come comes back to communication. So to me, it’s a common theme about communication. You’ve figured out what you’re going to do and then you keep communicating it to make sure people are staying aligned. But then someone needs to ensure that people are getting aligned, because people do change all the time.
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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