Integrated Project Management’s exclusive research found that when executives are aligned with their peers, their organization is more likely to accomplish their strategic goals and increase revenue. And they’re often not as aligned as they think they are.
IPM President Michael McLeod discusses some unique and challenging insights from the research.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Yeah, I think it’s the difference between alignment in principle and alignment in practice. I think it’s how you behave really is how alignment is sustained over time.
I think we’ve all been in decision-making forums where, at the end of the meeting, we reiterate what we’ve decided upon. Everybody nods their head and says, yes, let’s go for it. We all agree. And then you leave the meeting, and you wind up realizing not everybody’s on the same page. Or worse yet, there’s hidden agendas. Another finding in our study that only 30% of the executives believed there are no hidden agendas in our organization, which means 70% of them or 70% of the time there are. So the hidden agendas undermine the executive alignment, which undermines your ability to execute on your strategy.
In fact, in our client settings, we often advise them that the executive team and their actions are absolutely critical because they are the most frequent group to deviate from established prioritization processes. They have executive fiat. They decide, let’s just do this. Or I know we agreed to this, but my pet project is really important to me, so I’m still going to make progress on it or I’m still going to talk about it, or I’m still going to align my team to it, even though maybe that’s not what we agreed on at the organizational level.
So it really is the behavior of the leaders. It’s the agreement that they are going to operate differently, which oftentimes means they have to give something up.
Well, I think pet projects is one that you definitely need to give up.
I think when it comes to prioritization, you’re always looking for bottlenecks in the organization. What are the resources that are constrained by priority A versus priority B? And I think it’s pretty easy if you’re that constrained resource—think, you know, subject matter expert or a department that is involved with all of the projects or many of the projects—and they run do a pitch point and they say, should I work on A or should I work on B? It’s pretty easy for them to say, let’s drop B, let’s focus on A. We know that’s the priority.
I think the struggle is in the non-constrained departments. If all you care about is B and you have nothing to do with A, there’s nothing preventing you from keeping focused to B and making progress against that.
And I think that’s where pet projects dwell and where inefficiencies or misallocation of resources becomes most prevalent. And also where morale starts to suffer, because a lot of times they only can take their pet projects so far without involving some cross-functional team. And once they run into that barrier and they’re told, no, I can’t help you with that, then they get frustrated because they’ve made all this progress and they’re not getting the organizational help they need.
It definitely makes a difference with the efficiency in which you can execute in the morale and level of frustration of the team involved.
Let me tell a story. An internal initiative to IBM. And I know we should always practice what we preach, but sometimes we forget, and this was a good reminder of it.
Regarding our technology strategy, we have been talking a lot about artificial intelligence and how can we apply that to move our business forward. But we recognized that the priority needed to be put first on data and data security before we could start moving in earnest with artificial intelligence. And so we clearly made that a priority, that data and data security is the organizational priority.
But there is a pocket of passionate people that aren’t involved with data and data security, and they wanted to move forward with what they were doing regarding artificial intelligence. And they very quickly got to that intersection where they needed IT support. They needed data. They needed access. And they were told no. And they got very frustrated about the pace of progress and the pace of change, when clearly we had stated what our priorities were. We just hadn’t clarified what our priorities weren’t. And we did not make it very clear to them that any progress that they’re making on artificial intelligence would soon hit a roadblock and cause frustration. So please don’t work on that. Now we’re sequencing that in next quarter or next year.
I think it’s setting expectations for the organization. It’s setting focus and where they should be spending time. So I do think it’s important to state the priority as well as the inverse, to be perfectly clear.
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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