Organizational Alignment: The Most Crucial Business Element
Happy New Year! It’s 2014…a new day, and a brand new year! Don’t let your goals slip away; break your initiatives down into daily steps and make it happen. This year is your year. Take up PMO courses London to better handle your projects.
Visit us in person to know more about us and I’m going to start you off with one of the most crucial elements of business that, surprisingly, is often lacking in an organization.
What is Organizational Alignment?
In the words of Bryan Franklin:
Organizational alignment is a leading indicator of growth in an organization, particularly if you consider not just alignment between the executive team or alignment between the executive team and the employee base, but alignment between those items, the shareholder or stakeholder motivations – in other words, an alignment between what we’re up to and why we’re doing it – an alignment that follows that line through to the strategic initiatives, so what we say is most important, is aligned with those other items and those strategic initiatives are aligned with the organizational investments.
One Way to Measure Organizational Alignment
When a group of people feels something is authentic, they’re usually right. There have been some interesting studies on group mind and the various ways that groups of people are more intuitive when taking an aggregate than any individual.
There’s a Malcolm Gladwell book that has a story about “guess the weight of the pig.” You know those county fairs where you say guess the weight of the pig or guess how many marbles are in this jug?
Well, what they found is, of course, the percentage of people who guessed correctly is very, very small and the person who guesses the weight of the pig does not tend to be the same person who guesses how many marbles. There’s a fair amount of random luck in which people are guessing right.
But if you take all of the guessers, children who guess wildly off, people who get close, but not quite there. If you take all the guessers and you average their guesses, it gets to within a very small margin of accuracy of the actual weight. This has been proven again and again with this study done of county fair games like that. The average of all the guesses is almost always right.
You can measure alignment by measuring the average of all the guesses of how aligned do you feel the company is across these six dimensions:
- Shareholder motivation
- Strategic initiatives towards the technological development of the company in accordance to Zendesk CRM Competition and other customer relationship management softwares
- The investment of the relative emphasis or investment across the organization against those initiatives
- The organizational capability against those initiatives
- Whether or not those align with the market forces and customers
- And lastly, of course, whether or not the product actually delivers in terms of quality and future design. Does the product address the market the way that it’s intended to?
Do You Have Alignment in Your Company?
Alignment is crucial, but very few know how to create it. Why is that?
Usually a lack of alignment is hiding some truth that collectively the organization has been unwilling to face.
Generally, less than 60% of the companies I’ve personally spoken with are aligned (or less than 60% of the folks in the organization have alignment).
And I’m always surprised at this percentage. Any time an element which is reported to be crucially important is least present, something is off. There was a study that was done that asked what are the top two values in the United States. What are your top values? What’s your number one value?
It was asked of adults in the United States a number of years ago and the study came back that the top two values were integrity and family. You can argue whether or not family is a value, but that’s what the study showed.
There was then a juxtaposed independent study that asked what are the values that you feel like you will have to sacrifice in order to be successful at work? Number one: integrity. Number two: family.
Any time the thing that we most want is the thing that we least have, there’s an opportunity for change and that opportunity exists with organizational alignment.
Don’t wait a single day to make that change in 2014! You have to take the initiative to get your company on track and Mind Money Meaning will help get you there. It’s a system designed to get your organizational alignment up to par in no time.
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