Team misalignment is a persistent productivity killer. When teams are misaligned, tasks take more time to complete. Fragmented efforts lead to confusion and frustration. Subsequently, businesses are unable to achieve the results they aim for.
There are several warning signs you can look for:
- Departmental silos – each department focuses on its own mandate instead of the big picture that the departments need to support each other on
- Conflicting resource allocation – competition for money and people to work on projects pulling team members working in diverging paths
- Disengaged employees – confused, overwhelmed, and overworked, employees feel disconnected from the overall business goals
- Slow decision-making – reaching a decision takes more time due to the need for prolonged discussions to get agreement
These signals translate into uncoordinated decisions and actions. Fortunately, there are ways to build rapid team alignment.
Strong leadership cohesion
Alignment ought to start at the top. Incoherence at the top is a recipe for drifting teams.
In order to bring team alignment across a business, senior leaders and managers need to commit to align behind the business direction and goals.
Dedicate time to address any conflicts and misalignment as quickly as possible. This requires discipline to be cognizant of the misalignment and take action. Otherwise, delays in addressing the problem will cause friction that perpetuates.
With leadership alignment, leaders speak with one voice. Without it, the business faces the risks of prolonged decision-making, departmental silos, conflicting resource allocation, and disengaged employees.
Clear communication at every level
Managers at every level of the business need to articulate messages that are specific, relevant, and concise. These messages include communication on business vision and goals, priorities, latest market development, business positioning, initiatives, challenges and risks.
Team members would find it difficult to relate their work to the overall goals when the communication is not specific and relevant to what they do.
It is the responsibility of the managers to ensure all the communications are aligned. A slight deviation would steer teams to charge down a different path, resulting in misaligned choices of action.
The ripple effects of misaligned messages are conflicting resource allocation and work silos.
Consistent communication cadence
To ensure employees fully understand the content and intent of a message, it needs to be said more than once. Repetition is a must.
A consistent communication cadence is the best way to reinforce a message. Important messages require more frequent reminders. Each message also presents an opportunity to align people behind the work involved.
For instance, the communication cadence to initiate a change in how to manage customer complaints might be weekly to reinforce the new process. Over time, the cadence could be monthly and later quarterly as the customer service support group becomes familiar with the new practice.
Keep in mind that the cadence also helps to keep employees engaged and up-to-date on what their team or others are working on.
Congruent transparency
Sharing progress and company’s information keep employees engaged. Transparency is fundamental to align teams because team members need to know where the business is at.
In many businesses, information is accessible to a select few in senior ranks. Little information is shared beyond this circle of leaders and managers.
Poor transparency prompts people to make assumptions. The probability of incoherent assumptions is high. This essentially creates disparate directions furthering the impacts from departmental silos and resource misallocation.
Consider the Director for Operations in a professional service firm is great with communication. His direct reports are able to gain full transparency on the state of business. They in turn share the information with their teams. However, the supervisors of work groups like to hold back information, feeling that their work groups have no need for the information. As a results, employees at the work group level feel left out. They are disengaged.
Attaining team alignment requires persistent efforts. With full commitment, managers strive to collaborate and align among themselves first. That alignment facilitates clear and coherent communication in their respective areas. The strong foundation helps to perpetuate the spirit of team alignment across the whole organization.
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