Alignment PDF Print E-mail

Alignment is getting everyone to pull in the same direction, hence the name.

If you're putting together a team from scratch, you can do a lot to ensure that the type of people you're hiring are all aligned in the same direction. However, you'll need to do some work if you are given a group of people to work with.

Changing Direction

Sometimes you'll need to set a new direction. Let's say that after looking at the numbers, your free cash flow is crappy, and you need to get your people to think about that. So you come out and say "you need to think about cash flow" to your people. As soon as you do that - people hide in a bunker. They think "oh yeah, here's another management initiative that we'll ignore". Didn't you do that when you were a minion? Things haven't changed!

In Steve Miller's The Turnaround Kid, he describes how Iacocca at Chrysler tries to embrace the open management styles from Japanese companies that are doing well in auto. They thought this was a good idea to embrace, and so they started a series of seminars, or "truth weeks" on this topic.

"At the final truth week, Iacocca arrived at the end and listened to a summation of the lessons learned. Then, like Grandpa, he ordered us all to work with more openness and collaboration. There is was, word from on high. And everyone immediately went back to the old way of doing things."

Iacocca, and the managers you remember maybe didn't do it right. You need to do it right, and it's not that hard. Just bear a few things in mind.

  • Be consistent. If you flip-flop from one issue to another, you're telling your people that what mattered last week doesn't matter so much this week.
    • Support your direction. If your organisational structure, processes and resources don't reflect what you want, no-one will believe it.
  • Your culture needs to fit. It's tough to get all hard nose revenue focused at a mushy non-profit.
  • You need to fit. Maybe most importantly, your words and actions need to be consistent with your direction. If you talk up cost cutting and then drive up to work in the company Aston Martin, your credibility has gone down the toilet.