If you’re a CEO or a senior leader in your organization, you might be frustrated by the amount of time you spend trying to get your team aligned. While you probably love being with your team to collaborate on plans, solve important problems and support one another, the frustration you experience is the handholding that’s required to get your team pulling in the same direction. Each person operates like they have their own little fiefdom to rule and reign over, not purposely sabotaging one another, just immersed in the day-to-day of managing their team and trying to reach department goals. They jockey with one another for resources, there’s little accountability to one another on commitments made during meetings, they don’t keep one another in the loop on decisions they make and their communication is limited to formally scheduled meetings.
Because everyone is at high speed in their own lane, you all are operating based on unclear or unspoken expectations and a bit skeptical that everyone has the best intentions. All this demands your time, energy and focus to ensure the most important things are worked on, resolve communication breakdowns and get your team on the same page.
A client, who was experiencing much of this, text messaged me one Friday from an airplane and said, “I feel like I was involved in everything, but didn’t accomplish anything.”
A Drain on Productivity, Human Resources, and Your Energy.
The stakes of running a misaligned leadership team are incredibly high. Here are some of the things you risk by continuing to run your business with a misaligned leadership team.
- The productivity, not just of the leadership team, but of the whole organization is in doubt. You were hired to accomplish big things and you need your teams to deliver and not just at a predictable 10 – 20% increase but a 100%+ increase. Operating with a misaligned senior team makes this near impossible.
- The people who want a cohesive, aligned team will eventually seek out other options. The cost of replacing a single leadership team member is huge. It can be anywhere between one-half to twice that employee’s annual salary. There are other hidden costs that come with turnover of a senior leader –a decline in team morale, distrust in management and uncertainty about the future.
- The personal toll on you. The energy, time and focus this requires causes unnecessary stress and potential burn which will impact how you show up for your team and at home.
What you need to avoid this is a fully aligned, cohesive team. A team of senior leaders who aren’t there to represent the department they lead, but to solve problems that stand in the way and achieve goals that are on the path to the organization’s success. That means they readily offer up their resources and energy in order to serve the greater need of the organisation.
Never fear, everything you want is just three conversations away.
The Three Alignment Conversations
The 3 Alignment Conversations are critical to getting everyone on your team aligned. Beyond all the other benefits you’re about to read, they enable you to have the crucial time you need to focus on your mission critical priority—growing the business.
The three alignment conversations are:
- How do we behave?
- What’s most important?
- Who does what?
How do we behave?
The heart of the “how do we behave” conversation is defining and getting to specific agreement on how you will act and behave with one another. They often come in the form of core values.
Having a courageous conversation with your team and each individual member connects the values to specific behaviors so people know what is expected, encouraged, and rewarded within the team and organization. In addition to setting clear expectations, the conversation gives your team shared language and a clear identity.
One client who had the “how we behave” conversation had their CFO submit her resignation because the behaviors and identity were so clear, the CFO acknowledged that it wasn’t a fit for her anymore.
The results of the “how do we behave” conversation also drive productive decision making. When values aren’t clear, we can easily become paralyzed—or become too impulsive.
In Dare to Lead, Brene Brown said this…
“One reason we roll our eyes when people start talking about values is that everyone talks a big values game but very few people actually practice one. It can be infuriating, and it’s not just individuals who fall short of the talk. In our experience, only about 10 percent of organizations have operationalized their values into teachable and observable behaviors that are used to train their employees and hold people accountable. Ten percent. If you’re not going to take the time to translate values from ideals to behaviors—if you’re not going to teach people the skills they need to show up in a way that’s aligned with those values and then create a culture in which you hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values—it’s better not to profess any values at all. They become a joke. A cat poster. Total BS.”
Intolerance is Essential
One of the words I introduce to the CEO’s I work with on the “how do we behave” conversation, is the idea of being intolerant. This is not often seen as a positive word, but when it comes to creating clarity and alignment around behavior, intolerance is essential. If you as the leader or leadership team are tolerant of everything, you’ll stand for nothing.
How to Determine Your Values
The best way to figure out where your values and behavior are currently at, is to ask yourself this question: If an alien landed down into our workplace, and observed for a week everything that went on in our leadership team and organization, what consistent behaviors would they see? Or consider this: What are the current behaviors that are considered normal in our environment but get in the way of your work to be successful?
Start there and then discuss the behaviors, if practiced consistently, would lead to a high performing team and successful organization.
It’s critical to have this conversation with the whole team about how you will behave and how these behaviors manifest in practice. Follow that with a “how do we behave” conversation with each individual on your team. The goal of these conversations is to get to agreement with each individual and create a space for them to opt-in (or opt out as the CFO did).
What is most important?
Answering this question will have the most immediate impact on the team and organization and will garner back your time fast. It addresses two of the most frustrating day-to-day challenges you face—organizational ADD – shiny objects constantly distracting us – and silos within the organization. When you are clear on what’s important it reduces the impact of these two challenges.
Most organizations have a long priority list of tasks and projects to cover all the bases and rightfully so. There is a lot going on in your organization and lists help you track this; however, in our list making world, the trap that most organizations fall into is already scarce resources are spread across all of them and the result is failure to everything well or even accomplish them all. Having this list also contributes to the silo mentality on your team because each item on the list is invariably owned by a different member of your team and is their personal priority. Your team finds themselves working on cross-purposes and unwittingly hurting other’s projects.
The spirit of the “what’s most important?” conversation is to align your team and thereby the organization on – literally – the one thing that is most important.
To do this, we identify a rally cry. The most successful organizations focus all their attention, resources, and energy around one thing. Naturally, you have many things going in your organization, but what is the singular rally cry that everyone can look to as most important?
What’s Your Rally Cry?
To identify that rally cry, ask yourself this question: if we accomplish only one thing over the next period of time (i.e the next six months), what would that be? This is how you decide to spend your time, energy, attention and resources.
The most important outcome of the “what’s most important?” conversation is that it is shared across your leadership team. The team must take collection ownership for achieving it.
Getting to clear agreement on the answer to this question diminishes you needing to be a referee in your organization and breaks down silos where people are focused singularly on their own projects, department and resources.
Once you’ve identified and agreed to the rally cry as a leadership team, it’s time to have the individual conversations with each person on your leadership team and ask them: What needs to happen in your work so that our rally cry is your rally cry?
Who does what?
Regardless of how clear a company’s organizational chart may be, when I work with a leadership teamI’m never surprised to find that either people aren’t clear on who does what or there’s duplicates in roles and/or responsibilities.
While in the conversation What is Most Important, there is the spirit of leaving department and organizational chart distinctions to the side, it’s always worthwhile to take time to clarify and agree on what everyone is responsible for, what they do and the contribution they will make. Without clarity around that division of responsibilities the possibility of politics is very real. Too often, this division is assumed. In truth, one of the biggest points of confusion in the identification of roles and responsibilities is with the CEO. You often have the role of leader of the leadership team and have a functional expertise that bleeds into the area(s) of your team members.
Establish Clear Agreement
The “who does what” conversation is often the simplest of the Three Alignment Conversations and it’s goal is to establish clear agreement on the answer.
Once you’re clear as a team on who does what, bring it down to an individual conversation with each leadership team member to ensure each one agrees and can commit to it.
My encouragement to you as the CEO or senior leader is to have all three of these conversations. If you only have one or two, something critical is being left out. To get to the level of power you want, you need to have all three. If you want help facilitating these conversations on your team, reach out to me here.