Align Your 'Rowers' With Your Strategy

Consider this question: Is everyone on your team rowing in the same direction? On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that all employees know their own and the organization’s highest-priority objectives?

If your confidence is at a 9 or a 10, congratulations. But based on my experience, most CEOs, when speaking candidly, will admit to the nagging feeling they have quite a few out-of-synch rowers on the boat.

Apparently, their insecurity is justified. Aligning the team is a critical CEO responsibility, but this finding from the Corporate Executive Board reveals many of us come up short:

On average, only 21 percent of the workforce is actively aligning their efforts with company goals (i.e., prioritizing work to be more aligned with strategic goals and advocating for those goals). Even among those with significantly high levels of employee engagement, only 40 percent were aligning their efforts with corporate goals.

A couple of weak or out-of-synch performers may not kill you, but what if the weak performer is a manager? What if he interfaces with customers? Think about the variety of ways a misaligned employee can throw off your company’s trajectory.

Do any of these sound familiar (maybe even on your executive team)?

• The guy who’s doing really powerful, fast strokes—in the opposite direction of everyone else.
• The gal toward the back of the boat who’s barely pulling on her oars (and thereby demoralizing the people sitting behind her).
• The guy who appears to be rowing along with everyone else, but is covertly pulling the left oar a bit harder to move the boat in the direction he feels is best.
• The gal who’s so utterly concentrated on perfecting the minutiae of her own form that she can’t see she’s out of synch with everyone else.

For the CEO, these misaligned rowers are a real concern. Allow too many of them, and you’ll end up at the wrong destination—or nowhere at all.

4 Steps for Aligning Your Crew

Building organizational alignment is a constant and evolving process, but here are a few disciplines I’ve built over the years to help me feel confident that my team knows where we’re headed and what they need to do to get us there together:

1. Make sure you know the direction you want people to row in. The first step for any CEO is to determine the strategic direction of the organization. Until you yourself know where you want to take the organization—i.e., what direction people should be rowing in—it is hard to make decisions, much less hope other people will know what to do. To hold myself to this, I make sure I have documented and can articulate our mission, core values, and a clear set of goals for each quarter.
2. Communicate the direction to the team and reinforce it constantly. Once you know the direction, you have to transmit it effectively to the brains of everyone else on the team. If you don’t, your company is merely a collection of people pursuing their individual goals, guided by their own values. Consistently reinforce the strategic direction to the team: verbally, in writing, and through your actions and decision making. Don’t worry if you find yourself using the same words over and over; you’ll need to repeat yourself more than feels comfortable for the whole company to grasp and retain the intended direction.
3. Welcome all employees into the plan. Setting and communicating the top-level strategic direction of the company gets you pretty far, but there’s still a gap to bridge between employees conceptually understanding the direction and having them translate it into their day-to-day efforts. The best way to help employees see their own part in the direction is through integrated goal setting, where teams and individuals set goals for themselves that tie into priorities at the company level. (I’ve found that software can greatly aid in this.)
4. Set up a system for identifying and handling misalignments. With the above groundwork laid, CEOs must remain vigilant, constantly seeking to spot and solve misalignments. They can do this by tracking goal achievement quarter to quarter, consistently reinforcing the strategic direction, and keeping their ears and eyes open for words or actions that indicate an employee does not understand the direction. This doesn’t mean forcing uniformity of thinking throughout the organization; it means establishing a broad intent and ensuring the autonomous actions of employees align with that intent.

The bigger your boat, the more attention you’ll need to pay to keeping all your rowers pulling in the same direction. It’s worth the time and effort. After all, if you get this wrong, it won’t matter much what else you get right.

Joel Trammell is CEO of Khorus. Download his free e-book, 15 CEO Best Practices for Exceptional Results to get his take on how to succeed in this challenging, one-of-a-kind role.