Speaking of Business: ‘Leadership alignment’ is missing ingredient

Q: My senior management team has spent much time developing and communicating our strategy and operational plans, including employing a strategic management consultant. In spite of this effort, there’s still confusion and conflict between departments and employees that is adversely affecting company performance. How can we improve this situation?

A: A colleague of mine, Ken Adams, and I both feel this is where most companies fall short. A lack of leadership alignment within the senior management team often causes situations like the one you describe.

Ken has found that managers often assume that they agree on critical business factors and accountabilities because they have spent so much time dealing with them. However, Ken, as a veteran senior-management consultant, has found that this is usually a false assumption. Typically, important differences of opinion about critical business factors are lurking under the surface and not being openly discussed and resolved.

What is leadership alignment? Leadership alignment is the degree of actual, detailed agreement between managers on critical business factors and related accountabilities, including what these factors are, their impact on company performance, their current status and priority and how they manage them.

Examples of these critical factors include: company mission, vision and values, business strategy, market factors and trends, competition, customer satisfaction, organizational structure, resource allocation, employee satisfaction, business-process efficiency, the effectiveness of the management team itself, etc.

There are many causes of misalignment. Senior managers are experienced professionals. Each surely has his or her own private ideas about how things should be done. Additionally, the pressure on the top manager to get results may cause him or her to use their authority to bias team decisions.

Addressing leadership alignment is important because it dramatically affects company performance due to the amplified influence senior leadership has on the work environment and functionality of the whole body of the organization.

Some of the ways leadership misalignment degrades performance are:

” Distorting the communication and interpretation of strategic and organizational information that is critical for running the business effectively. Politics and opinions, rather than facts and solid analysis, tend to drive decision-making.

” Internally, misalignment degrades the efficiency of critical business processes that depend on intimate cooperation between departments and individuals throughout the organization. Such cooperation is difficult when the leaders secretly don’t agree.

” A major competitive factor is not product/service competition. It is competition for excellent people. Leadership misalignment causes frustration and conflict in the daily work life of employees that distracts them from productive work and creates negative feelings toward the company. As a result, good, conscientious employees tend to leave and the employees who don’t care tend to stay. Also, potential recruits are turned off.

” The grapevine is alive and well. Underlying misalignment among leaders is usually apparent to employees and undermines their confidence in the leaders and the company’s future.

To improve leadership alignment, management must make a firm commitment to resolve misalignments. The first and often most-difficult step is to openly admit that misalignments exist. It seems easier to attribute poor organizational performance to external factors than to look in the mirror.

To help managers, we’ve had great success using nonthreatening methods that makes misalignments obvious, and opens them up to rational discussion and resolution.

We confidentially interview individual managers and review documents related to critical business factors. We then create a survey that asks penetrating questions about these critical factors. Then, each individual manager takes the survey anonymously. We then present the team with a statistical summary of the survey results for consideration and action planning.

Greeley resident Russell Disberger is a founding member of Aspen Business Group, a Northern Colorado-based specialty-consulting and venture-capital firm assisting businesses in obtaining strategic growth. He can be reached at (970) 396-7009 or via e-mail at russell@aspenbusinessgroup.com.

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