Aligned leadership critical for successful businesses

Q: My management team has spent much time developing, fine-tuning 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: An old 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.

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.

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Ken, a veteran senior management consultant, 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. This is usually a false assumption. Typically, important differences of opinion are lurking under the surface and not being openly discussed and resolved.

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.

Here’s an example. A nine-member management team has supposedly “agreed” on a major strategic goal for the next year. But when the managers were anonymously asked to rate the probability (on a scale of 0 to 100 percent) of actually achieving the goal, the results were startling: one manager (the top manager) gave it 80 percent; four managers, 40 percent to 60 percent; and four managers less than 20 percent. Clearly there was a serious misalignment in need of resolution. There were other similar misalignments on other critical factors.

There are many causes of misalignment. Senior managers are experienced professionals. Each surely has his/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 his or her authority to bias team decisions. Other team members may be reluctant to voice opposing opinions. And, if they do, the result may be argumentative, non-productive or even “career limiting.”

For these and other reasons, differences of opinion are suppressed and go underground. Addressing these differences is difficult and the team may need skilled, objective outside help to resolve them.

Address misalignments

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.

n Leadership misalignment degrades performance by 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.

n 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.

n 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 those who don’t care tend to stay, while potential recruits are turned off.

n 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 non-threatening methods that make misalignments obvious, and open 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. After a general overview discussion, the team negotiates a mutual agreement on what the most serious misalignments are, and develops a plan for resolving them.

Even though we present the results in a non-attributional way, part way into the session individual managers start taking responsibility for their survey answers and real progress starts to be made. After the session, we conduct follow-up monitoring and coaching as needed.

 Russell Disberger is a founding member of Aspen Business Group, a Northern Colorado-based specialty consulting and venture capital firm. He can be reached by e-mail at russell@aspenbusinessgroup.com, or at (970) 396-7009.