Three practical approaches to align an organisation around its strategy

Organisations often talk about and focus on strategy. And rightly so: having organisational clarity on strategy improves organisational health and performance [link to the six questions].

Strategy essentially involves determining:

• Why an organisation exists – its core purpose or mission;
• Selecting a destination – a vision; and
• Working out how to get there – strategies for success

These three elements correspond to Simon Sinek’s why – how – what model that he presents in his book, Start With Why.

But a strategy is only as effective as its implementation.

Hence it’s important to create alignment throughout an organisation, ensuring everyone understands why the organisation exists, where it’s headed and how it will get there.

One way to visualise alignment is to imagine an organisation as the outline of a large arrow drawn on a page. The development of strategy selects the direction that this arrow will point. Then imagine a series of nested arrows within it, with each one representing a division of the organisation, a team within the division and an individual within the team. Even modestly sized organisations will have hundreds of arrows within arrows. The challenge is to ensure that they’re all pointed in the same direction.

As quoted within Measure What Matters by John Doerr, Aaron Levie – the founder and CEO of cloud storage company Box – says that “At any given time, some significant percentage of people are working on the wrong things. The challenge is knowing which ones”.

At any given time, some significant percentage of people are working on the wrong things. The challenge is knowing which ones

Aaron Levie, Box CEO

If ‘execution is everything’, alignment is therefore arguably more important than strategy itself. To ensure that everyone is pushing in the one direction. So much so that John Doerr considers alignment as one of the four “superpowers” of setting objectives and key results (or OKRs as they’re more commonly known) for an organisation. He cites a Harvard Business Review article titled ‘How Employee Alignment Boosts the Bottom Line’, which reports that highly aligned employees are more than twice as likely to be high performers.

The effect of alignment is twofold. First, it ensures that everyone is working toward the same goal. Second, alignment creates a clear line of sight between what each team member is working on now and how the organisation as a whole will succeed in the future. This is inherently motivating, as a it creates a stronger sense of purpose, which builds engagement and boosts productivity. Hence, people are not only pointed in the same direction, but they’re also motivated to push harder in the right direction.

How to create alignment

There are a few relatively simple methods to create alignment within an organisation – they’re simple, but not necessarily easy to do. They require commitment by leaders to stick with it, go hard and long on communication, and keep working on it long after they would have believed they need to. Given constantly evolving environments within which organisations operate, evolving divisions and team member turnover, the act of creating alignment will get easier with time, but it will never stop.

None of the alignment methods below are mutually exclusive, but anyone of them on their own will make a meaningful impact.

Six questions to create organisational clarity

In Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage, he identifies the six questions that every organisation needs to answer to succeed, by creating clarity and boosting organisational health: Why do we exist? How will we succeed? What do we do? What is most important, right now? Who must do what? How do we behave?

By answering these questions for an organisation and overcommunicating the answers so that all team members at all levels are crystal clear on them, it will create a strong sense of purpose and a common understanding of the organisation’s strategy. This will then enable each team member to start adjusting their own focus (including the clarification of their own role’s purpose, setting of priorities, adopted behaviours etc.) accordingly.

We have developed a Team Alignment Canvas that captures the six questions in an easy to follow and share format. You can download the Team Alignment Canvas for free. We recommend completing the Team Alignment Canvas for an organisation as a whole (if you need help doing this, check out our Strategic Planning Toolkit, which gives a straightforward approach). Advanced alignment can then be created by repeating the six questions for each division within the organisation. And then team within a division. This helps accelerate the alignment of all the arrows within the arrows.

Creating a clear vision for the future

The Roman philsopher Seneca said that “if a sailor doesn’t know to which port they’re sailing, then no wind is the right wind”. If team members don’t know where the organisation is headed in the future, then they can’t make the right choices in their own roles.

If a sailor doesn’t know to which port they’re sailing, then no wind is the right wind

Seneca, Roman philosopher

Clarifying an organisation’s vision – where it aspires to be in the future – therefore acts as a guiding beacon against which all team members can align their decisions and efforts.

Most organisations have a vision statement, but few have what Good to Great authors Jim Collins and Jerry Porras describe as an envisioned future, comprising big, hairy, audacious goals(or BHAGs) and a vivid description of the future. The BHAGs set the general direction, and the vivid description then translates the BHAGs into a ”vibrant, engaging and specific description of what [the future] will be like”. The BHAGs inspire people with their audacity while the vivid description creates a common, clear picture in the minds of each team member, allowing them to test every decision for its usefulness in moving toward that future.

Objectives and key results (OKRs)

Intel pioneered OKRs in the 1970s and they have since been successfully adopted by many organisations, including – most famously – Google. OKRs comprise two parts: an objective and a small set of key results.

The objective answers the question ‘Where do I want to go?’ and are ”significant, concrete, action-oriented and (ideally) inspirational”, according to John Doerr.

The key results (KR) articulate how we will get to where we want to go, how the objective will be achieved. John Doerr says that “effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic… they are measurable and verifiable”. Andy Grove, who invented OKRs when he was at Intel, says in his book, High Output Management, that KRs must be “so specific that a person knows without question whether he [or she] has completed them and done it on time or not”.

In Measure What Matters, John Doerr presents a simple example of how OKRs can be cascaded throughout an organisation. Imagine an American football team general manager who has the following OKR:

General manager
Objective: Make money for the owners
KR 1: Win the Super Bowl
KR 2: Fill home stands to 90%

This general manager’s KRs would then flow to both the head coach and the head of marketing, with each top level KR becoming an objective at the next level down, as follows:

Head coach	Head of marketing
Objective: Win the Super Bowl	Objective: Fill home stands to 90%
KR 1: Passing attack amasses 300+ yards/game	KR 1: Upgrade team branding
KR 2: Defense allows fewer than 17 points/game	KR 2: Improve media coverage
KR 3: Special teams unit ranks in top 3 in punt return coverage	KR 3: Revitalise in-stadium promotion

This process would then be repeated at each subsequent level in the organisation.

For various reasons that he articulates in the book, John Doerr actually cautions against simply cascading OKRs in the manner shown in the example. Instead he recommends that OKRs at each level should be a 50%/50% split between top down (i.e. cascading) and bottom up (i.e. those that the team identifies itself) OKRs.

Following this process creates clear alignment through the organisation and allows any individual or team to see how their work (as captured by their respective OKRs) aligns with what the organisational as a whole is seeking to achieve.

Want to create strategic clarity for your team or organisation?

We have developed a Strategic Planning Toolkit, which helps any team or organisation develop a one page strategic plan in a one day workshop. It includes a practical, proven and straightforward process. And it includes all the templates you’ll need, including agendas, e-mails, meeting invites and presentations. You can download a free sample here.