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How to Achieve True Alignment Between Business Strategies and Organization Objectives [#TrueAlignment #BusinessStrategies #OrganizationObjectives]

1. Define and Drive Organizational Culture
2. Do Not Just Communicate, Connect
3. Keep It Very Simple

1. Define and Drive Organizational Culture
Culture is the glue that holds an organization together.

It is often the reason behind why people choose to stay with your organization over jumping ship to a competitor. As a leader, it is your role to create, foster, and harness culture against organizational objectives.

Conduct focus groups, 1 on 1s, and surveys to get a strong grip on the current state of your business culture. Then define a desired state for the values and behavior you expect to see on display daily, and embody them in everything you do.

Once you are well on your way towards your desired cultural state, you need to then define the hedgehog concept of your business. This is time very well spent because it takes your underlying culture and applies it to specific business problems.

By deriving the intersection of 3 key questions:
What are we wildly passionate about?
What can we do better than anyone else?
What drives our economic engine?
you set a direction for people that is easy to align with.

Ask the 3 questions at all levels of the organization, calibrate the responses, and then package the inputs into an easily digestible reason for organizational being that relates to the majority of your enterprise.

Then you can focus organizational attention on how you are doing, not on what you are doing — or even worse, why you are doing it.

2. Do Not Just Communicate, Connect
When you give a presentation on your business strategy, key priorities, and other initiatives, how often do you check (either via polls, surveys, show of hands) what people understood from your communication, what they are taking away, and whether or not they agree?

Many leaders are scared to ask these types of questions because they do not like being second-guessed. Still, it is better to be second-guessed than to be zero-followed!

Taking the time to gauge the degree to which key messages are landing, as well as whether the audience is aligned, is probably the most important investment you can make as a leader.

Once you know where your participants are on a given issue, the next step is to connect the dots for them. Do the hard work of helping them see what you see and understand why you are making these choices. Allow them to question, build on, and enhance your ideas.

And finally, move forward, together.

3. Keep It Very Simple
It is relatively easy to stick to one road, drive the speed limit, buckle up for safety, and arrive at your destination both on time and with all passengers on board.

Once you start introducing shortcuts, detours, scenic routes, and bypasses into the mix, you are almost destined to lose some people along the way. No one meanders their way to success.

You pick a destination based on the best available information (expected weather, road conditions, permitted speed), calculate the mileage, gas expense, and time to arrival, and then start driving in as straight a line as possible until you reach your desired location, or in this case desired mission, goal, or objective.

Leaders who jump from highway to highway, seemingly without rationale, are leaders who lose the power of an organization primed and focused on achieving results. Y

ou have to know when to forge ahead, when to change course, and when to abandon ship — but at each inflection point, the more important concept to remember is that you need to reengage the enterprise when change is afoot, and never assume that people know the key whys and whats and hows behind the new direction.

Adapted from
How to Keep Your Team Agile and Aligned Under Pressure:
Strategy Driven