Two essential steps to achieve strategic alignment in your company

What you will find in this article: This blog post explores essential activities for achieving strategic alignment within your organization. It addresses key obstacles to seamless alignment, such as the 'Chinese whisper' effect, where strategy becomes distorted as it cascades down, and the proliferation of misaligned initiatives that resemble a strategic 'favela.' The article offers practical steps for maintaining discipline in strategy cascading and enhancing cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that every team is clearly aligned with the company’s core priorities."

Do your team collaborations remind you of "Brownian motion"?

In many companies, team efforts resemble Brownian motion more than the coordinated alignment seen in Dragon Boat rowers. Individual teams may move quickly, but often they follow different or even conflicting trajectories. Consequently, despite high effort from all sides, this leads to a significant waste of value in the output, as conflicting teams fail to advance in the same direction the company needs or desires. 

Why does this happen?

„Chinese whisper“ effect is your big enemy

There are two critical elements often overlooked or inconsistently applied by leaders in companies:

• i. Inconsistent Strategy Cascading: Company strategy is applied differently across various streams (such as marketing, sales, and supply chain), which results in: 

  • (a) Strategy Drift: Also known as the 'Chinese whisper' effect, where parts of the strategy become distorted with each transfer to a lower level. 

  • (b) Divergent Team Strategies: At the company’s base, the strategies of individual teams can diverge so greatly that they stand in stark contrast rather than in alignment.

• ii. Lack of Shared Priorities in Collaborative Teams: Teams that need to work together often do not share strategic priorities. This can create nearly impenetrable barriers in the handover processes during cross-functional project execution. Have you ever experienced a prolonged delay after sending an urgent email to another department? Chances are, your project was not a priority for them.

Step 1: Apply strict rules to your cascade to avoid strategic „favela“

Without strict discipline in keeping laser focus on your essential strategic areas for your company, your vertical cascade would become wider and wider, literally a strategic “favela” (rather than a house) with many add-ons or deviations from the main strategic highway.

Your priorities will also grow significantly in number. One of our clients has clearly defined three strategic pillars for its CEO. On the C-Level, it was in total close to 50, and on one level below (still senior management), we saw at about 850 separate initiatives. How can you manage?

Vertical alignment is a matter of strictness: you need to be disciplined in a way how you cascade down the company priorities. Limit them in number and never compromise on keeping that number.

Step 2: Make team One-Pagers available for sharing

Consider this real scenario from one of our clients: Ten divisions were each allowed to make three collaboration requests to each of the other divisions, totaling 270 collaboration requests at the top level alone! This scenario, which arose from a previous strategic planning process, was not merely complex—it was unmanageable. It was so overwhelming that all senior leaders agreed it led to inefficiency and waste.

In order to secure cross-functional alignment, you should apply the following principles:

• Awareness - Ensure that Individual Team Strategy One-Pagers are fully transparent and accessible to everyone, not just team members.

• Compatibility - Teams should convene to review the content and timing of their respective One-Pagers to ensure alignment in the priority areas where they need to collaborate.

• Focus - Avoid constructing a complex 'net' of all cross-functional relationships. Concentrate solely on the core priorities, specifically those explicitly named in the company One-Pager. 

• Tracking - Regularly include comparisons of collaborating teams' One-Pagers in your cross-team meetings. This will simplify and enhance the management of cross-team discussions using a well-known structure.