Okay, let’s just do a quick audit of your business….

  • Have you got a strategy in place in your organisation?
  • Have you taken that strategy and communicated it to the direct reports below you?
  • Have you aligned the personal development objectives of those direct reports back to that strategy so that it links in and delivers business goals at their functional level?
  • Have your direct reports have cascaded it down to the level below and aligned their personal objectives back to their functional strategy to make sure their departments deliver them and deliver your corporate goal?

Have you answered yes to everything so far? Really….? honestly…..?

Ok, that’s great! So, can you honestly say that you can go to the lowest level of your organisation, speak to Molly the cleaner or whoever they are and say to Molly why is it you do what you do? What is the point of your role and what are your development plans?

And can Molly articulate that back to you in a really simple and easy fashion and say ‘my line manager and I have agreed goals that link to what I need to achieve and what the business needs to achieve”.

If any of you can honestly say yes to that, give yourself a pat on the back, because you have done what very few of us manage in business – created alignment!!

During a visit to the NASA space centre in 1962, President Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He interrupted his tour, walked over to the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?”

“Well, Mr President” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

How great would it be is everyone at every level of your business could articulate your goals that clearly?

  • How many of you have mission statements?
  • How many of us have defined values for our company that align to those missions statements? That we walk, live, breathe and demonstrate within our businesses on a daily basis and that our employees buy into and believe, live, demonstrate and talk about on a daily basis?

How many times does that happen? Not many.

In many places we write a strategy; it goes on a piece of paper, we talk about it to a few people and then it goes in a drawer or it gets sent out to the heads of department. They look at it, don’t understand it because it isn’t communicated well and it’s not simple, so it goes in a drawer.

Truly, honestly does it speak to the people who we really want to engage?

Engaging with our people is often too hard for us, but we should do so much more of it! Because when we do, we start to listen and we start to ask the right questions. Then we start to find out what we should have known if we’d only had the time to stop, think and pay attention in the first place.

So now that I’ve got your attention, and now that I’ve made you think, let’s look at what we can do to improve communication of strategy and alignment of goals within your organisations.

There are five key steps that you need to put in place to ensure you have aligned your vision with your actions. These will allow you to gain clarity, create alignment and start making a difference to changing your business. Over the next few posts I shall be taking you through those 5 steps.

We work with leaders every day to help enable change within their business, and creating alignment is key to driving change. So if you want to know more go to www.successfultraining.co.uk/contact and get in touch to see how we can help your business, or look at our resource page for great books, blogs and videos that can give you inspiration.

Next time…. Start with why!