Alignment the Efficiency Catalyst
Alignment the Efficiency Catalyst
Aligned organisations create more value with a more motivated team
EDITED AND UPDATED - 15/01/24
TL;DR
You will run your company more efficiently (and effectively) if the whole team is working in the exact same direction. To make this work you will need to optimise your lines of communication and command to align everyone continuously.
Put the Horse before the Cart
Imagine two equally strong horses pulling a cart in opposite directions. That cart ain’t going nowhere and will quickly break. Now imagine that one pulls the cart forward and the other pulls orthogonally to that direction. That cart sorta moves forward (the net vector is in between the two directions at a 45 degree angle) but not as efficiently as a cart which both horses pull forward. I think you get the gist of this overstretched metaphor - the cart is the company, the horses are the team (with all due respect) and the forward direction is the intended strategy: alignment will yield more energy expended on the desired company outcomes.
It is impossible to get any team perfectly aligned so that everyone always agrees on everything and moves in unison (nor is that desirable). However, the point is that energy spent on alignment is worth it and should be on top of every leaders agenda who wants to ensure a motivated team that achieves the company mission most efficiently.
Types of Alignment
The dimensions that matter to us are communication, command and culture. Lines of communication allow for conveying strategy & culture top down and feedback & results bottom up. Lines of command allow for setting goals and agreeing on execution/tactics. Culture stands for alignment around the mindset and operating principles required for the stage and mission of the company.
When communicating downstream with the team one-to-many we set the company vision, mission (why) and culture (how). If everyone is fully aligned with these then there are less misunderstandings and unnecessary debates (necessary debates are welcome).
When feedback and results are communicated, we want to ensure we are aligned about the feedback mechanisms and format. Similarly, results should be relevant and gathered in an agreed upon way. Informal feedback and reporting have a place but to run an organisation that cycles through experiments efficiently to find the elusive product-market business scale fit, being aligned about how to communicate upstream is key for error correcting and adjusting the company direction.
While downstream communication is mainly preoccupied with the ‘why’ (mission/vision) and ‘how’ (culture), command (which is always downstream) is mainly focused with the ‘what’ (goals) and ‘how’ (execution). High-level company mission and vision is broken down into specific unambiguous targets and the parameters within they can be achieved are clarified.
Culture alignment is about how much the team is aligned regarding the attitude that is required for the stage of the company. A small team that is still figuring out product market business fit needs people to have the same level of excitement and tolerance for ambiguity and change. It’s hard to work with negative, inflexible and risk-averse people during the early stages of the startup journey. Team members also need resilience to motivate each other and be able to fight adversity with pleasure.
Lines of Communication
To ensure that downstream communication of mission/vision and culture works well it has to happen often especially in fast moving organisations. A rule of thumb is that when you start getting bored of saying the same thing over and over it will just start registering with everyone else.
The best tools to ensure this works are quarterly strategy on-sites, weekly team meetings and weekly one on ones. You need to encourage your managers and team to relate whatever is being discussed every week back to the mission, vision and culture in an authentic manner. If the whole exercise ends up feeling corporate, it misses the point. This “cult” like repetition makes decision making easier as the north star is always shining bright.
A good way to create a continuous presence of mission/vision and culture is to display things and write them down visibly. Yes, it is a cliche that startups create graffitis (whiteboards are fine too) of values and missions on office walls but those help with alignment.
The alignment in upstream communication is equally important. Reporting allows the organisation to understand whether its hypothesis around its experiments are working. This has both up- and downstream components. Often departments don’t cross report. Information goes up to management and then is reported across. However, making sure that the team knows what needs to be reported how often and in which way upstream is crucial for the integrity of downstream reporting. Without an aligned reporting infrastructure you are flying blind and wasting time and money.
Feedback flows both ways. Downstream is natural given that companies are hierarchical structures. Regular standing meetings allow for this to occur naturally (one on ones, weekly meetings, quarterly on-sites). However, what is just as important and often neglected is upstream feedback. You want to create a zero resistance environment for the frontline to report to the top leadership. There should be a clear alignment on how people can feedback, a clear understanding of its value and as little bureaucracy involved in the process as possible. The more intermediaries between top leadership and the company’s frontline team or its users/customers the more disruptable it becomes.
Whether it’s downstream or upstream communication, creating infrastructure and rituals that allow for it to continuously occur in a structured manner and in the right cadence is key to alignment. Therefore, spending time on designing the lines of communication thoughtfully is time well spent.
Lines of Command
Most of what I’ve mentioned above applies to lines of command too so I will keep this section shorter.
Command lines are about downstream instructions. Setting of goals (what) and the tactics (how) is key to getting desired results. The most motivating way to do this, is to show exactly how goals tie back to the mission/vision of the company. Doing this once every quarter doesn’t cut it. Similarly to the principle of repeating mission/vision and culture until you are bored, you should always remind people of how their specific goals and objectives are crucial to achieving overall success. This ensures that your team feels aligned with the overall company direction. This is also an effective litmus test that uncovers when your goals are misaligned, namely when you can’t tie things back easily.
A good way to keep the team aligned with goals is to display results everywhere. Often effort may be misunderstood as achievement. Monitors, whiteboards, weekly emails with actual results allow the team to be on the same page as to how they are stacking up against goals. This makes adjusting tactics easier as everyone is on the same page as to why course correction is happening. This is a no brainer but I still see many companies paying lip service to ongoing reporting with half-assed efforts. In the right culture this sort of reporting can be motivating and an a great effectiveness unlock.
The specific execution and tactics (how) used to achieve goals should be similarly tied back to the company culture. If ‘move fast and break things is a cultural value’ then quality assessing something for a quarter doesn’t make sense. So aligning execution/tactics with culture to ensure teams are working in line with the wider company expectations will lead to smoother acceptance of the specific “commands”.
Making sure that lines of command align goals and tactics with the overall company direction will make them feel more legitimate and will make achieving them motivating.
Culture Alignment
Startups are hard. There is a lot of adversity, ambiguity and volatility. To overcome all that is impossible, if you and your team don’t care about the mission/vision. Moreover, you need to have a positive (but not deluded) mindset about the journey.
Connecting with or being passionate about the mission of a startup makes work feel less like work. That’s good because especially at the beginning of setting a company up chances are that you’ll have to clock a lot of hours at work. So hiring people who are aligned with the mission will allow them to bring a different level of energy to the enterprise and increase the likelihood of success.
Culture alignment, among other things, is a fancy way of saying that someone has the right attitude and expectations. Being stressed about a changing direction or strategic adjustment signals inflexibility, which has no place at a nascent startup. Usually these misalignments express themselves in emotional reactions and negativity. Again it’s good to be critical to interrogate any given strategy sufficiently but not being able to stop complaining or letting go zaps everyone else of their energy.
Finding people who are happy to hold strong opinions lightly is advisable. Given that your startup has a limited runway and needs to cycle through experiments quickly, you need flexible and unemotional strategy adjustment. This means disagreeing but committing to a new tactic should be commonplace.
Hiring a team that has the right expectations, attitude and motivation is crucial. When everyone is aligned culturally, the unavoidable downs, adjustments and pivots will be more bearable. This way achieving traction and PMF will be easier and more fun.
Conclusion
Aligning an organisation is a no brainer and most startups do so. That said, there are orders of magnitude differences in the output between startups that do this right and those that don’t. By output I not only refer to hitting milestones but also the motivation and job satisfaction of your employees.
To do alignment right you need to design your lines of communication and command purposefully. Don’t forget that as an organisation grows you need to continuously adjust the infrastructure and rituals that enable alignment to make sure they fit the size of the company you are running.