09/21/2022
SUMMi7 Founder Eric Strafel shares on ALIGNMENT:
In any organization, be it big or small, aligning team members toward a shared mission and purpose is challenging. As time goes by, team members naturally drift into their own functional silos, leading to a lack of shared vision and focus across the team.
Most of us can relate to situations in which top executives become disconnected from the frontlines, leading to a breakdown in alignment of goals and objectives with middle management. Although this might seem more common in larger organizations, small to midsize companies are equally susceptible to these bottlenecks when the right systems aren’t in place.
Whenever embarking on a large project, setting a small, first-step goal that your team is able to quickly achieve can serve as a powerful method of ensuring alignment across your organization.
Early in my time at Honeywell, I saw this approach yield tremendous success. While working in a division that made pressure switches for thermostats, my boss at the time and our team set out to transform our division by focusing on improving productivity, performance to customers, and employee engagement.
The operation we oversaw was a perfect storm for potential misalignment – we had to coordinate bilingual teams across six different factories in two different countries with two sets of regulations in two different languages, all while producing 20,000 units per week in a highly competitive market.
In order to avoid misalignment as we embarked on the transformation of our division, we began working side by side with frontline leaders at each site, starting with a first event in which we outlined our objectives and how it would fit into the company’s wider purpose. Next, we began running weekly Kaizen events with each team, in which we taught them about the continuous improvement practices, how you move from identifying a process failure to planning a solution, implementing that solution, checking the results, and course correcting where necessary.
Moreover, we made sure to engage in dialogue with frontline employees to co-develop goals and metrics, which were consistent across all the departments. After establishing these goals, we posted them all on large boards at the entrance of each building and at the end of each assembly line – allowing leaders to track daily progress and reference them at stand-up meetings.
All of this created alignment and shared language among departments, which in turn gave team members a shared vision and sense of direction; increased motivation and engagement; and built a solid bedrock of trust in the company.
Discover how proper alignment can be the corner stone of your leadership practices in a webinar, illustrating how inclusive leadership can be catalyst to help grow your business.
To discover how proper alignment can impact your business growth, and to learn more about our Executive Leadership Workshop, contact Shelli Howlett at [email protected].
