Reward your future self at time of company sale by ensuring alignment today
Ask yourself this question – if I ask each member of my senior leadership team to write down what they believe are our current top 5 priorities to grow and improve our business, will they each write down the same answer?
Too often the answer heard from company owners and CEOs is no. Missed opportunity for creating company worth.
What is team alignment? It’s you and your key managers being on the same page regarding where team energy and focus should be and you’re discussing regularly the underlying actions to address them. If the team is not aligned, then you need to wonder what each person is making their priority. And as well, you need to wonder about the employees within each of their departments because they won’t be aligned with their peers either.
If your team is lacking this strategic priority alignment, here are the most common reasons we see causing it:
- Lack a strategic plan – the leadership team is tactical and working on tactical matters but there is uncertain connection to the strategic value for the organization. The dialogs frequently but the dialog is often tactical versus strategy.
- Chase squirrels/shiny objects – the members and team often get distracted by the shiny object syndrome so priorities are always changing.
- Incentive plan alignment – the key members of your team have incentive plans that reward them for working on different priorities versus sharing incentives to help align them.
- Lack of peer respect – senior team members that don’t respect each other will look to avoid interaction, not encourage it. If they want to limit their interactions, then it’s highly unlikely they are strategically aligned on priorities and have set their own.
- Owner/CEO not giving importance to alignment – at the end of the day, it’s the role of the owner/CEO to ensure there is team alignment. If they don’t give this priority, generally neither will the team and functional heads will work in silos.
At your next leadership meeting, do the simple exercise of asking each person to write down on a post-it note what they view as the company’s current top 3 to 5 highest level priorities and then have them hand those notes to you. If there is misalignment, then this is your starting point for discussing how to address this. Give a gift to your future self, build and maintain team alignment as it’s your fastest path to building company worth. Give us a call and we can provide you some strategic templates to help evaluate the alignment of your team.
