The Importance of Team Alignment
What is team alignment and why is it such a crucial ingredient?
Organisations have long recognised the importance of getting their people and teams ‘on the same page’. The need to build understanding and engagement around a business’s strategy, brand and culture is an obvious one.
When organisations do this, they typically focus on aligning people to their strategy and brand. This is usually done when a new strategy is shared and launched.
Businesses have traditionally used town hall meetings, team briefings and exec video presentations to do this. Social media and technology platforms are used to augment the delivery.
Unfortunately, the impact and effectiveness of these approaches are very mixed. While they may provide information and a broader context in which to help employees see their work, they are often delivered as a “one way” broadcast. As such they do little to improve either employee engagement or team alignment.
To align with a strategy, people need first to make sense of it on their own terms. They need to internalise the meaning and find the relevance to their own context. They can then share their own meanings with colleagues, creating a common language and eventually building team alignment.
This process helps a group to work through the different interpretations, biases, and assumptions we all make on receiving new information. Left unaddressed, these differences can build up to create a “fog” of confusion, and team misalignment.
Despite their significance, such alignment gaps can be difficult to spot, often sitting invisibly between people. They may go unnoticed until we measure metrics such as employee wellbeing.
Gallup’s most recent US survey of employee perception of their organisation caring about their wellbeing, showed a drop in those ‘strongly agreeing’ from 49% to 24% over the past two years to February 2022.
Employee expectations of work appear to have fundamentally changed after the worldwide pandemic of 2020 and 2021. Even before the sudden pivot to remote and hybrid working, our workplaces were becoming more complex and our teams increasingly diverse.
Against this backdrop, building engaged and aligned teams has never been more important and at the same time, has never been more challenging.
How organisations respond, define, and create team alignment, will be a key determinant in their success in the coming months and years.
Most of us have had the experience working in ‘great’ or ‘high performing’ teams. Such teams are characterised by motivated individuals who share a common view of what success looks like, understand the context in which they are operating, and practice behaviours and habits that support effective collaboration.
Note that definition of alignment does not extend to people ‘thinking the same thing’. It focuses on compatibility – making room in the team for differences and challenge, new ideas and change.
Team alignment can be seen a constantly evolving state of understanding between people. It is also a process, one we can use to help teams build trust, shared commitment, and a growth mindset.
Humotion’s process works with the Mirror Mirror tool to develop team alignment. This starts with an in-depth diagnostic review that measures the current “as-is” state of each team. Highlighting both common ground and differences to work from.
Once any gaps have been highlighted, structured constructive dialogue is used to build alignment and compatibility across the team.