Alignment: A Leadership Skill
Impactful leaders are work force multipliers. They help their organizations solve the larger challenges that individuals could not accomplish alone. As a lens focuses ambient light into an intense beam, a leader focuses individual contributions into a larger group capability. The ability to create and sustain this group focus is alignment and it is, arguably, the most important leadership skill.
Alignment can be elusive
An aligned organization can be visualized as a boat with everyone rowing in synch and in the same direction. With clear purpose and shared goals, there is little friction between those involved. To win they must all pull together. The competition they feel is in the other boats, not their own.
The reality, of course, is that organizational dynamics are much more complex than a rowing race. Larger group size can dampen communication and dilute individual accountability. The very organization structures erected in hopes of simplifying management (hierarchical reporting and functional role silos) can create us versus them divisions. Typically, there is a direct relationship between an organization’s size and its bureaucracy, politics, and conflicting internal priorities. The result can be individuals who are involved but not personally invested in the shared goal.
While organization size can exacerbate opportunities for misalignment, the biggest challenge across all domains is
increasing complexity. Whether it’s due to rapid technology advancement, globally interconnected markets, a deteriorating environment, expanding government regulations, or growing customer expectations, the problems that organizations are trying to solve are becoming increasingly difficult to predict and solve. Organizations are in uncharted waters with leaders navigating through unprecedented levels of uncertainty. Compounding this is the relentless sense of urgency that permeates everything and makes slowing down to gain more certainty an impossible option.
Alignment of an Agile Organization
Many organizations have turned towards agile ways of working as a response to the complexity in their operational environment. It helps them reduce uncertainty through accelerated knowledge acquisition and increases the ability for rapid course corrections. These beneficial attributes don’t come from process improvement alone, however. They typically require changes to traditional organization structures and authority allocation including the forming of cross-functional teams and the decentralization of more decision making to these teams. Teams are often closer to the solution space than leaders and, if given autonomy, can more quickly make the right decisions.
Autonomous teams, however, are significantly harder for leaders to align. Gone are the days of specifying a problem’s solution once at the beginning of an initiative and simply managing individuals' work tasks until completion. Now, leaders must remain constantly vigilant to morphing problems and their proposed solutions emerging from the teams. Agile leaders use the perspective and authority of their position to inform and empower others so the organization is capable of sensing change, adapting its response, and realigning itself accordingly.
Leaders are, ultimately, responsible for delivering organizational results, but they can’t do it alone. They must develop capability in the organization and then appropriately focus it. What leaders choose to focus on has a significant impact on how followers can be involved.
Balancing alignment and autonomy
Leading agile organizations requires a more nuanced approach to maintaining alignment. “Command and control” leadership could dictate compliance in individuals, but if the goal is also to build commitment, just telling people what to do will not suffice. No one would know this better than retired US General Stanley McChrystal, who writes “The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an ‘Eyes-On, Hands-Off’ enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.”
Leaders are, ultimately, responsible for delivering organizational results, but they can’t do it alone. They must develop capability in the organization and then appropriately focus it. What leaders choose to focus on has a significant impact on how followers can be involved.
Consider the following four leadership focal points relating to solving a problem:
When leaders focus on work activities to create a solution, they align how followers contribute. Task management can be an effective tool when coordinating small or less skilled groups in solving simple problems. However, follower empowerment can suffer with this tactical approach as all decision making is centralized with the leader.
When leaders focus on a specified solution, they align what followers contribute. By empowering followers to decide how best to provide the solution, they offer follower autonomy which fosters personal commitment instead of just compliance to work orders.
When leaders focus on the problem, they align why followers contribute. Helping the whole group connect emotionally with the challenge creates a shared sense of accountability in solving the problem. In addition, by leveraging the group’s collective intelligence there is more room for innovation.
When leaders focus on the organization, they align who followers contribute to and who we are as an organization. By influencing the culture of the organization, leaders help followers understand its values by how they are experienced through the thinking and behaviors of its leaders. Followers learn the norms of how to align around their interactions within the organization and outside of its ecosystem.
Leaders can balance their organization’s needs for both alignment and autonomy when resolving specific business challenges by intentionally choosing their focus on who, what, why, or how. Whether they can align on the vision, or also specify strategies, or also manage tactics depends on the capabilities of their organization.
Questions to explore
- What do you focus on today that hinders alignment in your organization?
- How can you shift your focus to better balance alignment and autonomy?
About the Author
Ross Hughes is an industry-proven Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) through the Scrum Alliance with over 25 years industry experience and he has been guiding organizational agile transformations for the last 7 years.
Ross began his agile journey in 2005 at IDX where Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland first scaled Scrum. At GE Healthcare, Ross continued scaling Agile by leading very large (25+ Scrum teams) development programs in life-critical applications.
