My last blog focused on why clarity of mission is central to inspiring investment and sacrifice from our teammates. This issue focuses on why it’s crucial for driving alignment.
Can you imagine standing before your team at the annual offsite, shouting the rallying cry, “Execution! Accountability!”
“Process compliance! Higher performance!”
You’re more likely to induce paranoia and fear than what you want – investment and sacrifice.
Clarity of mission–combined with belief in the mission–is what gets people excited about getting up in the morning. About sacrificing their time for the worthy aim, which is that gift you give to your customers, clients, end-users–the people who need what you create.
But clarity of mission also drives alignment. My favorite definition of alignment in the dictionary is: “the route or course of a road or railroad.” If you get alignment right, then everybody in your organization rides the same train.
The clearer your organization is about its mission, the easier it is for people to establish strategic and operational priorities because they can always ask themselves, “If we are successful at executing X, Y, or Z, does it make us more capable at giving our gift to customers? Does it remove barriers to our success?”
In the absence of this clarity, more, if not all, potential priorities seem equally important. That’s when you get different cars from the same train traveling on different tracks. At that point, you better pray you’re in the coffee car.
Execution and accountability are table stakes–permission to play. Investment and sacrifice are what drive people to play a bigger game.
Alignment is what drives them to play the bigger game at a higher level of efficiency and effectiveness.
Go back and reread your journal entries from my recent newsletter. In those prompts, we encouraged you to ask, “What is the gift our company gives to the world?” and “What is the gift our company gives to clients/customers?”
If you didn’t have the chance to journal on those prompts two weeks ago, do it now. It is your company’s mission to give that gift. To serve your core audience in some elevated, dare I say exalted, manner.
The clearer you are as to what this gift is for yourself, the easier it will be for you to communicate this to your people.
And, by extension, the more alignment you’re likely to have. The higher the probability that when your train gets to the next station, all the cars will be there.’’
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