A long time back, I was given an opportunity to discuss about business alignment with a set of people in my team. To make the session interactive, I asked the participants what exactly they understand by business alignment. Replies came in many formats, such as:
Aligning individual aspirations to business
Understanding organization opportunities in a better manner
Developing business acumen
Teamwork is happening towards a common business goal
While most of them were correct, I asked them back:
Is it possible for an individual to be absolutely open and align himself to business needs?
What if the business is not heading in the right direction?
I could see many blank faces! While the textbook definition of business alignment looks easy to understand, it’s extremely hard to implement in teams. Let us take an example. Assume a business leader is having a specific business goal. For example, improving customer satisfaction, considering the current situation of customer complaints. To improve the situation, the leader comes up with certain tasks to achieve desired results. These tasks need to be eventually implemented or executed by different teams in order to achieve the overall goal. However, when these task gets cascaded down the hierarchy, it gets interrupted by different layers in different ways.
What is seen as the right thing from the top management might be seen as an absolute blunder from individual team members. It can also be easily interpreted as the business leader trying to implement his personal agenda to gain some benefit for himself. This is one of the key reasons why practically achieving business alignment becomes very challenging. Now, how can a business leader ensure that the right thing gets implemented in the right way? In my opinion, there is only one way to do it – establishing trust throughout the chain!
Going back to the example of improving customer satisfaction, there could be many team members who see the value of executing a right away. They will go ahead and implement it without fail. For members who don’t see or perceive the value of implementation, will still implement because of the trust. They will work on fundamental beliefs that:
I might be missing something, let me implement this and understand this better.
I don’t agree 100%, but let me still do it for my leader
Not sure if it works. Let me try. In case it didn’t work, I feel comfortable to raise it up
I feel this is a very powerful paradigm, where team members are having disagree and commit mindset. This will open up a new set of possibilities, which the business leader might not have even thought of. Trust is the fastest and easiest way to achieve synergy in teams.
The power of trust is much bigger than actually thought!
