Are you an executive or business owner wondering how you can make a connection between your business plan and achieving your company goals?
Does it feel like all your teams are working completely separate from each other and not as a cohesive team, all working from the same playbook?
If so, then you’re in the right place. Keep reading to learn how strategic alignment is the answer to achieving the goals you create.
What is strategic alignment?
When your team’s day-to-day tactics or core tasks directly relate to your organizational-level strategies, you’ve attained strategic alignment.
Unfortunately, many teams never realise this ideal situation and instead find themselves bouncing from tactic to tactic, hoping to further their career and the company.
If your workforce doesn’t know the overall goals of the company, they can’t work towards achieving them. And, likewise, if they can’t see how the overall company vision relates to their daily tasks, they’ll never be truly motivated to work towards those goals.
Some key benefits of attaining strategic alignment include:
- More transparency between the executive level and company workforce
- Improved employee engagement and productivity
- Improved recruiting and onboarding
As you can see, by working towards strategic alignment, you will improve more than just reaching your goals. If you want to achieve company-wide buy-in on your strategies, you must work towards strategic alignment. But you might be wondering how you can do that—let’s dive into that in the next section.
How to implement your strategic alignment model
Too many organizations have too many departments that are siloed away from each other. Nobody understands what the other departments are doing or how their tactical actions are related.
However, when you start with a clear goal of what success looks like and then identify the gaps to close then you can engage your team on how. Your team will help create the goals that close the gaps and they’ll create the strategic pathways to deliver success.
1. Start with the end in mind
You must start by first defining your vision and your company purpose. If you can’t clearly articulate your company vision and translate this into a goals or objectives, how can you expect your team members to be able to do so? So, start by outlining the long-term vision for your organization. That’s what we’d call ‘Question 1‘ in Waymaker’s Leadership Curve.
2. Diagnose your gaps
Engage your whole team by inviting them into Waymaker to be a part of diagnosing the skills and systems required to grow the organization.
Ideally, this will include all levels within your organization. But, unless you’re a small start-up, this can be difficult to gather everyone together. So, gather your key leaders who will carry your mission to their departments and disseminate it clearly for you to their team members.
Once you have your first diagnostic completed (about 15 minutes in Waymaker!), you’re ready to start building out your potential goals into the strategic roadmap that your teams will carry out.
3. Create the roadmap
With your team’s input, take the time to review the Waymaker diagnostic. Breakdown each leadership curve and come up with goals to close the gaps.
Listen to your teams. They know what’s happening on the frontline as much as anyone and they have intimate knowledge about how their department can help to achieve your company vision.
As you work through each of the Waymaker Leadership Curves you’ll have worked your way through the 7 Questions and have identified the most valuable actions that could be taken.
You may have quite a number of backlog (potential) goals so now it’s time to prioritise down to the one, two or three most valuable goals. Use the priorities screen in Waymaker’s Roadmap module to do this.
Then, turn these backlog goals into committed or inprogress goals and cascade outcomes to other team members to create alignment across the teams.
If you don’t have clear communications with everyone involved, you’ll find it difficult to get everyone on board in the next step.
4. Implement and continuously improve
Once you have your strategy plan in place as goals, and your team leaders are ready to share it with their teams, it’s time to get to work. This is the stage in which many organizations falter.
Too many times, the daily tasks for each team aren’t in alignment with the overall mission of the organization.
You must have clear goals with accountable outcomes in place that you can track and evaluate regularly. Ideally, every week or fortnight. Using Waymaker’s confidence scores will allow you to see at a glance if you’re on track to reach the goals across any user, team or the whole organization.
These four steps can seem deceptively easy. But remember, nearly 70% of employees surveyed say they don’t see how their day-to-day activities affect the company goals. And many more can’t tell you their company vision or mission statement.
Tools for successfully implementing your business strategy
If you want to successfully reach strategic alignment, then you need the right tools. Don’t think you can hang a poster with your company’s mission statement and expect a successful outcome. You need to be proactive and you need to provide your team members with the right tools for success.
Here at Waymaker, we provide the tool you need to turn your ideas into a roadmap your team can follow. We provide the best way for everyone on your team to track their goals and to see how their activities directly drive the overall company vision.
Waymaker is the platform that will empower your team members to align their tasks with your goals. And with Waymaker, your team members can clearly see the growth your company is making each step along the way.
When you provide a transparent and strategic path, it’s easier for everyone on your team to follow.
The missing link
Too many executives spend all their time creating a strategy and then don’t spend any time showing their team members how their daily activities align with the overall strategy and goals. However, strategic alignment is the missing link between creating a business plan and realizing your company goals.
So, if you’re ready to arm your team members with the right tools they need to align their tasks with your company goals, then you need to try Waymaker.
We help organizations like yours every day to show everyone on your team how they can align their tasks with company goals so that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals.
