| Strategic Alignment for Growth by Cris Hagen
Originally published in the June 2003 Issue of Link & Learn.
How is your company planning for growth?
As your company grows, how prepared are you to achieve and sustain the following:
- Continued organizational agility in response to a fluctuating marketplace.
- An organizational structure that facilitates a leadership focus balanced between short-term operational concerns and long-term strategic goals.
- An ability to leverage best practices and process capabilities across global operations while refraining from an overly-bureaucratized approach to business.
- An adaptable leadership team, capable of continually adjusting to the changing roles and responsibilities that accompany growth.
- A workplace environment that fosters high commitment and high performance among all levels of employees.
- Cross-functional integration of critical work activities required to operate at high speed while maintaining high quality output of products and services?
These and many more questions are faced by leaders who understand that while growth is positive for the business, there are many unforeseen challenges. What happens is that these challenges tend to bubble up in discussions behind closed doors before they become part of the formal boardroom agenda. And how these concerns are put to rest often fails to resolve the problems from a holistic perspective. The solutions fail to address the complex relationships among:
- The company's growth strategy;
- Structuring the organization for adaptation and growth;
- Leading and coordinating operational and strategic work;
- Executive level teamwork;
- Establishing global work processes and leveraging best practices;
- Technological capabilities; and
- Human resource issues, including performance management, compensation design, and competency assessments.
Instead, growth plans often end up being addressed in a linear approach where one problem after another gets identified and addressed. The result is a piece-meal approach to change that might look like the following over the course of several months:
July: "We need to make some leadership changes."
August: "We need to change reporting relationships."
October: "We need to hire some new talent."
December: "We need better cross-functional integration."
February: "Our information system is too fragmented."
See a problem, fix it. See another problem, fix that one. When this happens, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture and fall short of defining a comprehensive, systematic approach that establishes a more lasting foundation for growth.
Strategic alignment: building your capability to see the forest instead of the trees
All companies go through pain as they move from one stage of growth to another. Pain is inevitable. But suffering is a choice. Whether the growth is through mergers, acquisitions, new product introduction, or ramp-up to meet growing demand for current products, the issues surrounding growth are often similar, regardless of industry. And although each company has unique industry, organizational, and cultural issues to deal with during growth, a systematic and comprehensive approach can reduce the uncertainty and help bring the choices about growth to a more conscious level.
Strategic alignment starts with the bias that a systematic and comprehensive roadmap for change can help prevent false starts and failed attempts. The goal is to get leadership and key stakeholders looking at the same roadmap in order to provide greater control and predictability as to the outcomes.
Creating your company's roadmap requires a view of the current landscape
Too often, executives suffer from "selective attention" -- or worse yet, "selective inattention" -- to critical considerations when preparing for growth. Instead of assessing the entire landscape of change, they forge a path forward, based on sheer will of force. And while speed is of the essence, sending out a "survey party" to see what lies ahead can often avert disaster.
One approach to get the lay of the land is to conduct a Strategic Alignment Survey (SAS). In contrast to your typical employee opinion survey, a SAS collects data from targeted stakeholders, subject matter experts, key customers, and thought leaders to provide senior executives with the information necessary to plot a solid course for growth. The SAS is constructed to provide insights on the alignment between various organizational elements that make up the fabric of the organization. Based on these insights, executives can lay out a roadmap for growth that:
1) Strengthens all aspects of the organization through improved alignment;
2) Enables successful navigation through an uncertain landscape by reducing that uncertainty;
3) Avoids piece-meal problem solving; and
4) Lays out the key decisions and choice points to enable a more comprehensive and systematic growth plan.
The best laid plans
Many companies seek a growth strategy by looking to other, similar companies and copy what they are doing. Or, they pay large sums of money to strategy consulting firms to study the issues, formulate recommendations based on so-called "cutting edge" ideas, and leave the implementation up to the client.
While benchmarking your company against others is valuable, it can fail to build the necessary internal capability that you need to successfully implement long-term growth. If you do take the benchmarking route, you must avoid relying too much on consultants who may not be available for the implementation process. Otherwise, you risk falling short of achieving strategic alignment throughout all elements of the organization, resulting in what may be a great strategy -- but for the wrong company. And finally, benchmarking alone does not ensure that you build the necessary ownership of the destination, let alone the roadmap to get there.
The necessary roadmap for success in achieving strategic alignment for manageable growth should evaluate and address all of the organizational elements described above, ensuring:
1) A comprehensive plan for the change journey;
2) Ownership of the change destination;
3) Development of internal capability and capacity for change;
4) Strengthened change leadership;
5) Employee commitment to change; and
6) A more efficient and effective implementation.
You must retain your focus on understanding the underlying problems and developing an appropriate solution. This approach raises everyone's perspective above the individual "trees" to enable a view of the entire landscape of change as it is evolving. The result is a more efficient and more effective growth strategy that builds commitment to the strategy as it is developed.
Summary
Tackling the complex and interrelated issues associated with growth requires that everyone be on the same page about how those issues will be addressed. Having a common roadmap that is based on a thorough understanding of your company's current landscape helps build the essential consensus for, and commitment to your growth plan to ensure a successful implementation. Any approach that fails to address your company's unique cultural, organizational, and people issues will lead to problems in implementation.
Cris Hagen is a consultant, author, and presenter who helps organizations achieve business results while simultaneously creating a climate that fosters professional growth and strong commitment to organizational objectives. His approach to consulting focuses on helping executives, managers, and internal staff to develop the capabilities and competencies for positive growth and change. With a strong foundation in whole systems change, Cris has helped clients to think "out of the box" with regard to improving business processes and outcomes, providing systematic ways for examining both the tangible and intangible elements that influence business results. His broad background includes experience in organization and leadership development, project management, team building for results, organization design, business process re-engineering, organization assessment, and strategic change and communications.
Cris is currently a consultant and founder of Cris Hagen & Associates. He began his career in Human Resource and Organization Development working with University Associates, Inc., where he completed UA's Intern Program and served as Registrar for the Graduate School of Human Resource Development while managing the Professional Services Department. Cris further developed his expertise through 15 years of internal corporate experience working in both management and non-management roles in such corporations as San Diego Gas & Electric, Rockwell International, and Prudential Healthcare. More recently, Cris has worked on large-scale change projects as a Principal Consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, as Director of Transition Management Solutions with The Genesis Group, and as an independent consultant where he was requested to sub-contract his consulting services to Deloitte Consulting in order to support their engagement on a global Oracle project. Cris holds a Masters degree in Counseling from San Diego State University, and a BS in Sociology from UC San Diego.
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