Organizational Alignment – Why it’s Critical

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Organizational Alignment -The Structure That Enables Success

Is your business tightly integrated to run like this watch?

Organizational Alignment sets up all of the facets of your organization to focus on a common objective - achieving business results. Alignment allows each function and department to operate in a way that enhances not only their own value but also other department’s efforts to achieve the common objective. In some cases, a department may do less to allow another department to do more.

Many companies purchase only what they need now. Just-in-time inventory is the highest example of this practice. However, some purchasing departments are measured on Purchase Price Variance. So the cheaper they can buy it, the better their measurements are. This can lead to buying more than you need right now because the bulk price is cheaper. However, the cost of carrying inventory erodes the benefit of buying at a lower cost. Out of organizational alignment.

There are a lot of companies whose mission statements boast about having highly motivated employees who are very excited to add value for the customer. In a high percentage of these companies, the employees’ response to this is, “Yeah. Right.” They know that the culture and the management opinion of the workers prohibit them from adding the value that they are capable of. The company leadership wants it to be a true statement. However, they have not taken the appropriate steps to make it a reality. Out of Organizational Alignment.

You have to look more deeply at any particular problem to determine if it is caused by misalignment. Many of these difficulties do not have single level causes. It may not be that someone simply screwed up or a machine simply broke down at the wrong time. Yet so many managers assign blame. They find out who did it, administer a tongue lashing and move on to the next thing. Don’t be one of them. Take the time to understand the root cause. Then you understand what it is that is out of line. Yes, it could be a person. But it could also be conflicting goals, a sloppy process or a strategy oversight or any number of things. An understanding of the real reason allows you to make the change to this element, most often preventing or at least lessening the re-occurrences. You need to resolve the underlying problem if you want to put it behind you.

Be aware that the solution may require people to look at their work in a totally new light than they have been used to. This is difficult for some people to adjust to after years of taking a certain view of things. You will need to manage the change until it becomes the accepted way to do things.

This is not easy to do. Time is not a luxury that you have in the crush of all of the other things you have to do. Elite Leaders prioritize this activity highly as they understand that taking the time to fix a root cause problem now will save them more time in the future as they wont have to solve the problem multiple times.

The Becoming An Elite Company program will assist you to bring the various facets of your organization into alignment. You will be able to structure things so that all of the energy is focused on improving your business results.

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