Alignment is a non negotiable
Do you know that there is some misalignment in your business, but you think can just ignore it and push through? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. It’s crucial to get everyone on the same page, and to consider before any strategy work exactly how you are going to achieve alignment and set your brand up for success.
Branding Before Breakfast Ep 132 \ Alignment is a non-negotiable
Hi, everyone. I’m Jodie. I’m the MD at Tiny Hunter, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about alignment. So, when you are undertaking strategy work, brand strategy work, any strategy work, really, it’s super important that you have alignment across the business.
And this comes in a couple of layers. So, the first part is you need to have the stakeholders aligned, the ones that are involved in the decision-making process about where you’re headed and your positioning. If you have a complex business, maybe you’ve acquired many businesses, maybe you’ve got quite siloed departments. Maybe you’ve got some stakeholders that don’t see eye to eye, then it’s really important to think about this alignment piece right from the beginning because you need to go through a more robust process to get to success.
So, you need to make sure that you are doing stakeholder interviews, really engaging them in the process before you get into workshopping anything during the workshop and then in terms of finalising the strategy. If you’ve got a large business, you’ve got a a huge workforce, then you need to think about how they are going to go depending on the changes that you are making. Do you need to be doing employee surveys and getting them to be part of the process and feel like they have voice in what is going on.
Then you go through the process, you’ve got this shiny, beautiful strategy, and it’s really important that everyone is on the same page. So, if there are some, there can be a couple of outliers that aren’t fully engaged in the strategy, this is gonna be a problem. You need to live and breathe this strategy through the entire business. But what you can find is that once you have really strong clarity on who you are and where you are going, and if you make that real through the business, often, people that don’t feel connected to that will naturally slip away.
Yes. They will move on. They will resign. And what you will find is there’ll be this transformation period, and then you will have a workforce that is wholly aligned to who you are and where you’re going because you have been articulating that clearly and consistently. It’s not always that smooth. Sometimes you need to make some tough decisions. If someone’s not aligned to the strategy, strategy is where you’re headed and where you’re going, then you might need to work with them to help them move on as well.
So, I want you to think about alignment today in your business. Is everyone aligned to your strategy? Is everyone heading in the same direction? is everyone saying the same things, telling the same stories, presenting the same united view of your business?
That’s it from me. It’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: November 9, 2022