Even great teams can suffer from poor alignment.
The symptoms of misalignment are internal mistrust, politicking, and backstabbing. It undermines your ability to put progress toward purpose and shreds the morale of ambitious teammates and leaders.
Strong collaborative cultures watch for signs of misalignment and resolve them as soon as possible. Here are some common sources of misalignment to look for so you can prevent the bureaucracy from suffocating your team in needless friction:
Undefined North Stars
A North Star is the undercurrent that informs what you’re aiming for.
Like a mission statement or high level objective, it creates context for decision-making and goal setting while answering the question “why” for everything you’re doing.
Leaders who don’t invest in building a clear direction - whether for a quarterly effort or a small project - leave room for interpretation. It’s in the muddy aftermath of a poorly defined North Star that teams and people decide what it means.
In 2002, Elon Musk founded SpaceX to decrease the cost and improve the reliability of access to space. Today, their mission is to make humanity a multiplanetary species. As a literal north star, its clarity creates enormous context for everyone working on any project. It’s not enough to build something that can reach space if it sacrifices progress toward multiplanetary transportation.
On the other hand, leaving a team to serve a client without exploring their underlying motivations for the project might lead to competing interests for what is “most important” in the project delivery. Having the answers at the start - a North Star - makes conversations about where to invest resources simple.
Different software tools that do the same thing
Software usually makes teamwork easier, but collaborating teams using different software for the same purpose will potentially introduce misalignment.
For example, if two teams need to work together on a priority, but they each use different project management applications, it won’t be clear what the source of truth is. Each team prefers its own tool over the others.
A more common example is when leadership teams track initiatives and goals in a spreadsheet (or worse, in meeting minutes or email exchanges), and the supporting work is tracked by teams who are actually using software.
Collaboration is most productive when the tools remain consistent for everyone involved.
Misalignment from a complex software stack creates:
- Alignment meetings
- Custom integrations between tools
- Manual tracking and analysis
- Complicated communications to overcome tool differences
Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a tool that accommodated different work styles out of the box?
Conflicting or overlapping processes
A huge source of speed and efficiency for any team is automation.
What gets automated? Processes, including:
- New teammate onboarding
- Issue handling
- Product reviews
- Code deployment
- Content creation
Misalignment occurs when processes become redundant or undefined. Predictable processes need clear steps. Most processes in a company are undocumented, but laying these out and defining them can introduce a lot of efficiency to your team.
A powerful way to address this is by creating flowcharts that show how something gets done from start to finish.
Processes are a series of steps to take. Each step should address What, Who, and How for the idea. They should also add value - by having a clear “why” - to the overall structure.
Priority list is too long
Too many priorities leads to a lot of well-meaning captains rowing in different directions. Disjointed efforts are the most heinous form of misalignment.
You might be on a team with smart people, working with other smart people, but feel absolutely lost in a sea of competing interests. Juggling too many items at once is a quick way to erode morale and increase burnout.
Moving fast isn’t worthwhile if you aren’t moving in the right direction.
This one comes down to the leadership team and sometimes the CEO directly: outline a focused, clear set of priorities.
These are North Stars, but they also support your overall mission (the biggest North Star). Once they’re clear and bound to a calendar period, spend extra time communicating them and aligning teams.
It’s not enough to announce the priorities: you also have to restructure your organization’s incentives to put your money where your mouth is.
Finally, make adjustments over time in the spirit of constant improvement and adaptation. Things change, and it’s important that your priorities change with them.
Unclear roles and responsibilities
Uncertainty around roles and responsibilities creates a negative ripple effect within a team.
People are forced to navigate confusing, invisible boundaries, left to guess who is doing something - or what they’re supposed to do. This hesitancy paralyzes momentum, suffocating productivity.
Tasks begin falling through the cracks waiting for work that no one is doing.
Unclear roles sow the seeds of frustration and conflict among team members, leading to a decrease in morale. A toxic work environment begins to form, one that can result in increased turnover, as people seek greener pastures with clearer paths.
Some organizational frameworks, like Holocracy, treat roles with a lot of intention, but you don’t need anything fancier than a few questions at the right time to address misalignment from ambiguity.
Like any relationship, your team needs to constantly communicate and talk about the work in front of them. Figure out where the gaps are by talking about the work, and rarely make any assumptions.
Get everyone comfortable asking “stupid questions” to reduce ambiguity around tasks, goals, and expectations.
Generational differences about how to move forward
The workforce is spread across 4-5 generations of people, each with very different experiences and beliefs.
Even though a multi-generational team brings a rounded set of experiences and perspectives, it also introduces the risk of misaligned expectations about how certain things should get done.
Typically, younger workers prefer asynchronous, remote work whenever possible. They desire a lot of autonomy and independence and can rapidly adapt to the changing digital landscape.
Older generations usually believe in paying your dues and building culture through enriching in-person teamwork. They aren’t against remote work, but it’s an unnatural activity for a group that has spent a significant amount of their career working side-by-side in person.
Quiet resentment and sabotage can arise in teams that don’t continuously acknowledge and address these differences. It’s overly optimistic to assume all generations will constantly agree on a strategy, but it’s possible to bridge differences by encouraging open discussions and avoiding stereotypes about different generations.
Leverage the unique strengths each generation brings. The experience and wisdom of older generations can be a valuable resource, just as the fresh perspectives and technological adeptness of younger generations can bring innovation and dynamism.
Political alignments get in the way
Office politics are inevitable.
They’re also important. Most people probably think of shrewd politicians manipulating others for their gain, but the truth is simpler: politics are the games teams play to figure out how to use a set of limited resources.
Politics allow groups to make decisions about how to use what they have. This “game” has rules that aren’t recorded anywhere, with participants constantly vying for different outcomes depending on the ambitions their team has that year, quarter, or even week.
One of the most important parts of the game is building alliances with others. They say if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.
Political alignments with other people and teams can create chaos if not appropriated well. Even if you create a set of clear priorities, hire the best teammates, and lay out the greatest plan, a political arrangement can still stifle your chances of success.
One manager doesn’t like a person on your team? They may not agree to give you extra time for the project you have to finish by the end of the year. Or maybe someone is hoarding information or access you need to move the ball forward. They’re negatively wielding their influence and making a power play to marginalize others and retain power.
Misalignment of this nature is 100% cultural, and cultures don’t transform overnight. They require consistent effort and very strong leadership willing to lead by example, create psychological safety, and adapt incentives to support desired behaviors.
Incompatible work styles
In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was published by a group of software developers outlining a set of values and principles for software teams to follow.
Some of the ideas, like preferring working software over comprehensive documentation, were contrary to popular working models of the time. Adopting these changes in an organization proved an uphill battle for most companies. The “agile mindset” practitioners practiced and spread ran counter to how many groups and leaders preferred to work, regardless of the merit the ideas had.
Clashing styles create friction, triggering philosophical arguments and practices for how work and planning should be accomplished. Misalignment creates rebel groups, even to the point where philosophical battles reign in conversation instead of the actual work getting done.
Although the primary cause of these problems is cultural, one way to resolve these disagreements is to find a tool that accommodates different work styles without sacrificing collaboration.
For example, a task management tool that empowers different teams to work together, even if one of the teams prefers an agile-based approach and the other desires a simple checklist. Tetheros offers such a platform for teams.
Fergus O’Connell states in “What You Need to Know about Project Management” that there is no correlation between project success and specific methodologies. This makes harmony and alignment far more important when getting your team on track.
Priority-shifts due to low resources
Organizational misalignment created by overstretched staff creates a climate of confusion and diminished efficiency.
If you’re juggling too many things at once, you’re bound to drop something. This shows up as missed deadlines or ignored initiatives. There isn’t enough budget or people available to take something on, so it slips.
There are two high-level ways to address this problem:
- Add more resources
- Reduce the burden
The first step, adding resources, is usually far less efficient. Adding more people to a late project makes it later: too much time is lost getting others coordinated and connected to outweigh the benefits of added capacity.
Add non-monetary resources proactively, not reactively.
The second method of reducing the burden is the simplest and most effective way. If there are too many balls in the air, spend time re-prioritizing them to fit your capabilities. It’s often better for a team to commit 100% to one item than 50% to two.
A final note on bandwidth: contingency and risk plans are vital for surviving any project. Building a cadence to visit resources and plans on a regular basis will save you stress and misalignment in the long run.
Patrick Lencioni states in The Advantage:
Alignment [is the act of] creating so much clarity that there is little room as possible for confusion, disorder, and infighting to set in.
Alignment starts with a strong, unified leadership team above all else. If you don’t know how to get moving, look there first.