Recently I talked about what your business looks like if it is aligned. Some business may have read that and realized that there business is not aligned. We have a specific process that we take a business through to help them get aligned and ultimately focused. I want to spend a few minutes today and walk you through that process.
Alignment is about you and your team working towards a common set of objectives. It creates focus, unity, communication and an improvement of systems in your business. Small businesses historically have a hard time with focus and creating systems in their business.
Where does alignment start? Here are the three dimensions. Vision, Objectives, Team.
Start With Your Vision
If I asked 100 business owners how important knowing their vision is, 100 would probably say that it’s very important. However, if you spend some time with business owners and ask them what their vision is, most would be unable to clearly articulate what that looks like.
Some of the components of your overall vision are:
- The ultimate outcome of your business
- Your mission and values
- Where you want to compete in your market
- Who your market is
- What makes your business unique
You must share this with your team and it may also make sense to have your team involved in this process of discovery.
You can’t do anything else effectively without first having a basic understanding of what the above items look like for your business. I say basic understanding because it doesn’t have to be perfect. If you wait for perfection, you’re dead. Get it to a reasonable enough place that you feel confident in moving forward and be open if the opportunity to change your vision becomes apparent as you start working towards it.
Set Objectives
I know. You have heard about the importance of setting goals before. You may also know that no one does it. Objectives move beyond goals. Objectives are the criteria for success in your business. You have to be able to identify what a win for your business looks like. Setting objectives is how you do that.
Totally True Wikipedia Fact:
Studies have shown that leaders who commit to management by objectives see a 56% gain in productivity. In fact even, leaders who implement the system and don’t commit gained 6%.
Breaking Objectives Down
There are several steps to the objective management process. First you start with your annual objectives. These are the objectives that you want to achieve by year end. From yearly you break them into quarters and then you break them down to monthly and weekly. You want to make your objectives as easy to swallow as possible. You give certain people too big of a goal and overwhelm inevitably sets in.
Aligning The Team
I want to take each objective and not just break it down by time but also break it down by people. You want your team doing real work not fake work. Real work is work that is aligned with specific objectives. The more time they spend on these activities, the more likely they are going to be successful. Make sure each person on your team has their own personal objectives that support the annual objectives.
This is a great tool for measuring progress more formally as well. Business owners struggle to tie specific performance to their team and don’t know how to give bonuses and raises. This leads to employees either always getting raises and bonuses, regardless of performance, or never getting them. That’s a morale killer.
When everyone has a role in the big picture then they are working with purpose. When your team is working with purpose, they are happy, excited, communicating and they understand how the work they do supports objectives as well as the big picture vision of the business. Oh yeah and they are also more productive.
Business owners suffer from the curse of knowledge. They just assume that, because their vision is clear in their head, that everyone else is clear about it too. This is also true for the expectations of what each team member needs to contribute. Aligning your business is about removing ambiguity and clearly laying out the future of the business and how each person can contribute to the journey.
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