The Importance of Building and Maintaining Strategic Alignment

9 Min. Read

The default state for many organizations in today’s relentlessly shifting global economy is to be in a constant state of flux, needing to respond and react to market forces and stay focused on achieving their business goals. In such conditions, it has never been more important that leadership teams are aligned on strategy in order to deliver higher growth at faster rates, drive scale and profitability, and enable pivoting at speed. 

Given its criticality in the modern business world, we’re going to take a closer look at what we mean by strategic alignment, the benefits and pitfalls associated with having or not having it, and how you build and – just as importantly – maintain it.  

What do we mean by strategic alignment?

In its simplest terms, strategic alignment is getting your entire organization pulling in the same direction to achieve or exceed the business results you want. For us, we break it down into four components:

1. Shared consciousness. This requires a clear purpose, vision, and mission that reflect and reinforce a collective understanding of your market and internal realities. By having this, everyone knows what’s important and what they should be focused on, and trusts each other to get on and deliver. 

2. Shared accountability. Your senior leadership team and the rest of your organization have a feeling of shared accountability for the success of your whole enterprise, not just their own part of it. 

3. Shared forward momentum. Alignment is connected with forward progress, the recognition that everyone is moving together in lockstep, which creates tangible energy, excitement, and resilience.

4. Supporting performance levers. At ZRG Consulting Solutions’ Business Acceleration Practice, we believe there are several performance levers – including culture, organization, and talent – that need to be aligned in support of your strategy.

Many companies confuse alignment with agreement. They are not the same. Alignment doesn’t mean you can’t disagree and debate different perspectives as a leadership team. In fact, we encourage that. But it does mean you need to find a common consensus that everyone can at least live with, and when you’re outside the executive room, you demonstrate support for the decisions made.

Why is strategic alignment important?

The main reason that strategic alignment is so important is that it generates better and faster business results. It achieves this because building and maintaining alignment helps to tackle three of the main challenges we see organizations facing:

1. Driving growth. The focus is on growing revenue – your top line. In our experience, and there is a significant amount of research that backs this up, the more aligned your organization is, the more successful you are at driving faster revenue growth. 

2. Scaling and profitability. While growth is about adding revenue, scale means also controlling costs so you’re more profitable. Alignment is critical to ensure that your leadership team jointly understands what they are moving from and to, and how they intend to get there.

3. Pivoting. Typically, your organization needs to make a significant change in who you are as a business and what you deliver for customers. You might be responding to market disruption or proactively going in a new direction. Having that bedrock of alignment enables your business to pivot with greater confidence, which increases your chances of survival and success. 

Is strategic realignment the same as strategic alignment?

No. Although they are closely related, the processes and methodology of strategic alignment and strategic realignment often differ, and are used to address different challenges within a business.

Strategic alignment is an ongoing process, aimed at ensuring that all areas of a business are working effectively towards the same goals. However, strategic realignment is more of a reactive shift within an organization, meant to address a lack of alignment between departments, individuals, or even internal practices that are incongruent with one another.

For instance, you can implement a strategic alignment plan without there necessarily having been prior issues of alignment within the organization — it may just be a new area of focus. However, strategic realignment typically arises due to specific problems, where it becomes clear that departments or individuals are misaligned.

Misalignment, in its many forms, can have a significant negative impact on a business, which is why strategic realignment is sometimes necessary. However, it is often a slightly different process than putting together a strategic alignment plan.

What are some examples of strategic alignment within an organization?

Strategic alignment is really a blanket term, which encompasses an organization’s alignment at every level with the overarching values and goals of the organization. Some examples of strategic alignment, which contribute to the overall alignment of an organization and its aims, include:

1. Financial alignment

Your budget allocation and spend within each department must be in keeping with the overall aims of your organization, ensuring that your financial resource is being utilized the best it can to help your company reach its stated goals and objectives.

2. Brand alignment

Branding is key to a company’s perception, marketability, and therefore, its chances of success in the modern market. It’s vital to ensure that your brand strategy is aligned with your organization's core values, from the partnerships and marketing opportunities you accept, to your company’s digital footprint.

3. Culture alignment

It’s important to obtain buy-in to your company’s core mission, at every level. Culture can be your secret weapon in improving employee engagement and satisfaction, and when employees really believe in what they do, they are better able to work effectively and drive the company towards where you want it to be in the longer-term.

4. Interdepartmental alignment

Poor communication, misunderstanding of responsibilities and office politics are all examples of misalignment on the departmental level. Departments who work in silos, are unwilling to share information openly, or are working at odds with one another will slow your organization’s progress, and make it difficult to succeed. You can improve strategic alignment between departments by promoting collaborative working, being transparent about how each department contributes, and taking steps to ensure a comfortable work environment where everybody understands that they have a shared goal.

5. Leadership alignment

Ensuring that your leaders and people managers are aligned with your organization’s goals is the best way to ensure employee engagement and buy-in at every level. By ensuring that your leaders understand the organization’s mission and the steps you’re taking to get there, you are more likely to have alignment with the entirety of your workforce. Misaligned leaders may struggle to be as effective, so it’s best to invest in these individuals and ensure that they are on board, so that they can do the same for their direct reports.

How do you build strategic alignment?

When we work through our Strategic Leadership Team Alignment process with clients, there are three key elements: 

• Open dialogue. Dialogue comes from the Greek work ‘dialogos’, meaning conversation. When building alignment, we facilitate a back and forth flow of ideas and views. Instead of just communicating information at each other, which is one directional, real dialogue is about getting a deeper understanding of other people’s perspectives and building on one other’s ideas to create something greater than the sum of your parts. 

• Constant iteration. Strategy discussions are not once and done. To forge true alignment, you must be constantly iterating on it, absorbing fresh perspectives, and debating them openly. Multiple rounds of dialogue make it more likely that alignment can be achieved as the strategy will be stronger for the reviews, and views, that have been taken into account. Iterating on strategy in this way also helps to foster trust and accountability, which as I wrote earlier are key components of alignment.

• Employee engagement. Strategy should not be decided by a small enclave of your leaders behind closed doors, who then announce their outcomes to the rest of your organization and expect them to jump on board. For strategy to get executed effectively, everyone needs to be aligned. That starts with engaging other leaders (C-Suite -1) from the beginning, getting their input, enlisting their support, and then using your middle managers as the ‘guiding coalition’ (in Dr. John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change) who can drive your strategy into the lower levels.

How do you maintain strategic alignment?

Strategic alignment, like your brand and reputation, can take a long time to build but disappear very quickly. It’s a living, breathing organizational imperative that you must keep alive if you want to reap its benefits. But how do you do that? It comes down to four essentials:

1. Continuous focus from senior leadership. As a leader, you and your team need to pay ongoing attention to maintaining alignment. You must understand that this is a forever responsibility that you need to role model. As well as staying aligned yourselves, you also need to bring your people with you by regularly talking about your strategy in a joined-up way that demonstrates collective responsibility. 

2. Operating mechanisms. This may sound functional, but it’s about putting in place the right structure and processes that form the foundation of successful strategic alignment. It includes your meetings and forums, metrics, and reports out on progress – to the Board, investors, employees etc. All of these are key to keeping your organization-wide alignment on track.

3. Share success stories. Show your people (and the outside world) how your strategy is delivering business results, and the role they all play. Public storytelling about your wins engenders confidence in your stakeholders and increases shared forward momentum among your employees that you’re on the right path. 

4. Be open about failures and learnings. This one is hard for many organizations. But you have to also publicly share what hasn’t worked out as you hoped, and, more importantly, what you learnt from it and how you’re going to leverage those lessons going forward. No strategy is perfect, and fronting up in an authentic way will reinforce your alignment.

What is the role of leaders in building and maintaining strategic alignment?

Similar to our colleagues in ZRG Consulting Solutions’ Culture Practice, we’re well aware of the long shadow of leaders. In strategic alignment, leaders are the single point of failure. That’s not being dramatic, it’s a fact. Leaders have five roles to play here:

• Publicly demonstrate alignment. At regular intervals, your senior leaders need to be getting up in front of other leaders, managers, and employees. We call these Organizational Alignment Sessions, and the purpose is to jointly talk through how you created your strategy and got aligned, and to visibly role model this alignment to everyone. Pro tip – people can very quickly tell if you’re not. 

• Leaders as teachers. In our work, we help your senior executives teach the rest of the organization about your strategy, market realities, competition etc. This concept of leaders as coaches and mentors to the broader business helps with the consistent cascading of the strategy, which strengthens alignment. 

• Be open to new ideas. Leaders have to be receptive to different perspectives from anyone in the organization. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them, but it does mean you have to accept that you don’t have all the answers and there may be others who know better (this story about the creation of Starbuck’s Frappuccino is just one example). 

• Transparent. When communicating with your people, your leaders need to be honest. Employees can tell when your leaders are lying, so it’s critical you speak the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable. This creates trust and goodwill for the inevitable tough times. 

• Vulnerable. Leaders need to have a degree of vulnerability, to show your human side, including your blind spots and development areas. Sharing in this way builds the bonds that hold alignment together.

What are some of the common pitfalls companies get wrong when trying to build and maintain strategic alignment? 

Our clients usually call us because their leadership team isn’t effective – they are not moving fast enough, or are changing too slowly. This is typically an outcome of not being strategically aligned, and the reasons for this more often than not boil down to one or more of the following:

1. The CEO and the rest of the C-Suite not working as one team. The CEO is still managing each direct report individually as opposed to leading them as a team.

2. Lack of trust and candor. For whatever reason, usually a lack of strong relationships, politics, or fear of judgement, your leaders are unable to have honest conversations with each other. 

3. Not enough shared accountability. The CEO thinks the problem is with their leadership team not working together, showing a lack of self-awareness and absence of collective responsibility. This is often the most challenging pitfall we see organizations face.

4. Behind closed doors. Strategies conceived by a few senior executives and then simply announced are doomed to fail. Your leaders have to let people in from early on – that’s an integral part of the alignment process. 

5. Shifting priorities. Company goals can shift on a quarterly basis, especially in today’s volatile global economy. This loses you valuable momentum and disorientates your people. For alignment to stick, you need to stay the course and give your employees a constant, consistent message about your strategic direction and priorities.

How can ZRG Consulting Solutions’ Business Acceleration practice help companies with this issue?

The key solution I would highlight is our Business Acceleration Teams (BAT) process, which is our proven methodology for accelerating your organization’s ability to deliver better business results faster, while simultaneously developing the leadership skills of a core group of change agents. It’s a powerful, practical process that blends strategic alignment, change management, leadership development, and executive coaching to make sure all your performance levers support your strategy, delivers actionable plans for future growth, and sets your organization up for sustainable outperformance.

Building and maintaining strategic alignment is a never-ending process. It requires vision, perseverance, and patience. However, it is worth spending time on, creating, and fighting for, because it’s the difference between business success and failure.

We can now support you in more ways than simply culture transformation – we partner in business transformation, leadership acceleration, assessment & succession planning, executive and leadership coaching, and talent acquisition. 

Get in touch to learn more and get started!