An organization can make a smooth alignment and approach a flow zone when people are ready to move to a fluid structure, and approach each other across boundaries to achieve common goals.
In adapting to rapid changes and unlocking business performance, forward-looking organizations experiment with different types of organizational structures to enforce business alignment, collaboration, and harmony. Strategic alignment is the process of creating subgoals at the departmental level from the main corporate goal, and producing business results piece by piece, which all support the achievement of the strategic goal of the organization. Those organizations that have a more mature alliance outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to changes.
Alignment is not just about conformity, it needs to include a close partnership with interpersonal communication, comprehensive value analytics, and proactive governance: Business management is both the art and science. Organizations are composed with different functions and levels of hierarchy. There is a need for alignment, consistency and adhering to central norms for improving business management effectiveness. The misalignment is usually caused by silo, miscommunication, and lack of cross-functional collaboration. Strategic alignment occurs on multiple levels, but it presupposes the ability of each link to articulate their strategic intent.
Alignment shouldn’t just refer to top-down conformity, order taking, or inside-out operational mapping. Business alignment is a continuous process that demands continuous attention, deliberately close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its products and services to execute the capability-based strategy. It needs to include a broader scope of organizational management such as engagement, collaboration, partnership, integration, affiliation, coalition, and convergence, etc.
Alignment and autonomy are not rivals but two faces of the same coin to drive desired changes by refining and reemphasizing the true business purpose: Very often, organizations have set their common strategic goals, but different functions are pulled in the different directions. That causes silo and business stagnation. To improve business performance, the stakeholders should be well aligned to refine common purpose; the processes need to be realigned to build dynamic capabilities; and people should be realigned to increase customer centricity.
Business management needs to make an objective assessment of whether their organizations demonstrate anarchy or autonomy; totally independent or seamlessly aligned; chaos or discipline. If there's a contradiction, or if the team must choose between the two, then clearly the organization doesn't have alignment. Alignment on key things is critical for autonomy at scale. If you are aligned with teams on bigger shared goals, you don't lack autonomy, but you agree to support those goals collaboratively. Where there is alignment in an organization, then autonomous action ought to be possible while still aligning with an organization’s vision smoothly.
Uncertainty acknowledges that one can never know everything about a problem or a business completely, the manager is required to look beyond what might be the known facts to consider what is not known about the situation. Holistic management takes cross-functional collaboration effort, not something one team does alone in the corner. Business alignment needs to be part of management practice to lubricate business relationships, harness cross-functional collaboration, in order to significantly improve the entire business performance.
Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of business new normal, traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of the business partnership will emerge. An organization can make a smooth alignment and approach a flow zone when people are ready to move to a fluid structure, approach each other cross boundaries to achieve common goals, and produce high performance results consistent with the strategic intent, leading to frictionless business transformation.
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