Stating the bleeding obvious…
When I was in my 20’s I went on a course. The instructor put up a slide. It looked like this:
His point was simple. To be successful create alignment. Make sure everybody is pulling in the same direction. It was such an obvious point that I wondered why on earth we were paying him to make it.
Older and wiser
20 years on I am a little wiser and more underwhelmed by the ways of the world.
Most organisations don’t create alignment. They don’t have a unifying purpose. At least not one that anybody with any imagination is going to get behind. Take Barnes and Nobel, the US Book retailer as an example. Their mission is:
To operate the best omni-channel specialty retail business in America, helping both our customers and booksellers reach their aspirations, while being a credit to the communities we serve.
How is that for all-encompassing and vague? I bet it scares the guys at Amazon out of their minds…
Nature abhors a vacuum
Humans seek meaning and purpose. If people don’t have a purpose, they will create one. So:
- Purchasing want the lowest prices
- Operations aim to cut costs
- Sales strive to maximise revenue
- HR focus on getting the best people
- Finance try to push up profits
These goals all seem sensible at first. And they create huge amounts of energy. That energy powers initiatives. But as none of these aspirations defines where the whole business wants to be, those initiatives shoot off in different directions and at cross purposes. The net result is zero, the business goes nowhere.
Showing now in an organisation near you…
Let me suggest a couple of scenarios:
- A sales force wants to become a “Revenue Centre of Excellence”. The sales director hands out sales targets to all his staff who run off and drum up more and more sales.
- An operations department aims for “World Class Efficiency”. It reduces its absolute spend and headcount, cutting out people left, right and centre.
- An HR department aims to be the “Lowest Cost to Serve”. It outsources all its learning and development capability.
Each department is pulling in a different direction. Is it a surprise when the conversations become a little fractious?
Organisation is the art of coordinating effort
If you want to become “World class” a good first step is to agree what want to be “World class” at.
What are you about?
- Making Sustainable Life Commonplace ~ Unilever
- Helping Britain Prosper ~ Lloyds Banking Group
- Improving People’s Lives Through Meaningful Innovation ~ Phillips
Writing your purpose down is not enough, it’s worthless unless you act on it. But to paraphrase Lewis Carol:
If you don’t know where you are going, all roads will get you there ~ Cheshire Cat
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Image by Beat Tschanz
James, how pervasive of an issue do you think this misalignment with overall purpose – or simply lack of overall purpose – is? My sense is it happens in a majority of businesses.
Annette :-)
Yep, I’m afraid I agree
Thanks for another really good article, James. it still see those crazy arrow pointing in various directions at times – and sometimes have to take a break and do something else for a while and then come back to my task and get the arrows all lined up and pointing in the same direction!
Glad you liked it Jo
Sounds like a big job
Hello James,
Alignment on purpose is difficult. Alignment on approach to executing on the purpose is difficult. Alignment across a group of human beings is difficult. The only truly effective mechanisms for fostering alignment, to any substantial degree, have been the religions. Religions are not only belief systems they also set forth a set of practices – like the 10 commandments.
Consider “making sustainable life commonplace” why should i, as an individual, care? Perhaps I care if sustainability / protection of the planet is a core value of mine. Which means that Unilever would have to be very good and highly selective at hiring. What about the employees that already work for Unilever when this new ‘purpose’ was cooked up? How do you go about changing their values, their priorities, their identity?
Now consider that each team is like a tribe. So not only do you have individual purposes – like be absorbed in work, enjoy an intellectual challenge, or simply earn a good living so that I can do what I want to do outside of work – you also have tribal purposes. I can assure you that the purpose of the Marketing function is not the same as the purpose of Sales, or of Service. Further, look into the marketing function and you will find that the purpose of the digital / ecommerce team is different to the purpose of the advertising/marcoms team…..
Manuel de Landa has written an interesting (to me) book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Philosophy_of_Society
In the book he sets about arguing that the operative unit in an organisation / society is not the individual nor the organisation but assemblages. Think tribes. Think teams. Think functions.
All the best
maz