In their report "Sustainable Organisational Performance: What Really Makes the Difference." the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD), identified alignment as the first of 8 "key themes" for driving sustainable organisational performance. Let us now take a closer look at what they meant by this and add some value to the concept so you can really see how to shape your future.
Their definition of alignment is: "Perceptions of consistency, fit, links or integration between the values, behaviours or objectives of different stakeholders, both internal and external and with the organisation purpose." This certainly conforms to most definitions of alignment and you can hardly fault it. The report cites 3 specific examples:
- Job roles should be clearly aligned to higher-level objectives.
- Attitudes and behaviour need to reflect organisational values.
- Systems and processes need to be aligned with organisational priorities.
There is certainly nothing new or profound in that, which begs the question, "Why is this shaping the future? Surely it should already be in place?" Yet it would appear that you cannot take this for granted. Statements like, "One vehicle for alignment is through cascading objectives and there was a wealth of evidence that our case study organisations were striving to achieve a clear line of sight from organisation through manager, team and individual objectives," not only imply that they are not in place but also that there are no consistent ways for ensuring it.
As I have suggested before, the fact that this is an issue is a clear indication that employees are not engaged. That being the case, it seems to be asking the impossible to try to fix this problem without addressing employee engagement first. Yet there is no suggestion of that here. Even worse, the very concept of "cascading objectives" retains the elements of hierarchical, command and control management that is supposed to be dead and so perpetuates one of the root causes of employee disengagement. Consequently, you have to question just how futuristic this report really is.
Of course that still leaves you with the question of how do you build employee engagement to the extent that alignment is no longer an issue? If you are a regular reader you will know the answer is of course quite simply employee ownership: to make the employees co-owners of the business.
Ownership is one of the best ways known of creating employee engagement. So making employees co-owners of the business is a must for any business. (Even for a non-profit organisation. After all, a non-profit organisation uses other people's money to finance its operations. That means it has MORE reason to look out for its bottom-line than a for-profit organisation. And with employee owners you can ensure this.) You build-in alignment to your organisational purpose. You embed employee engagement into your organisational culture. So you engender the distributed leadership you seek and build continuous improvement into your DNA. Thus you require less management intervention. This offers you a very real alternative to command and control management and in a way that is not dependent on personnel or personalities and so is not transient.
This is the kind of idea that will really help you shape your future – to align it with the one you want and not a default future that is out of your hands.