Today’s business environment is dynamic, fast-paced and wrought with uncertainty. The sustainability, profitability and success of an organization is based upon sound execution of their business model. Successful execution cannot be accomplished without strategic organizational alignment.

Strategic Organizational Alignment is a highly desired and productive state within an organization where the energies of people are focused on achieving strategic goals and carrying out strategic initiatives.

Elements of Organizational Alignment

Alignment begins with an understanding of the many complex elements that interact within an organization. These elements include: Mission, Vision, Values, Goals, and Strategies.

Mission and Vision are an expression of an organization’s fundamental intent. Mission statements define what an organization is in business to do. A Vision statement is a statement of some future state. It is a statement of the impact an organization would have on its environment (employees, customers, shareholders, etc.), if it successfully completed its Mission.

Organizational Values are the subtle values that drive individual performance at all levels of the organization. Most organizations identify the manner in which individual and group behavior will be conducted.

Strategy is the blueprint for the deployment of the organization’s resources, including capital, people, time and energy. It is a clear statement about how the organization intends to proceed.

Objectives are the benchmarks that tell members of an organization when they are achieving strategic goals. They are the what, not the how of organizational performance.

Organizational Alignment and efficiency requires that these interdependent components be in total alignment. It is essential that each of these elements is clearly articulated in a way that makes sense to, and is accepted by the workforce if alignment is to be achieved.

Achieving Organizational Alignment

To achieve strategic alignment, these elements become the foundation which organizational metrics are established. The goals of an organization can be broken down into specific strategies that can have measurable outcomes attached to them. For example, the goals of increasing customer satisfaction, increasing shareholder return on investment, or increasing marketshare can each be measured using specific tools and/or processes.

These goals must have specific strategies attached to them. Each strategy must then have specific tactics attached to it in order to make it happen.

As goals cascade to strategies and strategies cascade to tactics, measures must be applied at each step. These goals, strategies, tactics, and measures provide the focus for identifying observable and measurable behaviors that each individual in the organization must do as their contribution to help the organization achieve it Mission and Vision.

Creating alignment also includes assessing and adjusting all the operational and infrastructure factors that influence human performance. Each of these factors must provide positive consequences for desired behavior and negative consequences for undesirable behavior.

IRI can help your organization identify alignment gaps and facilitate the actions needed to achieve full alignment of your organization’s actions, processes and data with your business purpose.

For more information about Organizational Alignment contact IRI Consultants at info@iriconsultants.com or by calling (313) 965-0350.

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