Alignment - Part 1

Organizational alignment towards a common goal is one of the most important fundamental requirements for success. This is especially true for organizations that are staffed with highly talented and productive people and for startups. Not to imply that other businesses can get away without alignment, but problem surfaces quickly and is more pronounced in the former.

What is alignment? Alignment is every member of staff understands the vision and objective and these are the guiding principles of his or her actions.

What are the challenges in the way of getting aligned? To answer that question, let us examine what would it take to get a team member aligned.

1. Communicating vision and objectives - Team members need to understand what are they building - is it a website or a website that sells computers or a website that sells low end computers or a website that sells low end computers to primarily housewives and elderly who are not tech savvy - noticed the difference?

2. Right work environment - It is extremely important to maintain a work environment where it is ok to fail as long as we are learning from mistakes and improving continuously. A CYA environment changes the motivations and aligns everyone to do just that - CYA, instead of working towards a common goal. I am almost tempted to include motivation as a separate point but that is dependent on work environment to a large extent and its implications should be fairly obvious.

3. Alignment with personal goals - Different people work for different things. Some are working for cool development work opportunity, some are working to fulfill their duties on personal front, some are working for money/stocks, and so on - the list is almost as big as the team. With such varied motivational forces, getting the entire team to work towards a single goal of building a product that delights its customers is not trivial.

How do you make sure that person working for sexy scratch development work does not cut corners with testing or builds the required features and not cool features?

These are the three most important factors to build a great company that moves like a well oiled machine towards its common goals. If people understand what they are doing and why, if they are motivated and not afraid to act, and they believe that actions are aligned with their personal goals, you would have a well aligned organization.