… or so says Fred Smith, Chairman and Founder of Federal Express.
By any other name, there is no substitute for making sure that everyone on your team is “aligned” … with the goals of the organization, its vision and mission, its values …. One way to discover a lack of alignment is to send out an anonymous strategy assessment to your leadership team, a simple but provocative tool that invariably uncovers the lack of consensus among key executives about the principal strategy, goals or challenges that are top priorities in the organization.
Industry Week, a veritable business magazine headquartered in Cleveland (of which a college classmate and friend, Chuck Day, was once Managing Editor), sheds some light on the topic of alignment and offers some ideas about how to measure the degree of alignment in your organization.
Try their simple suggestion about how to assess the alignment in your organization. I’ll bet it will uncover significant gaps that you didn’t think existed.