Six Tips to Help Align Your Business and Your Teams

"When your organization goes through change, it means you have to re-align your business leaders, your teams, your vendors and sometimes, your customers. What steps can you take to get back on track once you realize you are not aligned? "

When your organization goes through change, it means you have to re-align your business leaders, your teams, your vendors and sometimes, your customers.  What steps can you take to get back on track once you realize you are not aligned? It's not about focusing on revenue (even though we all need to make profits) or adoption of automated email & marketing programs. It's rarely about training; people usually know what to do. It's about the identifying the differences in priority. You need to identify and fix that gap.  
 
We faced this a few times as our company grew and we developed the Global Demand center. Below are six items we used to identify our gaps and solve the issues. Use these to drive alignment for your business and with your clients.

Align your company on the 'why' you are in business.
Does the reason your company is in business translate down to the rest of the organization? Why do you have this vision, who are you really serving and why are you doing this? What is the 'rally call' everyone can stand behind? The products and the revenue are the results of why you are in business….not the reason you are in business.

Ensure team and regional leadership is aligned on the priorities.
What is the regional focus and does it support the executive vision?
Once you globally align the vision, main audiences, message and deliverables, the corporate teams better understood what to create, and ultimately how to drive business conversions. You start reusing and capitalizing on items already created. This was the main area we worked through.

Have your teams and organization look beyond the basic metrics to business results.
Teams need to know the operational basics, but, once they look at conversion and customer retention they can identify a problem address the gaps. This streamlined focus helps bridge cross-functional areas and moves them in the same direction.

Make people changes when needed.
The people factor matters. Once you ensure the business is in order, ultimately it's the people who make it happen and you may need to adjust teams, departments and people.  I mentioned the process of change in my last article. You must manage that change, both the positive change and the hard change.

Identify these roles: Who is deciding? Who is communicating? Who is supporting?
Identify the owners. Ensure decision making & communication are effective so all teams can support the strategy and make it happen. If these don't work, you cannot align.

Ultimately, it comes down to leadership.
You cannot build this from the bottom up. It must come from the top. It's almost impossible to have global adoption of strategy and alignment if each region is focused on different outcomes.
If you start realizing you are out of alignment, start looking at some of these items. Be advised, there is not 'one quick fix'. It takes time, and some of it's an on-going progress, but your business can re-align and move in the same direction.