An organization that doesn’t practice the daily discipline of aligning colleagues to priorities is like a human body deprived of oxygen.
The moment you hold your breath, your body begins to react:
- Blood oxygen levels decrease while carbon dioxide accumulates.
- This changes the concentration of free hydrogen ions.
- Your heart alters its regular rhythm and pumping action.
- Alert! Alert! messages are sent to your kidneys and liver.
- Continue to hold your breath and carbon dioxide, now soluble, crosses the blood-brain barrier.
- As the brain feels the change in pH, fainting or seizures are likely.
Suffocation by Distraction
Most organizations don’t practice the discipline of daily alignment. Just as the human body is stressed and eventually shuts down without oxygen, so do organizations suffocate from an inability to focus their energy on priorities. The results:
- Customers receive the wrong or diminished value.
- Employees become de-energized and disillusioned as their hard work has little impact.
- Resources (which everyone is begging for) are wasted.
- Unnecessary conflict erupts as employees operate with competing realities.
- Complexity is magnified while clarity of purpose is diminished.
Just as the body eventually dies without oxygen, so do strategies, plans – and eventually organizations – cease to exist when the resources of the organization are not creating the right value.
The Discipline of Daily Alignment
Organizational alignment is a big chore. Regardless of your role, doing your part in every-day interactions is essential to pump oxygen into the system. At Verus Global, we’ve supported thousands of leaders accelerate the achievement of priorities by building the discipline of daily alignment.
Here are a just a few proven alignment-creating questions you can ask to breathe life into your business:
- What is our singular definition of success?
- How will we measure success?
- What does alignment look like? (And what doesn’t it look like?)
- How does our success contribute to the achievement of organizational priorities?
- How will we commit to operating as a team to accelerate our success?
- When we experience conflict or deviate from our plan what will be our default response?
5 Ways Alignment Improves Performance
The human body is healthier with the right level of consistent oxygen. So, too, does your organization benefit from the discipline of daily alignment:
- Increased speed of execution.
- Greater ability to adapt plans.
- Improved employee experiences.
- Growth = new opportunities.
- Delighted customers.
Where this simile comparing human breathing and organizational alignment breaks down is here: Your body breathes instinctively. You don’t have to think about taking your next breath.
Aligning colleagues to priorities, however, is a skill that must be developed – and then a discipline that must be practiced daily.
Your colleagues are likely breathing. What will you focus on next?
