The Power of Alignment [Part II]: Mindsets, Behaviors and Processes
It happens every day. Executives perceive a change in the marketplace. They devise a strategy to address it, then move toward implementation. But, almost always, they run into chaos. No matter how many slide decks they present, meetings they hold or off-site retreats they lead, speed bumps are inevitable. Why? Because getting employees to understand and accept the strategy is challenging, and real change is impossible if strategy and culture don’t align.
Four Strategic Components
Alignment begins as a single concept but spreads throughout the organization as four components – strategic focus, relationships, daily operations and people development.
These components provide leaders with context. They allow executives to assess in more detail how well their organization’s dynamics and strategy align. Used together, they provide a framework with which to understand, measure, capture and ultimately influence the organization’s inner workings.
In addition, leaders must bear in mind their organization’s mindsets, behaviors and processes. Combined, these cultural building blocks form an interactive, organic system that ebbs and flows as each one changes. Executives need to ensure that mindsets – the organizations’ strategic intent – are consistent and reinforced by employee behaviors and the organization’s processes.
Mindsets
Mindsets represent the collective beliefs, perceptions and values of the organization as a whole. They:
Guide employees’ behavior by setting expectations, explaining what the organization intends to achieve and how it intends to achieve it.
Provide employees with a deeper understanding of purpose and intent, and influence how they can accomplish both the organization’s and their own individual goals.
Become internalized by employees, enabling them to make better decisions, use their own judgment with less supervision and complete their tasks more quickly and accurately.
Behaviors
Behaviors describe the employee’s day-to-day actions and define the degree to which workers fulfill the organization’s potential. Peer and management behavior, functional processes and expectations all influence employee performance, as do mindsets and processes.
In almost any situation, people look to the behaviors of others to guide their own actions. Changing their behavior to match how their colleagues work, they adapt to new situations in order to fit in. They quickly identify the social cues that trigger others’ behavior and adapt by acting like everyone else. After superficially mimicking behaviors, they look for the rules that drive them. In an organization, the rules are the mindsets and processes.
Once workers learn the organization’s mindsets and processes, they understand its expectations. This enables them to adapt to its norms without conscious thought. Collective, consistent behavior powerfully signals employees that they should adapt to, and match, the behavior around them.
Processes
Processes explicitly inform employees about what to do and how to do it. Influenced by mindsets and behaviors, they’re the defined sets of work controls that carry specific instructions. They guide behavior and help reveal the mindsets that employees must embrace to be successful. And, they provide specific behavioral direction on how to adapt to the organization in general and specific situations on a daily basis.
Alignment in Practice
Here’s an example: Misalignment frequently occurs when organizations install enterprise-wide software, or Enterprise Resource Planning, systems. ERP is designed to integrate tracking and standardize measurement of all activity across the organization. When implemented properly, it provides organizations with greater control and a tighter integration of effort.
But ERP also changes the organization’s culture, something few companies fully appreciate before implementation begins. ERP’s approach requires many employees to change how they do their jobs, tightens control of procedures, narrows the scope of some roles and changes the pace of work for almost everybody. It also forces workers to interact in new ways with peers and others both inside and outside of the organization.
Not surprisingly, employees must change their mindsets, behaviors and processes if ERP is to succeed. The system forces a cultural shift from “how we did our work before” to “how ERP requires us to work now.”
It’s tempting for executives to believe that implementing ERP is simply a very large IT project. That’s a dangerous assumption. In reality, ERP is an organizational transformation initiative, so installing and implementing the system requires the same approach needed for any major organizational change.
A clear vision and understanding of where the organization will be when the ERP is fully implemented.
A well-planned approach to the change process.
Strong buy-in across the organization.
Consistent and persistent leadership.
It’s critical that executive leadership articulate the strategic reason underpinning the ERP initiative. In other words, leaders must know ahead of time how they’ll sell the initiative to the organization. Once they can communicate the “why,” leaders must develop a clear plan to achieve the cultural change necessary to ensure the implementation succeeds. Without a clear vision and approach, employees won’t know why or how ERP will change their work or improve performance.
In many organizations, installing ERP creates havoc because employees must learn new processes without understanding the strategic imperative behind them. They retain their previous mindsets of how to act because they see ERP as a data collection system rather than a new way of operating.
Consequently, ERP’s processes are misaligned with employee behaviors and mindsets. That causes dysfunction and stress. If mindsets don’t change, ERP will almost certainly cause organizational misalignment.
Creating a Map with the Organizational Strategic Assessment™
Resolving this conflict requires a tool to measure the organization’s current alignment, giving management the data it needs to compare it with the new strategic direction. The Organizational Strategic Assessment™ (OSA) is such a tool. It can identify the mindsets, behaviors and processes that are either supporting or hindering a successful strategy shift. It gives leaders the information they need to design the future alignment required to support ERP, and then identify the best interventions to create it.
In this case, interventions must be both company-wide (for example, reward systems that support ERP’s measurement processes) and unit specific (new communication flows created by impacted workers). This requires an alignment blueprint that guides the changing of everyone’s behaviors, processes and mindsets.
Tracking Organizational Alignment
Because organizational alignment is a dynamic process, taking one measurement in time isn’t sufficient. To ensure that the organization is on track, reassessing cultural alignment at regular intervals—such as six or 12 months—is essential. Executives need to see when and where the needle is “stuck” and work to shift mindsets, behaviors or processes as necessary. Only in this way can a major strategic change truly improve organizational performance.
The Organizational Strategic Assessment™ gives executives the data they need to shift their organization’s culture to align with its strategy.
Learn more and take a sample assessment here.