Alignment health check

A lack of alignment between strategy, operations and people lies at the heart of a number of issues affecting business performance. Alignment in business results from adjusting the content and outcomes of all planning and operational activities so that they are coherent and contribute directly to achieving strategic goals. The root causes of a lack of alignment are often complex and hard to spot, but the symptoms or effects are very tangible.

Our survey will help you to identify a number of symptoms that collectively point to a lack of alignment. Beware of assuming that a single reason is to blame – life is rarely that simple.

Some of the indicators that might lead you to take this simple survey are:

Business results

 » Under performance (not just poor performance but failure to achieve full potential)

 » Inefficiencies: waste, high numbers of meetings, staffing levels, write offs, late delivery, customer complaints, inconsistent quality

 » Poor growth or drop off in performance as volume increases 

Operational issues – what you might see

 » Over reliance on operational people ‘holding things together’

 » People working long hours ‘fire fighting’

 » Tension between planning and operational delivery

 » Lots of activity and people being busy without clear results
 

Results issues – what you might hear

 » Talk about low accountability i.e. if X just did their job we wouldn’t be in this mess

 » I have hundreds of unread emails in my inbox and I never seem to find time to deal with them

 » I seem to have achieved nothing again today but I’m exhausted

 » I can’t see how we are going to meet our targets next year, we are already working as hard as we can

 » We always get asked for crucial/high priority demands at the last minute