Culture Care Technologies
  Human Resource & Organization Development Specialists in Company Culture

Alignment

Alignment remains the central challenge for every organization: How to ensure that the activities of members are aligned in support of the organization's mission, vision and strategic priorities? This challenge is made even greater because today's work requirements for flexibility, adaptiveness and individual discretion have outstripped the capacity of conventional alignment mechanisms such as direct orders, supervision, policies, plans and job descriptions.

The need for greater flexibility and adaptiveness reflect an increasingly dynamic business environment. Greater individual discretion is a prominent feature of the knowledge economy in which workers require and have considerable latitude in what they do and how and when they do it. Even front-line customer service workers require quite a varied range of verbal and interactive behaviours to consistently provide service excellence.

Today's requirements haven't made traditional control mechanisms obsolete, but have certainly highlighted their limitations. Within the context of greater flexibility and discretion, the alignment challenge can't be met by going from a 10 page to a 15 page job description or adding another inch or two to the policies and procedures manual. It can only be met through company culture.

Culture is the shared set of beliefs and values that members see the world through and think from, as well as the shared norms that guide their behaviour. As an alignment mechanism, cultural norms have much in common with conventional approaches: They focus on behaviour and exert, through peer pressure, external influence.

The alignment dynamics at the level of shared cultural beliefs and values are quite different. The focus is on aligning how (not what) people think rather than their specific behaviours. Since beliefs and values are held by the individual him or herself, the source of influence is fundamentally internal.

As a managed process, the focus of alignment through culture is on the strategic foundations of the organization – its mission, strategy and vision. The ideal is strategic cultural alignment, where the most effective beliefs and values for accomplishing the mission, implementing the strategy and, over the long term, realizing the vision, are widely shared and deeply held.

As a shared set of core beliefs and values to see the world through and think from, alignment through culture is ideological. Ideological or cultural alignment allows for a greater degree of day-to-day operational autonomy through which to meet the requirements for flexibility, adaptiveness and individual discretion. As well, since most of us have a strong desire to maintain our freedom of action and personal autonomy, ideological alignment minimizes what's known as “psychological reactance”: Reactance against influence attempts from others. Augmenting conventional mechanisms, such as 3 additional pages of job description, would merely exacerbate reactance.

In that it provides for a laser like focus on the company's strategic foundations, what cultural alignment maximizes is energy efficiency. Focused human energy is akin to the dynamics of light. In the average light bulb, as in the average organization, energy is dissipated and its impact minimized. In a laser beam, as through cultural alignment, that same energy is focused and concentrated. Its impact is significantly greater.