What is alignment and what benefits does it bring?
Alignment. An elusive concept that promises great things - teams pulling together in the same direction, everyone understanding how their work connects to others across the organisation and how what they're doing is driving the next level of work towards meeting organisational strategy. But the reality is that alignment is hard. People are busy, time is limited, and leaders often struggle to create an overview of their organisation that allows them to spot where connections are missing between teams.
This problem with alignment is something our team has been aware of from the start. Our co-founder Tim recalls a time over 20 years ago when:
“I was working as a developer on a nine-month project. At the end, there was a big launch party with hundreds of people who had all been involved in delivering the product to market. This was when I first realised how many people were involved in the project. During the evening, a TV commercial for the product was shown. This was the first time I learned the name of the proposition. I had been working on the engineering of a back end system and had never even met any of the marketing team until this point. I can’t help but think that had we connected earlier and shared the commercial's blueprint, I might have understood the purpose of the work better. If the marketing and engineering teams had been connected then who knows how much more efficient the project delivery may have been if the teams had understood each other's worlds more.”
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But the problem is you can't go from nothing to full organisational alignment. It’s a muscle you build up over time - once you’ve got it working at one level, you can start to build out and help other people measure what they're doing in the same way.
How does the Star Chart drive alignment?
Our Star Chart is a visualisation of your organisation, made up of all the teams, goals and connections. It’s designed for leaders to have a clear ‘mission control centre’, where they can view their entire organisation, and most importantly, the connections (or gaps) between teams, all to drive the strategic vision of their organisations. If you have cross-functional teams (https://www.stellafai.com/post/cross-functional-alignment) this need for an overarching view is even greater.
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When teams create their goals and targets, they can create connections between themselves, and any other teams and/or their goals, so any overlapping or collaborative work can be highlighted there. Connecting teams across the organisations is a key way to highlight and visualise these connections so that teams can collaborate better. Star chart shows these connections at the top level, creating a clear visual of how everything is connected, an where work needs to be done to strengthen these bonds and create a stronger cross-functional organisation. Your cross-functional teams can be unified around this shared vision!
You can then zoom down into the detail on star chart to really understand the detail of the collaborative work, and where cross-functional teams are working well together.
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With the visualisation of their organisations in this way, leaders can use the Star Chart to identify gaps in the connections across their organisation where there should be connections and teams working together, and address them. They can observe the success levels of cross-functional teams, to see where extra help may be needed, or to replicate successes across the organisation. When this overall structure is in place, tiny course corrections can still happen all the time. Leaders and their teams realise when their measures aren’t moving, and they can adapt and pivot to try something different. Continuous learning is built in to this process.
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If you need any help getting started or want to discuss, book a consultation call with Tim here 🚀
Want to learn more about Star Chart and the terminology around it? Check out our video on it 👉 here.
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