Alignment is like focus. It’s a business concept that’s easy to emphasize but difficult to attain. In the past I’ve written about how everyone likes to use the word “focus” but few people want to say “no” – which of course is necessary to frequently say if you want to be focused. But let’s talk about “alignment” for right now.
I credit my friend Mike Schmitz to telling me about the power of alignment as it relates to horses. Yes, that’s right: horses.
It goes like this: if one horse can pull an 800 pound load and is harnessed next to another horse that can pull a 700 pound load, you might think they can pull 1,500 pounds together, but in fact they can pull more like 2,000 pounds.
The reason? Alignment.
These numbers are theoretical, and there’s some debate in internet land about the actual math, but the concept is sound. There are two reasons for it, both of which are powerful to consider.
First, businesses seek “leverage” and military leaders look for “force multipliers”. Since the first cave man used a stick and a rock to move a larger rock, humans have been trying to figure out how to do more with less (for an interesting story about Abraham Lincoln and his observations regarding steam power, read here).
The physics of the horses being aligned creates the leverage, the force multiplier. The applicability to our own worlds is clear: when people are truly aligned, they are capable of pulling greater loads than the sum of their parts.
But there’s another aspect to this I find equally fascinating. Horses are herd animals. There is a theory that some of the alignment benefit happens because when horses sense other horses next to them working in the same direction they improve their output. Horses are able to sense that they’re not alone, that they’re part of a team. In fact, humans have long referred to such a collection of horses as a “team of horses”.
Human are herd animals also. As George Costanza frequently pointed out when he was vexed by his fellow man: “We’re living in a society!”.
When we know that our colleagues are pulling in the same direction….
…we feel part of a team
…we feel more accountable
…we become more focused
…we tap into shared motivation
Writing about the importance of alignment is sort of like talking about it: it’s the easy part. But organizations often find it ephemeral and difficult to grasp. Here are some important ways to achieve alignment instead of talking about it:
- Create, together, a shared vision of the goal within the team
- Work, work, and work some more to uncover unstated objections and cognitive dissonance.
- Use the shared vision to create shared goals and measurable objectives.
- Work, work, and work some more to uncover conflicts between objectives and sub-groups.
- Re-state the vision and the objectives.
- Publicly celebrate behaviors that reinforce actions that align with the vision.
- Re-state the vision and objectives.
- Re-state the vision and objectives.
- Re-state the vision and objectives.
As I indicate above, the work of alignment is largely tied to repeating yourself. I’ve checked employment law and it turns out that employers are NOT ALLOWED TO PHYSICALLY HARNESS THEIR EMPLOYEES LIKE HORSES, which was a surprise to me.
So you’ll have to use repetitive reinforcement of the vision and objectives to harness and align the team. It’s not easy, but if it were, everyone would be doing it.
Good luck!