Creating consistency and shared goals to accelerate achievement of results
Alignment from the CEO to the frontline and across business units on the purpose and priorities of a company can promote greater effectiveness and reduce wasted time, energy, and employee and customer dissatisfaction. Yet achieving this degree of cross-functional collaboration is often elusive and challenging to implement.
Have you asked a business question of an individual or department who gives you an answer that is completely different from that of someone else in the same organization? Whereas it is not unreasonable to expect some relatively minor inconsistencies from person to person, it is also not uncommon to encounter dramatic departures from the key objectives and priorities of an organization depending on who you are talking to and where you are working in the company. The latter circumstance leads to confusion and risk of setting up triangulation with the worst-case scenario manifesting as disorganization, distraction, and chaos. This is challenging for individuals within the organization and external organizations, partners, and customers.
The intent of this article is to highlight key considerations and some tested practices to help you build the kind of synchronicity and synergy that will help accelerate your company’s ability to achieve results. (The term, integration, will be used to refer to both vertical and horizontal integration unless otherwise specified.)
What Are Vertical & Horizontal Integration?
For the purposes of this article, vertical integration is defined as the process of creating consistency of priorities and direction from the senior most leadership of the organization to the frontline. Horizontal integration is the process of creating similar consistency across business units and departments. By aspiring to this level of fidelity with the business priorities of an organization, all members of the team are essentially headed in the same direction and, ultimately, to the same destination (Figure 1).
Figure 2 illustrates how different combinations of degrees of vertical vs. horizontal integration can manifest as familiar corporate archetypes.
Why Are Vertical & Horizontal Integration Important?
The archetypes outlined in Figure 2 describe what can happen when vertical and horizontal integration are not in harmony. Each of the imbalanced archetypes are associated with specific challenges, but the cumulative effect is the same: inefficiency, confusion, and, at times, florid conflict. All these conditions run contrary to the elements of a purpose-driven culture.
As noted in previous EverSparq articles, purpose-driven culture promotes connection, high engagement, and meaningful productivity gains by making work resonate on a personal level. (In the EverSparq article Connecting to Purpose: Creating a Purpose-Driven Culture, I outlined the Purpose-Driven Strategic Framework (Figure 3) and provided 5 tips for how to connect employees’ personal sense of purpose to the specific elements of the framework to support a purpose-driven culture.)
We may not always realize it but there is almost always something deep within each of us that motivates and drives us even during the most challenging times. Our true North. Helping individuals identify what that is and then determining how that applies in their daily work creates a level of individual, personal meaning that is incredibly profound. This increases a personal sense of ownership and accountability for the success of the company and manifests in ways such as a propensity to communicate more effectively with colleagues to create the level of organizational integration that leads to higher productivity, better quality work, and achievement of goals that, when aligned properly using the Purpose-Driven Strategic Framework, can propel companies forward in successful strategy execution.
Common Barriers to Vertical & Horizontal Integration
1. Lack of Recognition of the Value of an Integrated Approach
Given the somewhat more abstract nature of integration, this is not often top of mind for most executives and may not be recognized as a concept that can enable the company to be more successful. Reflecting on specific situations and examples when inconsistency of decisions, actions, and perspectives got in the way of achieving a company goal can be one way of beginning to build awareness. Similarly, conducting root cause analyses of failed or suboptimal initiatives to dig into “why” things did not work should incorporate a sensitivity to lack of integration as a potential factor. This may also illuminate specific improvements that can be made in the future.
2. Too Time Consuming & Cumbersome
Even if there is a recognition of the value of integration, given the multi-variate, time intensive nature of hardwiring new habits that will promote alignment, knowing where to start when dealing with competing demands for your time can be an impediment. Rather than try to solve world hunger, try breaking apart the situation to identify more focused tests of change. For example, targeting a specific department to enhance skills and tools to promote integration could be a more manageable start. Scaling up, targeting two interdependent business units could be another broader test of change rather than trying to tackle the entire enterprise all at once.
3. Uncertain How to Build an Integrated Culture
Assuming there is a recognition of the value of integration and the capacity to take action to cultivate this alignment, it can be an intimidating experience to actually build it. Below are some tactics that are intended to spark ideas that are a right fit for your organization. These are by no means exhaustive but outline some of the more concrete, tactical actions that can help get your company started.
4. Inadequate Attention to Sustaining Integration
For those leadership teams that value integration and have taken steps to promote this type of alignment and collaboration, it can be difficult to determine what is working and what is not. Building integration takes time and depends upon multiple variables. Building feedback loops so that input on what is and is not working moves up and down the chain and across business units can help enhance a company’s progress in its integration journey. It is also important to keep your foot on the gas pedal and consistently practice what is working while also maintaining accountability with others if you see deviations from the integration practices you are hardwiring.
How to Promote Vertical & Horizontal Integration
Unfortunately, I have yet to come across a “magic bullet” for suddenly transforming an organization into a highly vertically and horizontally integrated enterprise overnight. Building to this state is multi-factorial in nature, customized to an organization’s cultural and business norms, and takes time. There is no precise recipe but the following tested actions that I have observed, experienced, and intentionally built into companies seem to have a positive effect.
1. Ground All Employees in Mission, Vision, Values
An important, foundational component of promoting integration is creating a common narrative for all employees about what they are all there to do. As explored in greater detail in other EverSparq articles, Mission explains why a company exists, Vision describes what the company aspires to do and be, and Values contemplate the consistent behaviors that all employees demonstrate in accomplishing their work. (See Figure 3). These three elements of the Purpose-Driven Strategic Framework are deeply grounded in personal passion and connection.
Discussing daily activities in the context of mission, vision, and values helps these concepts come alive for employees in a way that begins to bind them together in a generally cohesive way and creates a foundation for other efforts to enhance your company’s level of integration.
Consider what company values are most consistent with building integration such as collaboration, integrity, creating clarity and understanding, etc. In promoting and holding employees accountable to the values through performance goals and reviews is one way to make consistent role modeling of these values a standard expectation and a priority.
2. Clarify Strategic Objectives
Strategic objectives are the specific goals that will be achieved in a defined period and will move the company closer to realizing its vision. This provides high level “guard rails” for all staff when determining what daily tasks and decisions to prioritize. These enterprise-wide objectives are then translated into relevant objectives customized for different business units, departments, and individual contributors, i.e., business unit A will have some unique objectives that are relevant to that unit and distinct from those of business unit B but, when achieved, support accomplishing enterprise-level strategic objectives. This can be cascaded as deeply into the layers of an organization as is practical and valuable.
Creating appropriate transparency of company objectives to all levels of an organization and declaring their importance upfront sets an expectation to refer to when evaluating “in-the-moment” opportunities to promote greater alignment and integration.
3. Emphasize a Distributed Decision-Making Model
Clarifying objectives and facilitating line of site for all employees to see how their daily activities can make or break achieving those objectives sets a foundational expectation. This foundation serves as a reference point or standard for ongoing, routine discussion and adjustments to the daily efforts of business units, departments, and individuals to align with the strategic objectives which, in turn, distributes the responsibility of coordinating decision-making and actions to all members of the organization.
Supporting this foundation with an appropriate decision-making culture is also critical. The distributed network decision-making model, in some ways, takes the best of both the centralize and decentralized models to create a balanced environment in which leaders and other employees can thrive.
- Centralized Decision Making
Promotes a high level of integration but is often very cumbersome and bureaucratic. This may be an appropriate approach for certain activities that have a corporate-wide impact (e.g., payroll systems, accounting tools, setting zero tolerance standards, etc.)
- De-Centralized Decision-Making
Promotes greater autonomy and agility and promotes innovation throughout the organization but poses a much greater risk of suboptimal integration with inconsistent response to issues that have adverse impacts on other areas of an organization. This may be more appropriate for highly specific decisions that impact a smaller group of individuals or activities in a relatively contained area of an organization, business unit, or department (e.g., when and how to conduct departmental staff meetings, taking action to temporize an emergent matter until more information can be gathered).
- Distributed Decision-Making
Core standards and parameters within which business units, departments, and individuals can exercise local autonomy can create a greater balance of agility and integration. This reduces the cumbersome dependence on a centralized figure or body to adjudicate every decision. Conversely, a distributed approach reduces the risk of leaving aligned decision-making and activity to chance in a de-centralized model.
A distributed network of interdependent business areas and individuals can be an effective way of finding the sweet spot of the degree of agility and consistency that aligns with the archetypes of the High-Functioning Enterprise (e.g., managing performance against achievement of company goals, making staffing decisions within budget, etc.)
4. Hard-Wire Coordination
Setting cross-functional performance measures and expectations can promote integration behaviors. Targeted business areas or individuals that are at high risk for being at odds with one another tend to be higher priorities for building in shared risk and reward for accomplishment of common key goals and objectives. These can be incorporated into performance management tools including annual reviews and linkages to incentive compensation. These maneuvers do not automatically guarantee agreement but can serve as a tangible and meaningful means of motivating the groups in questions to at least convene and discuss mutually agreeable paths forward.
Creating clear escalation feedback loops for when integration is flagging can also provide an outlet for those who would otherwise feel helpless to compel more efficient and aligned activity. This can be tricky as the last thing you want to create is a culture of tattle tales and retaliators so take some time to reflect on how to leverage concerns in a manner that is constructive to achieving greater integration and a healthy purpose-driven culture.
Depending on the circumstances, creating a RACI matrix that lists key decisions and activities opposite names of individuals who are responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed can provide a reference for adjudicating misalignment and incongruent decision-making.
5. Communicate Often & Create Feedback Loops
When I think about the challenges of accurately transmitting information, I am reminded of the game of “Telephone”. Leading groups through this exercise helps demonstrate the challenges of maintaining fidelity with an initial message after it has been interpreted and passed along to others. The first person is given a written statement that they then read to the next person around the table. That person then must remember what was shared and convey that to the next person without the benefit of the written statement, and so forth, all the way around. The first and last people share the final version of the message compared to the original. They are almost always wildly different.
Given this unintentional degradation of information, how can a large organization ever expect to achieve consistency and fidelity around common goals given the breadth and depth of initiatives in play at any given time? Two tried and true countermeasures include repetitive and multi-modal communication. These help people to process complex messages over time in ways that are compatible with their learning style. While your organizational culture may not be wired or able to customize communication and outreach tactics at an individual level, it is important to recognize the diversity of learning styles, languages, culture, and different dialects across business disciplines and then determine how best to tailor your information sharing practices.
Start by enlisting input from a diverse cross section of employees about how they wish to receive communication and what to avoid to reduce information overload. While you may not be able to accommodate every suggestion, you will invariably identify common themes that will help you land on a manageable set of communication tools and modalities to disperse important information that enhances integrated, aligned, and consistent decision-making and actions on a day-to-day basis.
The following list of common communication tools is not to suggest that all must be employed but rather to provide examples of tactics that may be a right fit for your resources and organizational size and complexity:
- Newsletters
Depending on your level of communication resources, the more comprehensive and sophisticated a newsletter, the less frequently you will likely be able to produce it. Delegating and shared responsibility for generating content helps create a more sustainable and predictable process. Identifying key sections like a human interest story; celebrating a high performer; highlighting mission, vision, values in action; and updates on progress towards achieving goals are all examples of ways to structure your newsletter so content needs can be anticipated and a repository of content can be developed in advance.
There are various media tools available to not only format these articles but to assist with distribution and version control and track data on which content is generating the greatest interest so you can improve your readership and engagement over time.
For smaller organizations, keep things simple and resist the temptation to bite off more than you and your leadership team can chew as consistency is key, regardless of whether that is on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. For smaller companies and teams, I find a brief weekly update by email can be more than sufficient. Sharing key highlights and wins for the week and noting how they specifically move the organization towards achieving its strategic objectives, briefly sharing examples of how specific employees demonstrated company values, and drawing attention to important upcoming milestones, activities, and deadlines used to take me about 30 minutes to compose. - Social Media
Quick posts on appropriate social media platforms about exciting updates, expressions of appreciation, and positive reinforcement of integration efforts can be less time-consuming in the moment and more appealing for those who have attention spans better suited to sound bites. It will be important to have role-based user permissions for posting to ensure appropriateness of content that adheres to corporate standards. - Leader Rounding
As part of the Purpose-Driven Culture Series, the EverSparq article on Valuing and Optimizing What You Have, the activity of leader rounding was explored in greater detail. In summary, leader rounding is the act of leaders meeting with their direct reports (and on occasion other staff) on a regular basis to ask a predetermined and predictable set of questions to gather feedback from staff. Keeping track of responses will also help generate newsletter and other content more easily and efficiently.
Any and all of these questions are opportunities to diagnose impediments to and promote integration.
- Create a Positive Frame of Mind
What is working well for you today? What is one thing that is going well for you today? (You may need to allow for a pregnant pause but wait for it.) If appropriate: I heard you did a really good job at ____. Thank you for ____. Here is how your feedback from our last conversation was applied. - Engage Others in Building Positivity
Who have you observed doing a particularly good job lately? What is something that you observed someone doing that you really appreciated or that role modelled our company values? Have you let them know? How might you acknowledge them? Do you mind if I also thank them? - Attend to Practical Needs
Do you have the tools and information you need to do your work effectively? Let’s discuss how we can better meet those needs. - Commit to Getting Better
What suggestions do you have for how we can do better as a team/company? What have you liked in other companies or teams where you have worked that you think might be beneficial if we were to implement it here? What suggestions do you have for how we can enhance our ability to coordinate and collaborate consistently and efficiently? - Acknowledge and See Others
Thank you for the input today. I will follow-up with you about your feedback (if any) and suggestion(s).
- Create a Positive Frame of Mind
- Town Halls
Whether you are a large enterprise or a small business, hosting thoughtfully structured gatherings on a periodic basis where information is shared and employees can ask questions to create deeper understanding and greater clarity can also be an impactful way to build your purpose-driven culture and amplify integration and alignment.
Walk attendees through the elements of the Purpose-Driven Strategic Framework. Consider asking individuals in advance to be prepared to share a personal story about their work that connects to one or more of the first three elements of the framework (Mission, Vision, Values) to help make the element more accessible and real to others. Highlight what successful cross-functional alignment looks like in action and ask a team member in advance to be prepared to share a specific example of how this type of integrated approach had a positive impact on their work. Build in time for audience feedback and questions.
In addition to live, synchronous meetings, consider making recordings available for those who either were not able to attend or want to revisit any of the content. - Data & Performance Dashboards
For visual learners, having a simple and consistently organized and routinely updated performance dashboard that highlights progress towards achievement of objectives can be an effective reference tool in building integration. These are couched as shared goals and activities and typically will identify specific individuals or departments responsible for completing certain tasks. When performance is lagging or at risk, it is easier to pinpoint and determine whether there is an integration and alignment issue that needs to be resolved.
These can serve as sources of key statistics that can be shared using any of the other communication channels outlined above. Analogous to a fundraising campaign, building these key data points into communication media can enhance engagement, alignment and integration to build momentum.
Conclusion
Vertical and horizontal integration and alignment on the purpose and priorities of a company can reduce inefficiency and employee dissatisfaction while supporting team members to efficiently make decisions and achieve goals and advance company success in a coordinated manner. Despite the abstract nature of building integration, taking a measured and realistic approach using concrete and tangible tools and tactics to make it easier to coordinate and align is well worth the investment.
For questions or to find out how EverSparq can help you design and implement any of the tools or practices described in this article to fit your company needs, please contact info@eversparq.com
