The Execution Disciplines That Determine Whether a Business Plan Succeeds: The Discipline of Alignment
Execution improves when insight travels sideways, not just upward.
Many leaders believe they have alignment on the annual plan because they ask for feedback in meetings. The problem is, they often ask by saying something to the effect of, “Does anyone have any suggestions?” or “Does anyone have any questions?” When the room stays silent, they check the box for buy-in and move on.
This is a dangerous assumption because silence is rarely synonymous with alignment. Often, people are thinking of the reasons why the plan won’t work, but they don’t feel it’s safe to say them aloud. They’ve seen ideas shot down before, or they feel the pressure of the schedule.
The most famous example of this failure is the 1986 NASA Challenger disaster. The engineers knew the O-rings might fail in cold temperatures. They sent memos. They had the data. But the leadership was under pressure. The information traveled up, but it didn’t make it across the organization or create a shared understanding among decision-makers. The plan moved forward, and the result was a tragedy.
In business, we see a less dramatic version of this every day. One department makes its numbers look great, but with little or no insight into the problems they’re creating for another department.
At one manufacturing company, the packaging department was being measured on pieces per hour. To hit their targets, they started picking the easy jobs and shipping partial orders. Their productivity numbers were through the roof, but their customer service team was suddenly buried in angry phone calls from clients who only received half their shipments. The packaging team was “winning,” but the company as a whole was losing. This happened because the plan was built in silos, the insight wasn’t traveling sideways, and the big picture was lost.
To fix this, leaders work to build a shared understanding from the boardroom to the front line. Research shows that when asked about their impact on the financial plan, only about 1% of frontline employees can answer correctly. If your people don’t know the answer, it’s usually because their manager never connected the dots. If the manager doesn’t know, it’s because the VP didn’t explain it. In other words, this is a leadership failure.
True alignment means asking three important questions: What are you responsible for? How is it measured? What is your impact on the financial plan? For a receivables clerk, the answer isn’t, “I collect money.” The answer is, “My goal is to collect in 30 days. We are currently at 40. If I hit the goal, I free up $100,000 in cash for the business.”
When everyone in the organization can answer those three questions, you have more than a plan. You have a team that is actually moving in the same direction.
The Takeaway: True alignment requires more than the absence of disagreement. It requires a culture that builds a shared understanding.
Part 3 of a 12-part series exploring the execution disciplines that determine whether strategy turns into results. Each article examines a critical behavior, mindset, or operational principle that shapes a plan’s ability to succeed once it meets the realities of day-to-day execution.
