Leveraging Leadership

Strategic Alignment and Lines of Sight from Corporate Level to Individuals

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 146

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Emily discusses strategic alignment through the balanced scorecard, touching on corporate, business unit, and individual levels. She shares practical examples from her client management department and explains the importance of communication channels. The episode emphasizes visibility, transparency, and clear lines of sight in aligning everyone's goals.

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Who Am I?
If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 


Time Stamps:
00:48 Understanding Corporate, Business Unit, and Individual Levels
02:58 Defining the 'What' and 'How' Elements
04:37 The Importance of Line of Sight
05:50 Transparency and Visibility in Scorecards
07:23 Decision Making with Clear Objectives
07:46 Effective Communication Channels

Speaker:

All right, we are continuing the conversation on, uh, All right, this is a continuation of our operationalizing strategy through the lens of balanced scorecard series. This episode is all about strategic alignment. So strategic alignment across all levels of the business. The levels we're talking about here are going to be corporate level, business unit level and individual level. So our corporate level is what it sounds like. So the highest level company wide organization wide level. Then we have the business unit level, and this is, customizable. You can make that what you want it or need it to be. Meaning if you are a startup and you have like three teams across the whole company, then those three teams might be your business units. if you have a global company with. It's regional divisions, and there's multiple departments within a division and multiple teams within a department, then you might have different levels to correspond with those business units. Then we have the individual level, and that's just like it sounds. So, every single individual team member, will be. Accounted for or incorporated, um, in this alignment process. So we've got corporate, business unit, and individual. And we want to align all of those levels across the organization. What do I mean by alignment in this case? That's the word that gets bandied about. Alignment is helping people understand what you want them to do next. Do people across your organization understand what should happen next? Okay. So we have these three levels and to go along with these three levels are scorecards. So there is a corporate level scorecard. which encapsulates the corporate strategy. Then there's the, let's just say department level scorecard. and then the individual level, every single person in the company gets their own individual tailor made scorecards, which is really cool. Um, sometimes you'll have team members with the exact same scorecard, but you can have two team members on the same team who are literally sitting right next to each other who have slightly different scorecards. Cause there might be a slight nuance in the roles and responsibilities within that team. One person might want to have more of an emphasis or focus in this area, which is a little bit different than their team member. They're all still aligned and rolling up to the objective of their department, but how they do that and how they contribute is a little different. And that's reflected in their individual level scorecard. Okay. So we have this alignment at three levels. We've got a scorecard at each level. Okay. Now let's talk about the what and how elements. This is really cool. And this is like kind of a light bulb moment for a lot of people. The corporate level delivers the what, so what should be happening? What's the objective to the department level, the department level in turn delivers or suggests the how. back up to the corporate level. So it's not just like some people in a small room coming up with like the strategy and lightning bolting down like here's the what needs to happen and here's exactly how it needs to happen. Boom, boom, boom. It's delivering the what. Here's, here's the objective. Here's what we're trying to be about. And then you tell me department, what is the best way to do that? How should we go about doing that? You're closer to it than I am. Same process happens from department to individual level. So the department will then say, okay, let me deliver the what to my individual team members. And then the individual will deliver the how Or make recommendations or suggestions for how best to contribute or how best to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish here baked into all of these, what and how deliveries are conversations. And dialogue and discussions and brainstorming and like support and encouragement and challenge and different perspectives. And so you want to be having these conversations and this process built in and a great way to think about it. And there's a chart if you're watching YouTube is the deliveries of the what. kind of goes quote unquote down the organization and the delivery of how goes quote unquote up the organization. Okay, next element to talk about here is line of sight. Does your organization have clear lines of sight? Does your team have a clear line of sight? What do I mean by this? Do the individuals in this particular team know what their department is about? Do they have clear lines of sight to that objective? I'll give you an example here. So when we were running balanced scorecard and I was in charge of our client management department, so multiple teams rolled up to me, all of, all of my team leaders and every single individual in my department could see my balanced scorecard. I could see how my scorecard was put together. Um, and I went over this with people and we were very transparent in our company, which went a long way. But people could literally see the items on my scorecard, the descriptions, the KPIs, and the percentage weightings. And we had our bonuses, so our variable comp tie to our balance scorecard score. And so they, they didn't know like my salary amount, but they could reverse engineer. What my bonus payout was per quarter if they wanted to I don't know if anyone did but they had that information to be able to do that and we would have open conversations about this. So like people could see my scorecard. People could see the status of my scorecard or the progress of my scorecard, which by the way, helpfully was a reflection of theirs. So my scorecard was a roll up of all of my team's scorecards. So all the individuals and then went to the team level and then it went to mine. So people knew how that worked as well and so that just helped reinforce like visibility, transparency, trust, confidence, clarity and it also help reinforce conversations that I would have with my team members around like, I want you to be successful. Like, I really want you to be successful. Not just because I'm a good person and I'm trying to be a good leader, but like, look, like we're clearly aligned here. Like, I really want you to be successful at all levels, at all levels of, uh, of that phrase. But it did add that extra layer, that extra oomph to things like, you know, what do you need to be successful? How are things going on your team? You know, is this tool working for you? What are you hearing from clients? Like, how are things going with this new change? All those types of discussions. Just, there was this, uh, like mechanism and this kind of core, uh, Um, this core scorecard that we were all working around. So everyone was plugged in and dialed into that. People had clear lines of sight. This also happened at the executive level. So all of the ELT, all everyone in the company had access to the CEO scorecard. we knew exactly how he was, um, compensated and what he was driving towards. And so that just like transparency is a breath of fresh air. It really is. It's like, there's no. hiding. There's no guessing games. There's no like political maneuver. It's like, boom, here's my scorecard. Boom. Here's mine. All right. Let's all work together to drive toward these objectives. So that was really, really helpful having those clear lines of sight. It was also helpful when you had to make decisions on the fly where it's like, Oh, something got thrown into my lap from left field. Did not expect this. All right. What are we trying to accomplish here? Um, I know what my I know what my corporate leader's about, I know what my department's about, okay, what am I going to do in this specific scenario? So clear lines of sight help with that. All right. Next element is lines of communication or communication channels. You want to make sure you have robust and efficient and effective communication channels up and down diagonal all throughout your organization. Um, I was just talking to someone last week and he was working for a startup. He was chief of staff for a startup that was growing rapidly and he was helping the business mature. And we were talking about like rhythm of business and kind of meeting cadence and all these different things. And I was like, okay, well, you know, what is your leadership team do now? Like, when do they meet? And he was like, Um, they don't. And I was like, excuse me. And the leadership team didn't meet. And I was like, what do they do? They just have like side one on one conversations and people slack each other and I'm like, okay, so you're like a 75 person company. You need to have a leadership meeting. So like block and tackle these basics for communication, but then think about things like, all right, if you've got this mechanism and balance scorecard going, or whatever methodology you have. If there's a tweak or an update, which there will be inevitably with like market conditions or your org structure changes or whatever happens. And you're like, look, maybe it's like, look, we've run, um, we've run this one process and set of KPIs for the last two quarters. And it's directionally correct, but we're finding like, we're missing like these use cases. And this one measurement we're using, um, Is fine as like a general proxy, but we want it to be more nuanced. We have an idea about how to measure closer to what we're trying to determine. So we're going to change how we measure this, that information, that change has to get to the relevant stakeholders so that that decision can't just be made in a vacuum, even though it might be a very slight adjustment in the grand scheme of things, the. Discussion, or at least conveying of information around why you did that and what it is now and how that affects, potentially other people's scorecard or approaches or priorities or whatnot needs to be disseminated. So having communication channels in place to easily be able to, communicate this is very helpful. Similarly, if you think about a quote unquote bottom up communication, it might be making sure that. Like frontline information from, from folks in the field is getting back to the relevant internal stakeholders or the leaders who are in position to make changes that could help the teams and the company. So for example, if you have, um, like a sales team who, let's say there's a sales team and they're starting to get a whole bunch of chatter. about this one competitor, like no one's heard about, like, who is this? And they keep getting more like kind of people saying, Hey, what about this? Like, these guys do this. Do you guys do this? And it's like, uh, kind of, sort of, no, but like, what are you talking about? And then you start losing deals. It's like, Whoa, okay. Our deal flow is going down. If the sales team just has an echo chamber around them and has no way to get that information out to relevant stakeholders or people who can do something at a bigger level across the organization, you have a problem. That's a problem. And you have to build the communication channels to go, Okay, we don't want to have a knee jerk reaction to one salesperson saying one thing one time. But if we're getting This, this chatter over and over and over again, and it's starting to create this critical mass where like, we're losing deals. We've heard it week over week. Now, this is not just a one off thing. Okay. This is big enough where we have to do something about it. That information has to be conveyed to the relevant people in, in the appropriate amount of time in your organization. So make sure you have those communication channels in place. Um, one note here, don't go overboard. Right. So I've had the, like, we don't have any leadership meetings and I've also had the Emily, we have thousands of Slack channels, not hundreds, thousands of Slack channels, and I'm like, holy Slack channel, Batman, that's way too many. So building effective communication channels might be paring down and pulling back or restructuring the communication channels you have today. Okay, recap and takeaways. Takeaways for you. Ask yourself, how is the alignment across your team? How is the alignment across your organization? Do people understand what they should do next? How are your lines of sight? How are your lines of sight from a rank and file new hire to the CEO of your company? Is that, is that pretty direct, pretty clear? Or is that like, nope, that's a dark hole. No one knows what happens above their direct manager. Um, how's your communication channels? So do people know where to go? Do people have outlets for information to convey information all across the organization? Is the right information getting to the right people at the right time? If the answer is yes, great job. If the answer is no, you might want to look at the communication channels. Sidebar here. Communication channels might be fine. Sometimes it's the people that's a whole other conversation, but just make sure like the structure and the mechanism, like the communication channels themselves are in place. So people at least have the access and opportunity to convey the information. It is a separate discussion. If you have those in place and people just choose not to do that, that's another episode, but just make sure. the communication channels are in place. So takeaways for you. How is your alignment, lines of sight and communication? And I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.