When it comes to addressing consequences of alignment problems, such as missed targets, low employee engagement, death by meetings, and finger pointing amongst teams, is the root cause more cultural or structural?
Keeping with best practices, the beginning of alignment is the definition of terms. In this case, culture and structure.
Let’s say culture is simply the regular behaviors of people in an organization. Included in regular behaviors are how people lead, follow, collaborate, listen, respond, interact, and so on.
Structure includes the collection of skillsets, processes, data, and technology that support an outcome hierarchy. Organization structure, incentives, and rewards belong as structural elements of alignment too.
Many would say that for true alignment, culture and structure need to be equally strong. One without the other is the chicken without an egg. But which should come first?
Popular thinking is that culture is the dominant driver of alignment. Furthermore, while individuals have reasonably high control over their own behavior, organizational culture is driven by behaviors of the highest-status leaders within.
If so, there are two big obstacles to fixing alignment problems by starting with culture. First, associates lower in the organization hierarchy take limited responsibility for driving alignment because it’s generally too hard or too risky to change behaviors of organization leaders. Second, only the most self-aware and emotionally secure leaders will recognize, admit to, and change behavioral problems.
Perhaps it would be easier and more effective to change structurally than culturally. Structure moves away from emotion into the realm of logic and reason, depersonalizes the issue, and provides a common external focus that doesn’t require admitting personal shortcomings. Establishing a clear outcome hierarchy, for example, is easier for most people than addressing passive aggressive behavior or protecting sensitive egos.
Answering questions like “what does winning look like” or “what do we need to do to win” is much safer than “why don’t you do what I want you to do” or “why can’t you stop irritating me so much?”
Imagine if you and your team clearly understood the organization’s outcome hierarchy, had the skills, processes, data, and technology to do the job, and were not clashing with other teammates’ unrelated and competing objectives. There would be solid structural alignment and very little reason to behave badly anymore. Chickens and eggs in harmony.
Want to give structural alignment a go?