Aligning Your Team

Does this story sound familiar?

After months of research and planning you have developed a breakthrough idea that will dramatically improve your organization. You have a vision of what it will look like and how to get there. You announce the vision to your team with great fanfare and everyone appears to be on board. However, after a few weeks, nothing seems to be changing and the idea fizzles. What happened?

Statistics show that about 70% of change initiatives are not successful. Quite often it is because the team, who must execute the new strategy, is not aligned around the change. The definition of align is to “bring into cooperation and agreement”, I believe the key is agreement. Change can be painful and confusing and takes a lot of energy. If your team doesn’t agree with the new vision, why should they exert the effort needed to execute it?

Here are a few tips to move your vision into reality by creating team alignment:

• Communicate: Before making a big vision announcement, it is important to create talking points with what people need to know and also what they will want to know. Encourage questions and suggestions.
• Express Excitement for the Future: What is your voice tone and body language portraying about the idea? Are you excited, bored, distracted? You communicate more with your body language (55%) and voice tone (38%) than with your words (7%).
• Establish Role Clarity: Everyone on your team will need to know what they are supposed to do and why. Role clarity conversations around how this will impact them personally and how they will contribute to the implementation are critical.
• Patience: You have been living and breathing the development of your new vision for several months, your team members have just learned about it. Patience is important to allow people to “catch up” with everything you know.

Effective leaders not only develop breakthrough visions, they develop aligned teams committed to executing the vision.

Management Skills Resource, Inc. is pleased to offer Work of Leaders and other leadership workshops to develop the leaders in your organization to turn vision into reality. Contact us at info@ManagementSkillsInc.com or call 972 881-5282.