Companies have mastered the mechanics of goals. Alignment loses to bonuses, tools and habits

Let's start with what the word means, because in Polish it is sometimes rendered as levelling, and that is misleading. Alignment doesn't mean doing what the CEO said, because that is simply obedience. Nor does it mean standardisation or centralisation: teams are meant to keep their identity and their potential, just pointed in one direction. It also isn't about every team contributing to the strategy, because that is physically impossible and some departments will always be in a supporting role. It is about a state in which every team knows where the company is going, can judge whether it has a chance to contribute, and can at least check whether its daily work contradicts that direction. Below roughly fifty people this can be handled with ordinary communication, because everyone can be gathered in one place. Above that, structure, the number of channels and inertia all grow, and with remote work the problem appears as early as twenty.

The order of work on this is fairly concrete. First, a direction that can be linked to anything at all: a strategy reduced to a sentence about wanting to grow doesn't help you make any decision, because then the answer to every client who increases revenue is yes, even if serving them forces a change to the product, the plans and the cost structure. A good strategy answers the question of what we will not do. Then the links have to be shown openly, not just held in people's heads: the strategic goal, the annual goal, the quarterly objective and the backlogs drawn in one place, even on a shared board, because the drawing itself builds awareness of what follows from what. Next come shared objectives, the ones set at the level of the product or service, jointly by representatives of the teams, with people chosen only afterwards to fit the objectives. A working group is formed by skills, for one cycle, which isn't always a quarter, and nobody is seconded to it full-time, because that never works anyway.

The hardest is the layer nobody implements deliberately. The most systemic block to collaboration is a bonus system that rewards individual or departmental results: it is hard to expect a person drawn into a working group to act against their own financial interest. One floor down sits a conflict of tools, and sometimes even of ways of working, because one department works in an agile way, another in a classic way, and a third on sticky notes. So the group has to agree on one tool, as simple as possible, for the duration of the cycle, and plan in it together, review progress every week, and draw conclusions about whether these actions are actually getting it closer to the result. None of this can be replaced by an announcement that we now need everyone's engagement, because people's first thought after a sentence like that is: what does that mean in practice, and what am I supposed to do. And one last thing, which only shows after a while: the cost of agreeing rises with the number of objectives. With several dozen objectives, alignment becomes a separate event lasting several hours, as in an organisation that, halfway through a six-month cycle, set out several dozen laptops with the objectives so that everyone involved could read them and consult one another.