The Importance of Team Alignment in Business
Strong strategic alignment is a key differentiator between high-performing and low-performing companies. Team alignment has a tangible financial impact on an organization and significantly improves its ability to remain competitive.
I think team alignment and communication are beneficial to almost every aspect of a business. The numbers below highlight that the impact on the business's performance are astonishing and here are some interesting ones.
Highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable than their misaligned counterparts. Aligned teams close 38% more sales deals.
Benefits that aligned companies get
- Increasing focus on high-value activities within a team
- Minimizing uncertainty and confusion about what a team is working on and why
- You need fewer man hours to get the same work done
- Faster Time to market
- Employees are more engaged
- Employees are more motivated
- Decrease in employee turnover
- Better utilization of your employees’ skills in the workplace
Those are some internal factors, but the benefits of alignment extend beyond the walls of the company. With this in hand, customers clearly understand what your business does, which will affect the understanding of the company’s value proposition. It’s worth mentioning that effective leadership, underlined by strong team alignment, drives greater confidence among buyers. And finally, companies that master alignment is in a much better position to be customer-centric and operate in a manner that enables them to succeed.
How to deal with misalignment and miscommunication?
The product culture and certain set of values are the answer to this question. On one side it’s your team's ability to innovate constantly and bring solutions that are valuable for your customers, and on the other hand at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter how great are your ideas if you can’t create a shippable version of it to your customers.
- Strong and aligned teams drive experiments, they do tests, and they know some will fail and some will succeed.
- Be open-minded, knowing that good ideas streamlined from anywhere.
- Empower teams — individuals and teams know they have enough power to try and test ideas.
- Be business and customer-centric: it’s the teams’ ability to understand not only the business needs and market constraints, but also match them with customer wants and realities.
- And finally, add mechanisms and tools that are in place for those initiatives to be tested, measured, and reported quickly and safely.
Final touches
As once Elon Mask said. “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”
Alignment and tooling supporting it, are the future initiator of growth and success of companies at every level. I’m very obsessed with team alignment and communication and how it reveals in every aspect of the work.
- Any campaign or content being produced by the marketing team should be aligned with business goals.
- The partnerships you get should be aligned with your vision, mission, and objective. And it doesn’t matter how big is the partnering company, but how much aligned is the partnership with your goals.
- Even if you are raising funding — figure out which investor is the best aligned with the type of business you’re trying to build. These all will have a much larger impact on your outcome than anything else could potentially.
