Motivating employees to align their behavior with the organization’s strategy (strategic alignment) and give their best efforts (employee engagement) is one of the challenges of senior leadership. Typically, leaders and stars feel connected to the organization but research shows that 75 percent or more of the employees do not. Because they don’t feel connected, over time they gradually stop caring, they stop aligning their behavior with organizational goals, they stop giving their best efforts and they stop fully communicating. One serious consequence of the break-down in communications is that decision makers don’t get the information they need to make optimal decisions. These conditions lead to underperformance at both individual and corporate levels.
To combat widespread disconnection, leaders must intentionally connect with the broader group of employees. In the years ahead, I believe more organizations will develop a role called “Strategic Alignment and Engagement” for this very purpose. One way to think of this new role is that it is a hybrid of internal marketing and knowledge management. While I certainly agree that the CEO and supervisors should devote time to strategic alignment and engagement, it is utterly impossible to consistently do this well given the CEO’s other responsibilities and the lower level manager’s lack of sufficient knowledge about the strategy to communicate it effectively.
Strategic Alignment and Engagement is time-consuming. It requires attending meetings with the CEO and senior management to identify strategic messages. It requires developing communications to educate employees about the strategy and spending time with a lot of people to explain it, as well as describe action items and the state of progress on each. It requires taking time to listen to employees’ input and considering it. It requires follow-up to communicate “here’s what I heard and here’s what I’m planning to do about it.” It requires communicating to management what was learned from interactions with employees and developing action plans, as well as management support to execute the actions. Finally, it requires communicating back to employees when actions are completed. Unless each of these crucial steps are followed, failure is certain.
Selecting the right individual to fill this role is also essential. Ideally, the head of Strategy Alignment and Engagement must be someone with industry knowledge, strong communications skills and the ability to build relationships and gain the trust of all levels of management and with individual contributors. In other words, this individual must be an intentional connector.
As a reminder, in the coming weeks I’ll be speaking at the following events:
9/29 NASA’s Exploring Leadership Colloquium
10/1 Wharton Alumni Club of Dallas/Fort Worth
10/6 Blogger for HSM’s World Business Forum in New York City
10/12 Podcast for Kevin Eikenberry’s Remarkable Leadership
10/13 Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
10/14 Northwestern University’s Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement
10/20 Illinois State University
10/26 Webcast for American Society for Training and Development (ASTD)
10/27 Chairman of Human Capital Institute’s Employee Engagement Conf. (Boston)
