Building Team Alignment and Developing Leaders

Have you ever felt like a broken record with your team? Do you find yourself repeating the agency's goals and vision, only to be met with glazed-over expressions? Have you effectively communicated the agency’s direction and vision? It’s a common struggle for agency owners to feel they’re desperately trying to rally the troops behind a unified purpose, yet somehow missing that elusive "click" of genuine understanding and buy-in. Today’s guest is a specialist in the art of leadership alignment and how to foster authentic goal comprehension that permeates every level of your organization. Learn how leaders can achieve authentic goal understanding by talking, not just telling, and invest in aligning their teams to the business's direction for success.

Julie Williamson is the managing partner at The Karrikins Group, a small boutique consultancy focused on helping leaders align and deliver on shared goals. She discusses the need for clear and easy-to-articulate goals, highlighting that repetition does not equate to clarity, and stresses the importance of engaging in productive conversations with team members to ensure understanding and alignment.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Fostering authentic goal understanding among your agency team.

• Making sure the path toward the goal is clear.

• Navigating trade-offs and unified execution with your team.

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How Leaders Can Foster Understanding of Agency Goals

As a specialist particularly interested in executive engagement, Julie works with business owners that are having a hard time aligning with their teams to pursue a common goal.

It could happen that they haven’t really defined said goals but often business owners make the mistake of assuming that clarity is measured in volume – the more they repeat or emphasize a goal, the more likely their team will understand and align with it. However, this is not how alignment works. This approach often falls short because it fails to engage employees in productive conversations that help them truly grasp the goals and their significance.

One of the things she encourages in these cases is to talk, not tell, when it comes to setting and communicating goals. Leaders need to invest in meaningful conversations with team members to ensure they not only understand the goals but also feel connected to them on a personal level. By involving employees in discussions about the goals, leaders can help them internalize the objectives and understand the impact of their work on achieving them.

One of the key aspects of engaging in these conversations, as Julie explains, is ensuring that team members can articulate the goals in their own words and understand the underlying drivers behind them. This deeper level of understanding will allow them to make informed decisions and choices that align with the shared outcomes.

Bridging Individual Roles to the Overarching Purpose

To ensure each team member understands and works towards a common goal there must be consistency in how every member is contributing to the overall goal. 

Just because the goal is clear it doesn’t guarantee that the way to the goal is clear. Each individual may have a different perspective on how to achieve the goal based on their role and responsibilities within the organization.

Therefore, leaders must clearly articulate the goal and ensure everyone understands what it means in the context of their own work. Otherweise, different employees may end up having their own interpretations of thegoal and behave differently in moments when they need to use their discretionary decision-making skills.  

To address this challenge, leaders must create a shared understanding of the goal and how each individual's efforts contribute to it. This can be achieved through open communication, collaboration, and a clear alignment of roles and responsibilities. By fostering a culture of teamwork and shared purpose, organizations can ensure that everyone is working towards a common goal in a coordinated and effective manner.

Empowering Leaders to Navigate Trade-Offs and Unified Execution

As a leader, try to look for people who share your core values because this is how to find the ones you don’t have to manage once you communicate the overall goals. This can be especially challenging once you start to scale. As you start hiring more people and getting more and more degrees of separation from the senior management, focus on building better leaders.

Invest as much in building leaders as in building technical skills because as your agency grows. You need strong leaders who can guide and inspire their teams towards achieving the core goals and growing in the same direction.

One of the key strategies Julie has been implementing is to encourage leaders to talk about trade-offs. Leaders often make decisions without fully understanding the trade-offs involved, which can impact the overall success of the organization. Even if they don’t fully realize it, leaders are making trade-offs with every decision they make; it may be profits vs. revenue, long term vs. short term, or reliability and predictability vs. variability and risk. Help your up and coming leaders understand the trade-offs and how to voice them because you may find their idea of what the trade-offs is different than the one you have.

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