Aligning Leadership

Happy New Year! Many of you are finalizing goals for 2016, and planning how you’re going to accomplish them. I want all of you to have even more success this year… and helping your team align their passion, priorities, and actions toward your organization’s goals will be a key to your success.
In the introduction to my “Planning to Plan” series, I proposed that leaders ask themselves a few tough questions about last year’s plan:

• Did we have a clear, compelling and attainable vision of what we wanted to accomplish?
• Did our team truly and deeply believe in what we were doing, and why?
• Did we clearly identify our priorities, and what was “out of bounds”?
• Did we encourage our critical thinkers to think critically, and help us face the brutal facts?
• Did our team buy in to an actionable plan that addressed their constraints?
• Did our entire team review and adapt the plan throughout the year?

In my last post, I shared some thoughts on building and articulating a clear, compelling and attainable vision. Next, I’ll focus on how we get our teams aligned for action in pursuit of the vision. What do I mean by “aligned”? In this context, I believe alignment has a few key facets: passion, priorities, and action.
Passion is what gets your team members out of bed in the morning, what motivates them to care enough about the work to actually do it, and what keeps them working for you instead of someone else. While there are people who say they don’t have (or don’t even believe in) passion for their work, you really want team members who care.