Come Together!
Everything works better when leaders are aligned toward goals
As companies grow beyond the first couple of dozen employees, alignment often starts to fray—not because people aren’t committed, but because the implicit culture of the founding team no longer scales. New hires bring different backgrounds and assumptions. Departments begin to form their own perspectives. Engineering questions how Sales positions the product. Roadmap debates harden. Side conversations multiply, and teams gradually drift into silos. What begins as normal growing pains can quietly turn into a drag on execution and morale.
Sometimes things are moving so quickly that you don’t notice teams are out of alignment until the situation boils over and you start losing employees or missing dates and revenue targets.
Poor alignment can stem from a confluence of several issues:
Lack of clear strategy
No plan of execution
Weak accountability
Poor communications
In an early stage startup, you may get by without alignment because there’s a strong implicit culture among the founding team. You’re focused on building features, closing deals and moving as fast as possible. You may be moving so fast that you don’t need to think about how decisions are made. They’re just made quickly by the founders with whoever is in the meeting and then letting other people finding out later via slack or email.
As you hire more people, things that are implicitly understood by the founders, may not be understood or followed by new hires. When you’re growing quickly, you will likely hire experienced executives to help scale. But if you don’t let them make decisions, it can lead to frustration on both sides. Having a strong executive team and alignment on goals, values and plans is key to scaling.
Whenever I join a high-growth company, I tell the board or the CEO that I will be an agent of change. And if they didn’t want change, they shouldn’t hire me!
Sometimes, the problem is that the operating principles that worked well in the early days no longer fit as the company grows. Maybe you’ve sold to early adopters via a Product Led Growth (PLG) model and now you want to sell to Enterprise customers. Or perhaps new competitors have stepped in with a weaker product, but stronger sales and marketing.
How should you respond?
There are lots of different ways to address this, but if you don’t have alignment at the executive level, you’re going to have a sub-optimal solution. And when the executives are not in alignment, it will only get worse further down the organization.
You need to get everyone moving in the same direction. Good companies respond to opportunities and evolve. They develop a strategy and execution plan that pulls people together and drives progress. The trick is to agree on the goals and then let leaders make the decisions. In other words, once you’ve agreed on what’s important, let departmental leaders manage how things get done. After all, that’s why you’ve hired them. Good leaders don’t want (or need) to be micromanaged.
Often alignment splinters when there are multiple conflicting views of how to proceed. Sales has one view of the situation, Marketing another, Engineering a third. Everyone comes with their own experiences, ideas and biases. It’s great to have input from many areas. Diverse views can result in better brainstorming and better solutions. For complex decisions, you must focus on what is best for the Enterprise, rather than for any single department.
Trust and Accountability
The two key issues are trust and accountability. When you hire experienced leaders, you must trust them to do the job they’ve been hired to do. You should also have prioritized quarterly goals so that there is clear accountability.
The best way to foster these two points is to promote a high degree of transparency in all areas. That means setting clear goals and plans for every department, with no “black boxes.” Adjacent teams (e.g. Sales / Marketing, Product / Engineering) should collaborate to define goals and plans together.
Once goals and plans are defined, leaders need to respect that their charges will deliver. You cannot allow second-guessing. Otherwise, you are undermining the progress of the company. You must commit to supporting your colleagues in their decisions. Instead of saying “it’s not how I would do it” try saying “How can I help?”
MySQL CEO Marten Mickos used to joke that for complex problems, the decision would get made by whoever would get the blame if things went wrong. Although that’s kind of a dark Scandinavian humor, what it actually meant was: whoever has responsibility makes the decision.
Here are 5 tips that can help improve alignment:
Build an annual plan that defines the top level company initiatives. This should include new products, new expansion plans and other big strategic bets.
Require written annual plans for each department. These don’t have to be lengthy, but they must identify not only their departmental objectives, but also what they will do to support the top-level company initiatives. These plans should be shared across all departments to increase transparency.
Make executives from adjacent teams work together on their plans. For example, Marketing and Sales must be in agreement on what segments and use cases will be targeted.
Ensure that departmental offsite meetings include participation from adjacent groups. For example, the Sales Quarterly Business Review (QBR) should include participation from Marketing and Product.
Communicate the top level initiatives and progress towards the goals in every all-hands meeting.
Fast growing companies always have a certain amount of chaos as you figure out the right positioning, features, go-to market model, pricing, etc. At the same time, you also have to build the internal processes that govern how complex decisions get made.
Having clear ownership and accountability can help increase alignment not only at the executive level, but throughout the company. It takes discipline and constant communication to keep people focused on the top priorities. But if you do it right, everyone will come together in harmony.
Many people will recognize the image at the top of this post as the album cover for the classic Beatles album Abbey Road. There were several alternate photos from the same shoot, but none capture the spirit of all four in alignment like the cover photo.
