The Math of Alignment

by Michael Tessler, Managing Partner

In previous blogs, I mentioned the importance of aligning your teams and the methods we have used. It’s obvious how important it is to make sure that everyone on your team is pursuing the same goals. However, many times leadership fails to prioritize and deliver on this.

To the leaders of today, why bother? Let’s start with the basics. Begin with the economics behind alignment and the costs of ignoring it. Don’t believe me? I’ll share some real-life examples and how we thought about it.

BroadSoft grew to a size of 1500+ employees in 20+ countries. At this stage, we realized we needed to change the way we aligned the teams. Why? Because BroadSoft was a mix of twenty acquired companies who all brought their own cultures. This created challenges in team dynamics and functional silos.

Thinking about it, we agreed that spending time and money on aligning the team made sense. This is where the math comes in.

If we improved alignment, efficiency would increase by 10%. This meant that we would have 150 more headcount power. We felt that 10% more efficiency was an achievable goal, especially if the result was an additional 150 people. Imagine the costs and complexity of hiring 150 new employees! The time and money used to align the team was cheap.

To accomplish, we hired a Chief Transformation Officer (thanks Jeff) to focus our efforts on team alignment, communication and empowerment. Along with this team and the executive leadership team we launched an initiative called One BroadSoft. The initiative focused on a few key pillars.

• Setting company-wide objectives
• Company-wide communications on a regular basis; making all employees feel like they were part of one family
• Setting and sharing our vision, mission and values
• Working with leaders throughout the organization on making sure the team felt empowered; introduced a few helpful tools like RACI
• Reworked and trained leaders on 360 feedback

The results proved that you can experience a significant jump in employee engagement by consistently applying some simple techniques. Team members felt connected to the business and felt that their contribution was valued. When your team members feel that the company recognizes their unique skills and contribution, their engagement jumps considerably.

As a leadership team, I suggest you make a serious commitment to a One Company initiative.

As a counter-example, many years ago I was part of a management team that decided that we should introduce a dress code at the offices. What that meant was that the developers could no longer wear shorts. Call it the No Shorts Policy !! When the executive team discussed, I estimated a 10% reduction in productivity for 30 days. The rest of the leadership team felt I was being dramatic and exaggerating. I had no idea how bad this decision would be taken by the R&D teams — they felt this was the end of the cool start-up and was the beginning of a larger cultural change. It became a reason to complain about everything. It took months to finally get the team over what most would consider a minor change. Culture is a funny thing. It takes a lot of effort to build it and one small thing to destroy it.

This was especially a factor when we acquired companies. Getting rid of the free coffee can turn into a downward spiral. You can ask Scott about the couch incident of 2007!!