Trend - Alignment: Get the Band Singing the Same Song

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we are entering into the second instalment. Of our trends report. We've studied the first to four tech trends, and now we're about to studying for collaboration trends together. And the key topic of today's episode is alignment.

How do we get everyone on the same page? Or what we learned is it's like, how do we get the band singing the same song? Now upon reflection is really interesting. Like I was expecting that the building part, the technology part of our trends report that we just completed. Well, tell us about all of the complexities and challenges of technology and it did, but here's the thing.

If that's all the [00:01:00] platforms and the tech, then the people stuff is equally as challenging. And we have got a lot of insights and a lot of best practices to share with you. So let's kick it off with alignment. Now here is one of the most interesting things from the entire report. Getting everyone on the same page was ranked almost twice as challenging as delivering the work.

Isn't that interesting. So if you think about, um, you know, getting people together, getting them on the same page, it's generally made up of, um, how we. Produce how we learn, how we connect and how we go. You get on the same page. These are all of the things that make up the bigger collaborations. Sorry.

What's fascinating is that this alignment, this getting everyone on the same page was almost twice as hard as the [00:02:00] doing of the work. So in terms of collaboration producing, like, Hey, let's build this thing together. Was actually way easier in the, what should we build together? Isn't that amazing? So this alignment thing is a real challenge and you know, the, the key thing, you know, that we would, uh, take from this trends report is that you have to work very deliberately on your.

Alignment as a team, you need to really understand and define first of all, and this is the first big insight that I have for you in order to succeed at alignment is you have to know what is. Our way of thinking and our way of working, this is almost always never, uh, written down. It's never taught. It's kind of spoken about at best, or it's just [00:03:00] kind of done and you're meant to kind of work it out on the fly if you're a new member of a team or a company.

So define your way of thinking, define your way of working. And that is the cornerstone to this, uh, uh, um, idea around alignment. If you want everyone singing the same song, everyone being on the same page, having the right attitudes, the right ways of thinking, then you need to understand and agree as a team of like, what are they, what is our way of thinking our way of working number one thing here for alignment, you need to know what those things are before we talk about how we get everyone to do it.

You need to know what they are. Now in going deep on this. I mean our trends report, we had a lot of people giving us feedback from all over the world and from many different industries. So this is really widespread. This challenge of alignment. One of the great things is we found that there were some really good [00:04:00] practices, um, that you can can start with the first one.

Is if you want alignment and you know, your way of thinking and working, then you need to use daily stand-ups daily scrums as a way of reinforcing how we think, how we work daily, daily, daily, daily critical is really, really critical. Because this is the chance to increase the calibration, increase the understanding.

Maybe sometimes unusual challenges come up, which become a chance to explore. How do we think about that? How are we going to work on that? And that needs to be reinforced daily. Unfortunately, I know this is going to sound like hard work and it is, but you've got to do it daily. This is how you reinforce the way of thinking and working, which is alignment.

Getting everyone on the same page. Now, the next thing is. You need. [00:05:00] So if that's the sort of daily reinforcement, you know, the talking about reminding and communicating how we think and how we work, the next thing is you need to guide people in your teams on how they can get aligned with the way of thinking and working within the team within the wider organization.

Here. I want to give a really big call-out, um, to a great partner of ours at ING Romania. It's overdue, Slavonia he's head of marketing and customer experience banking, uh, for business clients all over ING Romania. And he had this really great metaphor that it's like a band when we talk about alignment.

So he. Uh, gave us this great insight that we all need to think, like band leaders were the front man, and you need to invite your teammates to come join the band, play alone, and you might start, you know, imagine you're up there with the lead guitar or you're on [00:06:00] vocals. You might like get everybody going, but here's the key thing.

Once you kind of bring people together as the band leader. What you should do is over time, you sort of drift a little bit into the background and then you can maybe not play quite as much. And then over time, let the band take the song in the direction that they want to take it. So it's this idea of you guide them, but then you're able to reinforce on those daily scrums in stand-ups, but actually.

The key thing is if you want alignment, they need to actually not only think, but do in the way of thinking and working, they need to celebrate right. How you operate as a team. What, what is your purpose? All of that should be reflected not only in the leader, but they should make room for others. So it's got a little bit of a servant leadership, uh, notion to it here.

So [00:07:00] I just want to bring this back. This alignment challenge cannot be. Uh, underestimated. Because what happens is it's proving to be one of the single greatest challenges. It's far harder than actually like building stuff. It's like, what are we going to do is like much trickier than, okay. Let's build now.

So this is often why. We see products get built that are not right, because there wasn't alignment at the start of the project. We weren't agreeing on our purpose, how we think and how we work. So this is particularly challenging, particularly challenging for teams. Now, without a doubt, what we have seen as a pattern in some of our interviews for the trends report is that we did see that obviously COVID has made this alignment.

Harder it's tricky because sometimes we can leave people out unknowingly. Um, it's really hard, you know, you don't have everybody in the same room, so you can just say right everyone into the war room. [00:08:00] So alignment. It does become trickier. That's why our first recommendation is to know, define, celebrate your way of thinking your way of working and bring it back daily in your scrums, in your stand-ups in your status calls, make sure you bring it back.

And when it comes to really getting things done, Make sure you think of yourself as that band leader, as we learnt from overdue, make sure that you get the band going, but then actively take a little bit of a backseat. Let them take the song that then play, let them make it their own, because that has a lot of benefits beyond alignment.

You see autonomy and ownership will come out of that. And when people are doing that, they will feel like they are thriving in your team, in your business. Okay. Now, if you want to thrive when you're building products and services, if yo...