Note: this is the seventh in a new series of weekly tips to build a functional, collaborative, aligned team.
Here are three questions to create quick alignment for your team.
A little background. Spending the time to create alignment on your leadership team, mid-level team, and organization is critical to the ongoing health, productivity, and success of an organization. You simply cannot short-cut the process of stepping back and creating real alignment (email me if you want to some tips on how to do so). The consequences are frustration, turbulence, slow progress in critical priorities, departments and people working on competing priorities, and people at lower levels fighting bloody battles.
Sometimes, however, you are legitimately forced to move quickly to deal with an emergency or crisis or rapid deadline, and you need to create alignment “on the fly.”
Here are three questions to answer as a team to create that alignment quickly:
- What are we ultimately trying to achieve?
- What is most important for us right now?
- How can each of us best contribute right now?
These three questions clarify for everyone the ultimate ambition of the project, task, or issue in front of us, the most important immediate goal, and every single person’s immediate focus.
Go build a functional, collaborative, aligned team!
