Alignment Enables Autonomy

As businesses grow in rapidly changing environments, leaders lose the capacity to control every decision and need to rely on their team to move the organization forward. To ensure the team moves together towards a collective goal, we must create alignment within the organization and make decisions based on clarity of focus, purpose, and value. 

To do this, businesses should create an environment of high alignment which will enable high autonomy and allow empowered decisions to be made across all levels of the organization.

Think about the scenario in the graphic below, where you and your team need to cross a river. If you have high alignment and low autonomy, a manager will say, “we need to cross the river, go and build a bridge”. We are clear on what we need to do but we also get direction on the “how”. At the other end of the spectrum, high autonomy but low alignment, the team walks around thinking, “I hope someone is working on that river problem”. What we need is to create an environment where high alignment enables high autonomy – “we need to cross the river, now you work out how”. By separating the WHAT we want to deliver with HOW the team will deliver it, we create a clear goal while leveraging the collective knowledge of the team to find the best solution.  

Exhibit 1. Sourced from Henrik Kniberg, Spotify — Aligned Autonomy

Creating Alignment

Creating alignment is necessary to identify WHAT we want the team to deliver and ensure the team is moving together towards a shared goal. There are three methods we have seen which drastically increase alignment within an organization: 

1. Flexibility through continuous planning and regular adjustments  

In addition to one large annual plan, we recommend implementing planning each quarter to build on strategy and realign on objectives. Through quarterly planning the team can analyse progress each quarter to see what worked and what did not. From there the team can adjust and improve the plan for the next quarter. This process allows for multiple planning iterations each year and constant improvement rather than building a ‘set and forget’ annual plan that is only reviewed once a year.  

For example, a large Australian retailer needed to adjust to the disruptions of COVID and other natural disasters. The organization implemented quarterly planning cycles, enabling them to align the organization of over 200,000 people around the rapidly shifting priorities in supply chain, instore requirements and rapid rise of eCommerce. 

2. Measurable outcomes delivered regularly to demonstrate progress and get feedback 

With business objectives created, teams must measure the value they have achieved. The use of objectives and key results (OKR’s) is highly recommended to drive clarity and alignment at each level of the business by articulating what matters most (Objectives) and detailing what success will look like (Key Results). 

For instance, a large media company recently implemented goal setting at a portfolio lead and project level. It was the socialised and validated relevant stakeholders until the entire company had a common understanding of the strategic intent for projects, how value would be measured and how they could contribute. This resulted in a 2-3x efficiency gain in the overall quarterly workload portfolio by improving focus, quality of output, and overall team morale​. 

3. Make data driven decisions through a test and learn mindset

Teams need to find evidence of what works and what doesn’t through testing, learning, and adjusting. To do this, an organization must align around psychological safety where teams are comfortable with failure and willing to move on when something is not working.  

For example, one client of ADAPTOVATE, a leading global airline worked intensely to create a culture of psychological safety around test and learn within their innovation teams. By aligning teams on the measures of success for their ‘experiments’ they were able to rapidly test and then iterate without the fear of reprise. They were able to achieve a 15x increase in stopover-nights and personalised upgrades offers led to ~20% increase in revenue per offer. 

Creating Autonomy

Once the team is aligned with the larger organization, we need to ensure it has the autonomy to decide HOW to get the work done in the most efficient way. At ADAPTOVATE, we have found that organizations need to get three things right to build autonomous teams.  

1. Create cross-functional teams with all the resources and skillsets they need to own the outcome  

Teams cannot be autonomous if they do not have all the resources needed to get the work done. Cross-functional teams solve this problem by being composed of people from different business functions who can work together to bring a product from start to finish. Think about a team that is responsible for building out a financial web application.

They may have access to programmers, but if they do not understand financial regulatory requirements, how could they ever be autonomous? Having to send requests to the legal team and wait for clarification would be a slow process and create too much reliance on external approval. By having all functions within the team, decisions can be made and acted on without external factors slowing down the process.  

2. Leadership behaviors need to support and empower teams to own HOW they do the work 

To build autonomy, teams need a change of mindset around how they decide which work to do. The team must transition from an environment where a traditional manager dictates the work, to an environment where the team understands how they contribute to the overall business objectives and then makes decisions around how to do the work.

The people closest to the work, the ones who know the process back to front, are best positioned to make decisions around how to complete the work, leaving leaders with the role of serving the team in whatever capacity is needed to achieve the goal.  

3. Teams must show transparency and accountability 

Even though teams must be given the autonomy to choose how they do their work, they need to earn this through transparency and accountability or the whole system can fall apart. If leaders do not have a clear view of what work is being done, it will not be possible to create a test and learn environment as teams will not be able to get appropriate feedback. The organization needs to ensure team members deliver on their objectives and if they do not, make changes to ensure they do in the future. By making the team accountable to their objectives, this creates an environment where the team has the autonomy to choose how they do the work and remain aligned with the overall business objectives.  

Common Pitfalls

There are several common pitfalls to watch out for when working towards greater autonomy and alignment.