Aligning teams

In recent years, I've come to understand the concept of alignment which I now realize is the cornerstone of any productive enterprise. Certainly in engineering efforts, alignment of company ideals, team management, and individuals should mean that everyone is working toward the same team goals. This factor is naturally assumed at all companies because "everyone is on the same page" but the fact is that even well-aligned companies rarely have everyone "on the same page." Alignment comes from communicating ideas, goals, ideals, and needs from top to bottom and back to the top again. The top-down communication is generally assumed at all companies, but the bottom-up rarely is. Basically, fomenting a company philosophy of open-dialog between parties leads to better products, easier work life, and a happier staff.

My intent here is to define alignment in more certain terms and to provide a framework for discussion and analysis.

Alignment
There are several great articles and books on this subject [Strategic Alignment: Leveraging Information Technology for transforming organisations] and these have more to do with "straightening out" IT such that it more tightly meets the business objectives. This involves governance and defining key organizational objectives and filtering those down into the organization such that the IT is transformed. Quoting Wikipedia: Business/IT alignment is an ongoing process that will optimize the relational mechanisms between the business and IT organization by working on the IT effectiveness of the organization in order to maximise the business value from IT.

Clearly this is a little myopic. More and more organizations rely on IT to perform larger slices of their businesses and many companies are built around IT delivering new products, especially IT-based companies (e.g. Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm). In addition, this concept can be defined more broadly to include other engineering sciences and how they bring value to a company.

Team
A team is loosely defined as a set of people working in an organization separated by a few levels of management from the executive staff. Their objectives are often that of engineering and creative enterprises that indirectly add to the earnings potential of the company.

How do businesses view engineering
Engineering is the lifeblood of most companies shipping products these days and business is beginning to realize that these people are some of the most important people to a company's product-line and long-term growth.

For many engineers in the trenches, they feel saddled with the dogma that IT or Engineering is an expense. Basically, they feel that they exist to suck money out of the company. Few companies would explicitly recognize this fact, but at its basest level, this is the view. This can make engineers feel petty and makes their lives feel futile unless they realize that nearly all employees are viewed in the same light, except perhaps for the CEO and the executive management depending on who you ask. Basically, human capital is an expense and it is generally the most largest part of any company's business expenses.

So, on the topic of alignment, we can already see that an engineer's view of his place in an organization is probably misaligned with that of the leadership team of that organization, the extent to which is defined by that management. There is a lot to be said for companies that respect individuals who pore over tomes of technical specifications attempting to meet some product description or bridge requirement. This leads to better alignment at the onset of a relationship and fosters a mood of "partnership" which we'll discuss in some detail later.

Aligning the goals of the engineers with those of the company can mean that the engineer feels more able to approach management with technical "concerns" helping management to align better with clients. This cycle of communication leads to adjustments to contracts, money changing hands, and better client relationships meaning more future contracts.

Unaligned engineering goals can mean fewer interactions between engineers and management. This often leads to missed deadlines with little or no explanation, products that are poorly designed or don't meet requirements, and broken promises with clients. This nearly always leads to fewer future contracts and less capital.

Incidentally, these concepts apply to a lot more than just engineering.

How engineering views management
This point of view is often fraught with misconceptions. Engineers rarely think of the CEO or the executive staff as idiots, but they often do feel very disconnected with the goals that the executive staff set for the company. Some of the reasons lie with the fact that company execs often view the world in margins and bottom lines while responding to investor concerns. This set of business-related objectives rarely maps well to engineering objectives. In addition, engineering is all about process and planning and what engineers fail to realize is that business is generally all about that too. This leads engineers to believe that they are following more 'noble' principles or at least different ones on a daily basis when in fact, the principles are the same.

In most cases, engineers simply view management as too unconcerned with the engineering concerns to rely on management to help them solve problems. In other words, if managers don't understand, then an engineer often feels too busy to explain it to them. This is part of where misalignment is perpetuated. This is not where misalignment begins however.

Partnership
Making people feel engaged and involved with the decision-making of any company is quite a difficult task. By involving people in multiple discussions, many meetings, and feedback systems allowing them to feedback to management all costs money and does not ship a product any faster.

Let me say this: companies who have put partnership programs in place tend to outperform competitors by large margins. These companies include Apple, Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft just to name a few. Many of these programs aren't great, but their attempts to engage the employees in quality, ideas for improving the business, and money making opportunities all serve to build a sense of partnership. Partnership is one of the many tools for keeping teams aligned and here are a few of those strategies.

• Open team discussions that are brain-storming sessions and everyone must offer something.
• One-on-one discussions every few weeks between team-lead and employee to see what is happening on the shop floor.
• Product improvement incentives.
• Employee rewards programs.

Vision statements
Setting the course for your company is all about providing a "thought framework" allowing people a basis for discussion and a mantra to rally around. Ones that you may have heard are "Quality is job one", "We focus on the customer's needs", and "Why go anywhere else." It also makes clear the company's self view which helps employees align with where they stand within an organization.

A vision statement is the bedrock of a company's beliefs and can be a good set up for planning meetings and other discussions. Having multiple statements is often a bad idea but having one or two company ideals helps keep people aligned with overarching company views and smooths many discussions when employees lose focus on the needs of the company.

In spite of their ability to be trite, many of the motivation posters are positive reinforcement for the expectations that any company has when it comes to setting goals and teamwork. Companies that post a few of these posters around the office in most major rooms build morale and foster collaboration, depending on the posters chosen. Companies should consider which traits that they care to foster and find appropriate posters, mantras, and vision statements to help their teams focus.

Each team should also have a distinct flavor or character from other teams. This may mean another mantra on top of that provided by the company, differently colored jerseys, or even a team name. In any case, most employees fight with the constant personal battle to be part of something larger than themselves, but also to be distinct and team differentiation is one way to make people much more comfortable within an organization.

Engagement
An employee who sees some of his own personal goals as being the same as the company's goals is engaged. This means that the employee has aligned himself to the goals of the company. This is a fairly common occurrence at most companies and certainly worth considering. The majority of employees when starting a new job take a wait and see approach to seeing how the company behaves and whether or not s/he can see himself working there long term. Fostering a sense of engaging the employee and encouraging employee ideas will build better team members, better teams, a better company, and ultimately better products. Not too surprisingly, many engineers find themselves engaged in such a way that they are often thinking about engineering issues outside of work.

The overwhelming majority of employees do not enter into a working contract with any sense of insubordination or malice. Disengagement is one area that breeds feelings of distrust and malice. When employees feel that they are not aligned with the company, even ethically misaligned, the employee can become disengaged and recovery from this mental state is often difficult or even hopeless. If an employee begins to see the company as not serving customer needs, disingenuous in their claims or mantras, dishonest in their dealings, or capricious in their dealings with employees, the employee most often becomes disengaged. These areas fall into a business ethics discussion and are not really part of an alignment strategy, but these kinds of company 'misdeeds' will sabotage any efforts a company may make regarding alignment and "keeping employees on board with the company vision."

Another area that leads to disengagement is fear. Most employees have a certain level of fear built in which usually manifests as respect for superiors and working well with others. Few employees run amok in a company out of this sense, at least at some level. But fear works on even stout minds and eventually creates a fear-engagement. This is a "watch your back" mentality which courses through the company and undermines individuals and entire teams. People lose the ability to create, being too focused on keeping their jobs to do their jobs effectively. The causes of this type of disengagement are corporate bullying, financial losses at the company, the announcement of job cuts, and other factors which affect the welfare of he employee. Often, just seeing a good coworker be fired is enough to disengage the employee.

Defining goals
General goals are easy to define but hard to maintain. Keeping the company's mantra foremost in the employee's minds is never easy and falls along the lines of constant reminding. The basic rule of management is to be prepared to repeat everything you say at least 5 times. With that in mind, there are a few strategies for making sure that the company-wide goals are well understood by all.

Quarterly reviews of employee status is fairly common and this is a great time to repeat the basic company tenets and mantras. This is also a good way to make sure that the employee is attempting to hit that mark and if s/he is aligned with the company goals.

Most business theorists agree that the CEO sets the tone for the company and should speak periodically to remind everyone what the goals of the organization are. These company meetings serve to be a sound board for filtering information down to employees and keeping the company aware of recent developments, recent promotions, cash flow issues, strategies for the company, and the overall goals for the period.

However, an added step that works is to involve employees in these meetings. Home Depot employs this strategy to great effect by a once-monthly meeting called "Breakfast with Bernie". Bernie is one of the founding partners of the company and they utilize a network broadcast to all stores in the company on a Sunday morning. Part of the meeting is dedicated to feeding down status to the entire company. Another part is a Q&A with employees at different stores. A person is chosen from a few stores (usually 2) and a live question is posed to Bernie. This illustrates open lines of communication between upper mgmt and the employee. It also involves the employees creating lines of trust.

Nearly all people know what a goal is. But a goal loosely defined is a goal misinterpreted, particularly in engineering. All engineers are smart individuals, but they cannot know exactly what the intent of management, customers, marketing, and others desire. They will do their best, and they will naturally assume that once they hear the request/requirement as it is handed to them, they understand it. They are usually wrong, of course. The best way to keep everyone working toward the same goals is periodic review and this is where SCRUM can aid us. Keeping clients and engineers talking helps greatly.

Safe to fail
When things don't go well, people can easily fall into the blame game. In fact, this is so common, it is basically an expected human failing. To help keep focused on company goals, discourage the blaming of others for minor mistakes, the harsh criticism of poorly worded emails, and the acrimony that may come from a strangely worded question during a team meeting. We all do these things from time-to-time and while some level of criticism is appropriate, any openly public display of ridicule is likely to shut future doors of communication for all who witness it.

Missed deadlines are a constant source of aggravation for management as they try to mitigate disaster with their clients, yet making this a major source of concern or ridiculing engineers for under estimates will cause them to push away and not offer to do any extra work. Part of being an engineer is dreaming about what can be and making it happen, but engineers often become mired down in the minitue of the integration that they forgot to estimate. Often, effort is underestimated and this is the nature of engineering, but a correct strategy of biweekly deliverables, or partial SCRUM, means that any overages are caught early, that the work is more easily estimated, and that everyone understands what is at stake. This creates alignment upward promoting communication that can easily be managed by team leads, sales staff, and even the executive staff reporting to the board of directors.

Managers who understand the engineering process of requirements capture, architecture, design, implementation, integration, debugging, and maintenance can become a serious partner in the relationship between marketing, executive staff, and engineering. Making a safe-to-fail policy also means not jeopardizing anyone's job due to a missed deadline or failed attempt at a task. Most big gains in the world in engineering come with many failed attempts. This does not mean allowing a bridge to collapse is acceptable, but if early prototypes collapse and computer simulations fail to work, this should be considered part of the process, not the end of an engineer's job.

Flat management structure.
Too many layers: this is the bane of many an engineer. How does s/he communicate with the management staff and feel connected to the goals of the executive staff with so many layers of management? This is a huge problem at most larger companies where at least 3 layers exist between the CEO and the engineer. There are a few strategies for dealing with this issue.

The once a month (or once per quarter) meeting of the CEO to the entire company helps to keep people's minds on the company's goals. Team-related goals that are discussed every few weeks helps to keep employees "on board" with the monthly mention of company goals. The suggestion box can help, but this level of effort is so trivial most people ignore it unless the company is over a certain size.

Letting people approach their boss's boss without question and without retribution is the surest way to guarantee that people can feel that the layers of management are less important to the overall importance of communication within the company. This is a true "open door" policy and allows the sharing of ideas, reevaluation of a review that seems unfair, and even discussions about the communication within the company. Allowing people to leap-frog at least one level of management and encouraging that from time-to-time means that managers are slightly more busy, but that's why they become managers.

Conclusion
There is plenty to say about creating an atmosphere of alignment in your company, but this blog should provide a framework for getting started.

I'll go into fixing your company's broken alignment in my next blog.