Business Leadership 3: Role of Aligning Others to the Business Vision

This continues our series explaining the leadership roles & traits for small-business owners

Once you, as a business owner, establish the clear vision for your business, you need to align everyone to that vision. Many owners think only of aligning their employees. You should also align vendors, suppliers, clients, cross-promoters, and the others in your public. The more people who share your vision the better.

Aligning People Instead of Organizing Staff

I really like how John P. Kotter described it in his article What Leaders Do in the Harvard Business Review “Unless many individuals line up and move together in the same direction, people will tend to fall allover one another. To executives who are overeducated in management and undereducated in leadership, the idea of getting people moving in the same direction appears to be an organizational problem. What leaders need to do, however, is not organize people, but align them” (p7)

Sam Walton, for example, ruthlessly aligned vendors and suppliers to his vision of “The lowest prices Anytime, Anywhere!”. His leadership on this key issue proved crucial to transforming Wal-Mart into his vision.

Aligning is a Communication Challenge

Kotter explains how to align by first comparing it to organizing. Then, he writes “Aligning is different:

• It is more of a communications challenge than a design problem.
• Aligning invariably involves talking to many more individuals than organizing does.
• The target population can involve not only a manager’s subordinates but also bosses, peers, staff, in other parts of the organization, as well as suppliers, government officials, and even customers
• Trying to get people to comprehend a vision of an alternative future is also a communications challenge…
• Alignment helps overcome this problem by empowering people in at least two ways:
  • When a clear sense of direction has been communicated throughout an organization, lower-level employees can initiate actions with the same degree of vulnerability
  • Because everyone is aiming at the same target, the probability is less that one person’s initiative will be stalled when it comes into conflict with someone else’s.”

Tuesday we will continue exploring the role of leadership in small-businesses