The Three Places Misalignment Shows Up

This post is part 2 of 3 of the blog series: Map vs. Territory. If you haven’t read the first post, Why Organizational Alignment Matters, go and do that now.

Once you accept that a gap between map and territory is normal, the next question is where to look for it. In my experience, misalignment tends to hide in three places, structure, communication, and systems.

• Structure: who holds authority versus who the org chart says holds it
• Communication: what gets said in meetings versus what people believe and repeat privately
• Systems, Products & Programs: what gets funded and rewarded versus what the strategic plan claims matters most

Structure. The org chart says decisions run through a certain chain. The territory often shows something else. There are unofficial gatekeepers and managers at every organization. There is an employee everyone routes around policy to reach or a team that reports to one manager on paper but takes direction from another. Or perhaps you have a few people who sit in your org with titles that carry far less weight in the room than the chart implies. When the same name keeps coming up as the one who can get things approved, no matter what the chart says, that is a structural gap.

Communication. A strategic plan can say the company values transparency and accountability, and every department and employee can read that differently in practice. One department treats it as an invitation to share bad news early while another treats it as a reason to keep problems quiet until they are solved. Watch for information traveling faster through side channels and hallways instead of official procedures. This can be devastating for organizations if not corrected.

More than once I’ve encountered a team who kept a reporting problem from the sales department until a few minutes before the client pitch! Those pitches went as well as you might expect. If you don’t believe things like this are happening, go ahead and send an email asking team leads who attended a cross-team meeting what was decided and what agreements were made. Send me an email with your results!

You can read more about how agreement is not alignment in Harvard Business Review  here: The False Alignment Trap

Systems, Products & Programs. This is where money and time tell the real story. A plan can name innovation as the top priority while the budget, the project list, and the performance reviews all reward cost control instead. The gap shows up when you compare where the calendar and the budget go against what the strategy document says should come first. I see this all the time in nonprofit, especially now when so many of them are reinventing their revenue models at the very same time they have to tighten their belts.

Each of these gaps carries its own kind of fix, some as light as a conversation, some worth outside support. The next post covers how to diagnose which kind of gap you are looking at, and what to do about it first.