Team Alignment and why it’s crucial?

Discover the need to create a self-driven, collective vision-driven culture that’s Essential For Highly Effective Teamwork

In most of our Startup Bootcamp and Business Innovation Workshops, we inevitably discover one among the most important pains iterated by most entrepreneurs have been Lack of time, effort duplicity, and declining team cohesiveness. Most corporate innovation initiatives involving multi-disciplinary approaches involving geographically separate teams, engaged with novel projects/innovation / R&D on top of their existing workload demonstrate a phenomenon which we call “Innovators spasm”.

What initially starts as an opportunity to work on an exciting project quickly devolves into frustration where tons of effort is invested and work seems to be almost completed ends up with poor results and tiny impact. Adding to which the people factors start creeping in slowly, ultimately resulting in the slow death of the initiative and team collapses as well…

But, not all teams experience this…!!!! Right?

Such high-performing teams work on few fundamental aspects that are usually ignored. The best of teams we’ve encountered have used this to their advantage converting challenges to opportunities, constraints to advantages for better planning, better team management, and ultimately a more agile workflow. Building a robust team alignment is often ignored, which is the most crucial aspect in such initiatives.

In this post, Pavan Mujumdar founder & CEO of Mentorific Consulting and practitioner of ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ shares insights from his extensive experience of helping teams of all sizes, shapes, forms that work as one invincible force.

Many of us probably have our share of unpleasant experiences of working in misaligned teams. Such experiences are often characterized by tiny (real) progress and exponentially mounting timeline slippages & pressures, as the team remains stuck in either day-to-day stuff or other operational issues. We’ve been helping teams involved in new assignments involving uncertainty, lack of references, innovation out of imaginations, and here are a number of the key signs symptoms, and consequences of misalignment we’ve witnessed first-hand:

• Lack of Role Clarity: Unclear who does what
• Ensured poor results with minimum or no impact
• Declining team cohesiveness and invisible disintegration
• Inability to prioritize, thanks to un-identified root cause leading to resource duplication and overlap
• Losing early market advantage
• Un-ending Burning of Valuable resources: Time Energy and Money

Unquestionably the result of misalignment will be a poor EFFORT / IMPACT ratio. Tons of investment will go down the drain and in cases of Startups, Small and Medium-sized businesses NGOs, and academic institutions the price (intangible loss) paid are beyond estimates and the initiative typically reaches a state of extinction or completely drained motivation with no happy faces. Such an outcome is often seen as the team’s inability and investments are further beefed up in terms of resources training & skill upgrading etc… which can further the damage and badly impacts motivation. The initial excitement now becomes an unmanageable mammoth!!

Slowly, once an ambitious project will transform into tragedy!!

While the cause for such a failure mostly isn’t because people were incompetent or due to acute resource crunch… it had been just because the alignment was missing!!!

Anything a team achieves, from celebrating to putting together a space station is undoubtedly an outcome of getting a collectively created & owned vision (Common ground) with crystal clear roles each play, seamless communication, and coordination.

To align -or communicate effectively- means to make and maintain sufficient alignment and energizing vision or collective goal.

Collective vision a.k.a Common Grounds

All know something, and also know that all the others know. (De Freitas and al., 2019)

• A knows X
• B knows X
• A and B know that they both know X

Collective Vision is an important enabler of team success. When team members share enough common ground, people can predict, complement one another’s actions successfully and contribute positively to the shared vision. They assume individual ownership, make individual decisions holding the same information also taking into account the contributions of the others aligned and the team operates more harmoniously.

On the other hand, you can expect only poor results from a team with a low common ground. Members of the team run into unavoidable execution problems due to perception & assumption gaps. The lack of shared information makes participants wrongly predict each other’s actions and the collaboration goes off track.

• Tools to Achieve High-Performance Teamwork.
• Business Innovation Tools

for Startup | SMEs | NGOs teams by Mentorific Consulting presents two alignment tools specifically designed to boost the success rate of mission-critical initiatives by helping you establish a platform for invincible teams, ventures, and initiatives. Business Innovation Toolkit involves tools, methodologies, and approaches powered by:

· Appreciative Inquiry

· Neuroscience & Psychology

· Design Thinking

· Mind Mapping

· Vision boarding

Putting practical tools into the hands of every stakeholder around Entrepreneurship!!!

Mentorific Consulting was founded in 2018 with a single mission: to be the most successful, creative, and ground-breaking consulting agency for Startups | Small & Medium businesses | Academic Institutions, and NGOs by Putting practical tools into the hands of every stakeholder around Entrepreneurship!!!

Mentorific Consulting is a Trusted Partner for Advisory, Consultancy, and Workshops fostering Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Growth, Strategy.

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