Aligning leadership and action
Part of the work that we do at the Big Picture People is to help organisations to align their people around their vision, their mission, their goals and their values. But often we find that alignment has multiple meanings. It’s a term that gets misused, it gets misunderstood. We find that leaders sometimes think alignment is one thing, it’s everybody pointing in the same direction, which is certainly a part of alignment, but it’s much deeper than that. It goes down to an individual level with how aligned I am to the organisation. It’s alignment within my team as to whether we’re all pulling in the same direction with a shared common goal and its alignment across the whole organisation as to how we’re focused on delivering the outcome for our customers or our service users.
In this podcast episode we explore the concept of alignment and what it actually means. There are different levels of alignment, or different areas of alignment, that we need to be thinking about as internal communicators and employee engagers. This will help us to understand what we need to be doing to create this multiple level of alignment and ultimately to understand how that alignment then fits to the external market. Whether we’re in a commercial organisation with customers paying, or whether we’re in a service organisation, the market is a term that we can use to understand the people who are our end users, the people who we serve and how their needs affect that alignment within our organisation. So in this episode we’re going to be exploring the concept of alignment.
And to do that, we reached out to an expert who’s written a book. The book is called “Alignment” and it’s all about how we can understand what that alignment looks like and how we can improve alignment within our organisation to ensure that we are delivering on our promise and we are delivering our shared objectives towards our vision.
Guest profile
Jonathon Hensley is CEO of EMERGE, a digital product agency, where he works with clients to transform business strategies, user needs and new technologies, into valuable products and services. An accomplished writer and speaker, Jonathon has lectured on topics such as ‘The connected consumer’s impact on business’, ’Creating value through data-driven experiences’, and ‘User-centric approaches to innovation’. Jonathon recently authored “Alignment”, a book about overcoming internal sabotage.
Useful links
Related episode of the Engaging Internal Comms podcast: https://thebigpicturepeople.co.uk/blog/podcast/helping-leaders-to-walk-the-talk-s3-e4/
Jonathon’s LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathonhensley/
Jonathon’s websites: https://www.productalignment.com and www.emergeinteractive.com
Jonathon’s book link: https://amzn.to/3OtL4XK
Jonathon’s empathy mapping guide: https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/product-strategy/detail/customer-experience-empathy-map-how-to/