Remove barriers for your team by listening to and influencing other leaders to achieve alignment.
You have the right structure in place. You have the expertise you need. The team understands the needs, goals, outcomes, and capabilities required and how progress will be measured. Clear guardrails have been set. Each team member has objectives and understands how they fit into the bigger picture. The work should proceed easily from start to finish. Yet, somehow, it doesn’t. It starts with a sputter rather than a burst. Decision velocity is slow. The team is churning and complaining about someone who is in the way, creating roadblocks or generally making it difficult for work to progress. The person isn’t providing the support required or standing behind team decisions. Why is this person not aligned with you and the team?
Most often people have positive intentions, and when not aligned are coming from a place of concern because certain questions have not, yet, been fully answered for them. Perhaps the “phone game” is at play where one person says something, it is heard and passed along by another person who alters the message just a bit, and the next person repeats it, altering it a bit more, and so on until the current message looks nothing like the original. And the misaligned person is somewhere deep in the chain. Miscommunication is a primary reason for unintended misalignment. People working from different sets of information can find themselves faced with this kind of interference. Sharing information in direct conversations usually resolves the problem.
Purposeful misalignment, where someone either assertively or passively aggressively slows work is a bigger inhibitor, often caused by one of the following:
- the person thinks what needs to be done is different than what is being done
- the person thinks how it should be done is different than how it is being done or
- the person feels he has not been heard.
For the first two, notice the relationship to agreement. The person may not agree with the what or the how. Alignment and agreement are not the same, however. Leaders frequently must align on decisions and approaches even if they don’t agree with every aspect of them. It becomes a question of whether the strategy and goals can be achieved even if everything isn’t done exactly as each of us would do it? Good leaders separate the need to agree from the need to align, recognizing there are multiple ways to achieve a goal and providing the support the team needs to do so.
Note, also, the use of the word “feels.” Remember, human beings are emotional creatures and when we feel wronged, slighted, or ignored, it affects our behavior. The unaligned person’s behavior is a way of forcing others to take note and respond to his ideas. It is a highly ineffective approach to making people listen to him.
While there are certainly some for whom it is most important to be right, I have found people generally want to be listened to more than to be right. Listening is the key to creating alignment. Listening to understand whether a person’s concerns are about the what or the how will allow you to address his points more effectively and gain durable alignment.
As an example, I once worked with a leader who was not particularly technology savvy. But he had high interest and was open to learning. As a senior leader who held the purse strings for work in his area, he had the authority to positively or negatively impact the flow or work depending on the direction he set within his team. He had a habit of participating in meetings, aligning with others on goals and approaches and then pulling back after he had more time to think and identified additional questions. Further, he would pose those questions to his direct team members (non-technology associates) who would get him the answers. But the answers were “filtered” through the lenses of non-technologists and not always restated accurately. The team struggled to provide him what he needed to truly align and stay aligned. They often tried to help him understand how a new solution would improve our current position. Most often, though, he was asking what the solutions were and whether we could achieve the desired benefits without going as far as the team was planning.
I asked team members to change their approach with him. I asked them first to listen for whether he was asking a what or a how question and to address each question appropriately. Second, follow up and confirm they heard the question appropriately and repeat back what was most important to address from the conversation. Third, provide options and not just an answer. And all through the conversation, make sure everyone was working from the same information set. While not always easy, conversations improved and the team was able to achieve alignment faster, positively impacting the flow of work. He was not being purposefully belligerent. Nor was he being passive aggressive. He was trying to learn so he knew the solutions would meet the need, although some of his tactics could have been better.
Listening to one another creates openings for understanding which creates opportunities for alignment. When seeking alignment, it is important to understand each person’s motivation. When you recognize whether a person’s interest is primarily in what should be done or in how it should be done, you can address concerns more accurately. Be sure to listen to the words people use and seek to understand why they say what they say vs. simply hearing them. Hearing is a passive activity, listening is an active one.
While listening is required to achieve alignment, that alone is not enough. Influence is the second essential ingredient. Ultimately, creating alignment is about moving people’s beliefs about the why, the what, and the how closer to your view while being willing to shift your beliefs closer toward their views where appropriate, and influence is required to do so.
Think of people you know who are influential. What makes them this way? Why do you think they are able to influence others? Is it that the person speaks forcefully? Is it that the person is extremely knowledgeable? Is it that the person is likeable? Does the person bring a strong vision for the future? Or maybe the person’s influence stems purely from positional power? There are many reasons someone may be viewed as influential and many combinations of reasons that dictate how influential someone is. At the most basic level, influencing others requires three things: expertise in a topic, vision for the future, and strong communication skills.
First, expertise. It is impossible to influence others when you have no knowledge of a topic. It is difficult to influence when you have only a rudimentary understanding of the topic. It is easy to influence when you are an expert.
Second, vision. A leader who can leverage her expertise to speak clearly about the future and not just current day can create a bridge from today to tomorrow others can understand, follow, and be motivated by, thus improving the leader’s influence.
Third, strong communication skills. It doesn’t matter how deep a leader’s knowledge is or how wonderful the vision is if no one can understand what the person is saying.
The good news is these three characteristics are all within our control. We can work hard to become experts in our field. We can consider possibilities the future holds and can break through boundaries to that future (what would have to be true?). And we can practice our communication skills. It takes time and effort to become influential, but each of us can become more influential tomorrow than we happen to be today.
Ensuring alignment with other leaders is a gift your team will thank you for again and again. It shows you understand how their days can become clogged responding to a never-ending stream of requests for agreement or clarification and you are willing to resolve difficult issues inhibiting their progress.
Share your thoughts below.
Do you agree listening and influence are the keys to driving alignment or is there something different you focus on?
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