Team Alignment
One of your relationships with your team members is leader, and the other is often people manager. Whether you are managing directors, managers, or ICs it is important to consider an intentional strategy for people management to help your team succeed.
How are you managing your team for high performance? What is your people management strategy?
Managing your team for high performance is about the actions you take as a manager to:
1. Communicate for alignment
2. Collaborate on buy-in
3. Train or coach for development
What is alignment?
Alignment is the sometimes illusive, idealistic, or fantastical notion that you and your team members are clear and consistent on the what, how, and why you are doing things in work.
How can you achieve it?
No team is in perfect alignment. At best, as leaders, we are trying to see how much misalignment we can manage while continuing to progress toward our goals.
Alignment requires weekly (maybe daily) actions you take as a leader.
So what can you do?
1. Accept that perfect alignment does not exist.
2. Practice asking more alignment questions to identify gaps.
3. Make commitments to weekly intentional practices toward team alignment.
This could look like:
Weekly standups
Creating and monitoring SOPs and SLAs
Data and goal reviews
Retrospectives and pre-retrospectives
Questions in one-on-ones
Engagement surveys
And more!
As a leader, you likely have the foundational tools, resources, and processes to enhance team alignment. The challenge can be customizing or optimizing these tools within your unique leadership strategy.
Resources to Enhance Team Alignment
Does team alignment feel like this video from Abbott and Costello?
Are you ready to prioritize team alignment? Watch here for tips on how.
Read more about four key focuses to enhance team alignment.
The most important tool to enhance team alignment is communicating around clear expectations. Read more here.
To confirm alignment enhance more intentional reporting. Start by identifying the various lead and lag measures that will tell you if the work is successful.
About Talent Praxis
Praxis is bridging the gap between theory and action.
We help companies and leaders practice proven academic management theories in the workplace to build results-driven teams.
Management and leadership are not skills you learn once but rather ongoing practices to achieve results.
Talent Praxis offers one-on-one leadership coaching, training in people management, and consulting in performance management to help leaders and companies develop their own strategic praxis.
Ready to learn more?
