Reflection 6

"Alignment"

Are the oars pulling together? Drucker writes about the concept of alignment: even if we are all working towards the same goal, our work must align to maximize the benefit. We can all be pulling our oars to the best of our ability, but unless we all pull at the same time, we will not go anywhere. Our oars will get tangled, our ship will slow, and our progress will stagnate. On the other hand, pulling together will propel us forward.
[a note: This post assumes that the workers are always acting towards the goals of whatever organization they are part of.]

One place where alignment is salient to both the "workers" and the "manager" is the concert band or orchestra. All individual musicians (the "workers") play their parts as well as they can, but to achieve a cohesive sound, they must follow the directions of the director (the "manager"). No matter how expressively and musically each individual plays his part, each musician must adapt to the style the director wants in order for the group to work. The musicians' efforts must align.

The musicians know this, and they acquiesce to the director's vision rather than trying to assert their own interpretations of the music. The director knows this, and he tries to state his vision clearly so the musicians can follow it. He beats the tempo clearly with his baton. He asks for some musicians to bring out certain passages or explains that their role during as section is to support the melody, so they should play softer. He may ask the group to play more lyrically, or martially, or lightly and playfully. He makes judgment calls about the composer's intentions and steers the group toward making beautiful music. It's not enough for a musician to play beautifully: all must play beautifully together.

Alignment works in this setting because there the manager has constant contact with the workers, and the workers have constant contact with one another. They can all see (or rather hear) their efforts and whether they are aligning. They strive for a balanced, blended sound that can only be achieved when their playing aligns. The musicians constantly expect and receive input from the director (and one another) that helps them achieve this goal.

My aunt works in higher education management, and she says she deals with the issue of alignment every day, albeit on a different scale. Elementary school, secondary school, and higher education: All have students' education as their primary goal; however, the ways they achieve this may not align. This is especially prevalent among forms of higher education: credits may not transfer, what is required in University B may be impossible to find at College A, etc. Even though students' education is vitally important to educational institutions, a student who needs to switch between them may be burdened with repeat courses, or set back an entire year.

One essential difference in this case is the apparent lack of a manager. Although people such as my aunt try to get these institutions to standardize or recognize one another's credit systems (that is, align), there is no true "boss" present. The push to align has to come from the same level of the hierarchy, from within the institutions themselves. I think this points to one thing a manager should attempt to do to foster alignment: foster an awareness of the need for alignment in the workers.

On the other hand, alignment perhaps should not be stated overtly as a goal. Rather, the desired result of the alignment should be the stated goal that managers share with workers(e.g. to play music as a group, or to allow students to easily transfer between institutions). Open communication and motivation towards teamwork should encourage alignment naturally.

If alignment is stated as a goal, it begins to sound a little Dilbert to me: 'We will synergistically leverage our core competences to align paradigms while growing our key market values.' It's sort of like saying that the purpose of a business is to make profit: it doesn't really say anything about what the purpose of the business is. [Incidentally, the concept of alignment is related to one of my favorite business buzzwords, synergy, which occurs when the output of two workers (or processes or whatever) is more than the sum of their individual inputs.]

The engineer in me wants to talk about sinusoids [sine waves]: For a given frequency, in-phase sinusoids will add, slightly out-of-phase sinusoids will add to less, and completely out-of-phase sinusoids will cancel entirely. Sinusoids operating at the same frequency can cancel if they are out of phase; if they align, they add constructively.

The kid in me wants to talk about the Planeteers, who combined their powers of Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, and Heart to form Captain Planet.

The pessimist in me wants to return to the rowing analogy: When we pull together, we go places, but we're all still slaves on a Roman Galley.