Over the years I’ve been involved in dozens of meetings, workshops and conference calls aimed at trying to achieve “alignment” between groups in a company. Piles of books have been written, conference sessions presented, seminars held at airport hotels, all aimed at helping companies get aligned.

Generally what this means is trying to get two or more groups that are dependent on each other to all pull in the same direction. When I was running development teams, it was often between sales and product development. Later it was sales and marketing alignment. Like a meditation practitioner seeking enlightenment, alignment is often spoken about as if it were some higher state of consciousness where multiple groups within an organisation move together in harmony like a school of fish avoiding predators.

Great goal, but in many places the lasting change that comes from these efforts doesn’t really go beyond weekly alignment meetings, where heads of different groups are subjected to endless status updates, colour-coded spreadsheets that nobody reads, and more ammunition for buzzword bingo than you could ever want. Tick that box, we’re holding the meetings, we’re getting Aligned, right?

Over this time, I’ve come to the conclusion that most people miss the key requirement for alignment between any two groups in a company. Further most of the meetings, reports and other forms of water torture are useful, but nowhere near as important, provided you get this one key thing sorted out.

What is it?

Compensation.

Most people in a company have some amount of the salary that is paid based on achievement of certain goals. Problem is, those goals often vary wildly across the company. Marketing may have goals around press impressions, leads generated, or other metrics. Sales is usually based around revenue generated. Development could be around hitting deadlines.

All of these things are worthy goals, and they are all typically related to the goals of the company. Looking at each of them you can pretty easily mount a case for why achieving them would help the company.

There lies the problem. The fact that they are all slightly different from each other gives massive scope for issues between groups, yet on the surface they all seem like good things.

My position has been for awhile that a company needs to decide what their key goal is. What single thing they would want to have everyone aimed at. If you’re a non-profit. it may be different, but for many companies it may be some measure of revenue or profitability. Sometimes there might be a couple of measures, but it needs to be kept to a minimum. If you’ve got more than two I’d say you need to go back and look hard to see if some of them are not actually off-shoots of one of the primary measures.

Actually, this is generally not hard. Usually someone else, say the board or the owners, is dictating what the most important things are that you will be measured on. Once you know this, then everybody who needs to be “aligned” should have their variable pay held against these measures. Everybody.

Of course, the actual target may change from person to person and from groups to groups. Let’s say our measure is revenue. Different product groups may be held to revenue for their products. Different people in marketing may be measured against the revenue for the products or services they are responsible for. A sales person may be paid against revenue for a particular geographic territory or vertical. However, at the end of the day, it’s all about the key goal. Revenue in this case.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have other performance measures in different groups, but the ones that your pay is attached to should be consistent across the whole company. You need to make sure it is clear how these other measures promote the achievement of the key goal. If the goal is profit, someone in a services group needs to understand that a utilization measure is important, but only because it directly impacts the profitability of the company. ie. their costs are mostly fixed, but the higher the utilization the more revenue against that fixed cost.

Sadly, this usually doesn’t happen because it is felt that a goal like this is too far removed from a single person’s activities. That there are too many other people and groups involved that will impact the result, and that it’s somehow not fair to make part of my pay dependent on someone else doing their job properly.

For example, targeting developers on revenue derived from their products is very often controversial. While I agree there are many people involved in successfully selling software, I’d suggest that nothing influences sales more than the quality and capabilities of the product. Get that wrong and you will have a hard (but not impossible) job selling the product. However, nothing will influence sales more positively than getting these things right.

Ultimately, saying this is not fair because there are too many dependencies on other people is both tragic and ironic, because put another way, what this is really saying is that this is not fair because it requires alignment between everybody in the company.

Give the man a cigar, that’s exactly the point. It not only requires alignment, it fosters it. Where I’ve seen this done, alignment follows amazingly quickly. Make everybody feel the pain when we miss the goals, and let everybody get the reward when we hit the goals, and you can do away with many of the other pieces we currently put in place to get aligned. You still need to enable the different groups to communicate and collaborate, but the common motivation and common goal is now in place, so generally it becomes a task of guiding the interaction, not driving it.

Unfortunately, it seems too big a change for many companies to swallow. It’s much easier to schedule some alignment con-calls, review the amber status items and move on, telling yourself you’re aligned.