The concept of alignment (or ‘unitarism’ to use academic jargon) has long been the mainstay of how we think about the ideal state of any organisation. So, the logic goes, the stronger the degree of alignment between an employer and its employees, in terms of shared interests, values and behaviour, the better performing the organisation will be, all other things being equal. When highly aligned, employees work harder, demonstrate greater loyalty, and behave in a way consistent with the organisation’s strategic priorities. In poorly aligned organisations, on the other hand, energy-sapping conflict (or misalignment) creates the potential for value-destroying employee behaviour, poor execution and inefficiency. Alignment as a strategic priority should propel human resource management to the forefront of organisational strategising, effectiveness and performance.
In reality, alignment in the hierarchical and bureaucratically organised past was secured through command-and-control structures principally, and ‘unity’ was synonymous with employee uniformity. Standard terms and conditions, generic skills, and one-size-fits-all policies were common practices to maximise employee compliance and minimise conflict in industrially organised companies. Relatively simple to manage (but not to say easy), alignment was essentially one-dimensional in Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy of the early twentieth century. Today’s organisations – especially in the emerging post-pandemic business environment – are considerably more complex, as is the make-up of their workforces. They need to be multi-dimensional, which poses unique challenges for the management of people and their alignment to the common purpose of the enterprise.
For example, individualisation (and even personalisation) of the employment relationship has made aligning an organisation’s people vastly more complicated than it once was. It is more and more a relational exercise as much as it is a structural one. Moreover, individualism has created the potential for increased workforce diversity and ‘openness’ in terms of background, perspective, personality, and skill-set. These are necessary for organisations to match the ‘requisite variety’ of their increasingly complex and dynamic customer and competitor environments. And yet, individualism alone cannot deliver results when organisational performance also demands increased horizontal connectivity and collaboration between individuals, teams, functions, business units and geographies. But increased individualisation makes developing a collective identity and set of shared values – culture in other words – all the more difficult. Both Individualism and collectivism are essential to company performance in today’s business environment but they don’t make for easy bedfellows.
The challenge for enterprise leaders – including human resources professionals – is, therefore:
- How to achieve a workforce that is as diverse (in terms of background, knowledge, and perspective) as possible and as unified (in terms of ways of working, priorities, values and mindset) as possible?
- How to foster positive individualism for the sake of enhanced diversity and flexibility, whilst also developing collaborative (i.e., collective) to support integration, synergies, and shared values?
- How to manage employees at scale and ensure good governance, whilst also affording much more flexibility of space (where people work) and time (when people work)?
- How to prevent atomisation and organisational disintegration when employees are physically separated as the norm?
- How to become distinctively capable as an organisation, whilst relying more and more upon external resources within the wider enterprise ecosystem, including the valuable talent of partnering organisations, contractors and highly capable ‘gig’ talent.
These are some of the crucial 21st-century challenges facing today’s leaders as they seek to build back better. This article seeks to raise awareness of these issues, provoke reflection and provide insights and tips to help people leaders to navigate their organisation to a better aligned and better performing future state.
Dr Jonathan Trevor is the author of Re:Align: A Leadership Blueprint for Overcoming Disruption and Improving Performance (published by Bloomsbury Business, 9th June 2022).
