Testing the alignment of teams

When a business grows beyond a single person the objective is leverage - you can do more with multiple people than you can on your own. But leverage only applies when the team is aligned. If the team are not, then you have team members all doing different things - and then you are left wondering why things are not happening the way you want.

Questions

The following questions help work out what assumptions team members have - and if their assumptions align:

1. How does what you do lead to customer value?

For small teams each member will have a different answer to this (sales, product etc). For larger teams with team leads - all the team members within a team should have the same answer. If you have team members who do not know the answer to this question it means they can only optimise what is already there - and cannot generate ideas that will power tomorrows innovations.

2. How do you decide what is important?

This question is key and it does not matter the size of the team. People do what they think is the most important - and this needs to be aligned. Everyone on the team should give the same answer to this.

3. List 3 activities that you do that cause us to win with our customers

This is the strategy question - the how of strategy. By creating a list the team tell you about how they go about their work. Your customers will value certain things about your product and services, and how the team work should reinforce this. Do you customers value speed? Quality? Customer service? Everyone on the team needs to know so they constantly add fuel to the strategy with all their work.