When we think about organizational alignment, it’s easy to focus on grand strategies and sweeping visions. But often, it’s the small, seemingly insignificant barriers hidden in our daily operations that quietly derail our progress.
These inefficiencies and misalignments might not make headlines, but they have a ripple effect that slows teams down, frustrates employees and clients, and stifles growth.
The good news? These barriers are some of the easiest to address. Once you know where to look. In this post, we’ll uncover common operational misalignments and share quick, actionable tips to help your teams work better together.
Bonus: Since last week's blog was so long, this one is short and sweet!
The Problem
Alignment isn’t just a buzzword to make us feel good. And it's not just about big-picture strategy either. It’s about how teams work together every day, with each other and with your clients. Even the smallest inefficiencies can create ripple effects, such as:
Unnecessary Hoops: Long forms, multiple steps, approval processes and audits. All of these are barriers that slow down your progress. And they can also frustrate your workers and your clients.
Siloed Communication: Teams keeping information to themselves instead of sharing broadly. This can be intentional, with people wanting to protect their secret methods thinking it helps with their job security. It can also be unintentional, with people not knowing that it would be helpful to share intel with another team.
Misaligned Metrics: KPIs that pit departments against one another instead of uniting them. Like a marketing KPI around number of leads generated that ignores the quality of the lead - you know, the leads that sales would be more likely to close. The sales team can lose trust in marketing if they think they're generating junk just to fulfill a quota.
Information Under or Overload: I've seen both a scarcity of information and too much transparency, both are equally as harmful. If you don't share enough with your workers, they will write their own stories and they never jump to good conclusions, you'll have them thinking management is hiding something. If you are completely transparent with them, you might give them information they are equipped to process.
Lack of Empathy: Lack of empathy for workers, lack of empathy for other teams. This shows up in many ways. Accusing tone when something goes wrong, unattainable goals, guilt trips when people take time off. Lack of empathy erodes trust and without trust you can't have alignment.
Lack of Clarity: You have a vision for what the future of your company looks like - have you shared it? Do people know their part and how/why their work matters? If your leaders and your workers don't understand the strategic vision, how can they possibly align their work with it?
These barriers may seem minor, but they often result in frustration, missed opportunities, and slower growth.
Quick Wins to Remove Hidden Barriers
Here’s how to identify and fix these small-but-impactful misalignments:
Simplify Processes: Audit workflows. Are there redundant steps, unnecessary approvals, or outdated systems? Shortening a sales form, automating a simple task, empowering a worker or client. There are probably little things you can to to save time and energy, which still work within your safety frameworks.
Create a Unified Source of Truth: Miscommunication thrives when teams operate in silos. Use tools that centralize information, like shared dashboards or weekly cross-functional updates.
Align KPIs Across Teams: Go back to those marketing goals, for example. Maybe instead of number of leads generated, sales and marketing agree on what defines a qualified lead, and build the metric around that.
Rethink Meeting Culture: Fewer, shorter, and clearer meetings. I am a fan of sending materials to be reviewed in advance, with a clear objective for what the meeting is supposed to accomplish. And ensure that any follow-up work is clearly assigned to a responsible party with a due date. If your workers are spending time that could be spent client-facing, the work needs to be intentional and purposeful.
Practice Thoughtful Transparency: Give your leaders and workers the information they need to know to add purpose and clarity to their work - to understand the big picture and their part in it. Before you share something, make sure it pertains to the work and that the person or team has the training and expertise to understand it.
Involve Your Workers: Next time you're tempted to implement a new tool, ask your workers where they have challenges and solicit feedback on where they could use assistance.
Culture of Learning: Foster a culture of learning, not just reading or taking courses - turn every failure into a learning opportunity. Start with yourself, admit when you made a mistake and follow-up with the lesson your learned. Make people feel safe.
Even the smallest barriers can have a big impact on alignment. It's often the small things that erode trust over time, and not one big event. When teams work from the same playbook, whether that’s simplifying a process, aligning metrics, or improving communication, everyone wins.
And everyone wants to be part of a winning team. Going to put this reminder here again:
Small changes lead to big wins. When your teams feel empowered and aligned, trust grows, progress accelerates, and your organization thrives.
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Rise of Us is a practice run by Summer Poletti, specializing in revenue growth: sales, strategic partnerships, customer success, marketing alignment. We generally work with financial services and SaaS companies from $3MM - $10MM ARR and help them plan and execute for their next stage of revenue growth. We concentrate on strategy, coaching, and organizational alignment.
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