When Bill took over the helm of a failing company, he knew that it would take Herculean efforts to save it, let alone turn it into a viable company. These efforts would have to come first from him as the leader, but also from a management team he would have to create – and ultimately from the efforts of its decimated and discouraged workforce of nearly 3000 people. Losses were huge, quality was lousy, customers were leaving and morale was in the pits. He knew his best chance would be to create an aligned organization and motivate it to new heights of performance.

A comment lament among top management in many companies is that they need better “alignment of the organization” around their strategy. Research bears out the severity of this challenge: one study showed that in fully 90% of companies surveyed, their business strategies were not being implemented. Lack of alignment of organizations around those strategies is a major cause of that. This is the challenge that Bill faced.

So, how does a leader like Bill bring about organizational alignment? Before searching for solutions to poor alignment, however, let’s take a look at what organizational alignment is. Alignment means several things, including that everyone is pulling in the same direction and is doing their part to make the whole work. We “know it when we see it” – rather than having people arguing at cross purposes, sabotaging projects and policies, we see people readily jumping in to implement new policies, to make chosen strategies work – and to do it in a collaborative, mutually respective way, all toward a common goal.

How can we foster alignment in our company? Shall we exhort people to work together and be a “team”, and to keep focusing on getting desired results? That’s where many companies focus their attempts to get alignment. Sure, that can be part of the answer, but there’s a lot more to getting alignment than just making these exhortations.

You see, companies that do get organizational alignment take these additional steps:

1. Develop a compelling Mission and Vision statement – and communicate that purpose continually through many different ways to the organization. They also use that purpose in making decisions about strategy, and articulate the connection between the two. That helps excite people as to why the company exists – and to develop a sense of shared purpose. That’s where alignment starts.

2. Create a set of Living Values that lets people know, not just what we’re trying to achieve, but how we will operate – what we will stand for as a company in terms of human behavior and relationships. This creates a culture people can thrive in.

3. Continually help people to see, not just what their Job is, but to show them why it is important, and how it fits into the whole. This way they can begin to explore how they can do that job better – in order to help the whole work better.

4. Call on people to Contribute to the Whole, not just through their prescribed roles “their day jobs” – but also by getting involved in important project teams – and helping others where their expertise can make a positive contribution

5. Measure the most important indicators of success – and take the time a) to understand what’s driving those numbers, b) to come up with ways to improve those numbers (particularly the top management team together), and c) to share with people throughout the organization, in appropriate detail and ways, the numbers and the strategies for improving those results

6. Recognize and reward triumphs. This means taking the time, energy and resources to highlight not only victories but the alignment that powered them. It means providing additional rewards to those involved in major performance breakthroughs.

These six steps are not one time events, so that once we do them, we can forget about them and “get back to work.” Companies with great organizational alignment continually weave these six dimensions into all they do – whether it be strategy decisions, improvement programs, hiring and development, or rewards.

Back to Bill, our CEO seeking to bring about a dramatic corporate turnaround: He built the six steps described above into the fabric of the company, in the process…

– developing a compelling vision for the company that gradually rallied its people, changing their focus from the current financial crisis and imminent doom to one of possibility

– establishing a set of ethical values – actually the whole company helped develop those values – that unite people and draw courage and nobility from the organization

– making one of his primary roles to travel throughout the country meeting with groups of employees to describe the vision, the values – and the direction of the company and to engage them in discussion about – and action to achieve the company’s objectives

– setting up a measurement system to track and use the key measures of the company. One measure, employee morale, shot up from one of the lowest of 500 North American companies (at the start of the turnaround) to one of the highest. The company made similar leaps in other measures, such as quality, customer acquisition and retention – and profit

In short, the company in just three years became an industry leader. And, while outsiders looked at all the traditional kinds of actions that the company took (new products, marketing campaigns, etc), you really have to look deeper to discover how this near-death company pulled off such a feat. Bill, his management team and the people of this company knew the true deeper source of success: they had become a passionate, confidant, highly motivated organization aligned around a powerful vision and set of values. As such, they were unstoppable.