Organizational Alignment

It is a crucial, though often unlooked aspect of organizational success, which is why two of the five steps helping nonprofits grow on our website are related:

"Mission: Congruent with founding core beliefs.
Strategic Plan: Aligned with mission and guiding principles; reviewed regularly."

This article from Governing examines administrative/strategy alignment.

An excerpt.

“Are your administrative systems aligned with your strategy?

“Take this little test:

• Do you tell your people to look for ways to save money, while your budget system takes away any unspent money at the end of the year and reduces the base budget the following year?
• Are you trying to discourage empire building, turf and bloated staffing patterns while your job classification system awards more points based on the number of people supervised?
• When purchasing services, do you encourage your people to get the best value (results for the dollar) possible while your procurement and contracting systems pay for units of service (such as consulting hours) and not for results achieved?
• Do you tell your people that results are important while 95 percent of your organization's accounting system measures inputs, like full-time equivalents, space or travel, and its ability to measure results is minimal?

“Each "yes" answer highlights an administrative system contradicting your stated strategy. Believe me, the administrative systems win every time.

“Consider the entrepreneurial big city mayor who is passionate about innovation and encourages his department heads to take risks. He is constantly exhorting his people to try new things. His systems send a different message, however. His own office is filled with good people whose job it is to make sure that no one screws up. His budget office asks a million questions about anything new while blindly approving existing activities. And his organizational measurement systems reward how inputs are used, not what results are achieved.

“Moving Toward Alignment

“One way to tackle this problem is to completely redesign your administrative systems so that they are well aligned with your strategy. This is particularly important if your organization is spending millions on so-called enterprise resource planning information systems. Too many organizations are investing ERP dollars in automating misaligned systems -- paving over the cow paths.”