Organizational Conflict & Alignment

They are surely connected and without resolving one the other cannot be achieved, as this article from Harvard Business Review addresses.

An excerpt.

"If [fill in the person] thinks I've bought in, they're crazy."

"Even if [fill in the group] doesn't believe in our current vision, they'll believe when they see it."

"I don't think [fill in the project] even matters to our customers."

“These are not the kinds of comments any of us utter if we know "the boss" could hear them. But each of us can likely remember a time in our career where we said it, or heard it. It's tempting to think that people who aren't on board will eventually "self-select out of the organization" or, if you're the boss, you'll never have to be that hard-ass who says, "Sorry, but this is just how it is."

“Most of us generally avoid conflict. After all, who can remember getting a performance review saying, "You rock at conflict!" Instead, we reward getting along, and being good corporate citizens, and we hope that disagreements will resolve themselves. But as we've all learned in real life, hope is not a strategy. Because most of us are bad at dealing with conflict, we're also bad at fostering what must, in a successful business, come through conflict — whether overt or covert. And that's alignment.

“Alignment is among the contenders for the most overused word in business today. Why is that? It's not very sexy. Out of curiosity, I ran it through a search engine and what did I get? Wait for it... wheel alignment.

“Ooh, yeah. Sexy.

“But wheel alignment is actually an apt metaphor for organizational alignment. In a nutshell, wheel alignment is a matter of adjusting the angles of the wheels so that they are perpendicular to the ground and parallel to each other. The purpose of these adjustments is maximum tire life and a vehicle that tracks true when driving along a straight and level road. When a car is out of alignment, we get rapid tire wear, or a vehicle that pulls away from a straight line. The driver wastes time and resources fighting to keep the car on course. A shock to the system — hitting a pothole, say — can throw a car that's well-aligned out of alignment.”