For today's strategy and operations leaders at high growth companies, more emphasis has been placed on driving company alignment than ever before. And it makes sense. For most high growth companies, speed, dynamism, and effective decision making can be the competitive advantage needed to become the market leader in an industry you're trying to disrupt or create. 

When you consider the pace in which high growth companies need to operate, the question of 'Why is strategic alignment important?' answers itself. Company alignment is the key, not only for going fast, but going far. 

That is why today's strategy and operations leaders play a pivotal role in unlocking the growth potential for their company. Strategy and operations leaders at high growth companies are tasked with solving the challenge of organizational misalignment, while at the same time creating a team alignment model that can often serve as a growth catalyst for the business. 

Here at Elate, we have the opportunity to work with the strategy and operations leaders at the leading high growth companies of today. From countless hours spent in feedback sessions and learnings from hundreds of strategy and operations leaders, including the Chief of Staff, COO, CFO, and other strategy and operations positions, we wanted to share some of the best lessons we've learned along the way about company alignment and the impact it can have on your business. 

What Is Strategic Alignment? 

Let's begin by tackling the question of 'What is Strategy Alignment?' For many leaders, company alignment or strategic alignment might serve as nothing more than a buzzword or phrase being thrown out when someone drops the ball on a big project or a deadline that’s been missed. The reality is that true strategic alignment is much deeper than that. Usually organizational misalignment is a much deeper problem than just a simple project being off track or a goal missed. 

To understand strategic alignment, we have to first look at the overall vision for the company. If you are searching for organizational alignment best practices or types of strategic alignment, you will likely be bombarded with org charts, business alignment diagrams, and a plethora of graphs designed to create synergy or alignment. This is a warning to all those swimming in diagrams: get out of the pool! 

True company alignment starts with first setting and cascading a company vision and mission. By beginning your strategic alignment with the company vision and mission, you ensure your team understands 'what' you are building as a company and more importantly 'why' you are building it. 

At Elate, we believe that company alignment is connecting the long-term vision for the company with tactical execution. It is ensuring that everyone, from leadership down to every employee across each layer of the business understands what we are building towards. If every team member at the company can't answer the question of 'what is our mission and vision?', then we likely have skipped over the most important part of creating strategic alignment. 

So if you are asking yourself, 'what is business alignment?' Start by looking at every team member, and how you and your leadership team have communicated the overall company vision and mission to employees. 

Strategic Alignment Model 

In understanding what strategic alignment is and how it can impact your company, strategy and operations leaders must now find the strategic alignment model that works best for their company. 

Over the past several years there have been a number of goal-setting frameworks gaining momentum in helping companies communicate and execute their company's strategic plan and direction. From OKRs and EOS to 4DX and V2MOM, we get to work with a number of different goal-setting frameworks across today's leading businesses. 

After spending time with leaders using these different strategic alignment framework, the one thing we can say with confidence is that it isn't one size fits all. Each of the different goal-setting frameworks can help provide a successful organizational alignment framework. 

However, what we would encourage any company to do with a framework is be willing to modify it to your business needs. As you will learn from researching any successful implementation of a goal-setting framework such as OKRs, EOS, or 4DX, the companies that have successfully implemented the framework have been willing to modify the strategic alignment model to meet their culture and business. 

When you are searching for types of business alignment don't get hung up in trying to implement the framework to fit someone else's business. Focus on how OKRs or EOS works for your business, and be willing to evolve the framework as you continue to grow. 

Business Alignment Examples 

At Elate, we believe that successful alignment starts with Strategic Planning, and the process of connecting a long-term vision with tactical execution. Further, Strategic Planning should be taking place quarterly and annually for your company, which means you have a regular checkpoint for ensuring your company is aligned.  

Strategic Planning done well can help accomplish three things: 

- Connects the long-term vision of the company with tactical execution

- Creates clarity on where the company is going, and how they will get there 

- Provides an operating framework for how the company sets, plans, reviews, and takes action on the priorities moving the business forward 

With this in mind, we can shift to a few business alignment examples that help bring your strategic plan to life. But keep in mind, this isn't a simple strategic alignment model PDF. Rather, your Strategic Planning should be a dynamic, intuitive process that can be rolled out to the entire company. 

When you begin the process of building strategic alignment model examples, one pro tip we’ve seen that helps keep this process manageable: Keep it simple. Keep it clear. 

For many companies, examples of short- and long-term goals for a business tend to be focused on a few key areas: 

- Reaching revenue milestones 

- Delighting Customers

- Building new products 

- Creating an amazing culture 

Each of these corporate objectives examples can be a great starting point. Frankly, bringing on new customers, delighting existing ones, delivering incredible products, and doing all this with an amazing culture are company goals and objectives examples most companies would strive to achieve. 

But the key in any of these examples is also aligning the objective with the 'why' behind it. As an example: 

'Build the industry-leading Planning Feature to help companies Propose, Review, and Finalize Company Objectives to bring together the entire Strategic Planning process.' 

For this business alignment example, we know what we are building, why we are building it, and if done well, we should have key performance indicators that determine success across every team. 

Setting company objectives should be simple, streamlined, and focused on the big priorities that all your department, team, and individual objectives should connect with. If your company objective is revenue driven try, something like: 

'Reach $75M in ARR on our way towards becoming a $5B Strategic Planning platform, powering the growth of 20,000+ businesses.'

Again, a specific goal for this year, connects the organizational alignment example with the long-term vision. 

These are just some of the examples of how setting Company Objectives examples can help create strategic alignment across your business. 

Business Alignment Model Software 

When it comes to putting your Strategic Plan and business alignment model into place, we recommend ensuring your team has all three parts of the equation: People, Process, and Tools. 

Without the people and process, any business alignment model software will fail. Similarly, without the proper software to drive strategic goal alignment, your company alignment will falter. 

So when it comes to answering the question of 'why is organizational alignment important?' and 'How do I create alignment from leadership to employees?', we'd like to introduce you to the solution built for today's strategy and operations leaders. 

Meet Elate.

Elate is the leading Strategic Planning software built to help high growth companies communicate their vision, create alignment, and track performance all in one place. From working with leading strategy and operations leaders at all stages, it's no surprise that Strategic Planning and OKRs are becoming an advantage for leaders committed to building great companies. 

If you're interested in learning more about how Elate can help your team, feel free to reach out today. We'd love to share how we can help!