Alignment - A journey from remote islands to a common shore

In the 14 years since its birth, Cactus Communications, known to researchers and scientists globally as Editage, has been supporting academics in their endeavor to publish research. We improve scientific articles for publication and play our part in furthering human development through scientific and technological progress.

As CACTUS grew into a mid-sized enterprise, we struggled to find unified success across functions. At the heart of this disharmony was misalignment among the top leadership that had crept in through role, portfolio, and leadership changes in preceding years. We were grappling with the problem of each department speaking its own language, which caused dissonance and mistrust in the top team. We had differing priorities and didn’t understand one another. The wide geographic spread of our offices and the cultural divergence it brought reinforced the silos. At the same time, perceived roles of decision makers overlapped, making us excessively collaborative. This diluted the ownership and speed of execution of high-impact projects. We spent precious time debating how to execute tasks rather than how to achieve our goals. We always knew that we had great potential for growth, but this wasn’t coming through in our performance. We began to use external factors as excuses for not meeting our goals, and Editage’s sales saw downward mid-year forecasts. Moreover, our annual planning cycle limited checks on progress against goals during the year.

We realized the hard way that our business goals were unachieved because of internal conflict rather than external factors. Everyone in the top team agreed that we weren’t happy with our speed of execution and pace of growth, and we began to understand that the solution would be in truly aligning all departments to an overarching goal, so that everyone spoke the same business language. Also, to reduce misalignment caused by the global spread of our offices, we ensured that all our international offices were represented in the top team.

We peeled off the layers of departmental priorities to answer some obvious questions and get to the heart of the matter — our common organizational goal. Many of our KPIs changed to align to the common goal. We disintegrated old structures and groups to create new structures that supported the organizational goal. We had to work beyond egos when making these changes, and this wasn’t easy. Today, the success of the top team is measured against the overarching common goal. This can be tricky, but having understood and accepted that superlative individual performance is not enough if we lose sight of the organization goal, we now measure each individual’s success in terms of business impact. This works as a self-correction mechanism, where everyone is working to be successful. And naturally, when we fixed internal misalignment, we started seeing a positive business impact.

Since our top team wasn’t on the same page about business decisions, we created a pseudo-hierarchy among top decision makers. We resolved that when in conflict, we’d rely on the pseudo-hierarchy to move forward on goals. Marketing, for example, leads other departments in achieving our primary goal. It’s important to note that this hierarchy is dynamic. We establish such decision-making structures for specific periods and if one department is at the top of the hierarchy for this vision period, it is because our contemporary vision links most directly to that department. Our vision is evolutionary, and so is this structure. This structure has helped us significantly in recovering from the sluggish growth trajectory of preceding years.

Once we were aligned on our goal, we moved on to change the frequency of our planning and reviews. We now set annual goals but don’t make annual plans; instead, our planning and review follow a quarterly cycle. This format ensures continual top-team alignment to organizational priorities and agile goal achievement.

Today, we’re okay with not having consensus on all matters. Decisions are left entirely to the leader accountable for a goal. Our aim is to enable empowerment through organizational restructuring, whereby our decision makers are completely accountable for their goals and the outcomes of their plans, and others extend full support even if in disagreement with the approach.

To ensure that leaders are in sync with each other, we’ve set up regular meeting structures (daily operational, weekly tactical, and monthly strategic) to boost alignment and execution. We now regularly discuss both strategy and brass tacks. This works as a system of checks and balances, where leaders share updates on progress against their goals and others in the group comment on progress or changes to preset plans. We’ve enabled sufficient interaction to allow undercurrents to surface so that they are resolved instantly in the presence of the group, not in one-to-one conversations behind closed doors. We’ve moved away from the awkwardness of stealing glances during presentations to forthright questions and productive arguments. An environment that encourages open discussions is critical to conflict resolution—everyone should feel safe to protest or show their discontent about something. Members of the team don’t have to carry baggage with them outside meetings; they don’t have to worry that they’ll be judged for disagreeing, or that they won’t receive support on their projects. This open environment encourages leaders to trust each other but not with blind faith.

In sum, our method for achieving alignment has been multi-faceted. We improved alignment at the strategic, execution, and personal (values and leadership style) levels. It’s much easier to get buy-in across departments now that we believe in and are working towards a common goal. We didn’t rush the process because we knew that even though it took time, our approach was striking at the root of our troubles and would have long-lasting effects. Conflict management was part and parcel of the process of achieving top-team alignment. 

This process became smoother when we leveraged each other’s strengths to achieve goals; for instance, if someone on the team was good at something that someone else found challenging, the two paired up to move ahead faster. This went a long way in building trust and mutual respect. While the alignment we’ve achieved today is good, only a conscious effort will help us continue on this path. To cement this approach within our structure, we’re now extending the “softer” alignment we’ve achieved through structural and goal changes to KPIs and objectives. The next step for us is to have this alignment percolate throughout the organization, because when that happens, growth becomes truly exponential.