Alignment: for your project, not just for AI
Image credit: Image by vectorjuice on Freepik
When I was a manager at Google, my reports often checked in with me about how well aligned their work was with higher-level leadership priorities. Sometimes they wanted to know how to even tell if their work was serving an objective that relevant execs thought was important; other times they wanted to make the case to those execs that their work should be considered important. At still other times, they wondered how much they should actually care about maintaining that alignment.
I’ve since gotten similar questions from coaching clients who work within medium-size or larger organizations. It’s a perennial issue, causing both stress from uncertainty and real productivity drain from misaligned objectives and priorities. So I want to lay out a framework for thinking about it. Importantly, this has lessons not just for people following the priorities but for leaders who set them.
How important is leadership alignment to my work and my success?
Let’s motivate the rest of the discussion by addressing: “why should I even care about this?” Your answer will vary. Some factors that affect the importance of aligning your work include:
How big a team and how much time do you need to achieve your personal work objectives? Larger, more ambitious projects usually demand a sustained commitment of headcount, i.e. human labor, which is a central expense for most companies. Headcount allocation decisions, in turn, usually derive from senior leadership priorities; work that isn’t easily seen to be critical for achieving those priorities gets starved, especially when new priorities emerge and need people reassigned to them.
How much dependence does your work have on the cooperation of other teams? If you can only launch your cool new thing by convincing peers across the organization to do work on its behalf, you’d better be able to motivate those peers to take a chunk of their scarce time to help you. That’s much easier if you can point to an objective they’ll be serving that everyone knows senior leaders value.
How loosely or tightly is your organization managed? Some organizations allow much more autonomy than others for lower-level employees to do what they think is best, within bounds of varying degrees of specificity.
How much do you care about getting promoted or “climbing the ladder”? If you need to make a case for promotion, especially if there are decision makers beyond your direct manager, you will typically need to show how your work has impact on known objectives.
I’ve seen situations where people were happy and successful without caring much about aligning their work with leadership priorities. A person who has reached a level of seniority they’re comfortable with, is working on relatively independent small projects that their peers think are valuable, and lives within a high-autonomy organizational culture can often “get away with” just doing what they themselves think is important. But that’s not the common case; most people’s ambitions require thinking seriously about leadership alignment.
How can I know if my work is well aligned with leadership priorities?
Ideally you want to have a clear mental model of how your leadership thinks; how they decide what’s important; and why they decided to prioritize the things they currently think are most important. You can then figure out the level of alignment of your work by doing the empathy exercise of putting yourself in their shoes (note the similarity to the classic LLM prompt technique of saying “You are an expert on X. Tell me what I should do in situation Y”).
In practice your ability to make such a model will vary widely depending on:
Your social and organizational closeness to the relevant leaders and your ability to get time with them, especially 1-1 time. This is usually inversely related to hierarchy depth and overall organization size.
Leaders’ own skill at communicating their thinking to their organizations. Do they have clearly written, actionable objectives like OKRs or KPIs that you can easily find and understand? Are those kept up to date frequently as priorities evolve? Do they use group meeting times like all hands presentations or Q+A sessions effectively to broadcast and clarify their priorities?
Most often I find that while written objectives and all-hands presentations are essential starting points, they don’t tell the whole story. To understand what the real priorities are, you need to complement that official guidance with well-formed questions sent up the hierarchy. A well-formed question is one that bridges the gap between what’s written down and what you really want to know, and that is clearly specified enough that you can get an answer without taking a lot of a senior leader’s scarce time. Well-formed questions can also be a great tool for influencing priorities, as we’ll discuss in the next section.
But even if you can perfectly bridge all hierarchical communication difficulties, there will always be limits to how clear an answer you can get to such a question. Leaders are human beings, and as such their priorities are not always perfectly clear even to themselves, and are subject to somewhat unpredictable changes— just like your own personal priorities for your life. That means any signal you get about what’s important is somewhat noisy. Making your peace with that noise, and being ready to pivot like an agile startup when you get new information, is an underrated way to become more successful and less stressed.
How can I make my work more visibly aligned with leadership priorities?
There are three ways to do this:
Change the substance of what you’re working on to something you think is more aligned.
Change how you communicate about it to make existing alignment more obvious.
Convince leaders to change their priorities so they consider your work more important than before.
Developing (2) and (3) is a distinctive skill that most of us never learned in school, and (3) especially— often known as “influencing without authority” or “managing up”— takes practice, judgment, and patience. Common newbie failure modes include:
Not believing yourself empowered to advocate for work you think is important, and thus missing out on the chance to do something really meaningful.
Underestimating the difficulty of advocacy for your work, and charging in with what looks like a slam-dunk case to you but falls completely flat.
Here are some strategies for more effectively combining (1)-(3) above:
Start small. Add a reference or two in that next design document or product presentation to the OKR/KPI/etc your idea addresses and explain briefly how it does so. See what— if any— feedback you get on it from reviewers.
Start by listening and asking questions. If something seems unclear or ill-advised (or both!) about some priority statement, ask for clarification in an open-minded and curious way.
Observe which colleagues seem good at this, and cultivate them as allies and mentors. Often organizations have people who have no formal leadership authority, but whose seniority, expertise, reputation etc lend their opinions great informal weight. They can give you tips for how to ask the right question of the right person to get your point across. And if you want to influence upward, they may be easier to get on your side than a formally empowered leader, and getting them there can then make the formal leaders much easier to win over.
Recognize that people— including you— are usually bad at, and averse to, changing their minds as much as is optimal, so convincing them to do it is hard. All the communications principles I laid out in my last post apply.
Lead with empathy. Whatever the current official priorities are, the people who made them had higher-level reasons for choosing those priorities and not others. The better you understand and respect those higher-level reasons, the more effectively you can appeal to shared values to make your case for a priority change— or even just a clarification of something imprecise.
What if I’m the one setting the priorities?
I’ll restate my last point from the previous section: lead with empathy. The more aware you are of the situations the people under your authority face, their drives and incentives and worries, the better you can set and communicate priorities in a way that will make your organization productive and effective. Know that people are asking themselves the questions above, and do what’s in your power to give them efficient answers.
Remember that your people’s uncertainty and stress about alignment with your priorities is a tax on their productivity. Every minute they spend strategizing about how to deal with potential misalignment is a minute they’re not spending Doing The Thing. Your communication and your incentive design (e.g. promotion and evaluation processes) should always aim to reduce that tax. Yet it can never be zero, because the goal of making priorities easily understood and stable is in tension with the goal of making them good, especially as they change over time.
And that’s perhaps the toughest communication task I’ve faced myself as a leader: communicating not just about the current priorities but about their contingent nature. How confident are you, and why, that this thing is actually the most important thing? Where there is uncertainty, where does it come from? What kind of evidence would change your mind? Too few leaders, in my experience, intentionally give clear answers to these questions— and providing them is an underexplored avenue for improving employees’ productivity and sense of security.
As always, I hope you’ve found these tips useful. If you’d like to have a deeper discussion about how to apply them in your particular situation, you can schedule a free 30 minute intro chat at https://calendly.com/nweininger.
