What is the Number One Silent Killer of Business Growth?

Recognising the symptoms is the first step to managing them

Disconnection

Disconnection can waste resources, derail initiatives and fluff product launches. It enables competitors to move faster as your market share declines. It causes burnout across leadership and makes teams run just to stand still. It leads to forced restructuring, disgruntled employees and, perhaps worst of all, fleeing customers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Not if you’re honest with yourselves. You need to be crystal clear about what is getting in the way of happy employees, happy customers and business growth.

It’s your job to ensure that there’s no disconnection between any of the following:

1. Vision, strategy and execution
2. Leadership and employees
3. Departments
4. Your brand promise and customer experience

Any disconnect is dangerous to business profitability and longevity.

Disconnection can show up in many ways. It can look like competing priorities, miscommunication, drained resources, silos, firefighting, disgruntled employees and confused customers.

But it all stems from misalignment.

Where can misalignment creep in?

Misalignment between the vision, strategy and execution. Between leadership and employees. Between departments. Between the brand promise and customer experience.

If you have misalignment in any of these spaces, then you need to lessen the gap between where you are now and how you could be growing your business.

If we look into each of these spaces, what do we see and how can we optimise our game?

When your actions don’t match your goal

1. Disconnection between Vision, Strategy and Execution.

If you don’t have a vision, the day to day becomes your vision, more of the same. 

If you do have a vision, does it connect with the strategy and actions you’re taking? Does every step you take in the business align to your vision?

The best visions are those that project your mind into a future of practical possibility. Visions that are built on the firm foundations and aspirations of your business, resonating with your customer and in a space away from the competition. 

When you find your true vision, your strategy can be mapped out to make sure your execution makes it happen.

The Harvard Business Review says that most organisations believe they are around 80% aligned, but in actual fact it’s closer to 20%. 

Imagine a Sat Nav being only 20% aligned to the goal. You’d struggle to get there. You would spend more time and money and miss valuable opportunities along the way. Not only would your teams feel defeated but confused customers will vote with their feet.

Sears in the 2000s had a strategy to modernise and compete with Amazon, but they failed to translate that into operational improvements. Their stores remained outdated and supply chain issues crippled delivery efforts, leading to collapse after over 100 years’ business.

Mis-alignment between your vision, strategy and execution leads to stagnation and irrelevance, wasted time and resources, slow or failed innovation, frustrated leadership teams, overwhelmed and unsupported employees.

The cost of strategic misalignment

Indeed, operational misalignment across business is reported to lead to global losses of up to $6 million annually due to wasted time and resources, plus approximately $2m trillion globally due to project failures from strategic misalignment. 

Conversely, a study by Harvard Business Review found that companies with strong alignment achieved 58% higher operating profits and 33% higher total returns to shareholders compared to those with weaker alignment. Additionally, alignment can lead to increased project success rates, with projects aligned to strategy being 57% more likely to deliver their business benefits. 

This shows that your vision and strategy must be well developed, providing an overarching umbrella for your operational capabilities. 

Alan Mulally (Former CEO of Ford) says

“What I found over the years is that the most important thing is for a team to come together over a compelling vision, a comprehensive strategy for achieving that vision, and then a relentless implementation plan.” 

Alignment is key.

• How sturdy is your vision?
• Is your strategy built for success?
• Do your day to day operations completely align with your bigger picture?

When your managers and teams aren’t pulling in the same direction

2. Disconnection between Leadership and Employees

Leadership teams that align to an agreed vision and strategy are better able to manage projects and people. Decision-making is easier, leading to more autonomy throughout the business because, when the alignment is communicated properly, people instinctively know what sits well within the strategic direction and what doesn’t.

A strategic or cultural disconnection is most likely to occur between leadership and employees. And both are often due to poor communication. 

In 2016, Wells Fargo’s management set aggressive sales targets without understanding or addressing the pressure it put on employees. Instead of failing to meet their targets, employees opened millions of fake accounts and caused over $3 billion in fines and massive reputational damage. 

Another company with an ongoing disconnect between leadership and employees is Amazon. Warehouse employee well-being has been compromised due to leadership focusing heavily on operations efficiency at the expense of morale. Billions have been spent on damage control due to high turnover costs and working condition complaints.

A survey of C-level executives and vice presidents across a variety of industries finds most companies still struggle with significant misalignment issues between management and employees, making it difficult to implement key initiatives and retain top talent. The survey conducted by ‘POPin’ found that only 29% of respondents are ‘well aligned’ and ‘in lockstep’ with senior management.

When this happens, employees feel unseen and unheard, leading to low morale and disengagement, resulting in increased turnover, higher recruitment and onboarding costs.

The cost of employee misalignment

‘The State of the Global Workplace’ report by Gallup, concludes that 85% of employees are not actively engaged or are actively disengaged at work. In addition, 68% would consider leaving their job if they didn’t feel supported by more senior employees according to the Staples workplace survey. 

This shows the importance of ensuring alignment between leadership and employees, especially as Gallup suggests that an engaged workforce increases profitability by 23%.

Your leadership team must be living the corporate vision and strategy and able to collaborate with employees about the best way to action it. 

Mary Barra (CEO of General Motors) says

“If we win the hearts and minds of employees, we’re going to have better business success.”

Alignment is key.

• How engaged is your leadership team with the vision, mission, values?
• How involved are your employees in making the vision a reality?
• How strong is the connection between leadership and employees?

When your departments work in silos

3. Disconnection between Departments

Disconnection between departments results in silos. The inefficiency of a business with departments working in silos can cause revenue loss of up to 30%, according to IDC Market Research. This is likely to stem from duplication of effort, increased costs, missed opportunities, lack of information-sharing, reduced creativity, decreased employee engagement and restricted customer experience.

The usual disconnection is between sales and marketing departments. Sales often believe that marketers are out of touch with actual customers and marketing often perceive sales as too focused on individual customer experiences, rather than the larger market and the future. According to Hubspot, over half of sales professionals say that misalignment between sales and marketing departments leads directly to lost sales and revenue. 

BlackBerry’s decline in 2016 was related to the disconnection between departments. Their marketing promised innovation, which didn’t come fast enough and sales promised features that never existed. Bad connections leads to broken promises.

Disconnection between departments means mixed messages reaching confused and dissatisfied customers. It means internal competition instead of collaboration which can slow progress and innovation. Business then becomes inefficient and fragmented, unable to capitalise on opportunities or deliver cohesive growth.

The cost of departmental misalignment

According to the Harvard Business Review, it is estimated that businesses lose over $1 trillion annually due to lack of alignment between sales and marketing departments.

In contrast, Gartner surveyed 200 sales teams and found that aligned sales and marketing teams are three times more likely to exceed new customer acquisition targets. Forrester research shows that organisations that align these two departments grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.

The way to ensure better departmental alignment is top down from the vision, through the strategy. A strong strategy helps everyone to pull in the same direction. 

Bill Gates (Former Co-founder and CEO of Microsoft Corporation) says

“Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a ‘nervous system’, to coordinate its actions” 

Alignment is key.

• How united are your departments in achieving the vision through the strategy?
• How collaboratively are they working together?
• Together are they optimising the value that they individually bring?

When your customers are confused by you

4. Disconnection between brand promise and customer experience

This is an interesting relationship, because there’s a third element to consider between brand promise and customer experience: brand reputation.

The brand promise is what the brand says about itself, or what you as a business say about your brand. The customer experience is how it’s received. The reputation muddies the water because of our cultural reliance on what other people think. This element has ramped up hugely since social media hit our screens. A brand’s reputation could be completely destroyed with one viral message. This makes it even more important to ensure that what you are promising as a brand, is received in the way intended, so that the customer experience alignment can become social proof that you are authentic in your delivery. Riding a positive review wave could be the making of you. In simple terms, you need to be as good as your word.

Any disconnect here is magnified in the fickle world of social. Customers can quickly lose trust and become vocal critics instead of loyal advocates. The negative review and PR disaster can seriously damage a brand’s reputation, leading to sales decline as customers switch to competitors who are truly walking the talk.

In the late 2010’s Victoria’s Secret promised empowerment and beauty but delivered outdated ideals of attractiveness, as they ignored social shifts towards body positivity and inclusion. This caused their market share to plummet as they had to close stores and plan a brand revamp.

United Airlines, promising friendly skies, violently dragged a passenger off an overbooked flight in 2017, which went viral on social media and caused a $1 billion drop in their market value within days.

This seems extreme, but it shows how quickly one member of your team can compromise your whole brand in a single event. Kantar research reveals that 91% of CEOs believe that customer centricity is essential for growth, but actually only 19% of customers feel that brands are truly customer-centric. 

The cost of brand promise misalignment 

There is a significant gap between brand promises and actual customer experiences which leads to compromising customers’ trust and loyalty. Clear surveyed 34,000 respondents and concluded on average, the cost of this misalignment equates to between £220m and £390m in lost revenue for each brand, each year.

This shows how important it is for brands to align their promise with how customers are receiving the experience, because it’s the right thing to do. It will help growth as everyone is watching, all of the time. Our world is becoming more transparent with communication traveling much faster. People are ready to call you out.

Ryan Holmes (Co-founder and Chairman of Hootsuite) says

“As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges you will face will be building your brand. The ultimate goal is to set your company and your brand apart from the crowd. If you form a strategy without doing the research, your brand will barely float – and at the speed industries move at today, brands sink fast.” 

Alignment is key.

• Do you know exactly what your customers want?
• Does your brand deliver to this need?
• What are you saying you will be delivering?
• What do your customers think they receive?
• What’s the word on the street about your brand?

The importance of alignment

It seems that mis-alignment in any shape or form can be deadly. It can bring your business to its knees at any moment. So how do we stay on top of ensuring valuable connections in all of these spaces?

One of the earliest adopters of organisational alignment was Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary president of General Motors in the 1920s. At a time when most businesses operated chaotically, Sloan introduced a decentralised structure where each division operated independently but was aligned under a central vision and strategy. This allowed GM to outpace Ford, then the industry leader, and become the dominant player in the automotive industry for decades. Sloan’s principle was simple but powerful, that good management is only possible through alignment.

It comes from the top. Not just the top people wise, but it comes from ensuring that you spend the appropriate amount of time nailing your vision, mission and values through deep research. It has to be a single focus, a distilled powerful statement with no ambiguity whatsoever. Let two angles in, then already there is a disconnect waiting to happen. 

One Strategic Essence®, means one focus, one alignment, one vision, one strategy. This is when you are more able to align leadership with employees, align departments to each other and align your brand promise with both your reputation and your customer experience. This way everyone knows what they are supposed to do. They find it easier to make decisions, intuitively knowing how to make the business thrive. And when a business thrives, it can only mean growth and success.

So if you’re seeing the symptoms of disconnection - slowing growth, unhappy teams, lost customers - then it’s time to ask where the misalignment is hiding, how much is it already costing you and most important of all, what can you do to reconnect the business?

If you would like help aligning your business, email me [email protected] or WhatsApp me on 07457 418684 and let's chat.