A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon about the “silo syndrome” that most organizations struggle to navigate.
It got me thinking about the challenge of strategic alignment in general — how hard it is to get and keep the extended organization on the same page.
A big part of the marketing job is learning to manage by influence — a classic case of “accountability without authority.” Marketing is typically held responsible for results led by other functions in an organization.
Marketing strategy not only needs to dovetail with the overall company strategy, it needs to be communicated in a way that the rest of the organization can understand and act on.
I stumbled across a Harvard Business Review article from professors Vikas Mittal, Alessandro Piazza, and Ashwin Malshe that discovered a large gap between actual and perceived strategic alignment.
In their study, 82% of employees reported that they felt strategic agreement in their companies. But when the researchers probed written explanations from those same employees about what the company strategies actually were, the real alignment was only 23%.
This strategic misalignment can lead to all sorts of issues as companies work to make things happen.
As the CEO of one of the companies in the study concluded:
“Everybody seems to be interpreting strategy based on their functional silos, even members of our strategy team.”
(As an aside, the “herding cats” analogy was famously used in a 2000 Super Bowl ad by EDS, an HP company. But I was surprised to learn that the first known reference to cat herding came from the 1979 Monty Python movie, Life of Brian.)
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
