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Driving Strategic Alignment
Kai Miller
5 min read
Chiefs of staff often see themselves as the ‘guardians’ of strategy, ensuring that it is implemented and aligned to the organisational purpose.
'Are we checking ourselves and the opposition? Are we aligning to the strategy? Are we aligning to the purpose and the steps that we're taking? Are we the sanity check?'
With very few exceptions, chiefs of staff do not formulate or ‘own’ organisational strategy. However, our State of the Industry Report 2023 found that all survey respondents spent at least some of their time on ‘strategy’. Conversations during the Oxford programme shed more light on exactly what they may have meant by this.
Programme Director Professor Jonathan Trevor introduced his thinking about strategic alignment, which suggests that organisations or enterprises put themselves in the best position to ‘win’ (depending on what that means to them) by aligning strategy, operations, capabilities, and people behind a clear purpose.
This struck a chord with participants, who saw the link between purpose and strategy and the importance of constantly reinforcing that link.
'The point which stands out for me is the strategic approach to alignment. How it trickles down or how the hierarchy is set per strategy, capability architecture and systems. I think we talked about purpose and strategy also, but then we led into capability architecture and systems - how they enable you to achieve the strategy and eventually the purpose.'
'The tricky part is the delivery of the purpose, that we actually see this purpose being put into practice, that we see the rules coming out of it, and that we see the challenge and maybe remind our principals about why we do this.'
'It’s about being the guardian of strategy and also perhaps being the conscience for the organisation in the context of the purpose.'
Being ‘the conscience for the organisation’ is not a moral role, but one that considers the purpose as the guide for strategy and decision-making. Choices such as the allocation of resources, options for innovation, growth, or diversification should always be made by asking (among other things), ‘how does this contribute to achieving our purpose?’ Ideally this will happen without prompting throughout the organisation. But if it does not, the chief of staff is in the best position to keep asking that question at every level.
'You're the arbiter of making sure that the staff stay true to the purpose of your organisation and so that you can support your principal in implementing that purpose. Enforcer in chief? Chief alignment officer?'
Is this chief alignment officer role itself strategic, and is it the function of the chief of staff? The simple answer to both those questions is yes. If the organisation is disconnected in terms of how the purpose cascades down through the strategy to outcomes at the business unit, departmental, and individual level, then the strategy is unlikely to succeed. And although activities can be aligned at a micro-level – within teams or even within a business unit – without an organisation-wide view, there can be elements of distortion or misalignment.
'I'm reflecting that I set up power structures: I set up meetings, I set up rituals, I set up organisational structures to get the right kind of processes to drive the strategy. So it's the strategy in the centre bubble that I'm using all of those other tools to shape, to drive to the strategy.'
That is not to say that the chief of staff is the only person who should be focusing on alignment. It is an enterprise-wide effort. But the chief of staff is possibly the only person capable of simultaneously observing the alignment (or not) of the organisation as a whole and intervening if necessary at any level.
