Companies like Yahoo and Dell have lost their market share because their top executives lacked a clear vision for the future.

The lack of direction trickled down to employees. This resulted in a disjointed workforce that lacked clarity on their role at work.

Aligned team leadership is a source of competitive advantage. Employees in such companies have clear goals so they show up for work with a sense of purpose. They know exactly what they need to do each day.

So how can you ensure that your leaders are all working towards a common corporate goal? Keep reading to learn how you can align your team leadership to achieve your corporate goals.

Anyone that starts a company does it for a particular reason. Mostly, it’s to make money but could be for other reasons. Unfortunately, as the company grows, this underlying vision is often lost.

Employees find themselves working aimlessly towards an unknown goal. To prevent this lack of alignment, companies have been developing and communicating their purpose and values. They’ve done this through vision and mission statements.

Companies publish these statements in all possible locations to ensure that everyone knows them. Employees should also receive frequent training on corporate visions, missions, and values. This ensures that the employees’ actions are always guided by the corporate goals.

So how does a corporate vision help to align leadership teams for success? First, an overarching vision guides team leaders. They make the right call when faced with hard decisions.

The corporate vision also helps to guide the behaviour of team leaders. This is so that they work together to achieve common goals. The company vision can also guide team leaders when they create vision and mission statements for their departments.

A clear company vision and mission is the first step you must take to align your leadership teams to achieve corporate success. But we have all worked for companies with clearly defined mission statements but incongruent teams. Communicating your company’s vision is not enough to achieve team alignment.

Companies have to develop many smaller steps and objectives to achieve their vision. Let’s take IKEA as an example. The company has a vision to “create a better everyday life for the many people”.

The vision IKEA has is quite broad. Different department heads may have their ideas about how to achieve it.

What exactly are its employees supposed to be aiming for daily? The company’s leadership must come up with narrower goals and objectives for each department. This is where annual strategies, goals, and objectives come in.

Annual objectives help define employee performance standards. This keeps them focused on daily tasks. To be effective, your team objectives and goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-based).

Leadership teams can’t work in alignment toward a company goal that they haven’t bought into. Executives that have failed to make a positive change in an organisation are surprised by the pushback they experienced from colleagues and team members. But team leaders that aren’t involved in a decision will undermine any efforts to help the idea succeed.

So, when coming up with corporate visions, goals, and objectives it is important to get the buy-in of your team leaders. How can you get this?

The first thing you must do is consult your team leaders when strategising and making decisions. Every year, hold a strategy meeting with your team leaders. Ask them for input on how each of them intends to achieve the corporate vision.

As a team, you can then decide on the goals and strategies you intend to pursue for the year. The team leaders can then meet with their teams to come up with departmental objectives and key results to support the corporate goals. But team leaders must remember that all team goals must align with the corporate vision.

Each member of your leadership team should have clearly defined responsibilities. Sometimes there may be an overlap of responsibilities which creates confusion over who should do what. In such cases, it is better to clarify which leader handles that role.

Otherwise, these overlaps can create conflict, performance gaps, and leadership burnout. Role responsibilities act as the guide for performance management. You can use them for goal setting and measurement of success.

Once each leader has clear goals you must hold them accountable for their results. Your leaders helped to draft their departmental goals, so they should know how their results affect the company’s success. Any leader that isn’t meeting their goals should be ready to explain why.

Create an environment of open feedback where leaders can give and receive feedback from their seniors, peers, and juniors. This will improve performance as leadership will be able to identify and work on their weak spots while developing their strengths.

One area that executives often overlook when trying to achieve leadership alignment is the welfare of their team. Team leaders such as managers and supervisors experience a lot of stress, both at work and at home. A junior employee can come in, focus on their work, and go home.

But team leaders are responsible for the results of everyone that reports to them. They must learn how to navigate the demands of the company as well as their teams. On top of that, they still have their home life and personal stressors to deal with.

To get the best performance out of your leadership team you must provide them with a work environment that allows them to thrive. This includes the basics like a competitive pay and benefits package and medical insurance for the leader and their family. They should also have the best tools you can afford such as great office space, ergonomic furniture, fast computers, smartphones, etc.

Also, take the time to talk with your leaders to find out how they are doing and whether they need support. When your team leadership feels valued, they will care about your success. Happy team leaders are also less likely to butt heads with their colleagues.

Whenever several people must together to achieve a common goal, you can expect some conflict. But great teams know how to navigate conflict for the best possible outcome. Positive conflict can solidify team relationships and encourage groups to solve problems and come up with innovative ideas.

When conflict is suppressed or ignored, your company may start developing groupthink. If someone comes up with an idea that goes unchallenged, the team may end up missing some major flaws or issues with the idea. But a team that is open to positive conflict will have employees pointing out flaws and solutions to proposed ideas so that the result is flawless.

There is a reason why companies still engage in ‘cheesy’ team-building activities despite years of employee complaints about them. The fact is team rituals are a great way to align a team toward a common goal.

Team leaders that are constantly bickering could find a common ground when their children become friends during a company barbeque. Or a discussion over happy hour drinks could bring up a solution to a problem a team has been struggling with. Different companies have their way of bringing employees together so come up with your creative team rituals to increase team alignment.

A silo is a work situation where a department or workgroup keeps important information from other employees within an organisation. You can’t achieve leadership team alignment if some leaders withhold important information from the rest of the team.

You can remove silos by having a policy against them and encouraging employees to call them out whenever they see them. You can also encourage teamwork by celebrating organisational and team successes rather than individual successes.

Advances in informational technology have led to the creation of management software that can increase your team alignment. For instance, you can use business management software that makes it easy to assign tasks to team leaders.

Such software increases transparency on what each leader is working on and can encourage collaboration on projects. Some software also increases communication channels as leaders can share information in real-time through calls or chat messages.

Successful companies have learned how to get their employees to work passionately towards the same goals. This isn’t an easy feat as showcased by many companies that have lost market share due to a misaligned executive team. Here are seven ways to align leadership team for success:

• Develop and Communicate a Clear Corporate Vision and Mission
• Devise annual corporate objectives and goals
• Take care of your leadership team
• Embrace conflict
• Perform team rituals
• Eliminate silos
• Invest in management software

Having a corporate vision and mission is a great start to aligning your leadership team . But to achieve continuous alignment you must use a combination of the above-mentioned strategies. For a great example of how to improve your group executive team, check out this case study.