Business leaders and managers frequently find themselves grappling with the challenge of aligning their own expectations with the everyday behaviours, attitudes, and actions of their teams. While setting ‘top-down’ leadership expectations is fairly straightforward, doing it in a way that resonates with team behaviours is more complex. This can create a disconnect between leadership expectations and those of your teams, which if left unaddressed, can undermine productivity and morale, and lead to employee disengagement.
In this article, we will look at ways that organisations can bridge this gap to create a higher-performing and more motivated team.
Understanding Organisational Misalignment – Why Expectations Often Differ from Reality
The gap between leadership expectations and team behaviour is a problem of organisational alignment – or, more accurately misalignment, and usually stems from multiple interconnected causes.
Ambiguous communication is a common factor, as unclear directives or goals from leadership and management can leave team members unsure what is expected of them, and the criteria that defines success. This often comes down to leadership styles. An overly top-down approach, for example, may suppress openness and creativity in the team, while a more disengaged style can leave teams without sufficient direction. The problem is further complicated by individual motivations and challenges, which can vary within teams and change over time.
Early signs of this misalignment can include missed targets, frequent communication issues, conflicts, and visible dissatisfaction and disengagement among colleagues. Unfortunately, in some organisations these are not recognised and addressed quickly enough.
Effective Communication Techniques For Organisational Alignment
It is natural for business leaders to have expectations about the behaviours and attitudes of their teams, but these expectations are only as effective as the goals designed to achieve them. One of the key ways of addressing misalignment is to set appropriate and achievable goals or KPIs for your teams. Leaders should collaborate with their teams to develop SMART goals that align with individual motivations, as well as strategic business goals. When employees have more input into goalsetting, they often feel a greater sense of ownership and accountability for their outcomes, increasing morale and productivity. Furthermore, an open dialogue creates a working environment in which colleagues feel heard, which increases trust in the leadership and strengthens team dynamics.
The goals should also reflect the realities of your team’s capacity and resources. This requires your leaders to be agile and adaptable in their approach to leadership, recalibrating their team goals when circumstances change in order to achieve the overall strategy.
How To Set Realistic and Achievable Goals:
So, how do your leaders establish these realistic and achievable goals?
- Regularly assess the progress of your team against the agreed goals, allowing adjustments to reflect any shifts in skill sets, team dynamics, external circumstances, or changes in workload.
- Break your goals down into short-term milestones to maximise agility and allow leaders and team members to stay responsive to progress, and adapt plans swiftly if needed.
- Prioritise operational agility by building contingency plans into all your goals, so that leaders and teams have alternative pathways to success immediately available when challenges arise.
- Align each goal, where possible, with the team’s existing individual and collective strengths, while identifying opportunities to stretch and grow capabilities without overburdening the team.
- Celebrate collective successes and alignment, reinforcing the adaptability of your team while maintaining focus on your organisational objectives
Creating a Culture of Continuous Feedback
One of the key ways to avoid disconnect and increase organisational alignment in your leadership strategy is to encourage the development of positive feedback loops. Feedback loops can take various shapes in different organisations – from structured annual reviews to teambuilding activities and informal check ins, but importantly, feedback needs to flow both ways – your team members must feel safe and heard offering their insights to their leaders, helping foster a collaborative atmosphere for growth. Successful feedback loops need a mechanism for regular dialogue in order to identify and address misalignment at an early stage, as well as a means to create actionable insights and structured follow-up to assess how well teams (and leaders) respond to this feedback.
The way we encourage teams to debrief following experiential activities at GRA is a useful example of this. Individuals and teams reflect on their actions during the activities in a structured but open-ended fashion, unpicking the reasons behind their successes and failures, and why they made the decisions they did. This can help reinforce learning and integrate it into the workplace, while also strengthening cohesion and trust between colleagues.
The Path to Greater Alignment and Team Cohesion
Bridging the gap between leadership expectations and team actions and behaviours is ultimately a matter of dialogue and respect, in which both sides recognise their shared interests and meet each other where they are. Your leaders must take the time to genuinely understand the motivations and challenges of their direct reports, and adapt their expectations and leadership approach to align with the reality of their team dynamics. Behavioural change is never instantaneous – but by using tools like experiential learning, and immersing teams and their leaders in representative real-world scenarios, your leaders can help develop new ways of thinking and habits in their teams that have a positive impact on trust, cohesion, performance, and alignment.
Find Out More
For business leaders willing to take the steps to bridge the disconnect between leadership expectations and team behaviour, the rewards are well worth the effort. Our experiential approach to leadership development strategy helps to build effective and empathic communication, realistic goal-setting skills, and the ability to accept and learn from feedback, in order to drive lasting behavioural change and unlock the full potential of your teams. To find out more, please contact GRA today by clicking here, or give us a call on 01962 779911.
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