3

ALIGN Expectations

No matter how unified an organization is, its members may not always share expectations about what it should be doing or how it should go about doing it. L&D professionals may increase the success of their performance improvement work by knowing and thinking through what their clients want to achieve and what they expect will happen once they’ve achieved it. While it’s safe to assume all stakeholders want to solve a problem plaguing performance, they often have different views about the actual problem, and different expectations about what the solution will look and feel like. Until you understand these expectations and define success, you are setting yourself up for disappointment—and misalignment. This is why aligning expectations is the first phase of the strategic alignment process.

The ALIGN Expectations phase is your opportunity to uncover your stakeholders’ expectations of value—their wants, preferences, priorities, and perspectives—and to synergize these perspectives to ensure that you can facilitate positive and meaningful returns. Table 3-1 presents some objectives to accomplish and activities to help you meet them.

Understanding Stakeholders

Understanding stakeholders and their interests is a critical entry point for L&D professionals to strengthen their strategic value propositions. If you don’t understand their perspective and priorities, it will be difficult for you to help. Stakeholders regularly place competing demands on the organization’s finite resources. Whether the resources are financial, effort, or time, different stakeholders will disagree about where and how they should be used. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that behind any stakeholder decision, there are unique and perhaps narrow considerations about resource allocation.

Depending on the stakeholder’s position, what influences her decision might be somewhat different. For example, the higher up the organizational chart you go, the more a manager is accountable for overarching organizational results, and the more receptive she is likely to be about addressing the “business” or “organizational result” issue. Thus you are likely to have more success in influencing this stakeholder by establishing how sharing resources (perhaps financial and time) for strategic alignment will help her attain the organizational results for which she is accountable.

Conversely, the closer an individual’s accountability to a specific output or process, the greater his interest in ensuring that output or process is completed successfully. For example, a supervisor may be responsible for “calls answered on the first ring” or “number of patients whose co-pay was collected during office visit” or “widgets built.” He is likely to be persuaded to share resources (perhaps time and effort) to get a closer look at actual performance gaps and root causes that will drive his team’s performance. Organizational issues might be secondary for this supervisor, and so his views and priorities may look different from that of a manager.

Key Stakeholders

Thoughtfully identifying the key stakeholders involved in defining the problem and selecting or developing solutions is crucial because they will be instrumental in defining the scope of your efforts, as well as providing criteria for what constitutes an effective solution. So how do you determine your stakeholders?

Here, a stakeholder is any person with an interest or concern in the strategic alignment process. They can be managers, executives, employees, board members, strategic partners, funding entities, government, regulatory bodies, clients, or the community. Not all stakeholders have to be represented for every strategic alignment effort. Rather, depending on the focus and scope of the work, you will want to identify the appropriate stakeholders to include. Some of the initial tasks that can help identify relevant stakeholders include:

•   Describe what appears to be the problem (based on the requestor’s initial request).

•   List what individuals or groups could be most affected by the problem (and potential solutions).

•   List who can be most influential in helping drive change within the organization and how.

•   List who might perceive the potential change as negative or threatening and why.

•   Identify what potential barriers exist to enlisting their participation.

Another way to identify the key stakeholders for a particular initiative is to map them according to their relative influence and importance to the success of your strategic alignment project. To do this you can develop a matrix that helps you clearly identify the level of influence and importance of the various stakeholders (Figure 3-1).

•   Quadrant one: These stakeholders have high influence and high importance (for example, leadership, key managers, or supervisors) and need to be fully engaged on the strategic alignment process.

•   Quadrant two: These stakeholders have high importance but low influence (for example, employees directly affected by the potential performance solution); however, they still need to be kept informed through appropriate education and communication.

•   Quadrant three: These stakeholders have low influence and low importance; however, they should still be monitored and kept on board, as their relative position could change at any time. For example, these individuals could switch roles, and with that their influence within the organization may increase, as well as their potential for greater decision-making authority over resources. While many members of the organization may fall into this quadrant, you want to focus primarily on those that have the potential to influence others (whether formally or informally).

•   Quadrant four: These stakeholders have high influence but low importance. They should be kept satisfied with appropriate approval and perhaps brought in as patrons or supporters who endorse the strategic alignment process of the potential performance improvement program. This will also lend credibility and influence to your findings and recommendations.

Later, this chapter provides more information about how to begin identifying the potential stakeholders with your primary requestor (the person who initially contacted you for your assistance). With an initial list of those stakeholders, you can determine their relative importance to the project to help map your approach with each.

It is critical to remember that the map is not static; stakeholders can change and thus move around with increasing or decreasing levels of importance and influence. Effectively managing stakeholder relationships is crucial to solving the wide range of issues facing organizations today. To successfully manage your relationships with stakeholders, consider the following guidelines:

•   Acknowledge and actively monitor the concerns of stakeholders, and take their interests into account in decision making about alignment activities.

•   Listen to and openly communicate with stakeholders about their respective concerns and contributions, as well as the risks they assume by committing their involvement.

•   Recognize the interdependence of efforts and rewards among stakeholders, and attempt to achieve a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens, taking into account their respective risks and vulnerabilities.

The following section provides a discussion of stakeholder expectations and the wide range of factors that can affect where your stakeholders are in your stakeholder map, and in turn, better help you monitor and manage a trusting and productive relationship.

Stakeholder Expectations

In their bestselling book Crucial Confrontations, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler argue that much of the conflict in the world-whether an organizational failure, a family breakdown, or national turmoil-is born from violated expectations. These expectations are typically violated because we assume others either know what we expect or we assume we know what others expect of us. We may think, “If they were smart, they would have figured out what I meant,” or “If they cared enough, they would have looked into it further before jumping blindly into action,” or “If they were proactive, they would have fixed the problem long ago and avoided the mess we are in today.” We take for granted the uniqueness of our own perspectives and views, which are shaped by countless factors, and assume that what seems perfectly clear and real to us, seems just as obvious and logical to others. Of course, this—like much in life—is not a safe assumption.

The key is understanding the priorities for different stakeholders, what their underlying assumptions might be, and how collaborating in specific aspects of the strategic alignment process will help get them closer to achieving their goals. These efforts are aimed at making strategically aligned and collaborative decisions about the performance focus that is best suited for the situation presented to you by the requestor.

One common assumption held by stakeholders when requesting training or learning solutions is that if their people are not doing what they should be doing, they must not know how to do it, or they don’t want to do it. Based on this stakeholder assumption, giving them more knowledge will remedy the situation. Many stakeholders may not have extensive education in or deep understanding of human and organizational behavior, and therefore may be unaware of the multitude of factors that affect human performance in the workplace. Consequently, they may not be able to recognize these factors in the workplace, or they may not have the vocabulary necessary to communicate what they have observed beyond, “people don’t know how to …” or “people need to learn to …” Your ability to increase their awareness of other performance factors is important, as long as the approach is appropriate for each stakeholder group and without technical jargon.

Another stakeholder assumption might be that any type of up-front analysis or alignment will take more time than what they have available, and consequently, see it as a derailment to “taking action.” However, delivering desired results efficiently and effectively is even more important than taking immediate action. Immediate action can introduce a false sense of confidence because you and the stakeholder think you are on your way to solving the problem when in fact you’re not doing anything productive. Quick action should not be confused with efficiency, and certainly not with effectiveness. Effectiveness is about reaching the results you want, while efficiency is doing it better (for example, with the minimum required effort and energy). You need to help stakeholders clarify where they want to go and what it will take to get there. Only then are you in the position to recognize efficient and effective alternatives. Fortunately, you can satisfy the drive to take immediate action to remedy a problem, and still stay on the road of effectiveness and efficiency. You do this by clearly defining the decisions to be made, understanding the relevant questions to answer to make those decisions, and gathering the required information to make sound decisions. The strategic alignment process rests on this premise.

A third common stakeholder assumption is that the training department can only help with training. Some stakeholders may assume that your areas of expertise are purely in how to produce learning products or facilitate workshops. This stems from outdated practices in the field that have isolated learning and development from organizational realities and workforce challenges. As you establish yourself as a strategic partner through a demonstrable track record of delivering organizational results, this will change. At first, however, you will want to adopt a consultative problem-solving approach that helps stakeholders use critical thinking to better define key issues and appropriate solutions. You will earn credibility for understanding broader organizational issues and helping stakeholders select solutions that deliver results.

Factors Influencing Stakeholders Expectations

Stakeholders tend to come with their own interests. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they harbor a hidden agenda. Rather, it means that given different positions in relation to the problems or opportunities that need to be addressed, they may share some priorities with organizational members and disagree on others based on their definition of value.

The concept of value in organizational settings is variable, but can be understood as something that has potential worth to stakeholders (Harrison and Wicks 2013; Kaplan and Norton 2004; Lukac and Frazier 2012). Perspectives of worth can vary, but also work together synergistically. For example, Glaveli and Karassavidou (2011) demonstrated how a manager may value effectiveness while employees may value job satisfaction, but these values are cohesive and realized in value to customers (for example, loyalty or perceptions of quality) and to organizational goals (for example, profitability). These various value preferences are often based on perception (Barney and Wright 1998) and derived from the “transactions, relationships and interactions,” which influence perception of value (Harrison and Wicks 2013).

Others may take a contrasting approach, which Harrison, Bosse, and Phillips (2010) refer to as “satisficers.” Satisficers take a passive approach to value creation by offering products that are based on assumptions about organizational needs or based on indirect or anecdotal evidence that informs which products are useful. Here, prioritized attention isn’t given to proactive value creation, and, as such, opportunities for value creation go undetected. Creating strategic value for the L&D function is then the process of seeking requirements for shared value, identifying where those opportunities lie, and making ongoing adjustments to evolve strategically valuable and synergistic relationships.

With such variances in how stakeholders can interpret value, you can better understand how they define value through the choices they make: “We know from the basics of markets that people will tend to make choices that provide them the most value for what value they give up” (Harrison and Wicks 2013). With this understanding, a reasonable goal for learning and development is to provide “a highly positive ratio between the utility received and the value given up” (Harrison and Wicks 2013), or greatest value at the lowest cost (Tosti 2001; Bahlis 2006).

The perpetual pull between unique and shared priorities is influenced by a variety of organizational and individual factors. As illustrated in Figure 3-2, these factors include organizational politics, mandates, wants, needs, fear, culture, past experiences, and a variety of cognitive biases, some of which were described in the previous chapter.

Balancing stakeholder expectations requires assessing, weighing, and addressing the sometimes competing claims of those who have a stake on a specific organizational improvement initiative and the organization’s success as a whole. Finding an appropriate balance is important because you—and the organization—don’t have the resources to do everything for everyone all the time. As mentioned, the appropriate allocation of resources is a top concern for stakeholders and part of managing an organization is finding a way to “share” rather than “compete” for resources.

Balancing stakeholder expectations can be interpreted as institutional sharing, and sharing is one of the classic signs of prosocial behavior that leads to cooperation and survival of individuals and groups. This cooperation can result in the more efficient deployment of resources in the long run and a reduction in conflict among individuals and groups. You can play a central role in setting up the systems and mechanisms that support a culture of shared expectations and rewards. Therefore, you must apply a thoughtful and effective set of methods to understand the range of expectations that have to be met and how to balance expectations and benefits for the organization and its stakeholders. As a matter of legitimacy and credibility, if you don’t regularly meet the expectations of your stakeholder groups, you will lose the confidence and support of the very people you are trying to help.

The rest of this chapter provides you with specific guidance as we follow Kai applying this consultative problem-solving approach by documenting, weighing, and aligning stakeholder expectations.

Scheduling a Discovery Meeting

Setting up a discovery meeting allows you to learn about what prompted the request for help from the L&D team. It is likely your first meeting with the project sponsor and your first opportunity to gain an understanding of the performance issue, its context, and the sponsor’s performance expectations.

As discussed in chapter 1, asking the right questions is important in any situation. It is particularly important to begin the strategic alignment process with the right questions, because the answer will influence the direction of your efforts. Some of the overarching questions that guide these types of initial discussions include:

•   What evidence of success (tangible result) would you expect to see once this solution is implemented?

•   Why is that result important?

•   Who else would see the result as important?

•   How would that help the organization get closer to its objectives?

•   What seems to be driving or sustaining the issue?

•   How robust are your sources?

•   What other options have you considered or already tried?

•   Why this solution rather than other options?

•   Why is it important to address these issues now?

•   What are some risks associated with these solutions?

It is important to use language that is appropriate to your stakeholders and engage them in a natural dialogue. The discovery meeting is not an interrogation. Different stakeholders will gain different insights from different questions, which will influence their thinking, logic, and way forward. As you continue practicing and gaining experience, you will find the best combination of questions for each stakeholder. As you gain a track record and reputation for helping deliver results, you will also gain more influence and commitment to “getting the facts” before jumping to solutions. This will significantly contribute to reducing wasted time, disgruntled staff, disloyal customers, and other negative results.

Stakeholders may be accustomed to reaching out to the L&D team to request training as their go-to solution without a second thought as to whether it will fix whatever issue they want resolved. A meeting that delves into questions about performance needs may not have been part of the organizational culture in the past. While it may take some adjustment, this is your opportunity to begin changing the paradigm about what products and services your team can offer to support performance in the organization. In time, you and your stakeholders will have a closer consultative relationship focused on strategic decision making that delivers performance results, rather than a strict transactional relationship focused solely on the delivery of a learning service or product, such as a training solution.

To better understand the needs, and what root causes are sustaining them, you must look at organizations as a system. From a system perspective, much of the organizational challenges the requestor is experiencing are driven by circular patterns that are probably invisible. This means that you want to ask questions to help understand the facts, underlying concepts and assumptions, the soundness of the logic of the request, and the desired outcomes, according to the requestor’s expectations. Many of these answers will lead you to system issues, and you want to be able to follow up with system-related questions that focus on evidence and relationships between various issues and concerns. You can use questions within a specific focus area to understand the performance problem or opportunity, its context or environment, and performance expectations; then you can begin to make strategic connections to organizational objectives.

The discovery meeting is for establishing a strategic business partnership with the requestor. As you begin to establish this partnership, you also want to verify your notes about who the key stakeholders are and what the requestor sees as their stake and role in these efforts. Consider using the stakeholder mapping tool in the appendix to help guide the discussion about the relative influence and importance of each of these stakeholders.

You will want to define a general approach for engaging these other stakeholders, including whom to contact, when, and how. Defining this stakeholder engagement plan may extend beyond the initial discovery meeting, but the task should be introduced before it concludes as an important next step. This will mark an important start to your partnership with the requestor, as you begin to collaboratively plan how to engage other key individuals and gain their support for proceeding with this important effort. As you continue in this phase, you will also collect information from those individuals to completely understand their wants, perceived issues, challenges, and other relevant information to align the various expectations.

As you embark on the strategic alignment process, you need to ensure you have commitment from the project sponsor in planning, implementing, and sustaining your efforts. If you do not have commitment, you have no tangible connection to the goal or to the strategic alignment efforts. It is important for you and the requestor to clarify the shared and valued goals of the strategic alignment process and approach, as well as anticipate some of the potential obstacles and steps that should be taken to overcome them. This way, you can begin to develop a collaborative relationship that will keep the process moving forward, even in the face of challenges.

Just as with Kai, your approach to addressing the performance problem with the requestor may be slightly different from what you and the requestor are accustomed to. Your prior working relationship with the requestor may not have included an analysis, discussion, and collaborative decision of the appropriate solution. To facilitate this change in the way you do business with the requestor, you want to consider what you can do to facilitate a commitment for change in your problem-solution approach. Here are some general items to consider:

•   Develop and foster trusting working relationships.

•   Share risks, responsibilities, and rewards.

•   Facilitate a culture of cross-functional, interteam collaborative practice.

•   Anticipate potential challenges and specific steps to overcome them.

Discovering Issues From the Perspectives of Others

You should enlist the help of the requestor to further refine your stakeholder map and define an approach for involving stakeholders appropriately. Assuming you have obtained commitment from the requestor, you will collaboratively develop a plan that defines whom you will contact, when, and how.

This involves developing and fostering a partnership with those who will have the greatest probability to affect or be affected by the L&D decisions. Establishing a partnership with them entails gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of these stressors and conveying that their contributions are valued and required for the success of your efforts. These stakeholders want to know you are working with them and taking their needs into consideration when finding appropriate solutions to address current organizational needs. This can be a delicate path to walk because stakeholder vantage points can vary, which can influence the apparent priorities. You want to listen to them, and assure them that this information will be considered, without promising that all of their initial requests will be met. Therefore, it is important that you do not make promises you cannot keep, or you risk losing their trust, as well as your credibility and influence to support change within the organization.

For example, when speaking with staff, their perspective may focus on how the change will affect them and what it means to their jobs. Their expectations might have to do primarily with how to improve their circumstances. They may not readily or clearly know the connections between their expectations of performance and support, and the organization’s objectives, resources, and policies. As you progress through the various phases of the strategic alignment process, your job will include facilitating awareness of these connections to help them understand organizational realities, which will allow them to begin to manage their own expectations.

Validate Project Request With Others

Checking multiple sources helps you validate the information you have received from the requestor. Using multiple sources to make decisions will reduce possible unintended biases that may come from a single source, and in turn help you bolster your confidence with defining the problem and discussions about potential alternatives. To corroborate the original request, you should compare the responses of others to the same general questions you asked the original requestor in the discovery meeting. The focus now is on gaining an understanding of others’ perceptions of performance, specifically:

•   What do others perceive as the performance problem or opportunity?

•   What are the perceptions of others with regard to the context of the performance problem or opportunity?

•   What are others’ expectations of performance?

•   What do others perceive as the connection between their expectations of performance and the organization’s objectives?

Gathering and validating information from others is best conducted through face-to-face methods, particularly in situations in which validating L&D solutions has not been the norm. By meeting face-to-face, you can demonstrate the changing paradigm and bolster your efforts to develop and encourage the support of group decisions regarding performance improvement solution and delivery. Face-to-face is preferred because it gives you greater access to stakeholder information. For instance, being in front of the interviewee is likely to allow you to make stronger connections with stakeholders. It also gives you access to verbal and nonverbal cues, which allows you more flexibility to follow up on critical pieces of information more efficiently and effectively. Face-to-face interviews may give the interviewee a greater sense of trust in anonymity and therefore lead them to open up more.

Phone and Internet-supported interviews can have many of the same benefits as face-to-face, especially if you are using the video conferencing options. They can be more time and cost-effective than face-to-face, but you do lose a bit of that personal connection that can be more easily obtained from physical proximity. However, phone and Internet-supported communication is so ubiquitous today that for many people, it feels quite comfortable and natural.

Email or instant messaging would be best used as methods for following up on additional questions or to confirm information, rather than to hold an entire interview. They provide you with relatively quick responses, are immediately documented, and can be quickly reviewed for reference.

To ensure consistency, you should use the same questions and apply the same techniques (using business language, listening skills, system thinking) that you used in the discovery meeting. Remember that part of the reason you are gathering the perceptions of others is to ultimately align the expectations of multiple stakeholders, so you want to be able to compare the responses of various parties.

As in Kai’s situation, some of these interviews may lead to new information that you didn’t have from the requestor. This presents the opportunity to update your questions, and confirm the information with other stakeholders, and later with the requestor as well. The key is to triangulate sources of information on the important potential issues, challenges, and performance drivers. The better you can triangulate information, the more confidence you can have in the accuracy of the information.

To help you synthesize the information collected, you can use a calibration matrix (Table 3-4). This will allow you to summarize the information into categories and to better illustrate the level of alignment among them.

Gain Commitment From Others

Because this approach to building strategic partnerships with your stakeholders may be new to your organization, it is critical that you take the lead in gaining commitment from all stakeholders to ensure the process is adopted and others are engaged. This requires a consultative approach and close collaboration between you and the stakeholders. As such, you are not really “providing” solutions, as much as creating positive change together. A commitment to work together is critical. Some ways to gain this commitment are presented in the following sections.

Discuss the Collaboration Opportunities

A collaborative approach to your work is essential to shaping the expectations and accountabilities of L&D decisions. This approach also bolsters cross-functional relationship building and improves others’ perceptions of you as a strategically valuable business partner. Be clear about their role in these collaboration opportunities, and what specifically can be expected of them, so they understand what they are committing to and can prepare accordingly.

Describe the Strategic Alignment Objectives and Process

Your description of the purpose and value of the strategic alignment approach, as well as what it entails and how others are involved helps your stakeholders understand what to expect from you and what you expect from others. This also communicates how working together to address the performance problem or opportunity is a joint effort with everyone sharing input and accountability.

Negotiate Communication Plans

Your communication plan describes how each stakeholder is engaged in the process. It is important to uncover the stakeholder’s point of view in communication; for example, availabilities, access to communication methods, and roles and responsibilities.

Identify Potential Drivers and Barriers

The analysis, design, implementation, and tracking of results will be influenced by both drivers and barriers. Drivers are those factors that help facilitate successful execution of each stage. Barriers are those factors that may impede successful execution of each stage. When identifying potential drivers and barriers, consider the following:

•   expectations

•   feedback

•   tools and resources

•   consequences

•   incentives

•   skills and knowledge

•   selection and assignment

•   motives

•   preferences

•   management

•   culture and environment.

Aligning Stakeholder Expectations

Now that you have gathered the perspectives of your original requestor and other stakeholders, you need to synthesize these perspectives while maintaining and balancing the best interests of the business and each stakeholder. The following questions will help you interpret the information you collect in your calibration matrix across the various sources:

•   Is there consensus among the various stakeholders about the problem or opportunity to be addressed? If not, why?

•   Is there consensus about the magnitude of the problem or opportunity?

•   Is there consensus about who will be affected by the chosen solution?

•   Does everyone share an understanding of the business goal being addressed?

•   How consistent are performance expectations?

•   How clear are the performance expectations?

•   Is there agreement that a skill gap exists?

•   If not a skill gap, is there agreement to explore noninstructional solutions?

When synthesizing the perspectives, you will consider and weigh the credibility of the information provided to you. Specifically, you will analyze the relevancy, reliability, validity, and thoroughness of the information:

•   Relevant: The information provided is directly related to the performance problem or opportunity.

•   Reliable: The information provided is measurable, trustworthy, and consistent (rule of thumb: three or more sources to corroborate the information).

•   Valid: The information is based on logic or fact and considers other plausbile factors, causes, or relationships.

•   Thorough: The information does not omit important elements, as available.

Place a check mark next to each criterion that estimates the credibility of the information you are receiving from each stakeholder. Use the results of this assessment to help you assign appropriate weights to competing information. Table 3-5 gives an example. Your responses may reveal that not everyone has consistent views about the key issues and what results are most important. In addition to using the matrix above for comparing stakeholder perceptions and expectations, you can also use the information you have collected to map your initial understanding of the issues or opportunities.

Mapping Performance Issues Within the System

Chapter 2 introduced four levels of alignment. You now have a wealth of information about how stakeholders see the major problems, barriers, and success drivers. You can begin to depict apparent relationships among the various issues and problems expressed by stakeholders. At what level are the problems most pressingly observed or felt? Are they primarily concerned with knowledge and skill requirements? Are the central issues or opportunities primarily focused on the work outputs and requirements? Do they affect the organization and cut across specific groups of employees, functions, or departments? Are there significant problems or opportunities related to external clients and society?

From a living system perspective, systems are nested and interconnected, where problems, symptoms, and root causes are all interconnected in some way. Likewise, change can be achieved by pushing simultaneously at different levels. Still, stakeholders will have helped you establish some boundaries for your work.

It is important to note, however, that it is doubtful that you can map your organizational system perfectly. Rather, this exercise can help you to conceptualize the change implications and allow a shared understanding to emerge from stakeholder engagement and discussion about the system map. The truth is that many system mapping exercises are inherently limited and should not distract from thoughtful action and ongoing learning. As a result, some system maps are deliberately high-level abstractions that identify the principle components and relationships in a system, but are intended to act as a basis for discussion rather than a complete description of reality; this contrasts with other system maps that are incredibly detailed and attempt to describe the system and its operations.

While we recommend that you complete this exercise on your own to help you synthesize the initial information about stakeholder perceptions, you may want to use this type of mapping activity as a framework for presenting your preliminary findings during your follow-up meeting with the core stakeholder group.

As you map some of the issues onto the levels, consider adding specific information about where stakeholders’ perspectives seem to lie, to help anticipate what to expect when you have follow-up meetings to select the alignment level. You can use this information as well as the stakeholder mapping information to understand the perceptions, priorities, and expectations of your stakeholders, and in turn, be more effective in influencing them.

Just as documenting stakeholder responses in the alignment mapping tool facilitated Kai’s big-picture view of the problem and opportunities, you now need to decide where the performance issues fall within the system. Use your best judgment here-be cautious about counting the number of occurrences in each level, but rather look for the potential synergy of the parts that are working together to influence performance. The level at which you select to intervene will become your focal point for solution selection later in the process. You will still account for the organization’s response at all levels, but start here when thinking through the solutions most closely tied to the problem.

Selecting the Alignment Level

When you are comfortable with the utility and clarity of the completed alignment map and have a good idea of the level of alignment that you would recommend, it’s time to facilitate a dialogue about the information you have gathered and where the main issues are with your key stakeholders. You will not necessarily meet with everyone you interviewed, but you will meet with a core group that has clear decision-making authority for your efforts. (The initial requestor should help you identify this group.) You do not have to identify who said what, but share the preliminary information about where issues seem to lie within the organization. The goal is to walk away from this conversation with an agreement about the focus and expected results of the alignment efforts, and their commitment to support the process.

Use the information you have and consider the most appropriate alignment level. It is often very useful to use the preliminary alignment map to present your interpretations and generate discussion among the core stakeholder group. Remember that these levels are part of one organizational system, and in reality the perceived organizational issues or opportunities cut across these levels. When working with clients, we recommend always aligning efforts to value-add results, because that is what organizations exist to do—they exist to meet societal needs. To the extent that your focus and energy is on meeting the ultimate needs of the organization’s clients and beneficiaries, you can broaden your view and focus on true strategic priorities, and in turn increase your range of options for how best to get there. The more focused you are on the lower levels of alignment without clearly understanding their relationship to the higher levels of alignment and results, the greater your risk of failure.

We understand, however, that it can be challenging to gain commitment from some of the organizational partners to incorporate alignment of their L&D initiative to strategic value-add level. Use the alignment level selection considerations in Table 3-6 to help clarify the purpose, benefits, risks, and potential impact of either incorporating or ignoring each level. This table provides considerations you can use to help make the decision about how to align your work from this point forward. You can make a selection using the information you gathered from your stakeholders to determine what level the symptoms are present in, and to which level stakeholders have expressed commitment. It will be important to engage your stakeholders to reach agreement on the selected alignment focus—why the approach is the most suitable to the problem, how it may be carried out, and the roles and expectations of your stakeholders going forward.

Discuss how the alignment levels are connected with your stakeholders. For example, if alignment to employee outputs is selected as the primary focus, continue the discussion to establish the connections to specific organizational objectives and priorities, and thus, external value to clients. Your stakeholders may choose to formally exclude some of the higher levels, but it is your responsibility to explain the risks and failure scenarios.

The alignment choice made here will direct your workflow for the remaining steps, so this choice is important; as such it will involve both you and your stakeholders. A follow-up meeting after you have integrated the various stakeholder expectations and map the presenting symptoms according to the various vantage points is an effective way to discuss key issues and agree on the alignment level and way forward.

Gaining Commitment on Direction, Scope, and Approach

Partnerships with key stakeholders require formal agreements on specific steps to be taken to address shared needs. A clear plan should include who is responsible for doing what and when, as well as how to establish clear accountabilities. As you finalize your efforts in this expectation alignment phase, complete the following tasks with your stakeholders:

•   Describe the rationale for alignment to others.

        Offer support to communicate why alignment is best given the perspectives and criteria as you know them today.

        Describe the features of the alignment level selected:

–   purpose

–   benefits (anticipated and realized)

–   risks (anticipated and mitigated)

–   costs (anticipated, tangible, intangible)

–   impact potential.

•   Describe the process for the selected alignment level.

        How long do you anticipate it will take to carry out?

        What project roles and responsibilities will be required to carry out the selected alignment level?

•   Negotiate and confirm the communication plan for the process from this point forward.

•   Discuss and clarify expectations of success upon successfully completing the strategic alignment process. (Depending on whether you are an internal or external consultant, this can include full implementation and evaluation of the selected L&D initiatives.)

        specific results

        preliminary performance indicators (which will be updated in the alignment of results phase).

Align Expectations Checklist

Use this checklist to ensure you have covered all elements necessary for successful alignment of stakeholder expectations.