Performance Through Alignment

THE key to unlocking organizational performance in your company is to ensure that everybody working there are aligned and pulling in the same direction. This was eloquently described by Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot co-founder) in his presentation on “employee vector alignment” (and just as we are inspired by Dharmesh on this topic, he actually took his inspiration from a conversation with Elon Musk). 

The idea can briefly be summed up as each employee is pulling the company in a given direction with a given force, and the company’s overall motion being determined by the sum of all these forces. If the directions of the pulls are not aligned the forward motion will be less than its potential.

As leaders we have many tools in our arsenal to ensure alignment:

• Goal setting framework (e.g. OKR)

• Driving alignment through a strong cooperative culture

• Frequent communication, e.g. all-hands meetings

• Regular team meetings

• Daily stand-up meetings

• … and many others

Today we would like to propose an additional tool that we find is a great complement to the existing methods, and sometimes even a substitute that can replace meetings and free up valuable time for deeper work.

The Weekly Reflection Framework

The Weekly Reflection hits a good compromise between frequency and effort, and crucially it does not take up calendar time from anybody.

The basic idea is that at the end of every week all members of a team writes down the following things:

• Highlights: 3-5 things that went well in the past week

• Lowlights: 3-5 things that did not go so well, importantly also include key risks that were identified during the week, or became especially pressing.

• Priorities for next week: 3-5 key things to accomplish next week

• Progress on this week’s priorities: The priorities for the week that were communicated in the previous week’s report get graded by coloring them: Green=done, Yellow=made progress, Red=no or little progress.

A great way of implementing this is to have a collaborative document shared by the team, where every team member type in their update in their designated section, followed by the team leader summarizing the overall messages for the week.

The leader of the team can now complete the Weekly Reflection adding higher level  alignment information:

• Mission/Vision/Purpose. Reinforce the guiding tenets of the company weekly

• How are we doing. This section contains the key 1-3 KPIs that best define the performance of the business. The fewer the better, ideally your team has selected a single North Star Metric.

• Top Priorities. Winning teams know that focus is key, this is where the leader highlights the 1-2 key focus areas right now.

• Company Roadmap. Show key milestones and projects for the next 3-6 months

• Leader Insights. This is where the leader summarizes key insights for the week, comprehending the input from the updates from the individual team members.

The final document will end up looking something like this:

(Feel free to use our template)

Drive Efficiency

Use the weekly reflection model to ruthlessly drive efficiency in your organization. Don’t add it as yet another process on top of what already exists. The reflection should take ~15 minute per team member, make sure you remove 5-10X or more of coordination and bureaucracy in return, e.g. canceling the daily standup, changing the team meeting form weekly to bi-weekly cadence, have a monthly all-hands meeting instead of a weekly one, etc. This makes more time available for deep async work. Ultimately allowing your team to create more and better output.

In addition to the time saved in your team’s calendars you get all the benefit of having everybody genuinely reflecting over how their week has been, and what’s key for the next one to be successful.

Implement with Writeflow

Using the weekly reflection approach is an awesome way to have a much better aligned team, with the added benefit of converting cumbersome sync activities (i.e. meetings) into a time-efficient and  reflective async writing process.

The challenge, however, is the complexity of coordinating the timely update of a document from a 5-10 contributors. Talk about herding cats!

This challenge is perfect for Writeflow! You can setup a flow in Writeflow that automatically:

1. Weekly prompts leader to ready this week’s doc

2. Asks all team members for their input, and keeps track of completion, with friendly reminders for those who fall behind

3. The back to the leader to sum up the week based on the input

4. Distribute the reflection once it’s finished, and save a PDF snapshot for posterity