Never too late to align

Sometimes things don’t come out quite the way we would have liked. This is often true when work requires collaboration with other people.

Problems can come up midstream in the pursuit of an important goal because the other people you rely on for support typically won’t fully commit to things they don’t understand and also because you may not be fully aware of how others perceive priorities, capabilities or resource constraints — but you didn’t have time upfront to make sure you and the others shared a common perspective on the issues most relevant for your goal.

Spending time at the beginning of a process to validate your assumptions about what others believe helps a lot. But what if you are already well into your work plan? What if the beginning was long ago and you are in middle or later stages of implementing a plan?

There’s no better time to get aligned than ‘today’. You can’t make up for the lost opportunity, but you shouldn’t continue on a predictable path to mediocrity or failure due to inertia.

What’s keeping you from addressing your group alignment challenges today?