Ways to Foster Team Alignment With Company Vision

Helping your team identify their core values is essential for building a strong, cohesive, and aligned group. Here's how I've done it based on my experience: 1. Open Discussions: Start by having open and honest conversations with your team. Ask questions like: "What matters most to us as a team?" and "What principles should guide our actions?" 2. List Common Themes: Encourage your team to share their thoughts and ideas. As they speak, jot down common themes or recurring words that come up. This helps identify potential core values. 3. Prioritize Values: Once you have a list, ask your team to prioritize the values they believe are most important. You can use a voting system or a ranking exercise to do this. 4. Discuss Scenarios: To make values more tangible, discuss real-life scenarios where these values come into play. For example, if "Integrity" is a potential value, talk about situations that require ethical decisions. 5. Craft Statements: Work together to craft clear and concise statements for each core value. These statements should describe what the value means to your team. 6. Feedback and Refinement: Share the draft core values with your team for feedback. Be open to refining and clarifying the statements based on their input. 7. Finalize and Communicate: Once everyone is on the same page, finalize your team's core values. Make sure they are easy to understand and remember. Communicate them to the entire team. 8. Incorporate into Daily Work: Integrate these core values into your team's daily work. Discuss how they can guide decision-making and behavior. 9. Lead by Example: As a leader, embody these core values in your actions. Your behavior sets the tone for the team. 10. Regularly Revisit: Core values may evolve over time. Schedule periodic check-ins to ensure they still resonate with your team's identity and objectives. 11. Celebrate Values in Action: Recognize and celebrate when team members exemplify these core values. It reinforces their importance. 12. Address Misalignment: If conflicts arise or behavior doesn't align with your core values, address it promptly and use the values as a guide for resolution. Identifying core values is a collaborative process that requires ongoing commitment. By involving your team and consistently integrating these values into your work, you'll foster a culture that reflects your shared beliefs and principles. This can lead to better teamwork, decision-making, and overall team satisfaction.

I was asked in an interview recently how do you build culture in an organization. My thoughts. 1. Align Culture with Organizational Strategy • Define the Desired Culture: Start by identifying the behaviors, mindsets, and attitudes that will support your organization’s strategic objectives. • Communicate the “Why”: Ensure employees understand how cultural values connect to the company’s purpose and success. Clear messaging from leadership about how behaviors tie to business outcomes is crucial. 2. Embed Values into Everyday Practices • Recruitment and Onboarding: Hire people whose values align with the organization’s. Reinforce cultural expectations from day one. • Performance Management: Build values into goal-setting, feedback, and evaluation processes. Recognize and reward employees who exemplify the desired culture. • Leadership Modeling: Leaders must embody the culture in their actions, decisions, and communication. Culture flows from the top down. 3. Build Systems that Reinforce Culture • Recognition Programs: Celebrate employees who demonstrate behaviors aligned with company values — not just top performers but also those who uphold integrity, innovation, or teamwork. • Training and Development: Provide learning opportunities that reinforce cultural values. For example, if adaptability is key, offer change management workshops. • Policies and Processes: Ensure HR practices (e.g., promotion, performance reviews, and rewards) reinforce the desired culture. 4. Empower Employees to Drive Culture • Culture Champions: Identify and empower employees across levels to model and promote cultural behaviors. • Employee-Led Initiatives: Create space for employees to suggest ideas that align with the organization’s values 5. Reinforce Culture Through Communication • Storytelling: Share real examples of employees living the culture in newsletters, meetings, or company-wide platforms. • Rituals and Routines: Develop meaningful traditions that reinforce values. 6. Measure and Evolve the Culture • Employee Feedback: Regularly gather input through engagement surveys, focus groups, or one-on-ones to assess cultural alignment. • Track Cultural Metrics: Use data like retention rates, (eNPS), and performance outcomes to measure cultural success. • Adapt as Needed: Culture isn’t static. Reassess as business strategies evolve to ensure alignment. Key Takeaway: An amazing culture is built when values are embedded into how the organization operates — from hiring to leadership behavior, performance management, and recognition. When culture directly supports strategy, it becomes a driving force for employee engagement, retention, and business success.

When I joined Khan Academy, we were just four people in a small office, united by a vision of bringing free education to everyone, everywhere. Over the years, we grew to hundreds of employees, reaching over 100 million students worldwide. This exponential growth brought a significant challenge: how do you scale a team without losing the culture and values that made the organization special? The most crucial lesson I learned was that culture doesn't scale automatically - it demands constant attention and effort. The best way I found to attend to culture was to treat your culture like a product. You have to design it. As we grew, it became increasingly important to consider how to help team members learn about and carry the culture forward. Here are three strategies that helped us maintain our culture during rapid growth: 1. Over-communicate the Mission and the Principles that Guide it: As our team grew, we doubled down on ensuring everyone felt connected to our mission and understood our principles. Three of the most important principles were to focus on the student, Always be learning, and deliver exceptional ROI for donors. We regularly shared stories of how our work impacted students' lives, and what we learned from failures and successes, and calculated the number of learning minutes to keep the team aligned with our "why" and “how” and motivated by our shared purpose. 2. Create Rituals that Reinforce Values: We have meaningful rituals, such as starting meetings with student success stories and celebrating what teams learned, not just what they accomplished when we gave status updates. We also organized a yearly talent show and encouraged people to showcase new talents and skills. These practices served as constant reminders of our principles in action. 3. Adapt, but Stay True to Core Values: Growth necessitated changes in processes, tools, and communication methods. For example, we used to be able to share what we were learning during all-hands meetings, but at some point, it became impossible for each team to give an update. As part of our commitment to learning, we began to document our learnings and shared long-form asynchronous updates with everyone. We then shared summaries during all-hands meetings. Scaling a team while preserving its culture is challenging, and we weren’t always successful, either. But we were lucky that the team let us know when they thought we weren’t living up to the mission or principles and encouraged us to make changes.  It is achievable if you remain open to feedback and stay focused on core principles. What strategies have you employed to maintain culture as your team or organization grew?

Don’t mistake headcount for alignment. It’s one of the easiest traps leaders fall into. (Especially during rapid growth). You hire fast. You expand departments. You stack your org chart. And suddenly, you’ve got more people than ever… …but somehow, you’re moving slower. Here’s the hard truth: Adding people doesn’t mean you’re scaling. Alignment is what drives execution. Not more bodies. Not more meetings.  Not more dashboards. You can have 100 people in the company— But if they don’t understand the mission, the priorities, or each other, you’ll stall. So how do you create alignment while you grow? Here are a few places to start: 1. Repeat the mission until it’s second nature. Not just in onboarding. Weekly. Out loud. In writing. Until people can finish your sentence. 2. Define what success looks like—clearly. If people don’t know what “winning” means in their role, they’ll guess. And guesses rarely align. 3. Connect the dots between departments. Sales needs to know what ops is building. Customer success needs to know what marketing is promising. Transparency isn’t a luxury—it’s a requirement. 4. Prioritize clarity over speed. Slowing down to align your team will save you 10x the time later on when you’d be cleaning up confusion. 5. Don’t just communicate—check for understanding. Ask people to reflect the strategy back to you. Make sure they’re not just hearing you, but getting it. Scaling doesn’t mean adding more. It means getting everyone rowing in the same direction, at the same pace, for the same reason. Because growth without alignment? Is just noise.

We've spent years pushing for the concept of "better together", advocating for the importance of alignment across sales, product, and success. However, it's time to stop talking about "better together"; we all understand and get it. Let's do, "Together. Better." Especially today, when speed is essential and demanded in everything we do. Speed is seductive. It feels like progress. It looks like momentum. But without alignment, speed just creates motion sickness (OK, so maybe I'm still recovering from thinking about altitude sickness after a week in Peru). You get busy teams chasing goals that are aligned at the 30,000-foot level, but aren't aligned in where the work actually happens. There are unspoken and competing agendas. And fleeting and shallow wins that celebrate individual victories but not company wins. In the end, we're all left with mounting frustration that no one can quite name, but everyone feels. This is one of the hardest balancing acts in leadership: How do we move fast without breaking trust, clarity, or direction? How do we actually do "together, better?" The answer is not to slow down. It is to align more intentionally. More often. And more visibly. Alignment is not a kickoff slide or a mission statement. It is a discipline. A muscle. A shared drumbeat that keeps people running together, not just running. Because without alignment, speed scales confusion. With alignment, speed scales outcomes. My thoughts on three ways to lead with both speed and alignment: 🔹 Communicate decisions out loud. Assume nothing. Clarity compounds when leaders speak directly and often about what is changing and why. I've lost track of the number of times I thought something was communicated clearly, but realized I had been working on a concept for months and had only communicated it to the team for a few days. 🔹 Cascade purpose, not just tasks. When people understand the “why,” they can act faster and smarter without waiting for permission. Prioritize perspective over permission, which means sharing openly, broadly, and consistently enough context to create the perspective that lets people closest to the work make confident, bold, and faster decisions. 🔹 Check for drift. Build in rhythm to realign. Fast-moving teams need regular calibration. Without it, small gaps become big ones. At DISQO, our cross-departmental, recurring meetings are focused on ensuring continued alignment and providing colleagues with the opportunity to understand changes and collaborate on solving gaps together. Are you ready for "Together. Better?" #CreateTheFuture #LeadershipInAction #StrategicAlignment #HighVelocityTeams #LeadWithClarity #ExecutionExcellence #FutureOfLeadership #TeamPerformance #GTMLeadership #CultureOfExecution #ScaleWithPurpose #CustomerSuccessLeadership