Identifying Misalignments

Organizations can end up misaligned in many ways. Your goal during your first 90 days should be to identify potential misalignments and then design a plan for correcting them. Common types of misalignment include the following:

Skills and strategy misalignment. Suppose you head an R&D group and your goal is to increase the number of new product ideas your team generates. However, your group does not understand the latest techniques and support tools that would let you run more experiments faster than before. In this case, your group s skills do not support its strategy.
Systems and strategy misalignment. Imagine that you lead a marketing group whose strategy is to focus on a new customer segment. If the group has not established an effective way to compile and analyze information about those customers, your group s systems fail to support its strategy.
Structure and systems misalignment. Suppose you manage a product development group whose members are organized by product line. The rationale for this structure is that it focuses specialized technical expertise on specific products. But this structure has a downside: The group does not have efficient systems for integrating the overlapping expertise of different product teams . The resulting mismatch between structure and systems would make it difficult for the entire group to perform optimally.