Unless you work entirely alone, alignment is a big deal. When you are well aligned with your company’s goals you are a more valuable employee. When you are well aligned with your manager they can keep you on the right track and be an ally against obstacles. When you are well aligned with your peers you can keep each other focused on the most important work.

On the other hand, when you have poor alignment you can see all sorts of problems. When teams are misaligned they can undermine each other’s efforts. When you are misaligned with your manager you can find yourself being over managed or left out to dry when things get rough. When you are not aligned with the goals of your organization you miss opportunities to demonstrate your skills and advance your career.

Alignment is such an important part of being successful in an organization that it’s important to understand what it looks like and regularly assess how healthy it is. If it starts to degrade, you should work to fix it, or you will find it gets harder and harder to be successful.

Ensuring good alignment with your manager is the most important. A good manager should help you find work that is rewarding, encourages development, and furthers the company’s goals. This is a hard job, and even the best manager in the world can’t do this if they don’t know what you enjoy and what your goals are. Make sure you are talking regularly with your manager and you have a good relationship. I can’t overstate how important it is to have a manager you trust that is helping you grow.

A manager that is honest with you when you’re doing poorly is also important. It’s impossible to grow without pushing yourself, and when you tackle new challenges it’s almost certain that you will make mistakes. If you don’t get negative feedback when you need it you can end up wasting a lot of time and energy, and ultimately damage your reputation.

In Vancouver / Canadian culture a lot of managers (myself included) find it difficult to deliver negative feedback, but the alternative is so much worse. A manager that doesn’t communicate honestly and candidly may seem like they are supporting you and agree with your direction. This is like wearing a fake seat belt; when things go bad you will have no protection.

If you have a manager that can’t give you guidance because they don’t understand what you’re doing, you need to make sure they at least agree with the choices you are making. Be very careful here though, as some managers will say they agree with you without really meaning it, especially when the choices are complicated. You have to have make sure they really understand what you are asking and the implications of it. If they aren’t invested in the decisions, they may not back them up when you need it.

Another challenging situation is when your manager is too far removed from your work to have an opinion about it. In these cases you have to depend on the other kinds of alignment and do your best to manage and sell yourself. This becomes more likely the higher up you go in an organization.

Good alignment with your organization’s goals is also important, but this is impossible without a culture that supports it. People at all levels of an organization have to make decisions every day, communicate with customers and partners, and are constantly representing the brand. You and everyone else should know what the organization is trying to achieve and how you are personally contributing to it. When everyone isn’t working in the same direction it is easier to have miscommunications and disputes between teams.

The best teams I’ve worked on update everyone with recurring company or department-level meetings. Even if some of the information isn’t immediately or personally relevant, it all still soaks into the subconscious. Even just the exercise of gathering and presenting to the broader audience is valuable; it forces team leaders to understand the value they provide and makes sure they are measuring and delivering it.

Some companies don’t see the value of keeping everyone informed. If that’s the case where you work, you will have to take matters into your own hands. At the very least, make sure you read the company emails. Ask questions when you can, and try to always understand the direction your company is going.

Even when you have good alignment with your manager and a clear understanding of the organization’s goals, you may sometimes find yourself under a manager that isn’t well aligned themselves. Even if you are a perfect employee, the success of your team will reflect on you, and the team won’t be seen as successful if it isn’t helping the organization. The teams that are doing the best from this point of view tend to have the best bonuses and the best growth opportunities.

It’s not always possible to control the team you work on, sometimes the only way to improve things is to leave your company entirely. Of course there are lots of factors that go into a decision like that… but if you don’t feel that you, your team, and your company are going in the same direction, or if you can’t tell, you should at least be aware that it could be hurting your opportunities to grow and advance.