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Your company achieves Horizontal Alignment through an absolute commitment to your customers that pervades every aspect of your business and the way you meet customer requirements. You are horizontally aligned when your business processes (how you do what you do in the customer-value creating activities of your company) are designed to deliver what your customers care about most.
Horizontal alignment is not possible without vertical alignment. Indeed, getting your people and strategy aligned is the first requirement for achieving horizontal alignment. If you have achieved vertical alignment, congratulations; you are well on your way to a successful venture. Yet if you stop there, you have merely staged a corporate pep-rally unless you add the "horizontal stabilizer".
Horizontally aligned companies are different from others. They break down the traditional boundaries that between themselves and their customers by inviting them into their planning and execution deliberations. This suggests a different and deeper customer intimacy than many businesses seek. However, understanding what customers value, what they care about most, is only half the battle. The second half is the hard work of creating and delivering it.
Horizontally aligned firms excel at using cross-functional teams, representatives from each link in the value creation chain, in the planning, design and execution of business strategies.
"High employee turnover is often a symptom of horizontal misalignment," according to Fox Chase Bank CEO Tom Petro. "When the company's value-creating processes are not well honed, tremendous pressure is put on ordinary workers to accomplish extraordinary things. We call this 'individual heroics'". Each of us may be called upon to do something extraordinary to save a client or go above and beyond the call of duty to deliver a great result. Individual heroics may be occasionally warranted even in the best-aligned organizations. However, when such behavior is required as a normal way of operating because leadership has neglected the core value creating processes of the business one of two things will happen. Either employees will burnout and leave; or equally bad, they will become jaded with the attitude that if management does not care enough to fix the core business, why should they bother to care. Either outcome robs the company of life sustaining energy and slows the metabolism of the enterprise.
