Align While Away: Business Habits for Peace of Mind

With the passing of Memorial Day, summer has officially begun. The weather is heating up, the kids are finishing school, and the beach, lake, and pool beckon.

However, for leaders at growing businesses, the concept of taking a summer vacation may create more headaches than it eliminates. The responsibility of fighting fires constantly and worries about progress on critical initiatives can make it impossible to fully relax.

This situation is clearly unhealthy and unsustainable. A CEO unable to step back from the day-to-day of their business won’t be able to spend valuable time connecting with family, focusing on personal improvement and continuing education, or creating a long-term vision for their business and their life.

How can leaders manage to relax while still ensuring the continued functioning of their organization? The answer comes down to transparency and accountability!

This past week, the Align team was at 2019 Spring Scale Up Summit in Atlanta, a multi-day conference for leaders at growing mid-market companies. Attendees networked, listened to talks by management thought leaders, and brainstormed new initiatives to take back to their teams. The event also provided a rare in-person gathering of many Align users

In my conversations with our customers, I was struck by how many CEOs credited their team’s usage of Align with providing them the confidence to take time away from their company to be at the conference.  “A year ago, we would not have been able to take this trip. Align gave me the peace of mind to be here,” one CEO told me.

But how could business software create that elusive peace of mind? I’ve distilled it to three components of Align that any organization, whether using Align or not, can use to create the accountability and transparency that enables vacations and time away from the office.  

• Daily What’s Ups: We’ve written many times before on the benefits of regular daily huddles. Writing down daily tasks and progress gives team members the ability to check in on what everyone is working on without sending tons of emails. In just 5 minutes of reading, any employee can learn what work is being done that day, even in their absence.
• KPI Dashboard: Seeing a company’s KPIs and leading indicators in one easy to interpret dashboard makes evaluating organizational health fast and convenient.
• Priority Progress and Ownership: Assigning an owner to each strategic objective ensures that team members know who is accountable, even when managers are out of the office. Frameworks like the Functional and Process Accountability charts mean someone is always held responsible when issues arise and fewer problems require c-suite intervention.

While teams may be able to keep track of this information in google docs or across multiple systems, the convenience of a single software optimized to accomplish it all means less time spent tracking team performance and more time doing the things that really matter, like going to the beach with family!

As Hagerty Group CEO McKeel Hagerty recently told us from Destin, Florida, “As I sit here on vacation I’m pretty grateful that we put [Align’s planning tools] in place so that I can have this RNR here, and it too is part of the plan.”

If you’re using Align to check in with your team while traveling this summer, we’d love to see where! Post your photos on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter with the caption #AlignWhileAway and tag us (@aligntoday)! At the end of the summer we’ll publish them and give a special prize to the photo with the most likes!

If you’re not yet using Align, schedule a demo with an Advisor for to see how our tools can help you manage growth.