Gaining Strategic Alignment: Making Scorecards Work
Bonnie VanCuran
Empire State College
Cost Accounting

Motivating employees to align their behavior with the organization's strategy and give their best efforts is one of the many challenges most senior management personnel face. Senior management may feel connected to the organization but many of the employees do not. Because these employees do not feel connected, over time they gradually stop caring, they stop aligning their behavior with organizational goals, they stop giving their best efforts and they stop fully communicating. For alignment to occur, Dr. Bob Frost, director of Measurement International, says that there are three things that need to happen: "People have to know about it, People have to care about it, and People have to be able to act on it." (p. 5). This is so very true. A company can not succeed if everyone is not on board. Without management’s support and consistency, employees’ commitment to quality will usually deteriorate, their individual objectives will take precedence, and their morale and productivity will diminish overtime. In order to be effective, the cascading strategy must start with top management and cascade downward "unifying direction for units and functions, teams, and ultimately individuals" (p. 6). The most critical step in the alignment process is tying performance measures to the strategic goals of the organization. The best way to do this is by using a balanced scorecard. Used for more than a decade as a strategic planning and management system for driving accountability for execution, the Balanced Scorecard creates a system of linked objectives, measures and targets, which collectively describe the strategy of an organization and how that strategy can be achieved. Individual departments can retain their individual priorities yet