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Last week, I was working with a leadership team that had been talking about the kind of team they wanted to become: more collective, more unified and, inevitably, more aligned.
One of the leaders challenged the group:
"Hang on... Is that actually realistic?"
At the end of the day, he reflected, we're still individual leaders, responsible for different teams with their own expertise and outcomes to deliver. Surely we can’t always be aligned?
Rather than answer the question, I held it there for a moment. And someone else in the room offered what I think was the beginning of the answer:
"Alignment doesn't necessarily mean agreement."
That prompted a much more interesting conversation.
It also got me thinking: does 'alignment' have a brand problem?
We use the word constantly in leadership teams, but I'm not sure we're always clear what we mean by it.
Sometimes it seems to mean consensus: we keep talking until everybody agrees. Sometimes it means the opposite: the senior leader makes the call and everyone else is expected to get ‘on the bus’.
But neither paints quite the right picture.
I think genuine alignment requires a team to do almost the opposite of smoothing over its differences.
It requires the team to surface them.
Different leaders will inevitably see different things. They have different expertise, responsibilities, information and pressures. One person's priority will sometimes cut across another's. What one part of the organisation needs may create a cost somewhere else.
Those differences aren't necessarily evidence of poor alignment. Often, they're simply evidence of organisational complexity.
And one of the leadership team's most important jobs is to integrate those differences into coherent enterprise choices.
Because if the team doesn't do that work, the differences sure as heck don't disappear.
They simply reappear elsewhere in the organisation - in execution, resource decisions, mixed messages, competing priorities, or conversations happening in corridors that should have happened around the executive table.
The work of alignment, as I see it, is the collective work of reconciling the differences that matter.
Not by making those differences disappear, but by making explicit choices about what we're going to do about them.
What are we actually seeing differently here? What tensions or trade-offs does that create? Which of those matter at the enterprise level? And what are we going to do about them?
That doesn't mean everyone has to walk out believing exactly the same thing.
You might still believe Option A was the better option even after the team has chosen Option B. But if the discussion has been genuine, the competing considerations have been surfaced and the team has made an explicit enterprise choice, something important changes:
The commitment that leaves the room is ours.
We back it. We resource it. And we make sure the conversations and decisions within our own parts of the organisation are consistent with it.
Perhaps that's the distinction:
Alignment isn't seeing the same thing. It's deciding together what we're going to do about the different things we see.
And that suggests a practical place to start.
The next time your leadership team finds itself trying to ‘get aligned’, resist the temptation to ask immediately: "So, are we all aligned?"
Try asking instead:
"Where do we genuinely see things differently - or have competing needs?”
And then:
"What, if anything, do we need to decide together as a result?"
You may find that difference doesn’t prevent alignment. It might just be where the real work of alignment begins.
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I write these pieces not only in the hope they're useful, but also because writing them helps me refine my own point of view about the nature and practice of truly integrated leadership teams.
It helps me put a stake in the ground, test it against experience and research, and see where the argument holds - and where it doesn't.
And so, I'm interested in your experience too.
When people talk about "alignment" in your organisation, what do they actually mean? And how do they achieve it?
I can't promise we'll agree. But then perhaps that's the point.
Until next time,
Simon
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