I was talking with a CEO recently “When I’m with the senior leadership team we feel aligned, but when we check back a few weeks later I’m always disappointed. They don’t seem to get it. I wish they were more aligned. What am I doing wrong?”
Alignment is one of those words that sounds unquestionably good. Every CEO wants it. Every leadership team talks about it. Yet I wonder whether we lean on the word too quickly.
👋 Hi I'm Mr Joe Leech, Trusted Advisor to CEOs, you might know me from my background in behavioural psychology.,
Alignment was a symptom, but it wasn’t the underlying problem. His team understood the strategy well enough. They could explain it, they agreed with it and they genuinely wanted it to succeed. The problem was that, once they returned to the business, everything around them encouraged the old way of working. The targets hadn’t changed, the incentives hadn’t changed, the meetings hadn’t changed and neither had the conversations that filled their calendars.
“Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it currently produces.” - W. Edwards Deming
That quote explains more than a lack of alignment ever could. If collaboration is the priority but executives are rewarded for their own division’s results, the system wins. If innovation is encouraged but blame is administered on failure, the system wins. If long-term thinking is celebrated while every meeting revolves around this quarter’s numbers, the system wins again. What we often describe as an alignment problem is really a system protecting itself.
When a CEO tells me their team isn’t aligned, I’m usually more interested in what the organisation rewards than what people say in the boardroom. Behaviour follows incentives far more reliably than any slide deck.
We need to stop treating alignment as the goal and see at a symptom of something more fundamental. Before asking whether your team understands the strategy, ask whether your organisation makes it easy to behave in line with it. If the answer is no, no amount of communication will solve the problem.
Let me know your thoughts, hit reply, I’d love to hear them.
Thank you and catch you next time,
PS: If this has resonated with you, please do reply or send this email on to someone else PPS: proudly containing typos, no AI was used in the writing of this email.
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