“The moment I knew this leadership team wasn’t actually a team”

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Nine leaders, one strategy deck they all signed off on. I asked them to write the top three priorities separately and got fourteen answers, several contradicting each other. A field note on why friendly, talkative leadership teams still aren’t aligned.

The Alignment Problem That Friendliness Hides

The moment I knew this leadership team wasn’t actually a team came about twenty minutes into the first session.

I had asked each of them, separately, to write down the company’s top three priorities for the year. Simple exercise. Nine leaders, same company, the same strategy deck they had all signed off on in January.

I read the answers out loud with no names attached.

There were not three priorities in the room. There were closer to fourteen. A few of them quietly contradicted each other. The VP of Operations had written something the VP of Sales would have actively fought, and neither of them knew it yet.

Before that exercise, if you had asked this group how they were doing, they would have told you they communicated well. They liked each other. Meetings were friendly. Nobody was hiding anything on purpose.

They talked constantly. They had simply never agreed on where they were pointed.

The Gap Most Leadership Teams Miss

That is the gap I see most often, and it is almost never the one leaders come in worried about.

They worry about communication, about personality, about the one difficult director. Underneath, the leadership team is a set of departments that happen to share a building and a logo. Each one optimizing for its own number. Each one certain the others would back its read of the strategy.

A real leadership team can survive disagreement. What it cannot survive is nine people running nine slightly different plans while believing they are aligned.

We spent the rest of that day getting the actual priorities down to three. The real ones, with the tradeoffs named out loud and the conflicts settled in the room instead of in the hallway afterward.

The friendliness was never the problem. The shared direction was missing, and the friendliness had been doing a good job of hiding it.

A Question to Ponder

What is the clearest sign you have seen that a leadership team wasn’t as aligned as it thought?

“Accountability is the most overused word in operations”

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When a deadline slips, leaders reach for accountability. Most of the time the real gap is clarity — nobody agreed on what the target meant. A look at why execution stalls in the middle of the cascade, and what to fix first.

A deadline slips, and it shows up in the next leadership meeting like clockwork. We need more accountability. Hold people accountable. Build a culture of accountability.

Here’s what I notice when I actually sit with the team:

The person who missed the target usually couldn’t have told you, in one sentence, what hitting it looked like. The expectation lived in someone’s head at the top and never made it down intact. Put three directors in the same room and you’ll get three versions of the top priority — each one certain theirs is the real one.

You can’t hold someone to a target they were never given clearly

So the meeting calls for more follow-up, tighter check-ins, a new dashboard. Pressure goes up. The confusion stays exactly where it was. Effort rises, results don’t, and people start protecting themselves instead of doing the work — because the work keeps changing shape depending on who they ask.

Clarity has to come first

What does success look like, in plain language? When two priorities collide, which one wins? Who owns the call when the floor disagrees? Answer those three questions and most of what leaders label an accountability problem quietly disappears.

This is the part of the cascade most organizations skip. Vision gets set at the top. Execution gets demanded at the bottom. The alignment in the middle — where strategy becomes something a supervisor can actually act on — never happens. Then everyone wonders why execution stalls at the supervisor level.

At Blaze, this is where most of the early work lives. Before we talk about holding anyone accountable, we make the expectation clear enough to be held to.

A question to ponder: What percentage of your team could write down your top three priorities right now — and actually agree on them?

#ExecutionGap  #StrategyDeployment