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

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?