Leadership Team Alignment

Leadership teams establish the conditions that enable sustainable high performance in their organizations. Thus, they are accountable for setting clear direction, staying the course, and consistently supporting expectations.

Clearly, alignment among leadership team members is essential to execution and morale. Alignment is critical when the leadership team meets as a group — and especially when they are acting as individuals, so people experience the same message.

Is Your Leadership Team Aligned?

An aligned leadership team has its act together. Its members are consistent about the organization’s goals, what people must do to attain them, what success will look like, how they will measure it, and what leading indicators will show if they are on track.

People see and hear this alignment in meetings and communications, strongly affirming the leadership team’s credibility and intent. Employees respect and trust leaders when they are aligned. People feel confidence in them, and are motivated to do their best.

Symptoms of Misalignment Are Painfully Obvious

But leadership team alignment is more easily described than achieved. Team members are often seasoned veterans who have different experiences and styles. Moreover, they typically have significant accountability for ensuring that their part of the organization hits its goals.

Consensus can be elusive among leaders who have typically advanced because they are so good at acting independently, rather than interdependently. The result is that misaligned leadership teams are commonplace — and that’s where the trouble starts.

People sense a misaligned leadership team immediately: they hear conflicting messages, see uncertain assignments, and get different stories from different leaders. The grumbling begins: “Our leaders aren’t on the same page… they don’t know what they’re doing… Sales says this, Finance says that, and HR says something else.” Such talk is a warning sign: the leadership team’s misalignment is impeding the initiatives they are trying to execute.

And there is deeper damage: The inconsistent words and actions hurt the leadership team’s credibility and shake the organization’s confidence and trust. The result is churn, with employees losing time to confusion, uncertainty, frustration, and speculation.

CLG Can Help Align Your Leadership Team—Quickly

What does your team seek to achieve, and why? What will success look like? Alignment takes various forms, depending on your situation:

• Aligning on the problem or opportunity — reaching consensus on your team’s vision of the desired results. There may be competing opportunities, or an opportunity may have multiple facets. We help your team clarify its target.
• Aligning on the case for change — reaching agreement on the benefits to the organization and the resources to achieve them. We help your team analyze and distill a lucid case for change that communicates clearly to everyone.
• Aligning on a strategic decisions and its execution — reaching consensus on how to execute strategy is often the hardest task. We help your team create a behavior-based implementation roadmap that clearly shows who needs to perform the most critical behaviors for each step on the timeline.
• Aligning on priorities — attaining agreement on which efforts to pursue, and in what sequence, in the current business climate. We worked with a Fortune 100 that had over 300 strategies and initiatives in place. We helped their leadership team refine their list to 30, and then consolidate these to four strategic intents that led to outstanding total shareholder return. Once your leaders are aligned, we help them develop engaging communications to start of workforce alignment.

In each situation, CLG helps you identify new behaviors needed to achieve results, define the metrics (leading indicators) that will measure success, specify leadership requirements, and draw the roadmap to reach your goal. Whatever your scenario, we will create a program tailored to your team’s unique needs.

Other Support to Alignment

Once your leadership team is aligned and prepared to deliver consistent key messages, we can support them by assisting with cascaded alignment sessions. Sometimes these are a series of meetings, or sometimes we engage all managers in a “turbo session” to accelerate alignment.

CLG’s alignment sessions produce concrete outcomes:

• Setting manager-level goals that clearly support the initiative, checked cross-functionally to prevent competing goals among teams
• Identifying key performers and exactly what they must do
• Identifying leaders’ behaviors needed to support key performers
• Identifying metrics for monitoring the progress of the key performers and business outcomes
• Documenting agreements in performance plans

Sessions are designed to promote employee commitment to the initiative, and prepare leaders to communicate clearly to their teams down to the front line. We then follow up by coaching your leaders to secure alignment throughout the workforce.