If you want your company to perform, your leadership team has to align. It sounds simple, but misalignment at the top is one of the most underestimated threats to execution.
The Hidden Cost of Misalignment
In my experience, when leadership is even slightly out of sync, it causes ripple effects across the company. Priorities feel like they change weekly. Teams become reactive instead of strategic. And employees start to lose trust in the bigger picture.
This article from Forbes lays it out well: companies with aligned executive teams are 1.76x more likely to outperform their competitors. That’s not a minor lift. That’s the difference between outpacing your market or constantly playing catch-up.
Misalignment doesn’t always come with a warning sign. It often hides behind busy calendars, departmental KPIs, and polite agreement in strategy meetings. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll usually find that people aren’t quite rowing in the same direction.
Alignment Isn’t Agreement—It’s Execution
Alignment isn’t just about nodding along in a leadership meeting. It’s about turning strategy into action—consistently and clearly—across every level of the organization. When senior leaders are aligned, departments aren’t just coordinated, they’re collaborative. People aren’t duplicating work. Goals cascade down cleanly. Everyone knows what “success” means.
But getting there takes effort. It takes shared language, regular check-ins, and absolute clarity on what matters now—and what doesn’t.
One red flag? Strategy conversations that never make it past the leadership level. If your company priorities aren’t visible and actionable to frontline teams, they aren’t real priorities.
Questions Worth Asking
If you’re part of a leadership team, here are three questions to ask:
- Do we all agree on our top three priorities for this quarter?
- Do our teams understand why these are the focus?
- Are we reinforcing alignment in our day-to-day conversations?
And one more: What have we done in the last 30 days to make our priorities clearer?
Why It Matters Now More Than Ever
In a hybrid world where teams are distributed and communication is fractured, alignment isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. It keeps people focused, connected, and rowing in the same direction.
The best companies don’t just talk about alignment. They operationalize it. And in doing so, they set themselves up to move faster and smarter than the competition.