Leadership Team Alignment

Table Of Contents:

“A top management team is more than a collection of the organization’s senior-most executives – it’s a microcosm for the entire organization. How the top management team works together shapes how everyone in the organization works together, especially in challenging times.” – Lara Abrash, Chair/CEO, Deloitte & Touche, LLP

It seems like basic logic that the stronger and more aligned the leadership team is, the more aligned the rest of the organization will be. But with how quickly the business landscape changes, most experts agree that technological advancements, globalization, and economic instability can cause misalignments within leadership teams.

Corporate leadership teams are often composed of C-Level executives such as the CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, CTO, etc., but “leadership” can apply to any upper-level decision maker (in smaller companies, for example, leadership might be one person: the founder or CEO).

Leadership is responsible for clarifying and communicating the company vision, proposing the strategy to get there, executing that strategy, and ultimately making better decisions based on the outcomes of that execution so the business can grow.

However, this massive study of 25,000+ leaders worldwide revealed that only 42% think their organization’s leadership is high quality.

And this study revealed that only 28% of managers (over 4,000 surveyed) could list three of their firms’ top strategic goals.

This all points to widespread misalignment within leadership teams on a global scale.

In this seminal Harvard Business Review piece, the authors showed that even businesses that are seeing a decline in relevance can launch new and innovative initiatives when they realign themselves internally first and provide a practical roadmap for achieving leadership alignment.

The first step: find common ground.

Leadership Team Alignment: Vision

In the article just mentioned, the authors used Swisscom as an example. They were a multibillion-dollar company, but they’d stalled, and none of their 10 leadership team executives could agree on a way forward. But by the end of an extensive leadership training process with one of the authors:

The leadership team had converged on the “North Star” vision of Swisscom for 2025 and allocated resources for growth opportunities such as data security, the internet of things, and vertical markets, including financial tech and transportation.

In other words, they first aligned with a common vision for the company.

Business leaders throughout history have all shared the importance of vision, including Steve Jobs, Estee Lauder, Steve Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, and more.

And it’s why almost 100% of businesses that have worked with Conscious Copy & Co. to create a Vivid Vision® said they needed help aligning their team with the company vision: one of the most important aspects of alignment within a company is having a leader who can knows how important it is to align the team with a shared vision.

And Google’s study to discover what made great managers found that those that scored higher because of their ability to communicate their vision which:

Was crucial to the success of a team.
Allowed team members to know where they were headed.
Helped teams decide what to work on.

How To Align Leadership Team With A Common Vision

The first thought most companies have when aligning their leadership team is to create a vision or mission statement. Then they come up with an overly technical and boring run-on sentence no one remembers, that just lives on the “About Us” page of their website.

It’s not that this is the wrong approach, but most of them fall flat. Cameron Herold said it best in his book Vivid Vision:

We’ll go into a list of the most effective strategies for aligning a leadership team to an organization’s vision, but the first and most obvious is the Vivid Vision. In this post, we outline the undeniable differences between vision or mission statements and the Vivid Vision technique:

You can see other Vivid Vision examples here, ranging from manufacturing, IT, financial services, and healthcare to contracting.

Other Effective Leadership Strategies For Vision Alignment

Regular Check Points – Dustin Moskowitz co-founder of Facebook, and no co-founder of Asana shares tons of insightful leadership gems in this interview. One that stands out: schedule regular checkpoints to reflect on the high level vision.
Don’t Get Stuck In The How – We see this one all the time at Conscious Copy. When businesses who attempt a Vivid Vision on their own, many get caught up by focusing on how they would turn it into a reality. When you do this, you can potentially stop yourself from creating a Vivid Vision that truly expresses where you want to go.
Avoid The Paradox Of Purpose – If you want your team to take ownership, give them something to own.
Use Your Growth Strategy – Find common ground and align your leadership team with your company’s growth strategy (works with even the most prickly of leadership teams).

Leadership Team Alignment: Talent

Forbes asked 33 board and C-Level executives to define a “leadership team.” While all of them stated (in some form or another) that the leadership team are the DECISION MAKERS, many alluded to other responsibilities, like strengthening culture, shaping/communicating company vision, empowering employees, and developing talent.

Over the last two decades, the role of the C-Suite, or a company’s executive leadership, has changed. When companies hire CEOs (and other top-level positions), they not only look for individuals who are strategic and able to deliver financial results but someone who can:

Motivate diverse and technology-dependent workforces
Represent the face of the company as a diplomat or brand entity in the industry
Quickly jump back into their role as an effective managers and colleagues internally

In other words, good interpersonal skills.

For a leadership team to be aligned, they must be able to empower one another through the way they communicate.

Effective Strategies For Aligning A Talented Leadership Team

Model Apple – Functional structures have basically been stoned in the last few years to make way for structures and approaches that foster innovation, but Apple at its most innovative aligned it’s company leadership along a very rigid functional org chart.
Identify Disagreements Beforehand – Just get ‘em out in the open so they don’t rear their ugly little heads during more tense moments.
CEOs and Managers Must Be Strategically Aligned – Or the Dark Side of visionary leadership will show itself, and cause havoc on overall team alignment, not just between C-Suite and management.
Uncover Misalignments – Again, work to uncover any misalignments, then expose and discuss them. Otherwise they’ll simmer under the surface until resentment boils over at the wrong moment.
Focus On Transformation – Reinvent your leadership team, Howard Schulz style.
Hire Based On Your Vivid Vision – Make your Vivid Vision required reading throughout the recruiting process (and in general).
Assess Your Leadership Team’s Collective Social Skill – It’s the C-Suite skill that matters most.

Leadership Team Alignment: Structure

Most people still think of the classic hierarchical structure when they think of the company’s “leadership team.” That’s because most corporations still operate this way:

How an organization structures its leadership team depends on the size and function of that business. Other structuring concepts, like EOS’s accountability chart, are great, but there’s still a group of key decision makers who make up the leadership team.

What’s most important in aligning your leadership team is its functionality: the processes used to strategize, execute, measure, pivot, and communicate. Below is a collection of the most effective structural strategies for aligning your leadership team.

Leadership Team Decision-Making Process

The Big Idea – Reduce team bias, increase ROI
5 Questions To Ask – A simple whiteboard process for making tough decisions.
The Complete Guide – Harvard Business Review’s complete guide to organizational decision making.
Follow The Dev Team Model – To build a great product, a development team must a clear vision of what that product does, and aligning a dev team around a shared vision for a product is very practical in helping key decision makers to make those crucial decisions faster.
Coherent Planning – Nurture the growth of your team with practical planning to prioritize alignment, to result in better execution.
Listen To What’s Working – Listen to your team, partners, customers, and anybody else who may be telling you what’s not working within your company.
Address These 4 Issues – Why many teams who approach their KPIs a certain way are actually contributing to misalignment.
Avoid Planning – Don’t document choice. Make decisions.
Execute In Alignment (Because A Misaligned Team Can Still Execute) – Watch your strategy unravel right before your eyes as it’s being executed.
The Classic Decision-Making Approach – Still the most tried and true way to make both difficult decisions and those of the day-to-day.
The SEAL Approach – For those who appreciate a more masculine and assertive approach to “command and survive.”

Leadership Team Communication

Google’s Way – Google has a a treasure’s trove of information on how to instill great communication amongst leaders themselves, their managers, and the entire organization.
Unite The Leaders – Expose misalignments upfront to ease communication down the road.
Be Aware Of How To Lead During The Digital Transformation – Digital technology has its benefits, and its faults. As we move forward into the future of digital, be aware of what’s simply a shiny object, and what’s a necessary leadership tool that can help strengthen your company’s communication from the top down.