Suppose you are the CEO of a company in a meeting with your senior leaders. Everything was going according to the agenda, but you can’t shake the nagging feeling that something is off. What could it be? 

 

After the meeting ends, you go through everyone’s presentation again. It dawns on you that although each presentation was well thought-out and well delivered, taking a bird’s-eye view, they didn’t line up. Each person represented one part of the company but had different priorities, agendas, concerns, and goals. Sometimes, they even conflicted with one another. 

 

It’s like all the parts of a clock scattered on the floor; all the parts can be perfect, but they can’t make the clock tick.

Symptoms of Leadership Misalignment

You’re right– something was off during the meeting. It’s called leadership misalignment. Here are a few signs:

• Siloed priorities and decision-making (Like what you saw in your meeting)
• Lots of meetings but few decisions
• Lack of vision on how initiatives contribute to a goal
• Agreement without action

 

Siloed decision-making often results from not knowing what happens beyond a person’s immediate environment and responsibilities. When a person isn’t clear about how others contribute to a common goal, it becomes difficult for him to see their reasoning or decide how to support them. Therefore, there were more meetings, but there was no decision.

 

Actions speak louder than words. When someone agrees with you in a meeting but doesn’t take action to back it up, it probably means they don’t support your plan wholeheartedly. 

What Can We Do to Create Leadership Alignment?

We usually make four recommendations when we spot misalignment in an organization:

• Get clear on your visions
• Make your processes transparent
• Promote cross-functional work
• Help/train people to ask the right questions

Get Clear on Your Visions

Does it sound obvious? Well, maybe not. A whopping 90% of sales and marketing professionals report misalignment in strategy and process, and that’s just sales and marketing. In Traction, Gino Wickman lays out six components of a vision:

• Core value
• Purpose
• Unique value propositions
• Target market
• One-year picture
• Three-year picture

Leaders should communicate these points with the team and encourage members to ask questions for clarity.

 

Make Your Processes Transparent

You’ve made your vision clear. Next, encourage senior leaders to explore beyond their immediate environment and see what their counterparts are doing. This allows them to identify various kinds of expertise within the organization. This also allows individual leaders to know how they’re connected or disconnected and how they can collectively contribute to the vision. Some companies bring in a third-party consulting firm to achieve this.

Promote Cross-functional Work

Cross-functional work facilitates interaction and understanding. A one-way information session, such as the meeting described above, isn’t efficient for this.

 

Instead, you might consider a Focused Event Analysis (FEA) session. It’s a common practice among healthcare professionals, but other industries also benefit from it. 

 

Suppose your company had a less-than-ideal quarter. You want to gather people’s thoughts on what went wrong, so you ask participants to offer their take, one at a time. The goal here is to carefully document multiple perspectives before identifying a cause. Because it is often the case that one failure has more than one underlying cause. 

 

Letting people offer their observations and viewpoints fosters an open conversation and prevents hasty finger-pointing. It also showcases your thoughtfulness and level-headedness as a leader.

Help/Train People to Ask Good Questions

Cross-functional work starts with good questions; highly curious people are better at building networks. However, as people move up the ladder, there is a risk of becoming prone to not seeing what other people are reasoning and doing. 

 

Leaders can foster such curiosity by consciously being curious themselves. Alternatively, curiosity can be learned. Edgar Schein (1928-2023), an organizational psychologist formerly at MIT Sloan School of Business, points out four common pitfalls and their “cures” in his Humble Inquiry: the Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling.

 

Common pitfalls	How to avoid them
“Yes” or “no” questions	Ask open-ended, relevant, and specific questions, such as “How do you think we can improve this?”
Overly general questions such as “What’s on your mind.”	Be specific. “This campaign didn’t yield a specific result. Why is that?”
Assume you’ve grasped the speaker’s intent.	Paraphrase the speaker’s words, then check if you’ve missed points or information.
Assume “collaboration” will take care of itself without your effort	Periodically “check in” with your colleagues, e.g., How do you think X is going?

 

Leadership Misalignment and its Peril

Leadership misalignment is more costly than you think. The estimated loss due to misalignment is $1 trillion across all industries.

 

As an entrepreneur, you know businesses need to quickly and continuously adapt to customers’ feedback and preferences. Those insights come from two customer-facing teams or individuals: marketing and sales. What happens when one doesn’t consider what the other offers?

 

Imagine you have a seasoned salesperson who talks on the phone with prospects all day. The prospects enlighten him about their pains, needs, desire to pivot to a new direction, etc. However, this person doesn’t quickly share the information with his marketing colleagues, so the marketing team is stuck on those same old campaigns that fail to yield the results you want.

 

Imagine you have a dedicated marketing person, too. She notices that only a few product pages attract a high traffic volume. However, they don’t end up being customers. She does a few tests with no obvious improvement and doesn’t promptly inform her sales colleagues. As a result, the salesperson taking calls doesn’t ask prospects about the products in question. That’s a lost opportunity for improvement and, ultimately, sales. 

 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We have outlined four steps to encourage your leaders to interact more meaningfully and purposely with one another. We assume your leaders agree with your vision. Open, transparent, and honest communication will help you bring them on the same page. 

 

Need a fresh pair of eyes for clarity? We can help. Reach out to us today for a free consultation.