S1E4 - Alignment - The Most Misunderstood Word In Leadership

Everyone loves to say, “We just need more alignment.” Few know what it actually means. In this episode of Leadership Matters, Glenn Price and Terry Reynolds dismantle the myth that head-nodding equals buy-in — and expose the dirty yeses, polite pretence, and silent dissent that quietly sabotage execution.

They dive into why true alignment requires healthy debate (and a bit of conflict), why cascading messages rarely works, and why leaders must be intentional — especially in hybrid workplaces where assumptions are dangerous. From disagree-and-commit to the power of personalised communication, this episode reveals the habits that keep teams pulling in the same direction, even when the market shifts.

If your team “agrees in the room but unravels in the corridor,” this one’s essential listening.

Transcript

Welcome to Leadership Matters, a podcast created by Leadershape Consulting to help leaders take a vision and deliver results. My name is Glenn Price and I'm joined again by my business partner, Terry Reynolds. And in this podcast, we wanted to focus on the driver of alignment in the VTR model. Inside the Vision to Results book, we say that alignment is an agreement. It's commitment to move in one direction, even when you'd personally go in another. 

You know, in prep for this particular podcast, I was thinking alignment is one of those words, right? That gets thrown around a lot. We need alignment. It gets thrown around like confetti. Everyone loves the sound of it, but few people know what it actually means. You know, it's funny. Alignment for me is where you see executive teams fall over and that is that the CEO, the MD or whatever has shared what they need to do. There's lots of nodding heads or their silence.

And then there's an assumption that because I've shared it, there's an alignment to it. They're on the bus. absolutely I remember the meeting where we went through everything and everyone agreed. But that really is an alignment, is it? No, you see the nodding heads. I I refer to it and many of my peers refer to it as a dirty yes. Right. It goes around the table. Everybody nods. And then, know, the two usual suspects when they walk out going, well, I didn't vote for that, right?

I think when it comes to alignment, it's directly connected to leadership maturity. mean, true alignment is when people stay the course, right? Even when their decision didn't go their way. And when we were talking about strategy, we talked about those three phases, discuss, debate, decide. I think you need to get to decide and disagree and commit from that point. I mean, how often do exec teams mistake polite head nodding for genuine buy-in, do you think? All the time.

You know, haven't sat in Exec meetings, many exact meetings, where there is true, true debate. Disagreement, you know, maybe even raised voices, but people are emotionally connected to that debate and want it to happen. What tends to happen is there'll be a couple of people that will say, this is the direction. It's open for debate, but really people are not going to really buy into that. Do you think people come to those discussions prepared for the debate, right? Because I agree with you, there's a power in dissent, but I'll balance that with that leadership maturity again, right? I often would say that no pressure, no diamond, right? I'm mining for conflict here. In order to get alignment, you need to almost fight for it. Do you think that alignment requires that disagreement before commitment? And if so, then what do people need to prepare coming into that?

Well, people have to put it all on the table because otherwise emotionally they're not connected to whatever it is that has been agreed. And what happens is they walk out of the meeting going, well, you I knew whatever I was going to say wasn't going to be accepted anyway.

You're right, you can see it in terms of body language, those sorts of things. mean, what does misalignment look like in the wild? How can leaders spot it before it shows up in results? Because we definitely agree that if the leadership team, let alone anybody else, is not aligned, then it's going to have an impact on results. So how do leaders spot it before it shows up in results? It's interesting because I think that when people talk around effective leadership teams, effective executive teams. They don't really think about that disagreement, debate, criticism, whatever it is, is actually a sign of health, not dysfunction. So what they're actually doing is they're like a good relationship. I've never argued with my partner. Well, I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing because you need the healthy debate. 

You need the people to disagree. to be able to agree to be able to move on. It's definitely not dysfunctional. Maybe that's a misconception. And Pat Lencioni would say that in his book, Five Dysfunctions of an Executive Team, would say, if you can't have vulnerability-based trust, if people don't think it's safe enough to put it all on the table like you've suggested, then we're not gonna get that level of conflict. And so we don't get the debate, we don't get the conflict, we get the dirty yes. 

The next thing when you think about alignment in my mind is cascade. I hate that word. we're going to cascade it, right? So not only have we not got true alignment and buy-in at the exact level, but then we get this mix of, you know, a belief system that says, if we cascaded alignment from the top will automatically sort of trickle down. And my experience is that evaporates by the time it gets to upper middle management, let alone down to the front line.

And so there's almost a, I don't know what I'd call it, almost a hidden tax of misalignment there. How much time and energy do leaders waste, know, re-explaining, re-deciding, re-litigating the same issues over and over, or just believing that the case will work? Yeah, look, way too much. I'm not sure whether the executive teams walk out of there thinking, now need to communicate this to the wider group. I think that they've got it. They sat around the table, they debated it. They bought into it, but the communication or alignment doesn't cascade. It needs to be communicated at the end of the day. And I'm not sure whether a lot of executives have the ability or see it as important to be able to push that messaging down. Have you seen that done well? I mean, we've all seen it done poorly, right? So it's just a town hall, big bang fizzle, which we talked about earlier. What are some examples where you've seen the cascade work really well?

Well, I think that the executives themselves at that level need to own the cascade. So they'll come up with a communication plan about how it's going to be pushed down. They'll bring probably more likely bring their teams together because what people want to know is what does it actually mean to me? What do you need me to do? What impact will I have on me, on my team? And I think that at different levels of the organisation, that's more important.

I don't think doing a town hall and expecting everybody in that town hall to be able to be on board, I think that it needs to be more personalised. This was a European pharmaceutical company I'm thinking of, one of the things that I really admired was that the CEO's expectation, her expectation of anybody that had the leadership title in people leadership had to have one-on-one conversation. This couldn't be emailed. It couldn't be done in a town hall.

It needed to be done almost one-on-one and consistently over two to three years to gauge alignment because there's sort of alignment is one thing, but you want to make sure that you're not closing off autonomy of thinking with the people in front of you, right? So I'm a big believer in making sure that KPIs, for example, are aligned all the way from the CEO down to the frontline level person. It brings a backbone of strength, but I don't want leaders to get in the way of giving their teams freedom or autonomy to think and move between those guide rails, right? And that can only happen in my mind in a one-on-one or one to a few sort of conversation. And it's not a talking at, it's a talking with them and going, are we going to align to this? What happens if the market shifts? How do we realign ourselves? How regularly do we need to check in? 

It does. I think that communication needs to be localised and probably, I guess, a little personalised for the individuals within those teams. Because then it means something to them. It's, you know, sometimes when there's that big town hall, you will see people in that town hall that'll be scratching their head going, I'm not quite sure how that impacts me. And often that town hall is the last of that communication. I raised it, it's been done. I'll raise it at the next town hall, et cetera. But the quality of that communication by all of the line managers below them isn't really happening because some of them just don't necessarily have the skills or they may not have even been aligned themselves to have bought into it to then pass on that message. think one of the things that we often talk about on our off sites, which I think is a really, really good habit that we've got into, is going, how are we going to communicate? 

What's the agreement sitting around the table? How are we going to communicate what's happened over these last two days as we've built this strategy, which is a communication narrative which means that everybody's going to do the same thing. I mean, it's interesting. You just said do the same thing. For me, alignment isn't everyone doing the same thing. It's everybody doing different things, but for the right reasons, all the same reasons. You'll have different departments that will do different things, but there's this guiding pull back to those priorities and the strategy and that guiding overall direction to move forward. 

I've also seen some very well intended leadership teams who will workshop the alignment out. If we talk it out over and over and over again, we'll get some level of alignment. my experience suggests you can't workshop your way to alignment. And it comes back to the importance of the leadership team again, or any individual that's a leader. If you turn around somebody's following, you're the leader. Those behavioural leadership traits, I think, are what people buy into. I don't have all the information I need to be fully aligned, but because you've said it and there's a degree of back to that vulnerability based trust again, right? Because I've understood that it's you that's made this decision. I understood some of the reasons why you made that decision, then I'm more likely to go forward with a little bit of faith in there as well. Alignment, we're sort of talking because it's the third driver, we go vision, strategy, alignment. Alignment around vision and strategy is one thing also, but.

How do you maintain it when the market shifts or the plan changes mid-year? How do you get people realigned having just sent them in one direction? I think you need to... It still comes back to the way that the communication is done and how regularly it's done. It's not that you do it once and it's there because the market's shifting all the time. I think that people need to be reminded about that we're sticking to a course of action, the reasons why, and that people can see actually what they're doing is going to make the difference. I think there needs to be flexibility in that. You've just reminded me of something. I think a lot of average firms out there go, well, we'll check on alignment in our annual engagement survey. Yeah. 

And we're beginning to see our very best clients now with an app where everybody can check in on not just their level of engagement or alignment, but also their mental health. You know, if you imagine people being a battery how empty or full are they at any given moment because that's the resource that's actually going to bring this alive for customers and for colleagues. And I love that concept of managing the human resource, the alignment of your business, which builds the momentum live, not six months ago we found we had an alignment problem that comes out of an engagement survey. Do you have you ever noticed, you know, in probably the last two to three years, whether the work from home piece has impacted people's alignment because there's some organisations, they're two, maybe even three days at home versus in the office. Do you think that that alignment piece is interrupted, is impacted by people not being in the same place for five days a week? Good question. I think that the role of the leader has become more critical in alignment and now they have to do things on purpose, with purpose. 

I think in the past, simply having everybody in the office and you do that workshop or that town hall and go, great, I've got them all aligned because I physically saw them. I think now it's about regular check-in, whether that's done digitally or done through human means of reaching out via recall. You can't beat that. You can't beat that regularity and the human touch of it. I think that it's become harder, but in becoming harder, it's become more powerful, meaning that in the past we've just we've made some assumptions that the team is aligned because I can see them. But now actually you probably need to check in because you can't see what they're doing in their level of activity. You can only judge them on the result that they're delivering if they're working from home. 

And so leadership has become intentional in order to gain alignment. Clearly, we've seen if you've got that empowering vision or at least a true north, you've then got a strategy to get you to your vision, then making sure that the entire organisation is aligned behind that and not just on a one off but on a regular basis taking a pulse check of alignment is really important. Otherwise we end up five degrees off True North right at the end of 12 months or 18 months ago. did we get here? So here are some top tips for leaders on how you can drive alignment that lasts. 

First, Terry and I would recommend that you debate hard, decide fast and then commit fully. Encourage dissent before the decision but once made. You've got to make sure that that unity is non-negotiable. So can you get people to disagree and commit? 

Two, make sure that the red line or red thread is visible. So many times I see organisations that go, like you said, Terry, I've communicated it, but people just haven't joined the dots. So show how every goal, every project, every initiative, every role connects back to the overall direction. People align faster when they see the logic and then they give discretionary effort when it's emotional.

Check for that alignment as we were just saying, not just purely the understanding. I think people rationally get the understanding of where we're going in strategy, but alignment means that they're buying in behind it. And I like to ask people, look, not do you understand it, but what would you do differently because of this? Remember that a good strategy and a good vision should be the litmus test for decision making. 

And then last of all, build alignment habits. You've said this a couple of times that it's got to be a regular muscle that you try and build. I've echoed the same thing. Try to end meetings with the same question. What have we decided? Who's accountable and how will we communicate it? It can sometimes be as simple as that. So as we said, we always finish these podcasts with a bit of a prompt or a powerful reflection. And I'd like you to think where in your business have people agreed, but maybe not truly aligned to what you're doing. The next podcast that will be coming up is all about experience.

Because once we make these strategic decisions, those three, four or five things that matter in order to get to our vision and you've got people aligned, then it's going to have an impact both on your employee experience and your customer experience. I hope that's been of value. I look forward to talking to you on the next podcast.