What Happens When the Senior Leadership Team Isn’t Aligned?
We’ve already looked at how a lack of alignment in the senior team rarely stays contained at the top. Even when the disagreements amongst that senior team are subtle, the effects tend to spread very quickly through the organisation.
In this article and the video that accompanies it, I explore what tends to happen when the senior leadership team is not well aligned, and what leaders can do to spot the effects before they spread more widely.
So what does happen? And more importantly, what should you do about it?
What are the first signs that a senior leadership team isn’t well aligned?
One of the first signs is that those leaders appear to agree when they’re together in the room, but then pull in different directions afterwards. Mixed messages begin to appear. The priorities that the rest of the organisation thought had been agreed start to feel much less clear.
Those unresolved differences sit underneath what, on the surface, look like very polite conversations. You may start to see a return to silo working. And the tension all of this creates is often visible in very small ways, before anybody names it directly.
How does a lack of alignment in the leadership team show up across the organisation?
Different parts of the organisation start getting different messages, so they begin to pull against each other. People become much less sure about what really matters.
And the decisions that flow from the big priorities get slower. They get revisited again and again. People’s uncertainty and caution increase.
Why can even small misalignments at the top create big problems elsewhere?
Those small differences at the top tend to become amplified as they move through the organisation. People fill in gaps with assumptions when they know their leaders are not really aligned, or when they are simply not clear about what the priorities are.
So that uncertainty at the top often turns into friction, duplication, and silo behaviour elsewhere. What looks minor in the senior leadership team can mean slower execution, weaker decisions elsewhere in the organisation, and missed opportunities too, because people are just not moving fast enough.
It starts to affect performance pretty quickly.
What should leaders do to check whether those negative impacts are happening in their business?
One practical step you can take is this.
Experiment with a real, live priority. Take a little time to explore how aligned your senior leadership team is around that priority. Ask yourselves questions like:
- What will this priority look like when it is successful?
- Are we all working towards the same kind of outcome?
- What are each of us concerned about here?
If those questions reveal any gaps in your alignment, that is useful information. It gives you a chance to deal with those gaps before they widen outside the room, so that you are not papering over the cracks.
About me
I’m Nick Robinson. I work with senior leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.
My programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together, so the organisation benefits from clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better overall performance.
