Why You Should Align Your Leadership Team

Total Leadership Team Alignment
The essence of leadership team success is having all leadership team members working cooperatively toward a common goal.  Even if one leader goes off course, the misalignment can cause significant damage.  When you align your leadership team, everyone can tell. 

Employees want leaders to act in harmony to collectively lead them down a clear, compelling, and believable strategic path.   They want an exciting strategic vision of what the company hopes to become, a persuasive mission statement outlining the organization’s fundamental purpose, and targeted initiatives that provide a strategic rudder to make difficult decisions and allocate valuable resources.

Leadership team alignment is about creating synergy, leverage, and higher performance.

The Consequences of Misalignment
When leaders or teams work independently in silos, they tend to resist the greater good, and it is almost impossible to perform at your peak.  Departments end up with their own priorities, approaches, cultures, systems, and business practices.

Misalignment causes communication and knowledge sharing between functions and departments to decrease, and uncoordinated efforts lead to confusion, duplication, conflict, and lapses in both employee and customer experience.

Our Own Alignment Research
We conducted organizational alignment research using input from 410 companies across eight industries. We found that strategically aligned companies and teams consistently achieve higher performance by surprisingly high percentages.

Highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable while outperforming unaligned companies at these rates:

• Customer Retention 2.23-to-1
• Customer Satisfaction 3.2-to-1
• Leadership Effectiveness 8.71-to-1
• Employee Engagement 16.8-to-1

The Benefits of an Aligned Leadership Team
It is almost impossible to have an organization perform at its peak if the leadership team is not fully aligned with the plan for success.  Typically through proven strategy retreat facilitation, aligned leadership teams:

• Run Smoother Businesses
  The research is clear.  Misaligned leadership teams cause churn, politics, and hassles.  Aligned leadership teams set the stage for more effective information sharing, resource allocation, collaboration, employee feedback, and continuous learning. 
• Have Higher Levels of Employee Engagement
  16.8-to-1 greater levels of employee engagement for aligned leadership teams is startling.  There is no doubt that higher levels of leadership alignment lead to better levels of employee advocacy, discretionary effort, and intent to stay.  Do your employees understand the company’s plans for success, how they fit into the company’s future plans, and how their job helps the organization succeed?
• Create Better Customer Experiences
  What is it worth to your business to improve customer satisfaction by 3.2X and customer retention by 2.23X?  When goals, roles, team norms, and success metrics are clear and agreed to, it is much easier to collaborate and deliver a customer experience that aligns with your brand promise.

The Bottom Line
Employees expect leadership teams to set a clear, believable, and implementable strategy for success.  Is your leadership team on the same page and firing on all cylinders?  If not, it is worth it to step back and invest the time to align your leadership team.

To learn more about how to align senior leadership teams, download Alignment – The Missing Leadership Ingredient for Higher Performance