How to Create Leadership Team Alignment

Why Leadership Team Alignment Matters — How to Create Leadership Team Alignment
Just as poorly aligned tires can cause your car to drift off course, poorly aligned leadership teams can send your organization in the wrong direction. Even with solid strategies, many companies fail to translate their well-designed business plan into desired results. In fact, we know from a recent IBM survey, that as few as 1 out of 10 strategies are successfully executed.

A major factor is the lack of leadership team alignment. Leadership team alignment fosters a shared vision and drives that vision into everything the organization does at all levels

Alignment Research
Our organizational alignment research showed how important it is for companies and leadership teams to get aligned. With input from eight industries, over 400 companies, and 30 years of hands-on experience, we found that highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable.

And they outperform unaligned companies at the following 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

So how can you go about creating leadership team alignment to perform at your peak?

It Starts with Strategic Clarity and Leadership Development
When it comes to peak performance, high performing organizations are much more proactive than their peers. The top companies agree on strategic priorities and assess what it takes at the leadership level (especially for high stakes roles) to make it happen.

The key is to create a leadership team that understands how to move forward together toward business goals. As a coordinated group, they need to be skilled at creating clear strategies, effecting change, shaping a supportive culture, modeling collaboration, and prioritizing next steps.

Once the strategy is clear, believable, and implementable enough at the leadership level, high performers then heavily invest in targeted leadership development in four areas that matter most.

4 Areas that Matter Most When Forming Aligned Leadership Teams
Based upon data from our leadership simulation assessments, high performing leadership teams understand:

1. What Will Drive Success
   Aligned leaders have identified the critical factors that will determine whether or not they can fully implement their business strategy and consistently and visibly use those factors to guide their activities and strategic decisions accordingly.
   
2. The Culture They Need
   Effective leaders know the kind of workplace culture that will support the right behaviors and how to purposefully shape that culture.
   
3. The Capabilities They Require
   Leaders need to prepare their talent not just for the present, but also for the future. They must be able to predict what their employees will need to be able to do in order to maintain a competitive advantage.
   
4. The Organizational Structures that Will Support the Chosen Strategic Direction
   The best leaders have a holistic approach. Without the right organizational structures, systems, processes, and practices to support and enhance the desired behaviors, strategy execution is at risk.
   

The Bottom Line
Are you sure your executive team is fully aligned? Take a close look at your current leaders. Are they capable of moving the people and the business forward in a way that makes sense? If not, you have important work ahead.

To learn more about how to create leadership team alignment, download The Top Skills for High Performing Leaders