Why Getting Alignment is So Hard, and What to Do About It

You can’t get very far in most companies without hearing the seemingly ubiquitous “Make sure everyone is aligned.” So frequent and misused is the phrase that the word alignment has lost a lot of its actual meaning. Through dutiful neglect, we have reduced the idea that everyone should be pulling in the same direction to little more than a leadership platitude. But that ought not be the case.

Everyone has experienced the situation. A new project kicks off. It might be a particularly innovative new strategic initiative that flies in the face of the way things have typically been done at your company. Maybe the project is large and involve people from across the company. Whatever the reason, management has identified that this project is especially dependent on “solid alignment across the company”.

So what happens next?

There is typically a kickoff meeting. If you need everyone to be on the same page, what better way than to have the executive sponsor present a set of high-level slides that outline the importance of the project, the strategic intent behind the project, and management’s top-down support for everyone who is working together on the project.

The 2-hour marathon meeting goes well. There is the requisite back-patting and kudos emails that go out. People hang around the conference room for a few minutes after the meeting and glad-hand with the sponsors. Here on Day One of the project, everything is smiles. We are all aligned.

But flash forward a couple of months. The executive sponsors are absorbed in their other day-to-day tasks. The project has turned out to be more complex than originally planned. Nothing works quite as well as PowerPoint and Gantt charts suggest. Individuals are jockeying for position, sometimes for political or self-gain but more often just because they have different ideas about what the right path forward should be. The early days of Kumbaya have been replaced with something that more closely resembles a corporate version of the Lord of the Flies.

What happened?

Alignment in general direction is good. The initial meeting that outlines the destination is a worthwhile thing to do. It is important that everyone understand the strategic implications of the work they are about to do. It is even essential that people hear directly from management that this is a critical project for the company.

But true alignment requires much more than just coarse-grained agreement on principles. Projects might be founded on principles, metaphors, analogies, and executive soundbites, but they are grounded in the day-to-day details that make up the hard on-the-ground work. If you grab a bow and arrow and take aim at a target 100 yards down range, its the little things that determine whether your arrow strikes the mark. Did you account for the wind? Was your release true? Were you breathing or calm when you actually let loose the arrow?

The first mistake we make when seeking alignment is assuming that a kickoff meeting is enough to ensure that everyone is on the same page. All the first meeting does is ensure that everyone is aiming at the same downfield target. A necessary step for sure, but there is no alignment that comes out of a single meeting.

Once the project is underway, the project teams take over. These teams treat the individual project tasks in much the same way that initial kickoff is handled. This is not terribly surprising by the way. People follow leaders, and if you want alignment, having a solid kickoff meeting is what we have taught those in our employ.

The team gathers around a conference table (or maybe an online meeting). The leads explain what will happen next. As they talk, everyone nods their heads. This is mistake number 2. A nodding head does not mean alignment. People nod when they understand the words. If you are particularly good at monologuing, you will get a ton of nodding heads only to find out much later than people weren’t actually all in agreement.

If you are lucky, your corporate culture is aggressive bordering on downright hostile. At least then, when people disagree, they will do it openly during the meeting. You won’t waste any time at all thinking you are aligned; the open hand-to-hand combat is enough to keep you from feeling too good about things.

But if you are unlucky, your corporate culture is very nice. Everyone smiles and says thank you. They shower everyone with accolades. Then they huddle up as they walk out from the meeting, confiding in each other that the project is doomed because this or that is all wrong. As a leader, you won’t even know about it until you miss some important milestone and everyone backs away from the responsibility: “I was just doing my part. It wasn’t my job to make everything work together. That’s the leader’s role, isn’t it?”

So how do you know if you have alignment if you cannot trust a nodding head?

There are four major parts of alignment:

• Assumptions – These are the conditions that everyone just knows. They seem so basic that no one really talks about them. Of course, if you ask 10 people about their base assumptions, you will find 7 different answers. When making decisions, you need to be excruciatingly detailed about documenting assumptions. Unspoken nuances in perception, especially across functional boundaries, can wreak havoc on a project. You cannot sniff these out unless everyone is staring at the same page saying “Yes, those are all the assumptions.”


• Facts – It is useless to make decisions until a full list of facts are agreed upon. Frequently, team members will debate almost to the point of exchanging physical blows. Each person cannot understand how the other is reaching their conclusions. The root cause is frequently because they do not actually agree on the set of conditions that exist. Rather than trying to arrive at a conclusion, start with documenting the facts. If any fact is in doubt, then remove it from the fact list and add it to the opinion list.


• Opinions – In every decision, there are multiple ways to interpret things. These are opinions. Generally, any sentence that starts with “We should…” or “We could…” is an opinion. Additionally, any time a fact is in doubt, it is likely not more opinion than fact. The most dangerous opinions though are the ones that masquerade as facts. “We don’t have the resources to do this.” It is typically the case that the resources exist but the priorities don’t match. The fact is that other things are higher priority (other projects, customer deliverables, whatever). This is important because debating budgets and debating priorities are different.


• Conclusions – Conclusions are the final disposition for whatever decisions need to be made. Conclusions ought to be documented fully so that everyone understands the implications. For instance, if the conclusion is that something will be staffed with 2 additional heads, then the implication is that something else is not being done. Whenever you have one-sided conclusions like that, be aware that you likely are straying away from alignment (because those two people were obviously not sitting idle before).


• The key to getting alignment is understanding that the objective is not that everyone reach the same conclusion. Alignment is more than just getting to the answer; it’s having the same view of the entire situation. How can you take the next step decisively if everyone doesn’t agree on the starting point, the endpoint, and the path between? Agreeing on the only the end doesn’t ensure a cohesive path to get there. And agreeing on just the next step doesn’t ensure that you will remain aligned.

There are two major implications here: first, the kickoff meeting is necessary but not sufficient. Alignment will obviously require much more constant attention. And second, don’t be fooled into thinking that the conclusion is all that matters. Alignment is about reaching a predictably convergent set of decisions. How you arrive at a decision is almost more important than the decision itself in truly aligned organizations.

[Today’s fun fact: Wedding rings are placed on the left ring finger because it was believed that a vein only in that finger connected with the heart. I don’t wear a wedding ring. Does that mean I don’t have a heart?]

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