By Andreas Pettersson, Founder, Leaders ADAPT
You told your leadership team the priority in January. It's October, and three of them are still running last year's plan. The inner sentence, the one I hear underneath most CEO calls, goes like this: I know best, but I'm starting to doubt myself because I still don't get the results.
That's not a people problem. It's a leadership team alignment problem, and in our own coaching and assessment data only 18 percent of 84 owner CEOs name it, while 55 percent name team performance. They see the symptom.
Here's the test. The Alignment Check is a five question test of a leadership team: stated priorities are followed, delivery dates are known, decision rights are clear, cross functional handoffs hold, and surprises travel up and down early. This page is its home. Below: the check, a ten symptom table and what to do tomorrow.
Quick answer: Leadership team alignment is the state in which every executive on a leadership team works from the same short list of priorities, knows who decides what, commits to dates the others can rely on, and surfaces problems early. Misalignment shows up as missed dates, repeated handoff failures and surprises reaching the CEO late. It is fixed with fewer priorities, clear decision rights and a weekly cadence.
What is leadership team alignment?
Executive alignment isn't agreement, and it isn't everyone liking each other. It's five things being true at once, and you can test for each of them in a week.
The Alignment Check, question by question:
- Priorities followed. Ask each executive to write down the company's top three priorities, alone. Compare the lists. If they match the list in your head, pass.
- Delivery dates known. Pick the three commitments that matter most this quarter. Can every executive say the date, and who owns it, without looking it up?
- Decision rights clear. Take last month's three biggest decisions. Did everyone agree, before they were made, on who got to make them?
- Cross functional handoffs hold. Where does work pass from one department to another, and how many times this quarter did it drop?
- Surprises travel early. Did the last bad number reach you before it reached the board? Did it reach you from the executive who owned it?
Five passes is a team alignment you can build on. Three or fewer is a team that will keep failing customers no matter how good the post mortems are.
I learned the cost the expensive way. Scaling the company that made me one of Canon's youngest CEOs, I said yes to 47 initiatives at the same time. A board director summed it up in a line I still repeat: efficient company, wrong problems.
By the time we corrected, we were 14 months behind the market and had lost more than $1M in revenue. The fix wasn't working harder. It was choosing enough, and making the whole leadership team choose the same thing.
What are the signs of a misaligned leadership team?
A misaligned leadership team rarely looks dysfunctional in the meeting. It looks polite. The damage shows up between meetings, in the handoffs, the dates and the surprises.
Here are the ten symptoms I check for, with the root cause I usually find and the fix that holds.
| Symptom | Root cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Executives describe different top priorities | More than three company priorities, or none written down | One to three quarterly Rocks, published, each with one owner |
| "It's in progress" with no date | Commitments made without a date or a definition of done | Every commitment gets an owner, a date and one number |
| Decisions get re-opened after the meeting | Decision rights never defined; the loudest voice decided | Decision Rights Ladder: who decides, who is consulted, who is told |
| Departments blame each other for the same customer failure | The handoff point has no owner | Name the handoff owner; review dropped handoffs weekly |
| The CEO hears bad news from the board or a customer first | Bad news gets punished, so it travels sideways and late | Reward the messenger in the room; ask "what concerns you?" and wait |
| Meetings run long and decide nothing | Reporting masquerading as a meeting | Weekly Level 10 with a scoreboard, issues list and solved items |
| The same issue appears on three agendas in a row | No one owns the issue, so it is discussed, not solved | Assign one owner and a date in the meeting; track to done |
| High performers go quiet | Disagreement was met with contempt once, publicly | Thank disagreement out loud; close by asking what was not raised |
| Executives escalate everything to the CEO | The CEO kept the authority after handing off the responsibility | Hand off authority on paper; CEO stops answering routed questions |
| The plan changes every month | Firefighting with a planning label | Lock priorities for 90 days; one reset session only if something is truly wrong |
The ninth row is mine. I'm okay delegating responsibility; I struggle to delegate the authority. When a team owns a result on paper but still walks to the CEO's office for permission to act, the CEO is the switchboard for their own company, and nothing routes sideways. That was me for longer than I'd like to admit.
The fifth row is the one CEOs feel most. In a survey of 40,000 people across hundreds of organizations, about one third said their priorities change frequently and only just over one third saw due dates as real commitments (Culture Partners, Workplace Accountability Study, fielded 2011 to 2014, vendor funded). If your executives don't treat a date as a promise, surprises are the only possible outcome.
How do you align a leadership team?
Every executive team alignment framework I've run, EOS included, reduces to three pillars: a clear strategy with its priorities written down, culture included; a meeting cadence the team keeps; clearly assigned roles and authority. If those three aren't in place, it doesn't matter which book is on the cover.
Here's the order I install them in with a leadership team.
Step 1: Cut the list to one to three priorities
Ten rocks is the same as zero. One to three company priorities per quarter, each with a single named owner, plus supporting priorities per department. Everything else is stopped or parked with a date to revisit. The hardest conversation in alignment work is not what to start; it's what the CEO agrees to stop.
Step 2: One number per person
Each executive owns one number that moves when their priority moves. Not a dashboard: one number, reviewed weekly, marked on track or off track. The CFO's number, the sales leader's number and the operations number should add up to the company priority.
If they don't, you've found your misalignment before it costs you a quarter. If finance can't name its number at all, that's a CFO coaching conversation first.
Step 3: Draw the decision rights
Take the Decision Rights Ladder and fill it in for the ten decisions that caused friction last quarter. Who decides, who's consulted, who's told. Most teams discover that half the fights were about process, not substance: nobody disagreed with the decision, they disagreed about who got to make it. Put it next to the accountability chart so seat and authority match.
Step 4: Install the weekly cadence
A weekly Level 10 meeting for the leadership team, 90 minutes, same day, same time. Scoreboard first, each number on track or off track. Then the issues list, prioritized and solved, with anything unresolved carried to next week by name.
The purpose is lateral communication. If the team only talks to each other through you, you don't have a team. You have spokes.
Step 5: Reward the bad news
The last step makes the first four hold. In McKinsey's 2019 survey of 1,259 executives, only 26 percent said their organization makes good, fast delegated decisions (McKinsey Quarterly, 2019).
The fastest way to join the 26 percent is to make it safe to bring a problem early. Thank the person who disagrees, in the room, while the loss is still visible. Ask what concerns them and wait seven seconds. Surprises stop when honesty gets rewarded faster than good news.
Run the five steps and the Alignment Check again at 90 days. Whatever still fails tells you where to spend the next quarter.
Alignment vs agreement: what's the difference?
Agreement means everyone said yes in the room. Alignment means everyone acts on the decision after the room, including the people who argued against it.
A team that confuses the two optimizes for the meeting ending well. Objections go unsaid, the decision gets made, and the disagreement shows up three weeks later as a missed date or a quiet workaround. That's the dysfunctional leadership team pattern that looks healthiest from outside, because nobody ever fights.
The test I use in executive team building sessions is physical. I hand a leadership team a long pole and ask them to lower it to the floor using only their fingertips, no gripping. The goal isn't getting the stick to the floor. The goal is the communication, planning, roles and responsibilities that happen when nobody is touching the pole.
Teams where one person forces a planning conversation before anyone moves get a far better result, far faster. Teams where everyone executes on instinct watch the pole rise.
What I'm watching for alongside it: whether people answer a strengths assessment as who they are or as who they want to be seen as. A political answer is a marker of a siloed team, and a siloed team can agree on anything and align on nothing. For that pattern I assign Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and we start with trust, not with the plan.
How long does leadership team alignment take?
The cadence can be installed in two weeks: priorities cut, numbers assigned, decision rights drawn, the weekly meeting on the calendar. Behavior takes longer. In my experience an executive's behavior takes about two months to change and roughly two more before the people around them believe it. So plan on one full quarter before the team acts aligned without you policing it.
My own proof point came during the acquisition at Arcules, the most misalignment prone stretch a company goes through. We ran stand ups twice a day, 9:15 and 4:15, for three months. Six months after installing two rhythms, the Friday afternoon surprise had stopped. Zero Friday surprises.
The team hadn't gotten smarter. The information had started traveling sideways instead of up.
One warning on timing. The three month priority lock will frustrate a visionary CEO. One reset planning session is allowed when something is truly wrong. Doing it monthly is firefighting with a better name.
What tools help with leadership team alignment: EOS, OKRs, scorecards?
Any of them, if you use the part that creates alignment and skip the paperwork.
EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System). Quarterly Rocks, the accountability chart, the Level 10 meeting and a scorecard. I ran it for years and still run it. It works well in an office based structure up to roughly 150 to 400 people; cascading messaging is the first thing to break past that.
My one modification: pure EOS hands all authority to the integrator, which is wrong for an owner operator. Separate operational authority from visionary, leadership and sales authority, then run the system.
OKRs. Objectives and key results, usually quarterly. Strongest at translating a company priority into measurable team results. Weakest when teams write eight objectives, which is the ten rocks problem under another name. Cap it at three.
Scorecards. A weekly list of five to fifteen numbers, each owned by one person, each marked on track or off track. The cheapest alignment tool there is, and the most skipped, because it makes the truth visible every week.
Core values. Not a poster. Three to five words turned into specific behaviors you'd hire and fire on. Values do organizational alignment work only when a team can point to the behavior that broke one.
None of these fix a team that punishes bad news. Tools create the structure. Trust, built through longer leadership team development work, decides whether the structure gets used.
Leadership team alignment FAQ
What is leadership team alignment?
Leadership team alignment is the state in which every member of a leadership team works from the same short list of priorities, knows who holds the authority for each decision, commits to delivery dates the others can rely on, and raises problems early. It is measured by behavior between meetings, not by agreement inside them, and tested with the five question Alignment Check.
What are the most common signs of a misaligned leadership team?
The most common signs are executives naming different top priorities, commitments with no dates, decisions that reopen after the meeting, departments blaming each other for the same customer failure, and bad news reaching the CEO from the board or a customer first. Others include meetings that run long without decisions, the same issue recurring on several agendas, and high performers going quiet.
How do you fix a misaligned leadership team?
Fixing a misaligned leadership team starts with cutting company priorities to one to three per quarter, each with a single owner and one measurable number. Next, decision rights are written down for the decisions that caused friction, and a weekly leadership meeting is installed with a scoreboard and an issues list. Finally, the team makes it safe to raise problems early. Behavior change typically takes about one quarter.
What is the difference between alignment and agreement?
Agreement is everyone saying yes to a decision in the meeting. Alignment is everyone acting on that decision afterward, including those who argued against it. A team can agree without aligning when objections go unspoken, which shows up later as missed dates and workarounds. Alignment requires that disagreement is voiced and resolved before the decision, and that decision rights are clear so the outcome is accepted.
How often should a leadership team meet to stay aligned?
Most aligned leadership teams meet weekly for 60 to 90 minutes at a fixed time, with a scoreboard review, an issues list and clear owners for anything carried forward. Quarterly, the team spends a day resetting priorities for the next 90 days, and annually it sets the one to three year direction. Daily stand ups are added during high change, such as an acquisition or a turnaround.
Does EOS improve leadership team alignment?
EOS improves leadership team alignment when the team uses its core mechanics: one to three quarterly Rocks with single owners, an accountability chart, a weekly Level 10 meeting and a scorecard. It suits office based companies of roughly 150 to 400 people or fewer. Companies that adopt the vocabulary without cutting priorities or defining authority see little change, because the tools depend on those two decisions.
Alignment is a decision the CEO makes first
Every row in the symptom table traces back to a choice the CEO hasn't made yet. Which three priorities, who decides, what gets stopped, whether bad news gets thanked or punished. The team's misalignment is mostly the CEO's indecision, distributed.
That's the uncomfortable gift of the Alignment Check. Three of the five are about you.
So tomorrow morning, before any meeting, ask each executive to send you the company's top three priorities in one line, alone, no conferring. Read the lists side by side. That single exercise is question one of the check, and the spread between the lists is the size of your problem.
Where leadership team alignment work starts at Leaders ADAPT
The team work I do with a CEO runs on the pieces on this page. The Alignment Check sets the baseline, the Decision Rights Ladder and the accountability chart redraw authority, and a weekly Level 10 cadence, installed and coached for the first quarter, carries it. That work is the leadership team coaching engagement. CEOs who want the peer version of the same discipline run it inside the CEO Mastermind, up to 14 members, where the priorities and the numbers get reviewed by people who've done it.
The place to begin is free. The Team Trust assessment is twelve statements across four areas, and it tells you whether your people bring you problems early or manage you upward, which is question five of the Alignment Check. One of the twelve statements is the one I'd ask alone if I could only ask one, and it isn't the one most CEOs guess.
Take the Team Trust assessment tonight, before you send the priorities email. Leadership team alignment starts with knowing whether the answers you'll get back are true.
