Executive Team Alignment

“Authen­tic­i­ty is the align­ment of head, mouth, heart and feet – think­ing, say­ing, feel­ing, and doing the same thing – con­sis­tent­ly. This builds trust, and fol­low­ers love lead­ers they can trust.” — Lance Sec­re­tan, Author of Inspire! What Great Lead­ers Do

Strat­e­gy or exe­cu­tion: Which is more important?

If you get a bunch of lead­ers in the room debat­ing about what is more impor­tant — strat­e­gy or exe­cu­tion — it’s going to be live­ly. If you get a bunch of con­sul­tants, it’ll be even live­li­er — and you’ll hear all kinds of theories.

More impor­tant than either one, I say, is align­ment.

You can have an amaz­ing strat­e­gy that gives you a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage — but if it’s not well exe­cut­ed there’s no ben­e­fit. You can have a mediocre strat­e­gy that’s exe­cut­ed per­fect­ly — and you’re not going to get the full result either.

So when we go into a new com­pa­ny to help improve per­for­mance we always start with align­ment. Whether it’s around a good strat­e­gy or exe­cut­ing the right things, what tru­ly mat­ters is that all of the key peo­ple in the orga­ni­za­tion are clear on what needs to hap­pen — and are spend­ing a notable chunk of their time work­ing on it.

Align­ment helps a strat­e­gy to come to life, and helps exec­u­tives to work in har­mo­ny. And a good place to start is to get agree­ment on what’s not work­ing – or on what the biggest chal­lenges are in the com­pa­ny. Those are things most peo­ple agree on.

As we go through a strate­gic plan­ning process with a com­pa­ny — whether we are focused on strat­e­gy, strength of the team, or finan­cials – our goal, bit by bit, is to get every­one on the same page.

Every deci­sion you can get peo­ple to agree on as a team — cre­ates addi­tion­al team alignment.

“We’re great at this…we’re hor­ri­ble at that.”

“This is a won­der­ful opportunity…this is a waste of time.”

“This project was a suc­cess and why…or a fail­ure and why…or an expen­sive learn­ing expe­ri­ence and why.”

One neat package

I had an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence at the quar­ter­ly meet­ing of one of the com­pa­nies we’ve been work­ing with…everything made com­plete sense!

• When the CFO pre­sent­ed the finan­cials every­one agreed on the num­bers for where we were in the business.
• When the CEO reviewed the goals for the quar­ter, we had crys­tal clear updates on where we were at, where we slipped and what we need­ed to do to recover.
• Every sin­gle mem­ber of the lead­er­ship team report­ed on KPIs, on how they were doing and where they should be, and on their indi­vid­ual pri­or­i­ties for the quarter.

The whole thing aligned into one neat pack­age. Every­one knew their part in mov­ing the com­pa­ny for­ward. Every­one knew how he or she had per­formed because, in this review process, they assessed themselves.

In fact, the CEO of the busi­ness said, ​“This makes me even believe we don’t need a per­for­mance review process. This is our per­for­mance review. If we, as a team, deliv­er on our pri­or­i­ties for the quar­ter — and you, as indi­vid­u­als, each deliv­er on your KPIs and pri­or­i­ties — then we are all amaz­ing. If one of us isn’t doing well, it’s pret­ty darn apparent.”

The point is this: In your com­pa­ny your strat­e­gy and exe­cu­tion do need to be good. But most impor­tant­ly you need to have team align­ment through­out the entire com­pa­ny so that peo­ple are obvi­ous­ly con­nect­ed to your strat­e­gy — and peo­ple are obvi­ous­ly exe­cut­ing it in a way that works — together.

Then when things don’t go as planned – because they nev­er do – you can quick­ly iden­ti­fy and adjust, and then improve the plan to be more effective.