Leadership teams and misalignment to strategy

In today’s article I’d like to explore a common challenge that many leadership teams face; misalignment to strategy.

If you're a leader or a member of a leadership team read on to discover 3 tips to avoid misalignment pitfalls. First, let's start by exploring two of these pitfalls and their impacts on leadership teams.

Silent disagreement

When leaders don’t raise their objections in front of peers during meetings or other public settings then issues can’t be resolved effectively. Worse still, some leaders engage in delay and disruption. Instead of raising their objections, they may not allocate funds or teams to projects, or disengage from collaborative work to support the wider goal.

This phenomena of not raising disagreements or objections publicly is what Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson dubs a lack of “psychological safety”. The idea that within a team that it’s safe to publicly take a risky stance and not anticipate rejection or ridicule for doing so.

Further research however, conducted by the Harvard Business Review over a six-year period found that while “psychological safety” is important for leadership teams it’s not critical. In their view it’s far more important to have “the ability to manage conflicting tensions — as opposed to seeking cohesion — that is the most predictive of top-team performance.”

In summary, a leadership team needs to be able to disagree publicly and surface misalignment in a “psychologically safe” manner but also be able to manage conflicting tensions as opposed to seeking cohesion.

Lack of focus

This is harder to define as there can be a multitude of reasons for why leadership teams struggle with this. Some that come to mind include,

• Focus on day-to-day running rather than forward planning
• Time being absorbed in inconsequential decisions
• Decision making not sufficiently devolved (more on this later)

Of these (according to research conducted by the Global Leadership Forecast 2018), leadership misalignment is most damaged when there is a focus on current challenges rather than future vision. 

In addition, further research by the Harvard Business Review indicates that most high-performing teams constantly use information gathered from customer, competitor and market changes. This research found that these teams achieve “greater sales and revenue growth (10.6%) and better development of new products (8.2%).”

In summary, leadership teams that have strategic alignment adapt to a constantly changing environment and far outperform those that only focus on their current challenges.

Want to avoid these patterns?

Here are 3 areas leadership teams can review to avoid some of the pitfalls described above.

Review your decision-making processes.

Do you have a high degree of bureaucracy in how decisions are made? Do you trust those under you to make decisions?

By decentralising your decision making and devolving downwards, you’ll be working towards freeing up your time to have more meaningful, strategic discussions with your leadership team. Furthermore, the slower the decisions making, the longer it takes to adapt and pivot when the world around you changes. Think about how you can remove barriers for everyone in the organisation to get to the decisions they need as fast as possible.

Align around your vision.

As a leadership team, sitting around your vision, dissecting it and turning into a shared artefact will accelerate your ability to align around strategy. Even better, place your customer front and centre when you explore what this shared vision looks like.

Research shows best-performing teams are those that consider customer needs as part of their vision. Further research by Dr Richard Hackman has identified that a vision that is ‘clear’, ‘challenging’ and ‘consequential’ is a key condition that, when present, increases the probability of team effectiveness.

Move towards a shared leadership model.

This is harder than it sounds, modern management and leadership demands require a completely different outlook. Where previously it was valued for a leader to ‘know everything’ or be the sole ‘decision-maker’, now the emphasis is on collaboration, shared sense-making and mutual purpose. The Global Leadership Forecast 2018 highlights that only 55% of surveyed leaders feel they are engaged in these practices. By creating a “psychologically safe” environment where challenges and risks can be raised, your leadership team are far more likely to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Allow for equal voice and encourage everyone to lay out their concerns, encourage safe conflict.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this article useful. Of the three recommendations I've shared which one is your favourite? Share your thoughts below and we can continue the conversation!