Leadership alignment isn’t just a buzzword. It’s strategy. When leaders aren’t aligned with your company vision, priorities can easily shift, progress stalls, and confusion quickly spreads.
Vision drift is real. And costly!
What Leadership Alignment Looks Like in Action
Imagine this: You own a lemonade company. It’s the only one in town that uses fresh, homegrown lemons. You value quality and originality and work hard to deliver the perfect cup of lemonade every single time. You’re scaling to two new locations, and you’ve trusted two leaders to help you get there. But only one of them is aligned with your vision.
This example is a bit over simplified, but you get the idea.
The first leader, let’s call him Steve, is completely aligned with your vision. With the company vision in mind, Steve has identified his High Payoff Activities (HPAs) that are the best use of his time, energy, and focus. Those are:
- Strengthening current customer relationships and encouraging referrals
- Finding new marketing and sales techniques to reach un-tapped audiences
- Developing his team’s technical and leadership skills
The second leader, Jeremy, is extremely passionate about pursuing a new flavor profile to maintain the company’s elite lemonade status. While this is in line with your love for originality, new flavors aren’t directly driving your goal of expansion.
Jeremy’s HPAs look like:
- Researching and experimenting with new flavors
- Interviewing new vendors
- Testing new recipes with the current audience
Jeremy’s work is valuable, but it reveals a common challenge: lack of vision alignment in leadership priorities.
Which team lead do you expect to get the results that are most in line with your vision?
How Leadership Misalignment Hurts Growth and Clarity
Leadership misalignment like this happens all the time.
It’s extremely easy for companies with multiple locations, or multiple departments within one location, to drift from the company vision.
Maybe the company vision lives in your CEO’s head. Maybe it’s something the Executive Team talks about, but it stays behind closed doors. Maybe it’s on paper, collecting dust somewhere. Or maybe you revisit your strategy yearly only to find that few of those goals have been met.
Do any of these situations sound familiar? You’re not alone. According to a global survey by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Arlington Research, 49% of business decision-makers say their organization does not have a strategic vision in place. [1]
Unless your vision is co-created with buy-in from your leadership team, cascaded throughout the organization, and reviewed at least once a quarter, your teams may be spending precious time (and money) on the wrong priorities.
Left unchecked, leadership misalignment can slow growth, stifle operations, cause turnover due to lack of role clarity, and ultimately risk the health of the company.
Strategic and leadership misalignment is exactly what we help companies fix through our Accelerate Operating System and Strategic Coaching solutions. By cascading one united vision, creating individual and company goals aligned with that vision, identifying Key Performance Indicators for accountability, and revisiting the progress each quarter, teams experience alignment and unprecedented growth.
If you’re feeling misaligned, here are a few questions that can lead you down the right track.
5 Questions to Assess Leadership and Vision Alignment
Here are 5 questions to help you assess if your company is aligned with its vision.
- Is every role defined with clear responsibilities and key performance indicators?
- Are the goals of every department tied to the company’s biggest strategic priorities?
- Are you tracking progress on company goals?
- Is there a shared understanding across teams of what success looks like this quarter or year?
- How often do you review and recalibrate strategic priorities with your leadership team?
Need Help Creating Leadership Alignment?
Talk with one of our Strategic Growth Advisors and uncover hidden opportunities for growth. We can help you build a team that drives vision, not drifts from it.
[1] Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), “The Impact of Marketing” Report, 2022.
Available at: https://www.cim.co.uk/media-centre/news/half-of-businesses-lack-strategic-vision-cim-study-finds/
