What Executive Teams Mean When They Say “Alignment”

“Alignment” might be one of the most overused words in modern business.

Everybody wants it. Every team asks for it. Every deck you see now says they deliver it.

No one’s as aligned as they believe, of course.

What many companies call alignment is actually just a series of communications sent that result in meetings held that overflow with statuses shared. The visibility! The proximity! It’s all up in there! And yeah… they support alignment. I’m not bagging on communication; I do have a Bachelor’s in it. But these things are not alignment itself.

Real alignment, though, is operational. It exists when people around the org are making decisions from the same point of origin when it comes to their priorities and goals. They all have definitions that are more than just in the ballpark of one another… they’re the same. When they call something by a name, then everyone calls the same thing by the same name.

(Sounds so obvious. Sigh.)

Yet for all the weekly syncs a company has, or how many times you meet up at a golf course in Chicago to fill out the same worksheets (that’s an example, folks) – you can still operate with deeply fragmented thinking.

It can be subtle; you can have sales and marketing define pipeline differently, as a major example. Everyone in these functions is performing – there is lead volume and velocity but neither is necessarily flowing in the same direction. And it’s here where the friction starts compounding.

This is what makes alignment such an executive-level challenge… not the collaboration desire or the communication volume. The reduction in ambiguity around what matters most (and why!) and why decisions get made.

The strongest organizations I’ve seen tend to share a few characteristics:

• They have clear definitions (12 people in a room don’t give you 17 definitions for “lead,” to use my favorite analogy)

• They use a consistent operating language (“Aaron, here we call them ‘clients’”)

• Their priorities are visible

• The metrics are trusted

• Ownership is understood

• They have frameworks that are repeatable and they support the making of decisions

These Field Notes of late have triple-clicked on how less is more, and that’s true in alignment thinking, as well. A big mistake a company makes is assuming alignment naturally improves as communication increases – when it does the opposite.

More meetings do not solve unclear priorities.

And honestly, some of the best leaders I’ve worked with weren’t necessarily the loudest or most charismatic. They didn’t cultivate an aura of personality. They were the ones who consistently made the organization and the work easier to understand.

Not in a performative sense. In an aligned one.