Executive leadership teams who are fully aligned are three times as likely to report increasing revenue than those who are not fully aligned, according to recent research by Integrated Project Management Company, Inc. (IPM). Other benefits of executive alignment include better decision-making, cross-functional resource sharing, and more focused execution.
Unfortunately, IPM often encounters leadership teams who have gotten out of sync over time. And misaligned executive teams can lead to a toxic atmosphere, vague or misunderstood strategic plans, and ultimately, poor company performance.
IPM research identified the myriad reasons leadership teams become misaligned, so they can face and counteract the forces working against them.
What’s Getting in the Way?
Getting and staying aligned as an executive team is challenging because there are a lot of forces working against them. Organization and team culture. Personal egos, agendas, and pet projects. Customer demands. Investors and the financial market. Competitors and the operating environment. The list goes on.
In IPM’s survey, and in our experience, the most common reasons were resource constraints that lead to tougher choices, internal politics or power struggles, and lack of trust and respect among members of the executive team.
For example, on a recent engagement at a healthcare company, IPM found that functional leaders would embark on their own big projects without considering the help they needed from their peers. Then they would surprise each other with resource demands along the way.
Another client, a family-owned food and beverage company with one major product family, had become misaligned when it developed a second business unit. Some leaders were content to focus on the core business and treat the new unit as a side project. Others were more ambitious. They wanted to build the structure and processes to grow quickly. The enterprise project management office (EPMO) lead brought in an IPM consultant to assess the situation and provide discipline and structure. However, a new president didn’t see the value because the company was doing fine financially, so he discontinued the EPMO. Senior leaders went back to making their own decisions about what was most important, limiting company growth.
How Executive Leadership Teams Stay Aligned
Because their alignment enables more effective strategy realization and organizational performance, executive teams must make alignment an ongoing effort. In fact, IPM’s research finds that the more methods they use to stay aligned, the better their companies tend to perform.
So the solution must be multifaceted and deliberate:
- Commit to improving and maintaining alignment.
- Ensure the basic processes are in place and working.
- Go beyond the basics and adopt a slate of ongoing principles and practices, including pre-emptively identifying the actions, behaviors, and tradeoffs needed to realize strategy.
Download You’re Not as Aligned as You Think You Are to learn to recognize the signs of misalignment—including leading indicators—and explore effective methods to maintain team alignment.
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