Most leadership teams are not aligned, and the data proves leaders are often the last to recognize it. A recent Harvard Business Review article surfaced a striking pattern: 91 percent of executives say strategic alignment is critical, yet fewer than one in seven strongly believe their organizations are actually aligned. It’s a sobering perception gap that shows up quickly in performance. When alignment falters, collaboration breaks down, change stalls, execution loses steam, and trust erodes.
Our own research at IPM, published in You’re Not as Aligned as You Think You Are, revealed the same dynamic playing out inside executive teams. Leaders routinely overestimate their cohesion, even as misalignment quietly undermines decisions, timelines, and cross‑functional priorities. And the cost is real: companies with fully aligned executive teams are three times more likely to report revenue growth than those that aren’t.
Misalignment isn’t abstract. It’s measurable, and it’s expensive.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Alignment fails when it remains a C‑suite aspiration instead of an enterprise discipline.
Executive teams often assume agreement equals alignment. But real alignment isn’t what you say together, it’s what the organization consistently does together. Left at the leadership level, alignment evaporates the moment functional pressures, competing incentives, or shifting priorities enter the conversation.
That’s why alignment must be operationalized. And the only part of the enterprise designed to do that is the project management office.
Leaders Set Direction; PMOs Make it Durable
The Project Management Institute’s global report, Bridging the Gap: Positioning PMOs as Indispensable Partners in Strategy Execution, makes this point unmistakably. PMI found that senior leaders consistently want PMOs to spend more time on strategic alignment, value and benefits realization, customer‑centricity, and data‑driven insights—the capabilities that actually move the business. Yet many PMOs are still asked to focus on process, reporting, and compliance.
That disconnect is precisely where alignment goes to die.
When the PMO becomes the bridge between strategy and execution, the organization operates differently.
Principles become policy.
Executive teams articulate strategic principles, including the hard calls about what the organization won’t do. From there, the PMO translates those principles into the governance, prioritization criteria, and portfolio guardrails that withstand pressure, turnover, and noise. This is where alignment takes hold.
Intent becomes instrumentation.
Alignment stops being a feeling and becomes a system. Our IPM research highlights leading indicators—slow decisions, decisions revisited multiple times, cross‑functional silence—that the PMO can track long before financial results are affected. PMI’s work reinforces this by emphasizing value realization and data‑driven decision‑making as core PMO capabilities. Put simply: the PMO makes alignment visible.
Narratives become cadences.
Executive teams often retell the strategy every quarter. PMOs make it executable every week. Through predictable forums such as bi‑weekly strategy and risk reviews, monthly value realization updates, and quarterly portfolio resets, alignment becomes a rhythm, not a retreat deliverable. Execution becomes consistent because the operating model makes it consistent.
Shift from Nods to Mechanisms
This doesn’t diminish senior leadership. It strengthens it. Many of the root causes of misalignment—no clear owner, insufficient prioritization, lack of systems thinking—are leadership issues. But when leadership responsibility is paired with PMO instrumentation, alignment becomes durable rather than episodic. The executive team sets the direction; the PMO ensures the organization actually follows it.
So here’s the challenge to both audiences:
- Executives, stop assuming alignment exists because everyone nodded.
- PMO leaders, stop waiting for permission to be strategic.
If you want a practical place to start, go straight to one of the most underused tools in alignment: explicitly committing to what you won’t do. Then empower your PMO or EPMO to enforce those decisions across the portfolio. That single act cuts noise, accelerates decisions, and sends a clear signal that alignment is no longer optional.
And if you want to go deeper, download You’re Not as Aligned as You Think You Are. It expands on the research behind alignment’s performance impact and outlines the leadership behaviors and mechanisms that make alignment stick. It’s the natural companion to building a PMO that doesn’t just manage projects, it protects the strategy.
January 30, 2026
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