Written by Head of Marketing Josh Trebilcock.
We often find that Executive Teams hit a stage in their company growth where “what got you here, won’t get you where you need to go”. A period where they need to try something different. We see this begin to show up in a number of ways – does the below ring true with your Executive Team?
Within your Executive team:
- You often get stuck in the weeds – constant firefighting at the expense of strategic progression
- You are reaching a point where change is essential despite past success
- You might be clear on the need to change but several others aren’t – there is resistance or lack of understanding for the business case around change
As a business:
- You have a sense you are underperforming and not realising the potential you know you are capable of
- Effort seems to get spent on busy work and what’s in front of you rather than what’s really going to shift the dial
- Your top talent is fragmented – working hard, but not together.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. The solution is rarely more effort, more hours. It often starts with better collective alignment around what you’re trying to achieve. By this we don’t mean everyone nodding in agreement – it’s about achieving real clarity on what matters, why it matters and how to make it happen.
In today’s business environment, executive team alignment has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a commercial imperative. With macro pressures mounting, shareholders demanding results and internal teams needing clear direction, the role of the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) is under more scrutiny than ever.
With your time being pulled in different directions, it’s all the more important for ELTs to be clear and aligned on the ‘Why’. The extent to which you do, allows you and your teams to drive focus on the right things in executing the what and the how.
A lack of alignment can show up in siloed thinking and ways of operating. Siloes are often a sign that people are simply not bought in to your goal and overarching strategy. This can translate into individuals and their teams prioritising functional initiatives over wider business thinking. If left unaddressed, this can result in teams pulling different directions, instead of rowing together. It’s at this point we see, despite best intentions, progress stalling and frustration building. While there may still be progress, disjointed efforts can cause a lack of overall collective boatspeed and a feeling of unlocked and sometimes lost potential.
By coming back to the why and forming an understanding of what other business areas need to achieve and why that’s important, the conversation can turn more into ‘how each function can support each other to achieve your overarching goal’.
So:
- How do high-performing ELTs sharpen their focus? How can they get clear and aligned on what’s most important and avoid ‘junk miles’?
- What tools, rhythms and conversations help ELTs stay aligned and energised to make it happen?
This article explores our approach to what we mean by alignment and why it really matters for Executive Teams – and how high-performing organisations achieve it.
Why Executive Team Alignment Matters
Alignment isn’t about agreeing for the sake of it. It’s about achieving a shared clarity of direction, focus and execution. When that alignment is strong, leadership teams can become greater than the sum of their parts. Decisions are faster and cleaner. Messages up to the board and down through the organisation are joined up. People trust the direction because they see leadership walking the talk.
More importantly, the ripple effects go well beyond the ELT itself. Culture, energy, and accountability are all downstream of executive alignment. So often we use complexity as an excuse for clarity. When clarity is missing, symptoms can appear in a sense that everything is important, which means nothing is truly being prioritised. But by taking the time to achieve that clarity it enables a cleaner ability to embed priorities further down into the organisation and into the everyday decision making of the company.
The warning signs of a disconnect between an ELT and their teams often show up subtly at first: unclear priorities, competing goals, or leaders hesitating to make decisions. Over time, these small cracks grow into performance gaps. Functional leaders retreat into their silos. The level below gets mixed messages. Momentum slows.
Misalignment can take many forms. Sometimes it’s caused by a change in leadership, leaving the team without a new shared playbook. Sometimes it’s cultural – a clash between long-tenured execs and new arrivals, each pulling in different directions. In other cases, it’s the absence of a compelling “why” – the story that connects day-to-day effort with something that matters.
What Winning Teams Do Differently
We believe high-performing executive teams don’t happen by chance. They are built – deliberately and consistently – around three key performance ingredients:
The first is clarity of purpose. Elite executive teams don’t just have a goal – they have a shared goal that genuinely matters. It’s specific, emotionally resonant, and owned by every person in the room. Without that clarity, alignment quickly becomes impossible. You can find more detail on this here.
The second is to focus on what’s most important. Too many leadership teams mistake busyness for progress. Aligned to their gold medal, great teams ask the hard question – “Will it make the boat go faster?” – and act accordingly. That means killing junk miles, making bold trade-offs, and having the courage to say no to good ideas that dilute great ones.
The third is having collective accountability to execute. This is where many executive teams falter. They feel that once they are clear on the strategy that each leader can go off and focus on their function in isolation. High-performance ELTs behave differently – they hold each other to account not just for individual KPIs but for shared company outcomes. They establish team rules, clear rhythms, and mutual standards that enable them to make progress against each. And they role-model the behaviours they want to see echoed throughout the organisation.
Maintaining Alignment – Keeping Focused to Execute
Alignment isn’t a one-off activity – it’s a continuing discipline. High-performing teams maintain it through regular check-ins, feedback loops and structured reviews (e.g. quarterly offsite or alignment sessions) to catch drift early.
Crucially, aligned teams don’t just stay clear within themselves – they cascade clarity. They engage and empower the next layer, simplify the message, and connect it to a compelling story that drives buy-in.
But alignment without collective follow-through is fragile. Once priorities are agreed, the team must commit to focusing time and energy where it matters most – and call out deviations. This might mean having high performance conversations – the ability to have those tough conversations. It means being able to speak up and hold each other accountable when someone goes off-course or prioritises their club over country.
That feedback can be made easier by agreeing upon and articulating a set of team rules to help those areas of focus stick. When Co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis MBE recounts the story in the 18 months leading up to their Olympic Gold, there were highs, lows and moments of uncertainty. In order to get the best out of each other, the crew had to work together as a single unit. The team rules they created helped them form a set of behaviours, ways of working and habits that worked for the crew as a living and breathing document. It captured “them at their best”. Crucially, these rules were; developed by the whole team, specific and clear, constantly reviewed, simple and understood by everyone.
When the team are agreed on what they need to focus on and how they want to work, feedback isn’t personal – it’s part of the agreed upon rules of engagement of the team to make the goal happen. Accountability becomes a shared responsibility, not just the CEO’s job.
It sounds simple – but it’s where many teams stumble. Do get in touch if we can support your ELT in getting aligned and focused around your goal.
