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Alignment Gets Lost in Translation · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome to the show everybody!
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  I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington.
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  Edwin, today I want to talk about alignment, which might be the most overused word
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  in leadership.
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  Every offsite ends with everyone aligned.
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  Every all-hands has a slide about it.
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  And yet I read a number that stopped me.
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  Donald Sull and his colleagues studied nearly eight thousand managers across more
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  than two hundred fifty companies for Harvard Business Review.
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  Only fifty-five percent of middle managers could name even one of their company's
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  top five priorities.
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  One out of five, Edwin.
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  And I'd wager every one of those companies believed it was aligned,
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  Claire.
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  That's the problem with alignment as a slogan.
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  Agreement in the boardroom feels like alignment.
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  But alignment isn't something a team says.
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  It's how a team behaves under pressure, when two priorities collide and someone has
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  to decide which one wins.
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  So where does it actually break?
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  Because the leadership team usually does agree.
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  It breaks in translation.
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  Strategy is written at the top in broad terms.
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  Then it has to become a department goal, then a team goal, then a specific person's
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  Tuesday.
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  At every one of those steps, someone interprets it.
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  And small differences in interpretation compound.
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  By the time it reaches the person doing the work, it can mean something quite
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  different from what the leadership team intended.
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  Like a game of telephone, but with a budget attached.
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  Exactly.
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  And here's what happens when the cascade breaks anywhere along the way.
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  You don't get open disagreement.
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  You get compliance.
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  People do what they're asked, because they're professionals.
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  But they don't own it, because they can't see how it connects to anything that
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  matters.
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  Compliance looks like alignment on a status report.
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  It just doesn't survive the first real tradeoff.
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  I want to push back a little, though, because the same research says something
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  surprising.
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  Sull found that the vertical part of the cascade mostly works.
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  Eighty-four percent of managers said they could rely on their boss and their direct
• 2:02
  reports all or most of the time.
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  Where it fell apart was sideways.
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  Only nine percent said they could rely on colleagues in other functions all the
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  time.
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  So maybe the cascade isn't the problem.
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  Maybe it's coordination across teams.
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  That's a sharp point, Claire, and I think it completes the picture rather than
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  contradicting it.
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  Alignment has to travel in two directions.
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  Down, from strategy to roles, and across, from one team's output to the next team's
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  input.
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  Sull's numbers tell us the vertical handoff loses meaning, since managers can't name
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  the priorities, and the horizontal handoff loses trust.
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  Both are translation failures.
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  One loses the why.
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  The other loses the reliability.
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  So the handoffs are where alignment lives or dies.
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  And the handoffs are exactly what the org chart doesn't show.
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  An org chart tells you who reports to whom.
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  It doesn't tell you that the person handing work over moves fast and decides on
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  instinct, while the person receiving it needs structure and detail before they
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  commit.
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  Put those two people on either side of a critical handoff and you'll get friction
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  every single week, even if they both completely agree on the strategy.
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  So two people can be fully aligned on the goal and still be misaligned in how they
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  work.
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  Yes.
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  And that's the version of misalignment that never shows up in an engagement survey,
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  because nobody disagrees with anything.
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  It shows up in duplicated projects, slow decisions and a constant argument about who
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  has authority to decide.
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  So what do leaders do about it?
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  Because the usual answer is another offsite.
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  Three things, and none of them is an offsite.
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  First, translate the strategy explicitly at every level.
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  Each manager should be able to say, in one sentence, how their team's work serves
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  the top priorities, and their team should be able to repeat it.
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  Second, name who decides.
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  Most chronic disagreement isn't about the goal.
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  It's about decision rights nobody ever assigned.
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  Third, look at the people on either side of your most critical handoffs,
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  and check whether the way they're wired to work actually fits what that handoff
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  demands.
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  That third one is where behavioral data comes in.
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  It is.
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  OAD measures behavioral drive across five dimensions: Drive,
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  Influence, Resilience, Structure and Leadership.
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  When you can see how each person is wired to operate under pressure,
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  you can design the handoff around that, rather than discovering the mismatch through
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  missed deadlines.
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  In one illustrative example, a two hundred person operations organization that
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  placed people using behavioral data cut its promotion mis-placement rate from
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  roughly forty percent to roughly twelve percent, and its annual team turnover fell
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  from thirty-four percent to nineteen percent.
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  And alignment isn't a one-time fix either.
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  People join, people move, priorities change.
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  Which is why it has to be read continuously.
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  OAD's Team Variance Report gives a standing view of where a team's behavioral makeup
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  has drifted from what its roles demand.
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  And Performance Drift Detection, which is coming to the platform,
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  is built to flag drift thirty to sixty days before it shows up in a missed number.
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  If you want to see what alignment looks like in your own team's behavioral data,
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  start with the person you trust most.
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  OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in
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  twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card.
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  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
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  A strategy no one can translate is only a wish, Claire.
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  Alignment is the translation.
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  Perfect place to leave it.
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  Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.
• 5:32
  Always a pleasure, Claire.