Aligning Leaders and Teams
The Domino Effect That’s Undermining Your Teams and Your Results
Aligned leaders and teams has to be one of the single biggest influences of organisational success, yet many businesses overlook it as a “nice-to-have” or are completely ‘blind’ to the extent that it exists (or doesn’t) in their organisation.
As a result, rather than being treated as an imperative for productivity and performance, misalignment is undermining both the people side and the performance side of business.
Causes of Misalignment
Here are the top 4 issues we commonly see in organisations that are struggling with alignment.
Ambiguous Strategy
When leaders aren’t united on strategic goals or values, departments or teams may pursue their own agenda.
Siloed Organisational Structures
Functions work in isolation and inadvertently compete for resources, create bottlenecks, and duplicate efforts.
Communication Breakdowns
Companies often assume everyone “knows” what’s going on, so they fail to share mission-critical updates. Employees often refrain from sharing information to gain recognition and favour.
Low Psychological Safety Cultures
In unsafe learning environments, employees hide mistakes or refrain from offering feedback, which thwarts honest collaboration.
People and Performance Impacts
The following sequence demonstrates the impact misalignment has on people and performance outcomes.
Alignment → Communication → Trust: Typically, if alignment isn’t clear at the top, it shows up immediately in communication breakdowns. When communication fails, trust erodes fast.
Trust → Focus → Progress: Low trust hinders cooperation, which in turn undercuts clear priorities and forward momentum.
Progress → Results → Decisions: If you’re not making progress, it’s tough to get meaningful results; and without results, leaders struggle to make informed decisions.
Decisions → Assumptions → Inclusion: Where decisions are lacking, employees fill in gaps with guesswork, personal biases, and rumors—often leading to exclusionary behavior or a disregard for diverse perspectives.
Inclusion → Collaboration → Engagement → Connection: High-inclusion environments support true collaboration; collaboration fosters engagement and a sense of connection to people and purpose.
Connection → Respect → Turnover: When people feel disconnected, respect tends to fade. And when that happens, the exit door starts to look inviting.
The Data Deluge and Disconnected Tools
Despite having more data than ever, businesses struggle to derive a single source of truth. A dizzying array of different and disconnected tools capture and store separate slices of information, but they rarely integrate data to provide insights into relationships between the data.
The result is:
Data fragmentation - where each team operates off distinct dashboards, metrics, or versions of “the facts.”
Team fragmentation - where leaders feel they need to choose between supporting their people or achieving performance targets.
Leadership fragmentation - where leaders compete for resources, promotions, recognition and rewards.
Why this causes misalignment
Contradictory Insights: When separate functions rely on their own data sets, they can draw conflicting conclusions about what’s really happening in the business. It’s not uncommon for HR to claim one interpretation of employee behaviour, while leaders or managers sees a different pattern entirely.
Lost Context: Without shared visibility, no team sees the full picture. Missing context makes it harder to spot opportunities or risks—leading to decisions made in silos that ignore the bigger organisational objectives.
Inefficient Processes: Juggling multiple tools takes time and creates friction. Leaders spend energy misinterpreting data, making incorrect assumptions, and focusing on symptoms dressed as ‘problems’ and not the core issues that help them to achieve their strategic goals.
Eroded Trust: When people can’t agree or accept the data, skepticism creeps in. This can damage trust in leadership and in one another, especially if decisions appear to be based on “bad” or incomplete information.
Why This Matters So Much
For leaders, misalignment doesn’t only show up as missed revenue targets—it also reveals itself in the form of dysfunctional teams, reputational damage, and high attrition. An employee who doesn’t trust their leaders or sees little chance for meaningful progress will be the first one out the door. Meanwhile, organisations lose institutional knowledge, customer satisfaction dips, and leaders struggle to execute ambitious strategies. In essence, organisations lose their resilience. The greater the variance within and across teams, the lower the organisation’s capacity to maintain performance and momentum.
Moreover, misalignment has a way of becoming self-reinforcing. Dysfunction in one area feeds into others, creating a vicious cycle. As soon as communication dwindles, trust tanks. When trust tanks, people either withhold or distort information. Outcomes worsen, and the organisation tilts further off-balance.
People and performance are inextricably linked.
At Conductor, we help leaders understand how their people and performance are inextricably linked.
Supporting alignment is a cornerstone of Conductor’s leadership philosophy resulting in our ability to help organisations to radically improve both the employee experience and their bottom-line results.
Conductor is the bridge that connects people initiatives to business results, offering a comprehensive evidence-based approach to better performance.
