At a senior leadership retreat I led recently, we asked the leadership team to do something deceptively simple: Look at their real work—current projects, initiatives, and priorities—and assess how well that work aligned operationally with the organization’s stated mission, vision, and strategy.
In my experience as an executive coach working with leadership teams, it is as crucial as it is unusual for that kind of alignment to be meaningfully assessed and acted upon.
Unless leaders are willing to tell the truth about what isn’t working and take responsibility for changing it, it just seems easier to keep busy “heads down” doing business as usual. And telling the truth requires trust.
Trust & Safety Come First
Before we asked leaders to examine whether their work was aligned or not, we focused on trust. The C-suite team went first, naming job security fears directly and making a clear commitment that this work was about letting go of misaligned work—not people.
We paired that transparency with a fun trust-building movement exercise to get everyone out of “meeting mode” and into a more human, open state.
Their candor made it safer to tell the truth. The physical reset helped people show up differently. Several noted that without this upfront trust-building—especially leaders naming fears out loud—the alignment conversations that followed would have stayed polite and theoretical.
The lesson for any organization is simple: alignment work lands only after leaders create psychological safety – and go first.
And bottom line? Actually let go of the things that no longer fit. Take action, otherwise all that hard-earned trust will quickly vanish.
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Window: How Pixar Does It, Again & Again
Pixar leadership learned early that alignment can’t be assumed. As the company grew, misalignment inevitably crept in—processes that once helped started getting in the way, incentives shifted, and good work bogged down.
Pixar’s cofounder Ed Catmull didn’t treat that drift as a problem to hide; he treated it as a signal to intervene, and even something to expect. That’s why alignment at Pixar wasn’t declared once and presumed to last. It was revisited deliberately, again and again, as a core leadership responsibility.
Operational Alignment Has a Payoff
Research on strategy execution has shown for decades that most organizations don’t fail because of bad strategy. They fail because strategy never fully connects to daily work.
Kaplan and Norton’s work on the Balanced Scorecard and multiple McKinsey studies show that organizations with strong alignment between strategy and execution outperform peers on growth, focus, and results.
Alignment pays. Misalignment costs. You see it in churn, mistrust, burnout, and very busy people solving the wrong problems.
Mirror – Reflection Questions To Consider
- What do you already know is operationally misaligned with your vision, mission, or strategy that you enable to continue anyway?
- What will it take for you to let go of what no longer fits?
- How often do your leaders explicitly ask how a project aligns with mission, vision, and strategy before approving it?
Door into Action: 5 Amare Steps to Operational Alignment
1. Build an alignment assessment. Create a short alignment check with active input from your team. Demo how it will and won’t be used.
2. Pause approvals for fit. Before approving new work, require a clear answer: How does this advance mission, vision, and strategy—and what activities will we stop because of it?
3. Make truth safe and useful. Signal clearly that surfacing misalignment is part of the work, not a threat to it. Align incentives accordingly.
4. Go first. Publicly acknowledge misalignment in projects you’ve approved or that show up in your priorities. Correct it.
5. Make misalignment visible and act on it. On a regular cadence, review where time, money, and attention are actually going, identify work that no longer fits, and stop or reshape it.
Amare Team Talk
At your next team meeting, explain operational alignment. Share this newsletter. Ask the team to list current projects and choose one to examine together: How does this support our mission, vision, and strategy right now? Listen without defending. If misalignment surfaces, decide—together—what to stop, reshape, or clarify.
Your Inspirational Challenge
Most leadership teams don’t struggle with alignment because they lack commitment. They struggle because alignment requires leaders to slow down, look honestly at the work they’re enabling, and be willing to change course.
Which really takes courage. It means admitting that some work has continued because it’s familiar, not because it fits. That past approvals made sense once and don’t anymore. That stopping something no longer aligned can be harder than starting something new.
It’s a choice you make everyday – in approvals, tradeoffs, and how you spend your time and energy.
When you choose alignment consistently, your people see it. They feel it. Their focus sharpens. Trust builds, engagement returns, and people put their energy where it actually matters.
Go for it!
– Moshe
Today’s Amare Wave Wednesday Quote
“If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”
—Jim Collins, American business author
Click here and read more Amare Wave Wednesday newsletters on related topics:
Make Everything Feed Your Mission & Vision: Aligning Your Organization For Impact
No Secrets: How Transparency Empowers Highly Successful Leadership
Making Trust And Accountability Your Leadership Superpowers
To Thine Own Self—And Business—Be True: The Importance Of Alignment In Making Business Love
4 Ways To Be An Aligned Leader And Why It Really Matters
Original article published on Inc.com.
