Aligning a team: the difference between agreeing and pulling in the same direction

The meeting ends well. Everyone nodded, nobody objected, and the plan was approved. Three weeks later, each department is heading in a slightly different direction, and nobody understands why.

Agreeing is not the same as being aligned: the trap of meeting-room consensus

An agreement is an event. Alignment is a state that you check over time, one decision after another.

In a meeting, a lot of things push people towards “yes”. Time is short, the leader has presented the plan with conviction, and contradicting a superior in front of your peers still comes at a cost in most organisations. In a family business where the founder often decides alone, or in a Moroccan subsidiary that receives its priorities from group headquarters, that polite “yes” is even more tempting. People approve the plan, then each of them leaves with their own reading of it.

The tell-tale sign is that the disagreements come back later, in small groups, in the corridor or over private messages. This is not resistance. These are trade-offs that were never made together.

Patrick Lencioni describes exactly this mechanism in his model of the five dysfunctions of a team. Fear of conflict, he writes, comes from the desire to preserve “artificial harmony”, and it leads straight to a lack of commitment: “The lack of clarity and/or buy-in prevents team members from making decisions they stick to.” In other words, a team that does not debate does not truly commit.

What research says about strategic alignment

The most useful study on the subject was published in Harvard Business Review in 2015 by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull. It draws on a survey of nearly 8,000 managers in more than 250 companies, and its findings overturn two widely held assumptions.

First assumption: “our priorities are clear”. According to the authors, only 55% of the middle managers surveyed can name even one of their company’s top five priorities. The article tells the story of a chief executive who restated her strategy at every management meeting. An internal survey showed that 84% of staff said they were clear on the priorities, yet fewer than a third of her management team could name two of them. Repeating a message does not guarantee that it is understood, or that it means the same thing in everyone’s head.

Second assumption: “execution means alignment”. The processes that cascade strategy from the top down work fairly well. The real problem lies elsewhere: 84% of managers say they can rely on their boss and their direct reports all or most of the time, but only 9% can always rely on colleagues in other functions and units. The vertical chain holds. It is horizontal coordination that breaks.

Keep these two figures in mind, because they map out the method: clarify the priorities, then deal with the interfaces between teams.

The three levels of alignment: direction, priorities, roles

To align your team, you need to work on three levels, in this order.

1. Direction. Where are we going and why? This is the shared vision, put into one or two sentences that a new joiner can repeat.
2. Priorities. What matters most this year, and this quarter? Above all, what comes second? A priority without a trade-off is just a wish list.
3. Roles. Who owns what, who decides, and who needs to be consulted? Without clear roles, two people end up working on the same topic while another topic is left with no owner at all.

Most teams work on the first level (the talk about vision) and neglect the other two. Yet it is on the second and third levels that everyday friction plays out.

The real breaking point: alignment between teams

A team can be perfectly united and still hold the whole company back. Sales promises a lead time that production cannot meet. The Casablanca head office launches a campaign that the Rabat branch only discovers on the day. Financial control freezes a budget that operations thought had been secured.

Cross-functional teams are not immune to the problem. In a study of 95 teams in 25 large companies, Behnam Tabrizi found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional: they fail on at least three of five criteria, namely meeting the budget, staying on schedule, adhering to specifications, meeting customer expectations and staying aligned with the company’s goals.

To deal with this breaking point, map out your team’s interfaces. For each team you work with, ask three questions:

• What exactly do we expect from them, and by when?
• What do they expect from us?
• Who, on each side, can make a commitment and keep it?

This exercise is particularly useful in multi-site organisations (a head office and its regional branches, a factory and the sales department) and in subsidiaries of international groups, where some of the decisions are made elsewhere.

Method: align your team with five levers

1. Set shared goals

A shared goal is not the same as an announced goal. It is a goal that the team has put into its own words and connected to its own work. Start from the company’s goals, then ask the team: “If we could only achieve three things this year, which ones would do the most for these goals?”

In its research on team effectiveness, Google lists “structure and clarity” among the five dynamics that set effective teams apart, and states that goals “must be specific, challenging, and attainable”, citing OKRs as one tool for setting them. OKRs are not compulsory. The discipline they impose is: a small number of goals, expressed as measurable results.

2. Make priorities and trade-offs explicit

Rank your priorities from one to five. Not “all important”: ranked. Then write down the list of things the team will not do, or will do later. It is this second list that creates alignment, because it gives everyone permission to say no.

A simple rule helps: when a new request comes in, it must replace an existing priority, not be added on top of it.

3. Clarify who does what and who decides

A RACI-style chart is often enough. It distinguishes the person who does the work (R, responsible), the person who decides and is accountable (A, only one per row), the people consulted beforehand (C) and the people informed afterwards (I). Here is an example for a few decisions in a sales department:

The chart itself matters less than the discussion it triggers. The rows where two people each believe they are the “A” are precisely the ones causing conflict today.

4. Set decision rules

Every type of decision deserves a way of deciding that everyone knows in advance:

• The leader decides after consultation: quick, and suited to operational matters.
• Consent: you go ahead as long as nobody raises a reasoned objection. Useful for topics that affect several teams.
• Consensus: reserved for the rare decisions that commit everyone for the long term (values, organisation).

Announce the decision mode before the discussion, not after. Nothing wears a team down more than believing it is deciding together, only to find out that the decision had already been made.

5. Accept disagreement to secure commitment

Commitment does not come from the absence of disagreement, but from the feeling of having been heard. Before closing an important topic, go round the table explicitly and ask: “What could make this plan fail?” Then ask each person whether they can commit to it, even if they would have chosen differently.

This practice, often called “disagree and commit”, turns the polite “yes” of the meeting into a commitment that holds. It requires a team in which people can contradict one another without risk, which we explore in our article on team spirit at work.

The rituals that keep alignment alive

Alignment erodes naturally: new clients, departures, emergencies, decisions handed down by the group. It is kept alive through short, regular rituals, which work better than one big annual away day.

For teams spread across several sites, the weekly ritual can be held remotely, but the quarterly one is better done with everyone in the same room. Difficult trade-offs go down better around a table than on a screen.

Running these rituals is a skill in its own right. If your line managers are the ones who will lead them, team management training gives them practical tools for chairing a meeting where trade-offs are decided or for handling a disagreement.

Self-test: is your team really aligned?

Tick each statement that is true for your team, and be honest.

• If I ask each member separately to name our three priorities for the quarter, I get the same list.
• We have a written list of what we are not doing, or will only do later.
• For our recurring decisions, everyone knows who makes the call.
• Disagreements are voiced in the meeting, not afterwards.
• The commitments we make to other teams are kept, and so are the ones they make to us.
• A new urgent request triggers an explicit trade-off, not one more item on the pile.
• We have a regular ritual for reviewing our priorities.
• A new joiner understands within a week what really matters here.

Six ticks or more: your alignment is solid, so keep it up. Three to five: agreement exists, but alignment is still fragile, so start with priorities and roles. Fewer than three: the consensus is probably only for show, and the team needs dedicated time to work on it together. To track these signals over time, see also how to measure team cohesion.

When a facilitated workshop speeds up alignment

Some situations do not lend themselves to self-diagnosis: a leadership team that has just been reshaped, a reorganisation between head office and the regions, a strategic plan that is struggling to filter down, two departments that now only talk to each other by email. In these cases, the leader is both referee and interested party. An external facilitator makes it possible to ask the real questions without anyone’s rank weighing on the answers.

A well-designed alignment workshop usually follows four stages:

1. Diagnosis. Each person writes down, on their own, the priorities and friction points as they see them. The gaps become visible without anyone being blamed.
2. Trade-offs. The team ranks its priorities and decides what it will drop.
3. Interfaces. Teams that depend on each other formalise the commitments they make to one another and who holds which decision.
4. Rituals. Everyone leaves with a follow-up schedule, so that alignment survives the return to the office.

For a leadership team or a multi-site organisation, this is exactly what a tailored collaborative workshop is for, built around your real issues. And if you are planning a team event, a format of around two hours can combine team cohesion with strategic thinking, so that a sociable occasion also serves your priorities. That is in fact the condition for team building to have a lasting effect, as we explain in our article on the real objectives of team building.

From agreement to alignment

Start small. This week, ask each member of your team, separately, to name the three priorities, and compare the answers. The gap will tell you which lever to start with. If the work involves several teams or your executive committee, the consultants at TakeUp Consulting, in Casablanca and Rabat, can design and run with you the alignment session that fits your situation. All you need to do is tell us about your context.