We Need to Talk About Strategic Alignment
Recently, Wayne Aspland and I spoke with 55 global CEOs, Chiefs of Staff, and senior comms, strategy, HR, and operations leaders, as well as advisors about strategic alignment.
Along the way, we discovered that the level of strategic alignment in organizations has barely shifted in the eight years since we began researching the topic.
In fact, there’s evidence that strategic alignment is declining in the face of accelerating change. This is illustrated in bleak detail by one simple statistic. Mentions of the word “misalignment” in Glassdoor reviews have grown by 149% in just one year.
We can blame a range of issues for this poor state of alignment.
Like the Alignment Paradox, almost everybody acknowledges that alignment is critical to organizational performance. But there is widespread uncertainty about how to deliver it or what alignment even is. As Shel Holz, SCMP, IABC Fellow, senior director of communications at Webcor stated: “Most organizations have a strategy. What they don’t have is clarity or ownership of it across levels, and accountability for it is often missing altogether.”
Then, there’s the Accountability Paradox. Everyone has a theory on who is (or should be) responsible for alignment. But very few are actively measuring alignment. To state the obvious, without measurement there can be no accountability.
We also identified that enabling alignment requires four critical shifts:
- From a group of leaders to a leadership group.
- From proxies to proof.
- From cascades to conversations.
- From annual to agile.
Ultimately, Alignment Is Driven by Conversations
Perhaps the most astounding finding we made was that alignment is driven by conversations.
Not cascades or campaigns. And not top-down edicts.
Real, honest conversations. Where people talk to, not at, each other. Where people listen and act on what they learn. The sorts of conversations that not only drive alignment but also trust and psychological safety.
In particular, there are three conversations that really matter. Executive, public, and private conversations.
Executive Conversations
These are the conversations that happen (or sometimes don’t) inside both the executive team and the board of directors. They tend to happen before anything relating to strategy reaches the rest of the organization.
While a sense of alignment is projected at this level, it often doesn’t exist. Leaders (often driven by fear, ego, hubris, apathy, or politics ) avoid hard conversations, project false harmony, and accept decisions they don’t agree with.
They then leave the C-suite with their own interpretations and pursue their own divisional agendas.
The end result is a lack of leadership alignment that employees feel. In a recent global webinar, we asked comms and HR professionals and Chiefs of Staff whether the executive team in their organization is aligned. 54% said no. These are the people who see, hear, and feel the signals of misalignment in an organization.
Poor executive conversations can stall alignment, as well as strategy execution, before it even starts. As management and communications executive Heather Young said, “If the C-suite isn’t aligned themselves, communications can’t paper over the gap.”
Public Conversations
These are the conversations that occur across the organization. They include both the formal and informal conversations that exist daily and at major points of inflection.
As most comms professionals know, formal conversations, such as strategy launches and town halls, have a major impact on informal conversations.
Unfortunately, there is a major issue with these formal conversations. They are generally not conversations at all. They are just cascades of already-made decisions.
To make matters worse, there are often gaps between what leaders say and do and what the lived culture reflects. People notice and react to these gaps. This affects not only alignment but, as mentioned earlier, the level of trust that people place in the organization and its leaders.
Private Conversations
These conversations are an important part of how leaders connect with their teams. They help everyone genuinely understand the overall direction and strategy, and what it means for them in practice.
Despite their importance, most people leaders are woefully unprepared for these conversations. They’re not given adequate information to talk through the strategy, ask and answer questions, and translate it into day-to-day work.
These people leaders also struggle with a lack of capability in critical areas such as enabling alignment, translating strategy into execution, and having difficult conversations.
These issues are further complicated by the fact that everyone is just burnt out. Gartner reports that 54% of managers are suffering from work-induced stress and burnout.
What Can We Do About This?
Alignment is underpinned by the executive, public, and private conversations occurring across the organization. These conversations, however, are compromised in many organizations. As a result, the conditions needed to enable alignment simply don’t exist.
While communication professionals can’t solve this alone, there is a large amount we can do to address these problems.
In practice, this shows in how we support executive conversations – naming gaps when we see them, not just smoothing them over. It shows up in how we design strategy rollouts – building listening tours and strategy conversations, not only cascade packs. And it shows up in how we build leaders’ capability for the private conversations that create shared clarity and translate strategy into day-to-day work.
As global business internal communications partner Jorunn Aamodt said, “You can enable alignment even if you’re not in the room. Build the capability of the people who are in the room.”
We can encourage leaders to seek input while the strategy is being developed and feedback prior to finalisation. Involving people in the process rather than a top-down cascade encourages ownership and commitment.
One director of strategy and research who went down this path commented that, “Because people helped build it, they don’t need to be ‘aligned to it,’ they already are.”
These “listening tours” also have several other benefits. They improve trust and psychological safety. They also build a direct connection between the executive and the front line. This can accelerate both information flows and decision-making.
The harder question is how to do this when you don’t control the room, the budget, or the process. When you’re not at the table where strategy is being shaped. When the gap between what leaders say and do is visible to everyone except the leaders themselves.
These shifts, and the unexpected fourth condition we discovered, are laid out in our research white paper, From Groupthink to Governance: Leadership, alignment, and the courage to close the gap. You can download it and the executive summary infographic from clearleaders.com.au
IABC World Conference
This leads to a conversation our profession needs to have to about our role in enabling alignment and how we deliver it in practice.
I’ll be talking about strategic alignment and the findings of this report at this year’s World Conference in Toronto. Consistent with our findings, I’m keen to have a conversation with you, rather than a straight presentation.
That way, we can all participate in working through what this means in your context, and walk away with shared clarity about the task ahead.
If you would like to be part of a conversation that will define the future of our profession, join me at 1.30 p.m. on 15 June.
"Alignment should be a fundamental strategy or management concept in any organization: people need to be focused in the same direction. To me, strategic alignment is one of those fundamentals.”—André Oberholzer, IABC Fellow, SCMP, Group Executive Corporate Affairs, Sappi Ltd
IABC is proud to partner with Clear Leaders to bring you new, global research exploring one of the most persistent challenges facing organizations today: strategic alignment.
Based on insights from more than 50 CEOs, chiefs of staff, and senior leaders around the world, "From Groupthink to Governance" examines why alignment remains elusive — and what leaders can do to close the gap between strategy and execution. At a time of rapid change and AI-driven acceleration, this research reinforces a critical truth: alignment is not a communication exercise. It is a leadership discipline that directly impacts performance, culture and results. Access the report today.