Alignment Is the Risk Nobody Talks About

You can feel it before you can name it.

The company is growing. Hiring is up. Teams are shipping. The board deck looks healthy. But something is off.

Meetings take longer than they should. Decisions get revisited. Good people leave and nobody can explain why. There is a drag on the business that doesn't show up in any dashboard.

If you're a senior leader, you've probably felt this. The sense that your teams are busy but not pulling in the same direction. That decisions you thought were settled keep coming back. That the organisation is working hard but something isn't connecting.

I've watched this pattern play out in dozens of companies across more than a decade. The symptoms vary, but the shape is always the same. A company that should be performing well, by every visible measure, is quietly losing ground.

The root cause, almost every time, is misalignment.

The most expensive problem nobody sees

Misalignment is the most expensive and least visible execution risk in scaling companies.

That sentence might sound abstract, so let me make it concrete.

When a company scales, people lose line of sight. They can see their own work. They can see their team's priorities. But they cannot see how any of it connects to the company's direction.

So they do what capable people always do in the absence of clarity: they optimise for what's in front of them.

Teams start pulling in different directions. Not because they're bad teams, but because each one is solving a different version of the problem. Priorities conflict. Effort gets duplicated.

Decisions bottleneck at the top because nobody further down feels confident enough to make the call. The organisation gets busy without getting anywhere.

Here's what makes this expensive: these are senior people on senior salaries, working hard on the wrong things. Not wrong in the sense of incompetent. Wrong in the sense of disconnected from what actually matters at the company level.

Two product teams building features that overlap. An engineering director spending months on a platform migration that's no longer a strategic priority. A VP making hiring decisions based on a plan that changed two quarters ago but nobody told them.

The cost doesn't look like waste. It looks like work. That's why it's so hard to catch.

And here's what makes it invisible: no quarterly review catches it. No dashboard tracks it. It doesn't show up as a line item in the budget.

It shows up as attrition that HR calls "cultural fit." It shows up as missed targets that the exec team blames on market conditions. It shows up as burnout that everyone treats as an individual problem.

Misalignment degrades as a company scales. The bigger the company, the wider the gap between what people are doing and what the company needs them to do. Acquisitions make it worse. Reorgs make it worse. Rapid growth makes it worse.

And because it looks like other problems, leaders treat the symptoms. They restructure. They hire. They run offsites. They bring in coaches. They do everything except address the structural root cause.

Why the usual fixes don't work

Most interventions target a single layer of the organisation. That's why they fail.

Executive coaching works on the individual. A good coach can help a leader gain clarity, build confidence, and shift their behaviour. But if the team around them is pulling in six different directions because the org strategy is unclear, that individual clarity gets crushed by the system within weeks.

The leader goes back to the same meetings, the same conflicting priorities, the same structural confusion. The coaching didn't fail. The system absorbed it.

Team offsites work on the team. Everyone flies somewhere. There's a facilitator. Whiteboards. Energy. Alignment in the room. People leave feeling connected and clear.

Then they go back to their desks. Within two or three weeks, the energy has decayed. The clarity has faded. Because the org-level direction that the team was supposed to rally around hasn't changed. And the individual habits that were supposed to keep the new commitments alive haven't been built.

The offsite didn't fail. It just didn't touch the layers above or below it.

Strategy consultants work on the organisation. They diagnose. They build frameworks. They deliver a beautiful document. Then they leave.

The document sits in a shared drive. The people who have to execute the strategy were not in the room when it was designed. The human dynamics that prevent strategy from being executed, the unclear ownership, the conflicting incentives, the missing feedback loops, none of that was addressed.

The strategy was fine. The execution system wasn't.

"Transformation" programmes try to fix everything at once. New structure. New processes. New tools. New culture. The ambition is right, but the approach is wrong. Big-bang change creates resistance, confusion, and fatigue. People hunker down and wait for it to pass. The ones who can't wait, leave.

The pattern across all four: each intervention addresses one layer of the problem. Misalignment doesn't sit in one layer. It breaks down between layers.

Between the strategy and the team that's supposed to execute it. Between the team's priorities and the individual's understanding of their role. Between what the company says it values and how decisions actually get made.

Single-layer interventions can't fix a multi-layer problem.

Where alignment actually breaks down

There are three layers where alignment matters. Organisation. Team. Individual.

The organisation layer is about direction: strategy, priorities, structure, incentives. When this layer is misaligned, people don't know why they're doing what they're doing. The strategy is unclear or hasn't been communicated in a way that every team can connect to. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

The team layer is about execution: ownership, ways of working, decision rights, feedback loops. When this layer is misaligned, teams optimise locally. They don't know what they own. Decisions get escalated unnecessarily. There's no rhythm, no cadence, no mechanism for learning from outcomes.

The individual layer is about clarity and sustainability: priorities, boundaries, habits, energy. When this layer is misaligned, people are busy but not effective. They're burning out on work that doesn't connect to what matters. Their calendar doesn't reflect their priorities.

Here's the principle that ties it together: misalignment in one layer constrains the whole system.

You cannot fix team performance without individual clarity. If the people on the team don't understand their priorities or can't sustain their energy, no amount of team process will help. You cannot create individual clarity without organisational direction. If the company hasn't communicated where it's going, individuals are guessing.

And you cannot build organisational direction without understanding what's happening at the team and individual levels. Strategy designed in isolation from execution reality is just a document.

The layers are interdependent. That's what makes alignment work hard. And that's what makes single-layer interventions, however well-intentioned, insufficient.

The question worth asking isn't "which layer is broken?" It's "which layer is constraining the others?"

What this looks like in practice

I saw this play out in one of the clearest examples I've encountered.

When Pivotal was acquired by VMware in a $2.7 billion deal, the organisation changed overnight. Pivotal had been a tight company with a clear culture. People understood the mission. They could articulate how their work connected to the company's direction. That clarity was part of what made Pivotal effective.

After the acquisition, those same people were embedded inside a 30,000-person company. The mission didn't disappear, but the line of sight did.

People who had understood Pivotal's direction suddenly couldn't explain how their work connected to VMware's strategy. The alignment gap was immediate and visible. And it showed up in all the usual ways: confusion about priorities, decisions that stalled, good people questioning whether they still belonged.

I designed a Career Development Plan template to address this. But the template was a Trojan horse. The real intervention was structural.

The template required managers to document vision-to-values at every level, company, business unit, department, and team, before working on any individual development plan. You couldn't complete the individual section without first completing the levels above it. This forced a cascade: to help one person with their career, you had to first understand the strategy at every level of the organisation.

We rolled this out with more than 200 people across multiple teams.

The same thing happened almost everywhere. A manager would open the template, start at the company level, and stop. The section asked them to describe the company's strategy and explain how their team connected to it.

Managers who had been leading teams for years couldn't write the answer down. Not because they weren't paying attention. Because no one had ever made them connect those layers on paper.

That gap was the point. Managers reported that filling in the organisational levels was more valuable than the individual development plan itself. The organisational sections forced them to confront what they didn't know about the company's direction. Several teams used the process to uncover misalignment between their priorities and their department's, leading to conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

The CDP also became a retention tool. During the turbulence that follows any acquisition, people who could see how their growth connected to the company's direction were more likely to stay. The ones who left weren't always unhappy. They simply couldn't see the thread between their work and anything that mattered.

The individual development plan was the reason people showed up. The alignment conversations were what they left with.

This is what multi-layer alignment work looks like. The entry point was familiar (career development). The real value was structural (strategic alignment at every level). And the mechanism that made it work was the requirement to connect each layer to the ones above and below it.

What this means for you

This isn't a "five tips" section. It's a reframe.

If you're a senior leader and something feels off in your organisation, before you restructure, before you hire, before you bring in a coach or run an offsite, try answering three questions:

Can every team in your company articulate how their work connects to the company's strategy? Not in vague terms. Specifically. If you walked into any team meeting and asked "why does this project matter?", would the answer trace back to the company's strategic priorities?

When priorities conflict, does everyone know which one takes precedence? Not you. Everyone. The people three levels down who make dozens of decisions a week without checking with anyone.

If you invest in an individual, does the system around them hold it? If you send someone to a coaching programme and they come back sharper and clearer, does the team and organisation around them support that growth? Or does the system pull them back within weeks?

Most leaders believe they can answer these. The managers at VMware thought so too, until we asked them to write it down. If your answers aren't clear, the problem isn't your people. It's alignment.

And alignment isn't something you fix once. It degrades every time the company changes, every time a team reshuffles, every time a new leader joins or an acquisition lands. It needs ongoing attention, not because it's fragile, but because organisations are always moving.

The position I'm staking

Most companies try to fix execution by working harder, hiring more, or restructuring. They treat symptoms because the root cause is structural and hard to see.

The companies that get this right fix the thing underneath all of those: the connection between what the organisation says it's doing, what teams are actually working on, and what individuals understand about their role in it.

That's not a programme. It's not a one-off intervention. It's a way of seeing the organisation that shows you where the problem actually sits.

Most leaders have never been taught to look for it. They've been taught strategy. They've been taught people management. They've been taught how to run meetings and set OKRs and build roadmaps. But nobody taught them to look at the connections between layers, the places where strategy disconnects from execution, where team priorities pull away from company direction, where individual effort loses touch with anything that matters.

Every restructure, every offsite, every coaching programme that doesn't address alignment is money spent treating a symptom. The companies that learn to see this will fix what's underneath. The ones that don't will keep paying for the same problems with different names.