How do you know your executive team is not aligned? In my experience, not by the arguments, because there usually are none. An executive team in that state tends to agree in the room and then go back to its functions and act on seven different readings of the strategy. The seven signs below show it early, and most of them are visible from the CEO's own chair.
I treat alignment as a structural property of a team, not a mood. A team can like each other, meet weekly and report green, and still be pointed in different directions, because nothing in the way it decides, rewards or reviews work forces the differences into the open. That is why the usual warning signs, open conflict and missed targets, arrive late. The signs here arrive first.
What Does It Mean When an Executive Team Is Not Aligned?
An executive team is aligned when its members share the same understanding of the strategy, know who decides what, and act on decisions once they are made. It is not the same as agreeing about everything. A team that is not aligned may agree in the room and still diverge afterwards, because the agreement never reached the level of what each person will actually do on Monday morning.
The cleanest way I know to say it is this. An aligned team agrees on what it is deciding. A merely agreeable team agrees in the room. The first produces commitments that survive the weekend, and the second produces minutes that nobody reads.
The Seven-Signs Scorecard: Spot an Executive Team That Is Not Aligned in Minutes
Use the table before you read the detail. For each sign, say whether you see it, run the two-minute test with a few of your own executives, and note the structural cause the sign most often points to. Three or more signs present is a pattern worth acting on. One sign on its own may be a bad quarter.
| Sign | What you see in the room | Two-minute test | Usual structural cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Decisions get reopened | A settled decision returns to the agenda a quarter later | Ask three executives separately what was decided and what each agreed to do | No named owner; agreement never became a commitment |
| 2. Functions pull for themselves | 'My team needs' is heard far more often than 'we need' | Name the last trade-off between two functions and the rule that settled it | No shared decision framework; incentives that pull apart |
| 3. No strategic conversations | Every agenda is status reporting | Count the meetings last quarter that spent a full session on one strategic question | Status updates crowd out debate |
| 4. People go around each other | Workarounds and side-door requests to the CEO | Ask who needed to approve it and why that person was not asked | Low trust between peers or unclear decision authority |
| 5. Uneven turnover | One function loses people faster than the rest | Compare that leader's plan with the company plan, then ask the leader and the team | A function strategy that has drifted from the company direction |
| 6. Initiatives fade | A priority announced in one quarter has gone by the third | Have each executive write down the priority of the last initiative that faded, separately | No single accountable owner; different readings of the priority |
| 7. Private complaints | Managers say the leadership team is not working together | Ask your skip-level managers how they describe the executive team to their own people | Mixed signals passing down; little safety to say so upward |
The Seven Signs of an Executive Team That Is Not Aligned, in Detail
Each sign below comes with the question I would put to the team. Read them as tests you can run this week, not as a verdict on any one executive.
Sign One: Decisions Get Revisited Over and Over
You decide on a strategy in the first quarter. In the second, someone questions whether it was the right call. By the third, another executive has shifted their function away from it. This signals that alignment was surface-level: people nodded but did not commit, so the decision never became theirs.
Constant reopening is expensive in a way that rarely appears on a spreadsheet. Every revisit pulls senior time away from the work the decision was meant to enable, and it teaches the organisation that decisions here are provisional, which makes everyone below the executive team slower to act on them. The first question I would put to the team is plain: when we made this decision, who was in the room, and what exactly did each of them agree to? If the answers differ, you have found the gap.
Sign Two: Each Function Pulls for Itself, Not the Whole
Sales pushes for customer customisation. Engineering wants a platform approach. Finance wants to control headcount. These tensions are normal, and every business has them. In an aligned team they are resolved through a shared decision framework, so the trade-off is made once, openly, and everyone understands why.
In a misaligned team there is no such framework. Each executive makes the trade-off in their own favour and the company absorbs the cost of the collisions. You can hear it in the language: people talk about what 'my team needs' far more often than what 'we need'. Ask where the last real trade-off between two functions was settled, and by what rule. If the honest answer is that it went to whoever argued hardest or reached the CEO first, the rule does not exist.
Incentives are usually underneath this. At Optus, Australia's second-largest telecommunications carrier, a review found that several KPIs rewarded local performance at the expense of the whole. I mapped them to the customer journey and showed the executive leadership team where the gaps were, and they chose to change a specific KPI first. Silo behaviour softened once the incentive stopped pushing against it.
Sign Three: Strategic Conversations Do Not Happen
Open the agendas for your last few executive meetings. If they are all execution, with each leader saying 'let me walk you through what we shipped this week', then nobody is debating market strategy, competitive positioning or capability gaps. When strategy is not discussed, misalignment stays invisible, because nobody is ever asked to say what the strategy means in practice and so nobody discovers that their answers differ.
A team can look busy, coordinated and well informed for a long time while holding three different pictures of where the company is heading. The question for the CEO is when this team last spent a full meeting on a strategic question with no status updates attached. If you cannot remember, the conversation that would surface the disagreement is not being had. Protect that time, and move status reporting elsewhere so it does not crowd it out.
Sign Four: People Go Around Each Other
An executive wants something they cannot get through normal channels, so they build a workaround or go directly to the CEO. Occasionally that is simple urgency. As a pattern, it points at two problems at once: trust between peers is low, and decision-making authority is not clear enough for anyone to know who can say yes.
Workarounds are rational responses to an unclear system, which is why lecturing people about escalation rarely changes them. Notice, too, what it does to you. If you are the routing layer for disputes between your own direct reports, you have become the substitute for a decision process. Ask who this person needed approval from and why they did not go to them. The answer usually tells you whether the issue is trust or ambiguity, and those need different fixes.
Sign Five: Turnover Is Higher in Some Functions Than Others
Suppose, illustratively, that one function keeps losing people while another stays stable. Something is wrong in the first function. That could be the leader, but it is often because that leader is pursuing a strategy that conflicts with the company's overall direction, and their people are caught between what their leader asks of them and what the rest of the executive team expects.
Treat an uneven pattern as a prompt to look upward rather than downward. The question for the CEO is whether this leader's plan for their function is still the company's plan, and whether the rest of the executive team would say the same. Compare your answer with the one the executive concerned would give. A difference between the two is worth far more attention than the turnover figure itself.
Sign Six: New Initiatives Die Without Anyone Deciding They Should
You announce a major new direction in the first quarter. By the third, it is gone. Nobody cancelled it. Somebody simply stopped working on it, and then somebody else did. This happens when initiatives were not truly aligned and different executives interpreted the priority differently, so each gave it a different level of effort and a different meaning.
This kind of failure is hard to catch precisely because there is no decision to point at. Nobody says no. The initiative loses its owners one at a time, and the gap between what was announced and what happened becomes a story nobody tells in the executive meeting. The question is who owned the last initiative that faded, what each executive believed its priority was, and when anyone last checked. Write the answers down separately before comparing them.
In one client, the planning cycle produced a good plan that nobody owned. I introduced a firmer discipline: each priority had one named executive accountable, and the plan was reviewed against outcomes, not activities. Leaders began to speak about results instead of tasks.
Sign Seven: You Hear Complaints About the Executive Team Privately
In one-to-ones, people say things like 'The leadership team isn't working together.' 'I don't know who has decision authority.' 'Engineering doesn't understand our constraints.' This is explicit data: your team is not aligned. The organisation below the executive team feels misalignment early, because it is the part that has to turn mixed signals into daily work.
Treat these comments as information about the system rather than disloyalty by whoever voiced them. The question for the CEO is what people are telling their managers about how the executive team works, and whether your direct reports would recognise that description of themselves. Protect the people who say it. Once honesty gets punished, the signal stops arriving.
Why an Executive Team That Is Not Aligned Costs More Than It Looks
A misaligned executive team is not just inefficient. It is strategically dangerous. Cycles get lost to re-work, people get confused about priorities, and your culture mirrors the lack of cohesion. In my experience an aligned team moves faster and makes decisions that stick.
McKinsey's research on companies moving from founder-led to scaled growth calls the top team the final and arguably most important factor in what it terms the cockpit of a scale-up, and notes that procrastinating over if or when the founder team should be replaced by executives experienced in scaling can undo good work on every other factor. The academic work listed under sources studies the same thing from another side: how far a top team's behavioural integration shapes the quality of the strategic decisions it makes. You do not need either to believe that a top team which cannot decide together will struggle to run anything else well.
The five elements below are what an aligned team has in place, read through the Five Structural Pillars behind my free Leadership Diagnostic. None of them is exotic. What makes them powerful is that they are explicit, so nobody has to guess how decisions get made or who is expected to accept them.
What an aligned executive team has in place
- Clear decision framework (Alignment System): Everyone knows how decisions get made and who decides, so a decision is made once and does not return in the next quarter.
- Shared strategic narrative (Alignment System): The team can say the strategy in the same words, and each executive can say what it changes for their function on Monday.
- Trade-off clarity (Execution Cadence System): When a decision creates winners and losers, the trade-off is made explicitly in a regular forum and accepted.
- Function interdependence (Cultural Reinforcement System): Scorecards and rewards pay for the company's success, not for protecting a function's own number.
- Trust in reversibility (Leadership Identity System): People accept a decision they disagree with because they trust it will be revisited by an agreed route if it proves wrong.
Is the Problem the People or the Structure?
A good test: if you swapped two executives, would alignment improve? If yes, it is people. If no, it is structural. Most misalignment is structural: unclear decision authority, conflicting incentives, or a lack of strategic clarity. Fix the structure first, then assess whether people problems remain.
Conflicting incentives are the easiest of these to miss, and they are why the swap test matters. A leadership team can believe its problem is capability when the real constraint is that some functions have incentives that pull against each other, so good people make reasonable choices that clash. In that setup, swapping a leader achieves little for long, because the next person in the seat inherits the same incentive. Mapping how work and decisions flow, using the team's own examples, is how you show the pattern. Several of the signs above, especially the second and the fourth, usually point to a cause like this.
Can a CEO Force Alignment?
Alignment has to be genuine. A CEO can enforce compliance with decisions, but cannot force commitment. If alignment does not exist, you have to address it: clarify expectations, build trust, or sometimes replace people who will not align. Forcing compliance without genuine agreement creates performance theatre.
Disagreement itself is not the enemy. It surfaces real issues. The job of the CEO and the board is to create a decision-making process where disagreement is heard, trade-offs are made explicitly, and the losing side commits to executing the decision. If people cannot commit after losing the strategic argument, that is a different problem, and it is the one to deal with directly.
When two teams with different histories have to agree, the method is the same. At BNP Paribas I helped two executive teams from different organisations agree what the combined business was for and how decisions would be made before they debated detail. I met each executive separately, identified their concerns and brought the real disagreements into joint sessions. Meeting people one at a time first is also the cheapest diagnostic I know, because it shows where the answers differ before anyone has a chance to harmonise them.
How to Build Alignment That Lasts
Alignment is not a one-time event. It is a disciplined, ongoing practice. Start by diagnosing where misalignment exists, then build the structures that enable alignment: clear decision authority, explicit trade-offs, and regular review of whether decisions are working. Then invest in the harder work: building trust, creating psychological safety, and developing shared language for strategy and capability.
If you recognise several of these signs, the next step is how to realign an executive team that has lost alignment. To see why it happens as a company grows, read why leadership teams lose alignment as companies scale, and for the decision side go to how to improve executive team decision making. If the team also looks seams-first, why strong executive teams still fail at the seams covers the handoffs between functions, and how to know whether a leadership team is ready to scale tests whether the team can carry the next stage of growth.
For an outside read on how your own team is working, begin with the team effectiveness audit or the wider leadership assessments, and see team coaching for support in the gaps between meetings. CapabilityAI is an AI coaching companion built around these same alignment practices.
An aligned team agrees on what it is deciding. A merely agreeable team agrees in the room.