Executive Team Alignment Coaching

Misalignment is felt most by the people below the leadership team

Leadership teams often believe they are aligned because they agree in the meeting. The real test is what happens afterwards. These are the signs CEOs and HR leaders describe to me.

• ✦Decisions made in the leadership meeting are quietly reopened in corridors or one-to-ones.
• ✦Each director gives a different answer when asked for the organisation’s top three priorities.
• ✦Teams below receive conflicting instructions and escalate to whoever they think will win.
• ✦Budget and resourcing discussions turn into contests between functions.
• ✦A new CEO, a merger or a new strategy has left people unsure where authority now sits.
• ✦Out of respect for seniority, the team avoids open disagreement, then disagrees through what it does.

An aligned team still disagrees, and then commits

A common misunderstanding is that an aligned team is one without disagreement. Aligned teams often argue more in the room, because they have agreed how to argue and how to close. What they share is commitment to the decision once it is made. That commitment is one of the clearest differences between a group of senior people and a high-performing team.

Executive team alignment coaching therefore works on two things at once: the content of what the team commits to, and the process by which it reaches and keeps those commitments.

Three agreements every aligned leadership team needs

These agreements are simple to describe and hard to keep. The coaching is in testing them against real decisions until they hold under pressure.

1. 01

   A shared agenda

   A short list of enterprise priorities the whole team owns, not a set of functional plans stapled together. Each member can explain why each priority matters and what they are giving up to support it.

2. 02

   Clear decision rules

   Who decides, who is consulted and who is informed on the decisions that matter most. Much friction eases once this is written down and tested on real cases.

3. 03

   A way to disagree and close

   How dissent is raised, how long debate runs and what happens once a decision is made, including how it is communicated to the organisation.

We work on live business, not invented exercises

I facilitate sessions around the decisions and tensions the team faces now: a strategic choice, a resourcing conflict, a stalled initiative. Working on live issues means the team practises alignment while doing its job, and the improvement carries straight into the next leadership meeting.

Programmes can include leadership assessments, facilitated coaching sessions, workshops, team reflection, behavioural tools, action planning and follow-up coaching. Some teams begin with a leadership offsite and continue with regular sessions. My article on running effective leadership team meetings is a useful starting point for the meeting side of alignment.

Before the first team session, I listen to the people involved

An alignment engagement usually starts with the CEO or team leader and, often, the HR director. We agree what has prompted the work and what a more aligned team would look like in practice.

Where it serves the work, I then hear from team members about how each of them sees the priorities and the friction. The first team session brings those perspectives together without attributing them, so the team can see its own picture and decide where to begin.

Why my background suits work with senior teams

For more than 26 years I worked in leadership, HR and talent development, supporting executive teams through growth and transformation in financial services, FMCG, entrepreneurship and government. I have sat in leadership meetings where the real disagreement was never spoken, and seen what it cost the people below.

I am a certified Systemic Team Coach and an ICF Professional Certified Coach with more than 4,500 coaching hours. A systemic view matters here, because misalignment is often a symptom of how the team was set up and what the organisation asks of it. Systemic team coaching explains that approach in full.