11 Proven Ways to Get Your Leadership Team Aligned

You walk out of a leadership meeting thinking everyone is aligned. The head nods were there. The strategy sounded clear. You felt good about it.

Then over the next two weeks, you watch as your COO pushes one direction, your Head of Sales pursues another and your Head of Operations acts as though the meeting never happened. You spend your time refereeing, repeating yourself and wondering if anyone actually listened.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Research from INSEAD found that when asked who sits on their leadership team, there was consensus among only nine percent of respondents across 120 organisations. If leaders cannot even agree on who is on the team, it is no surprise they struggle to agree on where the team is heading.

Aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable according to LSA Global's research across 400+ companies and eight industries. McKinsey found that leadership teams with a shared, meaningful and engaging vision are nearly two times more likely to achieve above-median financial performance. The data is overwhelming: alignment is not a nice-to-have. It is the single biggest multiplier of leadership effectiveness.

But here is the thing most articles about alignment miss: the problem is almost never that your leaders are incompetent or unwilling. The problem is that you have not built the structures, clarity and trust required for alignment to happen naturally. You are relying on hope instead of systems.

As someone who works with leadership teams across schools, corporates and nonprofits in Australia, the US, UK, Singapore and beyond, I see this pattern constantly. The good news is that getting your leadership team on the same page is entirely solvable. It requires intentional work, but the results are transformative. Here is how to make it happen.

1. Understand Why Your Team Is Not on the Same Page

Before you can fix alignment, you need to understand what is actually causing the misalignment. In my experience working with leadership teams, it almost always comes down to one or more of these root causes.

1. You Have Not Created Clarity

Patrick Lencioni, the author of The Advantage and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, puts it bluntly: "There cannot be alignment deeper in the organisation, even when employees want to cooperate, if the leaders at the top are not in lockstep." Most leadership teams have never sat down and answered the fundamental questions that drive alignment. They assume everyone is on the same page because they have been in the same meetings. But as Herrmann's research highlighted in Harvard Business Review found, 82% of employees believe their organisation is strategically aligned while actual alignment measured by written responses was only 23%.

That is a 59-point gap between perception and reality. Your leadership team probably has the same gap. They think they agree. They do not.

2. You Have a Trust Problem

Alignment requires vulnerability. Leaders need to be willing to say "I do not understand," "I disagree" and "I need help." When trust is absent, people nod in meetings and then do whatever they were going to do anyway. Lencioni calls this "artificial harmony" and it is the second dysfunction in his Five Dysfunctions model. Teams that lack trust avoid conflict, and teams that avoid conflict never reach genuine commitment. Without genuine commitment, you get what looks like alignment but is actually polite compliance. If you want to build trust in your leadership team, start with vulnerability. I have written about this extensively in 10 Effective Strategies to Use Emotional Intelligence to Build Trust in Your Team.

3. You Are Doing Too Many Things

Lencioni's concept of the thematic goal is one of the most powerful alignment tools I use with leadership teams. The idea is simple: at any point in time, your organisation should have a single top priority that everyone rallies around. When I ask leadership teams how many priorities they have, the answer is usually somewhere between seven and fifteen. That is not a priority list. That is a wish list. And wish lists create misalignment because everyone picks whichever "priority" best serves their department.

4. Your Team Does Not Know Who Does What

Role confusion is a breeding ground for turf wars and dropped balls. When one leader's responsibilities overlap with another's, you get either duplication of effort or, more commonly, critical things falling through the cracks because each person assumed the other was handling it. This is Lencioni's sixth question for organisational clarity: "Who must do what?" Most teams have never explicitly answered it.

5. You Are Not Spending Enough Time Together

The Unstuck Group makes a point that resonated with me: "Time-starved teams are not on the same page." The work of alignment requires time together. Not just transactional meetings where you go through status updates, but real time to discuss strategy, debate ideas, build relationships and make hard decisions together. Harvard Business School's Michael Beer recommends that top teams meet at least once a week and hold regular offsites to maintain alignment. If your leadership team only gets together for a monthly meeting, you are starving the relationship of oxygen.

2. Build Trust First, Because Nothing Else Works Without It

If I could tell every CEO one thing about alignment, it would be this: start with trust. Not strategy. Not goals. Not a new planning framework. Trust.

Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions model is a pyramid, and trust sits at the base for a reason. Without trust, leaders will not engage in healthy conflict. Without healthy conflict, they will not reach genuine commitment. Without genuine commitment, they will not hold each other accountable. And without accountability, they will not focus on collective results. Every alignment problem I have ever seen in a leadership team can be traced back to a breakdown somewhere in this cascade.

Here is what building trust looks like in practice. Get your team to do Lencioni's personal histories exercise. It sounds simple: everyone shares where they grew up, how many siblings they have and the greatest challenge they faced as a child. But I have seen this exercise transform the atmosphere of a leadership team in under an hour. When people understand the human being behind the job title, judgment decreases and empathy increases. You can read more about this exercise in my blog Simple Exercise to Build Your Team.

The next step is to create regular space for vulnerability. This means the leader goes first. Share what you are struggling with. Admit what you got wrong. Ask for help. When the leader models vulnerability, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. And that is where trust is built, not in team-building activities or trust falls, but in the daily practice of being honest about what is hard.

If your team has serious trust issues, consider bringing in an external facilitator. Sometimes the dynamics are too entrenched for an internal leader to shift them alone. A skilled facilitator can create psychological safety, guide difficult conversations and help the team build new patterns of interaction. This is a core part of the work I do with leadership teams, and if you would like to explore this for your team, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

3. Answer Lencioni's Six Questions Together

Patrick Lencioni's six questions framework from The Advantage is the most practical alignment tool I have found. These six questions force a leadership team to get crystal clear on what actually matters. They are:

1. Why do we exist? Your core purpose. Not a marketing slogan, but the fundamental reason the organisation was founded.

2. How do we behave? Your core values. Not twelve aspirational adjectives on a wall, but two or three behaviours that define your culture.

3. What do we do? Your basic business definition. Simple and clear.

4. How will we succeed? Your strategic anchors. The deliberate decisions about what you will and will not do.

5. What is most important right now? Your thematic goal. A single rallying cry for the current period.

6. Who must do what? Clear ownership of responsibilities to prevent overlap and gaps.

The beauty of these questions is that they are deceptively simple. Any leadership team can answer them in a focused one or two-day offsite. But the conversations they generate are profound. Teams discover they have completely different assumptions about strategy, about what matters most and about who is responsible for what. Those hidden disagreements are exactly what is causing the misalignment you are experiencing. The six questions bring them to the surface so they can be resolved.

I have written extensively about Lencioni's six questions framework. You can find a detailed summary in my blog Understanding the Six Questions. If you want to run this process with your leadership team and would like a facilitator to guide it, reach out to me at jonno@consultclarity.org. I run these sessions regularly with executive teams across Australia and internationally.

4. Use a Thematic Goal to Create a Rallying Cry

Of the six questions, "What is most important right now?" is the one that creates the most immediate impact on alignment. Lencioni calls this the thematic goal, and I have seen it transform teams within weeks.

A thematic goal is a single, qualitative, time-bound and shared priority that the entire leadership team rallies around. It is not a metric. It is not a departmental objective. It is the one thing that, if accomplished in the next three to twelve months, would represent the most significant progress for the organisation.

Here is why it matters for alignment. When your leadership team has a clear thematic goal, every decision gets filtered through it. Should we hire two more engineers or invest in marketing? It depends on the thematic goal. Should we expand into a new market or deepen our existing one? It depends on the thematic goal. The thematic goal becomes a decision-making compass that keeps everyone pulling in the same direction.

The thematic goal is then supported by a small set of defining objectives, the measurable outcomes that indicate progress toward the goal, and standard operating objectives, the ongoing metrics that represent business-as-usual performance like revenue, customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

One Australian company I read about implemented this framework with their leadership team and over two years nearly doubled revenue, enjoyed a considerable uplift in operating profits and reduced attrition by 45%. That is what happens when a leadership team is truly aligned around a single priority instead of fifteen competing ones.

5. Know How Your Team Actually Works with Working Genius

One of the most common reasons leadership teams are not on the same page is that they do not understand how their team actually gets work done. They have smart, talented people, but the work keeps stalling, meetings drain energy and the same arguments keep resurfacing.

This is where Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius framework becomes incredibly powerful. The Working Genius assessment reveals six types of work that every project requires: Wonder (pondering and questioning), Invention (creating solutions), Discernment (evaluating ideas), Galvanizing (rallying people to action), Enablement (providing support) and Tenacity (pushing through to completion). Every person has two areas of genius where they are both capable and energized, two areas of competency where they can perform but it drains them and two areas of frustration where they struggle.

As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who has worked with executive teams, school leadership groups and corporate clients across multiple countries, I have seen this framework resolve alignment issues that teams had struggled with for years. When leaders understand that a project keeps stalling because nobody on the team has Galvanizing as a genius, they stop blaming each other and start solving the structural problem. When they realise the same person is carrying all the Tenacity for the team, they understand why that person is burning out and can redistribute the load.

The Working Genius team map is particularly useful for alignment. It shows at a glance where your team has coverage and where you have gaps. I have seen teams look at their map and immediately understand why certain types of work always fall apart. "We have four people with Invention as a genius and nobody with Tenacity. No wonder we never finish anything." That moment of insight is worth its weight in gold.

If you want to explore Working Genius for your leadership team, I would love to help. I run half-day and full-day Working Genius workshops for leadership teams and entire staff groups. My Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference received a 93.75% satisfaction rating. You can email me at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what would work best for your team.

For a deeper dive into how Working Genius can transform your executive team, read 30 Effective Tips: Working Genius for Executive Teams.

6. Fix Your Meetings

If your leadership team meetings are a waste of time, your team will never be on the same page. Bad meetings are both a symptom and a cause of misalignment. They are a symptom because they reflect a lack of clarity about what matters. And they are a cause because every bad meeting is a missed opportunity to build alignment.

Lencioni's meeting model from Death by Meeting breaks team meetings into four types. A daily check-in of about ten minutes to cover admin, schedules and red flags. A weekly tactical meeting of 45 to 90 minutes to address current issues and review progress against the thematic goal. A monthly strategic meeting to discuss and debate one or two major topics in depth. And a quarterly offsite to review the big picture, rebuild team cohesion and reset priorities.

The biggest mistake I see leadership teams make is combining all of these into one meeting. They try to do status updates, strategic discussions and relationship building all in a single hour-long meeting, and they do none of them well. The result is the meeting feels like a waste of time, and leaders walk out less aligned than when they walked in.

Separate your meetings by purpose. Keep your weekly tactical meeting focused on execution and firefighting. Save strategic conversations for dedicated time with proper preparation. And invest in regular offsites where the team has space to step back, build trust and think about the big picture. If you want to improve your team dynamics through better meeting rhythms, read 29 Simple Strategies on How to Improve Team Dynamics.

7. Overcommunicate the Clarity You Have Created

Creating alignment in a two-day offsite is one thing. Maintaining it is another. Lencioni argues that leaders need to communicate key messages at least seven times before employees truly understand and believe them. Most leaders communicate something once and assume it is done.

Once your leadership team has answered the six questions and agreed on a thematic goal, the work is just beginning. Those answers need to be communicated again and again and again, in team meetings, in all-hands presentations, in one-on-one conversations, in hiring decisions, in how you allocate budget and in how you celebrate wins.

One practical approach: create a one-page playbook that summarises your answers to the six questions. Keep it on your desk. Bring it to every meeting. Reference it when making decisions. When a team member proposes an initiative, ask, "How does this connect to our thematic goal?" When hiring, ask, "Does this candidate demonstrate our core values?" When the playbook becomes the lens through which every decision is made, alignment stops being something you have to work at and starts becoming something that happens naturally.

The most important thing is consistency. Alignment is not an event, it is a discipline. The leadership teams I work with that maintain alignment over time are the ones that build it into their rhythms: weekly tactical meetings, monthly strategic discussions, quarterly offsites and constant reference back to their playbook.

8. Hold Each Other Accountable

Here is where most leadership teams fall apart. They do the offsite, answer the six questions, create the playbook and then go back to business as usual. Without accountability, alignment decays within weeks.

Accountability on a leadership team means peer-to-peer accountability, not just the CEO holding everyone accountable. It means your CFO is willing to say to your CMO, "We agreed that marketing would deliver the campaign by end of month. Are we on track?" It means your Head of Operations is willing to push back when someone proposes an initiative that contradicts the thematic goal.

This kind of accountability only works when trust exists (which is why trust comes first) and when there is genuine commitment to the plan (which is why the six questions and thematic goal matter so much). When leaders feel heard in the decision-making process, they are far more willing to be held accountable to the outcome, even if they initially disagreed.

Lencioni's accountability framework is the fourth layer of his Five Dysfunctions model, and it is where results live. Without it, your strategy is just a document. With it, your strategy becomes reality. For a comprehensive guide to this model, read 183 Tips: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Summary.

9. Invest in Regular Offsites

If there is one single thing you could do to get your leadership team on the same page, it would be to invest in regular offsites. Not one offsite. Regular offsites. I recommend at least quarterly.

An offsite removes the team from the daily noise of operations and creates space for the deeper conversations that alignment requires. It is where you rebuild trust, revisit the six questions, reset the thematic goal, address elephants in the room and invest in understanding each other as human beings.

The INSEAD research on leadership team alignment emphasised that leadership team members need to spend quality time together, including in team offsites, to gain greater self-awareness and awareness of their team members' energy and behaviour. When leaders understand each other at a deeper level, they are less likely to see questions or different perspectives as a challenge and can instead start healthy debates.

A good offsite typically includes time for personal connection and vulnerability, a review of progress against the thematic goal, strategic discussion about one or two major topics, Working Genius or other team development work, and agreement on priorities for the next quarter.

As an executive retreat specialist, this is work I do regularly with leadership teams across Australia and internationally. If you would like help planning and facilitating an offsite for your leadership team, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org. The investment in two days together can save you months of misalignment.

10. Address the Difficult Conversations You Are Avoiding

Behind every misaligned leadership team, there is at least one conversation nobody wants to have. Maybe it is about the toxic high performer who is brilliant at their job but destroys team cohesion. Maybe it is about the founder who cannot let go of decision-making. Maybe it is about two leaders who fundamentally disagree about strategy but have never actually said so.

These unaddressed conversations are alignment killers. They create undercurrents that pull the team apart even when everything looks fine on the surface. People work around the issue instead of through it, and that creates exactly the kind of sidebar conversations, political maneuvering and passive resistance that prevent alignment.

The solution is to have the difficult conversation. And I know that is easier said than done. It is why I wrote my book Step Up or Step Out (over 10,000 copies sold globally), which provides a proven framework for navigating difficult conversations in a way that maintains relationships while addressing the real issues.

If you are a leader who knows there are conversations you need to have but do not know where to start, I have written extensively about this. Read 25 Crucial Tips for Handling Difficult Conversations for practical guidance you can apply today.

11. The Real Problem Is Not Alignment, It Is Health

I want to leave you with a perspective shift that changed how I think about leadership teams. The problem is not alignment. Alignment is a symptom. The real problem, or the real opportunity, is organisational health.

Lencioni argues in The Advantage that organisational health is the single greatest advantage any company can achieve, and it is available to anyone who wants it. A healthy organisation has minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity and low turnover. It is not achieved through a better strategy or smarter people. It is achieved through a cohesive leadership team that creates clarity, communicates clarity and reinforces clarity through every system and process in the organisation.

When your leadership team is on the same page, it is not just about them. It is about what becomes possible for the entire organisation. Employees stop getting contradictory messages from different leaders. Decisions get made faster because everyone is working from the same playbook. Innovation increases because people feel safe to contribute ideas. And the best talent wants to stay because they work in an organisation that actually makes sense.

The research backs this up. Gallup found that up to 70% of variance in an employee's engagement depends on their leader. LSA Global found that 68% of companies with low organisational alignment reported poor to very poor employee engagement. And IPM's research found that fully aligned companies are three times as likely to report increasing revenue. The ripple effect of leadership alignment extends far beyond the boardroom.

What to Do Next

If you have read this far, you are probably not just casually interested in alignment. You are feeling the pain of a misaligned leadership team and you want to do something about it. Here are three concrete next steps.

1. Start with an honest assessment. Ask your leadership team members privately and anonymously to rate the team's trust, alignment and clarity on a scale of 1 to 10. The gap between what you expect and what they report will tell you exactly how much work there is to do.

2. Get your team offsite. Block two days in the calendar. Get out of the office. Work through Lencioni's six questions. Build trust through vulnerability. Create your thematic goal. This single investment will generate more alignment than twelve months of regular meetings.

3. Bring in a facilitator. Sometimes you need someone from outside the team who can create psychological safety, guide the difficult conversations and bring frameworks like Working Genius and the Five Dysfunctions to life in a way that sticks. This is what I do with leadership teams every week. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org and let me know where your team is at. I will help you figure out the right next step.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to get a leadership team aligned?

Initial alignment through an offsite workshop typically takes one to two days. But maintaining alignment is an ongoing discipline. Expect to invest three to six months of consistent effort before alignment becomes embedded in your team's culture. The leadership teams I work with build alignment into their weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythms.

Can you create alignment without an offsite?

You can make progress, but offsites accelerate the process dramatically. The daily noise of operations makes it almost impossible to have the deep, uninterrupted conversations that alignment requires. Even a single two-day offsite can achieve more alignment than months of incremental meeting improvements.

What is the biggest mistake leaders make when trying to align their team?

Jumping to strategy before building trust. Leaders often want to skip straight to goals, metrics and accountability. But without trust, people will not be honest about disagreements, and without honesty, you will get the appearance of alignment without the reality. Start with trust. Everything else follows.

What role does Working Genius play in alignment?

Working Genius helps teams understand why work stalls and why certain types of collaboration feel difficult. It reveals the structural gaps in how your team operates, things like missing Tenacity or too much Discernment, that no amount of strategic planning can fix. I use Working Genius alongside Five Dysfunctions and the six questions to give leadership teams a complete picture of where they are and where they need to go.

How do I know if my team needs external facilitation?

If you have tried to address alignment internally and the same patterns keep repeating, external facilitation is almost certainly needed. Other signs include ongoing tension between specific team members, a history of offsites that feel good but do not result in lasting change, or a sense that people are not being fully honest in team discussions. An external facilitator brings objectivity, psychological safety and proven frameworks.

What if one person on my team is the main source of misalignment?

This is more common than people think. Sometimes alignment requires a difficult conversation with a specific team member about their behaviour, their commitment to the team or their fit within the organisation. My book Step Up or Step Out provides a framework for exactly this situation. The key is to address it directly rather than working around it, because working around one person costs the entire team.

Can alignment work for small teams as well as large executive teams?

Absolutely. The principles are the same whether your leadership team has three people or twelve. In fact, smaller teams often achieve alignment faster because there are fewer dynamics to manage. The six questions, thematic goal and Working Genius framework all scale beautifully.

How often should a leadership team revisit their alignment?

Weekly tactical meetings should keep execution aligned. Monthly strategic discussions should address emerging issues. And quarterly offsites should reset the thematic goal and rebuild team cohesion. Alignment is not something you achieve once and forget about. It requires ongoing maintenance, just like any healthy relationship.

About the Author

Jonno White is the Co-Founder of Clarity Group Global and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator. He works with CEOs, Heads of Schools and Boards to build leadership teams that are aligned, healthy and high-performing. Jonno is the author of Step Up or Step Out (over 10,000 copies sold globally) and hosts The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. His blog at Clarity Group Global is read by more than two million leaders each year. Jonno works with leadership teams across Australia, the US, UK, Singapore, Canada, India and beyond, delivering keynotes, workshops, executive team offsites and facilitation using Patrick Lencioni's frameworks including Working Genius, Five Dysfunctions, The Advantage and Death by Meeting. To discuss how Jonno can help your leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

183 Tips to Build Your Team: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Summary

Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions model sits at the heart of everything I have written about in this article. Trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, results. These are the building blocks of a leadership team that is truly on the same page. But the model goes much deeper than most people realise, and understanding the nuance of each dysfunction is what separates teams that read the book from teams that actually transform.

I have put together a comprehensive summary that walks through all five dysfunctions with 183 practical tips you can apply with your team. It covers what each dysfunction looks like, why it develops, how it connects to the others and what you can do about it starting this week. If alignment matters to you, this is essential reading.

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