Your Team Isn’t Confused – They’re Misaligned
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Nothing drains momentum faster than a team sprinting hard… in different directions.
It doesn’t always look like chaos. Sometimes it looks like busy people working really hard… on the wrong things. And when that happens, energy gets wasted, results get watered down, and leaders start carrying weight they shouldn’t have to.
Alignment Pressure From All Sides
If you’re leading today, alignment isn’t just about the team that reports to you.
- With your team: competing priorities, duplicated work, projects slipping through the cracks.
- With peers and bosses: the “up and sideways” alignment is just as critical - and usually messier.
- At home: you’ve probably had to corral kids out the door or sync up on a family trip. It takes just as much brainpower.
But here’s the difference: at home, you can pull rank.
At work, people can’t read your mind. Influence and communication are the only real tools.
Why Alignment Builds Confidence
When people know not just what they’re doing but why it matters, they move differently.
- They take ownership.
- Silos shrink.
- Trust grows.
Alignment isn’t just efficiency, it’s credibility. Leaders who create it become the steady ones others look to when things feel scattered.
When Alignment is Missing
Even strong leaders stumble here:
- Priorities shift but never get translated into team language.
- Teams stay “busy” without connecting back to strategy.
- Direction gets shared once and assumed to stick.
Here’s the truth: alignment doesn’t live in compliance. As explored in Creating a Leadership Legacy, it lives in influence. And influence only works if you keep talking about the story until it’s clear.
The Strategic Move Forward
Leaders get tripped up when they assume people “just know.” They don’t. Even the ones who’ve worked with you for 20 years can’t read your mind.
That’s why leaders who create alignment communicate until clarity sticks.
They bring voice to the story:
- What are we doing?
- Why are we doing it?
- Who does it involve?
- What’s at risk if we fail?
And they don’t say it once. They repeat and reframe until the message is heard, understood, and owned.
The pattern is simple:
- Translate strategy into plain language your team can act on.
- Test for shared understanding – invite people to play it back in their own words.
- Recalibrate often, because priorities never stay static.
The Leadership Test
Your people want clarity. And they want to know their work matters.
The question is, are you giving them both?
Reflection Prompt: This week, ask yourself: Does my team know not just what we’re working on, but why it matters – and do my peers and leaders hear the same story from me?
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