Executive Team Alignment: Is Your Leadership Team a Cohesive Force or a Collection of Silos?

As a CEO, you have assembled a team of highly talented and experienced leaders to run the key functions of your business. But talent is not enough. The ultimate determinant of your company's ability to execute its strategy is the degree to which this group of leaders operates as a truly aligned and cohesive team. A misaligned leadership team, no matter how talented its individual members, will create friction, slow down decision-making, and undermine your strategic goals.

True alignment is more than just agreeing on the high-level strategy. It's about a shared understanding of priorities, a common language for measuring success, and a collective commitment to the overall success of the business, even when it comes at the expense of a departmental win. It's the difference between a collection of functional silos and a cohesive executive force.

The Litmus Test for Leadership Alignment

How can you diagnose the level of alignment on your own team? Ask yourself these three critical questions.

1. Can Every Leader Articulate the Top 3 Company Priorities?

Individually and without preparation, ask each member of your leadership team to write down the top 3-5 strategic priorities for the company for the next 12 months. If the answers you get are not nearly identical, you have an alignment problem. A lack of clarity at the top will create confusion and conflicting priorities throughout the entire organization. True alignment begins with a single, shared definition of what winning looks like.

2. Are Your Incentives Aligned with Your Strategy?

Look at the bonus structure and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of your functional leaders. Are they designed to reward cross-functional collaboration and the achievement of overall company goals? Or do they create a "zero-sum game" where the Head of Sales is incentivized to close deals at a discount, even if it hurts the company's overall profitability? A misaligned incentive structure is one of the most powerful drivers of siloed behavior.

3. How Are Trade-Off Decisions Made?

Every business must make hard trade-off decisions. For example, should you delay a product launch to add a feature requested by the sales team, or should you launch on time to hit a marketing window? In a misaligned team, these decisions are often made based on who has the most political capital. In an aligned team, these decisions are made based on a shared understanding of the company's strategic priorities and a robust debate about what is best for the business as a whole.

Achieving true executive team alignment is one of the hardest but most important jobs of a CEO. It requires a deliberate and ongoing process of communication, accountability, and strategic discipline. At PICO, our Executive Team Alignment & Performance Scorecard service is designed to facilitate this process. We help you translate your high-level strategy into a unified set of measurable objectives and a cohesive strategic scorecard that ensures every leader is aligned, accountable, and pulling in the same direction.