Our leadership team can't agree on what winning looks like, so the business keeps lurching

You have seen that email dozens of times now. The wording changes but the function doesn't. On Monday, an exec told the business to move faster. By Wednesday, a delivery lead got burned for taking a shortcut. Now a middle manager is trying to square it in writing. Softening language. Reinterpreting intent. Quietly signalling to their team where the real line probably sits.

Nobody calls it misalignment. They call it being sensible.

Unfinished decisions

Most executive teams I work with don't fight. They agree. Quickly. Too quickly, usually.

Cost matters. Speed matters. Risk matters. Customers matter. People matter. Heads nod. The slide advances. Everyone leaves believing alignment happened.

But here's the thing I've learned to watch for: alignment doesn't live in the meeting. It lives in the next hard trade-off, and most teams never get there. They agree on the nouns and skip the verbs.

When cost and speed collide, what gives? When customer experience adds hours, who absorbs the hit? When safety slows delivery, who owns the delay and what happens to their bonus?

If those answers aren't explicit, the organisation answers them anyway. Through behaviour. And those answers are rarely consistent.

I want to make an uncomfortable claim that most leaders resist when I first raise it: misalignment usually isn't caused by disagreement. It's caused by decisions that feel socially resolved but remain operationally incomplete. The meeting ends. The decision didn't.

The one cause that matters

There are many contributors, but after fifteen-odd years of watching this pattern, one dominates.

Leaders are rewarded for different definitions of success, and nobody forces the collision into the open.

Yes, there's fragmented data. Yes, incentives differ by function. Yes, pressure makes people defensive. But those are accelerants. The fuel is incompatible success measures that never get reconciled.

I watched a CFO and COO argue past each other for six weeks once. Manufacturing business, about forty million in revenue. The CFO kept saying "we can't afford slippage." The COO kept saying "we can't break delivery." Both were right. Neither had been asked to choose what loses if both can't win.

What made it worse wasn't a lack of operating rhythm. They had plenty of rhythm. Weekly steering meetings. Dashboards refreshed every Monday morning. A fortnightly exec sync that ran for exactly ninety minutes.

The problem was that the cadence had become theatre. Decisions were "noted." Actions were "taken offline." Nothing stuck, because the underlying trade-off had never been owned.

This is where I part company with a lot of the conventional advice. Patrick Lencioni's work on team health, for instance, treats operating rhythm as foundational. And it is, for teams that have already resolved what they're optimising for. But I've seen companies with impeccable meeting hygiene and catastrophic alignment. More rhythm doesn't fix unresolved priorities. It just gives them more airtime.

What this actually looks like

Let me drop the abstractions and describe what I see when I walk into these organisations.

A delivery manager I worked with last year had rewritten her project plan three times in a fortnight. Not because requirements changed. Because the funding assumptions underneath her kept shifting as finance and ops played tug-of-war over a number that was never really agreed.

There's always someone building a spreadsheet to reconcile CRM numbers with finance numbers, because leadership meetings keep derailing over whose figures are right. I met a business analyst in Adelaide who spent eleven hours a week on this. Eleven hours. She called it "the translation tax."

One engineering team I know stopped raising risks in planning meetings entirely. The last person who flagged a problem early was told they were "slowing momentum." So now problems surface late, when they're expensive, and everyone acts surprised.

A senior engineer I respected quietly stopped mentoring juniors. When I asked why, he said: "Everything feels provisional. Why invest in someone's development when the project might not exist in three months?"

This is how cynicism forms. Not as attitude. As adaptation. People learn that priorities are unstable, so they hedge. They wait. They do what can't be criticised later rather than what helps now. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety explains why bad news stops travelling upward in these conditions, but you don't need an academic paper to see it. You see it when the first honest update arrives only after the deadline has already passed.

When this gets dangerous

Everyone reaches for the Boeing 737 MAX story here, and I understand why. The investigations described a system where safety rhetoric coexisted with intense schedule and cost pressure, where engineers struggled to escalate concerns effectively. But that example is so large and so distant that it lets people off the hook. "We're not Boeing," they think. "We don't build aircraft."

So let me tell you about a mining services contractor in Queensland instead. About eighteen months ago, I spent three days on site with their leadership team trying to understand why their safety metrics had drifted.

The company had all the right words. "Safety and wellbeing are non-negotiable" appeared on posters, in the CEO's monthly video, in the onboarding pack. But their bonus structure told a different story. Supervisors were measured on utilisation. Ninety-two percent was the target. There was no counterweight for safety leading indicators, no adjustment for crew fatigue, nothing.

The ops manager showed me the incident log from the previous quarter. Fourteen near-misses. Of those, only three had been formally escalated. When I asked why, a supervisor named Dave said something I haven't forgotten: "You learn pretty quick what a near-miss is and what's just part of the job."

The system had taught him that. Not through a memo. Through a thousand small signals about what actually mattered when the pressure was on.

Within eight months, two of their best supervisors had moved to a competitor. Both cited the same phrase in their exit interviews: "I couldn't keep asking my guys to do things I wouldn't do myself." Absenteeism in the maintenance crew rose 40 percent. Leadership was shocked by both developments.

They shouldn't have been. The system did exactly what it was told.

What actually works

You might think alignment means consensus. I used to think that too. But I've come to believe that chasing consensus is often how alignment dies. What works is forced clarity, even when it's uncomfortable. Especially when it's uncomfortable.

I've started calling this "Decision Completion" when I work with clients, because the gap I keep seeing isn't in decision-making. It's in decision-finishing.

Write down what winning means so it can be argued with. Not a strategy deck. A single page that states the primary goal for the next ninety days, the constraints that genuinely won't be breached, what you're explicitly not optimising right now, and which decisions are allowed to disappoint someone.

The first time I ran this exercise, with a professional services firm in Brisbane, two partners tried to renegotiate their KPIs in the room. One of them got genuinely angry. He said I was "creating conflict where there wasn't any." But there was. It had just been living in the gap between the partners' assumptions and their practice managers' reality. The document did its job by provoking the argument early, instead of letting staff absorb it later.

Decide how decisions get decided. Most misalignment persists because decision rights are fuzzy. People relitigate choices because nobody is sure who actually owns them. Write it down. Publish it. Then honour it when you don't like the outcome. That last part is where most teams fail.

Use cadence to expose drift, not to perform alignment. If your weekly forum never names what lost so something else could win, it's not alignment. It's choreography. The CFO and COO I mentioned earlier attended the same meetings for six weeks. The meetings didn't help because the meetings weren't designed to force the question.

Treat this as an employee experience problem. I use a fast test now: ask "what will a team member stop doing on Tuesday because of this decision?" If the answer is vague, the alignment isn't real yet.

The diagnostic I trust

Forget engagement surveys for this. Try something smaller.

Ask five leaders, individually, in writing, to answer two questions. First: what is the single most important outcome for the next ninety days? Second: what would you accept getting worse to achieve it?

I've run this with eleven leadership teams in the past two years. In nine of them, leaders named different primary outcomes. In all eleven, fewer than half could name a trade-off. The most common response to the second question was some version of "nothing should get worse."

That's not alignment. That's wishful thinking with a deadline.

The surprise for me wasn't the disagreement. I expected that. The surprise was how rarely leaders are asked to name what loses. Strategic planning processes are designed to produce aspirational answers. Nobody wants to put "we will let X slip" in a board paper. But that's exactly the discipline that separates alignment from agreement.

I'll be honest: I don't always know what to do when the diagnostic reveals a team that can't agree even after the exercise. I had one client, a SaaS company, where three of five execs simply couldn't converge. They ran the exercise twice. Different answers both times. We eventually recommended they revisit whether the current team composition could work. That's not a comfortable conversation to facilitate, and I'm still not sure it was the right call. The CEO ended up replacing one of the execs six months later, but I don't know if that fixed the underlying problem or just moved it.

Where execution partners matter

This is where many teams stall. They reach agreement in principle, then struggle to make it visible in how work actually flows.

This is usually when 3 Dot Digital gets called. Not to referee strategy, but to translate intent into operations.

I've seen alignment harden when data gets unified so leadership debates anchor in the same numbers. When systems get integrated so hand-offs stop being the place where intent dissolves into rework. When automation gets applied to the work people resent carrying, like the eleven hours a week that Adelaide analyst spent on reconciliation.

When those things change, alignment stops being something leaders assert and starts being something staff experience.

But I want to be careful not to overstate this. Technology doesn't fix misalignment. I've seen plenty of companies buy integration platforms and dashboards without resolving the underlying disagreement. The tools help when the trade-offs have already been made explicit. They paper over nothing.

A practical close

If your leadership meetings end with different interpretations, run a trade-off session. Two hours. One page output. Publish it, warts and all.

If steering meetings collapse into data arguments, fix the data before you fix behaviour. You can't align on a story when people are reading different books.

If work keeps dying in hand-offs, map the workflow end to end and remove one manual break. Just one. See what surfaces.

If your people are propping up the business with spreadsheets and inbox management, pay attention to that. It's not resilience. It's deferred risk wearing a clever disguise.

One more thing. I've learned to be suspicious of alignment that comes easy. If your leadership team reaches agreement in a single meeting, you probably haven't asked the hard question yet. The hard question is always some version of: "What are we willing to lose?"

Until that's answered, the decision isn't finished. And your Thursday afternoon email is already being drafted.