Perhaps you have experienced this on your team: everyone nods in agreement, says that priorities x, y, and z are important. Then they leave the meeting and go back to working on their own priorities.
It’s like walking toward your car after dinner with friends or family, thinking everyone is following you, only to look back and realize they’re still standing there talking.
Most leadership teams don’t struggle because they lack priorities. They struggle because they have too many, haven’t resolved the disagreement underneath them, or keep changing them before people can align around them.
Here are three practical shifts to start aligning your team around the same priorities:
- Choose one, overarching, short-term goal that is more important than anything else.
You must have a single goal that is more important than anything else and big enough that the team must work together to accomplish it. If you don’t, why would the team align together? They’ll be too busy working on their own priorities.
This goal must be specific, so everyone knows exactly what it means to be done. And it must be short-term, ideally in the next 3-9 months.
Every major priority should clearly support this overarching goal, apart from the everyday work required to keep the business running.
Here’s a quick test:
If you stopped a random leader and asked, “What matters most this quarter?” would you get the same answer?
- Surface disagreement early
Watch for hesitation, silence, and quick agreement on complex issues. There is often disagreement under the surface. Don’t rush past it. Lean into it.
Create space for truth to surface:
- “What feels off about this?”
- “Where could this break down?”
- “Who sees this differently?”
- Eliminate competing priorities
Alignment is about eliminating competing priorities just as much as it is about choosing priorities. Misalignment often happens because leadership teams don’t have the courage to say no. Everything can’t be important. Otherwise you don’t actually have any priorities. You just have a big list of goals and tasks.
So what will NOT be a priority?
Alignment is rarely a communication problem alone.
More often, it’s a clarity problem, a courage problem, or a priority problem.
And under pressure, those problems only become more visible.
The leadership teams that move forward together are usually not the teams with the best strategy on paper. They’re the teams willing to slow down long enough to get truly aligned around what matters most.
