When alignment starts slipping, the instinct is often the same: communicate more, have more meetings, demand more updates, send more emails, and create more dashboards.
None of these are wrong, it’s just that often, there is a deeper issue than just communication.
When people, work, departments, or expectations become misaligned, there can be many causes: unclear priorities, competing agendas, incongruent incentives, silo mentalities, lack of communication, or even the complexity of the work itself.
But there is one overlooked cause that keeps popping up: the inability to decide what matters most.
Misalignment is often a prioritization problem before it is a communication or culture problem.
Someone has to decide what matters most. Until that happens, alignment is largely impossible.
Alignment doesn’t happen when everyone agrees. It happens when everyone understands what the organization is optimizing for.
When we don’t make that decision, we’re withholding clarity from the people who depend on us.
The result?
- Multiple “important priorities”
- People start to drift apart
- Projects stall
- Rollouts create friction
- Departments optimize for themselves
- Teams keep revisiting decisions
- Execution slows
- We lose the power of our collective effort on an important problem or opportunity
No wonder alignment slips and we don’t feel like we’re operating as one team. Why would we? There’s no compelling target to work towards together.
One of the passes we must give to those we serve as leaders is truth. And often, the truth people need from us is not just candid feedback or more information. It is clarity about what matters most.
I understand there are legitimate conflicts between priorities. Often times, prioritization is just as much about deciding what matters less than what matters most. Yet I’ve repeatedly seen the momentum that emerges when people are clear about what matters most.
Here are some examples:
- A newly opened medical facility smoothed out daily operations much faster by everyone in the building being focused on eliminating root causes of start-up problems.
- A manufacturer gained market share by everyone rallying around the fact that project management was going to be the strength of the company.
- When I was young, working as a cook for Pizza Hut, our restaurant thrived because everyone understood the priority: get pizzas to customers in 15 minutes or less. Cooks, servers, and managers all knew what mattered most.
Do we do that after hearing everyone’s perspective and engaging in debate? Absolutely. Do we need to reinforce the decision over and over? Definitely. But those are topics for another time.
For now, recognize that when alignment starts to slip, before increasing communication, ask whether the organization lacks clarity on what matters most.
