Alignment Gets Lost in Translation

Claire Monroe

Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, today I want to talk about alignment, which might be the most overused word in leadership. Every offsite ends with everyone aligned. Every all-hands has a slide about it. And yet I read a number that stopped me. Donald Sull and his colleagues studied nearly eight thousand managers across more than two hundred fifty companies for Harvard Business Review. Only fifty-five percent of middle managers could name even one of their company's top five priorities. One out of five, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

And I'd wager every one of those companies believed it was aligned, Claire. That's the problem with alignment as a slogan. Agreement in the boardroom feels like alignment. But alignment isn't something a team says. It's how a team behaves under pressure, when two priorities collide and someone has to decide which one wins.

Claire Monroe

So where does it actually break? Because the leadership team usually does agree.

Edwin Carrington

It breaks in translation. Strategy is written at the top in broad terms. Then it has to become a department goal, then a team goal, then a specific person's Tuesday. At every one of those steps, someone interprets it. And small differences in interpretation compound. By the time it reaches the person doing the work, it can mean something quite different from what the leadership team intended.

Claire Monroe

Like a game of telephone, but with a budget attached.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. And here's what happens when the cascade breaks anywhere along the way. You don't get open disagreement. You get compliance. People do what they're asked, because they're professionals. But they don't own it, because they can't see how it connects to anything that matters. Compliance looks like alignment on a status report. It just doesn't survive the first real tradeoff.

Claire Monroe

I want to push back a little, though, because the same research says something surprising. Sull found that the vertical part of the cascade mostly works. Eighty-four percent of managers said they could rely on their boss and their direct reports all or most of the time. Where it fell apart was sideways. Only nine percent said they could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time. So maybe the cascade isn't the problem. Maybe it's coordination across teams.

Edwin Carrington

That's a sharp point, Claire, and I think it completes the picture rather than contradicting it. Alignment has to travel in two directions. Down, from strategy to roles, and across, from one team's output to the next team's input. Sull's numbers tell us the vertical handoff loses meaning, since managers can't name the priorities, and the horizontal handoff loses trust. Both are translation failures. One loses the why. The other loses the reliability.

Claire Monroe

So the handoffs are where alignment lives or dies.

Edwin Carrington

And the handoffs are exactly what the org chart doesn't show. An org chart tells you who reports to whom. It doesn't tell you that the person handing work over moves fast and decides on instinct, while the person receiving it needs structure and detail before they commit. Put those two people on either side of a critical handoff and you'll get friction every single week, even if they both completely agree on the strategy.

Claire Monroe

So two people can be fully aligned on the goal and still be misaligned in how they work.

Edwin Carrington

Yes. And that's the version of misalignment that never shows up in an engagement survey, because nobody disagrees with anything. It shows up in duplicated projects, slow decisions and a constant argument about who has authority to decide.

Claire Monroe

So what do leaders do about it? Because the usual answer is another offsite.

Edwin Carrington

Three things, and none of them is an offsite. First, translate the strategy explicitly at every level. Each manager should be able to say, in one sentence, how their team's work serves the top priorities, and their team should be able to repeat it. Second, name who decides. Most chronic disagreement isn't about the goal. It's about decision rights nobody ever assigned. Third, look at the people on either side of your most critical handoffs, and check whether the way they're wired to work actually fits what that handoff demands.

Claire Monroe

That third one is where behavioral data comes in.

Edwin Carrington

It is. OAD measures behavioral drive across five dimensions: Drive, Influence, Resilience, Structure and Leadership. When you can see how each person is wired to operate under pressure, you can design the handoff around that, rather than discovering the mismatch through missed deadlines. In one illustrative example, a two hundred person operations organization that placed people using behavioral data cut its promotion mis-placement rate from roughly forty percent to roughly twelve percent, and its annual team turnover fell from thirty-four percent to nineteen percent.

Claire Monroe

And alignment isn't a one-time fix either. People join, people move, priorities change.

Edwin Carrington

Which is why it has to be read continuously. OAD's Team Variance Report gives a standing view of where a team's behavioral makeup has drifted from what its roles demand. And Performance Drift Detection, which is coming to the platform, is built to flag drift thirty to sixty days before it shows up in a missed number.

Claire Monroe

If you want to see what alignment looks like in your own team's behavioral data, start with the person you trust most. OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

A strategy no one can translate is only a wish, Claire. Alignment is the translation.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to leave it. Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always a pleasure, Claire.