Imagine an executive team where each executive has his/her own: agenda, vision for the company, exit strategy for the business (or for them personally), and strategic priorities for the coming year. How successful would you believe this company would be? If you said unsuccessful, you would have given the right answer.

Often we see companies that profile as described above. An unaligned executive team will not succeed in the marketplace. They are more vulnerable to competitive pressures than their aligned competitors, they are prone to higher employee turnover and a dissatisfied and disgruntled workforce, which translates into poor customer service.

Now you may be asking, if an unaligned executive team has such adverse consequences why would they not become aligned? It seems so obvious. The answer is: they don’t know any better. It’s like the boiling frog story. Drop a frog into boiling water and the frog will immediately jump out. Place a frog into cold water and slowly start to boil the water, and the frog will not make a change.

Team alignment is the responsibility of the CEO. What you permit you promote, and if you permit each executive to in effect “do their own thing”, you will promote and actually encourage this behavior.

Some of the reason CEOs will permit the executives to be unaligned are:

• They believe they are successful enough
• They are afraid to confront their executives for fear of loosing them or retaliation
• They truly don’t believe or are simply unaware there is a problem, at least at the executive level

Unless the executive team is aligned, meaningful change is not possible. And like the boiling frog story, when the CEO finally realizes that something needs to change (because employees are leaving, it’s difficult to hire good replacements, customers are defecting and the business is starting to fail) – it may be too late.

In our Quick Tips we will provide you with ten questions to ask to see how well your executive team is aligned.

Copyright 2010 Kubica and LaForest

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 24th, 2010 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Business Growth & Entrepreneurial Strategy, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.