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Maximize Alignment

The Third Leadership Essential

Your Company's Greatest Speed Booster

Alignment is the most underestimated source of speed in any organization.

In the latest episode of Upsize Your Leadership, I make the case that alignment doesn't merely add people's efforts together. It multiplies them.

While misalignment can lead to conflict, misalignment is not usually a conflict problem. It's a clarity problem that comes in two varieties.

The first is divergence — genuine disagreement about direction. The second is ambiguity about the ultimate destination. People may want to align, but they can't, because leadership never made the ultimate destination clear.

We spend enormous energy managing divergence. But we tend to ignore the ambiguity, even though it's usually the bigger drain on speed and momentum. Ambiguity compounds the challenge of building engagement, because at best, ambiguity leaves them agreed on only a very general direction, not one that they can readily envision.

This episode offer practical, easily implemented steps for overcoming both divergence and ambiguity. These steps lead to a setting in which everyone has his or her oar in the water and is rowing in a synchronized movement toward a clearly defined destination.