I have really come to appreciate the art and skill of gaining alignment with your team before trying to move forward on strategic initiatives. My personality defaults to moving now, asking questions later so I must be careful, especially when engaging with folks whose default is to remain in the status quo until there is no other choice.

We were all part of a change management experience with the recent global pandemic. We were put into a position of “have to figure out” how to do many things remotely. Literally overnight, so many things were migrated from in-person to virtual because the world was put into the “have to.” When we want to make changes in our business, we aren’t often given this clear of a mandate. The really challenging changes are the ones you want to do when there is no emergency. You, as the leader, are left to create a sense of urgency.

I want to talk about gaining alignment around BOTH strategic initiatives AND normal day-to-day issues that cause your team and therefore company to get “out of alignment.” Whenever you have more than two humans involved, there is going to be misalignment. The more people you have in your company, the greater extent of misalignment that can occur. Most companies don’t have a good system for addressing the snags that happen, let's call them issues that are unprocessed and therefore are causing lack of alignment.