Leading a company is hard.

Leading a purpose-driven company is harder.

The Importance of Strategic Alignment

For purpose-driven companies there is the added complexity of balancing purpose with profit to accelerate your impact. Managing for growth and impact requires strong strategic alignment of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).

The Challenge with Strategic Alignment

SLTs are often not as strategically aligned as they need to be, and they don’t necessarily recognize it. The challenge is that alignment issues are commonly masked as something else.

  • Unresolved conflicts amongst the SLT that keep resurfacing

  • Teams who are wasting time in unproductive meetings

  • People who are spread too thin leading to continual overwhelm & possible burnout

  • Departments that have an “us versus them” mentality

  • Teams that fail to take the right risks, stagnating innovation

  • Leaders or teams who chase “shiny objects” without focus

  • Decision making is taking too long (e.g., difficult time agreeing to annual budget)

  • Teams who are not meeting their strategic goals

  • Leaders who are stuck in the doing and are not leading

  • Culture that is slowly eroding

These are not the only symptoms that can result from alignment issues but are some of the more common and problematic ones that we see.

Not All Alignment is Created Equal

It is not as simple as having a purpose or not. In our work with purpose-driven companies, we look at alignment on at least 3 different levels. Most purpose-driven companies are at Level 1. Some are at Level 2. A select few go deeper into Level 3.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁-𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗟𝗧𝘀 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝟯.

Is it Time for an Alignment Check?

If you are interested in doing a strategic alignment check, we created a short Primer specifically for purpose-driven companies. It contains a few exercises to help you think deeper about alignment and evaluate your organization.

It can be hard for a company to facilitate the process of getting aligned and creating the conditions to stay aligned. If you think you could make some moves to improve alignment, we’d be honored to have a brief conversation with you.