Leadership Trap #3: Mistaking Agreement for Alignment
Executive Insight
Using the same words does not automatically create alignment.
Agreeing on an objective is not the same as agreeing about what it means, what is causing the current condition, or what success requires.
Disparate departments may hold different yet plausible explanations. Create the shared evidence that allows those perspectives to become a better understanding of the whole system.
Everyone agreed we needed better quality.
That was about where the agreement ended.
My manufacturing client was experiencing frequent warranty claims on one product line. Everyone agreed quality needed to improve. But when we started asking why products were failing, the agreement disappeared.
Production pointed to the design. Engineering suspected inconsistency in vendor-supplied components. Supply Chain noted that Production was responsible for inspecting and accepting incoming goods.
Everyone could explain why the problem wasn't theirs. And everyone was partly right.
Agreement on the objective doesn't create shared understanding.
“Better quality” sounded like alignment because everyone could agree with it. And each department subsequently looked at its own processes and declared itself compliant.
Departments experience quality through their processes. Customers experience quality through their experience with a product or service.
That's why local compliance isn't enough; every function can follow its own process and still produce a poor enterprise outcome if the interfaces between those processes aren't working.
An investigation revealed multiple failures across the system: After conducting root cause analyses on returned merchandise, Engineering identified design features that made the product difficult to manufacture and test consistently and work instructions that needed improvement. Spot checks confirmed inconsistency among supplied components. An internal mock ISO audit exposed gaps in incoming inspection, traceability, FIFO practices, and final quality testing.
There wasn't one root cause; there were interacting causes. Yet, each department had been looking at the ones outside its own boundary because it complied with its own processes internally.
Using the same words does not automatically create alignment. Sometimes, apparent agreement prevents us from discovering that we aren't aligned.
Competing explanations can all be true.
The breakthrough wasn't getting everyone to agree on whose explanation was correct. It was creating enough shared evidence to see how the explanations fit together.
We generated this evidence by doing the root-cause analyses, spot-checked incoming components, and tracing the manufacturing process from incoming inspection through assembly and final testing.
The competing theories of a design problem, a supplier problem, and a manufacturing-process problem were all true. And once we stopped treating these as competing explanations, we could see the system producing the failures.
That's an important part of what I mean by translation: Translation preserves meaning while changing context.
Translation isn't persuading Production to accept Engineering's explanation or vice versa. Sometimes it means helping people see how different perspectives describe different parts of the same system.
Alignment becomes meaningful when it changes action.
I reviewed the findings first with corporate quality leadership and the division executive. Once we agreed that this was a system problem rather than a departmental failure, we could turn “better quality” into specific commitments.
Engineering could improve manufacturability, work instructions, and testability. Supply Chain could address supplier capability. Production could strengthen inspection, traceability and final testing. More integrated tracking could make the connections visible.
Different responsibilities. Shared outcome.
Research on shared mental models supports this distinction. Teams perform better when members develop enough common understanding of the task, roles and environment to coordinate effectively, even though they bring different expertise and perspectives.[1] Research on team learning similarly shows that co-construction and constructive conflict can help teams develop shared mental models.[2]
The SMART goals mattered because they translated shared understanding into coordinated action.
Don't ask only whether people agree.
Alignment isn't everyone nodding at the same objective. Agreement tells you people want “better quality.” Alignment means they share enough understanding of what that requires to coordinate their different actions toward the same outcome.
So when agreement comes easily, I think it's worth testing. Don't ask, “Do we agree?”
Ask: “What does that mean to you?”
Then listen for differences in definitions, assumptions, causes and measures of success. Those differences aren't necessarily evidence that alignment has failed. They may be the information you need to build real alignment in the first place.
References
[1] National Research Council, “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science,” National Academies Press, 2015.
[2] Piet Van den Bossche, Wim Gijselaers, Mien Segers, Geert Woltjer, and Paul Kirschner, “Team Learning: Building Shared Mental Models,” Instructional Science 39 (2011): 283–301.
