5 Signs Your Team Isn't Really Aligned (Even If No One Is Pushing Back)
“We’re all on the same page.”
You’ve said it. Your team has said it. And somewhere between that meeting and getting the work done, things went wrong.
Steve, the CEO of a fast-growth financial startup, thought his leadership team was perfectly aligned. After months of planning, they all agree on one goal: becoming AI-centric.
But that illusion of alignment fell apart the moment Steve brought me in.
Operations thought “AI-first” meant efficiency—eliminating as many jobs as possible. Marketing saw it as a cool slogan, not a real change in how they worked. Product Management thought AI should inform decisions, but not replace human judgment.
The executives were aligned in principle but at war in practice.
The illusion of alignment always has a cost. When people realize they’ve been working in different directions, frustration grows, trust erodes, and energy that should go into work gets wasted on fixing problems.
This happens because most leader…
