Your leaders are not pulling in the same direction, and the team below feels the drag of the mixed signals.
Each leader optimizes for their own area, priorities compete, and the same debates keep resurfacing because they were never actually resolved. This is the most upstream leadership problem: no amount of decision rights, delegation, or capability fixes a leadership team that does not agree on where the business is going or how it will operate. This guide aligns the leadership layer on direction and priorities, defines how they work together as a team, resolves the real disagreements, and makes alignment a practice rather than a one-time event.
Plan on one or more working sessions, then ongoing upkeep. Do this with your leadership team, not to them, because alignment can only be built with the people who have to carry it. Have your current direction on hand, along with honest examples of where leaders have pulled different ways.
Get an honest read of the team's alignment across direction, the top priorities, roles and boundaries, and how the team makes decisions and holds itself accountable. Then surface the places where leaders privately disagree or quietly work around each other.
Assumed alignment is the most dangerous kind, because it hides the gaps. Naming them is the first real move.
Open the Leadership Alignment Assessment →Get the team genuinely committed to the same direction and the same short list of priorities, then name what each leader owns toward them. A leadership team aligned on three real priorities beats one nominally supporting fifteen.
If you cannot align on priorities because the direction itself is unclear, there is no articulated mission, vision, or plan to align to, that is a strategy problem sitting under the leadership one. Create the direction first, then come back here to align the team to it. Strategic planning and clarity →
Make explicit how the team works together: its shared purpose, each leader's role and boundaries, how decisions get made together, and how the team holds itself mutually accountable.
A leadership team that has never named how it operates defaults to the founder's improvisation, which does not scale.
Open the Leadership Team Charter →Take the conflicts and competing priorities the assessment surfaced and resolve them explicitly. Decide, do not defer. Unresolved leadership disagreements do not disappear, they leak downward as mixed messages. A disagreement aired and settled aligns the team; one avoided keeps re-splitting it.
Revisit the Leadership Alignment Assessment →Set how alignment is maintained: a regular point where the team reconfirms direction, priorities, and how it is operating. Alignment is not a workshop you complete, it is a state you sustain. This connects directly to the leadership rhythm you may build later.
Set the review rhythm in the Leadership Team Charter →Your leaders describe the direction and priorities the same way. The same debates stop resurfacing because disagreements get resolved instead of avoided. Leaders stop optimizing only for their own corners. And the team has a named way it operates and holds itself accountable. That is the move from siloed leaders toward an aligned, collaborative leadership team.
With the leaders aligned, most people move to Clarify Decision Rights and Clear the Bottleneck, because aligned leaders still stall if authority is unclear. If your sequence points elsewhere, follow your plan. Clarify Decision Rights and Clear the Bottleneck →