How to break your team spirit in three acts
Act 1: You just got back from a great team offsite. Everyone is energized! You aligned on values and priorities. Everyone is heading back to work excited about working together to deliver. It feels great!
Act 2: It's two months later. The offsite is long forgotten. Your team has reverted back to working the way they worked before the offsite. The same disagreements, the same people irritating each other, the same petty complaints.
"What happened?" you wonder. "That offsite was so great!"
"Was there an offsite?" your team responds. "I don't remember that."
Act 3: Two more months have passed. You're thinking about your next team gathering, but it's exhausting to contemplate. The last one only bought you two weeks of goodwill. These days, if anything, your team is working together even less effectively than before.
Sound familiar?
The illusion of alignment
At least a couple of times a week, one of the leaders I coach relates an experience like the above. It doesn't have to be an offsite. It might be a quarterly kickoff or a new values rollout. It's any event where you declare priorities and everyone nods their heads in enthusiastic agreement.
You work for months to perfect your plan and communication. You feel great coming out of it, but a few weeks later, everyone has etch-a-sketched right back to where they started.
When I was a CEO, I put a tremendous amount of work into comms and messaging. Even my biggest detractors would likely agree that I am a strong storyteller and that I thoughtfully articulate values and priorities. But after numerous kickoffs where I felt great initially but saw big fissures a few weeks later, it was clear that my rollouts weren't enough. That's because all the important work to keep a team aligned happens in everyday conversations, not in big launches.
Here's how to build a team that gets aligned and stays aligned.
#1: Keep it simple.
Most misalignments start with one thing: too many priorities. You don't get to have five values and four key metrics and six strategic initiatives and three different launch dates in focus all at the same time. Ask me how I know.
An aligned team generally has one "what" goal (e.g. "customer renewals above everything else") and one "how" goal (e.g. "take accountability, share credit") in focus at a given time. The bigger your team gets, the harder it is to find a simple, clear north star that works for your whole team. (And remember, AI will not save your internal comms!). But it's worth trying, because keeping it simple is the only way #2 below works.
#2: Keep it autonomous.
One of my top challenges as a CEO was what I call the swoop problem. For many years, when I saw things getting misaligned, I would swoop in to suggest adjustments on the ground. I was constantly playing sweeper, keeping things aligned by never taking my eye off a single detail. I'll give you one guess as to how well that worked as the company grew.
If you've done the work to define simple goals, the next step is to ask people to apply those goals to their own work and make decisions accordingly. Rather than leading with your own opinions, this means coaching people by asking questions:
- "If our goal is to put customer renewals above everything else, what decision do you recommend here?"
- "Walk me through how [IDEA] aligns to our top team goal of securing customer renewals first."
We get to alignment when people have clear yardsticks for making decisions that they can apply autonomously. Without that, you can't hold people accountable for making good decisions, because "good" is just a matter of opinion.
#3: Keep it honest.
Often, teams will leave kickoffs and offsites feeling so overcome with rah-rah spirit that they overlook alignment red flags. This is the most problematic situation of all, and it's extremely common. Hope springs eternal and people hate conflict.
False alignment is far worse than open disagreement. Being honest about disagreement is the prerequisite to finding common ground. Even when opinions are strong, open discussion breeds trust.
On the other hand, if people believe they are aligned but they are not, they end up feeling let down by one another's decisions. This causes people to doubt one another's competence, or even worse, their transparency. It erodes trust.
Name misalignments when you see them. Name them even if you just suspect them, so you can have the honest conversation that gets to the bottom of it.
Kieran
I’m a former CEO who helps ambitious operators build like founders, regardless of their title. My clients include startup CEOs, C-suite execs, and ambitious leaders inside large organizations, all leading with founder-level clarity, urgency, and ownership. Become a client!
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