Target Groups: Executives, Leadership Groups, Board of Directors

Need: A disciplined, skill-based process for alignment from initiation through execution.

What’s Missing: An effective process for building and sustaining alignment from initiation through execution. The group agrees on an action and/or initiative but is not aligned on what is required of them. They are derailed during implementation when they discover differing views, needs, and expectations.

Session Description: Nothing undermines leadership groups more than the absence of alignment. Decisions are made and agreed upon only to discover that everything falls apart during execution. When this happens it is a clear-cut indication that a disciplined process for alignment achieving and sustaining alignment is missing.

Agreement, consensus, and compliance are often confused with alignment;
they are not the same.

Agreement occurs when people believe they share similar view points. Agreement, however, is an ineffective decision-making process that unravels when people realize what is required of them to implement the decision. During the implementation phase people discover many areas of non-agreement, resulting in behavior that derails, and often sabotages, the original agreement. The organization then receives confused and mixed messages from leaders that directly impact performance, productivity, and morale.

Consensus, on the other hand, is used to include everyone in the decision-making process. Unfortunately quality suffers when problems and solutions are reduced to their lowest common denominator in order to obtain group consensus.