Building leadership and team alignment

During periods of growth or change, alignment between leadership and teams can often slip as a business evolves faster than the leadership rhythm supporting it. 

In this article, our Senior People Partner Katerina Spaseska shares the early signs and resulting issues of this and how to bring clarity - and realignment - back to your team. 

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Question 1: What challenges often cause leadership and team misalignment?

When a company is growing quickly or there are structural changes: roles and ways of working may not all scale at the same pace causing leadership and team misalignment. Another common reset opportunity is at times like the start of a new year or planning cycle, when priorities evolve but you haven’t necessarily got everyone aligned. 

As a business leader, you might have a big ambitious vision but not yet have it clearly defined or translated for your team. While your team might feel your energy and momentum, they might not see the same picture that you do. It can lead to people interpreting priorities differently, making decisions in pockets, and often struggling to connect day-to-day activities to the long-term goal. 

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“It’s not a lack of capability, but a lack of shared clarity about what matters most and how you can lead together in this next chapter.”

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Question 2: How do you approach leadership and team alignment?

The goal isn’t to just run another strategy session. It's to help your leadership team find shared clarity and confidence in how they’ll lead the next phase of growth.

We do this by: 

• Clarifying vision and focus: Unpacking your big vision and goals, and translating it into a clear, shared picture of what the next 12 months should look like.
  
  
• Clarifying roles and ownership: Exploring what it really means for your team to lead together - how ownership is distributed and how decisions get made.
  
  
• Building a rhythm that lasts: Rather than a one-off workshop resulting in no tangible changes, we leave teams with a clear plan and cadence you can keep using - an alignment rhythm embedded into your day-to-day leadership.

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Question 3: Digging deeper here, how do teams gain clarity and what practical tools or frameworks do they need?

First, we need to understand the current state: what’s working, where leaders feel stuck and what needs to be solved.

Through one-on-one leadership interviews, we learn everyone’s perspective on how decisions are being made, where accountability sits, what’s slowing momentum and where more clarity is needed. 

Spending time with business leaders lets us understand your vision and clarify what success really looks like  over the next 12 months, so we can help turn broad ambition into something the leadership team can connect to – and deliver against. This way, your whole team is left with a shared understanding of direction and priorities.

The RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) framework can be the biggest unlock for teams. Once we map out who fits into each of these categories across key business areas, it quickly highlights any overlaps, gaps and points of confusion. Seeing it on paper helps teams make clear, confident calls about ownership and decision-making, and reduce bottlenecks.

By the end, we want your team to not just agree on what matters most, but have in place the structures, roles and rhythm to keep that clarity alive beyond the room.

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“The RACI framework can be the biggest unlock for teams.”

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Question 4: What are 3 pieces of advice for leaders looking to strengthen team alignment?

1. Slow down before you speed up. Fast is fine but only if you’re all running in the same direction. Create time and space for honest conversation about what’s working, what’s not and where priorities have drifted. The best teams know when to stop, step back and make sense of where they’re heading.
   
   
2. Simplify the plan. Too many priorities create noise. Focus the team on the few things that will have the biggest impact and make ownership clear. When you try to do everything, you generally don't do anything very well!
   
   
3. Embed alignment as a leadership practice. Treat alignment like any other capability. You need to intentionally build, maintain and strengthen it as the business grows. 

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We hope you enjoyed this conversation. Want to hear more from the WRC team? Head to our Articles page where the crew covers more of the most common and difficult People & HR challenges we see every month.

Need a people and culture partner who gets it? Reach out to start a conversation of your own around how WRC can support your team with an upcoming project or ongoing support.