Your Strategy Isn’t Stuck. Your Alignment Is. (And no—another reorg won’t fix it.)
- Roger Grant
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Most strategy failures aren’t about bad ideas. They’re about misalignment.
TL;DR – The Cost of Misalignment
Strategy isn’t failing. Execution is splintering.
Teams are busy, but not aligned. Energy gets wasted on friction.
AI scales what you feed it, clarity or confusion.
Up to 70% of your team may be misaligned, quietly killing velocity.
Alignment isn’t just culture; it’s a critical performance lever.
Real traction doesn’t come from force. It comes from coherence.
Want repeatable impact? Don’t just plan faster. Align faster.
Strategic misalignment quietly drains up to 20% of your potential revenue.
But it doesn’t show up on the balance sheet; it shows up in your Tetris calendar.
You’ve felt it:
Endless back-to-back meetings. Late-night sync calls. Half-listened-to presentations, with heads popping up like meerkats just before the meeting ends to score participation points. Real work starts after dinner, once the swirl of shifting priorities finally dies down.
This isn’t a soft culture problem. It’s the hidden cost of slow execution, wasted energy, and misalignment.
The Illusion of Alignment
This isn’t new.
In the 1960s, psychologist Solomon Asch ran a now-famous experiment. Participants had to match line lengths. The answer was obvious, but the planted actors deliberately chose incorrectly.
The result? Most participants conformed, even when they knew better.
It wasn’t about eyesight. It was a test of alignment under pressure.
Now, picture your boardroom. The CEO reveals the strategy. Heads nod.
The deck is flawless. The all-hands ends perfectly on time. And yet, everyone walks out and pulls in seventeen different directions.
The Four Fault Lines Slowing You Down
Alignment doesn’t shatter suddenly. It fractures silently until velocity stalls, and no one understands why.
Here’s where alignment cracks first:
1. Speed Outpaces Clarity
A fast decision with slow alignment is just a faster way to fail.
Strategies now move at AI speed. But clarity still moves at the speed of trust.
You’re launching bold moves without buy-in, causing strategic drag disguised as momentum.
Sometimes, you have to slow down to go fast. Because speed without alignment doesn’t scale, it breaks.
2. Signals Die in the Handoff
The message doesn’t live in the slide deck. It lives, or dies, in translation.
You announce the big idea. But three layers down, it becomes noise.
Stress, overload, and quiet scepticism kill momentum long before your first milestone.
One executive once asked me if Personna offered mind-reading courses. His team kept complaining: “You never shared the vision.” (He thought he had, loudly and repeatedly.)
That’s alignment failure in real life.
There’s nothing more thrilling than a fast-moving team, everyone rowing in the same direction, chasing the bigger game. That momentum, clarity, and shared purpose? It’s not just powerful. It’s addictive.
3. Output Gets Rewarded. Alignment Doesn’t.
Busy teams don’t win. Aligned ones do.
Everyone’s running hard, but in different directions. You don’t have a performance problem. You have fragmentation.
In aligned environments, rewards follow outcomes. Recognition is merit-based, impact-driven, and tied directly to value.
In misaligned environments, credit flows through politics and proximity. It’s less about who delivered and more about who’s loyal to whom or who people like the look of.
4. Trust Erodes Faster Than Performance Can Catch Up
You can’t outrun a trust gap. It catches you mid-transformation.
Layoffs. Reorgs. AI. Pressure. People aren’t resisting change; they’re resisting uncertainty.
When trust drops, clarity disappears. And once your high performers stop believing? They stop staying.
The Green Lie
Your team hits deadlines. Your dashboards are green. But it’s watermelon reporting, green outside, red underneath.
Look closer and you’ll find:
Stalled initiatives
Conflicting priorities
Delayed decisions
A handful of well-meaning muppets still chasing outdated tasks like it’s business as usual.
This isn’t alignment. It’s performance theatre, staged enthusiasm masking strategic drift.
Metrics that move the needle, but not the business.
You’re not behind on performance. You’re behind on shared direction.
Because busyness doesn’t scale. And activity isn’t progress.
The Frozen Middle Isn’t the Problem
Middle managers have become convenient scapegoats. But the truth is, they’re caught between strategy from above and people below trying to keep the wheels on the bus.
They’re expected to carry vision, absorb pressure, and deliver results while navigating trust gaps, team churn, and AI-driven role confusion.
They’re not failing. They’re frozen, trapped between clarity and collapse, with no air cover and no playbook.
The result?
Ghost transformations
Burnout
High-cost teams are slowing to a crawl because no one’s rowing together
AI Won’t Replace You. But It Will Expose Your Fuzziness.
Being busy used to be enough. Now, the game is precision.
AI doesn’t care how hard you work. If you’re aligned, it amplifies. If you’re not, it scales chaos fast.
Whatever you feed it, clarity or confusion, AI won’t filter. It will just scale.
The enemy isn’t failure. It’s wiggling: false starts, performative progress, and energy without traction.
You don’t need a sharper strategy. You need a sharper focus, at scale.
Alignment Is Now a Frontline Skill
It’s not 70% alignment you're dealing with. It’s 70% misalignment, hiding in plain sight.
And here’s the twist:
As AI accelerates strategy, the spotlight shifts. Not to the best planners, but to the fastest aligners.
Theory → Momentum
Momentum → Revenue
Or Serious Cost Wins
Because nothing is cool until you scale it.
If they’re not on the bus, just flip them. — Regional HR Head, Global Tech Firm
That mindset? Common. Dangerous. And completely unscalable.
Coherence and operational precision aren’t backend hygiene anymore. They’re frontline value creators.
Implementation Beats Inertia
When strategy stalls, most leaders push harder. But impact isn’t driven by force; it’s created by leverage.
Alignment is your fulcrum: A small shift at the right point creates massive movement.
Done right, it turns effort into sustained performance gains.
Implementation beats inertia. And alignment is where traction begins.
What Alignment Actually Looks Like
Alignment isn’t agreement. It’s momentum with clarity.
It’s when people aren’t just clear on the goal, but also on their role in achieving it. When trust is high. Priorities crisp. And energy stops leaking into friction.
It’s hard to define in a deck. But like momentum, or misalignment, you know it when you see it.
You can’t always define perfect alignment. But like trust or tension, you know it when you feel it.
You feel it when:
A high-stakes deal moves fast, without internal drag
A cross-functional team anticipates, not reacts
A strategy lands in every sprint and customer touchpoint
Alignment doesn’t slow you down. It removes the friction that already is.
When you're aligned:
You move a mile in one direction, not an inch in a million
AI amplifies your signal, not your noise
Strategy turns into traction
Traction becomes repeatable performance. Make Your Impact Count
The world isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating, with no room for fluff or misalignment.
What separates the teams that transform from those that stall? Not talent. Not tools. Alignment.
At Personna, we don’t coach. We don’t consult. We propel.
We help leadership teams pinpoint exactly where momentum is stuck and fix it. Fast. Visually. With the next steps that land.
Let's make your impact personal and make it count.
Ready to Accelerate Your Alignment?
If you're navigating big shifts and want to move faster with less friction, drop me a note. I'd love to hear what you're working on. roger@personna.me
Since 2010, Personna has helped ambitious leaders scale strategic impact by aligning their personal vision to what matters most to their business.
Let's talk alignment.
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