The False Allignment Trap

Decades of experience and research have consistently shown that most organizational change efforts fail. In 1993 Michael Hammer, who launched the business-process-reengineering movement, somberly concluded in his book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution that “as many as 50% to 70% of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.”

Things have not improved with the passing of time. Over the past 20 years Boston Consulting Group research into nearly 2,000 public companies from around the globe has found that more than 70% of companies fail to outperform their industry peer-group average in both the short (one year) and long term (five years) after a performance downturn. It is a remarkable data point. During the same period, we digitized the global economy, mapped the human genome, and built self-driving cars. But we did not get systematically better at helping groups of people to do things differently.

There is, of course, no simple reason why companies struggle so much with change, but in many cases change failures can be traced to dysfunction at the top. Members of the leadership team often fall into a behavioral trap: false alignment around the transformation they’re attempting to implement.

The False Alignment Trap.  Every change program needs clear answers to a few seemingly obvious questions:  Why are we changing our company?  What are we changing about our company? (And what are we not changing?)  And how will the changes occur?

Executive teams often make the mistake of embarking on a transformation before everyone truly agrees on the specific answers to those questions. Worse, executives frequently behave as if they are much more in agreement than they really are.  Alignment and agreement are not the same. Alignment suggests a set of objects that are positioned in a line or perhaps facing the same direction. When company leaders say, “We are aligned,” what they usually mean is, “We are not in one another’s way.” Or perhaps, “We have discussed this topic at least once and generally accept the contours of a plan.”

But during change efforts, leaders need to do more than stay out of one another’s way. They need to intensely collaborate, compromise, and communicate in harmony. Leaders who settle for mere alignment typically find that it fails them in the end—which is why we call it false. By contrast, leaders who work hard to create detailed and explicit compacts—what we call true agreement—find that they can effectively make progress on shared priorities and hold one another to account.

False alignment typically occurs for one of three reasons:  Executives don’t realize that they don’t agree, Executives pretend to agree, and Executives put off resolving their differences.  

The Consequences of False Alignment.  When executives don’t have a shared agreement on what is changing, why it’s changing, and how the change will occur, the teams tasked with practically executing the change program will struggle to deliver.  There are three common outcomes for teams in this situation:  Paralysis: lots of talk, no action; Hyperactivity: lots of action, no progress; and Tunnel vision: lots of progress—on the wrong thing.

Reaching True Agreement.  How can you counteract your natural tendency (and your colleagues’) to assume that the people around you share your views? How can you start the tricky conversations that you know will lead to disagreement? How can you persuade your colleagues to invest time into properly resolving their differences? The authors find that the most successful executive teams use a five-step process:  Set clear parameters, Provoke an early exchange, Have a quality debate, Come to a formal verdict, and Send a unified message.

To lead a transformation, leaders must take the time to get their team to truly agree on why change is needed, what those changes will be, and how they will occur. There is often more time than leaders think there is to get that right, even in high-pressure situations, and if executives have reached true agreement on a change, there typically will be opportunities to accelerate later. By contrast, programs without an up-front agreement encounter significant delays during execution, requiring far more time and energy than would have been spent on debate at the beginning.

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