What To Do When Your Leadership Team Isn’t Behind You

Have you ever felt like your strategy was moving faster than your leadership team could keep up?

The truth is, the biggest barrier often isn’t your frontline employees, it’s misalignment at the top. In fact, only 25% of organizations say their senior leaders excel at managing change.

True progress requires more than ambitious goals or new org charts; it demands that senior leaders operate in sync, with shared clarity on priorities, decision rights, and communication. When alignment is missing, initiatives become confusing or contradictory, and momentum stalls before delivering any meaningful impact.

Here’s how to ensure you and your leadership team are working together, not against one another.

Don’t assume you’re on the same page

Leaders often believe they’re aligned, but unspoken assumptions can derail progress.

At a recent team offsite I facilitated for a financial services firm, two senior leaders, let’s call them Josh and Anthony, discovered this firsthand.

Josh was focused on driving aggressive growth, assuming Anthony’s team had capacity to execute immediately. Meanwhile, Anthony prioritized operational fixes, assuming Josh knew that foundational issues had to come first.

Josh and Anthony’s competing priorities sent mixed signals to their teams, who weren’t sure whose direction to follow. As Josh later admitted: “We were talking to the same people but telling them two different things.”

Both leaders were capable and committed, but without agreed-upon priorities, alignment broke down in real time.

Before taking any action, leaders need to create the right conditions for lasting change: clarity on timelines, priorities, milestones, and how that information will be communicated to their teams. Those agreements aren’t a one-and-done exercise, either. It should be a continuous practice that utilizes regular feedback and observation.

Ask yourself: How can I verify that my assumptions about others’ priorities are accurate?

Unify behind a shared purpose

Without a shared purpose, even the most capable leaders can pull their teams in different directions. Establishing a common goal is the first step toward coordinated action and meaningful impact. One client’s experience with an enterprise-wide AI adoption illustrates what can happen without a shared purpose.

Sam, a new Chief Information Officer, was tasked with leading the transformation, but responsibility for AI had been divided across multiple senior leaders. Because they weren’t united in their vision for the initiative, the executive team struggled with unresolved turf battles and conflicting roadmaps.

Sam didn’t yet have the authority to reshape the initiative, so he did what he could: he observed and he listened. He tracked how these different projects had splintered across departments and documented redundancies and disconnects in how resources were being used. When the CEO invited him to share his perspective with the executive committee, Sam unveiled a straightforward but eye-opening map of overlapping efforts.

Most importantly, Sam didn’t surprise his peers with this information. Before speaking with the CEO, he met with each individual leader, went over the findings, and asked for their input. That transparency built trust with his peers. So when the CEO brought in external support, the leadership team was open to it and ready to define a shared purpose: what only they, as the senior team, could uniquely deliver.

Once united, the leadership team established five company-wide priorities, each tied to a clear owner, outcome, and measurable impact on employees, customers, and performance.

Ask yourself: How can I make sure my fellow leaders and I are united on the “why” before we move to the “how”?

The pace of change matters

When initiatives are rolled out too quickly, leaders—and their teams—are set up to fail.

I worked with one leader, Andrew, who had just inherited a restructured team with competing priorities and unclear decision rights. Pressure from the C-suite was high, and his new team was exhausted, underperforming, and verging on burnout.

The expectation was immediate results, but when Andrew looked at the system in place, he knew that he needed to slow down. Not only did the process need an overhaul, he also needed to build trust and establish clarity with his people.

Once he clarified what mattered and aligned the team’s work with the business’ desired outcomes, both morale and performance improved. By pacing the rollout to match his team’s capacity, Andrew ensured changes were sustainable and effective.

Rushing ahead would have produced a short-term spike in output, but at the cost of long-term execution. Leaders can either slow down to match their readiness or create more capacity through coaching, workshops, or facilitated sessions. These interventions help leaders articulate priorities, reconcile assumptions, and create an operating rhythm that supports execution. Then, leaders can move faster without burning out their people.

Ask yourself: Is my organization moving at a speed my team can realistically sustain?

Companies can adopt the most innovative technologies, hire top talent, or restructure, but without leaders operating in sync, those initiatives risk failure.

To quote Henry Ford, “When everyone is moving forward together, success takes care of itself.”

Alignment at the top isn’t just an ideal, it’s the operating system that makes transformation possible.

(To read more about how Sam and Andrew helped their teams navigate change, check out these two articles from Fast Company: “How to lead with focus during a company-wide transformation” and “What to do when you inherit a team that’s not set up to win.”)