Inspired by an episode of the Leadership Matters podcast.
I listened to a recent episode of Leadership Matters while rollerskating. The topic was alignment, a word that appears in decks, town halls and offsites so often that it usually passes without much examination.
The speakers used the expression “dirty yes”. A meeting ends with apparent agreement. People nod, the discussion moves on, and later, in the corridor, the objections begin to emerge. The decision has been recorded as agreed, although some of the people expected to carry it out have serious reservations.
In leadership discourse, alignment is often treated as a communication success. The strategy is explained, the message is repeated, people appear to understand it, and the organisation takes that as evidence that alignment exists.
The difficulty becomes visible when a decision meets competing priorities, limited resources or personal consequences. Someone may genuinely support a decision and still act against it when existing targets reward a different course of action. Others may have withheld their objections because they anticipated the reaction. What appeared to be agreement in the meeting can conceal very different interpretations of what has been decided and what people are prepared or able to do.
Why the familiar remedies often disappoint
The podcast is already sceptical of communication cascades, staged agreement and the assumption that a message has landed simply because it was delivered. The discussion raises a further question: what happens to disagreement once someone has expressed it?
Workshops can help clarify operating rules, trade-offs and consequences, but achieve little when they mainly collect visible enthusiasm. One-to-one conversations may build trust, although they can also encourage selective disclosure when people anticipate an unwelcome reaction. Town halls can communicate priorities to a large audience, yet the enthusiasm visible in the room says little about how individuals will handle those priorities during the following week of work.
The podcast describes a pharmaceutical-company CEO who expected managers to hold one-to-one conversations over two or three years, revisiting alignment as circumstances changed. Regular conversations could give teams opportunities to raise concerns that might otherwise remain private.
Their practical value would depend on the decisions that followed. Were competing targets addressed? Were deadlines revised? Did leaders acknowledge situations in which two priorities could not realistically be delivered at the same time? Repeated conversations may strengthen trust and familiarity, but the unresolved conflicts still have to be dealt with.
Why physical presence can mislead
Leadership conversations often treat physical togetherness as evidence of stronger alignment. Remote work then appears as a threat to cohesion.
Rooms make agreement easier to perform. People stay polite, the pace remains smooth, and visible dissent often narrows. Calmness in the room can coexist with private distance from the decision. In some organisations, calmness is simply the safest available behaviour.
Remote work changes what can be observed. Deadlines, written decisions and follow-through may leave a clearer record, while informal dissent and private reservations can become harder to detect. These records help trace execution, but they cannot establish why someone complied, resisted or fell behind.
Why check-ins need a method behind them
The podcast also speaks positively about “battery-style” check-ins used to monitor alignment and mental health in real time. Collecting frequent responses creates a new problem: who interprets the data, what counts as ordinary fluctuation, and how can anyone distinguish fatigue, caution or temporary discomfort from genuine misalignment?
Without a method for interpreting the responses, these tools risk becoming sentiment dashboards. A low battery reading may reflect workload, fatigue or anxiety. On its own, it cannot establish whether someone understands, accepts or is able to execute a particular decision.
How drift actually begins
When execution begins to diverge from a decision, leaders may assume that the original message was insufficiently clear or that people have lost sight of the strategy. Yet some of the divergence may have begun before the work started, when objections were still being discussed.
Information starts being softened. A deadline privately considered unrealistic may still be described as ambitious. A serious concern becomes a complication to be managed later. Sometimes this is deliberate. Sometimes people have learnt from experience which objections create friction and which are better left outside the formal discussion.
People begin speaking in two registers. One belongs to the room. The other appears outside it. The formal decision stays in place, while the information supporting it becomes less reliable.
When colleagues notice this pattern, they may begin to discount what is said in meetings. They can no longer tell which concerns have been resolved and which have simply disappeared from the discussion. The same decision may remain formally in place while different members of the team operate from increasingly different assumptions.
The podcast ends with a question worth asking: where have people agreed, but not truly aligned? I would also want to know where the behaviour began to diverge from what was agreed, and what made that divergence possible.