Aligning Your Senior Leadership Team
The job of a senior leader is to ensure your company hits its numbers.
In one way, it really is that simple.
The numbers are hard data. You meet the targets, or you don’t. Binary. Yes/No.
The nuance, of course, is in the human part of the equation.
***
You can have the right seats for your leadership team, and the right people in them.
But if you have the right people with the wrong incentives, or the right people who aren’t bought in, or the right people who are out of alignment…then you can have all the potential in the world, but you probably won’t hit your goals.
Here are a few things that business owners need to understand:
- Every team member, no matter how loyal, how senior, how committed, is first and foremost concerned with their own well-being.
- This is not something to resent or be angry about. It is something true that you must accept.
- To be successful, leaders need a combination of buy-in or skill. Even your senior leaders have much less of either than you might think.
Because these things are true, team members do not naturally align with one another. They have different needs, different skill sets, and different relationships with the organization.
But alignment is precisely what you need if you want a team that can hit its numbers consistently.
So, how do you do that?
***
First, you bring clarity. This looks like the work we do with clients around strategic planning. You articulate a strong Mission, Core Values that you live by, and a believable plan for the trajectory of the business.
You use a tool like the Role Map to identify the seats the company needs, and find the people with the right combination on Values, Desire, and ability to get Results to fill them.
Then, you set very specific expectations with existing team members—or new ones during your hiring process—about what they are accountable for and what numbers, especially, they own. You track the most important of those numbers weekly on a scorecard.
(All of this, by the way, is what we build with clients through the Growth Method.)
You get the leadership team’s agreement, set your quarterly OKRs, track progress weekly. Everyone is aligned; everyone is bought in.
Sounds great, right?
Here’s the problem. You keep moving the goalposts.
***
For the record, moving the goalposts isn’t a bad thing in this case.
It’s a natural part of what happens in a business. Especially in the companies we work with, where the owners have an appetite for growth and want to maximize the value of their asset.
But not every individual—even the most senior of leaders—has an infinite capacity to grow and stretch. More importantly, at a certain point, they stop wanting to.
(That’s what we really mean when we say a leader who excels in a $20 million company might fail when the company is $200 million. Their capacity, drive, or both falls short of the goal line.)
Your team is willing to travel with you on your growth journey, to a certain point. How far? That depends on some factors you can’t control—risk tolerance, capacity for change, drive to develop, age, family, etc.
But there are a few things within your control:
- Incentivizing leaders so that when the business wins, they win financially, too. Aligned compensation, slightly above market rate, is one of my top recommendations for getting and keeping great leaders.
- Refining and iterating on your vision and the company’s growth trajectory on a regular basis. This requires time and effort (reflection, deep thinking) but is worth every moment to ensure the vision you lay out continues to be crystal clear.
- Following through on the expectations you set, and adjusting them as needed. Establishing open and honest dialogue with your leaders. When they fall short, hold them accountable—otherwise, they’ll learn that the expectations are really just suggestions.
As you decide when and how far to move the goalposts, some members will naturally stop playing for your team. New ones will come on board. But if you continue to think of alignment as an ongoing process, not a one-time activity, then even when hard decisions to move on get made, everyone will be on the very same page.
***
To bring this all back to the binary: hitting your numbers is a black and white question.
Whether your team was capable of hitting the numbers, whether they had the right incentives to hit the numbers, and whether they are onboard for hitting even bigger, bolder numbers.
That’s not black and white. It’s shaded with nuance—and full of possibility.
