Leadership Team Alignment During Organisational Change

Why Alignment Is the Leadership Team’s First Job in Any Change

When an organisation embarks on significant change — a new strategy, a restructure, a merger, a shift in operating model — the leadership team becomes its primary reference point. Every part of the organisation watches what the leadership team does, listens to what it says, and draws conclusions from what it sees. A leadership team that is aligned gives the organisation something to follow. A leadership team that is not aligned gives the organisation permission to do the same.

Research consistently finds that around two-thirds of major change initiatives fail to deliver their intended benefits. Studies by IMD and McKinsey both identify lack of senior leadership alignment as the primary reason — ahead of flawed strategy, inadequate planning, or insufficient resources. In most cases, the plan is not the problem. The collective leadership capability to implement it consistently is.

The distinction matters. Alignment is not simply about agreeing on the change at a strategic level. Many leadership teams do that. The problem shows up in implementation, where individual leaders interpret the change through the lens of their own function, their own priorities, and their own sense of what it means for their part of the organisation. The result is a change that is understood differently by different parts of the business — and experienced as inconsistent, unclear, or contradictory by the people responsible for delivering it.

What Alignment Actually Means — and What It Doesn’t

Alignment is frequently mistaken for agreement, and agreement is frequently mistaken for alignment. A leadership team can reach consensus in a meeting — every head nodding, no objections raised — and leave with entirely different understandings of what was just agreed.

Real alignment goes further. It means the team shares a common understanding across four dimensions:

Strategic direction. What is the change, and why is it happening? Not the official announcement, but the real understanding — what this change means for the organisation, what it requires it to stop, start, and do differently.

Implementation priorities. Where does the change start? What is sequenced first and why? When circumstances shift — as they will — what principle guides reprioritisation? A leadership team that is aligned on direction but not on priorities will make inconsistent decisions the moment pressure mounts.

Pace. Not every leader will read the pace of change the same way. Some will be ready to move faster than the organisation can absorb. Others will feel the pressure to slow down and consolidate. If the team has not had an explicit conversation about pace — including the tension between speed and sustainability — those differences will surface in implementation, often in ways that are disruptive rather than productive.

Narrative. What is the story the organisation is being asked to believe and follow? A leadership team that cannot tell a coherent, shared account of the change — one that answers why, what, and what it means for us — cannot expect the people it leads to do so either.

These four dimensions are interdependent. A team that aligns on direction but not on priorities will fracture when things get difficult. A team that agrees on pace but cannot tell a consistent story will confuse the organisation even as it moves. Genuine alignment requires all four — and it requires them to be rebuilt every time the change requires the team to adapt.

Why Alignment Breaks Down Under Change Pressure

Leadership teams that function well in stable conditions often find alignment harder to sustain when change accelerates. This is not a personal failing. It reflects predictable structural and relational pressures that change creates.

Information is incomplete and unevenly distributed. In periods of change, different leaders often hold different pieces of the picture. Decisions are made before the full context is visible. Leaders draw conclusions from what they know, not what the team as a whole knows. Without a deliberate mechanism for sharing and integrating information, alignment on paper becomes misalignment in practice.

Competing mandates create genuine tensions. A chief financial officer managing cost during a change programme and a chief people officer managing capability and culture are not simply playing different roles. They may have genuinely incompatible short-term priorities. Alignment does not eliminate those tensions — it creates the conditions in which they can be worked through openly rather than resolved by each leader in isolation.

Change triggers identity and territory protection. Significant change almost always involves shifts in who holds authority, whose function grows or shrinks, and whose way of working is affirmed or challenged. These are not trivial concerns. Leaders who feel their domain is under threat — whether consciously or not — may pull back from collective accountability and prioritise protecting their own position. The team’s alignment weakens precisely at the moments when it needs to be strongest.

The pace of change compresses the time available for the team itself. When there is always something more urgent than a conversation about how the team is leading, the team does not have that conversation. The result is that misalignments accumulate in silence, and the team discovers them through implementation failures rather than through structured reflection.

Three Patterns That Signal Misalignment

Leadership team misalignment during change rarely announces itself directly. It tends to surface through patterns that look like execution problems, communication breakdowns, or individual performance issues. Three are especially common.

Different functions implementing the change differently. When the leadership team is misaligned on priorities or narrative, each function interprets the change through its own lens. The organisation experiences this as inconsistency — different messages, different standards, and different emphases depending on which part of the business you are in. Middle managers and frontline staff become confused about what is actually required of them.

Decisions made at the leadership team level are quietly reversed below it. When leaders leave a meeting with different understandings of what was agreed, or when they are privately unconvinced by the direction, those doubts surface in how they brief their own teams. Decisions that appeared to have consensus at the top are informally renegotiated — or simply not implemented — at the functional level.

The team operates as a collection of change managers rather than a collective leadership entity. Each leader manages change for their own function. No one is accountable for the change as a whole. The organisation experiences the change as fragmented, and the leadership team as absent from the issues that cut across functions.

If one or more of these patterns feels familiar, the issue is unlikely to be a communication problem or a capability gap in any individual leader. It is most likely a collective alignment problem — and addressing it at the collective level is what makes the difference.

How Leadership Team Coaching Builds Alignment

Leadership team alignment during change does not happen through a strategy offsite or a team-building day. It is built — and maintained — through structured, repeated, deliberate work on how the team understands and leads the change together.

Archetype’s approach to alignment in a change context works on four things simultaneously.

Shared meaning, not just shared information. Alignment begins with understanding, not briefing. Coaching creates the conditions in which leaders can work through what the change actually means — for the organisation, for the team, and for each leader’s own domain — rather than simply receiving a presentation and being asked to communicate it downward.

Surfacing and working through real disagreements. Real alignment cannot be built on suppressed dissent. When leaders privately disagree with the direction, the pace, or the priorities, those disagreements do not disappear — they surface in implementation. Coaching creates a space in which those disagreements can be named, examined, and resolved at the leadership team level, before they become organisational problems.

Establishing how the team will make decisions when things change. Change does not unfold according to plan. Circumstances shift, assumptions prove wrong, and the team is required to adapt. A leadership team that has agreed in advance on a framework for decision-making — what requires collective resolution, what is delegated, and what principle guides reprioritisation — maintains alignment even when the ground moves.

Creating and holding a shared narrative. Coaching helps the leadership team develop a coherent account of the change — one they have genuinely worked through together, not simply received and been asked to relay. A narrative built that way is more likely to be communicated consistently, because it is understood at a level that goes beyond the slide deck.

This is work that sits alongside, not instead of, the operational requirements of leading change. The goal is a leadership team that can hold its alignment through the full arc of the change — not just at the point of launch, but through the difficult middle and into embedding.

Read more about how we work with leadership teams leading change.

Signs Your Leadership Team’s Alignment Is Under Strain

Alignment rarely disappears all at once. It erodes gradually, often invisibly, until the effects become visible in ways that are difficult to trace back to the source. The following are common indicators that a leadership team’s alignment is under strain during a change initiative:

• Leaders agree on the change at a strategic level but their functions are implementing it differently

• Decisions agreed in leadership team meetings are being revisited or quietly amended at the functional level

• The same questions about the change — what it means, what the priorities are, what comes next — are being answered differently by different leaders

• Some leaders are visibly moving faster than others, without the team having explicitly agreed that differential pace is appropriate

• Middle managers report receiving mixed messages from different members of the leadership team

• The leadership team is not having explicit conversations about how it is leading the change — only about what the change requires

If two or more of these feel familiar, it is worth examining whether the alignment the team has is real — or assumed. See also Five Signs Your Leadership Team Is Functioning as a Group Not a Team.

Who This Is For

This work is relevant to:

• Chief executives and managing directors leading an organisation through significant strategic, structural, or operational change who want the leadership team aligned and capable rather than reactive and fragmented.

• Boards and chairs who are concerned that the leadership team is not leading the change as a unified entity, and want to understand what can be done about it.

• HR directors and people leaders who are supporting the leadership team through a major change programme and want structured coaching to address alignment alongside other change management activity.

• Leadership teams who recognise that alignment has been assumed rather than built, and want to address that before it becomes visible in execution.

How Archetype Works on Leadership Team Alignment

Archetype’s leadership team coaching is delivered by Tony Gardner and Emma Holderness.

Tony is a former chief executive and board chair with over 25 years of real-world leadership experience, combined with deep expertise in systemic leadership team coaching. Tony is based in Auckland.

Emma is a former RNZAF officer and Chief People Officer with extensive leadership development and coaching experience. Emma is based in Wellington.

Engagements focused on leadership team alignment during change typically include:

• An initial assessment of where the team’s alignment currently stands — what is shared, what is assumed, and where the gaps are

• A structured workshop to build shared meaning, surface real disagreements, and establish a clear collective position on direction, priorities, pace, and narrative

• Ongoing coaching sessions aligned to the arc of the change, so that alignment is maintained and rebuilt as circumstances shift — not just established at the start

• Individual sessions with each leadership team member, enabling the coach to understand each leader’s perspective and work through individual concerns that affect collective alignment

The aim is not a leadership team that agrees with itself in a room. It is a leadership team that leads consistently, makes collective decisions under pressure, and gives the organisation a coherent, unified account of what the change requires.

Explore our full approach to Leadership Team Coaching

Frequently Asked Questions

What is leadership team alignment during change?

Leadership team alignment during change means every member of the leadership team has a shared understanding of what the change requires — its direction, its priorities, its pace, and the story the organisation is being asked to follow. It goes beyond agreement in a meeting to shared meaning that is visible in how each leader acts, decides, and communicates in their own domain.

Why is leadership team alignment so important during change?

Research by IMD and McKinsey identifies lack of leadership alignment as the primary reason major change initiatives fail to deliver their intended benefits — ahead of flawed strategy or poor planning. When the leadership team is misaligned, the change is experienced by the organisation as inconsistent and unclear, and implementation fractures at the functional level.

What is the difference between alignment and agreement?

Agreement is what happens in a meeting. Alignment is what happens when leaders leave the meeting with a shared understanding of what was agreed and why — and act on that understanding consistently in their own areas. Many leadership teams mistake the former for the latter. The difference shows up in implementation.

How do I know if my leadership team is misaligned?

Common indicators include: different functions implementing the same change differently; decisions made at leadership team level being revised or quietly ignored below it; middle managers reporting mixed or contradictory messages; and the leadership team having strategy conversations but not conversations about how it is leading the change together. See our page on Five Signs Your Leadership Team Is Functioning as a Group Not a Team.

Can a leadership team rebuild alignment once it has broken down?

Yes — but the sooner it is addressed, the easier the work is. Misalignment that is caught early, when patterns are still forming, is far quicker and less disruptive to resolve than misalignment that has been operating for months and has already shaped how the organisation is experiencing the change. If you recognise the signs, the best first step is a conversation.

What does leadership team coaching do that change management consulting doesn’t?

Change management consulting typically focuses on the change itself — the plan, the process, the programme. Leadership team coaching focuses on the team leading the change — its collective capability to make decisions, hold alignment, and model the behaviours the change requires. Both are valuable. For complex or high-stakes change, working on both simultaneously is most effective.

Take the First Step

A misaligned leadership team is the most predictable risk in any major change programme — and one of the most addressable. Investing in alignment early is far less costly than repairing fragmented implementation later.

To explore whether leadership team coaching is right for your team and your change, contact Archetype for a no-obligation conversation.