Creating Alignment in a Disconnected Team

How to Align a Disconnected Executive Team (in 30 Days or Less)

If your executive team seems disconnected, chances are you’re already feeling the consequences: missed opportunities, inconsistent messaging, internal competition, or worse — strategic drift that slows the entire organization down.

The good news? Creating alignment doesn’t have to take months of painful meetings or endless trust-building exercises. With the right approach, it can happen in just a few days — and the positive impact can be seen in less than 30.

At LeaderShift Insights®, we specialize in accelerating this process. We’ve found that when you focus on the right conversations, with the right structure, alignment isn’t just possible — it’s inevitable.

The Real Problem Isn’t (Just) Personality Conflicts

When executive teams are misaligned, the root cause usually isn’t personalities or politics. It’s a lack of a shared agenda.

Without a clear and agreed-upon framework for how they work together, serve stakeholders, and drive results, executives naturally fall back on personal priorities or functional silos. The result? Each leader pulls in a slightly different direction — and those degrees of separation eventually cost the organization momentum, money, and credibility.

The antidote is simple but powerful: define and align on the non-negotiables first.

Create a Shared Agenda

The fastest way to create alignment is to help them build a shared agenda — a set of agreed-upon principles that anchor every decision, every action, and every interaction.

Depending on the situation, a shared agenda could include:

• A differentiated value proposition: What do we stand for? What makes us different from competitors in a way that matters to customers?
• Customer criteria: Who do we serve? How do we prioritize customer needs and ensure consistency across functions?
• Team operating principles: How will we work together? What behaviors are expected, rewarded, and unacceptable?
• Structural design criteria: If we need to reorganize, what must the new structure enable us to do? What problems must it solve?

Getting clear on the collective “table stakes” — what everyone agrees is non-negotiable — makes it dramatically easier to make decisions, prioritize initiatives, and eliminate infighting. It puts the focus back where it belongs: on the success of the enterprise, not the success of individual leaders.

Why It Works (and Why It Sticks)

When leaders co-create the shared agenda (rather than being told what it is), three critical things happen:

1. They own it. People are far more committed to what they help create.
2. They see each other differently. Conversations shift from protecting turf to advancing common goals.
3. They create positive peer pressure. Once aligned, the team naturally holds each other accountable — and it’s no longer acceptable to default to personal or departmental agendas.

In fact, once the shared agenda is solidified, many of the so-called “personality issues” disappear on their own because they were symptoms, not the root cause.

How We Create Aligned Teams in Days — Not Months

At LeaderShift Insights®, we’ve refined a fast, proven approach to executive alignment. In most cases, it only takes 1–2 days of facilitated working sessions to get the core alignment in place. (We often say “30 days or less” because that’s when the visible impact across the organization really begins — but the heavy lifting happens much faster.)

Here’s what it looks like:

• Preparation: We meet individually with each executive in advance to understand their priorities, concerns, and perceptions of the team’s effectiveness.
• Clarity: We facilitate conversations that cut through the noise and help the team surface what they already agree on — which is usually more than they realize.
• Co-Creation: We guide the team to define and document their shared agenda, including value propositions, customer criteria, operating principles, or structure criteria (depending on the business need).
• Commitment: We help the team articulate specific ways they will hold themselves and each other accountable to the shared agenda.

No artificial trust falls. No endless venting sessions. No dragging out the pain. Just real conversations that drive real clarity.

The Results

Once an executive team has a shared agenda:

• Meetings are faster and more productive.
• Decision-making speeds up — with fewer debates and derailments.
• Turf wars and infighting fade as leaders rally around common goals.
• Communication with employees, customers, and shareholders becomes clearer and more consistent.
• Strategic initiatives launch — and land — with greater impact.

In short, alignment becomes a force multiplier.

Creating Alignment Is Not Optional — It’s Urgent

In today’s business environment, the margin for misalignment is razor-thin. Whether you’re driving a transformation, integrating a new leadership team, or simply trying to regain lost momentum, executive alignment isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s mission-critical.

And the longer misalignment persists, the more costly it becomes — not just in dollars, but in lost opportunity, culture erosion, and leader credibility.

If your team needs to get aligned — fast — it’s absolutely possible.
You just need the right conversation, the right structure, and the right facilitator to get it done.

At LeaderShift Insights®, our superpower is helping executive teams create alignment that lasts — with visible impact in 30 days or less.

Ready to get your executive team aligned and accelerating results?
For a limited time, purchase 10+ copies of Mastering the C-Suite for your team, and unlock a FREE 90-minute strategic debrief with Jennifer Eggers, Founder, President and Strategic Leadership Advisor. She’ll help you apply the book’s insights to your specific situation.  Click HERE to purchase your books, send a copy of the receipt to info@LSIteam.com, along with your contact info and we’ll reach out to schedule your session.

In nearly 30 years of consulting, coaching, and executive roles, Jennifer has seen it all, done a lot of it, and if she hasn’t, she’s worked with a client who has. Her value is in her experience and ability to get results by blurring the line between coaching and consulting.

Jennifer is known for creating aligned teams executive integration, repositioning personal brands, driving behavior change, and increasing leaders’ ability to drive performance through others.