Alignment doesn’t mean harmony or unanimous agreement. As the saying goes, “When two people in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary,” (a quote often attributed to William Wrigley, Jr.). Alignment is actually achieved when leaders set one shared growth priority and communicate it clearly so everyone in the company knows to row in the same direction.
Misalignment is an enormous drain on energy. Everyone on your leadership team can be working hard—but if you’re all pulling in slightly different directions—the company moves in circles instead of making forward progress. That’s why the Scaling Up Framework—the engine that powers MAGNET’s growth acceleration platform—is centered around defining and aligning across four pillars: people, strategy, execution, and cash. If leaders aren’t aligned on those critical fundamentals, the business will likely struggle to achieve consistent growth long-term.
Think of alignment as the difference between force and momentum. Hard work is the force. Alignment is what turns that force into momentum which carries the business further, faster, and with less effort.
Misalignment works a lot like the mess in your junk drawer. After you organize it, everything fits and it functions well…for a while. But over time—you hurriedly grab what you need, toss in new things that might not belong—and little by little it’s a jumbled mess again. That’s how leadership misalignment happens. It doesn’t fall apart overnight it slowly drifts out of order as the business moves faster and challenges pile up.
Misalignment isn’t a crisis—it’s just the natural result when good people get busy doing their jobs without regularly stopping to reset together.
Drift doesn’t look like conflict—it looks like silos (and sometimes, chaos). Each leader dutifully stays in their lane, unaware of how their choices impact others. Unfortunately, that ends up feeling like mixed messages to employees, inconsistency to customers, and a whole lot of wasted energy when it comes to growth.
For Lee Watson at AECO, leadership misalignment looked like losing focus. “I’ve always had a strategic plan that I tried to follow, but we were easily distracted. We would drift away from things we decided were important (and had committed to doing) because other things became more urgent, more pressing,” he says.
Overwork and near burnout among leadership were the cost of that drift. “One of the things we identified was that the executive and senior leadership team was working way too hard and [too many] long hours. Our middle management team (great people, I don’t want to suggest that they’re not) either didn’t have good critical thinking skills or didn't feel empowered to use them." Either way, “They weren’t effective decision-makers, so they would wait for somebody in senior leadership to make a decision and that was exhausting.”
Even if they don’t recognize it as misalignment, most leaders know the cost of drift; it’s stalled execution, endless firefighting, and growth that just won’t come. And it can occur across levels and functions throughout the organization. Here are a few common examples you might recognize from your company.
CEO drift often happens when vision and communication get out of sync. The CEO sets a bold direction—such as growing into a new market—but without clear, repeated communication each department interprets that differently. Sales hears “sell more.” Operations hears “stretch capacity.” Finance hears “protect margins.” Each team responds logically, but without a shared interpretation the execution falls apart.
Sales drift shows up when the team is working hard but is disconnected from the larger strategy. They may be chasing deals that look good in isolation but don’t support the company’s long-term positioning, simply because they are focused on their own quotas and relationships.
When they’re aligned with strategy, your sales team can clearly articulate not just the revenue goal, but who the right customers are and why. Alignment gives sales clear targets, guardrails, and support from the rest of the organization. That’s why, for example, the tagline of the proprietary sales process I created (TOPMAP™) is, “Selling on Purpose.” Sales should be a clearly defined, prescriptive process just like every other area of a manufacturing operation. When it’s not, the result is almost always drift.
Operations leaders are trained to keep things efficient and timely. When growth goals aren’t fully connected to operational capacity, Ops defaults to protecting stability. That’s not wrong, but it can turn into drift if their definition of success doesn’t match the CEO’s. When operations and strategy are linked, capacity planning becomes proactive instead of reactive, and the Ops team’s efforts support growth rather than stall it.
If the examples above don’t sound familiar, asking yourself these five questions can help determine whether your leadership team is slightly—or very—out of sync.
Answering “no” to any of these questions is not a sign of failure. It’s a sign that your business is moving fast enough to require recalibration.
Think of your company as a high-performance vehicle. Every system—engine, steering, suspension—works together to keep you moving smoothly and safely. When one system gets out of sync, you can still drive but performance slips. The steering feels loose, the tires wear unevenly, and efficiency drops. Leadership alignment works the same way. Maintenance is critical. Even the best machines drift out of tune over time, and the faster you’re growing the more often you need to recalibrate.
But alignment doesn’t happen on autopilot—it takes intention and discipline. The Scaling Up Framework we use with clients, gives structure to recalibration. Scaling Up emphasizes the importance of a one-page strategic plan and establishing a meeting rhythm (Daily Huddle, Weekly Huddle, Monthly Management Meeting, etc.) for exactly this reason. A shared plan and consistent communication prevent drift by making sure everyone is measuring from the same baseline.
Lee Watson says that AECO has maintained its strategic focus thanks to the Scaling Up Framework, particularly the huddles. And no, these are not the kind of meetings that could’ve been an email. A client of mine shared that these 5-15 minute (max) daily regroups are, “…by far the best habit we have incorporated into our overall process.”
Watson describes his team’s huddles this way: “We meet at 8:08 a.m. every morning, and the meetings last 5 to 15 minutes, no more. We talk about the business of the day. It's very effective, very efficient communication and alignment. And then once a week, we take that same time slot and have a 90-minute weekly strategic planning meeting where we review our priorities and report on how we're doing.”
He has found that hitting the quarterly priorities leads to meeting the annual initiatives, which leads to achieving the 3–5-year strategic plan. “We're not perfect. We miss some quarters, but we have gotten very good at having a very small number of priorities and pushing them over the finish line. And more years than not, we achieve our annual initiatives.”
Consistently hitting annual initiatives has made an enormous difference for AECO. “Six or seven years ago we were a $20 million company. We set a goal to be a $50 million company by the end of 2025, and I'm really happy to announce that we became a $50 million company in 2023. It was a lot of hard work. There were definitely some failures and some good lessons learned. But here we are, and now there's absolutely no reason that we can't achieve $100 million.”
How did AECO address the under-functioning/over-functioning relationship between mid-level and senior management? “We set down a path to evaluate peoples’ skills and competencies, and then we came up with a methodology to train them [middle management] to become more effective,” Lee explains. “I would bet that if we hadn't [implemented Scaling Up], we wouldn't have the same leadership team today because some people would have said, ‘This isn’t worth it; there's more to life than work,’ and I would completely agree with that.”
It’s nearly impossible for leaders to recalibrate themselves.
You’re in the thick of it; running the business, solving problems, keeping customers happy. That inside perspective is invaluable but it limits what you can see. That’s where a coach can help to facilitate alignment. Think of a coach as a mechanic. They help you do the regular maintenance—like wheel alignment—that can prevent a systemic failure—like a blowout. A coach doesn’t remove conflict, which is a good thing. Different viewpoints are the bedrock for better decisions. Their job is to help create an environment where those differences can be surfaced and discussed productively.
The value of a coach’s external perspective is in challenging assumptions, sparking creativity, and helping leaders think more strategically. Most business owners could eventually find their own way—but with the right coach, they get there faster, with less friction and with far more confidence.
Leadership alignment isn't a destination; it's an ongoing practice. The manufacturers who consistently outpace their competitors aren't necessarily the ones with the best products or the biggest budgets. They're often the ones at which leaders clearly articulate the same priorities, strategic decisions cascade smoothly through operations, and where the entire organization moves forward with purpose.
Once you experience true alignment, you'll never want to go back. An aligned company produces consistent results, and consistent results allow for consistent growth.
A quick way to remember how the best teams manage leadership misalignment, is that they CATCH themselves before they drift.
C – Coach: A neutral guide helps the team stay calibrated, ensuring everyone measures from the same baseline
A – Attitude: Alignment starts with a willingness to listen, debate, and stay open to new perspectives
T – Trust: The glue that keeps leaders engaged even when conversations get hard
C – Collaboration: Real teamwork happens when the group sticks together despite friction, debates and conflict
H – Huddles: Consistent communication rhythms keep everyone connected to the same goals and outcomes
Leadership alignment isn't a destination; it's an ongoing practice. Just like you wouldn't allow critical equipment to be out of alignment, you can't afford to let your leadership team function that way, either. The manufacturers who consistently outpace their competitors aren't necessarily the ones with the best products or the biggest budgets. They're the ones where every leader can clearly articulate the same priorities, where strategic decisions cascade smoothly through operations, and where the entire organization moves forward with purpose.
David Sluka manages MAGNET's Strategy, Marketing & Sales practice and is a certified Scaling Up coach. Known as “The Growth Guy,” he works with leadership teams at manufacturing facilities across NE Ohio to create and implement proven and effective strategies and processes that enable these organizations to thrive in an ever-evolving marketplace.
There’s an easy way to find out. All it takes is 15-20 minutes for your leadership team to complete an online questionnaire that generates a comprehensive report which rates and benchmarks your leadership alignment. From there, I meet with the full leadership team to review each person’s feedback and use that to understand where you’re aligned, where you’re not, and where you can make changes to be ready for growth.
If that sounds like something your team needs, check out MAGNET’s Growth Readiness and Leadership Alignment Assessment.