Peer & Leadership Alignment

Small gaps in alignment at the leadership level become canyons by the time they reach your teams.

Alignment, as in people really agreeing on what to do, why, and how to get it done. It's also one of those leadership things that sounds so simple and straightforward in theory. But we all know that it's not always that easy in practice.

My guest for this episode, Neil, brings his experiences on the topic of alignment. Neil has 25 years of experience in the industry. He's primarily worked in startup contexts, focusing on communications and data aggregation. For the last 10 years, he's been in senior engineering leadership positions with organizations of 50-100 people.

Neil and I talk about how to spot misalignment before it becomes a canyon and a crisis. We speak about the hard work of building genuine consensus at the leadership level and how to translate high level strategy into something that your engineering teams can actually use to make decisions.

Together, we bring you practical mechanics of creating alignment that is not just nodding along in meetings, but the kind that permeates every aspect of decision making within your organization.

This conversation was recorded in June 2024.

The full episode transcript is available here.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Small gaps in alignment at the leadership level become canyons
by the time they reach your teams.
You know that feeling when your team seems stuck going in
circles on decisions that shouldbe straightforward when capable
and smart people are struggling to make progress?
Not because they lack skills, but because something somehow at

(00:21):
a deeper level isn't quite right.
But it's really hard to pinpointexactly what.
And then once you dive deeper into these issues, it very often
becomes clear that the issue isn't that people are lazy or
that they don't want to do well and like some executives may
posit, but that the issue is misalignment.
And the misalignment that's often so subtle that it's

(00:43):
impossible to spot at the surface.
And a misalignment that often traces back to senior leadership
and executive levels. Yes, those exact same senior
leaders that ask you questions about why things aren't moving
faster, Those tiny gaps in theirunderstanding seem manageable in
their meetings, but suddenly create massive friction for the

(01:03):
people doing the actual work. This is leadership confidential,
real talk on more than two hard things in technology, finding
community and becoming the engineer leader you can be.
Today we talk about one of thosebig words that we all like to
throw around. I'm definitely guilty of that
and sometimes without being 100%well aligned on what they mean.

(01:28):
Alignment, as in people really agreeing on what to do, why, and
how to get it done. It's also one of those
leadership things that sounds sosimple and straightforward in
theory. Like, duh, of course everyone
should agree. But we also all know that it's
not always that easy in practice.

(01:48):
You know, I'm a systems person, and from a systems perspective,
misalignment has this especiallynasty quality.
It's so much more painfully feltat lower levels in your
organization than at executive levels.
At the executive level, and I'vebeen and still am in many of
those meetings, small disagreements often feel
manageable. They're often also abstract or

(02:10):
easy to brush aside with a quickah, we'll figure it out, or even
the teams will figure it out. We trust that they've got this.
But by the time those small gapscascade down to teams that try
to plan their work and make day-to-day decisions and move
fast, they suddenly become majorroadblocks and usually become
much, much bigger. Because unlike the executives

(02:33):
working on topics at an abstractlevel, teams have to handle a
lot of concrete problems that arise as a result of that.
And that is what my guest and I today talk about.
My guest name is Neil. Neil has 25 years of experience
in the industry. He's primarily worked in start
up contexts focusing on communications and data
aggregation. For the last 10 years, he's been

(02:56):
in senior engineering leadershippositions with organizations of
50 to 100 people. That sweet spot where alignment
becomes both critical and suddenly unprecedentedly
complex. Neil and I talk about how to
spot misalignment before it becomes a Canyon and a crisis.
We speak about the hard work of building genuine consensus at
the leadership level and how to translate high level strategy

(03:18):
into something that your engineering teams can actually
use to make decisions. We dive into the practical
mechanics of creating alignment that is not just nodding along
in meetings, but the kind that permeates every aspect of
decision making within your organization.
Here's real talk on more than two hard things in technology
with Neil. All right, so who are you and

(04:03):
how long have you been in the industry?
Well, I've worked in the industry about 25 years,
primarily in start up contexts and primarily in communications
and a kind of aggregation of various different sources and
trying to jam those things together.
Nice. And in terms of your current

(04:24):
role in preview, is there anything that might be worth
sharing just for context like you think I'm thinking, you
know, organizational size or anything like that?
Yeah, high level anything you. I guess most recently, and I
guess for sort of the last 10 years or so, I've been working
in engineering leadership positions, the sort of size
organization where I think my sort of sweet spot is that sort

(04:47):
of 50 to 100 people. And and a lot of what I would
talk about today will be, you know, from from the perspective
of a leader of that sort of organization.
But then also how do you go get to that size from, you know, a
ten person company or a twenty person company?
And I don't know too much about what happens after a hundred 150
other than it looks. Terrible.

(05:10):
But that will be the sort of, you know if I can speak on with
authority on any size of engineering or that's going to
be the area where we're asking be most awesome.
And then anything you want to share about your identity or so.
I'm a pretty boring white guy kind of archetype within the
industry. Yeah, that's that's.
A bit thank you for sharing though.

(05:32):
And what are you here to talk about?
Well, I thought today maybe we could talk about alignment.
How do you get alignment across your management team and an
organization, figure out what's actually important to your
business. And then once you've figured
that out, how as an engineering leader do you interpret that?
And how do you make it accessible to your team so that

(05:53):
it isn't just, you know, management coming up with some
slogans that sound great but youcan't do anything with them?
How do you actually apply that in your day-to-day, make it
useful and have confidence in the decisions that you're going
to make on the ground. Perfect, let's go.
I'm going to start with the definition and effect that's
kind of mean because honestly, Istruggle to define alignment
sometimes. So how do you define it?

(06:16):
Yeah, I think it's one of those topics that it's really easy to
try and over intellectualize it,but really it's just that
everyone agrees on some core things and they agree in a way
that isn't nodding along. They have internalized it to the
point that it then permeates every aspect of their decision

(06:36):
making within the organization. So that then means that even the
tiniest little gaps between two people actually are material and
significant. And you have to spend a lot of
time really trying to get to thepoint where everybody is
comfortable with what those sortof ground fruits are going to
be. You can't just sort of nod it

(06:57):
along and compromise in the moment, but then sort of stick
to what you were hoping you've got further along.
You've really got to delve into that.
And I think that might be, that's where you start right at
the top, because you know, if you have two leaders within an
organization who are saying pretty much the same thing, but
not quite the same thing, that tiny little gap that seems sort

(07:19):
of OK in when those two are in the room, how that's felt
further down, the organization becomes a massive great big gap
and really quite significant decisions are now becoming
possible and blocked. So you have to go right the way
back up the organization to actually get some clarity on
which way to go. And that slows you down.
It gets everyone frustrated and so you have to spend that time

(07:42):
at a leadership level just agreeing and then internalising
on these sort of basic truths ofwhy do you exist, what are you
trying to do, what's important right now.
I think a lot of organisations can skip over that or believe
that they've achieved it and perhaps haven't achieved it.
I think that's pretty the most dangerous scenario.
So yeah, that's kind of how I would think about alignment.

(08:04):
I think honestly, I also really like that you've already covered
basically like why is it important?
The sort of it's not even a ripple effect that misalignment
has at the leadership level, butit's more I was honestly trying
to like find a good visual and couldn't, but it's more than
take small cracks at the top aregoing to like lead to large the
gaps basically across the organization.

(08:27):
Can't find a good metaphor, but I'm going to keep looking at
some point in 10 minutes. I sort of think of it like like
a sort of gorge that opens up and you have a tiny crack at one
end, and then as you go down that crack just grows and grows
and grows, and by the end of it you've got a whole Canyon.
And it's got 2 continents. Moving apart and that pain is
real like if you are on the ground in that situation, you

(08:49):
just can't get stuff done. And it didn't feel that bad at
the leadership level because it was such a small gap.
Like it's, you know, you can't always agree with everything
perfectly. And yet you, you have to find a
way to to find that shared understanding and really
internalize it so that when you're not thinking about it
directly as a leader, you are still true to that that core

(09:10):
belief. I want to highlight the point
that I thought was really good there, which is that the
misalignment is like much more painfully or acutely felt at
lower levels in the organizationand not not as much often at
leadership levels. Because I very much agree.
And I think that is honesty there's at least in my

(09:31):
experience. I'd love to hear what it's been
like for you. But that is one of the most
dangerous things about it because at the executive level
or so, it's often just a higher like they'll figure it out, it's
going to be fine. Whereas in like levels of the
organization where then the day-to-day work needs to get
planned and prioritized and actually done based on that.
People actually, as I think I heard from you, like get stuck.

(09:52):
They don't know what the path forward is or they're annoyed
because of like the head of product and the head of
engineering are, again, not on the same page and the product
manager is pushing for somethingelse.
And I think those like, basically those effects of
misalignment, like not being felt as vastly in the same way
at all levels. I think honestly, there is a
huge issue. I mean, I think it's not if, you

(10:13):
know, I've heard you put it thisway.
It's also, I think this is a quite common issue with other
areas as well. But yeah, I just thought it was
a really good observation. Well, there's also, it's not
even just in the moment, you can't bridge the gap at that at
that sort of lower level in the organization.
It's the cumulative grind of that.
So every single time you have totouch on this area, you know

(10:36):
that your counterpart and product might go somewhere else
and every single time you have to have the same.
Good point the. Same.
It starts to be like a battle. It erodes trust.
How can you build trust with someone when you know that
you're both trying to do slightly different things and
the only way you solve that is you get your, you know,
collected, you know, management chains to actually do the work
can and, and close that gap for you.

(10:57):
And then suddenly everything drops away because it's not, you
know, it's a structural thing that's making you and your
counterpart have to be misaligned or you just go rogue
anyway and just decide for yourself.
But then you're either doing theopposite of what your direct
boss is telling you to do. That's that can be quite
challenging. Or your you and your
counterparts come up with some third completely different way.

(11:20):
And that's also probably not going to be super great.
Yeah, or you're told you're not collaborating well enough.
Right, right. And all of this.
And you're not building alignments suddenly.
And all of this because you know, your boss, or your boss's
boss or boss's boss just haven't.
Haven't really spent that time to close the gap as tightly as
they possibly could. I kind of honestly want to pull

(11:42):
on that thread a little bit if that's OK, because I, it's kind
of, it's not my favorite thing to say out loud, but I find it
useful as a kind of model is that my sense is that quite
often organizations are most ready to change in the areas
where like the pain is most acutely felt.
And most like quite often that is not the place where kind of

(12:05):
the decisions about change happen.
Like a figure that is a really good example of that.
So I honestly, that's why I wantto ask.
It sounds like, you know, if themisalignment is most acutely
felt in like different parts of the organization, then like
where basically the issue is kind of starting.
I, I do want to say because I, Iguess a lot of things are

(12:26):
systemic, but at this point thatwe're basically talking about
leadership misalignment trickling through the art.
How do you then, you know, as the leadership teammate, first
of all, how do you spot the misalignment?
How do you, you know, know that we actually need to get on this
and fix this? Yeah.
I think as a leadership team, much as you say that you, you
spot that something is wrong because you see some team is

(12:47):
unable to do their stuff in the way that you think they ought to
be able to. And you're looking at and
thinking, well, there's very capable people there, that the
app, the results that they're getting just aren't what we
want. And they don't seem to be
talking to each other. You know what's going on?
So it's like delivery challengesand like some sort of
communication breakdown. Yeah.
Or. Or maybe, yeah, they're they're.

(13:07):
Trying to so you know. Yeah, they're, they're spending
so long going backwards and forth on this one topic, it's
really obvious what they should do.
Why are they finding this so? Hard.
Yeah, that's really obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I thought it. But I I, I say in a sort of with
some irony drifting off. But, but that's the thing.
But that's. What it feels like.
From a leadership point of view.Why can't they figure it out?
Yeah. Like what's?
What's going on here? I could feel myself getting

(13:28):
worked up. Right.
And then you go and sort of spend a bit more time with them.
And I think that the, you know, it's a little bit like I, I do a
lot of running. I go and occasionally have to go
and see a physio and I say to them, look, my ankle really
hurts. And I assume they're going to go
and poke around my ankle. And what they actually do is
poke the other leg right the wayup.

(13:51):
And it's because it's connected to here, to connect to here.
And you know, that's their skillto like trace through your body
and understand where the where the real problem lies.
And I think it's a bit like that.
If you go into that situation naively or you go into it still
with your engineering manager team hat on and you try and fix
at a team level, the best you'regoing to do is make it a little

(14:14):
bit better, maybe put some plasters over things.
But the the underlying problem'snot going to get solved and it's
always going to be there. And I guess the skill then is
to, sometimes it is at a team level and you do help them that
way, but often it's not. And then you have to go up a
level and maybe up another leveland then it starts to get quite
scary because these are big problems that have been hard to

(14:39):
touch. You've got to persuade other
people that the problems at a management level and a team
level. It's always unfortunate if it's
your thing to figure out. Right, right.
And you've got to find a language and a way to express
that to to your management team so they get it, take it
seriously and carve out enough time to really talk about it,
get people in the right frame ofmind to talk about it.

(15:01):
And I think that takes a long time to get used to that, that
approach. Because even if you develop the
skill to realize where the problem lies, you've got a whole
extra set of skills that you've got to develop to make that case
to your peer group and really get them to engage with it
somehow. And they're all busy, you know?

(15:25):
And they might not think this isreally a problem at the moment
level that they might be still quite happy to be like, no, it's
just the team's wrong. You're engineers.
They're just all incompetent. Yeah, well, they're just being
uppity and they need to get overthemselves and, you know, think
about this more commercially andyeah, and whatever.
And so it's a hard conversation to say no.
I think it's, I think it's not them.

(15:45):
It's it's hard. And you need a lot of support to
be able to do that. Now you can create an
environment with your leadershipteam where that is easier or
harder. But I guess that's your CE OS
job or your CE OS job to, you know, to try and create the
sense of first team at a leadership level.

(16:07):
You really have to invest in that because if you don't have
those relationships, you really can't, or at least my experience
has been, I found it much, much easier to do that in some
organisations than others. Me too.
And creating that environment iskey to to doing it.
And I've certainly been in companies where I think, I think
it's sort of, I've just sort of 3/3 situations.

(16:30):
One where the group believes that there's a high level of
alignment and trust and they believe that passionately, but
probably not true. One where you don't scratch the
surface very far to realize how little trust there is in the
room. Everyone's doing their own
thing. Everyone understands what's
important to their area and they're going to.
They know that's ultimately how they'll be judged on and it's

(16:51):
not a first team. It's quite a sort of toxic kind
of grinding environment to be in.
Especially with the like, yeah, the surface level, we're all on
the same page. It's all great.
And then, but then right there below is the yeah, no, actually
nothing's good. Again, breaking through that is
and. Then yeah.
And then the third one is not tosay everything's great, but at

(17:12):
least you can have the conversation and you do somehow
have a strong enough bond with your peers to, to really be able
to cut through when you have to.And, you know, I think that's
what everyone would hope to have, but it, it's very, very
difficult to, to get there. And there's no good way.
I mean, I've never been ACEO, but there's no real good way to

(17:36):
measure it either, so. I haven't.
I can say that yes, that is accurate.
Right. But how do you do that?
I, I guess you do need to somehow create a sense of first
team amongst that leadership. You do need to sort of try and
create an identity away from your functional areas.
I, I, I guess ultimately that means the normal ways that you

(18:00):
try and build trust in a group, you try and find some way to
help everyone feel safe to be vulnerable in front of their
peers. If you can achieve that will go
a long way. And and you know, this sort of
really classic example is you will sit around in a circle and
if somebody shares some significant moment from their

(18:21):
childhood, say or whatever, you know, I'm not sort of trying to
mock that because I do think there is something into it, but
it's not a one off thing. You you build that assuredly
over a long period of time. And you think also, of course,
just normal teen balance. You think very carefully who
you're going to bring into the group when you're hiring and all
that sort of stuff. If you can get that and it's not

(18:42):
going well, but the room's not necessarily aligned that it's
not well, some think it's fine, some don't.
Some then you need, you need that mechanism to sort of raise
the flag. Maybe you go in as a couple of
you, or maybe you have to go in solo and you just call out all
the problems and you say this isbecause that you have to feel

(19:02):
safe to be able to challenge. And it's not, it's not oh, so
and so you're wrong, but it's this is the outcome.
You know, you're like all, all the normal stuff, like when
you're trying to give feedback of anything like you're not,
you're not trying to sort of make it a personal.
Situation behaviour impacts right, right, right.
Whatever your model of choice, it's understanding different
perceptions. Really like that.

(19:24):
That's basically it's like, oh, I have a different, like here is
my view on this. What is your view on this?
And then you can ideally back trace until you find the last
place where you had the same view and then figure out like
how things broke down from there.
Yeah. And then I think once you've
agreed that there is a gap, thenI think you do just have to go
through and ask yourself some very basic questions about your
business. And there's loads of different

(19:45):
models I guess out there that you can go.
Towards what analysis or things like that it could.
Be that or just. You know to name.
The Patrick Lencion, any staff? Well, that's that's the the five
dysfunctions, you mean? I was thinking more the
advantage. Oh yeah, I I would agree.
That's a good. But maybe the five dysfunctions
for getting the environment the environment so that you can and

(20:08):
talk, yeah. But like the good strategy, bad
strategy. Like, right?
Absolutely. Romod I think Richard, I just
don't know how the last name is pronounced for you.
And so we go through this process of writing down what you
thinks the company's there to do, and every single word really
matters. And it's extremely painful.
And you have to hope that everyone's bringing their full

(20:28):
energy to the table because they've got to get behind it and
they've got a lion on on this stuff.
And I think examples are really valuable, and challenging
counterexamples are really valuable.
You know examples in the sense of if we write into our
strategy, we want to whatever expand our market index, what
would that actually look like atthe your feature levels?
Those kinds of examples. Were kind of like thinking this

(20:50):
through to the lower level or yeah what kind of examples it's?
What would be the implication ofthis and what are the trade-offs
we're making as a result of it? You.
Know so yeah, so including I would also add the like what are
we not doing as a? Right, Right.
Exactly that. Exactly that.
Yeah. What are we not doing?
Are we happy with that? Yeah.

(21:11):
Are we really happy with that? You know, are you?
Really, really happy with that. So and so I'm looking at right
now, are you happy with that? Yeah.
And you go through that process and you write it all down and
you challenge yourself with it. And, you know, these things are
shouldn't be complicated questions.
And they are like, you know, like, why do we matter?

(21:32):
Why do we exist? How are we going to win?
What's the problem we're trying to solve?
Who's our customer? Yeah, all that, all that stuff.
And, you know, so for instance, we recently went through this
process and we realised that oneof the core things, the core
tensions, was not that anyone disagreed with what we were
doing. They disagreed with the time
frame over which something mighthappen, you know?

(21:55):
Time frame in terms of ex sequencing of things or time
frame in terms of how fast it would be delivered?
Time frame in terms of right nowwe're trying to make a business
successful in this way, but longer term our ambitions are
broader. We'd like to go here.
And the point at which you startopening up that funnel was the
point of contention. No one realized that was the

(22:17):
point. We just knew that we were kept
fighting about how much we should optimize for the here and
now, how much we look to the future.
All came down to where that point in the future might be
where we could start to what would have to be true before we
felt we'd got our core business actually working really well and
then we could start, start, start opening up that funnel a

(22:38):
little bit like how would that be?
And we had some folks in the group that really thought we
needed to do it right away, but if we didn't, we'd never get
there. And others who are like, if we
do that right now, we will die because we need to focus.
So. And so it was.
Yeah, completely rational opinions.
Yeah. And we just had never realised
that that was the thing that. Was very different assumptions.

(22:58):
Yeah, yeah. And once we knew that everyone
was just, everyone just breathedout, it's like.
We thought that we hate each other time, man, time's so cute.
Like, how did you actually realise that was the crux of it?
Because it sounded like it was, you know, really intense process
and there was a lot of like build up and for like
misalignment for a really long time.

(23:20):
And that's why I'm curious. Yeah, I think it it the the two
folks that were most into that were going backwards and
forwards and I think a third party.
Sometimes you just need someone who's not got quite so much skin
in the game to say facilitating statement and suddenly all the
veils just drop away. Everyone just sees it really

(23:41):
clearly and you just felt the tension drop out of the room.
It was extraordinary. What do you remember what that
person said? It wasn't.
I don't remember the words, I remember the body language,
which I can't express via podcast, but.
I could describe it and you just.
There's just everything. Just.
Take the tension falling off. Yeah, yeah, I.

(24:02):
Mean if the sun had was able to come out at that moment, it
would have. The heavens opened and the birds
started singing. Because suddenly then the oxygen
to talk about this and the tension moved away and then we
could move really rapidly. The next sort of 15 minutes was
probably more productive than the whole however many day
workshop and that really helped.And that and we could keep

(24:23):
referring back to that moment for the rest of the day.
So, so that was a huge breakthrough for this particular
team. I've done this process where
we've never really had that moment.
And I think a lot of people, youknow, myself included, walked
out thinking I didn't work it out like what none of us did.
And so that was sort of quite troubling.
I mean, those were, you know, itwas earlier in my career.

(24:44):
So I was sort of learning about how to have the good meetings of
that. But yeah, by just being entering
into those sorts of conversationin good faith, really trying to
just give as much of yourself aspossible to try and figure out
where that attention comes from,then, you know, if you can do
that, then that's great. And you come out with your

(25:04):
thing. And the problem is you put all
of this effort in and then you and you put it in your deck of
how you're going to explain it to the rest of your company.
And it reads something like we're going to sell.
More. And it pretzels to.
To primarily Scottish people and.

(25:24):
Yeah, and, and the rest of the world was like, you're joking me
like. So basic.
Like you spent three days on that?
How? Did this take us like 9 months?
They couldn't. We've just take up, yeah.
Yeah. I I hate that when you're like,
oh man, like you, you'll never know how much went into this one
line and hear about the freakingpretzels like.

(25:45):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's also great.
But The thing is that part's theeasy part, right?
Like you've worked out now what's important and now you've
got to express it. So what you probably shouldn't
do is show up in front of your company and say, right, we're
going to sell our pretzels. Go.
You've got to, you've got to make this more consultative.
I think your culture and your business will determine exactly

(26:07):
how you go about that. I think whatever you do though,
you have to attack it in multiple different ways, more
different channels. So you might, you might do
individual anonymous surveys, you might do team get togethers
and say, hey, what does this mean for us?
Right. To help people kind of connect
the dots of like their area withthe big picture.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly that or.

(26:28):
With the one liner Bob Pretzels and Scottish people.
Right, right. Like what does this mean for us?
We sell what? About the Irish.
Yes, yeah, With the Irish team, what are we supposed to do?
And then and you know, other youmight choose to share it with a,
a smaller group, maybe your middle management or not just
management, but there's just leaders within the organization
you might choose. To bring your technical leaders

(26:48):
into this, I just want to. Yeah, exactly that.
But what I found was you almost,you know, engineering,
particularly in a start up context is often the the largest
group by quite some way. And the pattern that you apply
in engineering is likely to be different to the rest of your
peers because you have more people.
And what I found was that while the high level strategy, like we

(27:13):
wanted to communicate that directly to to everybody and
have a a healthy sort of feedback cycle where people
could scrutinize and we can still make changes to it.
We can answer that Scottish Irish pretzel problem, you know,
and. Hopefully national crisis.
Yeah. I mean, hopefully we don't make
huge changes, but sometimes you do get some really useful
feedback. But what I also found was it

(27:35):
wasn't particularly actionable really.
Basically, the words that you'd put on the page as a leadership
team weren't actually part, wasn't actually well.
It was OK, so supposing we've got this pretzel business and
we're going to focus on Scotland, but what does that
mean where we're trying to choose our pretzel factory
location, say, because you've got a great one in Ireland and

(27:56):
it's really good. It's the best in the world
actually. So how, how do we use this
knowledge? What you probably then need to
do is help your team through that process.
And so you're going to create a sort of engineering strategy
that is trying to bridge the kind of day-to-day stresses and
strains that you might have and in but inform that with your

(28:18):
company strategy and show how it's linked.
But it's really spelling it out and then really getting into,
OK, does this actually, what does this actually mean?
What does it mean about for our branch in Dublin or really
trying to, you know, just paint a picture of like really getting
into the details as what? Yeah, very specific questions
like, so my company at the moment, we're an open source
company, but not everything we do is open source.

(28:40):
So how do we decide if a given project should be open source?
If so, which license we're goingto use and what should be
proprietary? So you ask that question, you
refer to your strategy overall, and you explain how to apply
your strategy to answer that question.
And you give a really hopefully unambiguous answer to here's how

(29:02):
you decide. So either it's like really
straightforward, it's just, you know, very simple algorithm to
decide at A or B, or it's more nuanced.
But like, here's the five thingsyou're considering and here's
the process. So if it is more nuanced, you're
probably going to need some level of managerial oversight on
that kind of decision. But ultimately, you know, we
want you to, you know, try and decide yourself, make your

(29:25):
recommendation, But here is yourprocess for doing it.
And going through that process does definitely require your
leadership across engineering because you say to them, what
are the hard questions that we you don't feel confident with?
And they tell you what those arethe format the that I used for
that particular exercise I took.AI don't know if it's actually

(29:51):
his model or if he took it from somewhere else, but a chap
called Will Larsson had a a sortof structure for engineering.
Strategy. He's really good.
Yeah, he might have taken it. I think it was adopted by room
like from the remote. It is good strategy, bad
strategy, isn't it? Yeah, and he, but basically
it's. A good like bridge to
engineering. Right, right.
You have your problem statement of what you're actually trying
to solve. As an engineering org, you're

(30:13):
guiding principles that help youhow to decide stuff.
And then a list of actions that you're going to do that are
either things that enable you totransition, things that enable
you to enforce like some guidingprinciple or, or, you know, just
anything that you know that you need to do to achieve the sorts

(30:35):
of things that you're hoping to achieve.
And I found that structure really great because the, you
know, that problem statement piece that probably is largely
top down. I mean, strategy by it's nature,
like there is an element of top down.
It has to be, it's your job. So you're hoping not to have to
make too many changes to that piece, though definitely
clarifications is is valuable. The guiding principles is more a

(30:58):
partnership with your leadershipbecause they will have questions
that are not on that list. You didn't think that that was a
the challenging question is, Oh no, you're right, that is a
challenging. Question How would?
We let's work it out together. And then the actions I think
very much is you're looking to your team to, to help you with
that. So you sort of engage them more
fully through the process. And the lovely thing about it is

(31:18):
you share, you don't, you don't share it in one go.
You, you start with the problem statement and at that point as
the leader, you're doing most ofthe work really to lay it out in
front of them. They get more and more involved
as the process goes on. And by the time you're ready to
ship, everyone just feels very aligned with this.
And they have a lot of personal ownership with this.
And I've definitely noticed the,the engagement and the, the

(31:39):
energy that people were bringingto the table has increased as
I've gone through. I've gone through this process
and then you're going to share it with everybody going to have
the same process again to some degree.
I mean, in this case, you're actually going to share the
whole lot at them. So it's a lot of information,
but you need this culture of feedback and iteration and and
challenge. And what I would really love to
see is somebody come to me and say, I couldn't, I had this

(32:02):
problem and I couldn't use the strategy to help me.
Like, what's that about? That would be great because it
would show that they were tryingto use the strategy.
It would help me improve the strategy and hopefully then
unblock someone else in the in the future.
The other thing that I'm very much looking forward to is when
I'm, you know, spouting off withleadership type stuff in front

(32:24):
of my team and saying, right, you know, this is where we're
going or wherever. The day that somebody uses that
strategy to tell me that I'm wrong and that I'm actually
misaligned with my own strategy,that's also going to be a very
special moment because it reallyshows that you've built
something that's valuable and that the person feels sort of
empowered to use this to stand their crowd.
It gives you a shared language because you know, it's often

(32:47):
very difficult when you're an individual contributor to and
sort of switch up the abstraction layer to engage at a
much more abstract level, which is where your management are
often. And it gives you a shared
language to talk about this kindof stuff.
And I think that if you can get to the point where your team
feel confident to use a written strategy for something like

(33:08):
that, then that probably shows that you've got it there,
particularly then if the leader's like, you're right,
well. Done.
Yeah. There are so many good things in
what you said. That's why I don't want to just
like leave there. The first bit that I wanted to
pull out was the like grant. The last thing in terms of just
like strategy, is only useful when you actually use it.

(33:31):
And. I like what I heard as like
basically the process of fake essentially like stress testing
it like whilst you're rolling this out at like different
levels of the organization, likeactually like you're talking
this through with people and looking at, OK, what would this
actually mean for your team, foryour domain?
What decisions would you make aspart of that?
And and both I really liked whatI at least interpreted as

(33:54):
essentially you might be walkingthrough some very concrete
examples with like, oh, this is the thing that you would build.
This is maybe the thing you would de prioritise, but then
also basically making the thought process transparent.
Like maybe there's already a wayto like use those principles
that you've kind of defined in the but basically not just
testing basically which concretedecisions will be made, but

(34:17):
basically how would people on the team make decisions in the
future, right, right. So that you're not just solving
for, well, what is whatever the road map for this year or what
is it for the next quarter. But also if say like a ticket or
a new request comes in, how would people then make a
decision about how to prioritisethat basically?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

(34:37):
That and being able to refer to it and pepper your language with
it is a really key way to keeping it front of other folks
minds. I've definitely found that
useful because if you're talkingabout something, whether it's
very high temperature, person you're talking to maybe doesn't
actually like the way that this is going to conclude.
But at least if they can understand where the structure

(34:59):
is coming from and it's something they're already
familiar with and they see how it fits into the whole, you
know, it's much easier to acceptsomething that isn't what you
would want as a sort of one off outcome.
If you can see how it fits in with the broader kind of picture
that you don't feel that you're being sort of disadvantaged,
like your team's getting a hard deal.

(35:21):
Because you can see, OK, we're having to give this up.
But if we give this up and everybody else gives this up,
then that does open this other thing for us.
And if we just gave it up unilaterally, it would be
ineffective and we just lose out.
But because we know everyone is doing this and we trust that
everyone else is doing this, we can see that you can have a
different level of conversation with the team and really sort of

(35:45):
engage them more with the sort of overall strategy of the
company. And hopefully that then is makes
for a more empowered environment.
They can understand how they really add value to their
business and they understand where their team fits in with
with the whole. I honestly feel like I basically
wanted to still say yes. There's like several of the
things you're saying, including at least what I heard is

(36:06):
basically like is using different words to talk about
these things because I understand my experience, one
big weakness that a lot of strategy documents have.
And I think honestly the remote approach is like fine, but it
does, at least in my experience,especially for engineering
teams, it does sort of foster a bit of a tendency kind of
philosophize and really sort of Galaxy brain the whole

(36:27):
situation. And so that's why I think I kind
of latched onto that. What I heard from you in terms
of like you actually talked thisthrough you use different words
because so many people often struggle when like and honestly
understandably because like I dotoo when it's like, I mean, even
with like alignment self like werealized or talked about
earlier, like there's so many big words and there's like, oh,
you know the customer and the revenue and the market and which

(36:50):
is all like great. And I'm sure that everyone
listening to this is going to write great strategy documents
as a result of listening to you,like sharing this.
But I wanted to make a point to like, really basically say, use
different language, like use different words.
Like have people recap to you maybe what they understood or
how they're interpreting this. Like really, Because the more
honestly you're sharing this, the more it feels to me like

(37:11):
there's really visceral process in like building the alignment.
Like really sort of one conversation, one Lego brick at
a time. And again, really sitting down,
talking to people, walking through things and not just
saying, ever passing on this document.
And now it's rolled out like boxticked.
Yeah, you have to refer to it through multiple channels and,

(37:32):
and, and use it, show people howyourself are using it in a
practical way. You'll have lots of different
ways that you communicate with your team at scale, you know.
So maybe you have a, you know, Ithink some some leaders will
write a weekly recap or something like that.
Yeah, you have your all hands meetings, you have your own,
your staff meeting. You have just your various

(37:53):
incidental conversations that you might have with you with
your engineers, and you're always just find trying to find
ways to refer back to how you might use this this strategy to
inform your decision making. So you can put that in.
Maybe this week you're going to talk about it in your newsletter
and the next week it goes in theall hands or when you're just

(38:15):
talking to someone one to one, you're like, well, you know, if
this is a hard problem, let's see if our strategy helps us and
you sort of do it through. You don't want to overuse it
because then you just, you know,going to seem quite peculiar, I
suppose to you. But there, you know, if your
strategy is good, there's going to be lots of very natural
organic moments where you can refer to it.
And you also just sort of set the expectation that if people

(38:37):
see that referring to the strategy and using it to make
their case for a given point, that's an effective way to to
make your case, then I think that that can be, you know, you,
it's very reinforcing. And you can also set an
expectation around that, even say, you know, like for whatever
investments you want to make or whatnot, like please, you know,
explain how those connections. Yeah, like help me see how this

(38:58):
would be. Concrete here, yeah.
So that's kind of what I mean, just trying to find little ways
to just keep that conversation alive.
Encourage your direct reports todo the same sort of thing and
you and you show them how to do it by role modelling because it
does feel a little bit awkward sometimes to say, let's pull
down the sacred tome and you know it's.
But but I think it's important, like, yeah.

(39:19):
But you know, if someone was trying to make a pitch for
staffing, say they want to, theywon't open up a role and you
say, right, strategically what we're trying to do is.
Hire doughnut Baker. Yeah, right.
Where does that doughnut Baker pretzels?
Pretzels. I love doughnuts, but we're not
doing it, you know, or so. So you can.

(39:41):
Yeah, you can. Make trying to make a pitch
versus bringing in a new like, yeah.
So, so OK, let's see how the strategy plays into this.
And I, I think that can be a very powerful way to just try
and really internalise it amongst everyone such that at
some point people don't, you're not even really saying let's
look at the strategy. It's just everyone understands

(40:01):
where we stand on doughnut making, or at least pretzels are
#1 you know, like. Right.
So we'll have given the pretzels#1 and we all know this.
We, we don't necessarily need torefer to the strategy anymore
because we all we're all really sure about pretzels and #1.
And we know what that means every day.
Right. And even though it's painful,

(40:21):
that does mean that we're not going to do any doughnuts today.
But, you know, there might be some caveats on context where we
might want to go down the doughnut route.
But this would have to be true and this would have to be true,
and this third thing has to be true, and this third thing isn't
true yet. So that's why we're not going to
hire your doughnut maker. Or we use the pretzel dough to
make pretzel rolls instead of pretzel shaped.

(40:43):
That again, would have to be a decision because it might like
take customers away who are interested in pretzels only
because of the shape and the crispy surface.
Feel like I should talk about pretzels more maybe outside of
this. But like, I, you know, I'm
honestly also realizing that like, I really like the many
examples you're giving us makingthis very concrete because, you
know, ultimately obviously say, yeah, ensuring alignment,

(41:06):
building alignment, whatnot. But like, honestly, like a lot
of people really struggle to know what that actually means.
And I also honestly wanted to kind of close the loop back to
what you can start it with. Your definition.
Music, I heard you define as, you know, like everyone agreeing
on kind of what we're doing. And, and, but I liked it like
multiple times. I also heard from you like,

(41:28):
yeah, like some people may not think that pretzels are #1 like
some people may think, well, I prefer Donuts or I prefer, no, I
can't think of any pastry for the flapjacks.
Sure, in the UK scrawling with it, but like that person that
still needs to focus on making pretzels because that is
ultimately what the company is trying to do.

(41:49):
And so I do, you know, I thoughtit was interesting to me to
agree. Initially, I thought that
everyone, you know, basically has the same opinion, but I
don't think that's what you meant.
Like it's, it's agreeing in the sense that everyone understands
and is then like making like taking actions and making
decisions that are contributing to that.
I'm trying not to stay aligned with that.

(42:10):
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's having a set of
truths for this business. And whenever you engage in a
conversation, you have trust that the other person takes
those truths as as a given. And that's our foundation for
the conversation we're going to have.
We don't have to have the pretzel doughnut conversation
once more. We've already done that.

(42:32):
We've got our personal opinions on it.
But as an organization, this is our ground truth that then
enables you to move much faster through your decision making at
a leadership level, but also further down the organization as
well. And it's that speed of decision
making further down the organization I think is what you
really want. That's where the real value is
going to come. From I do want to kind of as a

(42:52):
last and I do want to ask a bit about basically how you like the
sort of observability aspects essentially around like how do
you in very practical ways, maybe have some examples?
But like, how do you basically, you know, continue ensuring
alignment? Because you're very early on
mentioned that it's kind of basically it's an ongoing
process. It's not that we roll this thing

(43:14):
out, we share this document witheveryone and then boom, aligned.
But so how do you, you know, what are your markers or
metrics? Like how do you observe
qualitatively or however alignment decided you are still
given Or that there might be like some first signs of
misalignments? I think it's going back to where
we were earlier when you see something isn't quite working

(43:37):
for a given team and you, you know, and that will be manifest
by they're, they're not achieving what they're trying to
achieve or what you want them toachieve.
And you, and so you, you know, managerially, you take note of
that and you try and understand a bit more trying to think
through, well, you know, often it's due to a lack of context

(44:00):
and they're making good decisions based on what they
understand for what they understand is insufficient in
the context of the Broadway company.
And then asking yourself, well, why?
Why don't they have that context?
I mean, it's a failure of management.
Like it's a failure of communication.
They didn't know this fact that you believed everyone would know
by now because you feel like yousaid it 27,000,000 times and
they don't know this. Well, as frustrating as that

(44:22):
might be, that's still your fault as a leader.
Like, yeah, like why didn't? Why?
Why don't? They crumbles.
Yeah. And you can then go, you can try
and debug that and think, well, what would have to have been
different so that this person did know that thing, because if
they had known it, then they might have made a different
decision. And then you go through your,
you understand where the break in communication happened.

(44:43):
And that could just be a just poorly chosen words.
I mean, sometimes, yeah. We're now work, living in a
world where remote work is much,much more common.
You, I mean, being based in London, we've always had lots
and lots of different cultures to, to work with and lots of
people, you know, English will be the sort of common language,
but second language for most of your colleagues.

(45:04):
And there's all sorts of words that translate quite well, but
in a different way. And definitely as a native
English speaker, you know, we, we love our Indians.
We've got a lot of them and theydon't translate and you can
really easily be misunderstood and you don't realise that
you're being misunderstood. Or even take the you know
earlier. Like everyone agrees, that means
alignment. Right, right, right, right

(45:26):
again. English isn't my my first
language either. Yes, you know, just very small
example those kinds of things, but it's.
So yeah, it's so easy. I mean, the, the sort of the
classic one was I was in an interview once and it was a
management interview. We talked about conflict.
How do you manage conflict? And the person I was talking to
just they were French. I think the way that they

(45:46):
understood that word was different.
It was much more ferocious. It was much like.
A fight, yeah. Yeah, it was like a war sort of
sort of sort of usage. And so, you know, you're
interviewing an engineering manager and saying, oh, tell me
about a time you had to deal with a conflict.
And they said I've never had a conflict, right.
And and I think. And that is like technically in

(46:08):
a sort of there's never been a disagreement in my management
career. If you look at it from that
angle that is honestly it's a red flag for a manager.
Well, of course I was baffled when the person How did you.
Like you the. Person was doing really well in
the interview and then they justhad never had a conflict.
It's like, Are you sure? And then I've talked about it a
bit more and I had a bit of evena chat with some of my French
colleagues and say, look, do youhave any idea what happened

(46:29):
there that weren't wrong? And we talked it through when
you realised. So the point was a very small
turn in language can create the gap.
So your question was, how do yousort of maintain this?
How do you keep this going? I think you just have to keep
attacking your problems with a view to if someone is making a
decision that you can't understand, why are they doing
that? What context do they have that

(46:50):
is different to your context? Maybe they actually know
something you don't and they're making the right decision.
Yeah, that can also be there, but.
They're not always wrong. Yeah, yeah, forbid.
Like, you know, they're small people.
They they sometimes actually, yeah, quite often.
They quite often know this worldbetter than you do.
But you know, the other thing though is when you write your
engineering strategy, you need to update it every so often so

(47:15):
you do get a sort of natural cadence and a moment when you're
allowed to revisit it. You should, through the course
of the year, just give a an update on, well, how are we
doing on our strategy? We've got all these actions that
we defined. Are we actually doing any of
those? Yeah.
How true are we being to our guiding principles?
Maybe you could even survey mid year on something like that and
say look what. Are you checking?

(47:35):
Yeah. Is this actually true?
Did we achieve it or not? And.
Do people feel like they're, youknow, still contributing to the
strategy? Basically I think.
Yeah. And if and if you're not being
true to your strategy, they've got a real good channel to tell
you so and say, look, this guiding principle sounds great,
but we do not live it. Here's 3 examples where we don't
do it. So, so I think you can do those

(47:56):
kind of things and keep trying to engage the team on this point
and keep giving. You know, if there are enough
examples where someone has called out a flaw or something
that's now missing because we'veevolved and they can see that
got put in to the strategy, thenI think that could be quite
engaging because it's then OK, this is our strategy.
This isn't just something that'sbeing handed to me.
I mean, it's a big scary document, but if I really felt

(48:18):
passionately that I it was deficient, somehow I can get
that I can make that case and atleast have a conversation about
it. So I think that's how you
maintain it and keep it going and how you observe it's
effective nurse it. But it applies further up the
organization as well because, you know, particularly in
engineering context, you're working alongside product people
and designers and you've all gotdifferent reporting lines.

(48:41):
So checking how those groups of people are interacting I think
is really key to this because ifthey can move quickly with
confidence in their decision making, then you've probably got
it right. If they're finding it really
hard to find common ground, well, it could be a local
problem, but it's it's probably a management problem, it's
probably a leadership problem. I honestly do think there is a

(49:03):
lot of like basically small signals that I've heard you know
from you in. Terms of yeah, I think so.
Like, how are things going? And then, but honestly, I think
most dealers I pick up on anyway, like that's part of the
job. But then the next step I think
is so important basically in theworld.
Could this be a misalignment issue?
Because I think honestly also our minds may not go to that

(49:23):
place as kind of the first thingthat we say, oh, you know, yeah.
Of course, if people are all disagreeing and they can't
figure it out, it's, again, not because they're incompetent.
I really do. Generally also I work with a
competent feeling saying that those kinds of things about
today. But I know honestly, because I
like in all earnest, like a lot of people still think that even

(49:44):
though they know that they work with competent people, but that
they can't use that as signals. I think, Oh yeah, are we all
still aligned? And then you can if that's the
case, then you can figure out where what else, what else might
be going wrong. I'll see the other part that I
can wanted to just emphasize as well as essentially that, you
know, you mentioned earlier thatlike, yeah, you say things
27,000,000 times. I think that was actually the

(50:04):
number you've that is the take away from this podcast.
Like 27,000,000 is the but like,again, I often joke at this
point sometimes like, Oh yeah, I'm the coach here.
That's why I get to ask the coachee questions.
Then you just say, Oh yeah, whatproblem are we trying to solve
or what goal are we pursuing? And it's it often I say I feel
often really silly, but also I think 95% of the time when I ask

(50:27):
this question actually turns out, yeah, no one really knows
Brian, Brian. And so, you know, there are a
lot of things where honestly, itcan really help to remember that
a lot of the basic stuff that reads really simple, like, yeah,
build alignment, of course, it'sjust, it's a lot of work and
it's a lot of good habits and it's a lot of just staying in
tune with your organization. That's a really good way to put
it. When you just stop thinking

(50:48):
about it, you just undoing it because it's a.
Habit it starts slipping away kind of like the dead man switch
in a like on AI think on subwaysright right, right yeah operator
where you can if you have to constantly told and I'm not in
mechanics and do you know how that means which actually works.
Yeah, you you have to consistently apply some activity
to keep it where it is. At the moment, let it know that

(51:10):
you're still alive. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's. Yeah, yeah.
I don't know how they. Mechanically, we can probably
add something to the show, but I'm.
Familiar with the concept? I think that's what it feels to
me like you have to like the only thing you'll do as a
leader, but it needs to be a very routine or they're like, I
was honestly thinking in like public restrooms, for example,

(51:32):
like we're in the seminar building here, but I'm sure they
have on the wall somewhere. Honestly, in my building, they
have a 2. There's a plan break, you know,
twice a week. There's a cleaning service like
with folks that come by and theymaintain the surroundings.
And there's every like twice a week there's an entry with like
someone you know, at state and, and signs.
That's honestly what it feels like to me.
There is a very like, there's a routine to it, yeah.

(51:55):
For sure, yeah. And you've just got to get it to
the point where you're not really thinking about it, but
that routine is always happening.
Right. But I, I feel like the as
someone with second word emergency is the sort of not
thinking of things, just it's not like something things exist
in my calendar or they don't, right, Right.
I'm honestly just, you know, I think that is a good statement
also. Like I don't want to subscribe

(52:15):
to that because I know that's going to go really hard for me.
I'm kind of the same in as much as, you know, everything's,
everything gets squeezed out. And so the I think that having
some fixed signposts that you were pre committing to like
whatever. Yeah, that's.
Really. OK, cycle for example, Yeah.
And really good times. Are like that, but they actually

(52:36):
are like helpful tools. For it, yeah.
So you have a sort of plumbed inretrospection thing and you'd
have to consciously not do it. Yeah, like a cadence where you
don't have to actively think of it, but it still happens.
It's where you're in that momentof retrospection.
And in order to not retrospect, you would actually have to
consciously say right now I'm not going and a retrospect and

(52:56):
that's not what hopefully let the.
Switch go. Yeah, that's hopefully not what
you're going to do. You're going to go, oh, I'm in
my retrospective moment, I will now go and do this.
How are we doing against our strategy and try and get that
feedback from your team. Yeah.
I mean, I yeah, I'd like to callthat just leadership hygiene.
I think that's why I went to thelike room maintenance and cost
maintenance. This is really good.

(53:18):
I'm, I really want to make sure you can also actually talk to
people at the conference. Is there anything else that we
haven't covered on alignment that you really want to share?
I mean, I think that you know, when you are originally rolling
this stuff out, you have to get to the point where people get
bored to tears with you talking about it.
That's so good the way that I thought.
I find that you might, you make a joke about that and you say

(53:43):
that I'm, if you're still tolerating me talking to you in
this way, then I haven't said itenough and I'm sorry.
I'm going to keep going and you're going to hear from me in
all these different places and I'm just going to keep going
until everybody is bored to tears and.
Hearing about to shut the heck up or I quit this job.
And you make a little joke aboutit, because then when you do pop

(54:04):
up again and again, they're likeme again, all right?
Still here? Yeah, yeah, he's here again.
But he did say he's going to do this and we sort of understand
why. And maybe it's not 27,000,000,
but it's probably like at least seven times, right?
7 million. You've got to, you've got to,
you've got to make it feel like that.
You've got to make it feel like 27.
Million, I will say that my my reference and that is I talk

(54:27):
about this a lot in this change management context as well as
like once you get tired of saying it, assume that about 70%
of people have heard it. Right, so.
You still got to keep going likethrough push through that, even
though it's. Actually, that's a really good
point, isn't it? It's not just the person
receiving it is getting tired ofit.
You yourself as the leader are miserable.

(54:48):
Yeah, but. Just I really sometimes like I
really, I can hear myself talking in like really, you
know, delay by one sentence. I'm like, oh man, like I really
want to think something. Yeah, exactly.
Like can we like, please talk about like other, you know,
French pastry already, like pencils are just done.
But I think that's a really goodpoint.

(55:08):
Like the yeah talk about it morethan once, maybe under
27,000,000 times. Somewhere.
In the special I could find. You know, it depends.
Like whatever works for you. So how do you actually feel
about pretzels? I'm, I'm saying I'm like warmly
disposed. I'm not.
I don't think I want to make that my my goal for the next. 10

(55:31):
years. I mean, where we've gone through
this process, we haven't actually mentioned pretzels in
the strategy anywhere. It's almost like a totally
orthogonal wow. I mean, I'm starting to.
It's like a big gap. I feel like there's a market
right here and I'm pointing. Or maybe I need a section of
what we're not doing and pretzels just aren't mentioned
so. That is, I mean, that is like

(55:52):
disappointing, but fair since you are in the software
business, I guess. Yeah, we just don't have a
pretzel strategy at all. That makes sense.
And what other baked good would be your next number 1 The.
Worst thing is it is flap track.People are really going to think
I'm I'm I coerced to somehow explain to all the stereotypes

(56:15):
about this country? I didn't even realise until we
talked today that flapjack was aBritish thing.
I just assumed that was a ubiquitous thing across all
culture. Like let me Google this on the
side so we can just add some knowledge to this and I don't
just have to like make a note toadd this after the fact.
The flapjacked origin. OK, so etymology is early 17th

(56:36):
century from flap in the dialectsense.
Toss a pancake Jack like that's the second one.
Second part of it sends like dates from the 1930s and it's
probably a regional coin. Flapjack in parentheses.
Oat bar, Yeah, also known as cereal bar.
Oat bar or slice is a big bar cooked in a flat oven in tin and

(56:57):
cut into spares or rectangles. Great history.
Shakespeare refers to flapjacks.OK, so Wikipedia is not actually
as conclusive as I Yeah, we havecereal bars in Germany, but
they're also. They're not the same entirely,
but you do like a flapjack. Yeah, that's pretty, pretty my
go to. I do like flapjacks too.

(57:19):
I've been on a quest to like, make really good ones at home.
That and oatmeal cookies. But yeah, you can see that.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
The tough reality, as we all know, like with so many other
things in leadership, is that alignment is not just a one time

(57:39):
exercise, but a continuous process that requires constant
maintenance and checking in. I love Neil's practical
approach, which moves much beyond those abstract concepts,
but shows instead how alignment directly impacts your team's
effectiveness and how you can take responsibility for creating
that kind of clarity. So if you, like pretty much any

(58:00):
other company, struggles with alignment in your organization,
here are a few takeaways. First, remember that solving
alignment issues requires looking up your organization,
not just down. Small misalignments at executive
and senior leadership level become major gaps at team
levels, so address them early. If you can, make your strategy
actionable by testing it with concrete examples, and maintain

(58:23):
alignment by talking about your strategy again at least every
couple of weeks. Check if the work that's done on
your team still goes in the direction that you all set out
to move into. Because successful alignment
means the teams can use your strategy to make decisions
without constantly having to escalate to you or your boss or
people above. So your strategy document isn't
just A1. Use item.

(58:45):
Return to it over and over to check if it's still useful,
still working, and make tweaks as you learn along the way.
And I'll say it again, never stop talking about strategy.
Remember, when you can't stand listening to yourself talk about
it anymore, that's probably whenabout 70% of people have
actually heard it. So keep going.

(59:07):
Leadership Confidential was created, produced and presented
by MI Lena Reinhard. Theme, original composition and
mixing by Esteban Delpino. Production assistance, guest
support, and social media best Istart.
Thank you for listening.