The Alignment Problem
When you have a chance, choose Alignment over Agreement - it will give you space to hone your decision making skills, allows groups to change their mind and embrace unknown nature of big decisions
This is part of the my recent Maven Lightning session where I talked about “10 Hard lessons of Leading Teams”. The session highlighted the 10 lessons I learnt while leading teams for over two decades of my professional experience. If you want to know more and participate in an engaged 2 day immersion session on leadership where I go deep into such topics, here is the link with 25% discount 🚀
Why Agreement Falls Short
A lesson I took dearly in my career as a leader was that “Organizations are not democratic, and are designed to preserve the momentum of a decision”. As an early career manager of an engineering organization, I believed in the power of agreement to move things forward and bring people together on a decision. Early in my management career, I wanted people to like me. I believed getting everyone to agree on every decision was the best path. Whereever agreement was not possible, I intervened and made sure I coach people into agreeing by providing them different perspective of the decision I want them to agree upon. It was all well intended, but it created more problems for me and my teams than it solved. People and my teams were happy I wanted them to agree on something before moving forward - it was a sign of inclusion and also an impression that I really cannot move forward if they don’t agree - which gave them a slight power of the outcomes. However, the cost of getting people agree on something, especially a large group, cost me time, energy, money and overall reduced the effectiveness of how decision was acted upon by the group when agreement was arrived. Decisions tend to take longer because people need to agree on the approach, and created almost a pseudo bureaucratic setup where its either everyone or no one. People tend to be less risky and more cautious with decisions as the ownership of the decision is not with a specific individual but a group that agrees on that decision. There was less “skin in the game” and more of a prevailing notion of hiding behind a group. It also created the idea that people cannot complain or withdraw from a decision at a later stage with almost like creating a religious belief. “I agreed to the decision, now how can I show my face if I chose to disagree” is what prevented people to challenge in the face of new facts and information.
What I learnt from all that early experience, is that agreement is binding and prevents people from taking bets and risks, and also reduces the overall quality of judgement from an individual. When we know better and have new information to change our minds about a particular output of a decision, it was way harder to now go back to the same audience that agreed to the earlier decision to change their mind. Agreement in its essence brings the imagery of a written legal document that you sign and keep quiet.
The Power of Alignment
The lessons from my failed attempts at getting my team or a group to agree on everything made me realize that true progress comes from alignment— having a shared direction, not identical opinions. By alignment, I mean a shared direction or commitment to an outcome—even when opinions differ. Getting a group to agree is hard, and becomes harder as the group size increases. Alignment is a better problem to solve than Agreement. Alignment offers the choice to individual to disagree and yet commit if they believe the decision they need to align on is in the right spirit and direction. Alignment also enables the group to have different diverse opinions - almost gives the group the permission to not have the same opinion as others, and yet it focuses on moving to the next - taking action. Alignment also exposes individuals who are decision makers and curates their individual risk taking ability and their judgement skills - necessary in the world we are all moving together with lots of information sources, scattered “interpretable” facts and a need to move fast. Amazon has an infamous leadership principle “Disagree, and Commit”, which better or for worse has helped Amazon to move fast, build a large business empire and become synonymous for the go-to e-commerce store on the planet. I do align with the ethos of that leadership principle, but I would offer a different view to that principle which emphasizes Alignment - “Choose Alignment over Agreement in most cases”. It offers the idea that Agreement is not bad per say, but there will be large number of cases where Agreement is way expensive and comes in the way to move things, and in those cases Alignment may offer a better approach.
How do you choose Alignment over Agreement in your teams ?
When making a decision that needs inputs from your team members or peers, start with the identification of a clear decision maker. A decision without a clear individual decision maker indicates favoring of “Agreement” of groups.
Inform the participant of the decision that disagreement is acceptable, but needs to called out explicitly, whether in the form of comments on a decision document or verbal communication of why a particular disagrees. Staying in silence for someone participating in a decision is a form of agreement. Alignment requires individuals to speak up, let their voices heard and respect that ultimately the decision is made by accounting all things by the decision maker.
Identifying the cost of non-decision or a delayed decision is critical for groups to understand whether it justifies for the group to spend time agreeing on the decision.
Documenting the decision made and specify a “Best before” date indicates a potential shelf life of the decision and an opportunity to come back to the decision when we have new information or the situation has change. It allows going back to the people who did not agree on the decision and allows them to engage to change the course of the iteration of the decision.
Closing thoughts
We often push for agreement in teams, thinking consensus equals unity. It comes with good intention, however knowing that agreement is creating more issues than it is solving is the step towards enlightenment. As a leader ask: “Am I pushing for agreement, or cultivating alignment?” If the answer is the former, consider how you can shift your group’s dynamic—and move forward more swiftly with alignment.
When you have a chance, choose Alignment over Agreement - it will give you space to hone your decision making skills, allows groups to change their mind and acknowledges the fact as leaders we are always working in the unknown and we get to do our jobs of making high quality decisions in the midst of lot of unknowns.
A Google NotebookLM audio podcast version of this is available here :
All images used in the article are generated using Generative AI technologies and there is not intention to resemble any specific person, dead or alive.
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