In this episode of the LeaderFactor Podcast, Junior and Dr. Tim Clark dive into the critical role alignment plays in team and organizational performance. They explore the two essential types of alignment—cognitive (shared understanding) and affective (emotional commitment)—and explain why both are necessary for achieving meaningful, sustainable results. You’ll learn how to avoid common pitfalls, maintain alignment over time, and use five powerful questions to ensure your team is on the same page and fully committed. 

00:00:01:00 Junior: Welcome back, everyone to the leader factor. I'm Junior here with my co-host Doctor Tim Clark. And today we're going to be covering a topic that you mentioned a few minutes ago as a sleeper topic.

00:00:11:26 Tim: Sleeper.

00:00:12:23 Junior: Tellme more. What's a sleeper topic?

00:00:14:11 Tim: Alignment. I think it's a sleeper because we just don't give enough attention to it. We don’t do it very well. We don't think about it enough. And it's something that requires constant ongoing activity and effort and work.

00:00:28:23 Junior: I think it's a unique topic, something that we have an opinion on that may be non-obvious. So, I'm interested to see what all the listeners think after they, give the episode a whirl. So, I wanted to start today's episode with an anecdote from the 1950s. So, in the 1950s, Jonas Salk and his team united scientists, volunteers and entire communities to fight a terrifying disease.

00:00:51:23 Junior: You remember which.

00:00:52:09 Tim: One Ido? Because my uncle had that disease. Polio. Polio?

00:00:57:13 Junior: Their global effort led to a breakthrough vaccine that not only saved countless lives but nearly eradicated the disease. What's even more astounding than a scientific triumph is the way thousands of people aligned intellectually, but also emotionally. They shared rigorous research protocols and a profound moral drive to protect children. Today, we're exploring how that alignment, that dual alignment of head and heart, affects not just scenarios like the vaccine, but every day in our teams.

00:01:28:24 Tim: Yeah, I think, Joe, to understand the importance of alignment, we have to go back and think about the concept of an organized nation. The concept is that an organization functions based on coordinated action and coordinated action requires alignment. Otherwise, what do we have? We have confusion. We have people working at cross-purposes. And we get as a result of all of that, we get poor performance.

00:01:58:04 Tim: So, if we go back and we understand the premise of an organization or an effort or a project, it's all about coordinated action. Coordinated action requires alignment.

00:02:11:13 Junior: When I look through a practical lens at my performance as a leader, the times that things have gone really well, the times that they've gone poorly, So, much of the success and failure is attributable to how well I was doing alignment. And so, as I evaluate the entire landscape of our organization, the organizations we partner with and help, I think it is a sleeper topic because it's not one that people point to all the time and say, there's the failure pattern, there's the mistake, there is what's inhibiting us from reaching the next level.

00:02:41:15 Tim: Do alignment very well. How often do you hear that?

00:02:44:15 Junior: Almost never. Right? I don't know that I've ever heard it pointed to as the failure pattern, and it just might be.

00:02:51:24 Tim: Well, let me ask you a question, junior. You said that, before our session today, that you had a long conversation with one of our team members. How much of that was about alignment?

00:03:05:00 Junior: The majority. The majority? Well, and it's funny you ask, because as I'm replaying that conversation, it speaks to the anecdote up front. And the crux of today’s episode, which is that there are, two big variables in alignment. There's a cognitive side, and there's, emotional side.

00:03:27:10 Tim: Yes.

00:03:27:23 Junior: And we were doing both of those things this morning. And so, it really put some of these tools to the test. So, maybe that recency will help me frame today’s episode as we work through it. So, let's start with the most basic question which is what is alignment. A Google search will get you this arrangement in the straight line or in correct or appropriate relative positions.

00:03:50:29 Tim: Yeah, I think we're still lacking some pretty critical elements, especially when it comes to oh, I mean, I guess that's alignment in a basic sense. We're talking about organizational alignment. Yeah.

00:04:02:12 Junior: We’re going to say that it's two things. Which brings us to the first slide. Understanding and commitment. One of the things that organizations often missis the commitment piece, which we're going to get into today. The first thing that they look at is what we will call cognitive alignment. And that's the understanding piece that's getting into. Task focus.

00:04:29:06 Junior: It’s do we share the same mental models. Do we look through the same filter when we’re looking at this problem? It's understanding clarity and reason. It’s rational coordination. It's operational. And that's what most people think when they think alignment.

00:04:48:12 Tim: Right. Yeah. And when we look into the future do we see this same portrait of the future. Do we, do we see the same future state. Because those have to be the same even though that future state does not exist. We need to have shared understanding about that, what that needs to be and is going to be.

00:05:09:26 Junior: So, if we look at this slide, what's the emphasis in cognitive alignment. It's the tasks. The definition is the degree to which the team shares the same mental models. The primary concern of cognitive alignment is reducing errors and reducing rework. And the style is operational. Yeah. So, this is a full maybe this is a full maybe 50% of alignment, which often neglects the other half, which is the nonobvious piece.

00:05:36:23 Junior: And as I was doing a literature review on alignment and looking into the OB research regarding alignment, I found an interesting body of research called affective alignment. This is the extent to which team members share emotional congruence, or at least complementary emotional states around their work goal sand each other.

00:06:00:15 - 00:06:01:21Tim: 00:06:01:24 Junior: Would you say that most leaders understand this piece?

00:06:05:28 Tim: I would say they probably do. In theory.

00:06:10:07 Junior They feel.

00:06:10:23 Tim: It. They, they feel or when.

00:06:12:13 Junior: It goes wrong they feel it when it does right. They may not describe it that way.

00:06:15:19 Tim: Yeah. And if you talk to them about it, they'll say oh yeah I understand that. But getting there is a different story. Yeah.

00:06:22:10 Junior: So, if we look at this slide, you'll see that the emphasis for affective alignment is relational bonds. We say that it's the degree to which the team shares emotional congruence. Not that we do. That's how it's defined. Primary concern is fostering commitment and resilience. And the style is holistic. We’re looking at the entire situation. We're asking how people might feel about a given course of action or taking into consideration our own emotional states.

00:06:46:29 Junior: We want to make sure that we're on the same mental page, and you have to have both of those in order to get alignment.

00:06:53:08 Tim: Wouldn’t you say, junior, that one kind of sits on the other, that you've got the cognitive alignment as the foundation because it it's understanding, and then you put the affective alignment on top of that.

00:07:11:16 Junior: Maybe I wonder if it's chicken and egg though. Yeah. Because it could be that you need the same affective alignment to even start the conversation. Sure. I don’t know.

00:07:25:20 Tim: They are mutually reinforcing, and it's a bit of an oversimplification, but I think it’s hard to get motivated about something that you don't understand. Yeah. So, I think there's some kind of minimum requirement of shared understanding before the affective alignment really takes hold.

00:07:45:26 Junior: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that this slide will help us unpack that a little bit more. So, when we say alignment, we mean those two things. We need commitment and we need understanding. We need cognitive and we need affective. When we put these two together, I was just experimenting and thinking through what’s the relationship between these two things.

00:08:09:05 Junior: I asked the question you just asked, does one precede the other? Are they necessarily separate? Is there a third element? And it really did boil down to those two variables which are separate and distinct. They're different tracks of work and you need to pay attention to both. So, if you put those on axes, like we always try to do this for whatever reason, we get another two by two.

00:08:33:11 Junior: And I messaged Gillian, and I said you're very welcome. You have another two by two to work with because we need more. So, on the y axis you'll see commitment. Andon the x axis you'll see understanding. So, when we get low we're going to label that checked out chaos. You ever been in this environment I.

00:08:53:29 Tim: Actually I Iove this two by two that you put together I think that the labels for the quadrants are quite accurate. So, yes, to your to your question checked-out chaos. I've seen that people don't have a shared understanding and they don’t have shared commit commitment. And So, they're, they're doing different things or they're doing nothing at all.

00:09:18:21 Junior: If we then take commitment up the y axis, we start to get into the misguided enthusiasm box. And this box is really interesting to me. We're really excited, but we're not sure exactly what we're excited about. We have high affective alignment and low cognitive, So, we're not really sure what's going on, but we’re really enthused about misguided enthusiasm.

00:09:43:13 Tim: That’s a great label.

00:09:45:01 Junior: The non the flip side, we have what we'll call informed resistance. This one's a little bit nuanced. You have high understanding and you have low commitment. That low commitment could be coming from, I guess a few different areas. The first would be that you disagree. Sure. That's an interesting way to.

00:10:03:12 Tim: On merit.

00:10:04:04 Junior: Oron merit. And you pointed this out when I originally put forward the idea. So, tell me more about informed resistance and how disagreement might affect it.

00:10:13:01 Tim: Well, I think that if you're in this quadrant, you are a and presuming that you a reacting in good faith and you're a detractor, but you're acting in good faith, you’re worried about the direction. You don't agree with it on some rational grounds, based on some logic and some data that you have. Okay, fantastic. Then we need to work with that.

00:10:37:26 Tim: That’s not all. That's not that's not a bad thing right now. Eventually we need to get to alignment. But if we have informed resistance at the beginning of a process that we want to know that you disagree and why, So, we can work through it. Because you may be pointing out things that are very valid obstacles, threats, dangers, hazards, misguided assumptions, whatever it may be.

00:11:06:04 Tim: So, we need to work through that. So, that's part of the process.

00:11:10:10 Junior: So, that’s the first piece is I disagree with what it is we're talking about. Therefore I'm not committed. The second piece, which is More difficult. It might be more difficult to solve for which is I just don't care.

00:11:30:16 Tim: That’s a bigger.

00:11:31:03 Junior: Problem. I just low energy.

00:11:33:03 Tim: Yeah.

00:11:33:28 Junior: I understand what it is. We're trying to go after, but I don't really care. Yeah, and So, my commitment is low informed resistance.

00:11:44:00 Tim: That’s a motivation problem that resides at a deeper place. And that's a that's a bigger issue. Yeah.

00:11:50:13 Junior: So, the resolution to that we can talk about a little bit later. But those are two separate problems that are worth calling out. I agree. Disagreement and just low energy.

00:12:00:22 Tim: Yeah.

00:12:01:22 Junior: Okay. The next one, which is the place we want to get to is optimal alignment. This is high commitment high understanding. So, we understand what it is we're going after in a cognitive sense. And we're all on the same emotional page as to how we’re going to approach it and the level of commitment we're going to bring. Many people don't achieve optimal alignment and sustain it ever across any line of work.

00:12:28:01 Junior: Yes. And So, this gives us something to shoot for. So, that's part of why I think it’s important to break this down into its component parts. Because if you just say, well, we need to go strive for alignment. What most people mean is cognitive alignment. Do we all agree what it is we're going to go after, and what they'll take as success is a nod or the absence of objection?

00:12:54:17 Tim: That’s right. So, it's assumptive junior. And I've seen this my entire career. You’re in a meeting. We talk about priorities. We talk about goals. We talk about the future. We talk about what we're trying to achieve. And then the leader says, okay, are we all on the same page? And then people nod their heads. And So, we take that as evidence of alignment.

00:13:19:04 Tim: And It's not So, it's assumptive in nature. Think about what a terrible proxy that is for actual shared understanding and shared commitment. A little head nod. Does that really verify that we have alignment? No, it doesn't. Right. People could be doing that for all kinds of reasons. They may have questions. They may have doubts. They may have objections.

00:13:47:22 Tim: They may lack understand all kinds of things, but they'll just nod their head. They’re in a meeting. Right. And the boss says, okay, let's go. Everybody ready? Break. So, there's a lot there's a lot missing there.

00:14:03:26 Junior: And how many times have each of you, as a listener experienced this? Where someone says, okay, we were good, we're all on the same page.

00:14:14:27 Tim: Awesome. Great. Great.

00:14:16:20 Junior: And that’s all. That's where it ends. That's what most organizations do for alignment. And then on the flip side, let's say that you approach it appropriately and you've got the cognitive alignment. You've got the affective alignment. And the meeting goes really well. And then you leave what happens. That alignment begins to degrade immediately. Immediately the second you walk out of that realm.

00:14:41:15 Tim: Ideally.

00:14:43:01 Junior: I can’t tell you how many times I've left a meeting where we've approached it in a way that's maybe not ideal, but pretty good. We've got high commitment. We’ve got high understanding. And then two days later, three days later, there's a cycle. We have another meeting and we're like completely off base. We’re misaligned. I want to emphasize how perishable alignment is even when you do it well.

00:15:15:22 Junior: So, it’s something that you have to become good at and do constantly.

00:15:19:04 Tim: So, junior, I want to weigh in on this as point for a bit because I think it, it, it undergirds everything that we're saying. I think it's a premise and I think it’s a revelation for many managers. And here's the premise. Alignment is an unnatural state of affairs in an organization. It's an unnatural state. Misalignment is the natural state.

00:15:46:26 Tim: And So, to get to alignment requires all kinds of work. We're talking about cognitive alignment aspect of alignment. And as you said, even when you get there there's an expiration date on that alignment. It could be hours. It could be days. It's never going to be months. That's way too long. So, misalignment is is the is the state of nature.

00:16:13:26 Tim: And So, you got to know that as a leader, I emphasize that with teams all of the time. And I've seen I've seen leaders struggle with that. When I say it. And they’re wrestling and they're thinking, could that be true? What does he say? That seems So, counterintuitive? I never even thought of that. And it really Isan epiphany for them.

00:16:34:24 Tim: And then it settles in and they realize, oh, that's true. Without all of the work that we need to do. It's not going to happen. It never happens on its own.

00:16:46:01 Junior: It’s as if alignment is the antidote to organizational entropy. If left to itself, the organization is going to degrade.

00:16:56:11 Tim: Increasing disorder.

00:16:57:24 Junior: Into nothing. That's right. And So, the alignments like, you know, constantly pulling it back together recentering realigning. And it never, ever, ever ends.

00:17:07:13 Tim: And never ends.

00:17:08:11 Junior: There’s, and there's an art piece, and I can't remember the name of the piece. It’s industrial art, and it's a machine that is operated hydraulically, and it’s full of hydraulic fluid, and it's on.

00:17:29:17 Junior: Smooth floor. And in order for the machine to operate, it has to have hydraulic fluid in it. There's a leak in the machine. And the piece of art shows the machine. It’s a big arm with a scraper scraping the hydraulic fluid that's on the floor. Back into itself. And it just does that forever.

00:17:48:16 Tim: Yeah. 00:17:49:08 Junior: And that makes me think about organizational alignment. You get the hydraulic fluid in and it just leaks out again. And you're just doing that forever.

00:17:58:05 Tim: It's a it's a great visual. I want to share, a quote junior, that I've always loved. And I think it, it speaks to the jet, the challenge, the nature of the difficulty in achieving and then maintaining alignment. So, this is from AG. Lastly, AG lastly was the CEO of Procter and Gamble for a long time. He went into a retirement.

00:18:24:26 Tim: They promoted his successor didn't work out. They brought him back out of retirement to to lead P&G again. And I think one of the main reasons is this gentleman really understood alignment. Here's what he said. He said it's Sesame Street language. I admit that a lot of what we have done is make things simple, because the difficulty is making sure everybody knows what the goal is and how to get there.

00:18:57:12 Tim: He’s running an organization with thousands of employees, and he has learned through the years he's been tutored by all of his mistakes and all of his misalignment. It’s sesame. I need to use Sesame Street language. I need everyone to understand what the goal is and how we're going to get there. That's the difficulty. There's a lot of insight in that.

00:19:21:21 Junior: There is the next piece of the conversation that I want to get to is the order. The sequence. And we touched on this a little bit. Where do you start? You start with affective. You start with cognitive. I'm going to put forward a hypothesis. And I would love for you to respond to it as we go through. I was thinking about the emotional energy that's necessary to go after some big, complex goal.

00:19:47:22 Junior: And to me, the only motivation is story. If there's not a good story, then I'm not even going to get out of bed.

00:19:57:19 Tim: Okay. Why? Yeah.

00:20:00:23 Junior: Unless you’re aspiring to something great. Unless you're going to go do meaningful work for some meaningful reason. Yeah, it's not worth it. And So, my hypothesis is that we need to start with affective and then go to cognitive, and that So, much of the breakdown in alignment is. A deficiency on the affective side. So, share a grand story.

00:20:29:00 Junior: Why. What makes me think this. If I look at the greatest feats of alignment ever, they were.

00:20:37:10 Tim: All.

00:20:38:18 Junior: High stakes.

00:20:39:24 - 00:20:40:26Tim: 00:20:40:29 Junior: High stakes make for great stories. So, Operation Overlord, D-Day 1964 is the largest amphibious 44.

00:20:51:20 Tim: Yeah, yeah! 44.

00:20:52:17 Junior: Goodness. Thank you.

00:20:53:22 Tim: That’s all right.

00:20:54:29 Junior: Largest amphibious invasion in history 156,000 troops from different countries. Fleets of planes and ships, all coordinated aerial bombardment, paratrooper drops. Obviously, there are a lot on the war front. The require tremendous coordination. Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park code breakers from World War two.

00:21:16:02 Tim: Oh yeah, that's super cool story.

00:21:17:26 Junior: That is the 71 Blackbird, that skunkworks project. That's cool. And then the polio vaccine coming back to Jonas Salk, that was fueled by a moral mission, a humanitarian mission. Polio was terrifying.

00:21:37:11 Tim: Yeah.

00:21:37:17 Junior: It was. Imagine that period where, you know, you your uncle had polio.

00:21:43:23 Tim: Yeah.

00:21:44:15 Junior: Yeah. Imagine what that must have been like as a parent in that era. And So, eliminating that disease became a global crusade. And So, on the one hand there's cognitive alignment in that we're agreeing that this thing's a problem and that we might want to solve it, but almost at the same time it's imbued with this story in this narrative and these stakes and this energy.

00:22:07:16 Junior: Yeah, that motivate the rest of the alignment that has to happen. It's more tactical. So, what do you what do you think about that? The role that story plays in affective alignment, even preceding organizing?

00:22:19:12 Tim: Oh, I think you're uncovering a key point here, JR, that we just often don't get to. And I don't think organizations dig deep enough to find the story or craft the story that will get you out of bed in the morning. Love that. You've got to be actuated by something that you feel deeply that you can get behind.

00:22:42:03 Tim: That is bigger than you are. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. I think it just all the memories come back to my Uncle Steve when he was a child. He lived in the hospital for, I think it was close to two years, and my grandmother could only come and visit him once a month for a couple of hours.

00:23:02:29 Tim: That’s all they allowed. That's on. And he lived in the hospital. He was a little kid. He was like, seven years old, and he could see his mom once a month. So, that’s the kind of emotion and urgency that surrounded this issue.

00:23:18:22 Junior: Well, as a listener and here with you at the table, when I hear that story, I’m imbued with a sense of.

00:23:25:12 Tim: Energy.

00:23:26:15 Junior: And emotion that, yes, of course, that's a problem that needs solving. And we will put in motion all of the tactics and practical things, the operational side, that would have to be true in order to eradicate something like that. And So, you can see on the flip side, let's say that there was some task that required a similar amount of coordination across clinicians and the whole gamut, but that didn’t have the narrative.

00:23:57:09 Junior: There’s no way.

00:23:58:14 Tim: It’s not going.

00:23:58:26 Junior: To happen. There's no way that that's going to happen. People are going to checkout. They're not going to wade through the fog and do all of the work necessary to stay aligned to achieve the thing. If the story's not motivating enough. And so, one of the notes that I threw down here was that the leader sets the tone, and that if the leader doesn't understand the story therein and the role they play in that story, they have to start there, because otherwise, how are you going to give energy to anyone about the thing you're going after?

00:24:30:17 - 00:24:31:03Tim: 00:24:31:05 Junior: And So, that sense of energy I think is contagious. If you are setting out to go on an expedition, a quest, an adventure of some sort, that’s professional life. And if you don't see it that way you have some thinking to do. In my opinion, there's too much difficulty to go through life. And achieve something meaningful if it's not meaningful, if you don't think that there's something at the end or in the process that's worth your time.

00:25:04:00 Junior: Howin the world are you going to wade through all the nonsense, develop the skills, make the sacrifices, give the effort to do the thing you want. And you can see the difference between leaders. We've all engaged with them who know what story they're in and what role they play in that story. And those who don’t. Those who are wandering sans story.

00:25:28:13 Junior: We’re out here. This is my job. I guess I'm in charge of you.

00:25:33:00 Tim: So, that’s compliance. Work is compliance.

00:25:36:17 Junior It’s sad.

00:25:37:18 Tim: It is.

00:25:38:12 Junior And It's.

00:25:38:29 Tim: Empty. Those does great performance. Does great accomplishment come out of indifference? Never. It never does. We get some compliance. Yeah. But that’s, that’s not the alignment that we're seeking.

00:25:52:26 Junior: Well, and I also put in here that you might have to artificially raise the stakes. We’re not all working on polio, right? We're all not trying to put man on the moon. We're not all trying to cure cancer, but there's story inside any job there really is. Yeah. If you think long and hard enough about it, you can find you can trace impact to another human.

00:26:17:10 Junior: There’s value creation happening somewhere. Otherwise it wouldn't be a job. And So, if you can attach that value creation to the story that you're in, you'll have a much better time, a much better idea of how to do the work necessary to align your team, and how to align yourself with the institutional mission. And So, the person has to feel like their role is weighty.

00:26:42:25 - 00:26:43:04Tim: 00:26:43:05 Junior: We have to feel that ourselves as leaders, there has to be some weight to what it is we're doing, or we will not have enough motivation to do what we need to do.

00:26:52:18 Tim: I think it goes back, JR to fulfilling the very deep human need to make a contribution and do something that's meaningful. And So, alignment is about finding line of sight, understanding and line of sight commitment between what you do and the greater purpose. And somehow we've got to make that connection. If the connection is not there. And then, people kind of they retire on the job often, they're not releasing their discretionary effort.

00:27:26:21 Tim: They’re not giving their best. They don't they don't believe that they're doing work that’s meaningful. Right? That really satisfies that need. Yeah.

00:27:37:25 Junior: Well, you think about the alternative as you're describing. If you don't have the story, you don't have the meaning. Then what I've seen as a pattern, just purely observational, is that you do poor work and you hate your job while you’re doing it. So, we get poor quality and we get low commitment.

00:27:55:05 - 00:27:56:01Tim: 00:27:56:03 Junior: That's the alternative. And So, if you hear this argue in and you say well that's a little much. You know we don't all work in some grand narrative. Yeah you do. You may be doing it unwittingly and you may be doing a poor job of it, but you have to see it that way in order to get through the effort required.

00:28:16:13 Junior: The next piece of the puzzle is that the leader sets the tone in a way that requires the trust of the team. They may lean on you more than they lean on the institutional mission. That is true. If they see you fired up about it and they know that they can trust you, they may just hang on to the vision that you have.

00:28:37:28 Junior: And that’s okay until they develop their own.

00:28:40:18 Tim: That’s right.

00:28:41:02 Junior: But what a cool thing to be able to be relied upon that way, to give vision to someone who doesn't yet have it. And you can help them develop it over time. But if you don't have it, how are you going to help them have it? You have to have your eyes toward the future, set on some worthy goal So, that you can help pull them along and till they get committed themselves.

00:29:02:25 Tim: Very true. And often there's an incubation period for people to understand, to contextualize, to see where we're going to put to connect the dots. And you may have to do that for them. You may have to carry the vision until they can get it, until they understand. I think that's often true. And that's part of leadership, right? That's part of your role.

00:29:28:13 Tim: That’s an extension of the vision. They may not be able to see beyond you as to your point. And I think that that happens maybe more frequently than we would think.

00:29:38:27 Junior: I think sometimes we have to be the Gandalf in the story, or we go knock on the door and say like, come on, we got to do.

00:29:46:22 Tim: We’ve got to get why.

00:29:47:23 Junior: I want to stay here and hang out.

00:29:49:05 Tim: Right? Yeah, you.

00:29:50:02 Junior: Have to paint the grand vision, and you have to appropriately raise the stakes.

00:29:59:03 Junior: The last piece that we'll touch on for affective inconsistent reassurances from the organization. We talked about how alignment is perishable. Even when I say alignment is perishable, my mind immediately goes to the cognitive like, okay, are we still on the same page?

00:30:17:24 Junior: But we have to think about that consistent reassurance coming from the organization on the affective side of reinforcing mission, of reinforcing goals and making sure that the energy is there because that also starts to go down. So, think of a kickoff meeting, right, that you might have for some initiative. It's high energy probably. And a lot of people might leave that fired up.

00:30:43:02 Junior: But that energy wanes quickly and needs to be pumped up again and again and again. So, that we can maintain the movement. If not, it's probably going to fizzle out.

00:30:54:26 Tim: Just think about football as an example and how often we realign. So, not only So, if you’re on every six seconds every yeah every play, if you're on offense or defense, you're not just calling a play. You are going to call play. Okay. So, for example say you're on defense. You're going to call your defense, but you’re also going to talk about what you're seeing and you're going to adjust.

00:31:23:11 Tim: So, you realign constantly. And then you have the big realignment at halftime. But realignment takes place throughout the game. It's a constant thing.

00:31:34:15 Junior: Ilike the idea of needing to win that over constantly and thinking, not that all this person joined the organization seven years ago. And So, you know we’re good. We cross that.

00:31:46:23 Tim: Bridge. Yeah.

00:31:47:18 Junior: But rather if they could have no adverse consequence by stepping away or they could move to something better in some domain right now. What decision would they make? Right. We have to assume that they would make a different decision. So, how do you imbue that negotiation with more confidence? How do you give it more energy such that they would choose to stay with you and continue on the route that you're going?

00:32:16:20 Junior: You have to paint the picture. That personal commitment is huge. Okay, let's get into the cognitive. This is the operational. This is the tactical. This is the practical. And we're going to go through the five alignment questions. The fifth speaks a little bit to the affective. But I have found these alignment questions to be hugely useful. We've shared these with leaders everywhere.

00:32:42:04 Junior: And It's one of the things that people come back and say, wow, that was great. It’s practical. It's actually that I can use they actually work. And So, you might see these and at first glance they like, well, you know, not terribly unique, but when you start to use them, instead of just asking a binary question about alignment, things get pretty interesting.

00:33:09:16 Tim: Yeah. They do.

00:33:10:02 Junior: Do you want to take us into the first one?

00:33:11:17 Tim: Yeah, sure. Question number one. What is your understanding of the project? So, you’ll notice we start big picture. We're transferring the responsibility of understanding to the individual. And we want to teach back. We want that person to help us to that. We want them to tell us what's going on, what they understand So, that we can see holes or gaps or what's missing.

00:33:39:11 Tim: So, let’s just start with that. What is your understanding of the project? And then we listen.

00:33:46:00 Junior: And then we listen. That's important. That's not often what's happening with alignment. So, you think about traditional alignment. People will just tell tell tell. There's very little inquiry. When most alignment is happening or what most people think is alignment. Number two is what concerns do you have? Why is this assumptive? Why do we ask it this way?

00:34:08:21 Tim: Because we we assume you have concerns. We don't ask you. Do you have any concerns? That’s not the question. It's what concerns do you have? If you don't have any, then you haven't thought about this hard enough.

00:34:26:15 Junior: I love that idea because what do most people do? The obvious path is, hey, anything you want to say? You know, anything you don't understand.

00:34:34:09 Tim: And at the very.

00:34:35:10 Junior: End, we’re about. Yeah.

00:34:36:24 Tim: Yeah. After we've had our discussion, they have said at the very end when we’re adjourning the meeting.

00:34:41:27 Junior: Yeah. And I've been guilty of this. Right. And often, why do we do it that way? A couple of reasons. One, we don't allow time for it. So, we have 30s left in our meeting and oh, you know, we check our watch and we say, okay, I guess that’s all we have time for. Any questions.

00:34:59:26 Tim: Right?

00:35:01:26 Junior: All right. My break.

00:35:03:18 Tim: Yeah.

00:35:04:05 Junior: Or we don't want to hear what someone might have to say if we were to ask that question. So, we don't.

00:35:11:01 Tim: So, we’re doing the very opposite or assuming you have concerns. And we would like to understand what those are. And we're giving time and space for you to do that. Yeah.

00:35:22:13 Junior: Well, and think about the positional power you might have depending on your role. Let’s say that you're a senior leader. The way you frame this piece of the conversation is hugely important. If you wait until the end and you say something like, well, you know, I think it sounds like we're all in agreement. I think this is a great path forward.

00:35:41:10 Junior: Anybody have anything else to say? Right. No one's going to raise their hand. Right, right. Very few people.

00:35:47:19 Tim: Especially in a hierarchical situation where there's an ace asymmetrical relationship between the leader and all the direct reports. Come on.

00:35:59:25 Junior: And for any leader who's been doing this for a while, you know that it's easy to lead the witness, right? It's very easy to lead the witness in a group setting like that and just say a few things So, that people will agree with you and nod, and you kind of suffocate the dissent. So, that's number two. What concerns do you have?

00:36:17:07 Junior: Number three. How do you see your role in this? Explain this one.

00:36:23:26 Tim: What we’re trying to do, junior, is again line of sight understanding between your role and what we're trying to achieve. And So, there's got to be role clarity. But again you're asking the individual to explain back to you, to describe back to you what their understanding is in the context of the priorities of the strategy of the vision.

00:36:50:11 Tim: So, you, you, you're able to assess the cognitive alignment, right. What's your role in this?

00:36:58:11 Junior: I also like thinking about this question in an iterative sense. If you think about a scope change or requirement change when you're doing this over and over again, you have to continue to ask this question. So now what's your role in this? Yeah. How did your role in this change what's new today that we didn’t know yesterday. And that's an ongoing thing.

00:37:21:17 Junior: The way that people will engage with whatever it is we're talking about depends on the way they see their role in the application for the given issue. If you don’t address it, people will take a guess or they'll opt out. And obviously that’s not as good as what this would be.

00:37:37:09 Tim: One of the things that you'll find again and again and again is when you ask these questions, and this was question three, you are giving to the person an opportunity to do a whole lot more critical thinking around this and about this. And often they haven't done that. And that comes that comes out. It becomes clear very quickly.

00:38:00:25 Tim: And that needs to happen. So, you're shifting that you're you do the critical thinking. What do you think. Yeah.

00:38:07:29 Junior: Next one. What do you need. So, this requires the person to think through all necessary requirements personal strategic, cultural. They have to think through all of those elements in order to answer that question. Because and once again, this is part of why I love this. You're putting the burden of critical thinking on them, because if they don't tell you what they need, then they can’t complain about it later.

00:38:38:06 Junior: And So, you didn't give me what I needed. Oh, like we talked about it.

00:38:42:12 Tim: Right, right.

00:38:43:28 Junior: And this is what we thought we needed together. So, we missed something.

00:38:47:23 Tim: Yeah, right.

00:38:48:20 Junior: So, at least somewhat, we're both on the hook instead of you. It's very easy to deflect responsibility in a situation like that. And you can start to see as a leader, you may be feeling the brunt of when this goes wrong and your people may point the finger and maybe rightly so, maybe wrongly So, at you for not explaining things the right way or not giving enough detail.

00:39:16:21 Junior: If you’re feeling that this is the solution. If you want to get rid of that management angst where people keep pointing at you, you got to help transfer ownership and critical thinking. And these questions do that.

00:39:31:23 Tim: There’s also another hidden benefit, junior, which is when you go through these questions with people and you really give them the burden of the critical thinking, you are able to, assess their potential and their performance. And so, it's it's it the the hidden benefit is that it's, it's great for identifying high potentials and doing succession planning as well.

00:39:55:00 Tim: Yeah, it totally is.

00:39:57:06 Junior: I also want to click on the fact that it's this whole relationship shouldn't be adversarial, right? You and your team, it's should be collaborative. And So, what do you need is an opportunity for you to learn about what you may not know about the situation. Well, this would have to be true in order for this to go well.

00:40:17:12 Junior: OH, I didn't know that right. I didn't consider that variable.

00:40:20:24 Junior: And that's something that I find happens with my team often. Is there something that I hadn't considered. I didn't know that X, Y and Z would have to be true in order for this thing to get across the line by the certain date. And So, that allows them voice to say, hey, you know, I would really need a lot in order for this to work.

00:40:45:04 Junior: And then you can talk about whether or not it's worth it. So, you may, in the process of aligning find that the thing you are trying to align about at the start is the wrong thing.

00:40:58:12 Tim: Exactly right. Wouldn't that be great to know?

00:41:01:16 Junior: Yeah. And then you can go back to the beginning, choose a different direction, And then go through the same process and see if you can make it all the way to the end. So, I think there are checks and balances here that are really useful for the organization. It prevents you from going down a road too far that you would regret.

00:41:20:21 Tim: And if you are going down the right road, if anything, it's going to help you refine that direction and crystallize your communication about that direction. Yeah.

00:41:33:22 Junior: Okay. The fifth and final alignment question, how would you describe your current commitment to the project? And this speaks to the affective. So, if we're going to give you.

00:41:43:29 Tim: Kind of tying a bow on it all on top of everything.

00:41:47:05 Junior: Itis, and if you're going to use, tool.

00:41:49:16 Tim: In.

00:41:50:10 Junior: This is what we would suggest, the five alignment questions. And assuming we have some semblance of vision and some energy, this allows the person to express whether or not that's true, if they feel committed to what it is. And So, the first four address cognitive. Do we understand what's going on. What do we need. It's operational. And then we get to.

00:42:11:07 Tim: And So, we have a sequence built in there.

00:42:13:24 Junior: Tellme about a language for this question. Because there are a lot of different ways that you could word this question.

00:42:19:08  Junior: Why did you choose this way.

00:42:24:03 Tim: And you don't need to ask it exactly this way. You the last thing you want to do is come across as scripted and contrived and artificial. So, you could just say hey, So, we, we've spent a lot of time going through this and exploring this. How do you, how do you feel about it. Yeah. You could ask it like that.

00:42:48:02 Tim: It could be that simple. Yeah. But you're getting at the same thing. What is your affective alignment with this. So, ask it in a natural way. And So, you may use you may use different words.

00:43:02:07 Junior: I think another point of view, people feel that you're being inauthentic when you’re being inauthentic in an attempt to be authentic. So, one way to do this well in my opinion, is to call it out explicitly and say, hey, I've seen these five alignment questions floating around and I just want to give them a try. And So, we're going to go through them verbatim.

00:43:25:18 Junior: I’m I’m even going to read them. And we can have a discussion about it.

00:43:29:11 Tim: So, there’s no decent genuine element to the conversation. Yeah. There's no pretense. Yeah.

00:43:36:03 Junior: There'swe're just calling it as it is. That will preserve your authenticity while still allowing you to rely on the actual tool. And So, I've found that doing that explicitly can be useful. You don't have to the as fluent as you might think you need to be.

00:43:56:01 - 00:43:57:11Tim: 00:43:58:05 Junior: Okay. Then talking about the how do you solve for the I don't care or I disagree. If you get an I'm not committed at the end of that question.

00:44:11:17 - 00:44:12:17Tim: 00:44:12:19 Junior: Dig into it. Because it could be one of those two things. Either there's some disagreement that's lurking in there with the approach or it could be that that person just needs to disagree and commit. It could be that they're being lax a days ago and there's just a pure energy problem or junior.

00:44:34:08 Tim: It could be that they're bothered or irritated or annoyed or upset with something else. Yeah. Yeah. And it's entirely something else. But it's getting in the way and it preoccupies their thinking and their feelings, and it doesn't even have anything to do with what we're talking about. But they're upset about it. Yeah. So, you can uncover that? Yes.

00:44:55:14 Junior: And that this is where you can do that with a little bit more nuance. And So, don't just take the answer of someone being non-committal as one thing. It could be several things. And the I have a genuine disagreement with the approach that we’re taking, and I have some constructive feedback to give, is very different from I just I don't care.

00:45:19:03 Tim: Right.

00:45:19:21 Junior: Because if it's constructive feedback, great, let's have a conversation. If it's I just don’t care about anything in a general sense, then like very quickly you'll be invited to not work here anymore. Right. Right. Those are two very different outcomes. One is incredibly productive and the other is going to be painful and probably productive in the long term if you're not here anymore.

00:45:38:23 - 00:45:38:29Tim: 00:45:39:05 Junior: But those are two very important things to understand In the world of alignment. We have cognitive and we have affective. The last point that I want to make on those two is that both need to be led with inquiry, not through telling.

00:45:59:12 - 00:46:00:21Tim: 00:46:00:23 Junior: Telling is what leads you into a trap in alignment. I’ve found as a pattern in my own experience, when I do poorly, I find that it’s because I'm telling people things and I'm not asking questions. It takes longer. Sometimes it feels inefficient. Sometimes it feels like you got to dig in to the affective side and it gets emotional and like, who wants to do that for too long?

00:46:24:11 Tim: Yeah.

00:46:24:26 Junior: Butit's necessary. And so.

00:46:27:01 Tim: Junior, there’s a false sense of achievement that comes from telling. Because when you finish telling you, you say to yourself, I've delivered myself of all my views, feelings, instructions, direction, everything. I feel good about that. Yeah, right. I've accomplished that. Yeah. And So, you. And that's where the assumption of alignment comes as well. Very dangerous. Yeah.

00:46:51:09 Junior: I want to make one final point, which I threw in my notes, which is that alignment lives and dies by discretionary effort. You made that point originally. And as I thought about that. Why? Why did you say that? Like what? Why? Why is that true? And this is what I came up with. It's really difficult for people to stay aligned if they do minimum necessary work because the environment is So, dynamic.

00:47:20:11 Junior: If the environment's dynamic and strategy is emergent, then alignment has to be emergent. If strategy is going to change and implementation is going to change, then of course alignments downstream from that. So, it's going to have to change the amount of work that it takes to stay aligned is gargantuan. And you have to be up for that as a leader.

00:47:43:08 Junior: That’s part of your job. Which leads me all the way back around to the story. If you need to tap the discretionary effort of your people, there's no way that you will be able to do that if they don't feel like they're playing an important role in an important story. So, as a leader, you have to frame the stakes.

00:48:01:25 Junior: You have to know what you're going after, both you as an organization and you personally as a leader. You have to understand your role in the story So, that you can help other people along. You share that affective lens, and then you use the cognitive lens to operationalize the vision and actually get the practical elements done. If you can do that and you do that through a dialog that’s ongoing, then you are well on your way.

00:48:29:09 Junior: It’s an art form. It's a skill that you can develop and work on for decades. It’s never done. The greatest leaders do it well. The leaders who don't do it well don’t experience the same type of success and buy in and discretionary effort that the others do. So, there have been some interesting points in this episode. I learned a lot, you know, preparing for this episode and chewing on a few of the ideas.

00:48:56:17 Junior: What would you leave the audience with?

00:48:58:23 Tim: I would just point out, JR, one more thing, and that is that let's remember and acknowledge the environment that we're trying to communicate in and achieve alignment in. It's a noisy environment, right. It's So, it's noisy there. So, getting the signal to noise ratio where we want it to be is extremely difficult. We’re competing for attention. So, as a as a final point, I'd like to share, a quote that from Herbert Simon that has always been one of my favorites because when we are trying to achieve alignment, we're trying we need the attention of our people.

00:49:48:27 Tim: Here’s what he says. In an information rich world, the wealth of information means a death of something else a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. And So, that's the context in which we're trying to do alignment in the first place.

00:50:20:19 Tim: So, I don’t think there's a level playing field just going in. Yeah. I just want to point that out. The nature of the environment is challenging. I love it.

00:50:31:19 Junior: So, that’s in our invitation to all of you is to go develop the skills necessary to do both of these jobs. The cognitive and the affective alignment. We've got tools for you to do it. We're not leaving you with nothing and just the ideas. We’ll have a downloadable with the five alignment questions. Some of the things that we've gone over in today's episode and hopefully that's useful to all of you.

00:50:55:02 Junior: And at the end of the day, that's why we do what we do. That's why we have these conversations, is to try to be useful to someone out there who might need a little help on this. It's a journey that we're on. We're trying to develop these skills as well. And Leader Factor's institutional mission is to influence the world for good at scale.

00:51:13:19 Junior: So, hopefully today's effort was worth it. Yeah. That's the story that I had to tell myself to get out of bed and come record today's episode.

00:51:20:27 Tim: I’m glad you had that story.

00:51:22:06 Junior: Yeah, well, take care everybody. We will see you in the next episode. Bye bye.‍

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