HOW'D WE GET HERE?

I’ve asked that question more than a few times at Ninety.

We’ve had moments where we talked about the plan, aligned on the direction, and then went heads down. A few months later, we looked up and realized the work got off track. Not because people didn’t care or because they weren’t working hard. Because somewhere along the way, we stopped checking whether we were still seeing the same thing.

That’s where alignment gets tricky. A leadership team can spend an entire meeting on the same issue and still leave with different interpretations of what happened. One leader sees an operational challenge. Another sees a capacity issue. Someone else believes the problem is strategic.

You don't want to make the mistake of assuming people are aligned just because they're in the same conversation. It's okay to disagree. But you have to reach a shared understanding of what the issue really is. That part isn't optional.

Hear more in Why Leadership Is Never Aligned — feat. David Meyer.

I talked with David Meyer about this in the latest Founder’s Framework podcast episode. His point was simple but powerful: Sometimes the old story no longer matches reality. And when that happens, you have to slow down long enough to understand what changed before deciding what comes next.

That takes patience and honesty.

What old story about your company no longer matches reality?

PERSPECTIVES

“The hardest part is aligning around it, picking out what it is, why it’s not working, what next is." — David Meyer

MARK MY WORDS

I always come back to the same scene from Animal House. The one where the marching band is moving down the street, someone takes the baton, turns into an alley, and suddenly the whole thing breaks down.

That’s the thing I worry about inside companies.

We talk about the plan, agree on the direction, and then everyone goes heads down. Six months later we look up and say, “How the hell did we get here?”

That happens when we don’t stay clear on what’s now, what’s next, what’s later, and what’s never.

As founders, we have to keep naming those buckets. Otherwise, good people can work hard and still end up marching into the alley.

TUNE IN

Inside Ninety
One theme from this week's podcast is that leadership teams can end up operating from different assumptions when they don't have a shared view of what's happening in the business.

That's one reason we built Trends View for Scorecards inside Ninety. 

• See cross-team Scorecard performance in a single view
• Quickly identify what's on track, off track, and at risk
  

When leadership teams can see the same data, they spend less time debating what's happening and more time deciding what to do about it.

[Check out Trends View in Ninety]

ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD

In case you missed it, here’s more from Founder’s Framework:

What Great Leadership Teams Do Before Making Decisions

Before great leadership teams make decisions, they make sense of what’s really going on. In this article, I talk about why shared understanding comes first, especially as companies grow and different leaders start seeing different parts of the picture.

[Learn how to make better decisions]

Leadership teams don’t need perfect visibility. They need enough shared understanding to keep moving in the right direction together.