A leadership team can look fine from the outside and still be quietly misaligned.
You might be hitting targets. Delivering projects. Making decisions that are good enough. Yet underneath, there is often a different story: decisions take longer than they should, priorities keep shifting, meetings feel heavier than they need to, and the same conversations keep returning.
It’s not about failure. It is friction. And over time, that friction quietly reduces the capacity for leaders and teams to thrive.
When leadership teams are misaligned, it does not always show up as drama in the boardroom. More often, it shows up as underperformance against potential, reduced strategic clarity, and a slow drain on energy, trust, and pace.
This blog explores what misalignment really looks like, why it happens even in capable teams, and what helps leadership teams rebuild alignment in a way that supports both delivery and thriving.
What misalignment really is (and what it is not)
Misalignment is not the same as disagreement. Healthy leadership teams disagree. They challenge, test assumptions, and surface tensions early. There is good evidence that different types of conflict have distinct impacts, and that conflict is not automatically beneficial simply because it is labelled task-focused (Jehn, 1995; Yuan, Yin and Sun, 2025).
Misalignment is when the team does not share enough clarity about the foundations that make good decision-making possible, such as:
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- What we are optimising for right now
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- What matters most, and what can wait
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- What trade-offs are we willing to make
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- How do we make decisions when information is incomplete
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- What standards do we hold for pace, quality, risk, and responsibility
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- What gets spoken about, and what stays unsaid
In misaligned teams, people can appear aligned on the surface while holding different mental maps beneath the surface. That is when the quiet costs begin.
The hidden costs leaders feel but rarely name
1. Slower and lower quality decision-making under pressure
In complex environments, leadership teams need both pace and judgement. Research that views the top management team and board as a strategic leadership system suggests that stronger behavioural integration improves the quality of strategic decision-making (Thys et al., 2024).
When behavioural integration is low, you often see:
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- More pre-meetings and post-meetings
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- More lobbying and less collective thinking
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- Decisions that do not stick
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- Repeated revisiting of the same trade-offs
The decision still gets made, but the cost is time, trust, and momentum.
2. Conflict that damages performance, even when it looks professional
A common leadership myth is that task conflict is good for teams. More recent synthesis work suggests a more cautious reality. An updated meta-analysis found that different forms of team conflict are, on average, negatively related to team performance, with effects varying across contexts (Yuan, Yin, and Sun, 2025).
In leadership teams, conflict often becomes hidden rather than resolved. It shows up as:
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- Polite agreement masking tension
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- Passive resistance to decisions
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- Decision paralysis disguised as due diligence
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- Competing narratives about what is really going on
When tension is unspoken, it does not disappear. It simply moves into the system.
3. Loss of shared thinking, and the rise of fragmentation or groupthink
Leadership teams need shared understanding to coordinate, especially when the organisation is moving fast. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis found that interventions can improve shared mental models in a meaningful way (Lines et al., 2022).
There is also a nuance worth naming. Shared mental models can improve coordination, but can also reduce proactive problem-solving if the team becomes overly confident or too similar in how it sees the world. A recent Human Relations paper explores this tension directly, highlighting both the coordination benefit and the risk of narrowed thinking (Carraro, Furlan and Netland, 2024).
Misalignment often creates one of two unhelpful patterns:
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- Fragmentation: everyone pulls in different directions
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- Overalignment: people stop challenging assumptions
Both reduce strategic adaptability.
4. Emotional drag, and the quiet erosion of trust
In senior teams, the emotional reality is often present, even when it remains unspoken. Misalignment creates emotional drag, a background tension that makes everything feel harder than it needs to. Leaders can start to self-protect, speak less candidly, or hold back dissent, not because they lack commitment, but because the interpersonal conditions no longer feel fully safe or coherent.
This is where psychological safety matters, not as a nice-to-have, but as a condition for voice, learning and intelligent risk taking. A CIPD evidence review summarises a broad research base linking psychological safety and trust to a wide range of positive outcomes at individual, team and organisational levels (Wietrak and Gifford, 2024).
Without psychological safety, quieter voices do not bring the challenging idea. The dissenting view stays private. The team keeps the peace and loses the truth.
5. The system pays the price
Misalignment at the top rarely stays contained. It spreads.
People lower down sense the contradictions quickly. They notice unclear priorities, inconsistent messages, and unresolved tensions. The result is often slower execution because teams are waiting for clarity, workarounds because decisions feel unstable, reduced accountability because ownership is blurred, and higher attrition because the culture feels uncertain.
Even when the organisation performs, the human cost rises.
Why misalignment happens, even in strong teams
Misalignment is often a sign of change rather than incompetence.
It is common when growth outpaces the team’s operating model, a shift in strategy or market conditions, a restructuring or merger, a new executive joining, or sustained external pressure that pushes leaders into threat-based patterns.
It is also more likely when the senior group meets regularly but does not function as a real team with a shared purpose, clear decision-making norms, and mutual accountability (Hackman, 2002; Wageman et al., 2008).
What helps: reflexivity, not more meetings
If misalignment has a hidden cost, the solution is rarely a bigger strategy deck.
One of the strongest practical levers is team reflexivity: the capacity to pause, reflect on how the team is working, and adapt intentionally. A recent meta-analysis supports the link between team reflexivity and performance and highlights key conditions that strengthen this effect (Leblanc, Harvey, and Rousseau, 2024).
What also makes a difference is the tone leaders set. Research suggests that when leaders show humility, meaning they stay open, curious and willing to learn, teams are more likely to pause and reflect on how they are working together. That reflexive habit, in turn, supports innovation, especially in teams where people are naturally inclined to be proactive (Leblanc, Rousseau and Harvey, 2022).
In practice, this can be as simple as a senior leader saying, “I think we are missing something here” or “Let’s slow down and look at how we are making this decision.” Those moments create permission for the team to think together, not just act together.Reflexivity gives teams a way to work with complexity rather than be overwhelmed by it.
A practical reset: five places to realign
1. Reclarify what you are optimising for
What are the three priorities for the next 90 days, and what are you explicitly deprioritising?
2. Make decision rules visible
How do you decide when information is incomplete? Who decides what? What is the escalation path?
3. Surface the unspoken
What is being avoided? What tension is being carried quietly? What does the team not yet have language for?
4. Strengthen shared understanding without rigid thinking
Build shared mental models, but keep them flexible. Encourage challenge, not just agreement (Carraro, Furlan and Netland, 2024; Lines et al., 2022).
5. Protect space for collective sense-making
When pace is high, sense-making is often the first thing to disappear. Yet it is exactly what leaders need in chaos: space to slow the moment down, interpret what is happening, and respond with intention.
Reflection prompts for senior leadership teams
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- Where are we aligned in words, but not aligned in meaning?
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- What decisions are we revisiting, and what is that telling us?
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- Which voices do we hear most, and which do we hear least?
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- What emotions are present under the surface, and how do they shape our choices?
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- What would become possible if we worked with more trust and less noise?
Closing thought
Misalignment is not a sign your team is broken. It is often a sign that your system of leading together needs to evolve. It is your leadership team telling you that the way you make meaning, take decisions, and hold one another to account needs to change to meet the level of complexity you are leading through.
When teams realign, the benefits go beyond smoother meetings. You get sharper decisions, faster execution, stronger relationships, and a culture that can thrive under pressure.
And that is often when people across the organisation start to feel more clarity, consistency and confidence in the direction of travel.
If this resonates with you, you are welcome to get in touch or stay connected through the Thrive at Work newsletter.
References
Carraro, M., Furlan, A. and Netland, T.H. (2024) ‘Unlocking team performance: How shared mental models drive proactive problem solving’, Human Relations, online first. doi: 0.1177/00187267241247962 .
Hackman, J.R. (2002) Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
Jehn, K.A. (1995) ‘A multimethod examination of the benefits and detriments of intragroup conflict’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(2), pp. 256 to 282. doi: 10.2307/2393638.
Leblanc, P.M., Rousseau, V. and Harvey, J.F. (2022) ‘Leader humility and team innovation: The role of team reflexivity and team proactive personality’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 43(8), pp. 1396 to 1409. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2648
Leblanc, P M., Harvey, J F. and Rousseau, V. (2024) ‘A meta-analysis of team reflexivity: Antecedents, outcomes, and boundary conditions’, Human Resource Management Review, 34, 101042. doi: 10.1016/j.hrmr.2024.101042.
Lines, R.L.J., Hoggan, B.L., Nahleen, S., Temby, P., Crane, M. and Gucciardi, D.F. (2022) ‘Enhancing shared mental models: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials’, Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 11(4), pp. 524 to 549. doi: 10.1037/spy0000288.
Thys, K., Vandekerkhof, P., Steijvers, T. and Corten, M. (2024) ‘Top management team and board of directors as the strategic leadership system: The effect of behavioural integration on strategic decision making quality’, European Management Journal, 42(5), pp. 721 to 734. doi: 10.1016/j.emj.2023.04.010.
Wageman, R., Nunes, D.A., Burruss, J.A. and Hackman, J.R. (2008) Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
Wietrak, E. and Gifford, J. (2024) Trust and psychological safety: An evidence review. Practice summary and recommendations. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Yuan, Z., Yin, J. and Sun, J. (2025) ‘The paradox of team conflict revisited: An updated meta-analysis of the team conflict team performance relationships’, Journal of Applied Psychology, advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/apl0001315 
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