Alignment Is a Practice, Not a Destination: Zora Artis on Leading

Zora Artis, guest · [02:00]A number of years ago, I tried to work out what my origin story was. I was working on my brand, and as someone who's worked in brand for, for decades, I've never really focused on my own. And the woman I was working with said, we need to know what your origin story is. So, you know, we delved into that. And I realized that I've been in the business of alignment in some form or other my whole life. And when I go back and look at that, it comes from the early years. My family migrated three times by the time I was 13. So I often felt like I was the odd one out, and I had to learn how to read the rooms, understand the dynamics of the, the culture, the people. How things worked, what were those unwritten rules, and look for a way to belong. So I felt this pressure all the time, but I wouldn't have necessarily thought that that was alignment at the time. It was, it, to me, it's a thread that links through it because it was trying to work out or make sense of things when you really don't fit. And that sort of carried through into my career over time, and it was about the fact that I'm quite a curious individual. Curiosity is one of my three values, and I'm always interested to see how people make sense of what's going on, where things get stuck, and how you move through things together. How are the things that could seem quite disparate, how are things connected? So it's, it's very much about that sense-making piece. It was always central to what I was doing, whether I was working in marketing, whether I, whether I was in management, whether I was working in, creative and full-service advertising agencies, or whether I was running my own business or as a consultant or whatever it was. It was always about sense-making and observing, talking with people, and working stuff out. And so that became quite clear in, in the work that I was doing. So I moved from working in communications In creative, in brand and strategy over time to take a much deeper focus on leadership and alignment, strategic alignment to start with, and then it went, went into organizational and team alignment. And so now I'm often brought in when things are messy. I've rarely been brought in when things are going well. In actual fact, like I could probably count on one hand in 35 odd years how many times I've been brought in when things are going well. So it's usually when something's messy. So there's a whole range of things that can happen that bring me into an organization.

Zora Artis, guest · [09:40]And in shorthand, I would describe it as alignment is, is moving as one, as one whole, and that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone thinks the same way, agrees on everything, or behaves identically. It means that there's enough shared clarity and commitment about where they're going and why. And for that to flow into the decisions, the priorities, the trade-offs, the resourcing, and the work that people actually do. So we have to connect up. And it's not just about looking at how that works just within the organization, so through the organization, it's also across through customers and stakeholders. So there's an external element as well as an internal element. And the most common misconception about alignment is that it means agreement, and it's become very much more spoken about, particularly on LinkedIn. You're seeing all sorts of people now talking about alignment, whilst when I, I did the first study with my colleague back in 2018, it, it was the, literally the first global study on strategic alignment at the time. And so, but now it's becoming much more commonplace and spoken about because it's, people are You meet means agreement. They, people see, people in a room, say it's a, an executive team or even just within any team, and people are nodding in, in, in the room, or they say they agree, or there's this, or potentially there's even silence. So it looks like you've got harmony and people are in agreement, and so then there's the assumption that there's alignment. But what often happens, more often than not, is that people walk out with a different interpretation of what they think was the agreement or whatever the decision is. They walk out with different interpretations on what's decided and what that actually means to them. So someone who's, say a CFO will take, will look at a decision and they'll see it from their lens as a CFO. a CMO will look at it from a marketing perspective, a general counsel from the risk or legal perspective. So Different perspectives come into play rather than necessarily really working out that everyone actually understood has that shared clarity, not just understanding, but also around the meaning of what that thing, topic decision is, what the trade-off is. That's where things come unstuck.

Zora Artis, guest · [14:46]Well, it's not necessarily about, say, if you're achieving alignment, that's almost like presuming that you get an outcome of alignment, whereas I look at alignment as something that you do to achieve other outcomes, like more effective teams or people actually being more cohesive and being in flow, being able to perform better, being able to have better cultures, all those sorts of things. So it's, it's about trying to understand what you really have, and generally, I will say that Alignment starts at the top. So the executive team is the team that really needs to be the team that is aligned because you can do all sorts of things within the rest of the organization, but if the exec team isn't aligned, it becomes really difficult for the organization to really be at its best. They know it's misaligned. They can see the patterns, the behaviors, they sense that they feel that they can hear what's going on in the rest of the organization. And I was speaking with senior HR executives here in Australia, and, they had done a study of charos, about what their top ten issues were, what was keeping them up at night, and the second issue was executive alignment. So we know that the top teams aren't aligned. They think they are aligned. I've spoken, I've spoken often to them, but there is this reticence to look in the mirror and to genuinely really work on it, because there's a whole series of things that stop that happening. the study that I just recently did, we examined that, and there is a lot around ego, there is a lot around hubris, there is a lot around fear, but there's also a lot around futility. So, you know, where people find that it's, they've seen other people being shut down when they've spoken up, or they've been shut down themselves, or nothing has changed, so why bother? You'll find that the people that are often in the executive team are coming in into that team as the experts in their space, and they're not necessarily behaving as an executive team, they're behaving as a team of execs rather than an executive team. So they're not necessarily looking at things with the whole enterprise in mind, so they end up having their own priorities and they go off and do work on their things or their own interpretation of things, and then that becomes messy. So you start with that executive team first.

Zora Artis, guest · [19:28]I worked with one organization and there's a, the case studies in, in the paper from the last study and high, high performing team. Goals, all that sort of stuff. And they were a client that I'd worked with for a couple of years, worked with them on culture. And then we were, we were doing the leadership team alignment, the executive team alignment. And, it turned out that they really weren't behaving as a team per se. It was really obvious, but there were all these underlying conflicts and things, all these behaviors that were coming up in the sessions that we were working on together. And the CEO had a moment of, one of those insights, insight moments, you know, when you're coaching and you can see the light bulb going off, and this happened in the, in the room. And he said, all those times that I get sent those emails, and he's talking to the, to the team, those emails where I'm CC'd on things. It was that passive, aggressive behavior when you're not making the decisions that need to be made, and I then bring you together, make the decision, and we move on. So we've never dealt with the conflict. He said, so what we're doing is we're really, we're banking future conflict. And I wrote that up on the board and he looked at me and I just turned around and I let there be silence in the room and I think the other, execs were just like, oh my goodness, he's actually said this, right? And he looked at me and he said, Zora, are you going to write about that on LinkedIn? I said, only if you write it with me. And I, I, I didn't. But then I wrote an article recently about it and I sent it to him and I said, oh, I think I should share this with you. And he's moved on from that organization and he came back and he said, oh, love it. I'm, I'm glad to see that a high-performing dysfunctional team can be of, of, of use to other people.

Zora Artis, guest · [21:38]They, often they don't know how to unpack it. So they don't know how to have the right, they don't know what the approach is. So it's a dialogue that needs to be had. There's a way to do it. It's not a debate. It's not just a conversation. It's the dialogic process, and that's what I do in my work. So it's, it's a structured process that as coaches and facilitators, we can do with, with teams. And it can be learnt by, by the people in the organization. So they don't have to become dependent on us, but we can show them how to do it. So then it becomes part of what they do, and they can build that into the rhythm of how they work. So being able to bring things up. So You can genuinely, you can disagree with each other and still be aligned. So you can hold really different views, but as long as you're able to surface the views, to listen to each other and understand what sort of sits underneath the views, and then you can reach that shared clarity, what exists for the, that team, for that whole or for the team of teams or the organization, you can work that out together. So you can still hold disparate views, but you'll have a shared one and you work from that. It is about trust and you need trust to have alignment, but alignment also creates trust, which is, is interesting. And going through that dialogic process, you know, there are guardrails, you know, that need to be followed. So for example, everyone has an equal voice in the room. So there's no hippo per se in the room, even though you might have the CEO sitting in the room, the CEO isn't the loudest voice in the room. So that flips that a fair bit. So you've got that inclusive approach. You have to have the respect for each other. When one person is sharing their perspective, no one else speaks, so they have the time to, to share what they really think and feel. And the people that are listening need to be listening to understand, not listening to try and defend or respond. And if you do see as the facilitator or the coach, you do see someone trying to jump in and defend, you stop, you do stop that and you remind them. So I After a number of cycles of doing that, they understand the process and then they shift. And then you're asking them to ask clarifying questions, not questions that are loaded, right? Because you can tell, you can see where things are going. So yeah, it's a process and it's, it's a skill that can be learned and it's really, really useful. It changes the dynamic, it changes the environment, and people then feel that they are heard, which is really important from the belonging perspective.

Zora Artis, guest · [25:57]In 2025, there was a study that came out by, a professor from SADE Business School at Oxford, Jonathan Trevor, who I studied under, I don't know, in 21 or, yeah, 21, when I went and studied strategic alignment then with him. And he did a study that, was a quant study with all sorts of leaders around the world and, you know, the question about how important is strategic alignment to an organization achieving its organizational goals. And out of his study, ninety percent of the leaders said it was fundamental. So ninety strongly agree or agreement with that. And in terms of the number of organizations that were highly aligned, his percentage was fourteen percent. So ninety percent or ninety-one percent said very important, fourteen percent were highly aligned. When we did the study in 2018, our numbers for the first part was ninety-six or ninety-seven percent, and the number of organizations that were highly aligned was only thirteen percent, which says that over time it hasn't shifted, right? So there hasn't been a shift, yet the context that we're in is extremely different, which is why we went and did the, the later study, and we looked very broadly across different types of leadership. It's really quite interesting when you look at the difference between then and now, and now we've got this acceleration of change that is just, the pace is just astonishing. Strategy is no longer really looked at from the perspective of the longer cycles that we were used to back in 2018 or even 2020. It can shift as three-month cycles, six-month cycles, nine-month cycles. It's much, much shorter, so strategy becomes much more fluid. So you're looking at it from the perspective of what are those strategic foundations, the direction, the values, our, how we make decisions, the decision rights we give to people, how we make the trade-offs, what are the core principles, how we work, what are the things that are really fundamental that we can align with, but still know that we need to be able to be adaptable to emergence and what's coming out because we have so much uncertainty. The other aspect of what's really different now is clearly AI, and what AI showed to us is that it's a multiplier. So it just amplifies whatever's already there. So if your organization, your teams are misaligned, that's going to increase so much more. Yet if they're aligned, AI can actually help with that. So there's, there's a whole shift in how it is now versus what it was then, despite the fact that there's still the disparity between, yeah, yeah, it's important, and very few are actually doing it. Ultimately, they don't understand it or how to do it.