Leadership teams often believe they are aligned. That doesn't mean they are.

One of the observations that continues to emerge from the Change Awards is that leadership teams rarely question whether they are genuinely aligned.

Most assume they are.

After all, the strategy has been agreed, the programme has been approved and everyone has left the room with the same presentation. Yet agreement and alignment are not necessarily the same thing. Real alignment becomes visible through decisions. Through priorities. Through the trade-offs leaders make when competing demands emerge. It is also visible to the organisation. Long before leadership teams recognise a problem themselves. One leader talks about growth. Another focuses on cost. A third continues to reward yesterday’s priorities.

None of these decisions are necessarily wrong in isolation. Together, however, they create mixed signals that make transformation harder to absorb. One of the more interesting observations from the Future-Ready Benchmark is that leadership coherence is consistently one of the most overestimated organisational capabilities. Not because leaders are deliberately misaligned, but because shared language can easily create the illusion of shared understanding.

Perhaps that explains why leadership coherence rarely appears on a programme risk register. Instead, it surfaces later as slower decision-making, competing priorities, inconsistent communication or resistance that appears difficult to explain. The question, therefore, is not whether leadership teams believe they are aligned. It is whether the organisation experiences them that way.