July 12, 2012

By Misha Galperin

In the language of leadership, there are certain words we encounter time and again: vision, innovation, change, decisiveness, etc. One word that we hear about in a secondary role is alignment. Alignment sounds like something you do for your car tires. It’s hardly inspiring. It just means that everything is working in a state of balance.

But the fact is that aligning goals and people is one of the hardest, trickiest aspects of leadership. I was once speaking with a consultant from McKinsey who told me that the most critical aspects of effecting organizational change are leadership, intensity, focus and alignment. In my work, without alignment, lay leaders and professionals may be at odds with each other, goals may contradict each other and board development may lack clarity. Read more