3 Ways Executive Teams Unknowingly Fake Alignment During Disruption and How to Fix It
Disruption tests more than just your business model — it tests the strength of your executive team’s alignment. The pressure to present a united front can push leaders to appear aligned on the outside while sweeping real disagreements, fears, or uncertainties under the rug. This “performative alignment” may feel safer in the moment, protecting reputations and minimizing conflict. But in reality, it creates hidden fault lines that can fracture trust, delay critical decisions, and sabotage execution.
The truth is that disruption requires more honest, transparent alignment — not less. Yet many executive teams unintentionally fall into patterns that look like cohesion but actually mask deep misalignment. These patterns are subtle, and they often happen to even the most well-intentioned, talented leadership groups. If left unchecked, they can lead to confusion, disengagement, and poor results at precisely the moment when the organization needs clarity and confidence the most.
In this article, we’ll unpack three of the most common ways executive teams unknowingly fake alignment during disruption — and, more importantly, share practices you can use to spot and address them before they derail your strategy.
1. Silent Agreement in Meetings
Leaders nod their heads, appear to agree, and move on — but have no intention of following through. This is often driven by a fear of looking unsupportive or risking conflict in a charged environment. Research in group dynamics shows that groups under stress will often over-index on surface harmony to preserve psychological safety — but that harmony is fragile and costly if no one feels they can challenge ideas. Over time, silent agreement creates a widening gap between what is said publicly and what is believed privately, which can fracture trust and stall execution. Leaders may then leave meetings feeling frustrated and disengaged, fueling side conversations and political maneuvering that further fragment the team.
What to do instead: Create explicit space for disagreement, with ground rules that dissent is valued. Name the fear of “false consensus” directly and remind the group that high-performing teams encourage productive conflict as a route to better solutions.
2. Rallying Around Vague Slogans
In disruption, phrases like “We’re all in this together” or “One team, one mission” can sound inspiring — but if they are not backed by shared understanding of trade-offs and decision criteria, they are empty. Leaders may agree with the slogan but hold wildly different interpretations of what it means in practice. This disconnect becomes painfully clear when tough decisions need to be made, and leaders realize they were never truly aligned on priorities, resources, or measures of success. These hollow rallying cries can then breed cynicism, with teams dismissing future messages as meaningless cheerleading rather than authentic leadership.
What to do instead: Break slogans down into clear, agreed-upon commitments, trade-offs, and measures of success. Otherwise, the banner of unity will fall apart when tough choices arise, and leaders will lack a shared playbook for action.
3. Pushing Out a Single, Unquestioned Narrative
Sometimes executive teams adopt a simplified storyline (“This change will be quick and easy!”) and suppress any evidence to the contrary. The intention is to protect the organization’s confidence, but it actually blocks honest sense-making. Neuroscience research suggests that when people sense gaps between words and reality, trust erodes quickly — and that gap becomes even more dangerous during change. Over time, a single narrative can become so rigid that it prevents adaptation, making the team slow to recognize emerging risks or opportunities. This unwillingness to interrogate the dominant story can leave the organization unprepared for the inevitable surprises of disruption.
What to do instead: Build in “reality checkpoints” — moments where teams collectively test assumptions, acknowledge uncertainty, and adapt messaging to match emerging evidence. Encourage curiosity rather than defensiveness when new data challenges the preferred narrative.
Disruption isn’t going away — and neither is the need for true alignment at the top. While it may feel easier to protect harmony through silent agreement, vague slogans, or simplified narratives, these habits will cost you dearly in trust, speed, and execution. Lasting leadership impact comes from surfacing what’s real, naming what’s hard, and building courageous conversations that hold the team together even in the most complex environments.
If you want to strengthen your executive team’s capacity to align, adapt, and lead through disruption, the TLI Executive Coaching program is here to support you. Our coaches work with executive teams to develop the trust, communication, and resilience required to thrive in times of change.
Schedule a complimentary consultation today to explore how we can help your team build real alignment, not just the appearance of it.
Leadership Practice: Alignment Audit
At your next executive team meeting, ask everyone to anonymously rate (0–10) how aligned they feel about your current strategy.
Collect and share the average — without judgment.
Invite each leader to name one place where they see unspoken misalignment.
As a group, explore what conversations need to happen to close those gaps.
Coaching Question:
Where might you be performing alignment rather than practicing it?
“When we avoid difficult conversations, we trade short-term comfort for long-term dysfunction.” -Peter Block
Author
Athena Williams, Founder and CEO of Tenacious Leadership Institute, has been supporting leaders worldwide to become more tenacious for over 20 years. She has found that tenacity is the key to sustained leadership success in today’s ever-changing world. Through her coaching and leadership development programs, she helps leaders expertly handle change, complexity and other challenges so they can quickly get better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations.
Take the first step to becoming a tenacious leader by scheduling a call with us.
