The Leadership Vision Podcast

Alignment Without Conformity: How Teams Can Fly in the Same Direction

• Nathan Freeburg • Season 7 • Episode 44

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In this episode of The Leadership Vision Podcast, Nathan Freeburg, Dr. Linda Schubring, and Brian Schubring explore what alignment truly means in team settings—dispelling the myth that alignment requires conformity. Using metaphors from nature, like the organized flight patterns of geese and the dynamic, colorful movement of flamingos, they delve into the complexities of alignment, why it’s essential for effective teamwork, and how it often looks messier than we might expect. The conversation highlights that alignment isn’t about uniformity; rather, it’s a shared commitment to move in the same direction while leveraging each person’s unique strengths.

01:25 Discussing Alignment in Leadership
02:50 Flamingos as a New Metaphor for Team Alignment
04:47 Defining and Achieving Alignment
07:59 Personal Stories of Alignment
10:43 Framework for Alignment
22:30 Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Key Takeaways:

  1. Rethinking Alignment:
    • Traditional metaphors, such as geese flying in a perfect V-formation, suggest that alignment means precise order and conformity. However, Brian and Linda introduce the image of flamingos flying together—distinct in color, spacing, and position—yet moving in the same direction. This imagery highlights that alignment can be diverse, flexible, and individualized, challenging the need for perfect uniformity.
  2. Commitment Over Conformity:
    • Effective team alignment doesn’t mean everyone thinks or acts the same way. Instead, it’s about committing to a shared vision and staying adaptable in how each person contributes. Teams can have different strengths, perspectives, and ways of working yet still move cohesively toward a common goal.
  3. Creating Personal Connections to Alignment:
    • Linda and Brian share insights on encouraging leaders to define alignment personally. By reflecting on times when they felt aligned within a team, leaders can better understand the nuances of alignment and recognize how it may look different from one team to another.
  4. The Four Frameworks of Alignment:
    • The team outlines four critical aspects of alignment:
      • Clarity: Defining what alignment means for the team.
      • Cascade: Alignment often starts with a few and then cascades to the rest of the team.
      • Cultivation: Continuously reinforcing alignment as the team moves forward.
      • Culture: Embedding alignment into the team culture to ensure resilience over time.
  5. Alignment as an Emotional and Relational Process:
    • True alignment isn’t just strategic; it’s emotional and relational. Team members need supportive relationships to maintain alignment, especially in challenging times. This relational focus helps individuals feel connected and engaged, fo

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Speaker 1:

You know, brian and Linda, I have noticed the geese flying south, at least that's where I assume they're going. At Chloe's soccer game on Saturday there was like literally a million geese that were flying and I was thinking about this book that I'd recently read with the kids about, you know, geese flying in this formation and I thought that's such a cool metaphor for leadership because they're all in this tight organized formation with the leader at the front and then, I assume, different rankings of geese all the way to the back where the grunts are, and I was like it's a fun metaphor for leadership because I also know they draft off of each other and there's some cooperation. Is that how you would describe leadership, as this perfect V formation going to the sky?

Speaker 2:

No, Okay, I don't believe that anymore. Well, I think it's a great.

Speaker 3:

I think it's a great analogy, it's a great metaphor that people have aspired to, I'm sure.

Speaker 2:

We've seen the posters in the break room that have that.

Speaker 3:

And there's nothing wrong with it and it's good reminders of like okay, we're going to go there together.

Speaker 1:

You are listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for the past 25 years so that leaders are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. For more information about what we do and to get some resources, you can visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and today, on the Leadership Vision Podcast, we are talking about alignment how to know if you're aligned, how to get your team aligned and how to know when you're all going in the same direction together. Let's just jump right back in with the new metaphor for how we see alignment. So then, what is a better metaphor?

Speaker 2:

How often do you really Crushing this? I guess my point is how often do we experience a leadership team that actually has that kind of synchronization, commonality of thought, conformity of practice? You just don't find that it's much True. I think my experience is the leadership teams that we work with the effective ones it's still messy and somewhat chaotic.

Speaker 1:

Like a preschool classroom. Yeah, kind of like that sometimes.

Speaker 2:

But what's key to what a team is doing is that they're more aligned on the direction they're going Um, and that alignment doesn't necessarily look like that perfect V formation that that geese are flying, and so I think that that's where where where we fall. We had an invitation to work with an executive team and the topic was alignment, and so we thought about this very illustration, nathan, that you're referring to, and that's not at all what we were thinking is practical. So what we ended up choosing was we found this really unique, dynamic and colorful image of a bunch of flamingos flying in the same direction. So again, not Canadian geese at your daughter's soccer game, but several flamingos. The only thing the flamingos have in common is that they're all flying in the same direction. So when you look at those Canadian geese pictures, like there's oftentimes the same wing positions and the perfect, like you know, spacing between the with this flamingo?

Speaker 2:

not at all. They're different colors. They're spaced out differently. Some are really far away, some are super close. They're different colors. They're spaced out differently. Some are really far away, some are super close, some are compacted, some aren't. There doesn't seem to be a very distinct order to this, except they're flying in the same direction, and when we presented this picture to the executive team, it was an immediate connection to that's it. That's what it is to live on this team we're flying in the same direction. That's what it is to live on this team, where we're flying in the same direction. That's what it means. At different paces, we all look differently.

Speaker 3:

And sometimes people would say like now I'm in the front or I'm the one definitely going slower. I might not even be in this image, um, but we find that, uh, presenting an image that surprises people, so not maybe a predictable, like I've heard this before about the geese, it opened up their imagination to begin to dream of. Are we really aligned? Are we even going in the right direction? I had a mentor that he would always say if I'm going to Chicago from Minneapolis, I'm going to get on 94 and go east. Am I on 94 and going east? And so it was this directional lesson. I think that I learned from Mike where, yep, we're going to head this way, and I think sometimes alignment begins with at least going in the same direction.

Speaker 2:

I think that the big idea for today is that we want to invite individuals and leaders to think about how it is that their teams, that they're on their leadership teams, how it is that they're aligned. Do they have a commitment to going in the same direction? And is there any type of consistency on how you're checking in with each other and realizing that what we're not saying is that alignment equals conformity Not at all. The purpose of our conversation today is for us to just begin to ask ourselves the question what does it look like for me to be in alignment with those around me and what does it mean for my team to be in an alignment, going in the same direction, aligned on what it is that we believe in and what we're trying to accomplish?

Speaker 1:

So then it's about the commitment, not the conformity.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

And I'm wondering where we start with that then, Like you have so many leaders that, like this is just the team that they have. It's one thing if you can pick your hand, pick your team for a specific job or a task or whatever, that's probably maybe a little bit easier to get alignment and commitment to. But how would you know any leader that's listening to us today? Is there a what's the process?

Speaker 2:

What's the one, two, three, 15 step process to get people to all go? I'll go East One of the places that we love to start is where we have commonality on just the idea, and so I think the first thing we would ask people is what does alignment mean to you? And just let that conversation evolve, because we don't know what alignment means to any team that we're working with. Let them define it, because I think it's really important to have an understanding that there may be many people that have different opinions on what alignment means. Second, can we agree on what alignment might mean for us? And then, third, where and when have we been aligned before?

Speaker 2:

Because we think it's really important to capture when a team is practicing something that they say to themselves we're not doing this, we're really struggling, and we would say you probably have been aligned before, you probably have been in that level of synchronicity before. So what does it mean to you as individual? What does alignment mean to you as individual? What does alignment mean to you as individuals? What does it mean? What does the topic of alignment mean for us as a team? And and Linda loves to ask these questions when have you been aligned before to remember what that experience looked like, what it felt like, what it sounded like.

Speaker 3:

Because when people start to first define it, then you start to realize that maybe people are, maybe people have really differing definitions. And so their operational definition of what alignment is maybe puts a value on that we're all in this together, or it puts in a value on the speed of how we're going to go at this or who all needs to be involved, and so that definitional start. Then what we find is leaders will kind of look around like is that how you define?

Speaker 2:

it. Oh, that's not how.

Speaker 3:

I thought about it, or that's not what the dictionary definition is, but when people are starting to wrestle with it, that's really important. And when people have that experience where they can name some time in their life where they were on a team or in a group or among a variety of birds headed to Chicago as. I'm mixing all the metaphors. I like it being able to remember, put themselves back in that space and then speak from the wisdom of what? They've learned in that space.

Speaker 2:

So when we meet with the team, we had that broad discussion, like we already covered. That's really our first step. The second place we go to is what Linda just said is when have you experienced being on a team that was aligned? Because that's really going to make the conversation personal for individuals. They'll feel like they're contributing to the overall discussion by remembering when they were in that place of alignment. I think that the other important thing, then, is to be able to listen to team members share those stories from early in their careers or from a decade ago, when they felt that they were providing some kind of momentum or innovation to how teams were aligning onto something that was in their future, because you'll see people's eyes light up, you'll see their body posture change, and that's oftentimes something that's maybe even more critical than the topic we're talking about is watching people come to life, when they begin to remember when they were a critical, contributing member to a positive team culture.

Speaker 3:

There's often one or two people that will say things like well, can I share an example of when we weren't aligned? And we usually say I mean, although that's important to learn from as well, and I think we do learn a lot of lessons about what not to do or, you know, we can watch a leader and be like we never want to be like that you know.

Speaker 3:

So I'd never want to have this kind of you know, lack of alignment going forward. We find that that conversation begins to spiral a little bit and what we want to help leaders tap into are those positive memories, are those opportunities to remember when they were aligned, to remember who was next to them, to remember if they were leading, if someone else was carrying most of the weight and, as Brian mentioned, yes, like the people light up.

Speaker 2:

And I think that's where some of the breakthrough of creativity, some of the breakthrough of other ways to look at an issue or progress when it comes to alignment and when we're having this conversation, the third thing that we provide is just some some a little bit of framework of what we're trying to reiterate with this conversation. With alignment, and like any frame or any four-sided frame, we have four words. And the first thing is alignment is about clarity. That's kind of the place that we want to start is. Can we have a commitment to any type of clarity on what it means for us to align? And the second thing is to just give out another side of the frame that alignment cascades.

Speaker 2:

Oftentimes one or two people will get it and that will cause others to come into alignment too. So just giving people permission that we're not maybe all going to feel aligned right away, but alignment cascades. And the third side of the frame is that with alignment, we need to cultivate it. We need to kind of like, keep that momentum, go remind ourselves of the direction that we're heading and why that's important. And then, fourth, to remember that for alignment to really be resilient and carry through over time, that topic needs to be part of our culture. It's a culture that aligns not just a team, but that we expect individuals to be aligned and other teams to be aligned in their appropriate ways as well. That's kind of how we finish off this first part of the conversation. I like it.

Speaker 1:

Brian Linda. I'm gonna read a paragraph from this document here. It says alignment is not about conformity. It's a shared commitment to moving in the same direction, leveraging each leader's strengths and insights, understanding that individual uniqueness and adaptive leadership styles are crucial for building a dynamic and resilient leadership team. Talk about that? Expand on that a little bit. I want to hear more.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that we want to emphasize in this conversation is that we are not at all asking people to refrain from contributing in an authentic and individualized manner, because what we are trying to do in our work from the very beginning is how is it that we can shine a light on what is beautiful and brilliant about people? And we want to then invite people to share that uniqueness of who they are as individuals, even when we're working in alignment, because we know that when individual voice is shared, when diversity is promoted, when innovation is encouraged, it provides a different type of life and energy to a team. That provides a momentum that I think is uncharacteristic in a lot of organizations.

Speaker 3:

So, if I think of some of the examples from leaders who have demonstrated some of their I don't know adaptive capacities. A lot of times, people are saying out loud hey, I'm with you, I'm just listening. Hey, I'm with you, I'm just introverted. And we know that the introverts among us do not give us as many data points as the extroverts, so they can you know, we don't know if they're aligned or if they're in the formation going in the right direction.

Speaker 3:

So sometimes, just probing and asking some of those questions, we want to unearth some of the adaptive capacities.

Speaker 3:

We also want to push leaders to consider the ways that they have been resilient in the past and sometimes that you know the resilience isn't just like, okay, fine, and you give up and you just, you know, give over to wherever everyone else is going, give over to wherever everyone else is going, um, but there's a bit of a give and take and there is a bit of a uh, maybe curious posture, open posture, like I want to learn from something and able, and then be able, to help us move faster together.

Speaker 2:

Here's an uh another example. We recently were working with a group on this topic of alignment and I saw one of the more critical thinkers, um, standing in front of this beautiful big screen staring at this picture. So I walked up over to him and stood alongside of him and kind of just gazed onto this big picture of these flying flamingos with them and he didn't say a word. I thought it was kind of awkward.

Speaker 3:

Like he stood there with me.

Speaker 2:

Um, and I said, well, what do you see? And so he kind of gave some descriptions of what he is seeing in the picture. And then I asked him, I said which one of these flamingos is you? And I was certain that he was going to be describing uh, one of the flamingos that was closer to the front of the pack. And he took his finger and he pointed onto the screen to the furthest flamingo outside of the flamingos that was closer to the front of the pack. And he took his finger and he pointed onto the screen to the furthest flamingo outside of the formation that's flying the lowest on the horizon.

Speaker 2:

He goes, that's me what caught my attention was the certainty with which he said it and the pride that he said like this is me. And I said why is that and why would you choose that one way out there? And he said because when I feel that I'm most aligned, I'm not flying with the group, I'm flying alongside and at a distance, watching, listening and learning Cause then I'll know exactly when my opinion is needed and then I'll fly closer to the group and then fly back out where I feel that my perspective is more keenly dialed in. And that idea, or that example of this man, emphasized a couple of things. He understood that it was okay to fly wherever you wanted to, but he also understood what role he played. And that was really part of the point of this whole conversation is what role do you play and wherever? Really part of the point of this whole conversation is what role do you play and wherever you think you are, it's okay. We're just asking for us all to be flying in the same direction.

Speaker 3:

And sometimes we just want to push up against the adage that that you have to fall in line to get in the right direction. Go ahead in the right direction, and I think there's. Falling in line and alignment are two very different things, and I think people feel more open or expansive or like, oh, I could try this instead of how do I conform? And I think that's why we ask people. It's not about being conforming, it's about committing to head in the same direction as everyone else.

Speaker 1:

So how do you know? You mentioned that there's that leader who felt aligned when he was kind of off to the side but as the leader of the group, how do you know when your team is aligned? Because I'm also hearing there's the team alignment but then there's individual alignment. So, however you want to answer that, just how do you know when there's some alignment? How does that become something that you can measure or mark and say yes or no?

Speaker 3:

Well, learning and living with people who compare everything, this one might be a good answer.

Speaker 3:

This may be a great opportunity to name when teams or a group is not aligned. Where you Uh cause that's usually when we get a phone call it's like the purpose isn't clear. Um, sometimes we say, like we want to invest in leaders to help teams align on purpose. So if the purpose is not clear or the purpose is not understood, that's where it's like oh, there are some people doing their own thing, there are splinter cells going off and doing this and other people going rogue. What in the world is happening? And it's not just hey, everybody get in the V, but let's diagnose what's happening, because for some reason we are not we actually aren't aligned. And so in some of our research that we have done extensively over the last 10 years with teams, we've learned a lot about organizational alignment. So maybe let's move into, then, what it is.

Speaker 2:

Because when we ask, when teams are working with us on getting aligned, we're trying to break this topic down as simply as possible, because we're not asking for this blanket alignment.

Speaker 2:

We're asking specific questions what do you want to be aligned on? Because we really want to provide an opportunity for an environment and for a team to experience a success, and that's critical for us. So a very common question is how do we align on strategy? Now, strategy is important. A lot of leaders need to know the direction that they're going and how they're going to get there and how their role plays into the strategy. So that's a more maybe common question, but then I want to follow that up with. A unique question of us is how can we be more aligned creatively, like, how can our teams promote creativity where it's not random creativity, but it's creativity that is aligned on a topic that needs innovation, if that makes sense? And so the question is how do we be creative in an aligned way that may provide some innovative solutions on a specific topic? That can also be something that directly impacts how a group is aligned.

Speaker 3:

Sometimes it's detecting how people are living their values, and so the values alignment is really important here. Uh, because we we will see like sometimes it's just there's a values fit, that's just, it's just as a maybe a misfit, um, or okay, we are aligned on values, but there are some other things that we need to discuss because maybe it goes back to strategy or we're just thinking inside of a box and not outside of a box, like Brian was mentioning, with creativity. So looking at values is really important here.

Speaker 2:

Here's another one. When we're answering the question of what does this alignment look like, we're working with another organization. It's an emotionally charged organization, but what makes this organization unique is that they're really wrestling with what does it mean to be emotionally engaged and how does that align? What types of emotions do we really want to promote here that serves the mission of the organization can be emotionally aligned there, and by doing that kind of conversation or by having that kind of conversation, they're also revealing the types of emotions that create this lack of alignment, Like what's really distracting and can get us to fly off course and again surprised by the question. But good.

Speaker 3:

Another component is that when you look at alignment, are you providing places for, or dialogue? That's intellectually challenging. That's a big component of alignment when people are free to just wonder, to poke holes in, to not be intellectually offended if someone asks a question. Holes in, to not be intellectually offended if someone asks a question, that some of the teams that we've worked with you know they'll bat a variety of ideas around and then at the end of the day, they decide on one and that intellectual challenge actually led them to advancing the strategy, moving in the right direction together.

Speaker 1:

What I was going to say to that brian's final thought is that before you can know if you're aligned, it seems like you have to agree on a bunch of stuff ahead of time. Yeah, um, and so, yeah, I'm not. Where am I going with that?

Speaker 3:

like yes, yes I do think, even just naming it and discussing it, it isn't um full knowledge. It's like, hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? Agitating the thinking, agitating some of the feeling to surface rather quickly yes what and what are the components right I?

Speaker 1:

just bring that up because it's, you know, like nearly everything in leadership, it's not a, oh well, if this happened, if a, then b, and so there's there's a lot of finesse and I'm perhaps you never have a hundred percent alignment. That's just sort of the you know the deal. It's like if you got 51, that's a good day. But, um, brian, how about you wrap this up? What, like? You have a final thought to kind of um land this proverbial ship, um maybe on the ship in Chicago, maybe before.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the birds?

Speaker 1:

or if we're birds, how do we land these flamingos down? They have to land eventually into a nice day.

Speaker 2:

They stand on all legs stand on one leg and they're pink because they eat shrimp or whatever no, they drink pink lemonade. How do you know?

Speaker 3:

we all know that right right and they swim in pools duh, um.

Speaker 1:

So how might you call it like brian? What's here? Um, I can tell all three of us are aligned here on wrapping up this podcast uh.

Speaker 2:

Final thought brian here's my final thought. And my final thought, um, I learned from an executive leader, uh, as she was gazing on this picture, same situation During one of the breaks. We had this picture on a large screen and I noticed one of the executives just looking at the picture. I do what I do. I walked up alongside of her and I said what do you see?

Speaker 2:

And she began to talk about the colors and that kind of thing, and again I asked her which one of these flamingos best represents you on this team, and she looked right into the middle and chose a flamingo that was alongside someone else.

Speaker 2:

And the reason why this example is so important for me is because what she identified was the importance of being in relationship with someone that was close to you, flying in the same direction, so you could help each other out on staying aligned. That lesson really resonated with me, and what we're trying to communicate is alignment sometimes feels very isolated, like you're the only one that's flying in the right direction. You may feel that way for a variety of reasons, and her comment made me really think of who is it that helps us maintain our alignment that person that we are with in the organization that understands who we are, that can contribute to some critical thinking, but that person that can provide relational and emotional support if we feel like we're off center or if we're struggling in any area. So the reminder that alignment is an emotional and relational game too. It's a process of being in relationship with each other, relying on our individual uniquenesses as contributing factors, but still holding each other accountable in ways that keeps us aligned and in relationship. I love that.

Speaker 1:

Brian and Linda. Thank you so much. I appreciate the alignment conversation and the new way to think about this. I'll no longer look at geese the same way I don't really have opportunity to look at flamingos. But anytime you could, I do I could. Or anytime I see some disorganized mess going in, generally the same direction Disorganized mess.

Speaker 2:

There's like a whole herd of turkeys in our neighborhood, like 21 turkeys.

Speaker 3:

I'm pretty sure it's not called a herd.

Speaker 2:

Well, they're like, they don't have any alignment, they just randomly walk across the streets or whatever.

Speaker 1:

That's what we call a rafter Really A rafter.

Speaker 3:

A rafter of turkeys.

Speaker 2:

There's lots of rafters of turkeys around here.

Speaker 1:

An adult male. A group of turkeys is called a rafter or a flock.

Speaker 2:

Well, I wouldn't consider when I'm watching our neighborhood. Anything about alignment with turkeys?

Speaker 1:

Well, that's good, but now we have some good imagery to think about. So thank you for that and thank you, listeners, for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has spent the past 25 years helping individuals feel mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. If you found value from this episode or any of your other material, we would love it if you could share it with someone else that you think might benefit from it. You can visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom. Please subscribe to our email newsletter, subscribe and review us on iTunes and Spotify and YouTube and all the social channels and blah, blah, blah. That stuff's all really helpful for us to get the message out. But again, thank you for listening. My name is Nathan Freeberg.

Speaker 2:

I'm Linda Schubring and I'm Brian Schubring.

Speaker 1:

And on behalf of our entire team thanks for listening. Should we do a turkey sound to play us out, or should? We gobble, gobble.

Speaker 3:

No, it's Halloween. I don't really have a gobble, but it won't be Halloween when this comes out, that'll all just be faded out I'm dressed in orange.