What a leadership team is really disagreeing about

You can spend a very long meeting agreeing that the organisation needs to be more ambitious.

Then discover that everyone has agreed to something different.

One person means growing the business. Another means doing the existing work properly. A third means being brave enough to stop the project that has consumed the last two years.

The word travelled around the table. The meaning stayed in three separate heads.

A better slide deck may struggle to help.

Start with the actual disagreement

Leadership team alignment becomes useful when people understand what they are choosing together, how the choice will be made, and what they will do afterwards.

There can still be disagreement. There should be room for it.

Before trying to align a team, I would ask each person to describe the decision in ordinary language.

What are we deciding? What changes if we choose one course rather than another? Who is affected?

If the answers describe different decisions, that is already useful information. You have found somewhere to begin.

Ask what each person is protecting

Imagine a discussion about launching a new service.

One person wants to move quickly. Another wants to wait. It would be easy to describe the first as entrepreneurial and the second as resistant.

Perhaps the first is worried about losing the opportunity. Perhaps the second knows that the people delivering the existing service are already stretched.

Both may care deeply about the organisation.

The way to find out is to ask them.

“What do you most want this decision to preserve?”

“What are you worried we will lose?”

These questions can make room for something more useful than defending a position. They also need to be asked with enough patience to hear the answer.

You cannot infer somebody's motives from which side of the argument they are on.

Give familiar words something to stand on

Growth. Quality. Trust. Innovation. Focus.

Lovely words. Quite slippery in a meeting.

Ask what each would look like in a real choice. Which customer would you say yes to? Which project would you stop? What would the team do differently next Monday?

This is where organisational purpose begins to matter. It gives people something to return to when several attractive options pull in different directions.

It may also reveal that the shared understanding needs to be revisited.

The conversation becomes more honest when a word has to pay its way.

Let people answer before the room answers

Sometimes I would ask everyone to write their view down before discussing it.

A few sentences are enough: the decision as they understand it, their preferred course, and the concern they most want heard.

Then read the answers with curiosity.

It gives the quieter person a place in the conversation before the most confident explanation becomes the room's explanation. It may surface one of those unknown knowns, something somebody already understands that has never reached the discussion.

Agreement reached quickly can be useful. It can also conceal a great deal.

Leave with a choice people understand

At some point, a decision has to be made.

Name it clearly. Name who is responsible for carrying it forward. Make room for a person to say, “I still disagree, but I understand the choice.”

Then choose when you will come back and look at what actually happened.

A meeting can feel successful because the tension has gone down. The more interesting test is whether people can act without recreating the argument in three different corridors.

If the choice itself is still unclear, finding the thing beneath the list may help more than another attempt to agree.

If your leadership team is circling an important question, bring me that thing.