Leadership alignment relies on many things, and many things can tear it apart. From conflicting priorities to low morale at work, understanding how to align leadership teams can set you, your people, and your business up for success.

This article will explore how to deal with team conflict at work without resorting to micromanagement, and how business productivity can be achieved through SMARTER goals and more coherent leadership alignment. We’ll also give you an excellent tool that helps you sustain the changes you make.

And what better place to start than with some LEGO?

A Fascinating Leadership Alignment Story from LEGO

We all know LEGO. You probably had a box of the stuff as a kid, and you’ve probably raised an eyebrow at its price as an adult.

But we’re not here to criticize LEGO’s pricing structures. We’re here to discuss how low morale at work, conflicting priorities, and poor leadership alignment almost brought about its demise.

More importantly, we’re here to discuss how this was resolved and the lessons you can learn as a business leader.

What’s the LEGO Story?

As we know, many businesses struggle with conflicting priorities, poor decision-making, and a lack of shared direction. In other words, they suffer from a lack of leadership alignment. While you might think this is something only smaller businesses have to deal with, it can also happen to the most prolific companies, as it did with LEGO.

How do we know? Because around 20 years ago, LEGO was three weeks away from collapse, despite being a beloved global brand. This was down to multiple reasons, and the company was struggling from a leadership perspective with internal silos (isolated teams working independently rather than collaboratively) and a culture that punished failure instead of encouraging collaboration.

A new CEO stepped in to turn things around, and he successfully transformed the organization by focusing on leadership alignment and cross-functional collaboration, with a simple, powerful message:

“No one gets fired for missing a goal or failing. You get fired for failing and not asking for help.”

This was key to changing the company’s fortunes, and it helped to create clarity, build trust, and align goals across teams. As a result, LEGO rebuilt its culture to ensure that teams supported each other, and performance skyrocketed as a result.

This is a perfect example of what happens when a business moves from dysfunction to business and leadership alignment. It also proves that fixing conflicting priorities at the top can turn around an entire company, while ignoring them can lead to struggle and failure.

The key question for leaders is whether your team is pulling in different directions, or are you making the same mistakes LEGO made in the early noughties? Perhaps more importantly, can you change things if you need to, and do you know how?

What is Leadership Alignment and Why is it Important?

Let’s leave the playroom, head back to the boardroom, and explain what leadership alignment actually is.

Leadership alignment is when your senior team is working towards the same vision, and everyone interprets success in the same way. It requires clarity, cohesion, and consistency in both direction and execution.

Failing to achieve leadership alignment affects your entire organization, not just the leaders, from long-term strategy to day-to-day decision making, and overall workplace morale. It often takes the form of conflicting messages, duplicated effort, and frustration through the layers like some badly designed wedding cake nobody wants to eat.

So, while leadership alignment starts at the top, it’s closely linked to business alignment and has ripple effects across any company. The way to get there is by connecting goals, culture, and systems to achieve the end goal that everybody wants.

But what if you don’t get there?

The Costs of Misalignment: What Conflicting Priorities Are Really Doing to Your Business

Our leadership model outlines four major consequences of business misalignment:

1. Conflicting priorities
2. Reduced productivity
3. Low morale at work
4. Poor decision-making

These can come about from fractured teams, unclear priorities, and ongoing friction between departments. These are rarely surface issues and likely mean you’re facing a lack of alignment, but how do you fix them?

Let’s focus on conflicting priorities, because they generally trigger the rest.

When teams or departments operate with conflicting priorities, it can lead to silos and widespread inefficiency. This ends up with dysfunctional teams, projects stalling, and trust eroding. Instead of working together, departments begin to protect their patch, which affects everything from delivery timelines to team culture.

How Do You Deal with Conflicting Priorities?

Unfortunately, conflicting priorities don’t fix themselves, and they’re rarely solved with more Slack messages or longer meetings.

To deal with them, you need to go beyond communication and tackle the root cause: a lack of alignment at the leadership level. This will result in more clarity in direction, prioritization, and accountability.

Why? Because if different leaders are aiming for different outcomes, or interpreting goals in wildly different ways, you’ll end up with silos and frustrated teams. So, fixing dysfunctional teams starts by aligning their leaders.

One powerful solution is shifting from traditional SMART goals to SMARTER goals. That means setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound, but also Evaluated and Reviewed. Doing so ensures everyone’s not just working hard, but working towards the same thing, and adjusting in real time if things veer from the goal.

Another strategy is management by exception (MBE). This means setting goals, defining the acceptable range for performance or success metrics, and only stepping in when someone’s off track or results fall outside the agreed “safe zone”.

For example, if performance is between 90% and 110% of the target, all’s well. Below or above that? It’s time to re-evaluate. It’s also important to note here that a business that’s 40% ahead of target is as out of control as one that’s 40% behind.

Developing this kind of leadership style builds trust, autonomy, and focus. It reduces the noise, empowers teams, and tightens alignment because everyone knows when and why to escalate. It also cuts down on micromanagement and lets people own their results, while keeping everyone singing from the same hymn sheet about what matters.

In short: if conflicting priorities are a symptom, alignment is the cure. And the sooner you treat it, the fewer fires you’ll be putting out later.

From Silos to Collaboration: The Culture Shift You Can Lead

LEGO’s turnaround proves what happens when leadership tackles misalignment and team dysfunction head-on. Before the new CEO changed things, departments weren’t sharing goals, and people were punished for failure rather than encouraged to ask for help.

By rebuilding its culture, LEGO rewired how teams worked together and moved from blame to collaboration, and from isolation to shared purpose. And it only worked because their leadership team committed to alignment and clarity from the top down.

This is crucial because when you create business alignment, fix dysfunctional teams, and reward collaboration, you don’t just improve performance, you unlock potential. This is a key building (or LEGO) block for growth and a happy, productive workforce.

The Simple Daily Habit to Sustain Leadership Alignment

Alignment isn’t something you achieve and forget about. Even the best leadership teams can slowly drift into unsafe waters when new projects pile up again, priorities begin to shift, and the clarity you’ve developed starts to blur.

This is where leadership journaling enters the conversation. We’ve developed a structured leadership journaling system trusted by CEOs and senior teams globally that enables leaders to clarify focus, reflect on key decisions, and reconnect with shared priorities.

 When it comes to business alignment, leadership journaling can help you:

• Revisit and sense-check your SMARTER goals.
• Spot deviations from your priorities or long-term goals.
• Avoid reactionary leadership habits like micromanagement.
• Keep yourself grounded and ground your team for the bigger picture.

In our experience, leadership journaling is where aligned thinking begins. Because if you want your leadership team and wider business to stay aligned, you need to align yourself first.

Final Thoughts: Alignment Isn’t a Buzzword, It’s the Foundation of Sustainable Growth

When leadership teams aren’t working from the same playbook, you get confusion, friction, and burnout. But when alignment is in place, you get clarity, confidence, and speed.

LEGO’s story is dramatic, but not unique, and many businesses operate in a quiet state of misalignment, with everybody busy working away, but nobody really aligned.

The good news is you don’t need a crisis to realign your leadership team. You just need intention, the bravery to make a change, and a strategy to make change stick.

Find Out More

Want to dive deeper into what it takes to align your leadership team and eliminate conflicting priorities? Episode 26 of the Stop Managing, Start Leading podcast explores the root causes of misalignment and how to fix them using tools like SMARTER goals, management by exception, and cross-functional collaboration.

You’ll also find powerful frameworks in our book, My Daily Leadership: A Powerful Roadmap for Leadership Success. It’s full of real-world strategies to help you lead with clarity, align your senior team, and embed meaningful reflection into your leadership routine, because alignment isn’t a one-off fix. It’s a habit to develop.