Page 238 - Fearless Leadership

Aligning Emotionally and Intellectually 225

whenever necessary; however, allowing decisions to slip out of alignment
without formally realigning and communicating those changes to others
is inefficient and ineffective.
Committed partners are rigorous in making sure alignment sticks.
They do not allow alignment to lapse. The moment circumstances change
that threaten the alignment of the group, committed partners reaffirm their
alignment or alter it, and appropriately communicate to others.
How do committed partners prevent a breakdown in alignment from
occurring? They hold each other accountable for maintaining or formally
altering alignment when circumstances change. Their commitment is to
sustain alignment and send a cohesive and consistent leadership message
to the organization.
Without emotional commitment, complying (also called a pocket veto)
is a temporary adhesive with no sticking power. When leaders use a pocket
veto, saying what others want to hear and giving in to group pressure, their
unspoken communication is, “I’ll keep my true feelings in my pocket until
the meeting is over. Then I’ll conspire against the decision and say how
I really feel.”
When leaders tolerate “good enough,” they withhold their ideas and
contributions and accept things as they are. This disrupts the entire deci-
sion-making process from alignment to execution. Complying comes at
a huge cost: the loss of future possibilities and opportunities.

Talking about Alignment as a Concept, and Not Defining
It as a Behavior
When leaders are sloppy and undisciplined in translating words into
explicit behavior, they get sloppy and undisciplined results. Leaders lose
their edge every time they throw words into a cauldron and reduce them
down to meaningless phrases. All too often leaders bandy about buzzwords
such as synergy, collective intelligence, and consensus decision making. But
without shared meaning and clear behaviors, new terminology is worthless.
How can you achieve and sustain alignment if you cannot define it in
terms of behavior? The short answer is you can’t. Without providing
explicit behavioral standards and guidelines, people cannot learn and
apply new skills and tools. In a high performance organization, people
share a common language that is broadly understood and applied with