ALIGNMENT
Misaligned Growth: The Calendar Tells the Truth
Sales, marketing, operations, and delivery stop moving together. A founder notices the team agrees, and the calendar does something else.
She reads the weekly summary. The leadership team has been aligned on the year’s three big bets for two months. The strategy doc says so. Every leader can recite the bets. The board has been briefed.
She opens the calendars. Three weeks of leadership team time. She tags every meeting against the three big bets.
The bets account for thirty-one percent of the time.
She looks closer. Sales has been working on a different priority — a quota push that emerged when a competitor moved. Marketing has been working on a brand refresh nobody put in the strategy doc. Operations has been working on tools nobody finished implementing. Delivery has been working on the customers who actually called this week.
None of it is wrong. All of it is happening. None of it is moving in the same direction.
The leadership team is not in disagreement. They are in agreement that no longer travels.
She notices the sales leader who stopped bringing the harder strategic question to the leadership team somewhere in the spring.
She notices the marketing function that is building for the brand it wishes it had, instead of the customers it has.
She notices the operations work that is completing a tool implementation nobody is using anymore.
She notices the delivery team that is quietly carrying the customers nobody else is paying attention to.
She did not choose this. None of the leaders chose it. Each function adjusted to the small urgent thing in its own week and stopped checking against the bets that were supposed to be the year.
She has not named it yet.
She has begun to notice that the four functions are no longer moving as one, and the calendar tells the truth that the strategy doc does not.