Alignment or coherence? They aren't the same thing
Alignment says everyone should think and act the same way. Coherence says something narrower and harder: a small set of norms we cannot afford for variance on, while everything else is free to look completely different.
Some consultants will sell you cultural alignment. For execution, what you actually need is coherence. They aren't the same thing.
Finance runs on precision and control. Sales runs on speed and relationships. Operations runs on whatever keeps the lights on today. Aligning them would mean flattening what makes each of them good at their job. Nobody actually wants that, and it's not what execution needs anyway.
What execution needs is narrower.
A commitment made in one part of the business has to count in every part of it.
Pace has to hold wherever one team's deadline depends on another.
Risk has to travel to whoever needs to hear it, not stay wherever it's comfortable.
That's the core, and it's small on purpose.
Everything else, how fast a team decides internally, how it prefers to challenge itself - can stay exactly as different as it already is. What can't differ is whether two teams can disagree at a boundary and resolve it themselves, without escalating.
That's not fragmentation. That's coherence doing its job properly.
Get this wrong, and you won't see it in an engagement score. You'll see it in the handover that stalled, the commitment that quietly stopped counting the moment it crossed a boundary.
Most culture work goes wide when it should go narrow. Naming the few norms you can't afford variance on, and leaving everything else alone, is more useful than a values statement everyone can agree with and nobody can act on. That's the work in Leadership.
Where would your core fail first?
This is part of lever 7 (Culture for Execution) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. See the full framework →
Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →
Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.
The one-pager linked below helps you to see which things fall into which group, and gives you the test to run across your own business. See it on LinkedIn →