Lean Consulting for Enterprises: A 60-Second Leadership Alignment Test

Your leadership team approves the plan. The meeting ends. By the following week, different functions are making decisions that pull the business in different directions.

Before adding another strategy presentation, test what each leader understood.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Izzy Galicia proposes a simple exercise: give every leader a sticky note and one minute to independently record the company’s vision, its three leading measures of success, and their contribution to those results. Compare the answers before anyone explains them.

His framework calls for a concise direction, a focused set of measures, a named owner for each measure, and a consistent basis for decisions. The exercise makes differences in understanding visible so the team can address them.

Look for differences that would change a decision

As you compare responses, separate differences in wording from differences in meaning. Two leaders may describe the same outcome differently. The more consequential gap appears when their answers would lead them to allocate people, money, or capacity differently.

Consider a hypothetical manufacturer. The commercial leader prioritizes accepting more orders. The operations leader prioritizes schedule stability. Finance prioritizes reducing working capital. Each objective may be reasonable, but the team needs a shared approach when an order requires additional inventory and disrupts an existing customer commitment.

Ask what each leader would decide in that situation. Their reasoning will reveal whether the team has agreed on the trade-off or merely acknowledged the same presentation.

Find the cause before rewriting the strategy

Different answers can point to several problems. A strategic change may not have reached every function. A metric may be defined differently across facilities. An incentive may encourage behavior that conflicts with the enterprise objective.

Discuss the discrepancy without turning the exercise into a memory contest. Ask where each interpretation came from and which operating decisions it influences.

If leaders understand the direction but face incompatible incentives, revising the vision statement will leave the underlying problem intact. If priorities have changed repeatedly without a clear decision, the team needs leadership to resolve that ambiguity.

Make the scoreboard usable

A short list of enterprise outcomes needs precise definitions. For every measure, document the calculation, source, reporting period, target, and accountable leader. Confirm that the people reviewing it are looking at the same population and the same time window.

Delivery performance, for example, can look very different depending on whether the business measures against the original customer promise or a subsequently revised date. A shared label on a dashboard does not resolve that distinction.

Keep detailed diagnostic measures available below the leadership scoreboard. A focused executive review still needs enough supporting information to explain a miss and choose a response.

Give accountable leaders a way to act

Assigning responsibility is useful only when the leader can coordinate the work needed to influence the result.

For an outcome that crosses functions, identify the contributing teams, the decisions the accountable leader can make, and the escalation route when priorities conflict. Make those responsibilities explicit before the next review.

The owner should be able to explain the current gap, the action being taken, the support required, and when the team will know whether the action helped. That creates a more useful discussion than asking someone to defend a number they cannot influence alone.

Close the meeting with a decision to test

Choose one discrepancy from the exercise and connect it to a live business decision. Resolve the priority, record the rationale, and name the person responsible for communicating it to affected teams.

At the next operating review, examine what happened. Did the decision reach the people doing the work? Did another target pull them in a different direction? Was a dependency left unresolved?

The sticky note exercise can start the conversation in a minute. Following that conversation through to an observable decision is how leaders learn whether their strategy is guiding execution.

Strengthen the connection between strategy and daily leadership. Explore Incito’s Lean consulting and leadership development services to support clearer priorities and coordinated execution across your business.