Episode 269: The Cost of Misalignment—and How to Get Your Team Back on Track

Darrin Peppard (00:00.888)

All right, my friends, welcome into the Leaning Into Leadership podcast, episode 269. Today, I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about what happens when our leadership team is not in true alignment. I wanna talk about the impact of that misalignment, but more importantly, I wanna talk about some steps that you as a leader can take to get your team back in alignment and really.

heading towards being a high-performance leadership team. So let's start here. Let me ask you a simple question. Have you ever walked out of a leadership team meeting and thought, okay, we just spent an hour talking and I'm not really sure if we moved anything forward? Or maybe, maybe you've said this about your leadership team. We've got a strong team. Our people really care. They show up every day, they put in the work and yet,

something just feels off. Like we're really close, but we're just not clicking. That is what I want to talk about today. Because in my experience, when things feel like this, it's not an issue of talent. It's not an issue of effort. It's an issue of alignment. And the problem with misalignment is it doesn't just sit up and announce itself and say, hey, I'm the problem.

Misalignment doesn't show up in big obvious failures or catastrophically poor decisions. Instead, misalignment shows up in little ways over time. And the worst part about misalignment is it slowly starts to tear at the fabric of your leadership team. Now, before we dive in and get really deep into this conversation, I wanna take a moment.

to thank the sponsors of the podcast because honestly both of them play a really big role in helping teams stay aligned in some really important ways. First, let's talk about our friends at Digicoach. One of the biggest places I see misalignment in schools is in instructional leadership. We have different leaders walk into classrooms and they're looking for different things. They give different types of feedback.

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they emphasize different priorities. What happens? Teachers get mixed messages. They're not sure what really matters most. And that leads to confusion. And what I love about Digicoach is it really brings the clarity and consistency to that process that is so incredibly necessary. Digicoach helps leadership teams align around what they're looking for in instruction, how they're gonna give feedback,

and how they're going to support growth among their staff. So instead of everyone looking and doing their own thing, you're going to operate from a shared understanding from the same place with the same focus. That is where the real impact happens. If you want to learn more, head over to digicoach.com and check them out. Make sure you let them know that you heard about them here on the Leaning Into Leadership podcast for special partner pricing.

Again, that's digicoach.com. Today's episode is also brought to you by our friends at HeyTutor. And again, it comes back to alignment. We can say that student learning is our top priority, but if our supports aren't aligned, if tutoring, intervention, and instruction aren't all working together, we're not gonna get the results that we wanna see. That is where HeyTutor comes in. HeyTutor provides high dosage

tutoring in both English language arts and mathematics that's aligned to your standards, aligned to your classroom instruction, and aligned to your students' needs. The best thing, HeyTutor handles all the logistics. They handle staffing, training, and management, so your team doesn't have to be stretched any thinner than it already is. Look, if it's really about making sure what you say matters,

actually shows up in practice, HeyTutor is somebody that you want to have a conversation with. I have a link for you down in the show notes that takes you to heytutor.com and lets them know that you heard about him here on the Leading Into Leadership podcast. Go hit that link in the show notes and check out HeyTutor. Okay, folks, let's talk about this idea of misalignment. Because again, misalignment isn't something that's going to announce itself. It's not going to be obvious.

Darrin Peppard (04:49.943)

but it could be anywhere inside of your leadership team. So let's talk about where misalignment will show up. It will show up when the people on your team have slightly different priorities. I go back to when I first became a building administrator, when I was a new building principal. My team, we absolutely were not aligned.

I may have said, here's where I want us to go, but I had other members of my team that I think had slightly different priorities. We weren't aligned. Another place that misalignment shows up is communicating things just a little bit differently. When we're not intentional to align what our communication will look like, we may be saying what we think is the same thing that we heard at the table, but ultimately, what's being heard?

maybe creates a little bit of confusion. Another place that misalignment shows up, we walk away from the table. Everybody thinks we have the same goal, but they get interpreted in different ways. What makes this really tricky is you can have an extremely strong team. Great people doing hard work, showing up every day for the right reasons, but they could still be misaligned.

And I'll tell you this, I work with a lot of leadership teams and I would argue that most of them, nearly all of them, are filled with incredibly talented, committed, dedicated, hardworking leaders. That is absolutely not the issue. The issue with most teams, and the reason why I push this so much with the teams I work with, is they haven't set the time aside, they haven't made the space to truly

ensure that alignment exists. And honestly, that comes with a cost. Let's walk through the cost of misalignment. The first thing is decision fatigue. When your team is not aligned, every decision seems to take longer than it should. You find yourself revisiting conversations or seeing the same thing on the agenda week after week when should have been quick and easy. You may find yourself

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especially if you're the leader of the group, you may find yourself saying, why am I having to clarify this again? I really felt like in our last meeting, we came away with a lot of clarity and now I gotta come back and clarify what it is I'm looking for again. You spend all this energy trying to get caught up and trying to get on the same page, but you're doing it in the middle of the work. It's really hard to get aligned when you're deep in the weeds and heavy in the work.

Now, this decision fatigue tends to lead to staff confusion. The people that you are charged with leading listen to every message that comes from every member of your leadership team. And when those messages aren't consistent, even if they're just slightly different, it starts to create uncertainty. Where there is uncertainty, trust will start to erode. And again, it's not because somebody's doing anything wrong, it's again, you're not aligned.

The third thing that happens, initiative overload. Without alignment, everything feels like it's important. So you take on more, you try to do more, and pretty soon, nothing gets the attention that it actually needs. So we're only doing a little bit on each of these things, instead of really pouring ourselves into the things that matter. The fourth thing that happens as a result of misalignment is leaders get frustrated.

And this is one that's not typically said out loud, but it starts to show up in members of your team thinking to themselves, man, why are we not on the same page? Or why is it that this feels a whole lot harder than it should? Over time, that frustration starts to build. When that frustration builds, that's when the fabric of your team really starts to erode. And that's when honestly, the members of your team

especially if you're the leader, they start to lose a little bit of faith in you. They start to maybe start looking around and thinking, hey, maybe it's time for me to go take on the next challenge. We don't want to see our teams erode simply because we haven't been intentional to set aside time to really get our team all on the same page and firing on all soldiers. The last thing that happens is lost time. Your meetings just go in circles.

Darrin Peppard (09:38.761)

Your conversations really don't lead to action. You end up with these days that are full, but really not productive. So I want you to think about this. Ultimately, you don't have a problem with time. You don't have a problem with talent. You have a problem with alignment. So I want to really share something here that I think goes well with this particular piece. And I think

It stresses the importance of why we have to work so hard and be so intentional to create that alignment on our team. When I first became a high school principal, the superintendent that I worked under, and I worked under three different superintendents, but the one who hired me for this position, at the time, I thought, this man is incredibly sharp. He just always felt like he was five or six steps ahead of us.

he asked such incredible and intentional questions. He did a great job of guiding conversations in a way that helped, think, all of us see the bigger picture, not just from our building, but from how this impacted the entire district. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't really recognize it when he was doing it. It's taken me some time and it certainly took some reflection.

took me sitting in my own superintendent chair to realize what he was doing wasn't just thinking ahead. It wasn't that he was playing chess and we were playing checkers, although that was true as well. The truth was he was getting us fully aligned. Before we made decisions, we were already in alignment. Before any new initiative rolled out, we were in alignment.

When we walked into conversations with our staff, we were in alignment. It was wonderful. Now it took some time for me to pick up on this and learn this, but because we were aligned, things could move faster, communication was clear. I think our leadership really felt purposeful. Contrast that to me leading in my early career. I wish I could have translated what he did into my own leadership.

Darrin Peppard (12:05.888)

Because as the leader of my building, I was just running from one place to the next, putting out fires. You guys, if you listen to the show regularly, you know this. I was just trying to keep all the balls in the air.

had a pretty good team, but we weren't aligned. And so nothing really changed. Nothing got better.

Fast forward a couple of years. I had two members of my team leave to go take on their own principalships. I hired two new members of my team.

another member of my team moved to a different location and I had hired that position and filled that position. So now I had a team that was all handpicked by me. And I felt like it's important for us to all get on the same page. Let me see if I can work to help them really feel strong about who our team is. So I decided, hey, we're gonna have a leadership retreat. Let me be clear.

When I talk about retreats, I'm not talking about, hey, let's just get away to get away. It wasn't just about team bonding or anything like that, just for the sake of team bonding. What I wanted to do was I wanted to create time and space to go do the work that we couldn't do in our day-to-day operations. You see, here's the thing about alignment. It doesn't happen in passing. It doesn't happen by accident. And it certainly doesn't happen in between interruptions.

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that you are faced with on a day-to-day basis. If you want your team to be aligned, you have to do it on purpose. And that is what a well-designed retreat allows you to do. Now, I found this out, honestly, by happenstance, but over time, what I've discovered is there's incredible power in a well-designed leadership retreat. Really strong leadership retreats.

gives your team the opportunity to get super clear on what actually matters. It gives you an opportunity to define priorities in a way that everyone understands. You see, when we have those one-hour meetings, those real quick meetings, those ones where somebody might open the door and say, hey, I need to talk to you for a few minutes, and so people are in and out, in and out, in and out, you don't get that opportunity to walk away with everybody fully understanding.

because there's not necessarily an opportunity to ask clarifying questions or to push back a little bit and say, you know, I'm curious about that. How would this work or what might be our steps to make that happen? So when your team has this intentional time and this intentional space to truly dive in and get crystal clear about what matters, it's incredible what ultimately happens.

Another thing that these really well-designed leadership retreats allow you to do is get super clear on role clarification. Then there's no confusion once things start happening, once the year gets rolling, about who is responsible for what. When you have extreme role clarity, man, your team is going to fire on all cylinders, but you have to do it intentionally.

It can't just be, here's a sheet of paper, this is what I laid out, you're responsible for this. It doesn't get the job done.

Darrin Peppard (15:44.172)

Here's the reality about this alignment. When you are intentional, when it is in place, everything gets easier. Decision-making, it happens faster. Communication, it's clear. Your trust within the team, and this was, I'll be honest with you, I think this was the number one thing that led me from being frustrated with my previous team to saying, love my team with this team.

was we worked so intentionally and we developed such trust within the team that the work felt manageable. Again, I've lived both sides of it. I've lived the version where everything was much harder than it should have been. And I've lived that version where everybody's aligned and moving forward together. And I can tell you, they feel totally different.

Let me give you something real simple to think about as you reflect about your team. If I were to come in, work with your team, and I sat down with each member of your team, and I asked them, what are the top three priorities right now? Do you think I would get the same answer?

If the answer's no, that's not a problem with your people. That's alignment. And it's one that's easy to solve. It's worth solving. So how do we do it? Let me give you a tool here, something I think is really practical that you could take back to your team right now. In fact, I wrote a blog about this earlier in the weekend. I'll put a link in the show notes to you so that you can go and check that out.

I think it's super important, but it's a simple protocol. It's a protocol I call start, stop, continue, consider. Here's why I love this in the context of alignment. One of the bigger challenges that leadership teams face is we just keep adding more. We keep putting more on the plate and we don't take a step back. We don't get up on the balcony and look at our plate and say, what needs to come off the plate?

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That just adds to the misalignment, adds to the confusion. So here's how this works.

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If I were to sit down with your leadership team, whether it's one of those retreat settings or even if it's just a dedicated block of time and walk through these four prompts, it would be incredibly powerful. And the first thing that I would ask is, what do we need to start doing right now? What is missing right now? What are the gaps in our leadership? What are the things that we're not doing that genuinely would move us forward?

Let each one think about that. Not make it a dialogue, just think about it, jot down some ideas. Second thing, what do we need to stop doing? This is the one that a lot of teams struggle with, probably more than anything. We're not aligned with priorities, but we keep doing these things. These things that are draining our time and energy that aren't leading to any impact.

but we just keep holding onto it because that's just the way we've always done it.

There are things we need to say, we just need to stop doing this. In fact, every time I have facilitated this protocol, and I have done it a lot, almost every single time, there will be things that come up that we should stop doing, that at least one leader in the room will say, we've already agreed we could stop doing that. But there's this level of confusion where somebody thinks we still need to keep doing it. Why? Because we probably talked about stopping doing it.

when that person was out of the room because they got interrupted. Be intentional. What do we need to stop doing?

Darrin Peppard (19:55.53)

Here's the truth. Every time you say we should start doing something, it probably ought to be something you should say, let's stop doing. There should be balance there. Don't just keep starting things. There's got to be some things we got to say, okay, it's time to let this go. Third thing, I would ask, what are some things that you're doing now that you need to continue doing? In other words, what's working? Where are we seeing success? What is it we need to protect, not lose as a part of this process?

Let's lean into the things we're doing well. Don't lose sight of those things just because something shiny comes along that we might start doing. And then finally.

What do we need to consider? What might be coming next? What do we need to be thinking about from a strategic standpoint that we might consider for down the road?

Where do we need to slow down and think before we act? You see, a lot of times people will say, we should start doing this and we should start doing this and we should start doing this. Most of those things probably should go to your consider list first because it's a really nice space that you can hold onto it and say, this is a really good idea, but we're not quite ready for it. Or let's make sure we've taken the correct steps so that this will be successful. That's a

big takeaway from me, from that superintendent I mentioned earlier. He was so strategic about starting to put things kind of in that consider space where they weren't necessarily actionable, but hey, that's a great idea, but let's just hold on to it for a

Darrin Peppard (21:37.673)

Why does all of this matter when we talk about alignment?

If I ask each member of your leadership team these four questions and I get completely different answers, that would be a signal that there is definitely a lot of misalignment. But when you walk through this process together, that's the magic. You start to build this shared understanding. You start to find shared priorities. There's some shared direction. Honestly, there's some shared ownership in what we will start doing, what we will stop doing, what we will consider doing.

and what we'll continue doing.

Darrin Peppard (22:17.287)

If you want to go deeper into this, like I said, I break it down really well in the blog that I did earlier in the week. So again, there's a link in the show notes and go check that out. I went into some pretty good detail on how you follow this protocol. And I'll be honest with you. If that's a protocol you're interested in, just reach out to me. I am happy to jump on a zoom and just share as much as I can about it. Or if you're thinking, Hey, I need somebody to come in and work with my team on this. Let's have a conversation. You guys know how to get ahold of me.

Send me an email, Darren at road.awesome.net. Let's talk. But even if you just take these four questions back to your team, man, what a powerful step that could be. Honestly, this is the kind of work that becomes so incredibly powerful when you give it the time and space it deserves, like in a leadership retreat setting. I'm telling you folks, the leadership retreat is such a powerful way to align your team before...

you get deep into the work. Now, if you're thinking, I wonder what that would look like for my team, especially as you're heading into your summer planning. Look, this is the work I get to do with leadership teams all over the country. I get to help them step out of the day to day. I get to help them get clear. I get to help them really build the alignment that's gonna last through that school year. And if it's something that you're even considering, let's just have a conversation.

and at no pressure, let's just think about together, what is it that your team needs? How can we make that happen? Because at the end of the day, your team doesn't need to work harder. They need to work together. They need to work on the right things in the right way in full alignment. So here's what I wanna leave you with today, a little pep talk to wrap this up. Misalignment, like I said earlier, is quiet.

but it is very costly. It costs you time, it costs you clarity, it costs your team energy, sometimes it even costs trust. And the fix is not working harder. It's working together. It's working purposefully. So don't wait for things to slow down because they won't. Create the space, set aside the time, bring someone, whether it's me or someone else.

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When I first did my first leadership retreat, I just used one of my instructional coaches. Bring somebody who can facilitate the work for you because you as the leader, you deserve to work with the team, not facilitating the team. There's a huge difference right there. Get somebody to come in and help you do that because if you get your team really truly aligned around what matters most, that's gonna be impactful.

that's going to set you up for success. You are going to feel the difference when you're working shoulder to shoulder with a team that is truly aligned. That, that's how you build your next mile on the road to awesome. Hey folks, thank you so much for listening into this episode of the Leaning Into Leadership podcast. If there was something in here that resonated with you and you think, man, I know somebody else who needs to hear this, please share this episode with them so they get the opportunity.

catch on and jump into some of this Leaning Into Leadership magic that we're sharing each and every week. As always, make sure you subscribe, that you rate, that you review, because all of those things help us spread the word of what we're doing here at Road to Awesome and on the Leaning Into Leadership podcast. So as always, folks, get out there, have a Road to Awesome week.