For thirty years, I've been having breakfast with Michael Praeger.
Mike is the co-founder and CEO of AvidXchange. He's also my friend, my coaching client of more than twenty-five years, and the co-author of The Journey to CEO Success: 7 Practices for High Growth Leadership. Across all those breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and walks, and across the journey of helping guide AvidXchange from startup to billion-dollar public company, we curated seven practices that the highest-growth CEOs share. The fourth practice is the one I want to talk about today
We called it Achieve Full Alignment.
Leadership team alignment is the shared, behavioral commitment of a senior team to the same priorities, the same owners, and the same definition of success, not just the same words spoken in the same meeting. That is the working definition Mike and I use, and it is the one I want you to hold onto for the next ten minutes. In my experience, it is the practice that either makes or breaks every leadership team I've ever worked with. Most leadership teams that walk out of a planning session feeling unified are not actually aligned. They have an agreement, and there is a world of difference between the two.
Let's get the language right, because words matter here.
An agreement is everyone saying yes to the same words.
Alignment is everyone moving toward the same outcome, even when the words feel uncomfortable.
You can have an agreement without alignment. People say yes in a meeting because they trust you, or because they don't want to extend the meeting, or because they figure they'll sort the details out later. Then they go back to their teams and do what makes sense to them. The strategy fragments quietly. Nobody fights. Nobody flags it. The cracks only show up at the next quarterly review when the numbers don't add up.
You can also have alignment without agreement. A team that has wrestled, pushed back, gotten uncomfortable, and then committed to one direction is far more aligned than a team that smiled and nodded for sixty minutes.
Alignment is not the absence of conflict. Alignment is the resolution of it.
Drift is not a sign of a bad team. Drift is a sign of a busy team. Every leader on your bench is solving complex problems inside their own function. Without a deliberate rhythm, each leader's gravity pulls them toward their own priorities. Sales pull toward growth. Finance pulls toward control. Product pulls toward the roadmap. Operations pull toward stability.
That's not dysfunction. That's physics.
Mike has put it this way publicly: "Rhythm is the key piece to creating organization out of chaos. By definition, in a high-growth company, there's lots of chaos." He's right. The CEO's job is not to eliminate that gravity. You can't. The job is to build a system that realigns the team faster than the gravity pulls them apart. In my experience, a leadership team that aligns at a quarterly offsite will start drifting within two weeks if there is no weekly rhythm to catch it.
When I coach a leadership team — and yes, I have used these on Mike at AvidXchange more times than he probably wants me to admit — I walk them through three questions. They look easy on paper. They are not.
Not what are we trying to do. What are we trying to win? Winning implies a scoreboard, a finish line, a moment where you'll know clearly whether you got there. Most leadership teams can list ten priorities. Very few can name one outcome that, if achieved, would make the quarter a clear win. If you cannot summarize it in one sentence, you are not aligned yet — you are still negotiating.
Notice the word: own. Not "support." Not "contribute to." Own. If two leaders both think they own a result, nobody owns it. If no leader thinks they own a result, it dies in a Slack thread. Singular ownership is the single most underused tool in mid-market leadership. It feels harsh. It is actually a gift because the moment one person clearly owns an outcome, the whole team knows where to send help.
This is where great teams separate from okay ones. A great leadership team clarifies not just what each leader owns, but what each leader needs. Sales needs marketing to deliver a certain volume of leads by week two. Product needs engineering capacity confirmed by Friday. Finance needs the forecast updated before the board meeting. When those needs are named out loud, you have a real working agreement. When they are not, you have silent expectations — and silent expectations are where resentment lives.
Most leadership teams treat alignment like an event. They go offsite. They build a strategy. They high-five. They go home. Three weeks later, the cracks reappear. Ten weeks later, they're scheduling another offsite to "realign."
Listen: alignment is not an event. It is a rhythm.
A healthy leadership team has three layers of rhythm. A weekly leadership team meeting — short, focused, status-driven. Use a Red-Yellow-Green check-in so the team can see at a glance who's on track, who's at risk, and where help is needed. This is where drift gets caught early. A monthly progress review — a deeper look at the scoreboard, not the to-do list. Are we still on track to win the quarter? What changed? What needs to change? And a quarterly planning session — the heartbeat. Reset priorities, recommit ownership, identify the next set of Winning Moves, and re-align before the gravity of the day-to-day pulls people apart again.
This is the Think Plan Do® methodology in action. Think hard about what to win. Plan with clear ownership. Do with a rhythm that catches drift before it becomes damaged. It is the same set of practices that helped Mike and his AvidXchange leadership team scale through every stage of growth — startup, mid-market, unicorn, IPO.
If you are the CEO, hear me on this. Your leadership team is not going to align itself. Alignment is the one job you cannot delegate.
You don't have to have all the answers. You do have to create the space for the team to wrestle, decide, and commit. You have to be the one who notices the silent nod and stops the meeting to ask, “What are you actually agreeing to right now?" You have to be the one who says, "We are not leaving this room until one person owns this."
That is uncomfortable. It is slower in the moment. It is so much faster over the course of a year.
The leadership teams that win are not the ones who agree the most. They are the ones who re-align the most. They expect drift. They build a rhythm to catch it. And they are not afraid to put a hard, honest conversation on the table when the drift shows up.
If you're feeling the silent drift on your leadership team, the kind of drift where everyone is busy, everyone is well-intentioned, and yet the quarter keeps slipping, you are not alone. We see it constantly. It is, in fact, the most common reason CEOs reach out to us.
If you are the CEO and you're reading this, listen. Your leadership team is not going to align itself, that is your job.
Not because you have to have all the answers. You don't, but because you have to create the space for the team to wrestle, decide, and commit. You have to be the one who notices the silent nod and stops the meeting to ask, "What are you actually agreeing to right now?" You have to be the one who says, "We are not leaving this room until we know who owns this."
It's uncomfortable, it's slower in the moment, but it is so much faster over a quarter, a year, a decade.
Before you close this article, do one thing for your team.
Take Rhythm Systems' free Organizational Effectiveness Test. Twelve questions. Five minutes. It will tell you, in plain language, where your team is aligned and where the drift is hiding, across your strategic plan, your quarterly priorities, and the weekly meetings where most alignment quietly dies.
Leadership team alignment is the shared, behavioral commitment of a senior team to the same priorities, the same owners, and the same definition of success. It goes beyond verbal agreement. A team is aligned when each leader knows what the team is trying to win, who owns each outcome, and what they need from each other to make it happen. In The Journey to CEO Success, Patrick Thean and Michael Praeger call this "Achieve Full Alignment" — the fourth of seven practices that separate high-growth CEOs from the rest.
Agreement is verbal — everyone says yes to the same words in a meeting. Alignment is behavioral — everyone acts in service of the same outcome, even when the work gets uncomfortable. A team can easily have agreement without alignment, which is why so many leadership teams leave a meeting feeling unified and end the quarter feeling fragmented.
Drift is not a sign of a bad team. It's a sign of a busy team. Each leader's day-to-day responsibilities create a natural gravity that pulls them toward their own function's priorities. Without a deliberate weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythm, that gravity quietly pulls the team apart — usually within two to three weeks of any alignment moment.
The most effective leadership teams realign on three rhythms: weekly status check-ins (Red-Yellow-Green), monthly progress reviews against the quarterly scoreboard, and quarterly planning sessions to reset priorities and ownership. Alignment is a rhythm, not an annual event.
The CEO's job is not to have every answer. It is to create the space where the team can wrestle, decide, and commit. That means surfacing silent disagreement, insisting on singular ownership of outcomes, and protecting the rhythm that catches drift early. Alignment is the one responsibility a CEO cannot delegate.
The three questions are: (1) What are we trying to win this quarter? (2) What does each of us own to make that happen? (3) What do we need from each other to succeed? When a leadership team can answer all three in one sentence each, real alignment is in place.
Patrick Thean and Michael Praeger detail the "Achieve Full Alignment" practice — and six other practices for high-growth leadership — in The Journey to CEO Success: 7 Practices for High Growth Leadership (Advantage Books, 2024). The book draws on more than thirty years of coaching that helped guide AvidXchange from startup to billion-dollar public company.