When we asked a room of senior communication and HR professionals whether their executive team was aligned, 54% said no.

That result did not surprise us. Our third global research study, drawing on interviews with more than 50 executive and senior leaders across five continents, confirms what we’ve been finding since 2018.

The gap between what leaders think is understood and what the organization is actually doing hasn’t shifted across sectors, geographies, or organization sizes in seven years.

If you work in communication or HR, you already sense this. You see the difference between what leaders say in the room and what shows up in decisions and behavior afterward. That gap between what leaders say and what they actually do erodes trust faster than almost anything else an organization can do to itself.

This is a governance problem, not a comms problem

Most organizations respond to misalignment by communicating more—more messages, more channels, carefully crafted narratives. It feels like progress. Yet it rarely achieves it.

Misalignment is a governance problem. It persists because nobody clearly owns it, most don’t measure it directly, and the organizations that do address it treat it as an event (think strategy launch, leadership offsite, cascaded talking points) rather than a continuous leadership discipline.

When we asked our research participants who is accountable for strategic alignment in their organization, the answer was consistently the CEO, the C-suite, or everyone—which, in practice, means no one has it clearly defined.

Jeppe Hansgaard, CEO and change leadership advisor at Innovisor, puts it plainly. Across 16,000 employees, when asked whether they “work as one organization,” the average score sits around three out of five. The average across organizations is three. “A lot of organizations talk about working as one, but they do everything else than working as one. That tells you something is off.”

Now add AI to the mix.

AI amplifies whatever already exists in an organization. Where alignment is solid, execution accelerates. Where it is fragile, fragmentation accelerates at machine scale, and the misalignment tax compounds.

What the misalignment tax is actually costing

The research identifies four areas where misalignment shows up, and all four will feel familiar.

• Time. Around a third of leadership time goes to firefighting, another quarter to realigning priorities that weren’t clear in the first place, and roughly 30% to fixing issues that better shared direction would have prevented.
• Capacity. Work gets duplicated because two teams didn’t know the other was doing the same thing. Projects get reworked because they were focused on the wrong priorities. And initiatives don’t get finished because decision-making is unclear.
• Speed. Decisions take longer than they should, execution slows, and the ability to pivot when conditions shift gets compromised.
• Relational cost—which is the quietest and most corrosive of all. Reduced trust in leadership, higher disengagement, good people leaving, and false harmony, where everyone appears aligned in the room but doesn’t follow through.

Research from Cascade found that 37% of company value is lost annually due to poor execution. Employee mentions of “misalignment” on Glassdoor in reference to leadership increased 149% in one year. People are no longer just feeling it—they’re naming it.

Where to start

Before any meaningful shift can happen, communication and HR professionals need a mandate. And to earn a mandate, they need evidence.

Start by coming together and agreeing on what each is observing. Then run a simple scan across a sample of leaders to see what they believe the top organizational priorities are. In one organization, the senior leadership group came up with 21 priorities compared with the executive team’s six. That kind of divergence is your business case. Take it to the chief of staff, frame it as a governance observation, and that conversation, done well, is where the mandate comes from.

Four shifts that change the equation

Once you have the mandate, there are four shifts that separate organizations actively enabling alignment from those still assuming it. This is not the work that any one function can do alone. It requires a cross-functional coalition of HR, comms, and chiefs of staff working alongside strategy and technology.

• From a group of leaders to a leadership group. The executive team has to do the real work of surfacing differences and resolving them, building genuine shared clarity on the strategy and what it requires, rather than performative consensus. Getting there requires an expert facilitator. HR and communication, working with the chief of staff, help build the capability that sustains it.
• From proxies to proof. Engagement surveys and financial metrics don’t tell you whether people understand and share the interpretation of the strategy or are making the decisions that reflect it. The shift is toward direct measurement across three dimensions: whether people can articulate the strategy in their own words, whether the same story is consistently told across functions and levels, and whether decisions and resources reflect the stated priorities. Without direct measurement, accountability for alignment is simply not possible.
• From cascade to conversations. A cascade moves information, while dialogue creates shared meaning. Three conversations matter: the executive conversation, where the leadership group builds genuine shared clarity; the public conversation, the organizational dialogue that connects strategy to how people work every day; and the private conversation, where people connect the strategy to their own role and contribution. Building every leader’s capability to have genuine strategic conversations at all these levels is the highest-leverage investment most organizations are not currently making.
• From annual to agile. Within three months of a strategy launch, Innovisor research shows 80% of leaders have moved on, just as employees are beginning to absorb it. The shift is to a continuous rhythm, with alignment as a standing practice in existing meetings rather than being an annual event. As Henry Ruiz, CEO, puts it: “There’s no perfect strategy. Learn it deeply, understand it well, and hold it lightly. You’ve got to keep it alive.”

If you’re wondering what the practical role for communication and HR looks like inside each of these shifts, that’s exactly what the on-demand webinar covers. It’s 45 minutes well spent.

The opportunity

The ask for communication and HR professionals here isn’t to take on more. It’s to focus on what you already do—sense-making, listening, leadership capability development, organizational development, change management, building alignment as an enduring practice—where it can have the greatest impact. And to do so in deliberate partnership with the functions that carry the other elements.

The organizations that treat alignment as a leadership discipline will hold together better, adapt faster, and execute more effectively. Leaders, teams, and organizations naturally drift apart. The capability is knowing when—and having the courage and tools—to bring them back together.

Go deeper

From Groupthink to Governance, the full Clear Leaders research paper provides the complete picture of the state of strategic alignment and leadership, the underlying issues, and the shifts needed to close the gap.

Download the full paper and the Executive Summary Infographic: clearleaders.com.au

Watch the on-demand Poppulo webinar here.

Zora Artis, GAICD, IABC Fellow, SCMP, ACC, is CEO of Artis Advisory and co-founder of The Alignment People and Clear Leaders. She coaches, advises, and facilitates C-suite and senior teams through change and complexity—turning competing priorities into clear decisions, stronger cohesion, and coordinated action.

Wayne Aspland, MAICD, FCSCE, is a leadership, strategy, and change communication professional. He helps organizations and teams realize their potential in today’s new world of work—a world where the opportunities created by AI are balanced against the strain of accelerating change and uncertainty.