INDUSTRY NEWS
BUILDING BETTER COMPANIES
The Alignment Advantage Are you and your leadership team solving the same problem?
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ou are sitting around the leadership table talking about what is holding the company back. Operations sees one problem. Sales sees another. Finance has its concerns. Someone thinks the company needs better people. Someone else thinks it needs better systems. None of them is necessarily wrong. That’s what makes it difficult. Each person is looking at the business from where they sit, seeing something that is real and trying to solve it. You can have capable people working hard on legitimate problems and still not be working on the same problem. Ask each person on your leadership team, separately. What is the biggest thing holding this company back right now? Then listen.
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If the answers are different, don’t rush to decide who is right. First ask why people responsible for leading the same company are seeing it differently. What looks like a list of separate problems may be something else. A company can start treating every symptom as its own problem. > A new system gets considered. > A new person gets hired. > A new process gets created. > Another initiative gets started. Each may make sense on its own. If you haven’t stepped back far enough to understand what is underneath the problems you’re seeing, you can spend a lot of time fixing things without fixing what is actually holding the company back.
COMMERCIAL CONSTRUCTION & RENOVATION — ISSUE 8, 2026
By Pat Alacqua
The differences in your leadership team’s thinking are worth paying attention to. Your operations leader sees what is happening in the field. Your sales leader sees what is happening before the work is won. Finance sees what happens to the numbers after decisions have been made. You see the whole company and the pressure coming from customers, employees and the future you are trying to build. Those views are all useful, but they don’t automatically add up to a shared understanding of the business. That becomes more important as the company grows. When you were smaller, you could often carry enough of the business in your own head to connect the pieces. You knew the people, the customers, the jobs, the decisions and the problems. You could walk down the hall, ask a question and get to the answer.