Is everyone on the same page?
This simple question is the most important thing you can ask your team.
Alignment is what makes the parts of an organisation work as one. When it holds, decisions move faster, teams trust each other, and the strategy reaches the work. When it erodes, the same effort produces less, and things start to unravel.
This assessment shows you how aligned everyone is today, where they diverge, and where to start, so effort translates into progress.
Set up Alignment Check →
The costliest gap is the one you cannot see
Every organisation has a form of dark matter. A gap between what leaders believe they have made clear and what everyone else actually understood. You cannot see it directly, yet it bends every decision, every handover, and every deadline around it, which is exactly why it survives.
The research is sobering. Almost every leader says their strategy is clear. But most of the people delivering it can't name the priorities, and the top team itself rarely agrees on what they are.
You have seen where this ends up. A strategy everyone nodded along to, then taken ten different ways the moment the meeting broke up. It surfaces as wasted effort, slow decisions, and work that unravels in the space between teams.
Alignment is agreement, across every level, about what matters and how you work together. It is invisible until you measure it, and it erodes if left unchecked. The assessment shows you where it holds, and where it has drifted apart.
Five pillars, one picture.
The assessment reads five pillars. Each one is a place where the gap between intent and reality tends to open.
Start solo. Bring the team when you're ready.
No jargon and no long forms. You rate a set of short, specific statements about how your organisation really works, across the five pillars. Twenty-five of them, eight minutes, and the picture builds as you go.
- 1Take it yourselfEight minutes, one leader, on any device. You get your own picture of the five pillars straight away.
- 2Invite the teamWhen you want the fuller truth, invite your team by email. Their answers are pooled and confidential.
- 3See the gapsCompare the leadership view with the team's, group by group, and see exactly where you diverge.
Someone two levels below the leadership team can explain how their week's work connects to a specific strategic choice we have made.
Decisions get made, stay made, and are not quietly re-litigated outside the room where they were settled.
When something goes wrong, our default is to surface it early because people trust that surfacing is safer than concealing.
Your alignment, mapped.
The moment you finish your own assessment, you get a clear picture you can act on.
Your organisation scores strongly on Strategy and weakly on Teamwork. The plan is clear. The connective tissue to deliver it is not.
Pricing
Leader View
- Twenty-five statements across the five pillars
- A radar of where you sit, against the typical pattern
- A weakest-link diagnosis with recommendations
- A PDF for your records
Team View
- Invite your team by email, in one go
- The overall shape across the five pillars
- A first look at where you stand as a team
- A taster of the full team picture
Team View Pro
- Compare up to three groups and the gaps between them
- Statement-by-statement analysis and your key priority
- An in-depth summary and a facilitation guide to debrief with your team
- Report PDF download and a share link
Aligned organisations perform better.
When an organisation is aligned, everyone is working on the things that actually matter, and the effort compounds instead of cancelling out. That shows up in the numbers. McKinsey's long-running work on organisational health, in which a clear and commonly understood direction is one of nine dimensions, finds that healthy organisations deliver three times the total shareholder return of unhealthy ones, and that companies which improved their health saw an 18% rise in EBITDA within a year. Pooled across the academic literature, organisations whose managers genuinely agree on the strategy perform better.
Leaders know it matters, and they name it as the thing that gets in the way. Asked to identify the single greatest challenge to executing strategy, more managers pointed to a failure to align than to any other cause. Misalignment is also worse than simply unhelpful. Across a study of 136 teams, a manager communicating a compelling vision while quietly out of step with the CEO actively damaged their team's agreement on the strategy, which is a good argument for checking the direction before putting more energy behind it.
The catch is that alignment is genuinely hard to judge from the top. Where middle managers and supervisors rate their company around the middle of the pack on strategic alignment, the typical top team rates the same company well above average. The optimism is consistent and it runs in one direction, so a leader who asks only themselves will land somewhere predictably flattering. In the same research, a third of the leaders charged with implementing the strategy could not list even one of its priorities.
One story is worth the price of the exercise on its own. A global company's staff reported in satisfaction and pulse surveys that they felt motivated, while performance stayed flat. A health diagnostic found what the surveys had missed: people were busy, content and working on the wrong things. Engaged but comfortable, as the report put it, like being in a warm bath. Engagement and alignment are not the same, and only one of them tells you whether all that effort is pointed the right way.
The things worth checking before you start.
Yes. The free Leader View gives you a full picture in eight minutes, on your own. Inviting the team is how you test your view against theirs when you are ready.
Yes. Team answers are pooled and shown together, never attributed to a person, which is what lets people be honest about where the organisation really stands.
Five completed answers unlock the pooled view, which is what keeps it confidential. The free Team View is capped at 5 people, so everyone you invite needs to reply. Pro gives you room, up to 50.
Eight minutes. Twenty-five statements across the five pillars are enough to locate the gaps clearly, and the signal is where the pillars diverge, which shows up fast.
It is yours. We email your report and keep your results private to you, with no spam. Participant emails and answers are deleted automatically twelve months after an assessment closes, and you can ask us to delete everything sooner.