Peak Performance Culture

Chapter 3Vertical Alignment

Horizontal alignment is hard, but it is a far cry easier to achieve than vertical alignment. I have facilitated hundreds of strategic planning retreats with leaders of companies and associations for the purpose of creating stronger horizontal alignment. Within a week – and sometimes over the course of a single day – these events generate a well‐articulated core ideology that reflects the executive team's understanding of the market and how to exist within it to generate the desired measures of success. While there have been a few exceptions over the years, most of these retreats have ended with team unity on this core ideology, enthusiasm for what it means for the organization, and a renewed vigor for the future. Yet within weeks of the event, much of this work will have been for naught due to a lack of vertical alignment.

Vertical alignment is much more complicated and time consuming than horizontal alignment. While horizontal alignment is a sort of leadership epistemology, vertical alignment is more akin to a leadership methodology. It is more tactical than strategic, though its origins are in the latter. Unlike horizontal alignment, vertical alignment is never static. Rather, it is a continuous process of identifying, adjusting, eliminating, and adding policies, procedures, and practices – starting with the most visible and influential and continuing through the subtle and innocuous. Vertical alignment requires tenacity, patience, attention to ...