“Alignment doesn’t mean agreement. It means you understand the ‘why’ well enough to disagree and commit.” – Jeff Bezos
Executive Execution and Alignment: The First Team Mindset in Action
In high-performing organizations, executive teams operate not as a collection of functional leaders, but as a single, aligned unit—what Patrick Lencioni coined in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team as the “first team.” This concept reframes the executive’s role: their primary allegiance must lie with the executive team and enterprise-wide goals, not just their functional domain.
This simple but radical shift lies at the heart of organizational execution. When executives prioritize their first team, strategic clarity increases, silos erode, and decision-making accelerates. When they don’t, even the most visionary strategies collapse under the weight of internal friction, misaligned incentives, and political infighting.
A Historical Look at Executive Team Structures
The evolution of executive alignment mirrors the evolution of corporate management theory. In the 1920s and 30s, Alfred Sloan’s management philosophy at General Motors introduced the idea of decentralized leadership with centralized coordination. Sloan’s executives were empowered to run their divisions but were expected to align through formal reporting structures and rigorous financial controls. While efficient for its time, this model often stifled collaboration across functions.
The 1950s and 60s saw the emergence of Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives (MBO), which emphasized the importance of aligning individual goals with corporate objectives. But MBO often failed to foster deep cross-functional collaboration. Functional leaders met goals in isolation, creating strong departments but weak enterprises.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rise of Agile methodologies brought new focus to cross-functional teams at the operational level, but executive teams were slow to adopt the same principles. The language of collaboration—OKRs, squads, alignment—was embraced. The practice, less so.
What High-Performing Executive Teams Actually Do
High-performing executive teams distinguish themselves in three key areas: shared goals, authentic collaboration, and fast, durable decision-making. These teams do not avoid conflict. They embrace it early, address it directly, and emerge with true commitment—what Amazon refers to as “disagree and commit.”
Case Study: Netflix’s “Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled” Framework
Netflix offers a strong model of what alignment looks like in practice. Reed Hastings and his leadership team focused not on controlling execution from the top, but on providing clarity of context. Executives invested time in ensuring all functions understood the company’s strategic priorities, allowing teams to make decentralized decisions within a unified framework.
This approach was particularly evident during Netflix’s international expansion. Instead of micromanaging how each market should be approached, the executive team established a clear vision for global growth, clarified success metrics, and let regional teams make executional decisions. When friction did arise—such as competing priorities between content, legal, and product teams—it was addressed directly in executive forums, not buried in backchannel conversations.
Case Study: Microsoft Under Satya Nadella
Under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft was known for its internal rivalries, particularly between Windows, Office, and Server teams. Satya Nadella’s leadership transformed this dynamic. He redefined the executive team’s purpose around customer-centric outcomes, not internal competition.
Executives were evaluated not only on their functional performance but also on their contribution to shared goals. Cross-functional product initiatives like Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps required deep coordination between engineering, product, marketing, and sales. Success in these areas stemmed from Nadella’s insistence that executives behave as a single team—even when their personal KPIs didn’t align perfectly.
Common Patterns of Dysfunction
Poor executive alignment isn’t always loud. In many cases, it looks quiet, polite, and even productive on the surface. But beneath the facade, dysfunction festers in several recognizable patterns:
Pattern 1: The Two-Meeting Problem
In many organizations, alignment is theatrical. Executives “agree” in formal meetings, then hold separate alignment sessions with their own teams where they reinterpret decisions to fit their department’s priorities. This pattern creates execution whiplash. Teams receive conflicting directives, dependencies are missed, and resentment builds between departments.
One mid-sized enterprise SaaS company experienced this firsthand during a major platform rewrite. The executive team had signed off on the product and engineering roadmap. But the CMO, uncomfortable with reduced short-term feature delivery, directed her team to continue pushing tactical campaign demands outside the agreed prioritization. Over time, marketing and engineering clashed, and product deadlines slipped. Alignment, in name only, proved worthless.
Pattern 2: Functional Heroism Over Enterprise Thinking
Another common failure mode is the presence of “functional heroes”—leaders who consistently deliver within their silo but do so at the expense of the broader organization. These executives are often rewarded for short-term wins, even when those wins create friction across the company.
A notable example occurred at a fintech company where the Head of Sales operated autonomously, closing large custom deals that required significant engineering effort. Product and engineering leaders were rarely consulted before contract signing. The company hit quarterly sales targets, but customer churn increased, morale in engineering plummeted, and the roadmap became unmanageable. The executive team failed to challenge the misalignment because the short-term revenue masked deeper execution issues.
How to Build True Executive Alignment
Establishing alignment among executive peers requires deliberate effort, not just quarterly strategy meetings. High-performing teams consistently practice the following:
1. Clarify the Shared Mission
Executives must agree not only on company goals, but also on what they are willing to trade off to achieve them. Alignment is not about agreeing on everything—it’s about agreeing on what matters most.
Example: During a major shift to self-service onboarding, a growth-stage SaaS company’s leadership team aligned around a north star of reducing time-to-value. This required product to cut custom features, sales to walk away from certain enterprise deals, and marketing to reposition campaigns. The shared goal clarified every subsequent debate.
2. Normalize Constructive Conflict
Healthy teams surface tension early. They define rules for engagement—how disagreements are raised, processed, and resolved. Many successful teams borrow from Kim Scott’s concept of “Radical Candor,” encouraging leaders to challenge directly while caring personally.
Example: At Atlassian, the executive team routinely holds retrospectives on strategic decisions. Leaders openly critique past alignment failures, turning them into learning opportunities. Conflict isn’t avoided—it’s operationalized.
3. Establish Cadence and Rituals
Weekly exec meetings, quarterly offsites, and monthly scorecard reviews provide the scaffolding for alignment. But structure only works when paired with transparency. Shared dashboards, not siloed reporting, ensure everyone is seeing the same reality.
Example: Stripe’s executive team is known for its rigorous documentation and operational reviews. Leaders contribute to shared memos (modeled after Amazon’s six-pagers), which require clear articulation of tradeoffs, data, and assumptions—driving aligned thinking before decisions are even made.
4. Reinforce Accountability to the First Team
Executives must model loyalty to the executive team over their functional teams. This means reinforcing company priorities, even when they diverge from departmental desires.
Tactical Tool: The “First Team Pledge” has been adopted by several private equity portfolio companies. It explicitly codifies expectations: executives are accountable to the enterprise first. Violations—such as backchanneling or publicly dissenting from aligned decisions—are addressed directly by the CEO.
Wrapping up…
True executive alignment is not a slogan. It is the result of continuous discipline, shared ownership, and transparent decision-making. It requires leaders to trade functional victories for enterprise outcomes, and to commit to decisions in the open.
High-performing executive teams do not operate with less conflict—they simply address it faster and more productively. Their alignment isn’t about harmony. It’s about trust, clarity, and the relentless pursuit of shared success.
When the executive team becomes the first team, execution becomes not just possible—but unstoppable.
