The Alignment Trap Why Your Best Leaders May Work Against Each Other

When Excellence Becomes Dysfunction

The scenario unfolds with disturbing regularity across corporate America: Operations delivers an impressive quarter through aggressive vendor consolidation and inventory controls. Sales loses major accounts due to the resulting stockouts. Sustainability discovers compliance risks from the cost-effective vendors operations selected. Three excellent leaders, three successful initiatives, one organizational disaster.

The Center for Creative Leadership's recent research paper identifies this as the alignment trap, and their diagnosis challenges conventional wisdom about organizational coordination. According to Jean Leslie, Katelyn McCoy, and Stephen Zaccaro, this represents not a structural failure or communication breakdown, but a leadership development gap that most organizations fail to recognize or address.

Their central argument deserves serious attention: Leaders are not failing to collaborate. They are succeeding at the wrong level of the system. This distinction matters profoundly for how organizations approach coordination challenges, particularly as polycrisis conditions multiply interconnected disruptions that demand unprecedented cross-functional integration.

The Differentiation Paradox Runs Deeper Than Acknowledged

The authors ground their analysis in multiteam systems theory, explaining how specialization creates a differentiation paradox. As teams develop deep expertise, they naturally build stronger internal identities, languages, metrics, and priorities. This specialization delivers value but simultaneously makes coordination harder by creating goal discordancy between team objectives and organizational imperatives.

This analysis rings true across industries. Consider pharmaceutical development, where research teams optimize for scientific innovation, regulatory affairs focuses on compliance requirements, manufacturing emphasizes scalable production, and commercial teams prioritize market access. Each function operates with legitimate goals that can easily conflict with others. A research team's pursuit of a scientifically elegant solution may create manufacturing complexity that delays time-to-market. Manufacturing's drive for production efficiency may constrain the clinical trial designs regulatory affairs needs.

Yet the differentiation paradox reveals only part of the picture. The authors focus on how specialization creates coordination challenges but give less attention to how organizational systems actively reinforce siloed optimization. Compensation structures typically reward functional excellence over cross-functional contribution. Career progression often occurs within functional silos. Performance management systems measure team-level outcomes more rigorously than system-level impact.

Research by Rebecca Henderson at Harvard Business School on organizational purpose suggests that without fundamental shifts in measurement and incentive systems, even well-developed leaders face structural barriers to system-level optimization. The leadership development gap the authors identify operates within and is amplified by these systemic reinforcements of local optimization.

Dual Identification Demands More Than Balanced Attention

The paper's most substantive contribution lies in articulating the dual identification challenge. Leaders must maintain strong identification with their team while developing equally strong identification with the broader multiteam system. The authors correctly note this requires genuine commitment to both levels, not simply keeping both in mind.

Their framework distinguishes between over-identification with either level. Too much team focus produces brilliant local optimization that creates system chaos—the opening scenario. Too much system focus weakens individual teams as leaders neglect team-level processes and erode the team identity that makes specialized contributions possible.

The proposed solution of balanced identification offers conceptual clarity but raises practical questions. The authors describe this as situational awareness about when to lean in which direction, using emergency response as an analogy. During acute crisis phases, system-level coordination demands peak attention. Once the critical phase passes, leaders should lean back to rebuild team cohesion and address deferred team priorities.

This makes intuitive sense but oversimplifies the lived experience of organizational leadership. Crises rarely arrive with clear boundaries, peak intensity phases, and defined endpoints. The polycrisis conditions the authors themselves describe involve multiple interconnected disruptions hitting simultaneously. Supply chain fragility persists. Digital transformation demands continue. Sustainability pressures intensify. Talent competition remains fierce. Which crisis gets priority? When does the critical phase end? When is it safe to rebuild team focus?

Moreover, research on polarity management by Barry Johnson suggests that team versus system orientation is not a problem to solve through better situational awareness but an ongoing polarity to manage. Leaders cannot resolve the tension between these levels; they must learn to harness it. This requires different capabilities than the balanced identification framework suggests—specifically, the ability to hold paradox, tolerate ambiguity, and maintain creative tension rather than seeking resolution.

Michael Tushman's research on ambidextrous organizations at Harvard Business School demonstrates that the most effective leaders develop comfort with simultaneous, contradictory demands rather than sequential shifting between them. They do not lean toward team focus then system focus; they maintain both continuously, using the tension between them as a source of adaptive capability.

Polycrisis Conditions Reveal Preparedness Gaps

The authors make a compelling case that polycrisis conditions intensify coordination demands. Their COVID-19 example illustrates how pandemic response required rapid coordination across IT, HR, operations, and finance teams that normally worked semi-independently. Many organizations struggled not because they lacked good teams but because leaders had not developed multiteam coordination capabilities.

This observation carries significant implications. The telemedicine case study they reference shows how IT systems, regulatory frameworks, economic structures, and social dynamics had to align to achieve breakthrough accessibility. Yet the authors note this coordination was not driven by pre-existing capabilities or strategic foresight. The crisis made single-team solutions impossible, forcing coordination through necessity.

This raises an uncomfortable question the paper does not fully address: Can organizations develop multilevel coordination capabilities before crisis makes them unavoidable? The authors frame this as the leadership development challenge, but their own evidence suggests that most coordination breakthroughs occur under duress when the cost of non-coordination becomes catastrophic.

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety and learning from failure suggests that organizations struggle to learn preventively. They learn reactively, after failures make the cost of current approaches undeniable. If multilevel coordination develops primarily through crisis-forced necessity, the practical path forward may involve creating lower-stakes simulation environments where leaders experience coordination breakdowns and develop capabilities before real crises hit.

The authors gesture toward this with their recommendation for scenario planning exercises where cross-functional teams practice navigating polycrisis conditions. This deserves more emphasis as potentially the most actionable element of their framework. Organizations rarely develop capabilities abstractly; they need experiential learning where consequences are real enough to drive behavior change but contained enough to allow safe experimentation.

The DAC Framework Needs Operational Specificity

The authors propose applying the Direction-Alignment-Commitment framework to multilevel coordination. Direction means fostering understanding and acceptance of shared goals at both team and system levels. Alignment ensures teams understand how their contributions connect to overall success and how their decisions impact other teams. Commitment builds willingness to exert effort for both component team and system success.

This framework provides useful structure but requires more operational specificity to guide implementation. Take direction, for example. The authors note that different teams often define success differently even while working toward common goals. During system integration after an acquisition, IT focuses on technology infrastructure, finance on accounting systems, HR on benefits harmonization. All pursue integration success but measure it differently.

The authors suggest getting specific about what success means at both team and system levels. Excellent advice, but how? Who defines system-level success when senior leaders themselves may have competing views? How do organizations reconcile genuinely conflicting priorities—speed versus quality, innovation versus risk management, customer satisfaction versus profitability—that cannot be fully optimized simultaneously?

Roger Martin's work on integrative thinking suggests that the most effective approach involves reframing apparently conflicting goals to find higher-level objectives that transcend the initial trade-off. Rather than arguing whether speed or quality matters more, ask what customer outcome requires the right balance of both. This moves beyond getting specific about predefined goals to collaborative redefinition of what success means.

Similarly, the commitment element deserves deeper exploration. The authors note that you cannot simply tell leaders to care about the whole organization; you must create conditions that make that commitment psychologically sustainable. They list five approaches: establishing clear connections between goals, creating participatory goal-setting structures, facilitating connection-building activities, implementing communication patterns that reinforce both identities, and creating guidelines for adaptive focus shifts.

Each merits fuller development. Consider participatory goal setting. Research on goal-setting theory by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham shows that participation increases commitment, but primarily when participants perceive they genuinely influence outcomes. Pro forma participation where decisions are predetermined can decrease commitment below levels achieved through clear top-down direction. What does meaningful participation look like for team-level leaders in setting system-level goals? How do organizations balance efficiency in goal setting against the time required for genuine participation?

Leadership Development Over Structural Change Understates Systemic Factors

The authors' core claim that this represents a leadership development gap rather than a structural problem deserves scrutiny. They acknowledge that organizations need the right structures—cross-functional teams, clear escalation paths, communication protocols—but argue that structure alone fails without leadership capability to navigate it.

This framing risks underplaying how structures shape behavior. Organizations get the performance their systems are designed to produce. If incentive systems reward functional excellence and career progression requires functional depth, leaders rationally optimize locally. Calling this a development gap implies leaders lack capabilities they should possess. More accurately, leaders deploy capabilities optimized for the system in which they operate.

Jeffrey Pfeffer's research on power in organizations demonstrates that leaders respond to where power and resources flow. If cross-functional coordination lacks clear authority structures, resource allocation processes, or consequence management systems, even leaders with sophisticated coordination capabilities will struggle to exercise them effectively.

The most powerful organizational interventions combine structural change with capability development. Amazon's success with cross-functional product teams stems not just from leadership capabilities but from structural mechanisms: single-threaded leaders with clear authority, written narratives that force systems thinking, leadership principles that create shared language, and compensation structures that reward long-term business outcomes over functional metrics.

The authors' emphasis on development over structure may reflect their institutional focus as a leadership development organization. Their recommendations for assessment tools, shared developmental experiences, and psychological safety building are valuable. Yet organizations pursuing this agenda should recognize that sustainable change requires concurrent structural evolution. Developing multilevel coordination capabilities without changing the systems that reward siloed optimization creates frustration more than transformation.

Measuring What Matters Remains Unaddressed

A significant gap in the analysis involves assessment and measurement. The authors pose excellent diagnostic questions for L&D leaders and C-suite executives: Can leaders articulate how team goals connect to system objectives? Do high performers show signs of over-identification with their teams? Have you created developmental experiences that build multilevel coordination capabilities?

These qualitative assessments provide starting points but lack the rigor that sustainable organizational change requires. How do organizations measure balanced identification? What observable behaviors distinguish leaders with strong multilevel coordination capabilities from those with weaker capabilities? How do you assess whether leaders possess the cognitive complexity, systems thinking, boundary spanning skills, and adaptive decision-making the authors identify as essential?

Without measurement frameworks, organizations cannot assess current state, target development interventions, or evaluate progress. The multiteam systems research the authors cite includes measurement approaches for constructs like goal alignment and shared mental models. Translating these research instruments into practical assessment tools would strengthen the framework's utility.

Furthermore, organizations need leading indicators of coordination breakdown. By the time operations decisions create stockouts that cost sales major accounts, significant damage has occurred. What early warning signs indicate emerging misalignment? Perhaps diverging team priorities in quarterly planning, increasing escalations to senior leadership for coordination decisions, or growing cycle times for cross-functional initiatives.

The Path Forward Requires an Integrated Approach

Despite these critiques, the core insight stands: Most organizations have more leadership capacity than they realize, but it is trapped at the wrong level. Leaders optimized for team-level performance lack developed multilevel coordination capabilities. This represents a development gap organizations can close, and the urgency for doing so intensifies as polycrisis conditions make cross-functional coordination not optional but essential for survival.

The most promising path forward integrates multiple elements the paper addresses separately:

• Start with shared crisis simulation. Create structured experiences where cross-functional leadership teams navigate realistic polycrisis scenarios with genuine consequences—perhaps tied to meaningful budget allocations or strategic initiative prioritization. This builds capabilities experientially while revealing coordination breakdowns in lower-stakes environments.
• Develop measurement disciplines. Establish clear metrics for coordination effectiveness, balanced identification, and system-level outcomes. Make these as rigorous and visible as traditional functional performance metrics. What gets measured gets managed.
• Align structures with capabilities. As leaders develop multilevel coordination capabilities, evolve organizational structures, incentives, and resource allocation processes to enable and reward system-level optimization. Development without structural change creates frustration; structural change without development creates confusion.
• Build psychological safety systemically. The authors rightly emphasize psychological safety as essential for leaders to take broader system leadership roles. But psychological safety is not created through exhortation or training. It requires concrete actions: leaders modeling vulnerability, responding constructively to bad news, explicitly rewarding speaking up, and addressing violations swiftly.
• Embrace ongoing learning. Following major disruptions, create space for collective sensemaking through after-action reviews that examine both team-level and system-level performance. The authors note that crises accelerate learning; capture that learning systematically rather than rushing immediately back to operational mode.
• Reframe trade-offs as polarities. Move beyond balanced identification as shifting attention sequentially between team and system. Help leaders develop comfort holding both commitments simultaneously, using the tension between them as creative fuel rather than a problem requiring resolution.

Implications for Different Organizational Contexts

The alignment trap manifests differently across organizational contexts, requiring tailored approaches:

• Matrix organizations already have structural mechanisms forcing cross-functional coordination but often generate role ambiguity and decision gridlock. Here, the development focus should emphasize adaptive decision-making—helping leaders navigate unclear authority structures and know when to escalate versus resolve coordination locally.
• Functional organizations with strong silos face the exact scenario the authors describe. Development priorities should focus on building cross-functional relationships, creating system-level visibility, and helping functional leaders understand downstream impacts of their decisions.
• Highly matrixed project environments like consulting firms or construction companies face different challenges. Project teams naturally develop strong identification, but project-level optimization can undermine firm-level priorities like capability development, knowledge management, or strategic account relationships. Leaders need development in seeing how project success connects to firm success.
• Post-merger organizations face acute coordination challenges across teams with different cultures, systems, and priorities. Here, the direction element of the DAC framework becomes paramount—establishing shared understanding of integration goals while respecting legitimate differences in team-level priorities.
• Platform organizations managing ecosystems of internal and external partners face multilevel coordination complexity that extends beyond organizational boundaries. Leaders need additional capabilities in stakeholder management, negotiation, and building coordination without direct authority.

The Deeper Question About Organizational Design

Ultimately, the alignment trap reflects a fundamental tension in organizational design that Lawrence and Lorsch identified decades ago: Organizations require both differentiation and integration. Differentiation enables specialized expertise; integration enables coordinated action. The challenge is not resolving this tension but managing it effectively.

The authors frame this as leaders succeeding at the wrong level of the system. But what constitutes the right level depends on strategic context. In stable environments with clear functional boundaries, team-level optimization may be entirely appropriate. Constant system-level coordination would waste energy better spent on functional excellence.

Polycrisis conditions shift the calculus by making system-level coordination more critical more often. Yet even in polycrisis, some functions must maintain team-level focus on specialized excellence. Someone must keep core operations running while others coordinate crisis response. The question is not whether to optimize at team or system level but who should do which when, and how to ensure appropriate adaptive shifting as conditions evolve.

This points toward a more nuanced view than the balanced identification framework suggests. Organizations need different leaders playing different roles simultaneously. Some should maintain strong team identification and drive functional excellence. Others should develop strong system identification and drive coordination. Still others should develop the balanced identification the authors advocate.

The leadership development challenge then becomes not building these capabilities in all leaders uniformly but matching leaders to roles aligned with their identification patterns while building enough capability flexibility that leaders can adapt as circumstances demand.

Conclusion: A Development Gap Worth Closing

The Center for Creative Leadership's analysis identifies a real and costly problem. As polycrisis conditions intensify, organizations face unprecedented coordination demands across specialized teams. Traditional approaches focusing on structure and communication fail because they miss the deeper challenge: Leaders have not developed capabilities for multilevel coordination.

The dual identification framework provides useful conceptual clarity. Leaders must maintain commitment to both team and system, recognizing when to lean toward each. The DAC framework offers practical structure for developing these capabilities through direction, alignment, and commitment at multiple levels.

Yet the path forward requires more than the leadership development focus the authors emphasize. Sustainable change demands integrating capability development with structural evolution, creating measurement disciplines that make coordination visible and valued, building psychological safety through concrete actions not intentions, and recognizing that team-versus-system orientation represents an ongoing polarity to manage rather than a problem to solve.

The authors end with an empowering message: Unlike external crises creating coordination demands, developing multilevel coordination capabilities is entirely within organizational control. This is true but incomplete. Organizations control the development agenda but must recognize that capability development succeeds or fails based on whether organizational systems enable leaders to deploy those capabilities effectively.

The alignment trap is real. The leadership development gap is real. And the opportunity is real. Organizations that develop multilevel coordination capabilities while evolving structures to enable them will not merely survive polycrisis conditions but find breakthrough innovations that siloed optimization makes impossible. That is worth the investment required—but only if organizations commit to the full scope of change needed, not development alone.

The question for leaders is not whether your best performers might accidentally work against each other. Given organizational complexity and specialization, they almost certainly do. The question is whether you will treat this as the serious leadership development challenge it represents and invest accordingly in both capability building and structural evolution. The polycrisis conditions creating urgent coordination demands show no signs of abating. The leadership development gap, however, can be closed. Whether it will be depends on organizational leaders recognizing its urgency and committing to the integrated change agenda required.