Walk into a lot of executive meetings and everything looks calm.

Heads nod. Slides glide by. Nobody asks the hard question. Everyone leaves saying the same thing.

“Feels like we’re aligned.”

Then the quarter hits. Deadlines slip. Decisions mysteriously change. Teams swear they are following the same priorities, yet the work on the ground looks nothing alike.

You are not aligned. You are just quiet.

Alignment rarely dies in a dramatic blowup. It leaks out in daily behavior. In how people argue. In how they write updates. In where conflict shows up and where it never appears at all.

If you are a CPO or HR leader, your real job is not another engagement campaign. Your real job is to show the CEO the signals that alignment is already drifting, then give them nowhere to hide.

Here are five signs your team is not aligned, even if everyone looks like friends in the room.

When Decisions Keep Coming Back From The Dead

Start with the most expensive sign.

Pick your last ten big calls. Product bets. Org design changes. Pricing moves. The decisions you walked out of the room calling “final.”

Now count how many times each one was reopened.

If you see the same issues resurfacing in new decks, new Slack threads, or “quick follow ups,” you don't have an execution problem. You have fake agreement.

On the surface, it looks like people are being thoughtful. In reality, they did not feel safe fighting for their view when it mattered. So they nodded, left the room, and went back to running their own plan.

James Detert and Amy Edmondson’s work on “implicit voice theories” shows people stay quiet when they believe speaking up will backfire, even when leaders beg for candor. Their research is clear. Silence is not agreement. Silence is self protection.

When you see decisions coming back from the dead, that is what you are paying for.

1. Lock the forum

For your biggest calls, set one rule. If you want to reopen a decision, you bring it back to the same forum where it was made. No hallway edits. No side texts. No quiet reversals.

That single constraint forces leaders to put their real concerns on the table, not in the shadows.

2. Track reopen rates like a KPI

Put a simple number on the exec agenda. For our top ten decisions last quarter, how many are still clean and how many did we drag back into debate.

Tools like Workplace make this visible in the language itself by picking up phrases like “quick revisit,” “reopening,” or “small tweak” around decisions you supposedly closed.

If that number is ugly, you just found a leadership problem, not a process problem.

And if this is happening, the next sign always shows up.

When The Room Stays Polite And The Real Fight Moves To The Hallway

Here's the pattern.

Exec staff is smooth. Voices stay level. The CFO raises a concern, the CPO offers a people angle, the COO nods thoughtfully. You end on what sounds like consensus.

Then the real argument explodes in follow up threads and private channels.

That split is one of the clearest signals that alignment is broken. Conflict has been pushed out of the decision forum where it belongs and into the places where it does the most damage.

Workplace data shows this in hard numbers. You see tame language in official channels and sharp, skeptical language in side conversations. You see no hard questions in all hands, then long, tense DM chains right after.

If the only place people are honest is in private, you are not leading. You are managing optics.

3. Assign someone to stress test the plan

Don't hope for dissent. Make it someone’s explicit job.

“Your role in this meeting is to find the cracks. You are not here to be liked. You are here to protect the company from wishful thinking.”

That one move makes disagreement a duty, not a personal risk.

4. Put conflict back on the main stage

Use your all hands to show people what healthy tension looks like.

“Finance pushed to cut this initiative. Product fought to keep it. Here's what we argued about. Here's the call we made. Here's how we are all backing it now.”

When people see that level of honesty, they stop reading every sharp conversation as a crisis. They start to believe the system can handle reality.

Once you do that, you will uncover the next problem.

When One Goal Has Three Different Stories

Ask three leaders to describe the same “top priority.”

If Sales talks about revenue, Product talks about features, and Ops talks about efficiencies, you don't have alignment. You have three different games running under the same slogan.

Decades of goal research from Edwin Locke and Gary Latham is blunt. Clear, specific goals improve performance only when they are not fighting each other for time and attention. Pile on competing targets and output drops. The evidence is solid.

Workplace sees this in language every day. Different orgs use different words for what “winning this quarter” means. Timelines don't match. Success metrics contradict. From the top, it looks like unity. From the ground, it feels like whiplash.

5. Run a language audit on your priorities

Pick your top three goals for the quarter. Pull written updates and planning docs from Product, Sales, Marketing, Ops and HR.

Read how each group describes those goals. Are they using the same words. The same numbers. The same definition of done.

If you would not know they were talking about the same thing, neither do they.

6. Force a single story

For each critical goal, write one short, plain description of success. One owner. One date. One scoreboard.

Then repeat that description until you are sick of hearing yourself. Use it in town halls, team meetings, performance reviews. Consistency is not fluff. Consistency is the only way people know what to sacrifice for what.

Because here's the truth. Once the story is crisp, the real disagreements show up.

When Conflict Attacks People Instead Of The Work

Not all conflict is created equal.

Karen Jehn’s research back in the mid 90s made this painfully clear. Teams that argue hard about ideas perform better. Teams that fight about personalities fall apart. Her study drew the line between task conflict and relationship conflict and proved what every good leader already feels in their gut.

If every heated discussion in your company quickly turns into defensiveness, turf defense, or subtle character attacks, the problem is not “strong opinions.” The problem is design.

When purpose, roles, and decision rights are fuzzy, people cannot tell if they are fighting the problem or each other. The friction that should sharpen the work starts slicing into trust.

7. Clarify the fight before it happens

Before any high stakes meeting, answer four questions in one line each.

1. What is the single purpose of this session.

2. Which goal wins if we have tradeoffs.

3. Who decides, and what is everyone else here to do.

4. What is in scope to change, and what is not.

If you cannot answer those, cancel the meeting or delay it. You are not avoiding conflict. You are refusing to host a real one.

8. Separate respect from politeness

Write this into your operating principles. Respect is non negotiable. No mocking. No eye rolling. No cheap shots.

Politeness is optional. People are allowed to say “I disagree.” They are allowed to say “I think this plan will fail for these reasons.” They are allowed to cut to the point.

If you don't draw that line, your nicest managers will quietly punish honesty.

Once you fix that, you will hear something even more revealing.

When The Language Shifts From “We Will” To “We’ll Try”

Listen to how your leaders give updates.

Owners who believe in the plan say “I will ship this by May.” “My team will have this live by the 15th.”

Leaders who don't trust the ground under their feet start to hedge.

“We’ll try to get something out.”

“This should be fine.”

“Hopefully we can hit that.”

Those tiny phrases are not harmless. They are the linguistic fingerprints of misalignment and fading trust.

Dirks and Ferrin’s meta analysis on trust in leadership showed that when people trust leaders, performance and cooperation climb. When trust drops, execution fractures and people start playing defense. The pattern is consistent.

Workplace sees this in real time when ownership language drops and hedging spikes in a team’s communication. You don't need a PhD to decode it. You just need to stop ignoring it.

9. Put words on the scoreboard

Pick one critical initiative. For the next month, review written updates from the owner.

Count how often they use clear commitment language like “I will” or “my team will” versus hedges like “should,” “might,” and “we’ll try.”

Don't police tone. Ask a harder question. What is it about our direction, resources, or decision process that makes this person unwilling to commit.

10. Make it safe to say “no” to nonsense

Hedging is often a symptom of leaders who feel trapped between impossible asks and a culture that punishes pushback.

Train your managers to say “This timeline does not match the resources. Here's what we can deliver by that date instead.”

Reward the leader who defends focus and realism, not the one who smiles and then quietly burns their team to meet a fantasy.

Once people trust they can say no without getting crushed, they start saying “we’ll” again.

The Question Every CPO Needs To Put In Front Of Their CEO

Here's the hard truth.

Alignment is not how calm your meetings feel. It is not how many heads nod when you roll out the new strategy deck.

Alignment is what your team actually does when the meeting ends.

If decisions keep coming back from the dead, if the sharpest debates live in side channels, if each org has its own story for the same goal, if conflict attacks people instead of the work, and if your leaders sound like they are always “trying” but rarely committing, you are not aligned.

You are just coordinated enough to fail slowly.

Your advantage as a CPO or HR leader is simple. You see the language. You see the conflict patterns. With tools like Workplace, you can measure them instead of guessing.

Your job is to walk into your next one on one with the CEO and ask one question they cannot wiggle away from.

“If we muted every meeting this quarter and only looked at how our leaders talk about decisions, conflict, and commitments, would we still believe this team is aligned?”

Because if the answer is no, the problem is not your people.

The problem is your leadership appetite for the truth.

Fix that, and alignment stops being a buzzword on a slide.

It becomes the way your company actually moves.