Walk into many executive meetings and you will hear a proud sentence: “The good news is everyone is rowing in the same direction.”

It sounds responsible. Unified. Efficient.

But here is the question nobody asks out loud.

What if that direction is wrong?

What if your real risk is not misalignment, but very tight alignment around a bad call, a wobbly goal, or a constantly shifting agenda?

That is how companies burn years of effort and mountains of goodwill while everyone feels like a team player. Until the results hit the board deck and the story falls apart.

Alignment Is Not the Hero You Think It Is

We have sold leaders a simple story.

Strategy is about making choices. Culture is about getting everyone aligned behind those choices. Once people are aligned, execution sings.

Nice theory. Here is how it explodes in real life.

A CEO rolls out three bold company goals at the offsite. Big market. Big number. Big narrative. Every VP nods along. HR builds enablement decks. Comms sharpens the story. Town halls are electric.

On paper, everyone is rowing together.

Now zoom into the next 90 days.

Sales asks for a special push on a big account. Product chases a competitor feature. Finance wants a margin program. Operations adds a cost project. None of these are stupid ideas. That is exactly what makes them dangerous.

The original three goals are still on the slide. Nobody changed the words. Yet every team is now juggling three headline goals and a stack of side projects that quietly compete for the same people and time.

From the top, it still looks aligned. From the ground, it feels like whiplash.

Decades of goal-setting research from Edwin Locke and Gary Latham is blunt about this: clear, specific goals boost performance only when they do not fight each other and split attention. Once you overload people with competing targets, effort fragments and results drop. (Source)

The problem is not that people are not rowing. The problem is that leaders keep pointing the boat at too many shores at once.

So here is the first hard truth: alignment is not automatically good. Alignment on confused or unstable direction is just a faster way to hit the rocks.

The Hidden Cost of “All In” When the Direction Is Wobbly

There is a pattern that shows up in every struggling company.

On the surface, you see passion and motion. New priorities. New launches. New slogans. Every quarter has a fresh theme. Every all-hands has a new rallying slide.

Underneath, you see something uglier.

People stop believing the plan will hold long enough to matter.

They smile in the room and hedge in private. They do just enough to cover themselves while they wait for the next pivot. They protect their energy, not the strategy.

Dirks and Ferrin’s meta-analysis on trust in leadership showed that when people trust leaders, performance and cooperation climb. When trust falls, execution fractures and people start playing defense. (Source)

Here is the part most CEOs and CPOs do not connect.

Nothing drains trust faster than demanding “all in” commitment to a direction that will probably be rewritten next month.

Your people are not dumb. They keep score. Every time you tell them “this is the north star” and then quietly swap it out, you teach them a simple lesson:

Do not bet your soul on any single direction. It will not last.

So they still row. They attend the standups. They fill in the OKRs. They repeat the language. But they stop giving you the one thing you cannot buy.

Real commitment.

And here is the twist. The more you praise alignment, the harder it becomes for anyone to question the direction itself. Nobody wants to be the downer in a room that is “all in.”

That is how bad bets run for six extra months. Not because nobody saw the problem, but because alignment became more sacred than accuracy.

When Rowing Together Silences the Only Voices That Could Save You

In your own company, think about the last time a big initiative went sideways.

Did it really arrive as a total surprise?

Or did you find out in the postmortem that people knew weeks earlier? Engineering saw the risk. Sales heard the customer doubts. Ops flagged the dependency. HR heard the burnout stories.

They just did not push hard enough. Or early enough. Or in the right room.

James Detert and Amy Edmondson have shown that people stay quiet because of unwritten rules about what is safe to say, even when leaders claim they want honesty.

Now layer that on a culture obsessed with “alignment.”

All-hands meetings with no hard questions are celebrated as wins. Planning meetings with fast consensus are called high-performing. Leaders who “keep everyone on board” are praised as culture champions.

In that environment, speaking up about the direction is not just risky. It feels disloyal.

The message people hear is simple: we are rowing together. Do not rock the boat.

So executives get a steady diet of polished updates and optimistic status reports. The real doubts move into side chats and private channels. By the time those doubts reach the top, they are not warning signs anymore. They are wreckage reports.

If you are a Chief People Officer, this is your red line.

When “alignment” starts to kill challenge, you do not have a culture win. You have a blind spot that will show up on the balance sheet.

Goal Stability Is the Alignment Lever Nobody Uses

Here is the paradox that trips up even smart leadership teams.

You want to be agile. You want to respond to markets. You want to move fast. So you change goals often and call that flexibility.

In reality, you are doing the exact thing that kills speed.

Research on goal shielding from Shah, Friedman, and Kruglanski found that when people commit to one focal goal, their minds automatically push distractions to the background. That is when deep progress happens.

Change the focal goal every few weeks and you break that mechanism. People never fully shift into the deep work that compounds. They are always half in and half hedging.

So alignment is not about how loudly you sell the story. It is about how long you are willing to protect the story so people can actually win.

That means you need one thing almost no executive team tracks: a standard for how stable your top-level goals stay in a quarter.

If every planning cycle introduces new headline goals while last quarter’s promises are still half done, your organization learns a rational habit:

Smile. Nod. Do enough to survive the review. Do not over-invest because this will probably change again.

That is not cynicism. That is self-defense.

Until you fix that, no amount of alignment workshops or comms campaigns will bring belief back. You are asking people to row hard toward a shore you keep redrawing.

The CPO’s New Job: Stop Selling Alignment and Start Auditing Direction

If you are a CPO or senior HR leader, your real power is not another engagement program. It is something sharper.

You are the only person in the executive room who owns both people reality and system design. That means you must stop being the internal agency for “getting everyone on board” and start being the one who proves whether the board is even worth getting on.

1. Install a Challenge Window Before You Ask for “All In”

For every company-level goal, build a short, visible window where challenge is expected.

One to two weeks. Clear rules. Any senior leader or critical team can question the goal, the tradeoffs, and the hidden conflicts.

Then publish the top challenges and how the executive team responded.

This teaches everyone that pushing on direction is part of their job, not insubordination.

2. Set a Direction Stability Standard for Every Quarter

Stop treating constant goal changes like agility. Define what will not move this quarter.

Make two lists:

• The few company goals that are fixed for the quarter.

• The specific areas where you reserve the right to flex.

Publish those boundaries. If leaders want to change something on the fixed list, they must explain why, what it costs, and what will stop to make room.

People move fast inside clarity. They crawl inside chaos.

3. Track Promise Integrity and Decision Reopens

Every goal is a promise. Every time you abandon or quietly shrink one, you chip away at trust.

Start counting:

• What percentage of top-level goals stay intact through the quarter?

• How often do you reopen big decisions that were supposedly closed?

Tools like Workplace already show when decision reopen rates spike and when language drifts from “I will” to “we will try.” Those shifts are signals that belief is fading.

Bring those numbers into the exec meeting. Put promise integrity next to revenue.

4. Measure Dissent, Not Just Engagement

Engagement scores can stay high in a culture that is quietly lost. People can like their manager and enjoy the perks while thinking the strategy is nonsense.

If you want to know whether alignment is healthy, look at how people speak.

Are hard questions showing up in digital channels?

Are multiple voices challenging plans, or is every risky question coming from one usual suspect?

Is dissent disappearing from big forums and popping up in private messages?

Language data can surface this. Rising hedges like “should be fine,” “we will see,” and “maybe next quarter” signal self-protection, not belief.

Your job is to put that reality in front of the CEO in a way they cannot dodge.

The Question You Need to Put in Front of Your CEO This Quarter

In the end, alignment is not about getting everyone to cheer louder.

It is about building a company where people believe that when you say something matters, you will hold it steady long enough for them to win.

If you are that CPO who wants to change the game, walk into your next one-on-one with the CEO and ask:

“Are we more proud that everyone is rowing together, or that we are brutally honest about where we are actually pointing the boat?”

If the honest answer is the first one, you have work to do.

Your people already know how to work hard. They already know how to line up behind a goal. They showed you that on day one.

The real test now is whether you will build a system where betting on the company’s direction is a smart move again.

Stop chasing the comfort of visible unity. Start chasing the discipline of right direction plus real stability.

Do that and alignment stops being a buzzword. It becomes the reason your company actually wins.