Your senior team agreed. So why is nothing moving?

Senior team alignment depends on commitments people can rely on. Polite agreement can leave the real decisions untouched.

The strategy meeting ends. Heads nod. Nobody objects. The CEO leaves believing the senior team is aligned.

Six weeks later, deadlines slip, priorities compete and the same decisions return to the agenda. Everyone remembers agreeing. Nobody can explain precisely what they committed to.

Agreement with a direction does not establish a commitment to delivery.

Senior team alignment means leaders share an understanding of the priorities and coordinate their decisions, resources and commitments accordingly. Agreement is only part of that work.

Why agreement fails to create alignment

Consider a leadership team agreeing to accelerate a product launch. Sales anticipates earlier revenue. Operations assumes more capacity. Finance expects delivery within the existing budget.

All three support the decision. They have committed to different versions of it.

BCG identifies a familiar gap in leadership teams: leaders signal agreement in meetings, yet their subsequent actions do not reflect the decision.[1] The test of alignment is therefore what people do afterwards—how they allocate resources, change priorities and coordinate delivery.

The practical test is what changes afterwards. Which resources move? Which work stops? Who can now depend on whom?Without those answers, apparent alignment conceals unfinished negotiation.

When professionalism becomes avoidance

Professionalism should help people address difficult issues clearly and respectfully. It becomes costly when it provides cover for withholding them.

We call an impossible deadline “challenging”. Save objections for the corridor. Avoid questioning a colleague’s assumptions because we want to appear supportive.

The meeting stays comfortable. The organisation inherits the consequences: contradictory instructions, repeated approvals, rework and delays.

The disagreement you avoid in the boardroom becomes the delay everyone else has to manage.

High agreeableness can become habitual acquiescence when preserving approval takes precedence over honest assessment. Yet silence alone tells us little about someone’s personality. People may have learned that challenge attracts criticism, decisions are already settled, or speaking up changes nothing.

Leaders need to ask what their own behaviour has taught the team about the consequences of honesty.

What commitment-based management adds

Fernando Flores’s work on conversations for action explains how people create commitments through language.[2] Saying that a proposal sounds sensible performs a different function from accepting responsibility for delivering an outcome.

Donald Sull and Charles Spinosa develop this perspective in their Harvard Business Review article on promise-based management, describing organisations as networks of promises.[3]

This makes commitment a practical relationship. Someone undertakes to deliver something that another person needs and will organise around.

A dependable promise therefore requires more than an owner and a deadline. Both parties need to understand the purpose, the outcome and the conditions that would make delivery satisfactory.

“We support improving onboarding” leaves those matters open.

“I will deliver a tested onboarding proposal by 30 November, covering the three problems we identified. Operations will confirm its process owner by Friday. We will pause the reporting project to create capacity” makes the choices visible.

The next step is to check that those involved accept these terms.

A credible “yes” needs room for “no”

Sull and Spinosa argue that people need space to decline requests or make counteroffers.[3] Otherwise, an agreeable response may conceal an impossible promise.

A director who supports the launch can still say: “We cannot meet that date with the current team. We can deliver a narrower release, or meet the full scope three weeks later.”

That response gives the organisation useful choices. Demanding commitment without addressing capacity encourages people to conceal constraints. The CEO gets reassurance; colleagues inherit uncertainty.

“Disagree and commit” also needs care. Deloitte recommends it when further debate offers less value than learning through action.[4] But leaders must first hear objections, identify who decides and resolve material constraints.

People can disagree that a strategy is the best option while sincerely committing to their part in it. They still need agreement about what that commitment entails.

How to turn agreement into dependable commitments

Before closing an important decision, establish six things:

• Purpose: Who needs the outcome, and what will it enable?

• Ownership: Who explicitly accepts responsibility for delivering it?

• Success: What observable result will satisfy the request?

• Timing: When is delivery required?

• Dependencies: Which resources, trade-offs and promises from others are necessary?

• Response: Is the answer yes, no, a counteroffer, or a promise to answer by a specified time?

  
  

These questions expose differences while the team can still resolve them.

Challenge should be grounded. Describe what you have observed, explain your assessment and its consequence, then invite another interpretation. “Two milestones have slipped; I doubt this date is achievable with current capacity” gives colleagues something specific to examine.

C.A.R.E. provides a useful structure: clarify the Context, test Assumptions, examine Risks and identify an Experiment.

The discussion must then produce explicit commitments. A well-facilitated debate is only useful if people know what happens next.

Commitment continues after the meeting

A promise creates expectations that other people plan around. Quietly moving your deadline transfers the disruption to them.

VISION’s commitment-loop approach includes negotiating the promise, delivering it and assessing whether the outcome satisfies the request.[5] Commitment therefore includes keeping the conversation active when circumstances change.

Raise a threatened deadline early. Explain the impact. Negotiate a workable alternative with the people relying on you.

When work is delivered, check whether it meets the agreed need. “I’ve finished” and “I have what I need” are different assessments.

This is how accountability becomes useful in everyday work: colleagues can see what is dependable, what is at risk and what requires a new decision.

Test your senior team’s alignment

Choose one important decision from the last month. Ask each leader independently:

What was decided? What did you personally promise? Who is relying on you? What changed in your priorities?

Compare their answers with each other and with what happened.

You may discover that the team has been trying to enforce commitments that were never properly made.

At SaltX, our people and culture advisory work helps senior teams surface these gaps, address avoided conversations and establish clear commitments across functions. That includes examining the leadership behaviours, decision-making and competing priorities that make those commitments difficult to sustain.

Bring us the decision your team keeps revisiting. Let’s identify what needs to change for your organisation to move.

References

[1] BCG, [When Leaders Say They Are Aligned—But Aren’t](https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/when-leadership-say-they-are-aligned-but-company-leaders-are-not), 2021.

[2] Fernando Flores, [Conversations for Action](https://www.conversationsforaction.org/node/11), chapter overview.

[3] Donald Sull and Charles Spinosa, [Promise-Based Management: The Essence of Execution](https://store.hbr.org/product/promise-based-management-the-essence-of-execution/R0704E), Harvard Business Review, April 2007; see also [VISION’s published version](https://www.vision.com/insights/blog/promise-based-management/). HBR’s public publisher summary and VISION’s text were consulted.

[4] Deloitte Insights, [Bias toward action](https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/prioritize-action-over-discussion.html).

[5] Brendan Fitzgerald, VISION, [The Loop: A Framework for Promise-Making](https://www.vision.com/insights/blog/the-loop-a-framework-for-promise-making/), April 2025.