Episode 218 – Leadership Alignment Is Not Agreement: How to Get Your Team Truly Moving Together – Member Case with Julie Williamson, PhD

Many leadership teams agree on goals—but still struggle to act in sync. In this session, we explore what true alignment looks like and why it’s mission-critical for founders looking to scale or exit. Julie Williamson, CEO of Karrikins Group shares why alignment is not about agreement, why it’s harder (and more important) in small firms than you think, and how to spot the early signs of misalignment. You’ll walk away with practical tools and mindsets to get your leadership team aligned—not just in theory, but in action.

TRANSCRIPT

Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the pro. Serve. Podcast. If you’re new to this, show, this show is dedicated to founders of boutique professional services firms. So if you market sell and deliver expertise for a living in the form of a service, this is for you. We hope to help you make more money, make scaling easier and make an exit achievable. And on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about leadership alignment, which is a topic that we don’t talk enough about, but it’s very important. And we have a well liked and member in good standing with us. Her name is Julie Williamson, PhD. Nonetheless and leader of a firm that specializes in this. So, Julie, would you please introduce yourself to the audience.

Julie Williamson: Sure. Thanks, Greg. I’m so happy to be here. As you said. My name is Julie Williamson. I am the CEO of Karrikins Group, and we are a boutique consultancy that focuses on solving the problem that we see as persistent across companies which is leadership teams know what they need to do, and they know why they’re doing it. But they often don’t know how to do it together as leaders, and we are dedicated to solving that problem.

Greg Alexander: I think so let’s start out with the basic definition of this week’s topic, leadership alignment. So what is it.

Julie Williamson: Yeah. So I’m going to start with what it isn’t, which is a famous consulting tactic. So you’ll have to forgive me. Forgive me for that right? But it isn’t agreement. Think about how many times you’ve sat in a meeting with colleagues, maybe sat around the dinner table with your family, or sat around the campfire with some friends, and everybody agrees that something sounds like a great idea like, Oh, our next thing should be to go hike Kilimanjaro. And everybody says, Yeah, that sounds great. Or if in a business perspective, we need to grow. Oh, yeah, that sounds great. We need to do that. That’s agreement and agreement is something, but it’s not enough. It’s insufficient to really get you where you want to go. And so we make a distinction that when leadership teams are aligned, they have the right decision-making processes, prioritization, the right mindsets group dynamics and processes between them in order to actually take action on the things that they agree are a really good idea to do.

Greg Alexander: Definition, and I do like the contrast between what it is and what it isn’t for sure. Let’s talk about why a founder of a boutique services firm would care.

Julie Williamson: I think that as a boutique services firm ourselves at Kerrikin’s group, one of the things that we know is we’re small and we’re scrappy, and we all need to be working on in the same way, on the same things and going in the same direction. And if we get out of alignment, which means that we might agree. For example, let’s use growth as an example. We all agree we should grow. How many boutique consultancies agree that growth is a good idea. Well, it’s easy to agree to. But in order to actually make that happen, you have to be willing to make tough decisions, you have to say yes to some things, and no to a lot more, and when you say no, you have to mean it so that you don’t keep coming back and using your precious resources of time and energy to relitigate the same decisions over and over again, or have the same conversations over and over again. So how do you get really precise about saying yes to some things, say no to a lot of things, and understanding collectively what growth looks like and what it means. And that getting aligned on that is a much more powerful thing to do than just agreeing. Yeah, growth is a good idea.

Greg Alexander: You know, when we first talked about doing this podcast and having you be this week’s featured role model for the member Q and A, I was skeptical because I said to myself, Well, how difficult can it be to get a small leadership team leading a small firm aligned like it just doesn’t seem like a big problem. However, I have lived this myself, and it is incredibly difficult to do so. So what would you say to somebody who is skeptical, that says my firm is so small it’s not that hard to get aligned. I don’t need to pay attention to this.

Julie Williamson: Yeah, I mean, I would just say, we’re 6 people. We specialize in helping other people be aligned, get aligned and be aligned, and we struggle with it at Kerrikin’s. If that’s not enough to convince you, I don’t know what is.

Greg Alexander: All right. Well, what do you think the root cause of the problem is?

Julie Williamson: It’s humans are messy, right? That’s just it in a nutshell. Humans are messy. And so we all every day we grow and we learn. And every day, whether we like it or not, we change a little bit because we’re incorporating new experiences, new inputs into our thought processes. And so what’s really important for leadership teams. And I actually think, especially for small firms that are trying to grow scale and exit, is that you need to stay in dialogue with each other, and it’s really easy, especially when you’re small and scrappy, to get really busy with the work of the day. What we call what you do. It’s really, it’s also sometimes a lot more fun to focus on what you do, because what you do you’re probably really good at. And so you’re in your performance zone when you’re doing what you do best, and staying in alignment with your colleagues across the firm might not be when you’re in your performance zone. Right? That might be challenging for you to always be kind of in that dialogue and trying to make sure that you’re using the same approaches and heuristics and mindsets for making key decisions about the business. So it can be sometimes for some people, not their happy place. But if you do it. It is so powerful. If you spend the time upfront getting aligned and then staying in alignment, your company will grow faster, and you will at the end of the day be so much happier with the results.

Greg Alexander: Okay. So if I’m a small firm, and I’m now in agreement that I need to get my leadership team aligned because I’m having some of the issues that you described. And I want to put myself through a diagnostic. And I’m asking myself where to look. Where might this problem show up. What would you say to me?

Julie Williamson: Yeah, we have a great little tool that you can play around with if you want called the 7 signs of Misalignment. And, Greg, I know you’ve taken a look at this, and you know some of them might look familiar like. Have you ever sat in a meeting and had the same conversation that you had the week before, and the week before, and the week before. Right, that’s a sure sign that there’s misalignment in your team. And so I think if you look for some of those signs, some of those indicators that you’re stuck in agreement, you’re just not moving into action on things. Another great example is, you have a priority list that everybody agrees to, but the priorities are not getting done. So you know Kerrikin’s group. One of the things that we’ve struggled with sometimes is that we think that this is probably true for everybody a little, you know, self-disclosure for me. But the pipeline is really important. We all agree with that. We should prioritize the pipeline. But with 6 of us we get really busy with our clients who we love, and we want to do work with them, and we want to spend time there, and quite frankly spending time on the pipeline isn’t the most fun place for any of us, and so we agree to that priority. But we have to really work hard to hold ourselves accountable to being aligned to making it a priority.

Greg Alexander: You know, in that answer you use the word we several times, and one of the questions I had for you is, who is responsible for getting the leadership team aligned? Is it the team? Is it one person who owns this?

Julie Williamson: Yeah, look, we always say, alignment cannot be delegated. And so this — with most of our clients — the most senior leader in the group has to be actively and energetically engaged. But also you don’t align your team by yourself. So the people who need to be in alignment, who need to be making decisions, who need to be setting priorities, who need to be taking action — those are the people who have to be engaged in the alignment work. And it’s not one of those growth and development opportunities that you can delegate to someone on your team to do for you. You actually have to do it for yourself, and as a leadership team.

Greg Alexander: Okay, very good. My next question is, since you’re a member, you know that we have this framework 15 years cradle to grave. 3 stages. Growth, scale, exit. 5 years in each stage. When does the leadership alignment problem show up?

Julie Williamson: Yeah, you know, this is such an interesting question for me, because part of me feels like where it’s most impactful is in that scale stage when you’re kind of beyond the somewhat chaotic growth or startup phase. And you’re really working to scale the company, because that’s when you have to start doing things more consistently. Scale depends on consistent business operations, but also on consistency across the leadership team. And so you really have to, I think, emphasize alignment when you’re in that scale phase. I think it is helpful to be attentive to alignment when you’re just getting started, and you’re in that growth phase as well, so that things don’t get too scattered. And so you can bring people along. Your clients know, by the way, if your team is aligned or not aligned. Potential employees will be able to pick up on whether you’re aligned or not aligned as a leadership team. And so it is important as you’re trying to grow. But I think where it really really becomes very impactful is when you hit that scale stage.

Greg Alexander: You know I would also, I agree with you, but I would also add that I think it’s equally important in the exit stage, and the reason why I feel that way is that we’ve helped over 50 members exit at this point. And usually these firms are a small partnership — might be 2 or 3 co-owners as an example. And making sure everybody’s aligned on what they want from the exit, basics like purchase price and structure of a deal, etc. But also other things like, who’s staying and who’s going? If I’m going to stay, what’s my job look like after the fact? You know, who do we want to sell it to? You know sometimes we’re not aligned on that. Some want to sell it to an investor, some want to sell it to a strategic firm, etc. Alignment — misalignment, I should say — can derail a lot of successful exits. All right. My last question is around the how, since that’s what you focus on. But I’m going to simplify it a little bit. If I’m someone listening to this, and I think I might have a leadership alignment problem. What are like a couple things I can do to get started towards a solution?

Julie Williamson: Oh, you know, I think that one of the things that we like to do as leaders sometimes is to really focus on tactical operations, so I don’t know. Let me just give you a very simple example. Timesheet reporting. That’s something that a lot of boutique consultancies have to pay attention to, and I always hear people gripe about the fact that people don’t get their time in on time or whatever. And so we try to put these structures around it. We try to make processes. And we try to invest in technology. And we try to solve very human problems with process and technology. If you think that you might have a misalignment issue, then you might want to consider whether you have the right processes. Processes and technology, sure. But don’t stop there. You need to understand the individual mindsets and the group dynamics that are sitting behind the behaviors and the decision making that you’re seeing. And when you get into that messiness of the human experience, then you’re really starting to wrap your arms around alignment. And what’s driving misalignment. And you’re getting to the root of it in a way that you’re never going to get to if you just try to solve misalignment through process and technology.

Greg Alexander: I think some people have too much process, and it results in a bureaucracy which then removes the primary source of competitive advantage for a small firm, and that is speed. When you’re small you can change quickly and make decisions quickly. And if you’re competing against big firms that everything’s done by committee, that’s a real advantage. And if you throw too much process at it, you can get bureaucratic. And I think if misalignment is a problem, it’s most likely more of a people problem than it is necessarily a process problem. Julie, what is your PhD in?

Julie Williamson: Organizational communication. I actually have an MBA with a concentration in finance. I have an undergraduate degree in information systems. So I hit technology, business, and social science from an education perspective kind of across the board.

Greg Alexander: And if somebody listening to this is interested in your work, should they follow you on LinkedIn, should they reach out to you? What do you recommend?

Julie Williamson: Yeah, we have a ton of content available on our website, karrikinsgroup.com. And we actually have a book coming out, “Make How Matter” — so very excited about that. That’ll be available on Amazon as of May 6th, 2025. So excited to get that out into the world. It’s chock full of resources that you can use to help start the conversations with your team about alignment.

Greg Alexander: Okay, very good. Well, listen. On behalf of the community, this was a big contribution. So I want to thank you for being here today and sharing your wisdom, and we look forward to your session on Friday, where the members can ask you questions directly about leadership alignment.

Julie Williamson: I’m looking forward to it.

Greg Alexander: All right. Okay, a couple of calls to action to conclude here. So if you are a member and you’re interested in leadership alignment — which I suggest you should be — then please attend the Friday Private Q&A session where you can ask Julie questions directly. If you’re not a member, and after listening to this, you think you might want to be, go to Collective54.com and fill out an application, and somebody will get in contact with you. But until the next episode I wish all of the listeners the best of luck, as they try to grow, scale and someday exit their firms.

Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.