What the research shows in 2026
The State of Enterprise Leadership Alignment
Understanding the business risks that come from individual leaders who agree but don’t align and deliver together, and what solving that is worth.
Contents
What’s in this report
Executive summary
What's the cost of misaligned enterprise leaders?
Misaligned enterprise leaders cost real dollars and time for organizations with big ambitions and goals.
Enterprise leaders who need to coordinate across the company to progress the most important priorities often struggle to deliver together on cross-organizational priorities. Transformation efforts bear this out: companies lose over $2.3 trillion annually in strategic efforts that come up short. In digital transformation work, only 20% of companies achieve more than 75% of anticipated revenue gains, and only 15% achieve more than 75% of anticipated cost savings (McKinsey, 2024).
In our work with enterprise teams at Karrikins Group, the most expensive, most overlooked leadership problem isn’t a skills or talent shortage. It’s the distance between what a leadership team agrees to and what it delivers. We call that distance the Failure Gap, and when teams learn how to close it, the returns show up in real business results, especially during times of transformation or disruption. Companies often invest in individual leaders through coaching or training, but they are far less likely to invest in bringing a leadership team into alignment on how to work together to take action and deliver on enterprise level goals.
Client story · Fortune 500
The board had declined to approve a more than $2B acquisition, not over the strategy, but over doubts that the leadership team could integrate it. After a few months of the C-Suite working on HOW to lead together as an enterprise team, the board approved the deal, specifically citing the team’s alignment, cohesion, and readiness to execute together.
>$2B acquisition approved. The investment in leadership alignment changed the outcome.
This report examines the unexpected ways that misalignment costs real dollars and how to maximize investments in people and teams to close the gap and deliver together.
Section 01 · The investment paradox
A $366 billion question
Leadership development is one of the largest sustained investments organizations make in their own performance. The commitment is real, and it has held steady through every market cycle. But, the outcomes are often far less than the investment would merit.
If organizations are investing this much and still can’t show results, what are they missing?
The positive effort and intent are there. The outcomes are not. That’s because most of the investments go towards individual leader competencies. While those are important (we aren’t arguing against good training for leaders!) they operate in isolation. When individual leaders develop skills that aren’t shared with the rest of their peers across the enterprise, they become almost impossible to put into action. It would be like learning to speak French so you could be more effective while living in Spain.
For enterprise level leaders — people who need to connect and contribute across the organization, not just vertically manage their own teams — developing clarity and connection across the business with their peers is often the missing piece for development. Building a shared language that drives commitment to how to lead together is the work of alignment, and it is usually left out of leadership development programs.
Enterprise leadership alignment is specifically focused on helping create successful horizontal leadership capabilities, not individual leader competencies. And our work on leadership alignment has shown that it is a high-return investment in ways that individual development programs can’t ever achieve.
Section 02 · The root cause
The Leader Alignment Failure Gap
When organizations try to fix leadership issues by investing in individual skills and capabilities, only part of the problem gets solved, and the investment comes up short. Leadership teams continue to struggle to deliver together, even when individual leaders are excelling in their own areas.
This shows up as:
- Enterprise priorities that don’t get resourced
- Strategies that sound great but don’t get delivered
- Frustration as leaders watch colleagues make decisions that serve their own area but not the enterprise
- Decisions that get revisited again and again
These problems aren’t solved by individual leader investment. They’re solved by getting leaders aligned to deliver together.
Most leadership teams are in the Failure Gap without knowing it.
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Section 03 · The true cost
Misaligned leaders drive real costs to the business
When people experience inconsistent and misaligned leadership it drives turnover, disengagement, and lack of ownership throughout the organization. None of these costs appear on a P&L, but they all exist and they are costing companies every single day.
The cost of misalignment is especially painful at senior levels. The work of getting aligned as senior enterprise leaders helps close the gap between senior people who are frustrated by their leadership experiences and senior people who are fully engaged to deliver together.
The most expensive version of this problem isn’t any single departure or stalled initiative. It’s a leadership team that agrees on everything, and delivers on less and less.
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Section 03 · Continued
If your gut is telling you there’s a problem.... it isn’t wrong.
Cost data describes the problem from the outside. From inside the leadership team, misalignment sounds like this. How many of these are said, or thought, around your table?
“Everything is a priority, so nothing gets done well.”
Prioritization without shared direction.
“Everyone’s status is green, but we aren’t keeping up.”
Agreement without accountability.
“We keep getting signed up for new things when we can’t deliver what we’ve already committed to.”
Overcommitment masking a deeper fracture.
“We agreed on the strategy. I don’t know why it isn’t moving.”
The strategy–execution fracture, the Failure Gap in one sentence.
“Our best people are leaving, and we can’t tell them why they should stay.”
Disconnection at the top: poorly-led employees are 4× more likely to leave.
“We spend more time in meetings about the work than doing the work.”
Decision dysfunction, paid for in cycle time.
“I trust my direct reports individually. I’m not sure I trust us as a team.”
Coexistence instead of one team, and trust in managers now sits at 29%.
Client story · Mid-market
Within 6 months the leadership team was operating differently together. They started showing up with one voice on what mattered, clear ownership, and decisions that stayed decided. They steadily built the company as a cohesive team and three years later, when the opportunity came they were ready.
Section 04 · The return
What solving misalignment returns
We’ve seen first hand the impact of investing in team alignment to shared goals. Our own client outcomes consistently bear that out, and industry benchmarks drive that home.
Speed of improvement
Deal outcomes
Revenue growth
Valuation & long-term returns
Retention
Client story · Healthcare technology
This company engaged Karrikins Group at a $250M valuation: talented executives, real momentum, and a leadership group working hard in different directions. The gap wasn’t effort. It was HOW the team set priorities and made decisions together. Over three to four years, the work rebuilt that core: one voice on what mattered, clear ownership, decisions that stayed decided.
Sold for $1B, the 4× beside this story.
A decade of research says these returns are available. The harder question is why some organizations capture them, while 71% can’t show results at all.
Section 05 · What works
What separates the organizations that see results
If 71% of organizations can’t demonstrate their leadership investment worked, the more useful question is what the other 29% do differently. The research points to four variables:
In practice, we have seen with our clients that the organizations that capture significant returns share four habits:
1. They treat it as a leadership-team problem, not an individual skills problem.
The work happens at the team level, tied to specific organizational goals, not through individual skills programs disconnected from strategy.
2. They don’t buy generic solutions.
The work is specific to how that team actually breaks down: the decisions it avoids, the priorities it abandons, the dynamics costing it execution velocity.
3. They treat it as ongoing, not an event.
A single offsite rarely changes how a team operates. Behavior change requires reinforcement in the flow of work, not a training catalog.
4. They measure what changes, not what was completed.
Whether decisions get made faster. Whether the team is operating as one. Completion rates measure attendance, not outcomes.
Solving for this requires treating HOW a leadership team works together as a knowable problem with a clear, programmatic solution. Within this solution, individual skills training is a leverage point to get aligned, not a solution to misaligned leadership.
Section 06 · Client story
From coexistence to one team in nine months
The situation
An enterprise leadership team described itself as “conflict averse” and “underutilized”: experienced leaders, individually driven, collectively disconnected.
The gap
They had been agreeing politely for months while decisions recirculated and priorities competed. Nothing was failing loudly. Nothing was moving, either.
The work
Over nine months with Karrikins Group, the team practiced the conversations it had been avoiding: surfacing disagreement instead of managing around it, naming a single owner for every priority, committing in the room rather than renegotiating after it. The leaders changed how they led before asking the organization to change what it did.
The outcome
Where does your team rate today on a scale of 1-10? Are you a group of individual leaders or an aligned leadership team?
Section 07 · Where your team stands
Is your leadership team aligned? Let’s talk about it.
Most leadership teams believe they’re more aligned than they are. The space between perceived and actual is where the most expensive problems in this report live. Ask yourself:
Does your team consistently deliver on its most important goals, or has reprioritization become a habit?
Do leaders typically make decisions based on what’s best for their area, or based on what’s best for the enterprise?
When strategy stalls or growth falls behind, does the explanation focus on what is being done or on how leaders are leading?
If you were being blunt, is your leadership team a set of well-meaning, highly skilled individuals doing their best work in their areas, or is it a joined up leadership team that is unified on goals, objectives, and measurements?
If any of these questions landed, it may be worth a conversation about where your team is, and what it could achieve.
