Leadership Alignment Is Becoming the Primary Value Creation Lever
August 5, 2025
For years, value creation discussions focused on strategy, capital allocation, and operational improvement. Those levers still matter. But increasingly, they are secondary to one foundational factor: leadership alignment.
Across both PE-backed and corporate organizations, alignment among senior leaders is proving to be the difference between plans that move quickly and plans that stall.
Why alignment matters more now
In simpler environments, misalignment could be managed. Leaders worked around one another. Tradeoffs were absorbed by the organization.
Today’s environment offers far less cushion.
Organizations are navigating:
Tighter execution timelines
More stakeholders with decision rights
Greater dependency across functions
Continuous change rather than episodic transformation
Without alignment, even strong strategies struggle to gain traction.
Where misalignment shows up first
Leadership misalignment rarely announces itself loudly. It surfaces quietly in execution.
Decision ownership becomes unclear.
Teams hesitate because they are unsure who ultimately owns a call.
Execution cadence drifts.
Projects move forward unevenly as leaders prioritize differently.
Messages fragment.
What the board hears, what the leadership team believes, and what employees experience no longer line up.
Trust erodes incrementally.
Confidence declines not because leaders disagree, but because disagreement is never resolved.
Over time, these issues compound into slower growth and lost value.
How aligned leadership teams operate differently
Aligned leadership teams demonstrate a few consistent behaviors:
Clear agreement on priorities and sequencing
Explicit decision rights and escalation paths
Shared understanding of success metrics
Willingness to surface and resolve tension early
Alignment does not require uniformity. It requires clarity.
Why alignment is now a hiring consideration
Increasingly, leadership alignment is influencing hiring decisions.
Boards and sponsors are evaluating not just individual capability, but how leaders will operate together. This shows up in:
CEO and CFO pairing decisions
Operating partner involvement
Functional leader selection during integration
Timing of leadership changes relative to strategy shifts
Leadership hires are being made with the broader system in mind, not in isolation.
What boards and leadership teams should ask
A few questions help assess alignment quickly:
Are we aligned on the next 12–18 months of priorities?
Do we agree on how decisions get made?
Are leaders incentivized toward the same outcomes?
Is disagreement surfaced and resolved, or avoided?
If alignment requires constant effort to maintain, it may need to be addressed structurally.
Looking ahead
As organizations face continued complexity, leadership alignment will remain one of the most powerful and underappreciated value creation levers.
Teams that invest in alignment early move faster, execute more cleanly, and adapt with less disruption. Those that do not often confuse activity for progress.
In this cycle, alignment is not a soft issue.
It is a strategic one.
About the Author
Eric Tenety
Senior Client Partner
Eric Tenety is a Senior Client Partner at Morgan Samuels, where he advises private equity sponsors, founders, and operators on senior executive search and leadership transition mandates.
With more than 20 years in executive search, Eric has built a reputation as a trusted partner to high-growth companies across stages and ownership structures. His work focuses on aligning leadership capability with execution priorities, governance expectations, and long-term value creation, drawing on experience leading C-suite searches across North America, Europe, and APAC.
This perspective reflects patterns observed across recent leadership searches and ongoing conversations with investors and management teams navigating an evolving market environment.