Most leadership teams describe misalignment as a communication issue.
Sales and Marketing are not aligned.
Customer Success and New Business operate differently.
Finance models numbers the field disputes.
The assumption is that people need clearer messaging, better meetings or tighter reporting.
In practice, misalignment is rarely accidental.
It is usually designed.
Incentives reward different behaviours across teams. Targets are set using different assumptions. Authority boundaries are unclear when tension appears. Trade-offs are implied rather than agreed.
Under those conditions, alignment cannot hold.
Consider the tension between growth and margin.
If Sales is rewarded primarily on volume and Finance is measured on margin protection, friction is inevitable. If Customer Success carries expansion targets without pricing authority, conflict becomes structural. If Marketing optimises for MQL volume while Sales is measured on qualified pipeline, handoffs degrade.
None of this requires poor intent.
It requires inconsistent design.
Alignment is not created through workshops.
It is created through structural coherence.
That coherence begins with clarity about what behaviour the organisation is intentionally rewarding. It requires explicit agreement about trade-offs under pressure. It depends on defined authority when commercial tension emerges.
When those elements are aligned, behaviour stabilises. Teams make similar decisions independently because the system encourages consistent judgment.
When they are not, variability increases. Reporting attempts to compensate. Escalations become frequent. RevOps mediates rather than architects.
Leadership often sees the symptoms before the cause.
Forecast disputes.
Pipeline disagreements.
Pricing exceptions.
Escalations between teams.
These are not communication breakdowns.
They are signals that incentive logic and authority structures are misaligned.
Real alignment feels less dramatic than most organisations expect.
It shows up in predictable behaviour under pressure. It appears when teams make trade-offs consistently without escalation. It becomes visible when forecasts stabilise because incentives and reporting logic reinforce the same behaviour.
Alignment is not a mood.
It is a consequence of structural design.
If misalignment persists, the solution is rarely another meeting.
It is usually a decision about incentives, authority or trade-offs that has not yet been made explicitly.