Monday morning. Six department heads in the conference room, one printed dashboard each.
Quality has the PPM target. Production has OEE. Maintenance has MTBF. Logistics has on-time delivery. Engineering has project milestones. HR has absenteeism.
Six targets. Six priorities. Six dashboards, each one excellent on its own terms.
Not one number the room agrees on.
That room contains everything that quietly defeats operational excellence — and the fix is not another meeting, another scorecard, or another cross-functional review. The fix is the opposite of adding. It is subtraction.
In the previous article, I showed how a single financial goal — Plant Cost Rate €30 → €25 — decomposes into six named processes, each owned by a department. That article ended with a claim I did not fully develop: that when six departments share one number, an alignment emerges that no organizational chart can mandate. This article is about why that alignment holds in some plants for a full year — and collapses in most by the end of the second quarter.
Alignment Is a Subtraction Problem
Most leadership teams treat alignment as a coordination problem. The instinct is to add: more cross-functional meetings, shared scorecards, alignment workshops, a steering committee. The logic seems sound — if the departments are not aligned, get them in a room more often.
It does not work. Adding coordination to six competing priorities produces six well-coordinated competing priorities. The meetings become longer, the dashboards multiply, and each department leaves more committed to its own number than before.
Alignment is a subtraction problem. Six departments align when you remove every priority except one — and that one priority belongs to all of them. Not a Quality priority that Production tolerates. Not a Production priority that Maintenance supports. One number that all six own equally, because the mathematics of the chain makes each of them a contributor to it.
This is what the €5 gap does. It is not a Quality goal or a Production goal. It is the plant's goal, and the decomposition makes every department's contribution to it explicit and measurable. The HR Director's cross-training process feeds labor efficiency that contributes to the €5. The SCM Director's material flow process reduces scrap that contributes to the €5. Nobody can opt out, because everybody's process is on the chain.
That is the structural condition for alignment. But structure alone does not hold. To understand why most teams drift back to silos despite having the structure, you have to look at what Patrick Lencioni identified as the deepest failure of any team.
The Fifth Dysfunction Is Where Silos Live
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni builds a pyramid. At the base: absence of trust. Above it: fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability. At the very top — the dysfunction that all the others lead to — is inattention to results.
Inattention to results is when team members prioritize something other than the collective goal. Lencioni names the two things that displace it: individual status and, critically for a plant leadership team, departmental ego. The Quality Director who optimizes PPM because PPM is "his number." The Production Director who defends OEE because OEE is how he is judged. Each one is competent, hard-working, and quietly pulling the organization apart — not from malice, but because the departmental result feels more real, more ownable, more career-relevant than the collective one.
This is the silo, described precisely. A silo is not a communication failure. It is inattention to the collective result in favor of the departmental one. And it is the natural resting state of any leadership team, because departmental results are concrete and personal while collective results are abstract and shared.
The shared number — the €5 — is the direct antidote to the fifth dysfunction. It makes the collective result more concrete than any departmental one, because every department can see its specific contribution to it. For a while, this works. The room aligns. The conversations unify. The first months produce real movement.
And then, somewhere around the second quarter, most teams drift back.
Why Q2 Is Where Alignment Dies
The collapse is rarely dramatic. No one announces they are abandoning the shared goal. It erodes, one meeting at a time, and the erosion follows a predictable pattern.
The first months carry momentum. The chain is fresh, the kickoff energy is real, the number is visible, and early wins accumulate. By month four or five, three forces converge.
First, daily operational pressure pulls toward local optimization. A customer escalation, a quality spike, a machine failure — each crisis is departmental, urgent, and concrete. The Quality Director cannot tell an angry customer "I am focused on the plant's €5 goal." She handles the crisis, in her department, with her metric. Crisis by crisis, attention returns to the departmental number because that is where the daily fires are.
Second, the shared number becomes wallpaper. It started on the boardroom wall and in every conversation. By Q2, it has moved to a quarterly review slide. It is mentioned in the monthly leadership meeting and nowhere else. When a number is reviewed quarterly instead of lived daily, it stops being a decision criterion and becomes a reporting obligation.
Third, partial success breeds complacency. The team removed €2.40 of the €5 in the first months — the easy wins, the obvious changeover improvements, the quick scrap reductions. The remaining €2.60 requires the hard, slow, cross-departmental work. And precisely when the work gets harder, the visibility of the number drops. "We made good progress" becomes the phrase that quietly ends the alignment.
By the end of Q2, the room looks like Monday morning again. Six dashboards. Six priorities. The shared number still exists on a slide somewhere, but the team has returned to its resting state: inattention to the collective result.
What Holds Alignment for a Full Year
The teams that stay aligned for twelve months do something specific in the very first session — and then protect it relentlessly. It is not a personality difference or a maturity difference in the abstract. It is a set of concrete practices.
It starts the moment the processes are named
The previous article ended with six named processes and their owners. The aligned teams do not stop there. In the same session, each process owner converts the process into one or more concrete projects with clear Process Indicators. Not "improve changeover" — a project, with a named PI, a target, and a timeline. Several projects per process, if the process warrants it. The owner is identified in the room, in front of the team, with the commitment made publicly.
This directly addresses Lencioni's fourth dysfunction — avoidance of accountability. Accountability is not a quarterly review mechanism. It is the public commitment, made in front of peers, to a specific number. When the SCM Director commits to a material-flow PI in front of the Quality Director and the Plant Manager, the accountability is built into the room, not bolted on later.
Then each owner lists everything that could go wrong — before it does
This is the practice I have found separates teams that recover from setbacks from teams that get derailed by them. In the same session, each manager builds a list: all the things that could go wrong with their project. Not after the problem appears — before.
I keep a version of this on the wall in plants I work with. One side reads "List all things that could go wrong." The other reads "Now fix them." Each anticipated failure gets a countermeasure, defined in advance. When the situation actually arises — and it will — the team does not improvise under pressure. It applies the countermeasure it already designed, learns from the application, and improves it if needed.
The power of this is psychological as much as operational. A team that has pre-mortemed its own projects has already faced the ways it might fail. The setbacks that derail unprepared teams — the ones that, in Q2, become the excuse to retreat into departmental safety — are anticipated events with ready responses. The drift toward silos loses its most common trigger: the unhandled crisis that sends everyone back to their own dashboard.
Then the number stays alive through weekly project review
The aligned teams do not review the shared goal quarterly. They review each project weekly. Weekly review keeps the number lived rather than reported. It keeps the collective result more present than the departmental one, week after week, which is the only thing that holds Lencioni's fifth dysfunction at bay over twelve months.
Weekly is not arbitrary. It is frequent enough that drift is caught within days, not discovered at the quarter end. It is the cadence that keeps the shared number from becoming wallpaper.
The Peer Group — For Teams Ready to Go Further
There is a second practice that works powerfully, but it depends on the maturity of the team. Not every leadership group is ready for it.
Form peer groups of two or three people who give each other daily support on the projects. HR paired with SCM and Production. Not a reporting relationship — a support relationship. They unblock each other, hold each other to the discipline, and keep the communication open between departments that otherwise interact only in formal meetings.
The peer group does something the weekly review cannot. It welds the team. It builds the daily communication that dissolves the boundaries between departments. When the HR Director and the SCM Director talk every day about their linked projects, the silo between HR and SCM stops being a wall and becomes a working interface. This is Lencioni's foundation — trust and conflict — built not through a workshop but through daily working contact on a shared problem.
But it requires a team mature enough to give and receive peer support without it curdling into politics or territorial defense. For teams not yet there, the weekly review and the countermeasure discipline are enough to start. The peer group is where you go when the foundation is solid.
When Something Does Not Happen, Why?
Across the year, projects will stall. A PI will not move. A countermeasure will not get applied. The instinct of most managers, when something does not happen, is to assume the person did not want to do it — that it is a motivation problem, an attitude problem, a willingness problem.
In my experience across eight plants, that instinct is almost always wrong. When something does not happen, the cause is one of three:
- The person does not know how to do it.
- The person cannot do it — they lack the resource, the time, the system, the authority.
- The person does not want to do it.
And the distribution is not what managers assume. Cause 1 and cause 2 together account for roughly 98% of cases. Genuine unwillingness — the manager who simply will not — is the rare exception, not the rule.
Even the cases that look like "does not want" usually are not. When someone appears unwilling, dig one layer down and you almost always find one of these: they did not understand what was being asked, they cannot actually do it with what they have, or they do not see a benefit that makes sense to them. Real bad actors exist — but they are the 2%, not the 98%.
This matters enormously for alignment, because the manager who diagnoses a stalled project as "he does not want to" responds with pressure, accountability theater, or escalation — none of which fix a knowledge gap or a capability gap. The manager who diagnoses it correctly responds with training, with resources, with removing the blocker. The first response damages the team. The second strengthens it.
This connects back to Lencioni at the deepest level. A team that assumes unwillingness operates from absence of trust — the base of the pyramid. A team that assumes competence or capability gaps, and investigates before judging, builds trust with every stalled project it diagnoses correctly. The 98% diagnosis is not just operationally accurate. It is the practice that keeps the foundation of the team intact through a hard year.
The Discipline That Holds It Together
Alignment is not an event. It is a state that erodes by default and holds only through deliberate practice. The teams that stay aligned for a full year do five things:
They name processes as projects with clear PIs and public owners. They pre-mortem each project and prepare countermeasures before problems arise. They review weekly, keeping the shared number lived rather than reported. They build peer support where the team is mature enough to sustain it. And when something stalls, they diagnose for knowledge and capability before assuming unwillingness.
None of this is about a better dashboard. The dashboard was never the problem. The problem is that the natural resting state of any leadership team is inattention to the collective result — six capable people, each optimizing their own number, quietly pulling the organization in six directions.
The single number is the antidote. But the antidote wears off unless you renew it, weekly, with discipline, for the full twelve months it takes to move Plant Cost Rate from €30 to €25.
That renewal — not the dashboard, not the methodology, not the chain — is what separates the teams that hit €25 in December from the teams that explain, in the Q4 review, why they made good progress.
At AdaptiveOps, we work with manufacturing leadership teams to build the chain, name the projects, and install the weekly discipline that holds alignment for a full year. If you want to map this for your plant, book a free 30-minute diagnostic call.
Related: A Worked Example: How a €5 Cost Gap Becomes Six Named Processes — the previous article, where the six processes and their owners are identified.
Related: Why Having 7 Priorities Means Having None — the True North that makes subtraction possible.
Related: 5 Signs Your Daily Management System Is Dead — what happens when weekly discipline decays.