Dear Reader,

Last month, I wrote about misalignment and how it's rarely dramatic, rarely obvious. It's just that quiet, subtle friction. Teams working hard but are rowing in slightly different directions. Stated priorities that don't quite match where time and money actually go.

A lot of you wrote back. And what I heard most wasn't panic, it was recognition:"That's exactly what's happening here," or "I've been sensing exactly this but couldn't name it."

So now we're a month out. Q1 is nearly done(🤯). And I'm genuinely curious: what did you notice?

Not what you fixed, not what you solved—just what became visible that you'd been moving too fast to see?

Because here's the thing about alignment work: the first shift is almost never structural. It's perceptual. You begin to see what the system is actually saying, versus what you've been telling yourself it says.

That gap (even just naming it!) IS the work. Like I always say: Awareness is the first and essential step to changing anything.

I've been watching this in the leaders I work with right now. Nobody overhauled their org chart, or rewrote their strategy doc. But someone did stop scheduling a meeting that wasn't actually serving anyone. Someone did name, out loud, that their top priority and their calendar were strangers to each other. Someone did say "we keep asking for this outcome from a system designed to produce the opposite," and instead of pushing harder, they paused.

Small shifts led to real coherence.

A few questions worth sitting with this week:

• Where have you made even a small change since February, and what impact did it make? (Whether positive or not!)
• What misalignment are you still tolerating because it hasn't fully blown up yet?
• If you made one structural change in April—perhaps a new incentive, a re-established norm, or a solidified dangling decision—what would it be?

If you're sensing that something is still off, not catastrophically, just persistently off, that's usually the signal. Not that you're doing it wrong, but that it's time to look at what the system is telling you instead what you want it to say.

Which is exactly the kind of conversation I want to keep having. And this spring, I'm making space to do exactly that more closely, with a small group of people doing this work.

If this resonated, please forward it to one person on your team or in your world who's been sensing the drag but hasn't quite named it yet. Sometimes the most useful thing is just a shared language for what's already true. First things first.

Warmly,
Shoshanna

​ ​If you've been sensing the drag in your team, your culture, your own leadership, but haven't had the real space to look at it, this is for you. ​ ​ The leaders who shift things fastest aren't the ones who push harder; they're the ones who finally get honest about what's misaligned and have the right people in the room when they do. Starting this spring, I'm opening a small group: 3 to 6 leaders, meeting live on Zoom over six months, doing the alignment work that doesn't fit in a one-hour call. ​ It's intimate, focused, and capped small by design. Reply to this email and we'll figure out if it's a fit. Let's work together.

Connect with me:

​​​​