"I've spent thousands on team-building activities, but my people still seem disconnected from our mission," a fellow founder confided to me over coffee last week. Her tech company had grown rapidly, but the team culture had fractured along the way.
Despite open-plan offices and regular social events, her departments operated like separate islands – marketing rarely communicated with product development, customer service had their own priorities, and leadership struggled to create cohesion. The symptoms were everywhere: duplicated work, missed opportunities, and a lack of shared purpose.
Contrast this with what I witnessed at a manufacturing company facing significant industry disruption. During my visit, I expected to find a worried workforce focused solely on survival. Instead, I found teams confidently adapting to market changes, making aligned decisions without constant management oversight, and supporting each other across traditional boundaries.
When I asked their operations director about this remarkable alignment, she didn't mention team-building exercises or motivational speakers. Instead, she showed me their structured approach to defining and embedding purpose throughout their organisation.
The difference between these two companies wasn't resources or talent—it was having a systematic way to align teams with a shared purpose that informed everyday decisions. After working with hundreds of organisations, I've identified four powerful tactics that consistently transform how teams find and maintain alignment.
Four Powerful Tactics to Align Your Team with Purpose
The following four tactics from Team Tactics by Pip Decks provide a framework for creating genuine team alignment that drives better decision-making, enhanced collaboration, and improved results:
- Team Vision: Creating a compelling shared picture of where you're heading
- Team Values: Defining how you'll work together to achieve your vision
- Team Strategy: Providing clarity on decision-making parameters
- Decision Stack: Connecting vision to execution with a clear framework
Let's explore each tactic with practical examples from a creative agency that used these approaches to transform their interdisciplinary teams from siloed specialists into a cohesive, purpose-driven force.
1. Team Vision: Create a Shared Vision That Inspires
Without a clear, shared vision, teams drift. The Team Vision tactic creates a compelling picture of your destination that everyone can understand and rally behind.
Team Tactic: Team Vision
A structured approach to create a shared vision that inspires and gives high-level guidance to your teams.
Why it works
People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. Your vision is the "why" that gets your team out of bed in the morning. It acts as a north star, guiding decisions at every level and creating emotional connection to the work. Research from Deloitte found that purpose-driven companies had 40% higher levels of workforce retention than their competitors.
💡 Tip: As Jared Spool puts it, "The vision is a stake in the sand with a giant flag on it, big enough for everyone on the team to see and march towards." Make it visual, memorable, and emotionally resonant.
How to create your Team Vision
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Picture the future impact
- Gather your team and individually answer: "What impact will our work have on customers' lives in 12 months?"
- Consider: "By choosing our product/service, our users will have the ability to..." (identify the change)
- Reflect on: "How will their lives change? What will they be able to do that they can't do now?"
- Ask: "If we achieve this, how will our users feel?" (capture the emotion)
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Craft your vision statement
- Combine the elements of emotion, people, and change into a cohesive statement
- Keep it concise, memorable, and aspirational
- Ensure it focuses on the impact, not just what you do
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Refine and validate
- Read it aloud to test how it sounds
- Check if it's memorable and sounds natural in conversation
- Revise until it resonates with everyone on the team
Real-world example
A creative agency I consulted for was struggling with alignment across their interdisciplinary teams. Designers, copywriters, strategists, and account managers each had different priorities and perspectives. They spent a full hour working through the Team Vision process, focusing on how their work impacted their clients' businesses.
After thoughtful discussion, they crafted this vision: "We tap into today's social currents to create campaigns that invoke awe for brands that become movements of social and positive commercial growth."
This statement transformed how they approached projects. Instead of seeing themselves as disparate specialists, they now had a shared purpose that guided their collaborative efforts. When facing difficult decisions, they could ask, "Does this align with our vision of creating awe-inspiring campaigns that drive social and commercial growth?"
2. Team Values: Instil Values That Guide Everyday Decisions
While your team vision gives your destination, your team values help forge the path to get there. The Team Values tactic helps identify and articulate the principles that will guide how your team works together.
Team Tactic: Team Values
A collaborative process to define and embed values that help you achieve your vision.
Why it works
Values serve as decision-making filters when there's no rulebook to follow. They create consistency across the team and help new members understand "how we do things here." Unlike generic corporate values that gather dust, team-generated values reflect what actually matters in your specific context.
💡 Tip: Ensure your team practices active listening during this process. When people feel genuinely heard, they're more likely to embrace the values you collectively define.
How to define your Team Values
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Explore what matters
- Discuss as a group: "What values will help us go further?"
- Reflect on: "What values do people show that inspire you the most in our team?"
- Consider: "How are we different from other teams?"
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Group and prioritise
- Organise answers by themes to identify common values
- Use private voting to decide which values resonate most strongly
- Aim for 3-5 core values that feel authentic and actionable
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Define with examples
- For each value, have everyone write a one-sentence explanation of what it means in practice
- Share these explanations and discuss any differences in interpretation
- Vote on which explanations to adopt for each value
Real-world example
Returning to our creative agency, they used the Team Values tactic to identify what would help them achieve their vision. After thoughtful discussion, they identified "Curiosity" as a core value, which they defined as: "We actively seek out diverse perspectives and challenge our assumptions to create work that surprises and delights."
This value became a practical tool in their daily work. When a junior designer proposed an unconventional approach during a client project, the creative director referenced their "Curiosity" value to encourage the team to explore the idea rather than dismissing it as too risky. The result was award-winning work that differentiated them from competitors who played it safe.
Their other values included "Collaboration," "Impact-Focus," and "Craft Excellence," each with clear explanations of what they meant in practice.
3. Team Strategy: Help Your Team Make Better Decisions
With vision and values established, your team needs a bridge to execution. The Team Strategy tactic provides clarity on decision-making parameters that give your team both purpose and autonomy.
Team Tactic: Team Strategy
A framework that helps your team make decisions and gives them the purpose and autonomy needed to get things done.
Why it works
A clear strategy connects high-level vision to everyday actions. It provides guardrails for decision-making while empowering team members to operate independently. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wisely noted, "A goal without a plan is just a wish." Team Strategy transforms your aspirational vision into an actionable roadmap.
💡 Tip: Focus on one key change at a time. Once you've addressed your most pressing strategic need, you can repeat the process for additional areas.
How to develop your Team Strategy
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Ground in values
- Display the values you identified in the previous tactic
- Use them as a foundation for strategic thinking
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Identify tasks for meaningful change
- List the most immediate tasks that would create positive change
- Focus on actionable items rather than vague aspirations
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Define the benefits
- For each task, identify two specific benefits ("whys")
- Example: "We'll spot issues earlier, cutting down on repeat work"
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Connect to outcomes
- Articulate how these benefits will change your team's trajectory
- Example: "Improve internal collaboration to give us more time to focus on what matters"
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Synthesise your strategy
- Summarise your desired end-state
- Clarify what will be different
- Specify what needs to change
- Detail how you'll make the change happen
Real-world example
Our creative agency identified that their onboarding process was a strategic weak point. New team members took months to become fully productive, creating frustration for both newcomers and existing staff.
Using the Team Strategy tactic, they identified immediate tasks like creating a buddy system and updating documentation. The benefits included faster integration and reduced strain on senior team members. The outcome was improved collaboration that gave everyone more time to focus on creative work.
Their synthesised strategy read: "Create a great collaborative environment so we can focus on what matters to our clients. The team will be ready and prepared for new employees through improved onboarding documents and communication, implemented via a buddy system and updated onboarding materials."
This clarity helped them allocate resources appropriately and measure success against a specific goal rather than vague aspirations about "better onboarding."
4. Decision Stack: Move From Vision to Execution
The final piece of the alignment puzzle is connecting all elements into a coherent framework. The Decision Stack tactic creates a visual representation of how vision, strategy, principles, and execution connect.
Team Tactic: Decision Stack
A framework that connects the dots between vision and execution to keep your team aligned and empowered.
Why it works
The Decision Stack answers two critical questions: Where are we going? How will we get there? By visualising the connections between different levels of thinking—from aspirational vision to tactical execution—it gives teams "guided autonomy" to make aligned decisions without constant management oversight.
💡 Tip: It's perfectly acceptable to have different Decision Stacks for different teams, as long as they ultimately align at the vision and values levels.
How to create your Decision Stack
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Gather your components
- Collect your team's vision, strategy, principles, and objectives from previous activities
- Ensure you have all the elements needed for a complete picture
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Sketch the framework
- Create a visual hierarchy showing how these elements connect
- Start with vision at the top, flowing down through strategy, objectives, opportunities, and principles
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Evaluate and refine each section
- For Vision: Is it concise, clear, and customer-centric? Does it set an audacious goal?
- For Strategy: Is it based on current reality? Does it tackle challenges and outline customer value?
- For Objectives: Are they qualitative, inspirational, time-bound, and actionable?
- For Opportunities: Do they represent your best bets and riskiest assumptions?
- For Principles: Do they allow you to make decisions? Are they specific to your company?
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Share widely
- Make your Decision Stack visible to your team and stakeholders
- Use it as a reference point for strategic discussions
- Revisit and update it as your context evolves
Real-world example
The creative agency's leadership team used their newly defined vision, values, and strategy to build a comprehensive Decision Stack. This visual framework showed how their vision ("creating awe-inspiring campaigns that drive social and commercial growth") connected to their strategy for improved collaboration, which in turn supported specific objectives around client satisfaction and team wellbeing.
They displayed this framework prominently in their studio and referenced it during project kickoffs and team meetings. When a potential new client approached them with an ethically questionable project, the team used their Decision Stack to evaluate the opportunity. Despite the substantial fee, they declined the project because it contradicted their principles and wouldn't contribute to their vision of positive social impact.
This decision—made confidently without escalating to the CEO—demonstrated the power of their aligned purpose. Team members later cited this moment as when they truly felt the company "walked the talk" regarding its values.
From Fragmentation to Alignment: Bringing It All Together
While each tactic is valuable independently, the real transformation happens when you implement them as an integrated system:
- Start with Team Vision to establish your destination and create emotional connection
- Define Team Values to guide how you'll work together on the journey
- Develop Team Strategy to bridge high-level thinking with practical action
- Create a Decision Stack to visualise how everything connects and empower autonomous decision-making
This systematic approach creates clarity at every level, from aspirational purpose to daily decisions, ensuring teams remain aligned even when facing complex challenges.
Addressing Common Objections
"We don't have time for all this strategic work"
Consider how much time you're already spending on misalignment—rework from miscommunication, meetings to resolve conflicts, explaining the same priorities repeatedly. The four tactics in this article require approximately 4-5 hours of focused work, but save countless hours of confusion and misdirected effort.
You might implement them over multiple days (four one-hour sessions) or as a single intensive day with breaks. Either way, the return on investment is substantial and immediate.
"Our team is too distributed/diverse for this to work"
These tactics work equally well for remote, hybrid, and in-person teams. In fact, distributed teams often benefit even more from explicit alignment since they lack the informal alignment that happens naturally in shared spaces.
For diverse teams, these tactics create a framework for harnessing different perspectives while maintaining cohesion around shared objectives. The key is ensuring psychological safety during discussions so all voices are heard.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Creating aspirational statements disconnected from reality that sound good but don't guide actual decisions
- Relegating these documents to slide decks that never get referenced after their creation
- Skipping the hard conversations about trade-offs and priorities during the strategy development
- Failing to revisit and refresh these frameworks as your context evolves
- Not involving the people who will actually use these frameworks in their creation
The most common pitfall is treating alignment as a one-time exercise rather than an ongoing practice. These frameworks should be living documents that evolve as your team learns and your context changes.
The Difference Between Aligned and Misaligned Teams
Remember the founder I mentioned at the beginning? After implementing these four tactics over a six-week period, her fragmented tech company transformed. Three months later, she reported that cross-functional collaboration had increased by 60%, decision-making speed had improved dramatically, and—most tellingly—employee satisfaction scores had reached an all-time high.
"We still have our social events," she told me, "but they're no longer substituting for real alignment. Now they're celebrations of our shared purpose rather than forced attempts to create connection."
That's the difference between aligned and misaligned teams: not superficial togetherness, but a deep, shared understanding of purpose that informs everyday actions and decisions.
In today's complex business environment, creating this level of alignment isn't just nice to have—it's a strategic imperative. These four tactics provide a proven framework for achieving it, one meaningful conversation at a time.
Take Your Team Leadership to the Next Level
Ready to transform how your team aligns with purpose? These tactics are just the beginning of what's possible when you approach team leadership with intention and structure.
For a complete toolkit of team leadership practices, Team Tactics by Pip Decks gives you 54 practical team leadership tools in a beautiful card deck, covering everything from building psychological safety to facilitating productive conflict. Each card provides clear instructions and examples you can apply immediately to your next team interaction.
Developed through work with hundreds of teams across industries, these tactics have helped thousands of leaders transform their teams from groups of individuals into cohesive, high-performing units.
The difference between being a manager and becoming a truly inspiring leader isn't about having more authority—it's about creating more meaning. Start your journey to purposeful leadership today.
Based on tactics from Team Tactics by Pip Decks.
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